Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  There was one other factor that made Garbo’s German spymaster ideally suited to receive the Mincemeat hoax: Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was Jewish.

  The Abwehr officer had a Jewish grandmother. Kühlenthal did not consider himself Jewish. Marriage to a half-Jewish woman had not impeded his father’s military career. But that was before the rise of the Nazis. Under Hitler’s brutal racial policies, the one quarter of Jewish blood in Kühlenthal was enough to mark him out for discrimination, persecution, or worse. Kühlenthal would later claim that anti-Semitism had forced him to flee Germany, “leaving a good job as manager52 of a large champagne and wine cellar owned by his uncle.” His brother, an army officer, had left Germany for the same reason, winding up in Chile. It was Canaris who had intervened on behalf of his relative (the Abwehr chief had a record of helping Jews) and arranged for him to take up the post in Spain, since “he could not serve in the Army53 being half-blood Jew.” In Madrid, he was farther from Gestapo persecution, though hardly safe. In 1941, Canaris had his protégé “Aryanized”54 and formally declared to be of good German stock. Leissner, the chief of the Abwehr station, confirmed that Kühlenthal was now officially racially pure. In the minds of hard-line Nazis, however, either a person had Jewish blood, and was thereby corrupt and dangerous, or he did not. The attempt to tinker with Hitler’s race laws provoked a rebuke from Berlin: “He has been created an Aryan55 at the instigation of his station. A formulation of this nature is out of touch of all reality. Can JUAN [Leissner] state the legal foundation for such acts of state?” The Spanish branch of the SD, the SS intelligence organization, also questioned how Kühlenthal could simply be declared Aryan, “since there appeared to be no56 authority for such an act.” Canaris again intervened, and the SD in Madrid was instructed “to let the matter drop.”57 Kühlenthal’s colleagues in Spain knew of his Jewish ancestry and the attempt to expunge it. For some, this was prima facie evidence of treachery. Major Helm, the head of counterespionage in Spain, sent a confidential report to Canaris accusing Kühlenthal of being “in the pay of the British Secret Service.”58 The Abwehr chief “refused to take the report seriously.”59 Helm was transferred to another Abwehr station.

  The British spies tracking Kühlenthal had noted that he seemed “cold and reserved”60 but also deeply uneasy: “Appearance61: nervous, uncertain. Peculiarity: shifty eyes,” read one surveillance report. Kühlenthal had every reason to be anxious. His stock in Berlin was high, thanks to Pujol and the Felipe network, but if Canaris should fall from power or cease to defend him, or if something went wrong with his organization, his anti-Semitic enemies would pounce. Kühlenthal was deeply, and understandably, paranoid. Failure might well prove fatal. As one informer told British intelligence: “Kühlenthal is trembling to keep62 his position so as not to have to return to Germany and he is doing his utmost to please his superiors.”

  Kühlenthal had already fallen for the elaborate con that was Agent Garbo. He was the ideal target for Operation Mincemeat: deeply gullible but admired and trusted by his bosses, including Himmler and Canaris; ambitious and determined but also frantically eager to please, ready to pass on anything that might consolidate his reputation and save him from the fate suffered by others of Jewish blood; he was also vain, possibly corrupt, and prepared to deceive those of higher rank to enhance his own standing. Kühlenthal perfectly exemplified the qualities that John Godfrey had identified as the two most dangerous flaws in a spy: “wishfulness” and “yesmanship.” He would believe anything he was fed, and he would do whatever he could to suck up to the boss and preserve his own skin.

  To succeed, Operation Mincemeat needed to reach Hitler himself. The best way of doing that, Alan Hillgarth knew, was to get the information to Adolf Clauss in Huelva, from whom it was certain to pass into the hands of Karl-Erich Kühlenthal and then, with the blessing of that favored but gullible officer, up the German chain of command. Clauss was the perfect recipient because he was such an efficient spy. Kühlenthal was the ideal spy to pass the information on because he was worse than useless.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mincemeat Sets Sail

