The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [242]
There was some embarrassing political fallout. German and Vichy French diplomats in Madrid complained to the Spanish Foreign Ministry, and on 12 August Radio France broadcast a report of the affair, asserting that as the car passed through ‘a small village in Andalusia’ the prisoner ‘tried to attract people’s attention by shouting . . . [but] the Englishmen declared “Don’t get upset, it’s only a member of the Embassy gone mad and we are taking him to a Sanatorium”’. Two days later the London Daily Telegraph, under the headline ‘Nazis invent a kidnapping’, reported ‘one of the highest flights of fancy from the Nazis’ propaganda department’, which alleged ‘a gangster-like kidnapping of a Frenchman by British secret service agents in Spain’. In fact the German story was pretty accurate, but one Foreign Office official thought that ‘the D.T. has done quite well and no doubt other papers would take the same line’, a sentiment with which Menzies agreed.22 The official story (as communicated by Commander Ian Fleming of Naval Intelligence to the British Red Cross in July 1942) represented Claire as ‘missing believed drowned’, en route to Britain on the SS Empire Hurst, sunk by enemy aircraft on 11 August 1941. After the war, in order to protect SIS, it was decided to pay Claire’s widow a pension, ‘however repugnant it may be to reward the dependants of a traitor’. As Valentine Vivian minuted about the matter, ‘It may be that “murder will out” in any case, but we stand to lose so much in this case if it does, that we ought not voluntarily to take the slightest scintilla of risk.’
The second affair which threatened to disturb SIS’s position in Spain was that of Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, who had been running a strategic deception section at GHQ Middle East in Cairo since the late autumn of 1940. Using cover as a war correspondent for The Times, and aiming with the help of SIS to make contacts to assist his deception work, Clarke travelled to Lisbon and Madrid where, some time after calling on Hamilton Stokes, on 17 October 1941 (as the British embassy reported to London the following day) he ‘was arrested in a main street dressed, down to a brassière, as a woman’. He initially told the Spanish police that he ‘was a novelist and wanted to study the reactions of men to women in the streets’. Later he asserted that in fact ‘he was taking the feminine garments to a lady in Gibraltar and thought that he would try them on for a prank. This’, added the embassy, ‘hardly squares with the fact that the garments and shoes fitted him.’23 A telephoned press report from Madrid to Berlin which SIS intercepted said that ‘Wrangal Craker, the Madrid correspondent of the London “Times”’, had been arrested. Reflecting the ‘unusual circumstances of these times’ and the ‘working methods of British agents’, he had been discovered ‘dressed as a woman’. ‘Craker’ had ‘unusually big feet with a remarkable . . .’ and here the intercept tantalisingly broke off with an ‘indecipherable passage’. In response to anxious cables from Menzies, concerned about a possible leakage of information, Hamilton Stokes reported that while the police were inclined to the theory that Clarke was a ‘homosexualist’, the German Gestapo had intervened and alleged he was a spy. On 21 October, however, Clarke was released from prison and the embassy got him away to Gibraltar the same evening.
On arrival in Gibraltar Clarke insouciantly claimed that the ‘incident in Madrid was carefully calculated’ and ‘nothing (repeat nothing) whatever compromised’. He asserted, indeed, that the affair had usefully confirmed that his cover still held with both the Spaniards and the Germans. Clarke’s eccentricity evidently reinforced his aptitude for secret work and the episode does not seem to have affected his own position, since he returned to Cairo and went on to have a brilliant career in deception. Hamilton Stokes, meanwhile, worried that his situation might have been jeopardised, while