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Dennis Wheately, Hitler and Norway (What the Conspiracy!)
26 Plays2 years ago
In this (final? maybe?) edition of "What the Conspiracy!", M thrills Josh with stories of espionage and disinformation from Word War 2. Tune in and let yourself be similarly thrilled.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Humorous Courtroom and Conspiracy Theories
00:00:00
Speaker
So, did you really mean to send me that document with all the planned future episodes of what the conspiracy in it? What? We turn to exhibit 42, a Google Doc entitled, Ways to Full M, in which the defendant lists a series of conspiracy theories they think my client doesn't know about.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hang on. In this document, there is a list of things Josh thinks Em doesn't know of, a list of things they think Em probably knows, and a list of potentially undiscovered conspiracy theories. Is this document yours, Mr. Addison? Well... Answer the question with a yes or no, Mr. Addison. I might remind you, you are not on the stand. Yes. Yes, it's mine.
00:00:43
Speaker
Did you not also, two months ago, on this very podcast, state that you came up with these topics on the cuff a few days before your turn at wanting the conspiracy? Well... Yes or no? Yes. Tell the listeners, Mr Addison, the date this document was created. I don't recall.
00:01:03
Speaker
Well, Mr Addison, Google Docs does recall. September 2021, Mr Addison. September of the Year of Our Lord 2021. Well, this is all very peri-mason. Bit Columbo. Definitely not, though, Hercule Poirot. There's no need for an accent here.
00:01:22
Speaker
I'll be the judge of that, Mr Addison. Let the listeners know that Mr Addison thinks I might not have heard of Watergate, but does think I know of the Fuzzy Butt Monkey conspiracy. But you don't? No. Damn it. It would have been a perfect episode, even if it would have been horribly psychologically damaging. How so? Well, it involves your mum and my mum.
00:01:46
Speaker
And a fuzzy butt monkey, although it wasn't fuzzy or related to butts when they started. I think we've heard enough. Indeed, given the grave content of this document, I think we've heard enough what's about conspiracies. I declare this segment officially over. What? No one for the road? No. Not even one last go round for the listeners?
00:02:07
Speaker
OK, one more. Although I do have a few more topics up my sleeve. OK, one more. Eh, maybe an extra one to close up some loose ends? OK, two more, but that's it. Unless, well, unless you want to, you know, surprise me with an episode from time to time.
00:02:26
Speaker
OK, two more and maybe a few after that. But it's over. Great. But first, I need to show you this video of that monkey. You won't believe the things our mums are going to do to it for science.
Introducing the Podcast and Hosts
00:02:47
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Indented.
00:02:56
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy and the inspiration for the movie Titanic and the actual Titanic, Dr. M.R.X.Tentiff.
00:03:10
Speaker
It's true, although, frankly, to my mind, the thing that I am most inspirational for was, of course, the career of David Warner. Poor deceased David Warner now, but the career of David Warner, whose pinnacle of acting triumph was, of course, as the butler, or valet, as we should call him in Titanic. Billy Zane's man's man, David Warner.
00:03:36
Speaker
Do you think it would be fair to say of you that your heart will go on and on and on, long after all of the rest of us, long after the mountains have crumbled into the sea? Well, as I plan to be a medical cadaver, yes, my heart will go on to greater things after my death. In fact, I'm hoping as a corpse, I go to greater heights and I ever
Exhaustion of Conspiracy Topics
00:03:57
Speaker
achieve as a living human being.
00:03:59
Speaker
are thoroughly appropriate then. So it is a what the conspiracy episode, the last what the conspiracy episode? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Josh has run out of things to say. I've pretty much run out of topics. I think we've said we both sort of have a little bit of a grab bag of things that we could never build a full episode around. So maybe we need a wrap up where we just sort of spurt out
00:04:26
Speaker
all these little one-liners that we couldn't really parlay into a full-length episode, and then maybe we'll be done.
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, there are there are a few where a case of this looks interesting, but it's basically a very small event that occurred with a really great name. So I just want to use the name. But there isn't enough to actually build a story around it. But also, this is a case of this is a great victory in the psychological warfare of being committing against you. Because I, as the conspiracy master, have so many conspiracies I could tell you about. And you, as the conspiracy novice, have exhausted your poor, paltry little
00:05:05
Speaker
Smooth brain. So I am the victor.
00:05:09
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose that's true. I'll be interested to see if we actually have, if the same item crops up on both of our lists. We could, it's possible we could both be sitting on this thing thinking, ah, I bet they've never heard of that one, and yet we both have. But anyway, we'll find out later, not now. Because now it's time for just an ordinary, good old fashioned, what the conspiracy episode when you're going to pump me full of exotic conspiracy juices as far as I know.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yes, as far as you know. Oh, well, let's chuck in a chime. I'm used to saying, play us a chime, but now that I'm sharing the audio editing duties, Josh, play me a chime. Yes, Josh, I will. Yes, Josh, I insist you put the chime in somewhere around about here. It's time to play What the Conspiracy.
00:06:09
Speaker
So it was written, so shall it be done. Now, you have a topic for me, I understand.
New Conspiracy Discussion Begins
00:06:13
Speaker
If you don't, this is going to be a very short episode. What the conspiracy is, have I prepared? No. No, in this case, we have to ask traditional questions three, maybe the last time we asked questions three. So I need to ask you what the conspiracy, where the conspiracy and when the conspiracy. Let's start from the end. When did this conspiracy occur?
00:06:38
Speaker
I am going to posit this conspiracy is occurring as we record this episode. That's an interesting wrinkle. We might have to mention that briefly. For the where, I'm going to assume it's everywhere but floating about four feet off the ground.