  LEVERTON & SONS, undertakers and funeral directors, began making coffins in the St. Pancras area of London around the time of the French Revolution. For two hundred years, the business was passed from father to son, along with the severe and formal cast of countenance required of officials in the death business. By 1943, the custodian of this long tradition, six generations on, was Ivor Leverton. His older brother Derrick was serving as a major with the Royal Artillery in North Africa and about to take part in the invasion of Europe that everyone knew was coming. Ivor had breathing difficulties and had been declared medically unfit for military service: he had therefore been left to run the family firm. Although only twenty-nine, Ivor took the traditions of the firm very seriously, ensuring that all clients, rich or poor, were treated with the same solemnity and dignity. But beneath that decorous exterior, like most undertakers, Ivor Leverton was a man of unflappable temperament and a bone-dry sense of humor. He felt a lingering guilt over being unable to fight on the front line. The closest he had come to seeing action was in 1941 when he went to collect a dead body from the Temperance Hospital and a German bomb came down the chimney, blasting shards of glass through his black “Anthony Eden” hat. Ivor longed to play his part. He was only too pleased, therefore, to be asked to transport a body, in the middle of the night, in deadly secrecy, as a task of “national importance.”1

  The request came from Police Constable Glyndon May, an officer working for Bentley Purchase, the St. Pancras coroner. Leverton & Sons did regular business with the coroner but had never been presented with a job quite like this. “I was not to divulge2 what I was told, under the Official Secrets Act, not even to my own family,” Ivor wrote in his diary. “No record would be made, and we would not be paid a penny.” May’s request arrived on April Fools’ Day, and for a moment Ivor Leverton wondered whether the “phone call from St. Pancras3 Coroner’s Court might be dismissed as a hoax.” Constable May was entirely serious: Ivor should get a coffin and take it to the mortuary behind the coroner’s office, where May would meet him at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 17. He should act entirely alone and carry the coffin himself. “I was still in fairly good shape,”4 grumbled Ivor, “but this was really asking a bit much.”

  Soon after midnight, Ivor Leverton tiptoed downstairs from the flat above the funeral parlor in Eversholt Street, taking care not to wake his wife, and retrieved a hearse from the company garage in Crawley Mews. He then drove to the front of the parlor and manhandled one of the firm’s wooden zinc-lined “removal coffins”5 into the back, hoping Pat, the firm’s most inquisitive neighbor, would not wake up and spot him wrestling with a heavy coffin in the dark. Glyn May was waiting at the coroner’s court. Together, with some difficulty, they heaved the body into the coffin. The dead man was wearing a khaki military uniform but no shoes. Leverton was struck by his height. Leverton & Sons’ standard coffins measured six feet two inches inside, but the dead man “must have stood 6′4″ inches tall”6 and could not be made to lie flat. “By adjustment to the knees and setting the very large feet at an angle,” Ivor wrote, “we were just able to manage.”

  After an uneventful drive through the deserted city streets to Hackney Mortuary, Leverton helped May unload the coffin, “left our passenger”7 in one of the mortuary refrigerators, and returned home. His wife, pregnant with one of the next generation of Leverton undertakers, was still asleep.

  Hackney had been selected by Bentley Purchase because it was run by “a mortuary-keeper on whom8 he could rely not to talk.” Later that day, at six in the evening, Bentley Purchase met Cholmondeley and Montagu at the mortuary, with Glyn May, the coroner’s officer. The body of Glyndwr Michael was removed from the refrigerator and placed on a mortuary gurney. Nearly three months had now elapsed since Michael’s death, and during the long period of refrigeration his eyes had sunk into their sockets, and the skin was yellowed from p
oison-induced jaundice. Otherwise the body appeared to be in a reasonable state of preservation. The life jacket was put over his head and tied around his waist. The yellow military jackets were known as “Mae Wests,” from rhyming slang for “breasts.” When fully inflated, the rubber jacket gave the wearer a distinctly busty look reminiscent, if you happened to be a sex-starved soldier, of the curvaceous film star. The chain was looped around his shoulder, outside the coat and under the Mae West, and securely tied to the belt of the trench coat. It had been assumed that the attaché case would be given to Jewell to clip to the chain at the last moment, but it was found that the canister could accommodate both case and body. The handle of the case was fastened to the end of the chain and placed on the body. Jewell would now only have to insert the documents and tip the body into the water, thus ensuring that it would arrive on shore in a way that “made it as easy as possible9 for the Spaniards or the Germans to remove the bag and chain without trace.” The watch, with the winder run down, was set to 2:59 and fastened to the left wrist: with luck, the Germans would assume that the watch had stopped when the imagined Catalina had crashed into the sea.

