 | ||
 | | |
| | | | |
Part Fourteen
"My father never was in either the U.S.A. or in Canada at any time of his life. Any mention of his demonstrating camouflage deceptions to Edgar Hoover is false." Alistair Maskelyne
What happened to Jasper Maskelyne after El Alamein ? David Fisher blunders his way to an unsatisfactory and abrupt ending. The two page epilogue to "The War Magician" is tantalisingly short and riddled with errors. For example, on the evidence available, Maskelyne did not visit Canada, did not set up either the top secret Camp 'M' or Camp 'X' for 'Intrepid', and did not meet with J. Edgar Hoover. Fisher almost certainly lifted the Camp X myth from William Stevenson's "A Man Called Intrepid" (1976), a biography of William Stephenson. This best-selling book was made into a TV mini-series starring David Niven. Intrepid's biographer wrote:"The "M" in station M was said to stand for Magic and Jasper Maskelyne, a hero to British schoolboys before the war, one of the great magicians of all time and a master at the art of deception. His section at Camp X was known as the "Magic Group"; it conjured up illusions and laid false trails. Maskelyne was a genius at make-believe. During an early visit to the camp by Hoover, the FBI director was astonished to see what appeared to be several warships on Lake Ontario. He was standing in a hut, and Maskelyne had rigged mirrors to produce a magnified effect with toy German battle cruisers." "He put the conjuring arts into battle," said Murray. "The trick was to make the enemy see what he had been led to expect." Maskelyne flew from Camp X to all corners of the world, creating non-existent armies, dummy cannon, trick air bases, false fleets." To avoid further confusion, I should point out that the author William Stevenson, a journalist, was writing about William Stephenson ('Intrepid'). The two men, coincidentally, have similar sounding names, but are actually two separate individuals. John Booth in his Linking Ring articles (1985) failed to make this important distinction. He misattributed the quotation"Maskelyne was a genius at make-believe" to the"master intelligence brain" himself. He then compounded this mistake by asserting that Maskelyne's three (brief and dubious!) mentions in "A Man Called Intrepid" somehow confirmed that "Maskelyne was, indeed, a "genius" whose products impressed the innermost circles." Unfortunately, Stevenson's book is hardly an authoritative account and has been savaged by professional historians. Far from confirming Maskelyne's role, "A Man Called Intrepid" contaminates and impedes a proper appreciation of Maskelyne's actual wartime career. This aspect of the Maskelyne myth is then carelessly regurgitated in other accounts. Fisher, a prime culprit, wrote the following paragraph in his epilogue:"In Canada he (Maskelyne) established Station M — the "M" standing for "Magic" — where he created top-secret illusions to be used around the world. While serving at Station M he recreated the illusion he had used in Farnham to convince Lord Gort that the battleship Admiral graf Spee was sailing down the Thames, this time making FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believe German cruisers were at work on Lake Ontario." As a publicity blurb, Stevenson 's bold quote that 'Maskelyne was a genius at make-believe' was placed prominently and misleadingly on the rear cover of the paperback edition. Alistair Maskelyne in his first letter emphatically denied such a meeting ever took place: "My father never was in either the U.S.A. or in Canada at any time of his life. Any mention of his demonstrating camouflage deceptions to Edgar Hoover is false." Given this adamant denial, I thought it worthwhile to investigate the background to Camp X and, if possible, search for corroborative or contradicting evidence. David Stafford, a history professor at Toronto University, has written an excellent book entitled "Camp X: Myth and Reality" (1986). In a follow-up article he added: "The reality of Camp X is startlingly different from the myth...most of the exploits allegedly planned and prepared at Camp X had nothing whatsoever to do with it." Stafford's independent account, based on genuine records and interviews with surviving participants, was very critical of misleading secondary sources. Significantly, there is no mention of Jasper Maskelyne in this book. In one section of his book, Stafford wrote: "According to official BSC documents, "Station M", a centre for the art of "manufacturing" documents was established in Canada in August 1941 - just four months before Camp X." The letter 'M' apparently referred to the manufacturing of forged documents and not to Maskelyne's Magic illusions. Camp X formally opened in December 1941, a time when Maskelyne was closely involved in the North African war. Obviously, if you accept the chronology presented in this series of articles, there is no way that Maskelyne could have been involved in the establishment and operation of a top-secret training camp in Canada. Furthermore, Hoover was suspicious of any training ground on the American continent which lay beyond his jurisdiction and control. He would have been acutely jealous of any camp that might rival the FBI's own training camp. On protocol grounds alone, I find it implausible that Hoover would have visited the place in person. According to Stafford, this territorial dispute was diplomatically smoothed over by having representatives of Camp X visit Hoover in Washington, D.C. , and not the other way round. Stafford noted that Stephenson (Intrepid) did meet with Hoover c. March 1942. One of Hoover's underlings was eventually invited to Camp X and several FBI agents received supplementary training from the new outfit, but I cannot find any record in recent biographies of the FBI Director that Hoover himself ever travelled across the border to Camp X , let alone met with Maskelyne. Overall, Stafford's well-researched book provides indirect support to Alistair Maskelyne's strong assertion that the Canadian episode in his father's career is fictitious. In Stevenson's book on Intrepid there is also a reference to a rapid transit route for V.I.P.'s flying from Canada to Scotland:"Couriers, atomic scientists, even spy masters went this way in extreme discomfort aboard bombers stripped of non essentials. Passengers squeezed into gun turrets, and confidential mail was stuffed into bomb bays. The dangers varied. A famous magician, Jasper Maskelyne, whose talents were required for creating illusionary weapons, almost died from oxygen starvation." This might be just another good story, but I passed on the reference to Alistair Maskelyne in case his father had ever recounted a similar tale but on a flight in another location. "...the hypoxia episode: probably some basis of truth there, he certainly did a lot of travel in war time aircraft, but on which occasion it happened I have no idea." ___________________________________________________________________________ If I were to summarise Jasper Maskelyne's actual wartime career I would be tempted to repeat the following line: Maskelyne was a master of make-believe, but not in the way the author of 'Intrepid' meant it. Maskelyne was a marginal spectator, a phantom performer, stranded on the sidelines of a conflict which, it could be argued, was a side-show compared to the campaigns being fought elsewhere, particularly those in Eastern Europe. Considering the evidence presented in these articles, Maskelyne's illusions , for the most part, appear to have been illusory. Which brings us to David Mure's "Master of Deception", a biographical tribute to Dudley Clarke. Potentially, the most intriguing reference to Maskelyne in the war literature occurs in the following passage where David Mure retracts the claims made in his earlier book "Practise to Deceive". According to Wild, Jasper Maskelyne's involvement in A-Force was "largely notional", i.e., in name only. "Clarke" , Mure writes, "deliberately gave him a shadowy eminence...based on his being the inventor of the dummy tanks, the bogus submarines, the camouflage aeroplanes and the fleets of fraudulent landing craft which were such an essential part of the visual side of deception . As the 'A' force officer in charge of the Beirut station in 1943 , I used to pass through double agent links with the Germans" reports of concentrations of aircraft, landing craft etc. strategically poised for the invasion of Greece and the Balkans. I honestly thought that the dummies had been devised expressly by the great magician and this gave me the greatest confidence in them. I have no doubt that, when such displays were mooted in command circles in support of a cover plan the commanders and senior staff officers got an equal feeling of confidence. No doubt Jasper's advice was sought and fully acted on when it could be of real use in devising deceptive equipment and ,by his own account, the boss who understood his talents and their application to current problems by far the best was Brigadier Dudley Clarke. But the work was actually carried out by the GHQ camouflage department. Maskelyne's co-operation was, therefore, largely notional." Was Maskelyne's role in camouflage work deliberately overstated? Does this help explain why many of the references in the war literature to Maskelyne are so inaccurate? Are they the long distance echoes of a clever misinformation scheme by Clarke? Maskelyne was an impressive stage performer, a skilled public speaker and, without doubt, an entertaining lecturer. Clarke, fascinated by conjuring as a schoolboy , was probably attracted to Maskelyne's charm, style and prominent public image. Taking advantage of Maskelyne's name, Clarke achieved a public relations coup. His unit's association with Maskelyne helped convince the higher-ups that the camouflage and decoy plans would be professionally executed. This 'notional' theory is plausible. If accepted, it would lead to a more sympathetic appreciation of Maskelyne's mysterious phantom role. I suspect, though, that crude and less flattering factors were also at work. Maskelyne was perhaps unscrupulous and opportunistic. He sought the limelight and was willing to bend the truth or let others bend it for him. He took credit where it was not always due. Alistair Maskelyne wrote:"The passage of time and the death of many of the personages involved in the events described can give rise to misrepresentation and over emphasis of the relative importance of the parts played by some of the players. I know my father had always liked to "big note" his activities, both on the stage and in the army. He greatly enjoyed his connections, even if peripheral, with more famous persons. As time passes, people forget, or do not know the facts and it is possible for an unscrupulous story teller to enlarge his ego or purse at the expense of the truth... "Being my father's son, I recognise in myself some of his characteristics, and find I do enjoy the odd newspaper article about my own life, so it is a family failing." In a later letter, Alistair Maskelyne responded to the 'notional' theory : "I rather like your copy of the pages from the "Master of Deception". Dudley Clarke figured very largely in my father's talks with us after the war, before my mother died, and after I had left my last ship, the Orari. A "notional" importance certainly explains much of what his position was in the army, and this idea is also fostered by one press cutting I recall from my father's albums: it shows a comical magical figure pulling things from a top hat, together with a column detailing my father's appointment to the camouflage section of the British army. It was published in a German newspaper about 1941. I guess that the British authorities could well have believed that this was an idea worth fostering: obviously slightly risible and with the effect of concealing more vital matters." ___________________________________________________________________________ Next article: in contrast to "The War Magician", the earlier book "Magic-Top Secret" does give 'information' about Maskelyne's career after Alamein. Its narrative is often unreliable and its chronology is vague, but despite these interpretative obstacles, we will try to extract some valid material. | ||
| | |