00:07:06
Speaker
everywhere but floating okay five four or five feet i'll just give myself a bit of okay all right and what kind of conspiracy is it
00:07:18
Speaker
Well, as we all know from the very beginning, I've been assuming you'll try to sneak some sort of a dairy related conspiracy past me. I've predicted cheese, I've predicted yogurt. I don't think I've managed to get into this sort of the curdy clotted cheese casing weirdness stuff, but I'm just gonna say it's gonna be a good old fashioned milk related conspiracy because that's the only thing that's left.
00:07:47
Speaker
It's not the only thing that's left because it's not a milk-based conspiracy. So your what is a dairy-based conspiracy? Your what is wrong? It's an espionage-based conspiracy theory. In fact, it's just an espionage-based conspiracy. It's a classic case of espionage, which by definition tends to be conspiratorial. It does. The where is Britain and Europe. And we're talking here... How far off the ground is Britain and Europe?
00:08:17
Speaker
It occurred in the air and in the trenches. So, in fact, actually under the ground. See, that must have been it. I was picking up on the trenchiness of it, but I got my y-axis reversed. So I should have said four or five feet under the ground. Maybe. You can understand my confusion. No, actually, I can't. And the win is World War II.
00:08:45
Speaker
Now, the reason why I say there's a wrinkle here is, of course, it might still technically be going on, not World War II. World War II is over and done with. But of course, some of the things that occurred during the Second World War are still protected by the Official Secrets Act in the United Kingdom. So the story we're going to hear
00:09:06
Speaker
there may well be details that are still being kept from the public to this day in the same respect that we know most of what happened at Bletchley Park around the breaking of the Enigma Code but there's actually still some stuff that occurred there which is under the Official Secrets Act and won't be released for another 30 to 40 years.
Espionage in WWII
00:09:26
Speaker
It is possible some of the stuff we're going to be talking about here is similar so there is a kind of tangential argument saying you may
00:09:35
Speaker
Incidentally, be right about what's going on now. But the events we're going to be talking about very much occur between 1940 and 1944. Righto. So Josh, I need to ask you a question. I need you to answer this honestly. Do you read Dennis Wheatley? No. Do you know who Dennis Wheatley is?
00:10:01
Speaker
Uh, no, no, I don't think I do. I mean, you, you probably do, but it doesn't require you to go back in your mind palace to your childhood in the 1980s and think about when you went into secondhand bookstores or maybe you were perusing
00:10:19
Speaker
a bookstore at a school fair. And there would be these luridly covered, almost satanic looking novels about adventures in black and dark magic, and they'd be written by one Dennis Wheatley. So you'd get books like The Devil Rides Out, which is also a film
00:10:40
Speaker
based upon his particular work, or the launching of Roger Brook, the shadow of Tyburn Tree, the man who killed the king, the dark secret of Josephine, the rape of Venice or the Sultan's daughter. In the 80s, these books were everywhere in secondhand bookstores and bookstores, although you'd be very hard pressed to find Dennis Wheatley on the shelves anymore.
00:11:07
Speaker
He was one of the best-selling authors of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.
00:11:15
Speaker
He is largely the originator of what we take to be modern spy fiction with his Grigory cellist books. And indeed, interestingly enough, the conspiracy we're talking about does mean that Dennis Wheatley was at one point in senior command over one Ian Fleming. So largely Bond and the Bond books owe
00:11:40
Speaker
a debt to the fact that the two writers met but also the Bond books are very much a natural extension of the Gregory Sellers book that Dennis Wheatley wrote. So Dennis Wheatley was a famous name once upon a time. He was initially famous for his spy thrillers and then eventually his prolific horror novels.
00:12:04
Speaker
But we're going to be talking about what Dennis Wheatley was doing during World War Two. Right. Because yes, we know Ian Fleming was up to all sorts of spy related business before he started writing about famous spies. So I would be thoroughly willing to believe that this fellow, if he was Fleming's superior, would have been knee deep in the stuff as well.
00:12:29
Speaker
Indeed, so a bit of background. So in 1934, Dennis Wheatley releases a book called Black August, and this is the first Gregory Sellist book. Now, Gregory Sellist is a man of adventure and also an espionage agent for the British government.
00:12:49
Speaker
And so in the 1934 book you've got this threat of a rising German power which Gregory Sellist is sent out to do something against. He writes another book in 1936 called Contraband. Now 1936 and World War II are quite
00:13:07
Speaker
quite tightly related in date. And then you get books like The Scarlet Imposter in 1940, Fate Passports also in 1940. In fact, he actually releases three Grigory Sellers books in the space of one year, because The Black Baroness is also published in 1940. And the Grigory Sellers books feature Grigory Sellers fighting the Nazis in Europe.
00:13:31
Speaker
as part of the war effort and indeed these books were best sellers for the sheer fact that Dennis Wheatley had an absolute ability to place Sellers into events that had just happened in the war. So the fact he could turn around books very quickly meant that you could get the
00:13:51
Speaker
surrender of the French to Nazi high command, and a few months later there would be a Gregory Sallis book detailing what Sallis did to make sure it didn't go even worse than it did. So Dennis Wheatley was someone who was very enmeshed in what was going on in the war. He would read every single news report he would get his hands upon. He
00:14:15
Speaker
wind and dined in high society which during world war two you'd think would be kind of impossible due to rationing but Wheatley had some way around around that ensuring that he could still live the high life he had before world war two and so he would talk to any famous dignitary diplomat or military personnel person he could find to get details to add to his novels now
00:14:42
Speaker
In the 40s, Wheatley had a bit of an issue. Wheatley wanted to be involved in the war, but Wheatley was also in his 40s during the war. He was too old to be able to sign up and go and join the forces. So he was simply stuck being a famous novelist fighting war battles in his mind until 1940.
