It's an exciting, untold chapter of British history that you won't want to miss. So welcome, Robert. Hi, great to be here. Thank you for being on the podcast. What initially inspired you to write about Colonel Dudley Clarke and how did you first encounter his story?

And crucially, he's arrested because he's walking down the main street of Madrid dressed as a woman, and which is not the kind of thing that the Spaniards stood for in the early 40s. And this caused a huge scandal at time. And indeed it caused such a sort of, such a scandal that the files on it were all hidden away. because I think we should have properly understood that this told us that Clarke was quite an important figure.

At the time, none of us had really heard of Clarke and all sort of wrote it up, I mean, as I did, as a bit of a joke figure. You know, this silly, silly British officer gets himself into trouble doing something that, you know, we all had a bit of a snigger, frankly. And only then sort of years later, when I was researching someone else, did I come across Clarke again and think, hang on a second.

Actually, I've completely misunderstood this man. He's actually really important to the war. And the reason why the files on his arrest in Britain were hidden away and not, you know, sort of filed with everything else is because his arrest was a a huge scandal because he was so important to the way that the war was being fought. And so that sort of led me to think, well, okay, maybe there's a, maybe, maybe this guy's, this guy's, this guy's worth a book.

And, and then you start to dig into him and, and look at exactly what it is that he did during the war. And I realized that this man who, at the time, very, very few people had understood what he was doing. When he's arrested, and news of his arrest gets back to London, the people who meet to discuss what to do about this are the chief of the general staff, so the most important soldier in the country, the foreign secretary, the most important diplomat, the war secretary, the politician who runs the Ministry of War, and Winston Churchill.

These are the men who are running the war in 1914. one. America hasn't come in yet. And, and they're sitting in a room to discuss what to do about Dudley Clarke's arrest. And that just, I'm sort of embarrassed in retrospect, because that's, that's a clue about how important he was. Those guys had other things to do. So, he, because he was so good at keeping what he did secret, and he always, he always you wouldn't really be able to understand the war unless you understood what he'd done.

But then he was never allowed to talk about what he'd done. So there was this sort of, there was this paradox where, yeah, as I say, he sort of, he remains an unknown figure. If people have heard of him at all these days, they've, it's probably because there's a BBC series called SAS, which may have made it to America. And he appears in that, he's played by Dominic West, and he appears in that, there's this sort of of Lucian, mysterious figure.

The other reason they might have heard of him is, they might remember his arrest, and what people don't have is any sense of what it was that he was doing and why he was so important.

So different people do it in different ways. Some generals just say, well, I had an intuition that he would attack at this end of the line, you know, and others, others sort of make up imaginary spies to cover up, as it were, real spies. And so one of the actual problems with this is that those spies then sort of, the imaginary spies then get sort of included. to everyone else's books and you're in this world of trying to, trying to work out what's, what's true and what's not.

But, but Clarke had been, Clarke did, in fact, want to tell his, his own story after the war, and, and asked, in fact, he wanted to make a film. Um, because he was, he sort of goes to the war office for permission and they say, don't be ridiculous. you know, basically, there's a, there's a nice memo in the archives where someone says, look, there's far too many people have been sort of, uh, telling their stories. And people will just think the top secret means nothing at all.

And, uh, so, so, so no, you can't, um, was the answer. And so he did, and he sort of, you can see in his correspondence after the war, he does sort of keep trying, but basically, he knows that, that the answer is always going to be no. and, and so he died, when he dies in the early 70s, 1974, he gets a two or three paragraph obituary in the Times newspaper that doesn't really sort of say anything about him, because nobody, nobody knew anything about him.

And, but it's a sort of, it's a test lab for all sorts of things that the British. and the allies will find themselves doing later in the war. Partly because between 1940 and 1943, this is the only place that the British are fighting the Germans. So if you sort of, it's a place where, as at the time, you know, sort of British officers were quite keen to get out there because if you want to have a go at fighting the enemy, if you want to try anything out, that's where you can do it.

And so Clarke is asked to, come there and sort of by the British commander at the end of 1940, a chap called Wavell. And Wavell says, I'd like to try using deception to, to, to help beat the enemy. And I think Clarke is the man to do it. He's, Clarke has already at this point got this reputation within the army as this sort of maverick thinker. So one person described him as the complete military Jeeves. So he's a, he's a sort of, and he described himself as a butler at one point.