  All Major Martin now needed to complete his outfit was footwear. But getting him into his boots proved to be the most difficult aspect of the entire dressing operation. In the extra-cold refrigerator, the feet had frozen solid at right angles to the legs. Even when the laces were fully undone, the boots refused to go on, for it is impossible to put on any boot, let alone a stiff army boot, without bending the ankle. Bentley Purchase came up with a solution. “I’ve got it,”10 said the coroner. “We’ll get an electric fire and thaw out the feet only. As soon as the boots are on we’ll pop him back in the refrigerator again and refreeze him.” PC May went to fetch the single-bar electric heater from the lodge of the coroner’s office. There then followed a truly macabre scene, as Montagu attempted to defrost the dead man’s feet and Cholmondeley tried to lever on the boots. Finally, the ankles defrosted sufficiently and the boots went on, followed by gaiters. Thawing and refreezing was certain to hasten decomposition, but with the gaiters securely buckled, the feet would probably not fall off. It was, said Montagu with feeling, “the least pleasant part of our work.”11

  Major Martin’s wallet, containing the letters from Pam and Father, was slipped into his inside breast pocket. His remaining pockets were filled with all the “litter” that made up a complete personality: pencil, loose change, keys, and, in an inspired last-minute addition, two ticket stubs for “Strike a New Note,” a variety show at the Prince of Wales Theatre starring the music-hall comedian Sid Field. This was another of Cholmondeley’s inspirations. HMS Seraph would depart from Holy Loch on Monday, April 19, and take ten or eleven days to reach Huelva. The Germans, however, needed to be persuaded that the body had washed up after no more than a week at sea, following an air crash. If the body was found on, say, April 28, then there must be something in Martin’s pockets indicating that he was still in London on April 24. This was where Sid Field could play his part. Cholmondeley purchased four tickets for his new show at the Prince of Wales Theatre on April 22, tore off the dated counterfoils of the two in the middle, and put them in the pocket of Major Martin’s trench coat. “We decided Bill Martin and Pam12 should have a farewell party before he left.” This would be their last evening together before the young officer headed to North Africa and certain death. The stubs would offer incontrovertible “proof” that the only way he could have reached Spain by the twenty-eighth was by aircraft.

  From a close examination of the letters and pocket litter, the Germans would reconstruct Major Martin’s last, poignant days:

  April 18: Check in to the Naval and Military Club

  April 19: Receive bill from S.J. Phillips of New Bond Street for diamond ring

  April 21: Lunch with Father and Gwatkin, the solicitor, at the Carlton Grill; Pam goes to dance with Jock and Hazel

  April 22: Go to the theater with Pam, followed by a nightclub

  April 24: Check out of Naval and Military Club, paying bill in cash (one pound and ten shillings); collect letters from Combined Operations HQ and War Office; board flight to Gibraltar at 2:59 p.m.; crash in the Gulf of Cádiz and die

  The body was photographed twice on the mortuary gurney. Only the torso of the man holding the trolley is visible, but this was almost certainly PC May, the coroner’s officer. The mouth of the corpse has fallen open. The skin around the nose has sunk, and the upper part of the face appears discolored. The fingers of the left hand are bent, as if clawing in pain. These are the only known pictures of Glyndwr Michael, a man whom no one bothered to photograph when he was alive.

  The already visible decomposition of the face raised another potential complication. The body would now have to be driven four hundred miles to Scotland, then loaded into a cramped submarine and taken on a ten-day sea voyage that might encounter rough weather. If the canister was jolted about, the face would surely suffer further damage from chafing against the sides of the canister. Again, Bentley Purchase came up with a solution: “Get an army blanket.13 Wrap the face and neck in it, and there will be no friction.” The body was rolled up in a blanket and “lightly tied with tape.”14 Following Bernard Spilsbury’s instructions, twenty-one pounds of dry ice had already been placed in the canister to expel the oxygen. The corpse was now “reverently”15 inserted into the homemade carrying case and packed around with more dry ice before the lid was screwed tightly in place. Major Martin now needed to get to Scotland, fast.