00:15:08
Speaker
In 1940, his wife Joan was operating as a chauffeur and she was driving one Captain Hubert Stringer home. Now Stringer was very pessimistic about the state of the war and was talking to Joan Wheatley about how he thought Germany would invade the UK very soon and was concerned that British army and British intelligence officers did not have enough countermeasures in place.
00:15:37
Speaker
to stop a German invasion. Joan, who was very much aware that her husband was very interested in these kind of things being a spy thriller writer, suggested that maybe her husband might have some ideas. And Stringer, who was desperate for any kind of advice as to how to save the realm from a German invasion,
00:15:57
Speaker
said, well, yep, he'd be willing to hear it. So, 14 hours later, Dennis Wheatley had typed up 7,000 words on what he took to be a plan for the Resistance 2 invasion, which was then sent to Stringer's office, and Stringer loved it.
00:16:18
Speaker
He then passed it on to people further up the chain of command. And they went, actually, well, some of these ideas are not practical. Some of them are incredibly clever and actually could be put into use. I mean, first of all, rattling off 7000 words in half a day.
00:16:41
Speaker
I'm impressed. I'm impressed without even knowing what their contents were. I should point out Wheatley
00:16:50
Speaker
apparently smoked about 200 cigarettes during this process and drank three magnums of champagne, allegedly. Allegedly. I don't know what cigarettes are a stimulant. I don't know what champagne does to one's ability to put a sentence together, but good on them, I say. Good on them.
00:17:12
Speaker
Now, one of the really practical ideas he had was that the British should remove all signposts near the coast of England. So basically go around to every coastal town and every coastal locality and just get rid of signposts that told you anything about where you were or how to get anywhere.
00:17:33
Speaker
on the notion that if there was a land invasion by the Germans, sure they could land on the coast, but then they wouldn't know where they were. They would have to spend most of their time trying to triangulate their position, which would then give British officials
00:17:51
Speaker
a better plan to be able to then fend off the invaders. That's one of the tactics people have been using in Ukraine, isn't it? I'm sure I've heard of people there. And it seems to originate from Wheatley.
00:18:06
Speaker
He came up with the idea that what better way to confuse the enemy than to ensure they have no idea what's going on around them. He also had a few ideas which were not deemed to be practical or indeed deemed to be ever so slightly unethical.
00:18:24
Speaker
He suggested that maybe a British submarine could pose as a U-boat and maybe sink an American ship in order to encourage the Americans to join the war effort. And when there was pointed out to him that this would probably not be a good idea, he really couldn't see any problem with the plan.
00:18:47
Speaker
on the grounds of what, we wouldn't get caught, but think it was the Germans, we'd blame. Have we talked about the Lusitania on this podcast before? I don't think we have. That might be something to add to the list.
00:19:02
Speaker
But yes, for now... So, British High Command, I should... I know Germans had High Command. I actually don't know whether the British described their upper echelon of the military as High Command. I think, probably, the British brass, the British brass. Brass, brass, brass, brass, brass, brass, brass, British brass. I'm just getting my axe on corny already here, my British brass.
00:19:28
Speaker
Anyway, the British brass, I'm not gonna be able to say it now, the British brass were very impressed by what Wheatley had come up with, especially given he'd just taken 14 hours and came up with some impractical ideas. He wanted to ship things between the UK and the European mainland using giant log boats and British military geniuses
00:19:58
Speaker
We just don't know how this is... I mean, where are you going to get the giant logs from? And why do you think they're not going to be attacked by Yubos? Oh no, they won't, because they'll just see piles of wood floating across the Atlantic, and people are going,
00:20:14
Speaker
I still think they're probably going to be suspicious of all these rafts travelling from the UK to the European mainland. I mean, yeah, sure, they won't look like boats, but that doesn't mean that you boat commandos go, ah, look, the trees are floating on the water top. We will just ignore this. This is, of course, nothing we need to be worried about. I also have no idea what kind of accent I'm doing. It went in several different directions before I think ending on stereotypical Indian.
00:20:42
Speaker
It always does, which is really quite disturbing. But no, that one does sound like the champagne talking. I'm assuming it must have. Yeah, I assume if you're smoking 200 cigarettes and drinking three magnums of champagne, some of your ideas are going to be a little bit outlandish due to the stimulant and the relaxant interacting and fighting for interest.
00:21:07
Speaker
So, he was then invited by the British brass to be involved in espionage.
Wheatley's Role in WWII Deception
00:21:14
Speaker
So, he was told by one wing commander, Lawrence Davall, to pretend he was a member of Nazi High Command and to work on how he would invade the UK.
00:21:28
Speaker
and he should then deliver this document to one Mr Ranch at the Office of Works, which turned out to be a cover name for the joint planning staff in the Ministry of Defence. And that has shades of the Lovecraft investigation staff where they have their... was it the Ministry of Works?
00:21:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think Ministry of Works. So that's obviously a riff on the Office of Works that was operating during World War II, which was a convenient name that seemed very nondescript for actually an espionage, or at least a proto-espionage unit that was working for the Ministry of Defense, because as we're about to find out,
00:22:06
Speaker
The military weren't very keen on espionage, at least not initially, because they didn't really think that espionage was in the spirit of fighting a war, because espionage kind of denotes cowardice. You're just not willing to meet the enemy face on. And this was going to be a problem, at least initially, for Wheatley and his co-conspirators, as they're trying to encourage the British military to engage in work that was unbecoming.