He's the kind of, he's the kind of chap who, when you're, let's say, you're commanding the general staff and you say, you know, Dudley, I'm a bit worried about problem X, and I just don't know what we should do about it. He's very much the kind of man who'll say, well, sir, as it happens, I was thinking about this problem last night. And here's a little paper I've run up with some possible solutions. So generals love him.

Even though he's borderline insubordinate at various points, he spends his entire military career wearing his Royal Flying Corps wings on his uniform. And he keeps being told to remove them because the Royal Flying Corps no longer exists. He trained as a pilot at the end of the First World War. And the Royal Flying Corps no longer exists. You are no longer in the Royal Flying Corps. Please take your wings off. And he will just... One of his friends said, well, if Dudley didn't like an order, he'd just ignore it.

and that shouldn't get you very far in the military, but it gets him far because generals can see actually that he's this kind of person who, it's kind of handy to have different thinkers around, and Clarke is a different thinker. So when Wavell wants deception, to sort of, wants a try out deception, Clarke is a man he goes to. And the two of the two of the two of the two of the two of them spend 41 sort of working out how you can, how you can fool the enemy, what the limits of that are, and what the possibilities of it are.

And by September 1941, Clarke has come to the conclusion that, as he says, you can use this to win the war. And he goes back to London and he says, what we should be doing is developing a plan to win the war using deception. So it's not like, you know, military deception is not a novel idea. It goes back at least as far as the Trojan horses. The Chinese have been doing it. You can find military deception in the Bible.

It's absolutely a sort of an ancient and practice. But what generally, it's used as a way of taking your enemy by surprise. And generally it's a way of sort of winning an individual battle. What Clarke has grasped by the middle of 1941 is that a world war allows you to do this on a different scale. So if I, let's say I, I'm, I'm attacking you, and you've got your men at the northern end of the trench, because I've managed to persuade you that that's where I'm coming.

And actually I'm coming at the southern end of the trench. You know, perhaps that gains me five minutes advantage. But ultimately, that's a problem you might be able to fix. But if I can persuade you that I'm invading Germany via Norway or via Greece rather than via France, and so you've moved men to Norway or to Greece, where there are lots of German troops on D-Day, then you can't move those guys back easily. It takes you time to do that.

And while you're trying to work out whether you should be getting. your men back, whether you can get your men back, I'm busy fighting my way through Normandy. And that's, that was what Clarke had grasped. And it's, I know it sort of sounds obvious to people, but I can tell you it wasn't obvious. And there's, there's one moment where, when the allies have sort of come up with their deception plan for, for D-Day, and they, one of the, one of the, one of the, uh, it's an, one of the, one of the, one of the American officers is sent to, to brief a more senior American general.

And he says, well, we're going to tell the enemy that we're, we're going to land at Calais. And the general looks at him and says, but we're not going to land at Calais. And yes, sir, yes, that's the idea. But, but to lots of generals, the way they correctly think, well, no, the way that you win a war is you go to where the enemy are and then you kill them all. And that, that is, that is how you win a war.

But Clarke said, well, another way you could do it is you persuade him to put lots and lots of men in the wrong place, and then you go to Berlin, and by the time he's worked out that the men are in the wrong place, it's too late. And indeed, sort of, at the moment of the German surrender, there are 300,000 German soldiers in Norway. They don't need 300,000 soldiers in Norway. Those soldiers are no use to them.

And they're sitting there in Norway because the British have successfully persuaded the Germans, that there's an army sitting in Scotland waiting to go to Norway. And Hitler's always very worried about Norway. So, now, if those 300,000 men had been sent back to sit on the Rhine, ultimately, you know, the Allies would still have got through, but a lot of British and American boys would have died getting through them. And, of course, those German soldiers would have died too.

So this was, this was Clarke's genius.

He, after the British retreat from Dunkirk, his commander says to him, we need to do something to give the men fighting spirit. You know, we're a beaten army. And Clarke says, well, I've been thinking about that, sir. And I've got this idea for a fighting force that will nip across the channel in the middle of the night, cut German's throats and then sort of knit back before anyone can find them, what are called sort of butcher and bolt raids in other, you know, the context.

