Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  The next day the Allies executed Operation Torch without a shot being fired against them by any Spaniard or German on either side of the strait of Gibraltar. The Allied landings coordinated by General Eisenhower followed Montgomery’s offensive against Rommel’s German–Italian forces across the Western Desert from El Alamein. As US and British forces waded ashore on North African beaches, the Madrid diplomatic circuit was inundated with rumours that German forces were massing in the Pyrenees. In the US embassy several key staff members had been in the words of one of them, ‘rushed, smuggled, or bombed out of their previous posts – Warsaw, Amsterdam, and Belgrade’. They now grimly readied themselves ‘for the nightmare to descend again, this time in Madrid’. They burnt confidential files, readied code books for destruction and filled gasoline containers to prepare for an evacuation of Spain via Gibraltar. Similar measures were taken in the British embassy.

  In the event, Hitler decided to hold off his plans to invade Spain. Historians remain divided as to the reasons why the Germans appeared surprised by the landing and failed to react as some had feared by striking back through Spain. There is some evidence that Hitler and his generals calculated that their forces might be better used elsewhere. It has also been suggested that there was an intelligence lapse provoked by tension between the German High Command and the Abwehr.

  The role of the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, has been the subject of a dispute unresolved to this day. Sympathetic biographers would have us believe that he was sufficiently anti-Hitler by this time and at loggerheads with the Gestapo and the various other German secret services to deliberately withhold intelligence he was given by his own agents in Spain. What is beyond doubt is that Franco did nothing to prevent the thousands of Allied troops that gathered in Gibraltar before crossing within range of Spanish guns on both sides of the Strait. That Spain’s neutrality held firm was in no small part due to the efforts of the Allied diplomats in Madrid.

  ‘Well, here we are, safe and sound in the anchorage to the west of Algiers,’ Randolph Churchill wrote to his father Winston. ‘Nearly everything has gone according to plan.’

  It was the morning of 8 November 1942. Thousands of British and American troops had landed and overwhelmed the pro-German French colonial troops of the Vichy government, taking the strategically important ports of Algiers, Oran and Casablanca. Randolph was among them, reporting on what a privilege it was to be taking part ‘in these great events’ and reassuring the British prime minister that ‘all goes well between us and the Americans’. Winston Churchill later told his commander-in-chief in the Middle East, General Sir Harold Alexander, that he wanted to ring church bells all over England for the first time since the outbreak of the war.

  After more than two years of European war in which Britain had been brought to the brink of disaster, only to be saved by a mixture of luck and resilience, the success of Operation Torch raised hopes that the tide was now turning in favour of the Allies. Churchill told his chiefs of staff to prepare for a huge offensive against Hitler, attacking mainland Europe from the Mediterranean, using North Africa as a springboard.

  On 13 November 1942, as the Allies consolidated their hold on French North Africa, Montgomery’s forces entered Tobruk, marking the Allied victory in the Western Desert. This time the bells rang out all over England. But as Churchill conceded in a letter to King Abdullah of Jordan, while the ‘end now seemed sure’, there was still a ‘long road to tread.’

  In Madrid, the British and US embassies separately received personal telegrams of congratulations from Churchill and Roosevelt for the critical part they had played in smoothing the way for Torch. Allied ambassadors, attachés and spies had spent the days leading up to the landings engaged in one of the most intense periods of diplomatic brinkmanship since Chamberlain’s fateful meeting with Hitler in Munich in 1938.

  Undoubtedly it was Allied military success that helped provide persuasive arguments against those within the Spanish armed forces and Falange party who trusted that Hitler would prevail. But it was also true that, for over two years, Hoare and his closest advisers had doggedly persisted, against considerable odds, in winning over friends in the Franco regime and countering German influence within the population at large with a range of tools, from economic assistance and discreet diplomacy, to propaganda, bribes and counter-intelligence. In doing so they had been ably assisted by the Americans, increasingly so after the appointment of Carlton Hayes as ambassador.