00:22:34
Speaker
not cricket style of warfare. So he sits down and he spends quite some time trying to work out different ways that the Germans might invade mainland UK. He comes up with about 14 different techniques they could use to land troops and advance troops through the region. Do any of the Germans floating across the British Channel on giant logs
00:23:00
Speaker
No, because he takes more time, he doesn't seem to be so champagne-fueled here. He does talk an awful lot about the fact that Germans might use chemical or biological warfare in the attack, because he challenges the
00:23:17
Speaker
British assumption at the time that the Germans would treat the UK in a nice way because they, you know, they're civilized people just like the Germans are, by pointing out that because of Britain's support for the Treaty of Versailles,
00:23:32
Speaker
German troops are probably going to be thinking quite horrible thoughts about the British people, given the fact that Treaty of Versailles had led to the economic situation, which allowed the Nazis to come into power in the first place. And thus most Germans are going to go, you're the reason why we've been living under rationing for so long.
00:23:55
Speaker
Not entirely sure we're going to be as friendly towards you as maybe you think we're going to be. So he comes up with a variety of different ways in that the British Isles could be... I'll try that again.
00:24:13
Speaker
He comes up with a variety of different ways in which the British Isles could be invaded, and what the Office of Works found striking was that Wheatley just didn't think the Germans would obey the unofficial rulebook of how wars are meant to be fought.
00:24:30
Speaker
And this impressed Churchill. Churchill was very, very impressed. And so in late 1941, when Churchill went, we need to have units which are coming up with ideas of this kind, and maybe engaging a bit of espionage at the same time, Wheatley was invited by the Prime Minister to join a strategic deception unit.
00:24:54
Speaker
Strategic deception unit. I kind of like the sound of that, although I suspect I'm not going to by the time you're finished. I mean, you're not going to like it if you're a Nazi. Are you a Nazi, Josh? Not currently, no. Have you, sorry, not currently. Have you, are you now, or have you ever been a Nazi?
00:25:18
Speaker
Question is, am I now, or will I ever be a Nazi? The future's a mystery to all of us. I can't rule anything out. I mean, I'm fairly sure I'll never be a Nazi. I mean, I can't. 100% guarantee that. I mean, I could have a head injury. Someone could insert a microchip beneath my skin. Brain parasites, alien influence, you don't know. Come on! But no, I'm not a Nazi, so that's OK. Good. Good.
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah, so this particular unit that Wheatley joined was run by one Lieutenant, I've got to say Lieutenant, as if I was a, a gosh, a darned American, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clark. And he'd actually already had a little bit of experience here. So Clark had mastermited the idea of ceding false information to the Nazis whilst an active commander.
00:26:14
Speaker
As a military commander, he would regularly invent or inflate troop numbers and get German double agents in the UK to see that information to Nazi high command. And this process had an official name. It was called Order of Battle Deception. They really liked the euphemisms for good old spycraft and espionage. Strategic deception.
00:26:41
Speaker
order of battle deception. It's almost as if they're going, oh, we can't call this espionage because only cowards engage in espionage. But if we engage in strategic deception or order of battle deception, that's fine. That follows the rules of warfare. These days, it would be tactical deception, I suppose.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, weren't they calling the disinformation campaigns by the Americans in the UK in tactical deception? Probably.
00:27:15
Speaker
Yeah, there was an attempt to go, oh, disinformation is a dirty word. We have to come up with a new word to explain how we're doing good disinformation. Call them freedom lies. Hmm, freedom lies. I just thought of that. I really, really like freedom lies. Actually, I might do that quickly. Quickly. I might trade back down.
00:27:37
Speaker
Because I am writing a new book on conspiracy theories and I think freedom lies is something which really does need to appear in those pages. I'm going to put a hat to Josh.
00:27:49
Speaker
But of course, everyone ignores hat clips and it will be attributed to me eventually. So frankly, thank you for that idea. So here's a question. How many German agents do you think we're operating in the United Kingdom by the end of World War Two? So agents for Nazi High Command reporting on what the British were doing. Oh, the way you say it suggests it's either going to be much bigger than I think or much fewer than I think.
00:28:18
Speaker
I'm going to say two dozen. The answer is zero. There were no German spies operating in the UK by the end of World War Two. So the British were very good at turning German spies into double agents who were working for the British government. And for quite a lot of the war,
00:28:44
Speaker
British intelligence was actually rather reluctant to cede information back to Nazi high command. Because even though they had lots of double agents, they didn't feel they could tell particularly big lies using these double agents. Because the worry was, if they ceded a really big lie, it would be contradicted by an actual German spy operating in the United Kingdom. When Enigma was broken,
00:29:13
Speaker
The British suddenly came to the realization that they had turned every single German spy operating in the United Kingdom and thus they suddenly went from we're reluctant to sell big lies to the Nazis using our double agents to we can tell the Nazis anything and we can get all of the spies to agree to the lie to relay it back and we can make them believe whatever we like.
00:29:40
Speaker
was this called Operation Pants on Fire? And if not, why not? Take off Churchill's corpse and ask him why not. So it turns out, like most agencies in the US, there's a list of pre-approved names you can use for particular operations. So if Pants on Fire had not been put onto the official list, then
00:30:08
Speaker
it just won't appear. And I've always assumed the reason why you have these official lists is to kind of ensure that you don't get fooled by a fake operation. So someone goes, I say Colonel Dudley, Operation Pants on Fire is going very well, but I'm going to need at least 30 more troops and 40 magnums of champagne. Don't ask me what the champagne is for, we just need it for the Operation Pants on Fire, you know what I want, what, what, what, what? And then Colonel Dudley would go,
00:30:36
Speaker
Just check, there is no Operation Pants on Fire. You tried to get me again at Addison. You tried to get me again, but you can't fool me. No, you can't. Or something of that stripe. Okay, so did it say how they were turning all these agents? Were they just paying them more? Were they just like, hey, come work for us and after we win, everything will be great over here and you won't be living in the bombed out remains of Dresden?
