Express reporter’s key role in plot to deceive Hitler
A DAILY Express journalist was at the heart of an operation to deceive Hitler about Allied plans to seize Sicily, a new book reveals.
War correspondent Cedric Salter was drafted in to help throw the Nazis off the scent by being “judiciously indiscreet” about a fake strategy while in Istanbul.
Salter was working for a rival newspaper at the start of the war but switched to the Express and his editor, Arthur Christiansen, had to be brought into the fold on the secret operation.
The details are revealed in The Illusionist: The True Story Of The Man Who Fooled Hitler, a book by political journalist Robert Hutton.
Uncovering documents from the time, it shines a light on littleknown intelligence operations to trick the Nazis during the war.
In 1943, the Allies captured North Africa and prepared to cross the Mediterranean to take Sicily.
Dudley Clarke was put in charge of Operation Barclay, a deception intended to persuade the Germans and Italians that preparations to invade Sicily were fake, and that the real plan was to invade Sardinia and Greece.
The eccentric cross-dressing British officer, who ran the special unit A Force, was played by Dominic West in the recent BBC
‘The reporters were in little doubt about whose side they were on’
drama SAS: Rogue Heroes. A part of Operation Barclay known as Operation Mincemeat became famous for deceiving Germany with fake documents from a supposedly drowned man that made their way to the top of the regime.
But another aspect involved our man spreading false information about British military plans that would get back to the enemy.
At the heart of the strategy was Vladimir Wolfson, Naval Intelligence’s representative in Istanbul, who was a colleague of Ian Fleming and believed to be the model for Darko Kerim in his novel From Russia,With Love.
Along with Clarke, he devised plans to enlist journalists.
Salter was in Istanbul and told by his former employer to stay within easy reach of the Balkans at the end of June.
Hutton found that Salter was “under instructions to be judiciously indiscreet”.
“I know my correspondents here well,” Wolfson wrote. “They have been idle and too well fed for far too long and a warning to stand-by would set them off like a pistol shot. They would talk their heads off, however confidentially, and it would be bound to get to the enemy.”
Salter joined the Daily Express
and Clarke wrote a “Most Secret” memo confirming the editor was being brought in on the plan. “It was exactly the sort of rumour and speculation that Barclay needed,” Hutton writes in his book. “Clarke had tried manipulating the press before, and found it fraught with unexpected complications. The previous year he had approached Alexander Clifford, the Mail’s man in Cairo, and asked him to write a story about the difficulties Rommel might have launching an offensive in the heat of May, in the hope that enemy intelligence would draw the conclusion that the British were reluctant to attack at that time of year.
“The piece had appeared, ‘most skilfully drafted’, and A Force had briefly been delighted, until The Times’s correspondent, irritated at being scooped by a rival, had written a story rubbishing the Mail’s piece and insisting that the army was quite ready to attack.
“In Algiers, he got around this problem by dealing with the press as a group. A select group of war correspondents was summoned and asked ‘frankly’ for their cooperation in spreading the false story.
“This was a tricky line to walk. The reporters who followed the Allied armies were in little doubt about whose side they were on, but were also clear that they were not supposed to be propagandists.
“But there was a middle path. ‘It was never suggested that they should write untruths,’ Clarke said. Instead, ‘they were invited to stress certain aspects of current happenings so as to bring them into line with the general indications of Barclay’.
“Many of the ‘current happenings’ visible to a journalist were of course being stage managed by A
Force, so they could be reported accurately and helpfully, if not entirely truthfully.
“If Clarke had any anxiety that the assembled press would object to being asked to take part in deception, he needn’t have. ‘You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist,’ the poet Humbert Wolfe had written a few years earlier. ‘But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to’.
“A Force’s invitation was taken up with enthusiasm.”
●The Illusionist: The True Story Of The Man Who Fooled Hitler, by Robert Hutton, is published April 25 byWeidenfeld & Nicolson