Read The Napoleon of Crime Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #Biography, #True Crime, #Non Fiction
The Napoleon of Crime (54 page)
Cholmondeley had the mind of an adventurer, but not the body, nor the luck. He was commissioned a pilot officer in November 1939, but his poor eyesight meant he would never fly a plane, even if a cockpit could have been found to accommodate his ungainly shape. “This was a terrible blow,” according to his sister. So far from soaring heroically into the heights, as he had hoped, Cholmondeley was grounded for the duration of the war, his long legs cramped under a desk. This might have blunted the ambitions of a lesser man, but Cholmondeley instead poured his imagination and energies into covert work.
By 1942, he had risen to the rank of flight lieutenant (temporary) in the RAF’s Intelligence and Security Department, seconded to MI5. Tommy Argyll Robertson (universally known as “Tar” on account of his initials), the MI5 chief who headed the B1A, a section of British intelligence that ran captured enemy spies as double agents, recruited Cholmondeley as an “ideas man,” describing him as “extraordinary and delightful.” When off duty, Cholmondeley restored antique cars, studied the mating habits of insects, and hunted partridge with a revolver. Cholmondeley was courtly and correct and almost pathologically shy and secretive. He cut a distinctive figure around Whitehall, his arms flapping when animated, hopping along the pavement like a huge, flightless, myopic bird. But, for all his peculiarities, Cholmondeley was a most remarkable espionage thinker.
Some of Cholmondeley’s ideas were harebrained in the extreme. He had, in the words of a fellow intelligence officer, “one of those subtle and ingenious minds which is forever throwing up fantastic ideas—mostly so ingenious as either to be impossible of implementation or so intricate as to render their efficacy problematical, but every now and again quite brilliant in their simplicity.” Cholmondeley’s role, like that of Ian Fleming at Naval Intelligence, was to imagine the unimaginable and try to lure the truth toward it. More formally, he was secretary of the top secret XX Committee, or Twenty Committee, the group in charge of overseeing the exploitation of double agents, so-called because the two roman numerals formed a pleasing pun as a double-cross. (The name may also have been an ironic tribute to Charlie Chaplin, whose
The Great Dictator
, a film released in 1940, features a dictator operating under an “XX” flag, mimicking a swastika.) Under the chairmanship of John Masterman, a dry and ascetic Oxford don, the Twenty Committee met every Thursday in the MI5 offices at 58 St. James’s Street to discuss the double-agent system run by Tar Robertson, explore new deception plans, and plot how to pass the most usefully damaging information to the enemy. Its members included representatives of navy, army, and air intelligence, as well as MI5 and MI6. As secretary and MI5 representative at this weekly gathering of high-powered spooks, Cholmondeley was privy to some of the most secret plans of the war. He had read the 1939 memo from Godfrey and Fleming containing the “not very nice” suggestion of using a dead body to convey false information. The Catalina crash off Cadiz proved that such a plan might work.
On October 31, 1942, just one month after the retrieval of Lieutenant Turner’s body from the Spanish beach, Cholmondeley presented the Twenty Committee with his own idea, under the code name “Trojan Horse,” which he described as “a plan for introducing documents of a highly secret nature into the hands of the enemy.” It was, in essence, an expanded version of the plan outlined in the Trout Memo:
A body is obtained from one of the London hospitals (normal peacetime price ten pounds); it is then dressed in army, naval, or air force uniform of suitable rank. The lungs are filled with water and the documents are disposed in an inside pocket. The body is then dropped by a Coastal Command aircraft at a suitable position where the set of the currents will probably carry the body ashore in enemy territory. On the body’s being found, the supposition in the enemy’s mind may well be that one of Britain’s aircraft has been either shot or forced down and that this is one of the passengers. While the courier cannot be sure to get through, if he does succeed, information in the form of the documents can be of a far more secret nature than it would be possible to introduce through any normal B1A channel.
Human agents or double agents can be tortured or turned, forced to reveal the falsity of the information they carried. A dead body would never talk.
Like most of Cholmondeley’s ideas, this one was both exquisitely simple and fiendishly problematic. Having outlined his blueprint for building a latter-day Trojan Horse, Cholmondeley now set about poking holes in it. An autopsy might reveal that the corpse had not died from drowning, or the plane carrying out “the drop” might be intercepted. Even if a suitable body could be found, it would have to be made to “double for an actual officer.” One member of the Twenty Committee pointed out that if a corpse was dropped out of a plane at any height, it would undoubtedly be damaged, “and injuries inflicted after death can always be detected.” If the body was placed in a location where it would wash into enemy or enemy-occupied territory, such as Norway or France, there was every possibility of “a full and capable post-mortem” by German scientists. Catholic countries, however, had a traditional aversion to autopsies, and Spain and Portugal, although neutral, were both leaning toward the Axis: “Of these, Spain was clearly the country where the probability of documents being handed, or at the very least shown to the Germans, was greater.”