00:31:04
Speaker
So the short story is the Eboe, which was the German secret service, was horribly corrupt.
00:31:14
Speaker
They employed a large number of agents because every officer felt he had to have an entire cohort or coterie of agents beneath him that only talked to him, which meant that the agents themselves were not particularly well paid and were crucially not particularly well supported or trained.
00:31:34
Speaker
So they would turn up in the UK impoverished with most spy car off training, so they'd be spotted very quickly. And then by showing a bit of kindness and giving them a moderate sum of money, you could quite easily turn these agents to working for you rather than against you. So basically, the British Secret Service treated the agents well, and it turned out to be very hard to turn them, although the Nazis managed to turn a few.
00:32:04
Speaker
Nazi agents were very easy to turn because they basically had no particular want or need to be loyal to a foreign service that treated them very poorly and gave them no ability to do their job in the first place.
00:32:22
Speaker
So, was D.S. Wheatley, like, was he in charge of the sex or involved in... No, no, so he wasn't... We will come back to the double agent stuff later on. So, he's not directly involved. In fact, technically, he shouldn't have known any of this because the Secret Service and that particular kind of spying was being run by a very different department.
00:32:46
Speaker
Wheatley's job was basically to mastermind ways of falling the Germans into believing things were happening that weren't. So under Clark, who had had a great deal of experience seeding false information to the Nazis about troop numbers and the like, Wheatley
00:33:09
Speaker
was told look you're going to be doing something similar and indeed Wheatley treated this as a fiction writing job. So previously when he had been writing his Gregory Sellers books which took a bit of a pause during his work for strategic deception.
00:33:26
Speaker
His audience had been the British public. When it came to his new job, he thought, well, I'm writing fiction, but I'm writing fiction for one particular reader. Who was that reader, Josh? He was at Winston Churchill.
00:33:42
Speaker
No, it was Adolf Hitler. Was Adolf Hitler? Okay, the other way, right? Okay, yes, he's making a joke. Because unlike the British brass, where there was a chain of command and various people beneath the Prime Minister actually made the final operational decisions, everybody knew that Hitler was in fact in charge of the entire war movement coming out of Germany. He was a very hands-on leader.
00:34:08
Speaker
And as many historians point out, actually not very good at tactics, which is why Germany, despite the fact it had better industry for producing weapons of war, ended up actually overextending itself and making poor decisions, because Hitler would be taken by the wrong idea or the newest thing, and the Allies were much better at going, no, we just need to churn out the same old, same old, and we can win by attrition.
00:34:36
Speaker
So Wheatley, aware that Hitler had particular predilections, decided that it should look like the British were about to invade Norway. Norway. Norway. Norway.
00:34:53
Speaker
So early on in the war, the Nazis took control of Norway, and that's because Hitler, in a public speech, has said whoever controls Norway wins the war. Because it controls the Nordic sea or something.
00:35:10
Speaker
I mean, so it's just because Hitler's an idiot. I'm just going to put that out there. There are ways to try and go, maybe he's right because of x or y, but it was very much Hitler's predilection was Norway was important. And of course, to Norwegians, Norway is also important. But for the Allies, people go, Norway's I mean,
00:35:33
Speaker
Norway is great for natural resources. It's got lots of ports. There's oil nearby. But it's not the most important part. I mean, for the British, France is a much bigger threat because it's really quite close to the coast.
00:35:51
Speaker
See, so Hitler was obsessed with Norway in the way the Allies weren't. So in early 1942, Wheatley and his offsider, one Fritz Lumby, came up with a plan to make it look as if there was going to be a sustained assault and retaking of Norway. They named the operation Operation Hard Boiled. That's more like it.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah, so that was on the list of approved kathenames. And they started training up a Scottish unit for the invasion because it needed to look as if there were troops being trained to go to Norway, even though the commanders in charge of the operation were told the invasion would be cancelled at the last minute. So the troops thought
00:36:41
Speaker
they were going to Norway, the actual officers in charge of the unit were told, I mean, they're not, but you've got to make it look as if they're gearing up for an invasion. They printed maps, they got Norwegian translators, they sent out diplomatic queries about the best places to eat and dine when you get to Oslo.
00:37:06
Speaker
putting in scapegoats, they lost some documents and then sent out messages over diplomatic channels saying, has anyone seen our Norwegian docu-, I mean, not that we're worried about Norway, but has anyone seen our Norwegian documents? We seem to have lost, I mean, they're not important, but if you do see them, please send them to Churchill's bunker ASAP. And they created so many rumours about an Allied invasion of Norway that Hitler sent
00:37:36
Speaker
50,000 troops to help fortify the region. And the region already had 100,000 troops in it.
00:37:46
Speaker
Hitler loved him from Norway, I guess. In fact, he loved Norway so much that Wheatley was able to do the Sirus several times during World War II, meaning that by the end of the war, there were 300,000 Nazi troops in Norway, a location the Allies had no intention of liberating. Okay, that's actually fairly clever.
00:38:14
Speaker
Now during this time Wheatley also wrote a text called The Basic Principles of Enemy Deception which became the go-to book on military deception during World War II and it was actually published after the war as well. Wheatley did write about his experiences during the war.