  Waiting in the Hackney Mortuary parking lot was a Fordson BBE van, with two seats in front, fitted with a customized V-8 engine. At the wheel was a small man with a neat mustache, wearing civilian clothes. His name was St. John “Jock” Horsfall, an MI5 chauffeur who also happened to be one of the most famous racing drivers in the country.

  St. John Ratcliffe Stewart Horsfall was born in 1910 into a Norfolk family of car fanatics: he acquired his first Aston Martin at the age of twenty-three. Between 1933 and the outbreak of war, he won trophy after trophy on the racing circuit. In 1938, Jock Horsfall took on six BMWs at Donington Park in the Black Car, his two-liter Speed Model Aston Martin, and beat them all. He seldom wore racing leathers or a crash helmet, preferring to race in “a shirt and tie,16 with either a bomber jacket or a sleeveless sweater.” Horsfall was shortsighted and astigmatic but declined to wear spectacles. He drove at staggering speed and suffered a number of serious accidents, including one in a trial run at Brooklands when his car, according to one eyewitness, “went berserk17 [and] tried to hurl itself over the top of the banking.” On another occasion, the throttle stuck open, forcing the engine up to 10,000 rpm until the clutch exploded, sending “potentially lethal pieces of metal”18 bursting through the bell housing at his feet.

  At the start of the war, Horsfall had been recruited into the Security Service by Eric Holt-Wilson, the deputy director of MI5, who had employed the racing driver’s mother as a staff car driver during the First World War. Horsfall’s primary job was driving MI5 and MI6 officers and agents, double agents, and captured enemy spies from one place to another, very fast. He was also involved in testing the security of naval sites and airfields and was privy to a good deal of highly classified information.

  Horsfall knew only that he was to transport to the west of Scotland a canister containing a dead body, which would be used to play a humiliating trick on the Germans. Horsfall was fond of practical jokes. He once wired up a toilet seat to a battery and waited for a girlfriend to use it. “The scream that Kath gave19 when the magneto was turned on was most satisfying,” he recalled. He even wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion.

  I gave her time to start her piddle20

  Then gave the thing a violent twiddle

  Before I could complete a turn

  She closed the circuit with her stern,

  And shooting off the wooden seat

  Emitted a most piercing shriek.

  The idea of carrying a dead body through the night
in order to bamboozle the Germans appealed strongly to Jock Horsfall’s sense of humor, yet he never told anyone of this, perhaps the most significant drive of his life. Reckless behind the wheel, outside a motorized vehicle Jock Horsfall was discretion personified. MI5 had a fleet of cars and vans, but for this operation Horsfall had selected one of his own, a six-year-old 30 cwt Fordson van, customized to accommodate an Aston Martin in the back, with a souped-up engine in which “he claimed to have done 100 mph21 in the Mall.” This was the van he used to transport the Black Car to the racetrack. It was past midnight when Montagu, Cholmondeley, and Horsfall loaded the canister into the back.

  The trio paused for a brief pit stop at Cholmondeley’s mews flat off Cromwell Road, where they ate a light meal, with “one of us sitting22 in the window to make sure that no one stole Major Martin from the van (even if he was not worth much to the thief, he was valuable to us).” It was, Cholmondeley later said, the first time he had ever “had supper with a corpse parked23 in his garage.” Cholmondeley’s sister, Dottie, prepared some cheese sandwiches and a thermos of hot tea, and at around two in the morning the party set off, heading north. Jewell had requested that the additional passenger be brought aboard HMS Seraph no later than midday on April 18. Horsfall was racing against the clock, his second-favorite occupation.

  Operation Mincemeat almost came to a premature and embarrassing end. On passing a local cinema where a spy film was showing, Jock Horsfall remarked on the “much better story”24 they were currently engaged in, became paralyzed with giggles, and nearly drove into a tram stop. A little later, the racing driver failed to see a roundabout until too late and shot over the grass circle in the middle. This is what driving with Jock Horsfall was like—an experience rendered yet more alarming by the need to drive with masked headlights during the blackout. