Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  Sanders was flung into a Bolivian jail. Some months earlier, he had realized the Bolivian police were intercepting his mail, so he had planted a fake letter referring to a shipment of mustard gas, to see if this would flush them out. The Bolivian authorities took the letter at face value: Sanders was accused of planning a coup against the Bolivian government and charged with smuggling arms into the country, including fifty machine guns and one hundred tons of poison gas.

  Hillgarth returned to Britain to face the wrath of his investors and the knowledge that he had been thoroughly and comprehensively duped. Sanders’s documents, it transpired, were fakes. The words on them had not even been written by a Spanish speaker, since they contained numerous grammatical errors and modern English idioms directly translated into Spanish. Gladitz and the New Process Company had vanished.

  The Sacambaya debacle had been a salutary experience. “No body of men could have24 done more than we did,” wrote Hillgarth. A very large hole in the Bolivian jungle was testament to the heroic pointlessness of that achievement, but it was also a lesson that Hillgarth would never forget: otherwise entirely sensible people could be persuaded to believe, passionately, what they already wanted to believe. All it required was a few carefully forged documents and some profoundly wishful thinking on the part of the reader. The Sacambaya trip formed the basis for Hillgarth’s fifth and most successful novel, The Black Mountain, published in 1933 to acclaim from, among others, Graham Greene.

  By then, Hillgarth had settled in Majorca with his wife, Mary, and three children, becoming honorary British vice-consul and then consul in Palma. At the same time, “he doubled up as a spy.”25 On the eve of the Spanish civil war, Winston Churchill met Hillgarth in Majorca, on his way to a holiday in Marrakech. They got on famously. When Clementine Churchill complained about the smell of the drains at their hotel, Hillgarth invited the Churchills to stay at his picturesque villa, Son Torella.

  Hillgarth played a pivotal role as a go-between during the Spanish civil war, helping to arrange prisoner swaps between the two sides and successfully ensuring the bloodless handover of Minorca to Franco’s forces in 1939. The commander of Nationalist forces in the Balearic Islands was Rear Admiral Salvador Moreno Fernández, and it was through him that Hillgarth arranged for the Republican forces to leave the island, thus averting, in Hillgarth’s words, “an intense bombardment which26 could have caused some 20,000 deaths.” Hillgarth’s prolonged negotiations with Moreno, a convivial and subtle politician, marked the start of a most fruitful partnership. When Captain John Godfrey of HMS Repulse wanted to dock in Barcelona, it was Hillgarth who ensured, through his navy contacts with Franco’s regime, that the British ship did not come under air attack.

  As the newly appointed director of Naval Intelligence at the start of the war, Godfrey remembered Hillgarth and recommended his promotion to naval attaché in Madrid. It was an inspired appointment to a most difficult and sensitive job. Neutral Spain was pivotal to British interests, the key to the Mediterranean and Gibraltar. With the fall of France, there were German troops on Spain’s border. Franco was in debt to both Italy and Germany for arms. Would he side with the Axis powers, and if he did not, and Spain remained nonbelligerent, would Hitler invade? Hillgarth’s role was to combat Nazi influence, stymie German sabotage efforts, prevent U-Boats from refueling and resupplying at Spanish ports, and countering the pro-Axis Falange within Franco’s government. With Ian Fleming, he helped to plan the campaign of sabotage and guerrilla war that would erupt if Spain was invaded, code-named “Operation Goldeneye,” the name that Fleming would eventually bestow on his Caribbean home. British policy required a nuanced approach, and Hillgarth’s reports showed how well he understood that delicate balance: Franco was anxious to preserve his neutrality and freedom of action, Hillgarth reported, but “a decisive German victory over Russia27 might enable the Falange to take complete control [and] Spain would probably throw in her lot with Germany.”

  Sir Samuel Hoare, a former Chamberlain loyalist appointed ambassador in Madrid by Churchill, played this tricky game at the diplomatic level. Hillgarth did so at a subterranean level, while simultaneously coordinating the operations of MI6, SOE, and his own network of agents. In all of this, Hillgarth had the personal backing of Winston Churchill (they were distinctly similar characters), who regarded him as a “very good”28 man “equipped with a profound knowledge29 of Spanish affairs.” The prime minister instructed Hillgarth to write to him “privately about anything interesting.”30 Ian Fleming shared Churchill’s high opinion of Hillgarth, describing him as a “useful petard and a good war-winner.”31 Despite contrasting personalities, Hoare and Hillgarth got on well and cooperated closely. Hoare called him “the embodiment of drive.”32 By contrast, Kim Philby, who ran counterintelligence on the Iberian desk at MI6 and was later revealed as a Soviet spy, disliked Hillgarth intensely, believing that Churchill’s support, the “secret funds that were made available33 to him for undercover activity,” and his direct access to “C,” Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, had all “helped to feed the gallant34 officer’s illusions of grandeur.” Philby was particularly irked by Hillgarth’s choice of “Armada” as a code name, which he considered self-inflating.

  It is hard to say which reflected better on Hillgarth: the admiration of Fleming and Churchill or Philby’s animosity.

  Philby would have been even more angered had he known the extent of funds available to Hillgarth for the purposes of bribery, on a staggering scale. Adolf Clauss bribed policemen and dockworkers; Gómez-Beare paid off “local police, dock watchmen and stevedores.”35 But Hillgarth bribed generals.

  The Spanish armed forces contained many patriotic monarchists opposed to the fascist Falange who had no desire to become “expendable parts of Hitler’s war machine.”36 Such officers, Hillgarth calculated, needed only a little financial encouragement to lobby Franco against an alliance with Hitler and keep Spain out of the war. The money was channeled to the generals through Juan March, a Majorcan businessman whom Hillgarth had known for many years. March had made a fortune in tobacco, worked for British intelligence in the First World War, helped to finance Franco’s rebellion in 1936, and purchased twelve bombers for Mussolini. He was small, thin, greedy, clever, morally void, and monstrously bent. March “took corruption for granted,37 and used it casually and openly.” He had been imprisoned for bribery and escaped to France, and by 1939 he was the richest, and dodgiest, man in Spain, nicknamed “the last pirate of the Mediterranean,”38 with a fortune that extended to shipping, oil, banks, and newspapers. “It would be a mistake to trust him an inch,”39 Hillgarth reported cheerfully. But March was also prepared to back Britain, and that, as far as Hillgarth was concerned, was all that mattered: “He has already had two German agents shot40 in Iviza [Ibiza], though I did not ask him to do so.” March was the ideal conduit for bribing the generals. The money would have no British fingerprints on it, and if word ever leaked that March was involved, no one would be remotely surprised.

  In the first phase of the scheme, with Churchill’s approval, ten million dollars was released by the Treasury and deposited in a Swiss bank in New York. From this, selected Spanish generals were invited to make withdrawals, in pesetas, with the balance to be paid after the war. Some two million dollars is thought to have been funneled to General Antonio Aranda Mata, who was expected to take over the army if Franco should fall. Another happy beneficiary was General Luis Orgaz y Yaldi, the commander of Spanish Morocco. (Orgaz was being rewarded by both sides: the Abwehr promised him “an amphibious car.”41) It is probable that Admiral Moreno, the man who had negotiated the surrender of Minorca with Hillgarth and had since been promoted to Navy Minister in Franco’s government, was also on the payroll. The admiral had long opposed Spanish involvement in the war; he kept Hillgarth abreast of the mood in Francoist government circles, reassuring him that if Germany ever invaded Spain there would be a general uprising: “There was not a Spaniard who would not42 wish to fight if the German
s came in,” he told Hillgarth.

  Hillgarth poured money into the pockets of sympathetic officers. “The Cavalry of St George43 have been charging,” noted Hugh Dalton, head of SOE and minister for economic warfare. This was an oblique reference to the image of St. George slaying the dragon on the British gold sovereign. In September 1941, the scheme hit a snag. The Swiss account in New York was locked as part of the American freeze on European assets, but Hillgarth urgently needed reinforcements from St. George’s cavalry. “We must not lose them now,44 after all we have spent—and gained,” wrote Churchill, who sent an urgent appeal, via Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Treasury secretary, to Roosevelt, urging him to unfreeze the New York account. The sluice gates reopened. There is no documentary evidence that Roosevelt backed this campaign of corruption and subversion, but as the historian David Stafford notes, “his approval can safely be assumed.”45

  The bribery scheme continued up to 1943, but whether the “Cavalry of St. George” achieved anything is open to question. Many Spanish officers were already disinclined to become entangled in the war and were naturally opposed to the fascists, fearing that “German victory would mean servitude46 for Spain, and an end to the individual freedom which is as necessary as air to most Spaniards.” Even Hillgarth acknowledged, with the sort of generalization beloved of certain Englishmen, that “the Spaniard is xenophobic and suspicious47 and wants to keep clear of other peoples’ quarrels.” The money may simply have made the generals rich—and Juan March even richer—but it certainly reaffirmed Churchill’s faith in his Madrid spymaster, and paymaster: “I am finding Hillgarth a great prop,”48 he said.

  Hillgarth possessed, by his own account, “a natural sympathy”49 for Spain. “Handling Spaniards is a special50 technique,” he wrote. “Everything in Spain is on a personal basis.” He cultivated his contacts like an expert forester planting trees, propagating and nourishing them, metaphorically and literally, with large and lavish dinners. An intelligence officer, he once remarked, “will be at a very definite51 disadvantage if he is a teetotaller. A good digestion is also important.” Charming, polished, and speaking perfect Spanish, Hillgarth moved effortlessly through the Madrid elite, making contacts with generals, admirals, diplomats, and foreign newspaper correspondents. “Even during the worst of the war,52 I had little difficulty in maintaining old friendships and making new ones,” he recalled later.

  Hillgarth could call in (or buy in) favors from every level of Spanish officialdom. But perhaps his most useful agent, whom he ran in tandem with MI6, was “Agent Andros,” a senior officer in the Spanish navy. Andros has never been identified. More than sixty years later, under Britain’s draconian secrecy laws, MI6 will not divulge the name of the “very reliable and well placed53 straight agent called ANDROS who obtained information of great value.” Andros would also demonstrate his value as a double agent. In 1943, he was approached in Madrid by a senior officer of the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the feared intelligence service of the SS, named Eugene Messig, who asked him “to supply intelligence which54 he would send straight to Berlin (i.e. not through the German intelligence HQ in Madrid).” The SD and the Abwehr were mutually suspicious rivals. “C” was initially dubious, fearing that this “might compromise a very55 valuable agent,” but Hillgarth was keen to open a channel of disinformation into the SS. Andros accepted Messig’s invitation and began feeding him nuggets of false information, selected by Hillgarth: “The items were so chosen56 that the Germans would be bound to draw the deductions that we wanted.” Andros, who also went by the code name “Blind,” proved a brilliant double agent, successfully passing on information indicating that the Spanish navy had learned, through its own sources, that U-boats were liable to attack from British planes and submarines in Spanish waters: “Messig swallowed the stories57 whole, was extremely pleased, and continually pressed for more.” In order to mislead Messig, Andros must have had genuine access to top-grade Spanish intelligence. “It was a delicate job.58 However, Andros was in particularly good position to inform Messig.” The admission that Andros was in a “particularly good position” to misinform the Germans suggests that he may have been a senior figure within Spanish naval intelligence. Whoever Andros was, Hillgarth trusted him completely.

  The British and German spies circled one another, spitting like cats. Hillgarth knew that “copies of all our telegrams59 were given to the Germans” and that the telephones in the embassy were being tapped. “It seemed that the listening60 in was done by an Abwehr member, but it might have been done by a Spanish telephone operator. Abwehr wireless traffic made it clear that a senior Spanish official had been ‘squared’ to allow the tapping.” Hillgarth warned: “Only by naval ciphers61 can really safe messages be sent.” Some of the Spanish staff at the embassy were suspected of being in German pay. One of the guards at the British embassy was “suborned by a woman in German pay”62 but was intercepted before he could do much damage. Even so, he knew that the Germans “kept lists of everyone63 who went in and out of the British embassy.”

  Hillgarth relished the contest—“the Germans would have someone64 following him, and he would have someone following the Germans”—and found the constant surveillance, by both Spanish and German spies, quite amusing, since these were usually “very amateurish and inefficient.”65 Occasionally he would bump into Abwehr officers at official functions. “Our deportment towards the German66 diplomats was to behave as if they did not exist. If we met them at a party, we ignored them. They did exactly the same to us.”

  Madrid was the crucible of European espionage, and as chief among the British spies, Hillgarth found himself fielding some odd customers from the intelligence world.

  Dudley Wrangel Clarke was the master of “A” Force, based in Cairo, the unit devoted to deception operations in the Mediterranean. As the intelligence officer in overall command of deception for Operation Husky, Clarke had been involved at every stage in the buildup to Operation Mincemeat. But Hillgarth had already come across him in a very different guise. In October 1941, he had bailed Dudley Clarke out of a Spanish jail. There was nothing so odd in that. Hillgarth was often bailing people out of jail. What made the occasion special, and acutely embarrassing, was Colonel Clarke’s outfit: he was dressed as a woman. A Spanish police photograph shows this master of deception in high heels, lipstick, pearls, and a chic cloche hat, his hands, in long opera gloves, demurely folded in his lap. He was not even supposed to be in Spain, but in Egypt. In spite of the colonel’s predicament, in the photo he seems thoroughly comfortable, even insouciant.

  His fellow spy chiefs were not. Guy Liddell of MI5 noted, “The circumstances of his release67 were to say the least of it peculiar. At the time he was dressed as a woman complete with brassiere etc.” It is the “brassiere etc” that gives it away. What on earth was the blighter thinking of? A chap might go in disguise, if needed, but in a brassiere? The Spanish authorities seemed to find the incident equally amusing and put out a propaganda leaflet announcing that a man named “Wrangal Craker”68 who claimed to be the Times correspondent in Madrid had been arrested, dressed as a woman.

  Having helped to get Clarke out of prison, Hillgarth obtained the photographs of his colleague, both in and out of drag, and gleefully sent them to Churchill’s personal assistant, Charles “Tommy” Thompson, who showed them to the prime minister. Hillgarth attached a deadpan note, but you can hear him snorting. “Herewith some photographs69 of Mr Dudley Wrangel Clarke as he was when arrested and after he had been allowed to change.” The “after” photograph showed Clarke in his more usual bow tie and jacket. “PM has seen,” said a note scrawled on Hillgarth’s letter. Sadly, history does not relate Churchill’s reaction to what he had seen. Word of the photographs spread around Whitehall: some wondered whether Clarke was “sound in mind,”70 while the more sympathetic explanation was that “he is just the type who imagines71 himself as the super secret service agent.” It did his career no long-term damage, but Dudley Clarke’s strange episode of cross-dre
ssing remains an enduring mystery.

  By the spring of 1943, following the successful North African campaign, the danger that Spain might join the Axis had receded, and after more than three years of playing cat and mouse with the Germans, Hillgarth was keen to counterattack. In February 1943, he sent a letter to the director of Naval Intelligence, declaring: “It is time to pass from the defensive72 to the offensive. It is time to get tough.” Axis submarines were still using Spanish waters; Spanish fishing vessels were being used to spot U-boat targets; German and German-paid saboteurs were preying on British shipping; and the Spanish port authorities were supplying the Abwehr with “more or less any naval intelligence73 they obtain.” All of this was in direct violation of Spanish neutrality. Despite repeated British protests, Hillgarth pointed out, “the Axis was allowed with little74 or no interference from the Spanish authorities, and in spite of constant British representations, to establish and maintain observation and reporting stations at vantage points along the Spanish coast.” Hillgarth specifically cited the activities of Adolf Clauss’s older brother Luis in Huelva.

  The solution Hillgarth proposed was simple and dramatic: “I have found a good man75 prepared to stick a limpet bomb on one of the larger German ships from a fishing boat, on a dark night with rain.” The cost of the operation would be fifty thousand pesetas, five thousand before and forty-five thousand on completion. The bomb would be timed to go off after the enemy ship left harbor. The Foreign Office should not be involved. “All operations are, if I may say so,76 better left to me,” wrote Hillgarth. “If anything goes wrong there is a perfectly good comeback by referring to German sabotage in Spain, and I could always be disowned and officially sacrificed. I am happy to stand the rub, as I feel so strongly that the situation now warrants action of this kind.” All Hillgarth wanted was a nod of approval and a bomb.