00:38:33
Speaker
So a lot of this is publicly known material. Now, you would think after the success in Norway, that Wheatley and Lumbee would be celebrated. But the problem was, military commanders didn't like what they were doing because they weren't obeying the rules of war, which is you
00:38:54
Speaker
Signal you want to battle, you have a battle, you count your losses and then you move on. This training troops to go to battle and then not actually sending them there was something which they didn't feel very comfortable with and it also wasn't helped that
00:39:11
Speaker
in many cases Wheatley and Lumbie couldn't really have conversations with the military brass about what was going on because everything was on a need to know basis and the military brass didn't need to know there was deception going on in case there were German spies operating at that time who might report things back because here we're talking 1942 at a point in time where they're not entirely sure
00:39:39
Speaker
that they've got rid of all the German spies in the war effort, even though it turns out actually by 1942 they had converted all German spies to be double agents. They just wouldn't know about it until an enigma was broken.
00:39:56
Speaker
very successful but not actually flavour of the month. I mean I assume the likes of, I assume the higher outs, I assume your Churchill's and what have you. Well we're fairly chuffed with them but everything's still, still hush hush so they can't get the credit they deserve. Precisely. So for a while Wheatley and Lumpy just have nothing to do. To the point where Lumpy gets bored of this particular job and moves off elsewhere leaving Wheatley to his
00:40:25
Speaker
his own designs, Wheatley, to start drinking throughout the day, and this is not one of those problematic drinking cultures, he just goes back to having a large amount of whisky during the day like he did before he took on this role in strategic deception. But in May 1942, things change, at least for Wheatley, for the better.
00:40:47
Speaker
He's given a new boss, which is Lieutenant Colonel John Bevan. And rather than working in an office in London, they move into Churchill's bunker. So they're now not at arms reach from the Prime Minister. They're working often in the same room as the Prime Minister. And this is because the Allies are about to invade North Africa in Operation Torch.
00:41:12
Speaker
less interesting, but still fairly vital as far as operation names go. Now, the problem with Operation Torch was it was going to be very obvious that there were a large number of troops moving into the Mediterranean, because you have troop carriers and other vessels carrying the weapons of war, the tanks and the like, and you can't really hide a mass troop movement.
00:41:41
Speaker
And so what they didn't want were for U-boats and the Nazis to destroy the troop carriers and the weapons of war before they got to North Africa. They also had the problem of they couldn't really disguise they were moving troops by sea because there was no other way to get them there.
00:42:00
Speaker
Wheatley and his cohorts in what's called the London controlling section had to come up with a plan to convince the Nazis that yes, troops were moving, but they weren't going to North Africa.
Operation Torch and D-Day Invasion
00:42:13
Speaker
So they came up with a variety of different plans.
00:42:18
Speaker
Their first plan was to make it look as if the troops in question were indeed traveling into the Mediterranean, but they weren't going to North Africa, they were going to the Middle East and would be diverted at some point to Malta or Sicily. So you'd end up going, well look, the target point is deeper into the Mediterranean,
00:42:40
Speaker
which means that the Germans can spend more time thinking about how they're going to attack these troop carriers and the like, which makes it all the less likely they're going to attack them at the entrance to the Mediterranean, which means you're more likely to get the troops to their desired location without harm. Yeah, I guess that makes sense, but you said that was their first plan, so were their problems with it, or did they come up with a better one? Well, no, because they basically wanted to
00:43:08
Speaker
distract the Nazis as much as possible. So the other thing they wanted to make them think was that Dwight Eisenhower wasn't going to command the expedition. So Eisenhower had already had remarkable successes in the war. He was taken to be kind of top military general from the US. The Nazis were very concerned that he was very effective at his job.
00:43:32
Speaker
So the other role was to make it look as if Dwight Eisenhower was still in the United States having meetings there, and thus couldn't possibly be associated with this troop movement, given that Eisenhower was associated with African campaigns. So you didn't want them to think that maybe this was a feint. So they made it look as if Eisenhower wasn't where he was at the time.
00:43:56
Speaker
And they also made it look as if actually the Allies were about to engage in a massive invasion into the north of France, and thus the Germans took most of their troops from the region and moved them north to prepare for an attack that was never going to occur. And is this all still just being done through fake information passed to double agents?
00:44:21
Speaker
fake information being passed to double agents. You get situations where you might take someone who's already died during the war, you would outfit them in a parachutors uniform, you would stuff some documents in their pockets, and then you would drop their corpse over occupied territory. You would- Was that the famous, was it Operation Mincemeat?
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, stuff like that. Yeah. So there's a lot, there's a lot of providing information to the Nazis that looks too good to be true. But it turns out Hitler really liked information was too good to be true, because he wasn't clever enough to realize that if people are giving you information which confirms your assumptions, you might want to question that Hitler was not a very clever man.
00:45:12
Speaker
Well, yes, there was the whole starting of world war and killing millions of people, counting against them, yeah.
00:45:20
Speaker
Yeah, many things were bad about Hitler. But I would say almost all of them. Quite a few. Yeah, not a fan of the mustache, I have to say. Very, very rum chap, very rum chap. Now Operation Torch was a complete success because the landings occur in North Africa and no lives are lost whatsoever. And the Germans are completely surprised to the point where
00:45:46
Speaker
the Allies are able to take Algiers with the Nazi officials still in their pyjamas as
00:45:55
Speaker
the Allies marched through. They just had no idea an invasion was going to occur. So it was very, very successful. And this this meant the London controlling section was taken to have had a large amount of success. And so they started doing a lot more work, including being involved in Operation D-Day. Now, Josh, what do you know about Operation D-Day?
00:46:22
Speaker
Unless this is a trick, I assume it's the operation where they made the Germans think that the D-Day landings were going to be in a different part of France than they actually were. Do you know why it's called D-Day? Because day starts with D and they really wanted to emphasize that fact.
00:46:44
Speaker
Because it was also A-Day, B-Say, C-Day and D-Day. Part of the information warfare here was to give different dates for the invasion. I did not know that. Yeah, so D-Day is one of the chosen dates.
00:47:00
Speaker
Now, we probably don't need to talk much about the details of Operation D-Day. It's one of the most well-known conflicts in World War II. What's important to note was one of Wheatley's
00:47:16
Speaker
contributions to Operation D-Day was once again convincing the Nazis they were about to invade Norway. There's wacky Nazis in the Norway. It's Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football at this point.
00:47:32
Speaker
Yeah, but I mean, as you point out, the thing which is big about D-Day was that the Germans did not think there was going to be attack at Normandy. They thought that the attack was going to appear in Calais. In fact, Hitler was surprised by the Normandy invasion. So German officials allowed him to sleep in before they even told him about the attacks. So I think he learned about the attacks almost 10 hours after the invasion had commenced.
00:48:02
Speaker
And Hitler was convinced that this was a feint. This was not the actual retaking of Europe. He was convinced that the invasion was actually going to occur in Calais, so he would not move troops from that region south to Normandy. He fortified a position that the Allies did not attack. So things worked out pretty well. Apart from all the deaths, obviously. Let's just say things did not work out well for the Nazis.
00:48:31
Speaker
Yes, that's probably the better way of putting it, yeah. Yeah, so post-D-Day Wheatley basically is out of a job, and he goes back to writing his Celeste books. They were slightly delayed by a few years, but eventually in 1946 he starts, he resumes the Celeste narrative where it was left off, so Celeste is involved in
00:48:56
Speaker
bringing Russia into the war on the side of the allies. Sallis is responsible for infiltrating Hitler's bunker and killing Hitler. And then eventually in a few years time, when Wheatley becomes absolutely convinced that communism is a grave threat to society and also inspired by Satanism, Sallis is fighting devil worshipers in Moscow to stop communism from taking over the world.
00:49:27
Speaker
Now, I said we'd go back to the spying thing and the double agent thing. Do you know about Garbo? Garbo? Garbo? The Greta? No, no. Then I'm stumped.
00:49:47
Speaker
Gabo was a German spy who the Germans thought lived in England and reported voluminous tomes of what was going on at embassies in the UK detailing troop movements and the like. Gabo was one of the favorite spies that Nazi High Command had access to.
00:50:11
Speaker
and Gabo was a little bit of a flummoxing factor to the British because Gabo claimed to be living in the UK but got all the weather conditions in the UK wrong and not just that he also claimed that summers got so hot in the UK that embassy staff wouldn't go into work and the British were going I mean that's that's
00:50:38
Speaker
Not true. I mean our summers are short and not particularly hot and That doesn't make any sense. Gabo would also confuse shillings with pounds and Also got the prices of common goods in the UK completely wrong and yet according to the Enigma decodes Nazi high command Believed everything he said and so they were going what?
00:51:07
Speaker
Who is the spy? So they go through the ranks of all the double agents they've got operating in Germany going, which one of you is writing these highly fantastical stories back to Nazi High Command? And eventually they discovered that
00:51:24
Speaker
The Germans thought Gabo lived in the UK. Gabo was a fantasist living in Portugal. In fact, Gabo had actually got in contact with the Allies early on during the war and wanted to be a double agent to feed false information back to the Germans.
00:51:43
Speaker
And the allies weren't particularly interested in someone in Portugal doing this because they didn't really think there was any particular need for this person to do this work. So Gabo just did it himself. He went to the Germans and said, look, I'll be your German spy living in the UK. If you give me a stipend and you send money to my bank account, I'll go to the UK and I will send you back these reports.
00:52:06
Speaker
And then he just moved to Portugal, got himself a hotel room, and just made things up based upon guide books he could find in the library and local bookstore. And yet would write stories in such a convincing way that Nazi High Command believed everything he said, and he became their favorite spy. And when the British realized that actually this was not someone on their books, this was someone who was doing this work independently, they were
00:52:35
Speaker
you should come and work for us because we'll give you even more money and we'll manipulate the stories such that we can get the Nazis to believe almost anything.
00:52:47
Speaker
And so they brought him over to the UK. Gabo told the Germans that he had pretended to become a political refugee, which is why there was now talk about him in the British media. He also claimed to be working for the BBC at this time as the German on the inside. And so he was able to then provide
00:53:11
Speaker
the Germans with accounts they believed, such that in 1944, before the close of the war, Nazi High Command was so pleased with his work, they awarded him the Iron Cross. Nice. He was actually German, was he? No, no, he wasn't. As far as I know, he was Portuguese.
00:53:36
Speaker
Oh, OK. I thought he moved to Portugal. I believe he'd been living. Yeah, I believe he'd been living in Berlin. Which is why he got the idea of I don't like these Nazis. Our reports on them. When the English said we have no interest in you as a agent for us. But I'll just I'm just going to do it anyway. I just don't like Nazis. I just don't like them. Yeah.
00:54:03
Speaker
So was he recruited into the same team as Dennis Wheatley? So in theory, Wheatley should never have had contact with Gabo, but we've got fairly strong indications that Wheatley was helping him craft narratives to send back to Germany.
00:54:22
Speaker
Technically they should have been completely separated, but Gabo was such a star for what he had done. It was very hard to avoid not being in his orbit to some degree, as far as I'm aware. Well how about that?
