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Part One

"What an excellent thing history would be" , said Tolstoy, " if only it were true."

A quick survey of my articles to date might indicate a puzzling array of topics which stray far from the traditional conjuring arena. However, I hope that on further inspection, many of these articles, which at first seem unconnected, will be seen to be closely linked, representing an attempt from several different angles to analyse the nature of deception.

Magic, in my opinion, is not merely about entertainment — it is primarily about deception.

The next series of articles will concentrate on the secret operations carried out by the magician Jasper Maskelyne during the Second World War.

The original impetus for this unusual subject was a fascinating two-part article by John Booth in the IBM's Linking Ring, namely, "The Mystery of "The War Magician" (February 1985 Linking Ring) and "The Most Heroic Sized Illusions in Magic History" (March 1985) in which Booth discussed the wartime adventures of Major Jasper Maskelyne.

In his Linking Ring column, John Booth recounted how he saw Maskelyne's stage show in England in 1949. He actually met with Maskelyne in Kenya in 1954, but he was not aware of the full significance of Maskelyne's wartime record until many years later when he first came across "The War Magician" by David Fisher (1983).

Booth was captivated by the book : "Few books in the past decade have intrigued me so intensely as this one." ..."Masterfully written, almost like a documentary novel, replete with conversation and verifiable historical detail..."

In a closing quotation, Booth clearly believed that Jasper Maskelyne deserved belated recognition as an important figure in magicdom's history : "As 'the war magician' he will go down in history not only as the last performer of the great conjuring family of the Maskelynes but as the prime designer and performer of the greatest illusions in human history."

Booth seemed reasonably confident that the events described in "The War Magician" really did happen. However, even in Booth's presentation, scepticism briefly surfaced. For example, in Kenya, Maskelyne had told Booth the strange story about his dramatic search for a hidden enemy radio transmitter. Booth was somewhat doubtful of Maskelyne's tale at the time, but having read "The War Magician" he was much more inclined to believe it. As we shall see, there are major discrepancies about this episode which makes me suspect that the story is overelaborated and probably concocted.

John Booth

Again, at one point, understandably puzzled as to why only an American edition of "The War Magician" existed, Booth asked "Are its contents too challengeable as inaccurate or overdrawn?" However, Booth immediately considered the opposite possibility: "Does it reveal too many wartime secrets ?"

Given that the book is concerned with an English magician's exploits while serving in the British Army, one would expect an English edition to be available. Booth speculated that perhaps Fisher's book could not be so easily published in England because of legal restrictions such as the Official Secrets Act.

This hypothesis initially struck me as far-fetched. After all, the material is now ancient by espionage standards and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be seen as posing a security risk. However, two recent episodes of attempted censorship have left me less sceptical. Firstly, the immense difficulties faced by Peter Wright when he tried to publish his own memoirs "SpyCatcher" which culminated in a surreal court case fought and lost by the British Government in Australia.

Secondly, the intransigence of the Thatcher government who delayed publication of its Official History of British Intelligence in the Second World War. Michael Howard's volume, commissioned by a Labour Government, and completed in 1980 , was only given permission for publication in 1990.

Booth also noted that little is known about David Fisher, the book's mysterious author. On the dust-jacket of my library copy , the blurb says that David Fisher is a former reporter for Life magazine and lives in New York City. It also mentions he has written a book called "The Umpire Strikes Back".

I now think I know who Fisher is. In September 1993, I bought a copy of actor Leslie Nielsen's sham autobiography "The Naked Truth", a deliberate parody of the Hollywood film-star confession genre. Nielsen is the star of hugely successful comedy films like "Airplane! " and "The Naked Gun".

The co-author of "The Naked Truth" also happens to be a David Fisher. And the dust jacket which includes a photo of a man in his early fifties with receding hairline reads: "David Fisher has collaborated on the best sellers Gracie, A Love Story with George Burns, The Umpire Strikes back with Ron Luciano and Killer with 'Joey', and wrote volume CL-DE of the Encyclopaedia Britannica."

This surely must be the same David Fisher. This recent collaboration with Nielsen is perhaps an ironic and pointed clue to the fact that Fisher has a tendency to embroider and fictionalise his subject matter.

I found "The War Magician" fascinating, flawed and frustrating.

David Fisher has virtually 'novelised' the material, adapting Maskelyne's original memoirs and framing them into a thriller-like account with elements of caper-comedy. There is enough material here to make an excellent movie or TV mini-series. The cynic might conclude that the material has been deliberately recast to meet such commercial requirements.

The result resembles a cross between Mission Impossible and Dad's Army! Particularly amusing is the story of how Maskelyne's team, nicknamed the Magic Gang, created huge quantities of camouflage paint by combining rancid Worcestershire sauce with camel dung.

From the viewpoint of professional historical research, the book is annoying because of the absence of footnotes, the lack of an index, no proper citation of sources, no information on how the scenes were reconstructed, and not a single map.

The narrative also peters out soon after the Battle of El Alamein, even though Maskelyne was supposedly involved in other important ventures. For example, Fisher only provides tantalising revelations about Maskelyne's work for MI-9.

And yet, so many details are there that it seems reasonable to conclude that the author must have had some access to Maskelyne's personal notes or diaries.

It is not clear whether Fisher even met or corresponded with Maskelyne in real life. And there is no indication that any surviving members of the Magic Gang were interviewed. Perhaps, Fisher only gained access to Maskelyne's personal papers after his death.

Significantly, Fisher makes no mention of Ultra (the secret intelligence gathered from the interception and decipherment of the German ENIGMA codes.) This omission, which is curious for a book published in 1983, somewhat weakens the background historical narrative and indicates to me that the material in its original form must have been assembled before 1974.