  The policies and strategy were pursued successfully by both embassies despite the huge organisational abilities and power that the Nazis exercised in Spain, and persistent opposition from the left in the UK from those who dismissed engagement with Franco’s neutrality as an act of cynical appeasement with fascism which served the interests of the Axis powers much more than it did the Allies.

  As things turned out, Hoare and Hayes emerged from Torch with their reputations enhanced while their German counterpart, Baron Eberhard von Stohrer, was unceremoniously sacked before the year was out. Not only was he blamed for failing to predict the Allied landings, but he was also accused of not being sufficiently pro-Nazi. He was replaced by Hans Adolph von Moltke, who although having none of Stohrer’s long experience of Spanish politics and not speaking the language, was unambiguously pro-Nazi. But despite the Allied success of Torch, and von Moltke’s sudden death from acute appendicitis, his appointment helped strengthen ever more the Nazi power base in Spain which had been developed in Madrid by Hans Lazar.

  Furthermore, despite the success of Torch, the situation in Spain remained tense, with Allied forces to the south and Axis forces to the north, and with increasingly elaborate intelligence activities involving both sides. There was also increasing maritime and air activity around the waters of the Peninsula, with a growing number of escaped Allied POWs crossing the French-Spanish border. ‘The American Embassy at Madrid will have to be all eyes and ears – and, on occasions, many-tongued,’ US ambassador Hayes wrote to Myron Taylor, the US presidential emissary to the Holy See, at the end of 1942.

  10

  Deception

  Dawn was breaking over the Atlantic Ocean off the south-west coast of Spain and the fishermen were hauling in their nets about a kilometre out to sea on the morning of 30 April 1943. As the sun rose over the white sand dunes, one of the fishermen spotted a yellow object floating in the calm turquoise waters. He rowed closer and discovered a Mae West keeping afloat the body of a dead man. The corpse was dressed in British military uniform and had a briefcase attached to its belt. Only years later would the fisherman, twenty-three-year-old José Antonio Rey, discover that he had become an unintentional witness to one of the most audacious acts of deception to be carried out in wartime Spain, in an episode that would gain notoriety as The Man Who Never Was.

  Months earlier, as 1942 drew to a close, the highly secretive interservice XX Committee, under the chairmanship of the MI5 officer John Masterman, had begun to put in place its latest plans to deceive the enemy. Its basic mission was to fully occupy German and Italian forces in Western Europe and the Mediterranean and thus discourage their transfer to the Russian front. As part of the deception strategy, two British military intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu from Naval intelligence and Charles Cholmondeley, another MI5 officer (both members of the XX Committee) developed a plan to feed the Germans false information about a major Allied landing in southern Europe following the successful Operation Torch in North Africa. The aim: to divert German troops towards Greece and Sardinia and away from Sicily, the area selected for the commencement of a major Allied offensive.

  Code-named Operation Mincemeat, the plan was put together in Room 14 (NI D12), a top-secret office run by Naval Intelligence from a basement in Whitehall. It involved a team of a dozen carefully vetted individuals, including secretaries, tasked with handling coded messages and, most famously, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. As a member of the XX Committee, Montagu had access to the ‘most secret sources’, the information
drawn from Ultra, the British system for intercepting and breaking of high-grade German code and cipher signals. He was thus able to plan his operation according to the analysis of the intercepted communications on military dispositions that the Germans in Madrid and Lisbon had with Berlin. These reached him from the communications centre at Bletchley Park.

  Patricia Davies was one of those who worked on Mincemeat. ‘A colonel in the marines got me into the Admiralty. Most of the people in Naval Intelligence were recommended by somebody in the armed forces because that meant you came from the right kind of family. Everything was incredibly hush hush. “Don’t you dare mention anything to anybody”, we were warned. I was put in a section that received the traffic from Bletchley … the intercepts used to come by teleprinter every day, into the little office of the building we called the Citadel.’