And Clarke's thinking about this because he's been thinking, well, how do other armies react? when the British beat them, which has sort of been at this point, the pattern of the previous hundred years. And he's even got a name for them. He says, well, we'll call them the commandos, because that's what the South Africans, the British have been fighting sort of 40 years earlier had been called. And the commando force that he creates, I mean, others then go on to lead it, but Clarke is sort of, is in at the birth and designed it.

And he writes this document on what a commando will be like. And you read it and you think, well, you've kind of described modern special forces soldiers. And he's then sort of, six months later, he's talking to FDR's envoy, who says, tell me about this, tell me about this commando thing. And because I think we're going to need something like that. And Clarke says, I think you will need something like that. And here, you know, here's my, here's how we went about it.

And what you need is you need to give them an exciting name, something that, something that sort of has some kind of historical resonance. And he says, what about the Rangers? Now, I have to tell you, if you go to any U.S. Ranger historian, they will dispute that this is where the name came from. Clarke, Clarke is insistent that this is where the name came from. And it is definitely true that the US then goes and creates a force called the Rangers.

And it is certainly true that the Rangers are sent to Britain to train with the commandos. So even if, you know, different people came up with the name at the same time, where those, that first American Special Forces unit is learning its trade is from the British unit that Clarke set up. Yes, he's a, he's a, he's an immensely sort of creative sideways thinker.

And their commander says, oh, stubborn nonsense. So we don't do things that way. And then the sort of the heroes of the story have to go around their bosses and sort of sneak a message to Churchill, because Churchill will understand. And that's, what I discovered is that's simply not how it was, because in 1941, Britain's military commanders know that they're losing. Well, they're certainly not winning. At that point, the point at which Clarke goes to London and says, you know, I think we should try and win the war with deception, the record is that every time the British army meets the German army, the British army runs away.

Now, you might think, oh, well, you know, all of these stuffed shirts, they will just kind of try and carry on doing things the way they're doing them, but that's not what they do. They're desperate for ideas. Have you got like, has anyone got an idea for how we can change this? Because we, we keep losing. And so, and actually, that's, that's true with the bouncing bomb as well. You know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, was desperate for a way to destroy these dams in the row.

It seems to be true, almost all these stories that actually, sort of British commanders were incredibly receptive to people who had interesting ideas, because they knew that their backs were against the wall, and they knew that what they had been doing wasn't working. So I think that's the, that's the thing that most sort of just, I just thought, I just hadn't realized the extent to which actually, there were lots of who were sort of willing to be open to creativity.

So, and Uncle Sidney is Dudley's, Dudley Clarke's godfather. He's definitely sort of, there is evidence that he taught Dudley how to do magic tricks. He, um, uh, there was evidence that the childhood Dudley performed magic shows. And, um, and so Clarke is thinking like a magician. And, And why that's important is because no one does deception as much as magicians do deception. So that, so did it about 50 years ago, a couple of academics who were quite interested in this, said, thought, well, you know, where can, where can the military learn about deception from?

And they, they went through all these various options. You know, con men obviously do deception, but a con man, you know, might run one con a knight. if he's busy, if he's doing a short con. A magician doing a magic show for children will do 30 or 40 deceptions. I did a magic trick to promote the book. You can find it on YouTube. And for that two-minute magic trick, I had to learn three different slates of hand, and which is incredibly hard work.

But what that taught me was that what that taught me was that magicians really do do an awful lot of deception. And Clarke, when you see how he's sort of, because thankfully we have his notes, you see how he's thinking about his deception operations. He is using the language of magicians. So he's talking about effects, for instance, which is how a magician talks about what you will perceive has happened. A lady has been sawn in half.

A rabbit has been pulled out of the hat. That's the effect. And Clarke is saying, well, you know, when he's thinking, literally the first one of these he's doing to deceive the Italians at that point, he is writing the effects. This is what they will think they have seen. They will think they have seen troops moving this way. And the other thing about magicians is they use loads and loads and loads and loads of different techniques.

So you will do, even if the trick seems to be done the same way, as if the effect is the same with a trick, they will have done it a different way. that when you're watching it, you think, no, no, no, it can't be, it can't be this up his sleeve because that time he had his sleeve rolled up. So it must have been something else. And of course, actually, you know, well, maybe it came out of his sleeve the first time, and then he rolled his sleeve up, and this time he did it, did it a different way.