00:54:38
Speaker
Now there's a few other details I wasn't sure how to bring in, but I'll just bring this up. One thing that Wheatley liked to do as kind of almost a part-time version of his job was that he would hold
00:54:55
Speaker
very long liquid lunches, and he'd get diplomats and military personnel to attend these things. And because he was a famous author, people would often either ask for a copy of his books, or ask to have a copy of his book signed. And so he would often, if there was someone he knew was being sent overseas for a posting,
00:55:17
Speaker
he would include a note in the book about a fictitious operation that they were about to launch. On the provides though, that presumably some officials going to be looking through documentation and inspecting items coming through. And if one of those officials happens to be a Nazi sympathizer, they'll report false information back to Nazi High Command.
00:55:41
Speaker
That's clever, yep. He and his friends also printed up a selection of
00:55:50
Speaker
bank notes that had the words British occupation of France on them. And so when they would go out to dinner at fancy restaurants, they would try to pay with these notes, and they also, sorry, sorry, that's the wrong note, and then would pay with proper currency, once again, on the notion that that would then spread rumors that the UK was about to liberate France and thus make the Nazis worried.
00:56:18
Speaker
and bring their own currency with them. Well, I mean, I suppose, I mean, when you think about it, when France was occupied, they started using German currency, which was printed up by the occupational government. So you'd go, yeah, maybe, maybe the British would print out their own liberty notes. Okay.
Wheatley's Lasting Influence
00:56:41
Speaker
So yeah, that is the story of one Dennis Wheatley, the precursor to Ian Fleming, who helped mastermind D-Day and largely wrote the book on military deception, at least by the British.
00:56:55
Speaker
No, very good. Yes, I had not heard of him before. He sounded familiar for a second until I realised I was thinking of Ben Wheatley, the director, who I just Googled and does not appear to be related. So I can't even sound clever by some sort of association there. But Killless is a very good film.
00:57:15
Speaker
Killst is a fun film, yep, yep. Free Fire, not bad. I don't think I've seen Free Fire. It's good, it's basically a film in real time, interestingly. Because you know how Ben Wheatley, all his films in some way or another seem to be about a sort of a descent into madness.
00:57:36
Speaker
with Kill List and what's the Tom Hiddleston one and the Tower? Oh, yeah, I know the one, but the name is book adaptation. Yeah, High Rise. Yeah, High Rise. And yes, Free Fire is another one that's not necessarily madness, but sort of a situation just getting further and further out of control, but basically in real time. And yeah, it's a bit of fun. Which is why I was fascinated by the idea that at one time he was going to make a Tomb Raider film.
00:58:07
Speaker
because he was attached to be the director for the second Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider film, which is now not going to happen because, is it MGM who had the rights, have now lost the rights and they've reverted back to Crystal Dynamics, who are the software company which currently controls the Tomb Raider franchise, so there is not going to be a sequel to that film. A film I have not seen, despite the fact I'm a really big fan of Tomb Raider the franchise,
00:58:34
Speaker
But I wasn't a very big fan of the most recent series of Tomb Raider games, in part because there weren't that many tomes. No, no, it was just, yeah, it became the more generic style of game and not actually, yeah, as you say, Tomb Raider-y. But yes, no, very good, very good story of World War II intrigue. I like the Norway stuff.
00:59:00
Speaker
Yeah, just now we're going to, I know, I know I said before, but now seriously, this time, this time, this time, this time and sitting there going, uh, yeah, but that's what we want to say. Want me to think, uh, but no, that was
00:59:18
Speaker
That was the count from Sesame Street again. But yes, you know, you're not going to fool me. One of these days, one of these days, Alice, it's going to be a real... And then who looks silly when the British finally do roll into Norway and I have my 300,000 troops there waiting for them? Then who are they going to be calling silly moustache guy? Not Hitler, that's for sure. No, definitely not Hitler.
00:59:45
Speaker
But yes, so if that is what the conspiracy episode we're going out on, then I think it's a thoroughly worthy swan song for the segment.
00:59:57
Speaker
Now, of course, we will have to replace the segment with something, but we have an idea about that. But maybe we should say no more. We're only going to tell patrons about that idea. Yes, we have a patron episode to record, and that will contain secrets of the inner workings of this podcast, and possibly an opportunity for feedback, an opportunity to maybe steer things,
01:00:25
Speaker
in whatever direction our patrons might most prefer. Although of course we prefer always spiraling upwards.
01:00:33
Speaker
Always towards freedom. We have to talk about Alex Jones because the schadenfreude is just too great, so we'll check a little bit of Alex Jones in there now. I should point out for a little bit of background information, Josh when he wrote up the notes for the bonus episode was there's not much to report and then immediately after he wrote that, the big bombshell news about the Alex Jones trial dropped in case of the issue.
01:00:58
Speaker
Now, suddenly there is one bit of Alex Jones news that we definitely got to mention. But anyway, so if you want to be privy to the inner workings of this podcast, then you'd best become a patron. And you can do that by going to betrayon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And if you already are a patron, well then buckle in.
01:01:22
Speaker
because it's going to be probably not that bumpy of a ride, if we're being quite honest, but nevertheless, it's all about you, you patrons, you who are the brightest and most shining and sweetest smelling and probably stickiest people of all. They are the light of our lives and they light the fire inside our, yes.
01:01:45
Speaker
Yes, yes they do. Right, so before we carry that thought any further and do all sorts of damage, I think it's time to call this main episode to a close. And so as a symbol of my closing-ness that got away from me, I'm just going to say goodbye. And I'm going to say the devil rides out tonight.
01:02:09
Speaker
been listening to a podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Ederson and Imdenter. If you'd like to help support us, please find details at our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.