The general reader might not be bothered by such questions and will probably enjoy the story for its own sake. David Fisher has produced an exciting and entertaining book, even if its final form is unsatisfactory.

Jasper Maskelyne actually 'wrote' his own account of his North African experience in "Magic-Top Secret" , published after the war in 1949. Booth suspected that David Fisher's "The War Magician" was based not only on this earlier account but on additional unpublished memoirs of Jasper Maskelyne.

As we shall see, Booth was on the right track.

This begs the question : How was Maskelyne able to overcome the 30-year restriction of the Official Secrets Act ? The answer to this question may be more straightforward than I imagined and will be tackled in the next article.

Unfortunately, "Magic-Top Secret" is very hard to locate. I have not been able to find a copy of this rare book in Australia. Even contacts within the Australian magic field such as book collector Margaret Yates have not been able to provide a copy.

Late last year (1992) , I contacted library authorities in England and initiated a search. "Magic-Top Secret" was on their records, but after six months of waiting, there was no sign of the book.

Meanwhile, after reading "The War Magician", I found myself in critical and sceptical mode.

I felt the following questions were important :

How reliable is Fisher's account of Maskelyne's activities?

Does it belong to the genre of creative non-fiction ?

Is "The War Magician" based on Maskelyne's own diaries/notes?

If so, how reliable/objective was Maskelyne himself ?

Were the anecdotes reconstructed and polished to have greater impact on the narrative?

A good example of autobiographical distortion is the late David Niven's account of his adventures in Hollywood. His anecdotes about film stars are wonderfully amusing and 'authoritative', but are riddled with inaccuracies and inconsistencies according to even a sympathetic biographer, Sheridan Morley:

"It is not that his stories were always exactly untrue, but that the truth in them was often rearranged to lead up to a better punchline."

"Even the best and most famous of the stories that do appear in his books tend to fall apart when double-checked..."

Were the wartime adventures of Jasper Maskelyne subject to similar distortions?

In July ,1993, there were two breakthroughs in my research.

Firstly, at a birthday party in the Blue Mountains for our two-year old son, I met up with Angela Maskelyne, the granddaughter of Jasper Maskelyne. Angela happens to be a good friend of my partner Niekie Hoving.

This personal contact is pure coincidence and is not connected with my interest in magic.

I asked Angela if I might contact her father, Alistair Maskelyne, and write him a letter containing questions about his late father.

Permission was granted and I duly assembled a ten-page letter outlining my research, my lines of argument, and my suspicions about the various sources.

Alistair Maskelyne is Jasper's son. When I began my research, Alistair was in his mid-sixties and living in semi-retirement in Queensland. His insider's account of his father's career might prove very helpful, but would he be willing to talk about his family's past ?

Within days of my letter, I received an astonishingly detailed seven-page typewritten response which included valuable information on "The War Magician". As you will eventually see, several of my suspicions were confirmed as valid. However, there were other surprising details to the story that I had not foreseen. Alistair Maskelyne' s letter meant I had to put everything on hold and carefully reassess what I had already written.

The second development also happened in the same month. I finally heard that my request for "Magic-Top Secret" had been met. A copy had been located in a library in Aldershot. As luck would have it , my mother was visiting from England in August 1993 and she was able to bring the book out on a special month's loan. I could now at last compare Maskelyne's original account with Fisher's later version.

If only it were that simple! As we shall see, there are significant chronological discrepancies — not minor oversights , but major inconsistencies —between the two accounts.

That does not mean that Fisher's version is necessarily always at fault. The original account ironically may contain more errors. There is a sting to this tale which I will explain in due course.

There are a couple of references I would like to follow up (and I am searching libraries in England for the material) but, having scoured the available literature, and followed up independent sources, it is time to present this revised story.

Originally, I had hoped to bring the pieces together and, in line with Booth's articles, give Jasper Maskelyne his rightful place on the stage of history.

It hasn't worked out so neatly.

You may recall that I used the term 'pathography' in a previous article on Houdini, arguing that biographers need to penetrate the public façade. Likewise, Maskelyne's mythical status as a clandestine war wizard needs to be critically reviewed. Even before receiving Alistair Maskelyne's letter, I had taken into consideration recent counterbalancing assessments of wartime deception operations.

In the mid 1970s retired intelligence experts flooded the field with memoirs of the secret war. The orthodox textbook accounts of the Second World War seemed obsolete.

However, in the 1980s, a revisionist school seriously questioned the effectiveness of the secret intelligence and deception operations.

I suppose that the full truth will never be rescued from the historical debris. Those who were fortunate to survive the bloody conflict and who eventually published their memoirs (aware of their own eventual mortality) were writing several decades after the events. Memories , even for recent events , are notoriously fallible.

In addition, many of the participants were exceptionally brilliant, contentious individuals who were vulnerable to the classic pitfalls of autobiography — insufferable egotism, self-justification and convenient memory lapses.

I would not be surprised to find that scarred veterans of the secret war sometimes developed bombproof psychological defence mechanisms which not only protected their own image in 'history' and inflated their own importance but also denigrated opponents and undervalued the contribution of rival services.

In these forthcoming articles, I will examine the alleged achievements of the man dubbed the "war magician".

I will attempt to go beyond Fisher's enthusiastic and uncritical portrait , and will try to assess more objectively Maskelyne's contribution to the course of the war.

___________________________________________________________________________

"On stage I watched a handsome, slender man about six feet, four inches tall, a veritable model of the perfectly accoutred socialite in full evening dress. With his broad smile, clipped moustache and dashing manner, he reminded me of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Sr., the motion picture stars of yesteryear. He looked a little too refined ,however, to be swashbuckling. His style of working was light and humorous; the reason for his professional success was obvious."

John Booth's description of Maskelyne in London, 1949.

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