That's deliberate to mislead you. So, so Clarke's thing was, as one of his colleagues said, never hand the Boche a thing on a plate. So let him think he's worked it out. So they would leave all of these clues for Germany. intelligence to pick up. They, they would fake photographs, for instance. One of the things that I think, you know, people, maybe people know a bit more now, thanks for the SAS drama, is that the SAS starts its life as one of Clarke's fake units.

And because Clarke knows the Italians are worried about parachutists. There are no parachutists, but maybe we can, maybe we can make them think we've got some. So he creates this special airspace. service unit. And he plants photos in a newspaper of these guys going to train. He puts dummy gliders out for enemy spies to see in photo reconnaissance to see. They have a fake, a run over Egypt where they drop, not men, because as I say, there are no parachutes, but they drop sort of parachutes attached to other things out of planes so that there are things for people to report.

They drop envelopes addressed to people in the special air service in places where they think that they're enemy spies working. They, in fact, send two men out in SAS uniform to wander around Cairo with this whole story that Clarke has worked out, incredibly detailed story about where the unit's training and what they don't like about their planes and, you know, and these are the types of guns. They use, all the kinds of things that soldiers gossip about.

And these two men are sent out with this very detailed narrative, just really in the hope that word will get back. And a, Clarke, all of this time, Clarke is thinking like a magician, and he's thinking, how can I, the magician doesn't say to you, I'm soaring a lady in half, you know, necessarily. They just, they perform a trick and they let you tell yourself, what's happened. And, um, and that's Clarke's genius. And actually, when you sort of, when you look at, it's one of the things that, that, that, that people continue sort of to not understand about deception was, as I say, you do lots of little bits and you let people sort of put it together themselves, but wrong.

Um, he was a, he was a great, he had a tremendous grasp of human psychology and how it is that the enemy spies and enemy intelligence officers would think.

What are they doing with them? What are their weapons like? All the, all the, all the questions that intelligence officers are asked, they are, they are trying to answer these questions. And Clarke is sort of, is saying, well, you know, here's a clue. Here's a clue. Here's a clue. Um, you put it together. And he thought of himself as passing jigsaw pieces. And the best thing from his point of view was that when it then turned out that, um, that the enemy had got it wrong, um, as hopefully they did, it gave the enemy an excuse he could give himself, which is, I must have put the pieces together wrong.

Look, if you assemble them in this other way, they create the real picture. Dunkoff. And, uh, this was, And of course, Clarke has been very helpfully, unhelpfully, telling him how these pieces, it's not an accident that these pieces have been put together the wrong way. That's because Clarke and his team have been sort of whispering in their ear and, sort of by the middle of the war, they're starting to get feedback. They have some intelligence on what the Germans are thinking and hoping.

And their big thing is, well, you know, tell them, tell them what they want. want to hear? How can we tell them what they want to hear or tell them, tell them the thing that they're scared of, which is, which both of those, both the things that we fear and the things that we hope for have an incredible sort of grip on our minds, if that makes sense. So, so, so, so, so they will be incredibly receptive to either of those stories if you want to tell them to.

It's a pretend invasion of. and that the real invasions are going to come in in Sardinia and in Greece, which are sort of for people who aren't familiar with that. Sicily is kind of in the middle of the Mediterranean and a Sardinia is to the west of that and Greece is a long way to the east of that. That's important because if we can persuade, goes to the argument, if we can persuade the Germans to keep troops in Greece, then they won't be in Sicily.

Now, mincemeat is run out of London, and it's come up with by a guy called Ewen Montagu. And Clarke is, in fact, at this point, in charge of, is in charge of all of deception in the Mediterranean, so he has to sign it off. And he's torn on it because he loves the story. He loves the idea. And you can see that he would. He loves the answer. theatrical things. He loves clever things, and here's a clever theatrical ideas.

So he loves that side of it. On the other hand, his whole thing is, we shouldn't ever, no individual bit of deception should, he says, ever be used to play for two high stakes. Don't give the Boche thing on the plate. You know, just let him, don't, don't essentially hand him the whole picture, hand in puzzle pieces. And so Clarke and Montague have this row. And in the end, Clarke gives away and says, okay, fine. you can do it.