  The plan involved creating the false identity of a Royal Marine officer, Major William Martin, and enlisting him in an equally fictitious mission, as the courier of top-secret letters detailing the Allied plans from Sir Archibald Nye, the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the War Office, to General Sir Harold Alexander, the British commander in North Africa under Eisenhower. An accident whereby the aircraft carrying Major Martin crashed into the sea, but near enough to a coastline that would guarantee his body and the documents being discovered by the Germans, completed the basic elements of the ingenious plan.

  To make the plot credible, weeks were spent creating Major Martin’s identity, making it as plausible as possible: family background, career record, love letters from a girlfriend, nights out at the theatre, intimate dinners in the West End, bank statements all documented and with the participation of an array of invented characters. Patricia Davies played her part in the deception. ‘Ewen (Montagu) handed me the big brown envelope that was to go on the body and got me to forge the address from Nye to Alexander … the love letters and the photograph of the girl friend were provided by girls from MI5 … I remember being rather annoyed not be asked to do that as well.’

  In its final stages the deception took on a macabre tone as the planners put out discreet enquiries to trusted service medical officers and waited to hear that a suitable body had been found. Over sherry at the Junior Carlton club, one of the country’s top pathologists, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, advised Montagu that the corpse of a man who had either drowned or recently died from any but a few ‘natural causes’ could be used. So the quest intensified.

  Montagu wrote later: ‘There we were in 1942, surrounded all too often by bodies, but no one that we could take. We felt like the Ancient Mariner – bodies, bodies, everywhere, nor any one to take! We felt like Pirandello – Six officers in search of a corpse.’ Eventually a suitable body was found, of a man who had died of pneumonia and had liquid in his lungs. His identity was kept secret, although Montagu told members of his team that he was a down-and-out, originally from Wales, who had spent the last days of his life sleeping rough on the streets of wartime London.

  Sir Bernard inspected the body and judged that if a post-mortem were made by someone who believed that death was due to drowning, there was little likelihood that the difference between the liquid in the lungs of a body that had started to decompose and the seawater would be noticed. ‘You have nothing to fear from a Spanish post-mortem,’ Sir Bernard told Montagu; ‘to detect that this young man had not died after an aircraft had been lost at sea would need a pathologist of my experience – and there aren’t any in Spain.’

  The body was kept in cold storage in a London mortuary, before being dressed up in a Marine officer’s uniform and given Major Martin’s identity papers, together with a briefcase filled with the fictitious documents. The major was then packed with dry ice into a metal container and driven north to Holy Loch in a 30-cwt Ford van. At the wheel was a racing driver who was on special duty at the War Office. He and Montagu took turns to drive through the night, accompanied by Charles Cholmondeley. Once in Scottish waters, the container was taken out by boat to the submarine HMS Seraph, whose crew had been told that it contained a secret weather reporting device bound for waters near Gibraltar.

  Eleven days later, at 4.30 a.m., the submarine surfaced in the Gulf of Cadiz, some 1600 yards from the mouth of the River Odiel and the nearby port of Huelva. The local currents and German presence had been meticulously studied over the preceding weeks by a small intelligence unit headed by Captain Gómez-Beare, the assistant naval attaché at the British embassy in Madrid.

  The Gibraltar-born Lieutenant Commander Gómez-Beare had worked in military intelligence for Franco’s army during the civil war before being recruited for covert wartime duties by Naval Intelligence. With his dark looks and southern accent, Gómez-Beare was one of a small number of embassy staff who could infiltrate the local population without drawing attention to themselves.

  Like his commander Captain Hillgarth, he had developed close ties with key sources in the Spanish navy and was familiar with the coastline, its ports, their personnel and the local weather. Huelva had been identified as a hub of German intelligence, with the Abwehr and Gestapo controlled from the German consulate and a Nazi agent monitoring Allied shipping from a house near the estuary. Gómez-Beare reported on close collaboration between the consulate and the Spanish naval authorities. It was considered that as soon as Martin’s body was washed ashore the Abwehr would be alerted and given access to the planted documents.

  It was still dark when the Royal Navy submarine went about its secret business that spring day in 1943. The new moon had just set and the ebb tide was on the turn. The submarine was trimmed down until the calm sea just lapped its hull. It was then that the mysterious container was raised aloft and unbolted by members of the crew who had been made privy to the secret of its contents by Captain Bill Jewell for the first time only minutes before.

  In silence, the seamen raised the body, wrapped in a blanket, and slipped it into the water, commending its soul as they did so even as their captain prayed secretly for its safe delivery into Nazi hands. In preparing for this final stage, the planners of Mincemeat had taken into account the lessons learnt from an incident that had occurred in Spanish waters some eight months earlier. In September 1942 the secrecy surrounding the build-up to the North African landings had nearly been compromised when an Allied Catalina crashed near Algeciras, killing all those on board. Among the victims was an officer who was carrying a letter about Operation Torch to the governor of Gibraltar, Noel Mason-Macfarlane. The officer’s body was washed ashore where it was discovered by a Spanish naval coastguard. Within hours the letter had been handed over to the British, but not before it had first been seen by the Germans and dismissed as a fake.

  Two aspects of the Catalina crash inspired the planners of Operation Mincemeat. First, no debris or equipment from the aircraft – similar to the one that had now ‘crashed’ off the coast of Huelva – had been washed ashore. It had thus been decided that there was no need to float a dinghy along with Major Martin to complete the deception. It was also assumed that the Germans, having cause to regret the ease with which they had been taken by surprise by the North African landings, would not again easily dismiss strategic Allied documents if and when they came into their possession.

  Martin’s body was discovered off the beach of El Portil, near Huelva. After it had been brought ashore by the fishermen, it was handed over to the local police, and eventually to the British consul, but only after a local German agent had taken copies of the documents and sent them back to Berlin via the German embassy in Madrid. The British vice-consul in Huelva, Francis Haseldan, was the only local British agent to be briefed on the operation. In Madrid, only a small group at the British embassy were party to the final stages of Mincemeat, their contribution as critical to its success as the accuracy of the intelligence they had helped provide. The naval attaché, Captain Hillgarth, became involved in a series of separate, carefully orchestrated exchanges with the Admiralty in London, which he shared with his contacts in the Spanish navy, d
esigned to give the impression that the documents were of the utmost importance and needed to be retrieved as quickly as possible. Hillgarth and his superiors in Naval Intelligence accurately predicted that such exchanges would be leaked to the Germans and fuel their belief that the documents were genuine.

  As part of the operation, Hillgarth decided to enlist the support of Burns. The press attaché had made some enemies in British intelligence, but Hillgarth was not one of them. The two cooperated on the basis of mutual trust. Burns was asked by Hillgarth to contribute to the deception by telling anyone who enquired about the fictitious ‘Major Martin’ that he was someone he vaguely recalled having dealings with as an agent of the British government in Burgos during the civil war. Questioned by his Spanish friends, Burns would claim to have forgotten the details.

  Gómez-Beare, Hillgarth and Burns were among the unsung heroes of Mincemeat. A fourth was Eduardo Contioso, a young Spanish doctor who was involved in the post-mortem of ‘Major Martin’. He had his suspicions about the real cause of death but refused to divulge to the Germans what he believed had really happened.

  Undoubtedly the biggest ‘hero’ of all was ‘Major Martin’, not an officer at all but an anonymous civilian who died in mysterious circumstances before being transported to Spain. It is there that ‘Major Martin’ lies buried, in Huelva’s main cemetery; a bunch of flowers was dutifully laid on his tombstone on Remembrance Day for years after the end of the war by a member of the local Anglo-Spanish community.