Cholmondeley’s idea was both new and very old. Indeed, the unsubtle choice of code name shows how far back in history this ruse runs. Odysseus may have been the first to offer an attractive gift to the enemy containing a most unpleasant surprise, but he had many imitators. In intelligence jargon, the technique of planting misleading information by means of a faked accident even has a formal name: the “haversack ruse.”
The haversack ruse was the brainchild of Richard Meinertzhagen, ornithologist, anti-Semitic Zionist, big-game hunter, fraud, and British spy. In
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), Meinertzhagen’s contemporary, offered a pen portrait of this extraordinary and extraordinarily nasty man: “Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain.”
In 1917, a British army under General Sir Edmund Allenby twice attacked the Turks at Gaza but found the way to Jerusalem blocked by a strong enemy force. Allenby decided that he should launch his next offensive at Beersheba in the east, while hoping to fool the Turks into expecting another attack on Gaza (which was the most logical target). The officer in control of the deception was Major Richard Meinertzhagen, on Allenby’s intelligence staff.
Meinertzhagen knew that the key to an effective deceit is not merely to conceal what you are doing but to persuade the other side that what you are doing is the reverse of what you are actually doing. He stuffed a haversack with false documents, a diary, and twenty pounds in cash and smeared it with his horse’s blood. He then rode out into no-man’s-land until shot at by a Turkish mounted patrol, upon which he slumped in the saddle as if wounded, dropped his haversack, binoculars, and rifle, and galloped back to the British lines. One of the letters (written by Meinertzhagen’s sister Mary) purported to be from the haversack owner’s wife, reporting the birth of their son. It was pure Edwardian schmaltz: “Good-bye, my darling! Nurse says I must not tire myself by writing too much.… Baby sends a kiss to Daddy!” Meinertzhagen now mounted an operation to make it seem as if a feverish search was under way for the missing bag. A sandwich, wrapped in a daily order referring to the missing documents, was planted near enemy lines, as if dropped by a careless patrol. Meinertzhagen was ordered to appear before a (nonexistent) court of inquiry to explain the lost haversack.
The Turks duly concentrated their forces at Gaza and redeployed two divisions away from Beersheba. On October 31, 1917, the British attacked again, rolling back the thin Turkish line at Beersheba. By December, the British had taken Jerusalem. Meinertzhagen crowed that his haversack ruse had been “easy, reliable and inexpensive.” But victory may also be attributed to another devious Meinertzhagen ploy: the dropping of hundreds of cigarettes laced with opium behind Turkish lines. Some historians have argued that the haversack ruse was not quite the success Meinertzhagen claimed. The Turks may have been fooled. Or they may just have been fantastically stoned.
The ruse had already been updated and deployed during the Second World War. Before the battle of Alam Halfa in 1942, a corpse was placed in a blown-up scout car, clutching a map that appeared to show a “fair going” route through the desert, in the hope of misdirecting Rommel’s tanks into soft sand, where they might get bogged down. In another variation on the theme, a fake defense plan for Cyprus was left with a woman in Cairo who was known to be in contact with Axis intelligence. The most recent variant had been plotted, with pleasing symmetry, by Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s older brother, an intelligence officer serving under General Archibald Wavell, then Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East. Peter, who shared his brother’s vivid imagination and was already a successful writer, concocted his own haversack ruse, code-named “Error,” aimed at convincing the Japanese that Wavell himself had been injured in the retreat from Burma and had left behind various important documents in an abandoned car. In April 1942, the fake documents, a photograph of Wavell’s daughter, personal letters, novels, and other items were placed in a green Ford sedan and pushed over a slope at a bridge across the Irrawaddy River, just ahead of the advancing Japanese army. Operation Error had been great fun, but “there was never any evidence that the Japanese had paid any attention to the car, much less that they drew any conclusions from its contents.”
This was the central problem with the haversack ruse: it was deeply embedded in intelligence folklore, the source of many an after-dinner anecdote, but there was precious little proof that it had ever actually worked.
Table of Contents
Chapter Three - The Manhattan Mob
Chapter Four - The Professionals
Chapter Five - The Robbers’ Bride
Chapter Six - An American Bar in Paris
Chapter Eight - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Worth
Chapter Ten - A Great Lady Holds a Reception
Chapter Eleven - A Courtship and a Kidnapping
Chapter Twelve - A Wanted Woman
Chapter Thirteen - My Fair Lady
Chapter Fourteen - Kitty Flynn, Society Queen
Chapter Fifteen - Dishonor Among Thieves
Chapter Sixteen - Rough Diamonds
Chapter Seventeen - A Silk Glove Man
Chapter Eighteen - Bootless Footpads
Chapter Nineteen - Worth’s Waterloo
Chapter Twenty-one - Gentleman in Chains
Chapter Twenty-two - Le Brigand International
Chapter Twenty-three - Alias Moriarty
Chapter Twenty-four - Atonement
Chapter Twenty-five - Moriarty Confesses to Holmes
Chapter Twenty-six - The Bellboy’s Burden
Chapter Twenty-seven - Pierpont Morgan, the Napoleon of Wall Street
Chapter Twenty-eight - Return of the Prodigal Duchess