The problem with Mincemeat is that when the invasion of Sicily turns out to be the real thing, there is the only alternative explanation for German intelligence is the British played a trick on us. Because here was this corpse and it was carrying these letters and those letters are clearly false. And so clearly they were, they tricked us. And always before this, Clarke had said, well, look, we, as I'm a lot, as I'm not, I say, we give them an alternative explanation.

We made the mistake. And Clarke had been doing this sort of ahead of Mincemeat, ahead of the Sicily invasion. He's been having commandos paddle up to Greek beaches and sort of leave evidence that reconnaissance parties have been there. And they've got partisans in Greece blowing up targets in the way that they might be if an invasion was coming. And so he's been doing his lots and lots of little puzzle pieces. And then sort of you and Montague pitches up and just hands, a great big puzzle piece to the Germans.

And it works. But, and it's, it's persuasive on the Germans. But afterwards, the Germans say, well, the British must have fooled us. And Clarke said after that, he said, we were always operating in an atmosphere of suspicion. That said, that's one part of the answer. There's this fantastic memo. from April 1945. There isn't a lot of April 19, I mean, April 1945, the war is basically over in Europe. And Hitler's, one of Hitler's most senior soldiers' census memo that says, I think the British have been using deception quite a lot.

And maybe we should try some of that ourselves. And you sort of think, well, I mean, you did, yeah, but, you know, but also. So that would have been a better insight to have three years ago. They never, they never understand what the British are doing. And indeed afterwards, they never understand. And indeed, on the British side, on the Allied side, very few people really grasp the full extent. Even Churchill sort of keeps getting confused by what's real and what's not in terms of sort of, because one of Clarke's, Clarke's great work is to make the British forces, the Allied forces, look much larger than they are.

I mean, they even invent, I think, at an entire US... carry a fleet that is sort of moving around at one point. There's vast numbers of imaginary soldiers that Clarke has created. And everybody gets, everybody sort of loses track of what's real, except Clarke. And so the Germans never grasped up. The Germans, do the Germans do deception? Absolutely. They, the great, possibly the single greatest piece of military deception in the war is that the Germans manage to take.

the Soviets by surprise when they invade in 1941. And that's an interesting one because the Soviet soldiers on the ground weren't fooled. They could see the German builder. And they were sending messages back to Moscow saying, you know, bosses. A awful lot of Germans on the other side of the bridge. And the British aren't fooled. The British, because the British are reading German codes. The British are sending desperate messages to Moscow. saying, Hitler is coming for you.

And only one person is truly fooled, but that person is Stalin, and he's the only person who matters. And he's fooled because he is telling himself a story, which is, I have got time that, you know, the person who breaks the pact that the pact that Germany has with the Soviet Union will be me, and I'm not going to do it yet. And so ultimately, this is an example of how you only, if you fool the rule the rule, right person, that's the only person you need to fool.

And so when the Germans do attack in the middle of 41, the Soviet forces are effectively taken by surprise. So other people do it. Nobody does it quite the way that the allies do, the British and American allies do it.

And that's precisely wrong. And actually, it was one thing that frustrated Clarke after the war, because he knew it was wrong. He, in fact, relied on German fast reconnaissance planes with their long lenses to take pictures of the things he wanted to show them. There would have been, you know, when their, when his team are building dummy times, tanks out in the desert. There's no point in that if the Germans don't come and have a look.

Just as there's no point in a magician doing a trick without an audience. You want people to see things. And in the same way, after the Second World War, people said, well, you know, this will never work again. Now the enemy's got satellites, you know, and they've got better radio communications, a better radio interception and so on. But you look at what's happening in Ukraine. My favorite example of things that have happened in the last couple of years is that during the initial Russian attack, the Russians are sort of trying to destroy Ukrainian airfields.

And the Ukrainians, rather, take very high-definition photographs of bombed-out hangars on their airfields, and then they print them off on huge sheets, and they lay those sheets over undamaged hangers so that from to the Russian satellites, these hangars appear to be also bombed out. And this is in a British intelligence report I read while I was doing the book. This is so successful that the Russian intelligence officers are heard speculating about whether the Ukrainians might have underground runways that they're using to take off.

