The later date would also “enable the operation to be carried46 out with a waning moon in a reasonably dark period (approximately 28th–29th April).” Jewell arrived at Submarine Headquarters, a block of flats requisitioned in Swiss Cottage, north London, where Rear Admiral Barry told him to go to an address in St. James. There he was greeted by Montagu, Cholmondeley, Captain Raw, chief staff officer to Admiral Submarines, and a set of operational orders laying out his mission.
Ronnie Reed, the MI5 case officer who “might have been the twin brother” of Glyndwr Michael.
Lieutenant Norman Limbury Auchinleck Jewell was thirty years old, with a cheerful grin and bright blue eyes. Understated and charming, Bill Jewell, as he was known, was also tough as teak, ruthless, occasionally reckless, and entirely fearless. He had seen fierce action in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. His submarine had been depth charged, torpedoed, machine-gunned, and mistakenly shot at by the RAF; he had spent seventy-eight hours slowly suffocating with his crew in a half-crippled submarine at the bottom of the sea; he had taken part in several clandestine operations that, had they been intercepted, might have led to espionage charges and a German firing squad. In four years of watery war, Jewell had seen so much secrecy, strangeness, and violence that the request to deposit a dead body in the sea off Spain did not remotely faze him. “In wartime, any plan that saved47 lives was worth trying,” he reflected.
Jewell was never informed of the identity of the body or the exact nature of the papers it was carrying, and he hardly needed to be told of “the vital need for secrecy.”48 The tall man with the extravagant mustache was introduced as “a squadron leader for RAF intelligence.” The body, Cholmondeley explained, would be brought to him in Scotland, “packed, fully clothed and ready,”49 inside a large steel tube. This canister could be lifted by two men but should on no account be dragged by a single handle, “as the steel is made of light gauge50 to keep the weight as low as possible,” and it might give way if roughly handled. The possibility of the container breaking and the body falling out was too awful to contemplate. The canister would fit down the torpedo hatch and could then be hidden belowdecks. Jewell would also receive a rubber dinghy in a separate package, a locked briefcase with chain attached, and three separate identity cards for William Martin, with three different photographs. In idle moments, Montagu had taken to rubbing Martin’s fake identity cards on his trouser leg to give them the patina of use.
What, Jewell asked, should he tell the men under his command about this large object on his small ship? Montagu explained that the lieutenant could take his officers into his confidence once under way, but that the rest of the crew should be told only that the container “held a super-secret automatic51 meteorological reporting apparatus, and that it was essential that its existence and position should not be given away or it would be removed by the Spaniards and the Germans would learn of its construction.”
Jewell pointed out that if the weather was rough, the officers might need the help of the crew to get the canister up on deck. If a member of the crew spotted the body, he was instructed, he should be told that “we suspected the Germans52 of getting at papers on bodies washed ashore and therefore this body was going to be watched: if our suspicions were right the Spaniards would be asked to remove the Germans concerned.” This cover story could also be told to the officers, but “Lt Jewell was to impress53 on [them] that they would never hear the result and that if anything leaked out about this operation not only would the dangerous German agents not be removed, but the lives of those watching what occurred would be endangered.”
Upon reaching a position “between Portil Pillar and Punta Umbria54 just west of the mouth of the Rio Tinto River,” Jewell should assess the weather conditions. “Every effort should be made55 to choose a period with an onshore wind.” Jewell studied the charts and estimated “the submarine could probably56 bring the body close enough inshore to obviate the need to use a rubber dinghy.” Cholmondeley had originally envisaged setting off an explosion out at sea to simulate an air crash, but after some discussion “the proposed use of a flare was dropped.”57 There was no point in attracting any unnecessary attention.
Under cover of darkness, the canister should be brought up through the torpedo hatch “on specially prepared slides58 and lashed to the rail of the gun platform.” Any crew members should then be sent below, leaving only the officers on deck. “The container should then be opened59 on deck as the ‘dry-ice’ will give off carbon dioxide.” It would also smell terrible.
Montagu and Cholmondeley had given a great deal of thought to exactly how the briefcase should be attached to Major Martin. No one, even the most assiduous officer, would sit on a long flight with an uncomfortable chain running down his arm. “When the body is removed60 from the container,” they told Jewell, “all that will be necessary will be to fasten the chain attached to the briefcase through the belt of the trench coat which will be the outer garment of the body … as if the officer has slipped the chain off for comfort in the aircraft, but has nevertheless kept it attached to him so that the bag should not either be forgotten or slide away from him in the aircraft.” Jewell should decide which of the three identity cards most closely resembled the dead man in his current state, and put this in his pocket. The body, with life jacket fully inflated, should then be slipped over the side. The inflated dinghy should also be dropped, and perhaps an oar, “near the body but not too near61 if that is possible.” Jewell’s final task would be to reseal the canister, sail into deep water, and then sink it.
If, for any reason, the operation had to be abandoned, then “the body and container62 should be sunk in deep water,” and if it was necessary to open the canister to let water in, “care must be taken that63 the body does not escape.” A signal should be sent with the words: “Cancel Mincemeat.”64 If the drop was successful, then another message should be sent: “Mincemeat completed.”65
Jewell noted that the two intelligence officers seemed utterly absorbed by the project and had obviously had “a pleasant time building up66 a character.” Before the meeting broke up, Montagu asked the young submariner if he would like to contribute, in a small way, to “making a life for the Major of Marines.”67 A nightclub ticket was needed for the dead man’s wallet. Would Lieutenant Jewell care to spend a night on the town, and then send over the documentary evidence? “I had the enjoyment68 of going around London nightclubs on his ticket,” said Jewell. “It was an enjoyable period.”
While Jewell returned north with his new operational orders and a slight hangover, another telegram was dispatched to General Eisenhower in Algiers. “Mincemeat sails69 19th April and operation probably takes place 28th April but could if necessary be cancelled on any day up to and including 26th April.”
If all went according to plan, Major Martin would wash up in Spain on or soon after April 28, where an extraordinary reception was being prepared for him by Captain Alan Hillgarth, naval attaché in Madrid, spy, former gold prospector, and, perhaps inevitably, successful novelist.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gold Prospector
IN HIS SIX NOVELS, Alan Hillgarth hankered for a lost age of personal valor, chivalry, and self-reliance. “Adventure was once a noble1 appellation borne proudly by men such as Raleigh and Drake,” he wrote in The War Maker, but it is now “reserved for the better-dressed members of the criminal classes.” Hillgarth’s own life read like something out of the Boy’s Own Paper or the pages of Rider Haggard.
The son of a Harley Street ear, nose, and throat surgeon, Hillgarth had entered the Royal Naval College at the age of thirteen, fought in the First World War as a fourteen-year-old midshipman (his first task was to assist the ship’s doctor during the Battle of Heligoland Bight by throwing amputated limbs overboard), and skewered his first Turk, with a bayonet, before his sixteenth birthday. At Gallipoli he found himself in charge of landing craft, as all the other officers had been killed. He was shot in the head and leg and spent the recovery time learnin
g languages and cultivating a passion for literature. Hillgarth was small and fiery, with dense, bushy eyebrows and an inexhaustible supply of energy. He was also an arborphile: he loved trees and was never happier than in forest or jungle.
In 1927, Evelyn Waugh recalled his first meeting with “a young man called Alan Hillgarth,2 very sure of himself, writes shockers, ex-sailor.” By this time, Hillgarth had embarked on a second career as a novelist, a third as adviser to the Spanish Foreign Legion during the uprising of the Rif tribes in Morocco, and a fourth as a “King’s Messenger” carrying confidential messages on behalf of the government. But it was Hillgarth’s fifth career, as a treasure hunter, that defined the rest of his life—and the next stage of Operation Mincemeat.
In 1928, Hillgarth met Dr. Edgar Sanders, a Swiss adventurer born in Russia and living in London, who told him a most intriguing story. Sanders had traveled to the interior of Bolivia in 1924, lured by legends of a vast hoard of gold, the treasure of Sacambaya, mined by the Jesuits and hidden before they were expelled from South America in the eighteenth century. Sanders showed Hillgarth a document, given to him by one Cecil Prodgers, a Boer War veteran and rubber tapper, who claimed to have obtained it from the family of an elderly Jesuit priest. The document identified the hiding place of the gold as a “steep hill all covered3 with dense forest … from where you can see the River Sacambaya on three sides,” topped by “a large stone shaped like an egg.”4 Beneath the stone, according to the account, lay a network of underground caverns “that took five hundred men5 two-and-one-half years to hollow out.” The gold inside was protected by “enough strong poison to kill6 a regiment.”
Sanders claimed to have found the site amid the ruins of a once-great Jesuit colony at a place called Inquisivi, deep in the remote Quimsa Cruz range of the eastern Andes. Nearby, Sanders claimed to have found hundreds of skulls, “reputed by the local Indians7 to be those of the slaves who were engaged in burying the treasure and then massacred by the Jesuits to prevent them divulging the secret.”
A “squarish man with conspicuously8 high cheekbones and hard slate eyes,” Sanders was clearly fanatical in his quest, and utterly convincing. In a final flourish, he laid out his scientific proof. A German scientist named Charles Gladitz, of the New Process Company of Southall, Middlesex, claimed to have discovered that metals, including gold, give off rays that “record themselves on a photographic9 plate of the ground under which this mineral lies.” Gladitz had examined Sanders’s photographs of the site and declared, unequivocally, that this was “the definite location of a strong10 gold source.” Sanders believed the Jesuits had created the underground cavern by tunneling from the riverbank, but the water table had since risen and getting to the entrance would require large pumps, digging equipment, a lot of money, and a great deal of sweat.
Sanders invited Hillgarth to join him in what promised to be the greatest treasure hunt of all time. The twenty-eight-year-old accepted without hesitation.
The Sacambaya Exploration Company was duly formed. On the eve of the Great Crash, money could be minted from dreams, and investors flocked to a project promising returns of 48,000 percent.
Hillgarth and Sanders set about recruiting “men who had had considerable11 experience of harsh conditions.” These were described in detail: “Sacambaya is a poisonous place,12 a dark, dirty valley, shut in by hills that rise almost immediately to 4,000 feet. It is either very dry or you are flooded out. It is generally very hot by day and pretty near freezing at night. It abounds in bugs, fleas, flies, ants, mosquitoes, sand-flies, rattlesnakes and other kinds of snakes. It is famous among Indians as a plague spot of Malaria. There are also skunks.” There were also bandits, no certainty of success, and a high probability of death. But this was an age that revered Shackleton and Scott. The expedition was overwhelmed with applicants. Some twenty-four men were chosen on the basis of expertise, resilience, and amusement value, including a photographer, an expert Serbian miner called Joe Polkan, and, crucially, a doctor. An American engineer named Julius Nolte would be picked up en route in Bermuda.
On March 1, 1928, the expedition set sail from Liverpool on the first stage of the nine-thousand-mile journey from England to Sacambaya. The forty tons of equipment stashed in the hold included two Morris six-wheel tractors, four vast compressors to drive the pneumatic hoists, picks, spades, and drills, two pumps, six cranes, a petrol motor, winches, electric light plants, forges, tents, mosquito nets, and a circular saw to cut wood for the railway that would have to be built at the other end. Dr. P. B. P. Mellows, of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, brought, in addition to the usual medical supplies, twenty-eight thousand quinine tablets to fight malaria and five thousand aspirin. Hillgarth purchased twenty rifles and twenty automatic pistols, four shotguns, two automatic rifles, and enough ammunition to start a small war, as “protection against the often13 extremely unpleasant individuals with whom one is always liable to come in contact in such places.” At sea, the captain of the SS Orcoma threw a celebratory dinner consisting of coupe de viveurs à la moelle, filets de sole Sacambaya, and biscuit glacé Inquisivi.
From the port of Arica in Chile, the expedition chartered a train to take them the 330 miles to La Paz, then south along the Antofagasta line as far as a station called Eucalyptus, where the line stopped. From here the road, such as it was, went as far as the town of Pongo, “across 20 miles of pretty14 poisonous, gradually rising desert, then through a succession of extremely unpleasant mountains, until it crosses the snowline at about 17,000 [feet], finally to descend in a series of perfectly horrible zigzags, into a nasty little valley.”
Pongo was a one-eyed mining town built to service the Guggenheim mines, presided over by a formidable American woman named Alicia O’Reardon Overbeck, whom the team nicknamed “Mrs. Starbird.” “This is the furthest outpost15 of what might be called civilization,” wrote Hillgarth. “This was the end of the road.” Sacambaya was still forty-five miles distant, along a track partly washed away by rains. Now the hard work began. The Morris trucks were abandoned, the equipment disassembled, and the smaller machinery packed into loads of up to five hundred pounds, and strapped on to reluctant mules. The largest items, including the compressors, each weighing one and a half tons, had to be dragged along the mountain tracks using manpower and oxen.
“This,” said Hillgarth, with echoing understatement, “was quite an undertaking.”16 In places the track had to be rebuilt, cut out of the solid rock. In one twelve-mile stretch the river had to be crossed and recrossed twenty-seven times. At times, the heavy machinery had to be lowered with a block and tackle. One compressor, two oxen, and several men hurtled over the edge and were saved only by becoming entangled in trees thirty feet below. Hillgarth, five other white men, and twenty Indians successfully transferred all the equipment to Sacambaya in five weeks and four days. Hillgarth declared that the total losses en route amounted to “one case containing 200 lbs17 of macaroni.”
That was the last piece of good news.
The treasure caves, Sanders calculated, must be about “100 feet into the hillside.”18 Armed with modern technology and an ancient document, the Sacambaya Exploration Company now set about picking, drilling, pumping, and blasting its way into the earth in pursuit of Jesuit gold. For ten hours a day, six days a week, from June to October, the men hacked into the mountain. Some thirty-seven thousand tons of rock were removed to create an enormous hole.
Conditions at Sacambaya were quite as nasty as advertised. Within weeks, three quarters of the men had jiggers, small worms that burrow into the feet. Any injury became instantly infected in the soggy, fly-infested atmosphere of the camp. “A complete absence of fresh fruit19 and vegetables from our dietary [sic] has brought on chronic constipation, but a great range of purges varying in propulsive powers have catered for all tastes,” Dr. Mellows reported cheerily. The mules and oxen came under repeated attack from vampire bats, which were also partial to human gore if they could get it. “One of our party awakened20 the other night
and in the light of the full moon in his tent was startled to find a vampire bat tearing at his mosquito net.” Mellows identified a new ailment he named Sacambayaitis: “Claustrophobia brought on by21 being shut up in an unhealthy valley between high mountains for month after month, working hard, living on a monotonous diet, with no diversions, subject to constant fear of possible attack by bandits, and day by day living on the edge of a psychical volcano.”
The only member of the team immune to Sacambayaitis was Alan Hillgarth. The photographs of the expedition show him fresh-faced and happy: digging, grinning, never without a tie, even when helping to perform a rustic appendectomy on a colleague. Hillgarth was unstoppable.
It was not the jiggers, the claustrophobia, the constipation, bats, or bandits that finally did for the Sacambaya Exploration Company, but water. It poured from the sky in sheets and bubbled up from the ground in gouts, filling every hole as soon as it was dug, despite the panting efforts of the pumps. The men built a makeshift dam out of empty petrol cans, flattened and reinforced with timber, spun yarn, and rope. Hillgarth worked up to his neck in water to try to bed the foot of the dam in the impermeable clay they believed was a few feet farther down, but still the water poured in. Finally, even Hillgarth had to admit defeat, despite believing that the cave wall might be just fifteen feet away.
The expedition had been an unmitigated, magnificent disaster. The company went spectacularly bust. Two of the team headed into the interior and were never seen again. The chief engineer was left behind in Pongo. “He has fallen seriously in love22 with Mrs Starbird,” observed Sanders, “and apparently does not intend to leave.” Polkan, the Serbian miner, was poisoned in La Paz, “either by the hotel people or the police.”23
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