Because they can't understand where the planes are coming from. Look, we can see all the runways and all the hangers are destroyed, and yet somehow these planes are taking off. So it keeps working. There are dummy tanks and dummy guns on the ground in Ukraine right now. the Russians applied deception ahead of their invasion of Ukraine. You know, and they, it was interesting. If you sort of think of the run-up, there were various people on sort of Western intelligence saying, I think that Putin might be about to do something, you know.

But they did achieve some level of surprise. But unfortunately, one of the groups of people they surprised were their own side, so that Russian forces were not ready. for the invasion, which is one of the reasons why their sort of their dash to Kyiv didn't work because the troops who were supposed to be doing it hadn't properly prepared and weren't properly equipped. So absolutely, I think it's still happening. And I think it was a frustration to Clarke that he thought people will have to relearn these lessons.

And I suspect that they are relearning them right now.

and so no, it absolutely doesn't hurt to Trump.

From British perspective, Suez is massively strategically important. And so Britain has its army there. And in fact, his British officers are behaving rather as though Egypt was a colony, which will have, after the war, there will turn out to be a large number of Egyptians who really resented that. And it's a continuous. to have echoes to this day, in fact, that sort of, but it's a really great place to spend the war because everything is for sale there.

Whatever vice you might have, there is somebody in Cairo who will cater to it. And there's no rationing in the way that there is back in London. So London, you know, in the mid-in-in-in-in-the-early 40s is a fairly grim place. It's a dark place at night because you have to turn the lights off because it's the blackout. You can't get loads of things. In Cairo, you can get anything. And so it's this sort of place of licence, and it's always been this place where, even before the war, sort of British people who wanted to live, how should we put this?

beyond the strictures that were imposed on them by sort of, by British morality. Well, you know, go to Cairo. It doesn't count in Cairo. So it's always been this place of licence. And actually, I think that's one of the reasons why Clarke is able to do all of this fertile thinking there is because it's a place where people are just thinking differently. So I don't think it's a coincidence that the SAS, which, as I say, starts as a fictional Clarke creation and then becomes a real thing that the people who are doing that are doing that in Egypt because it's a place where officers are sort of standing around in the bars of the hotels sort of having these thoughts or what if we did this, you know, that's not working.

It's a, it's a creative place. And actually, there's a really interesting literature comes out of British authors who for one reason or another find themselves in Cairo during the war. So it's, I think that that's why he was able to do what he did there. And also you have the advantage that you're far enough away from London that anyone who might sort of grab your idea or sit on your idea in the way that actually is what happens to the commandos with Clarke, they can't, they can't quite get to you.

So you've got more licensed. Clarke, effectively, was running a private army. Now, there's no way he'd have been able to do that. London. But in, um, in, in Cairo, there are several private armies.

I found a lovely story that I really liked. As I say, Clarke's thing was making British forces look larger than they were. And Churchill is very demanding of his generals. And at one stage, I can't remember exactly when they're saying to him, look, we don't have enough men in Cyprus to to do whatever it is that you want us to do this week. And Churchill, there's nonsense. I know for a fact that there's, you know, there's an entire army corps sitting on Cyprus doing nothing.

And the generals sort of send this reply that's just the right side of insubordinate that says, actually, sir, that's not a real army corps. That's one of Dudley Clarke's fake army corps. And somebody passes this this note to Clarke, who had a file that he kept of what he called indications that deception was accepted by the enemy.

And he never gets there. But that's, that's, that he was, this was the kind of person that he was, sort of stories attached themselves to him. And his friends believed he was capable of anything. There's, there's an anecdote that I, I, I, I'm unable to nail it down, but the one his friends told that when Clarke was a younger officer and he and a friend were heading to London for a weekend of fun but didn't have any money, he, he told his friend to friend to nip into the gentleman's toilets and take his suit off.

And then he left him there, and he takes the suit to a pawnbroker and borrows the, borrows money against the suit with security and then goes down the road to another shop where he uses the money he's just got from a pawnbroker to pay a deposit on a grandfather clock. And then he takes the grandfather clock to a second pawnbroker and he pawns the grandfather clock. And then he ponds the grandfather clock. And then he gets the money to go and get his friend's suit back.

And now they've got, now they've got the suit and they've got the money and the grandfather clock, which is kind of technically stolen, is no longer their problem. And his friend says to him, why a grandfather clock, Dudley? And Clarke says, my dear fellow, the grandfather clock is so respectable.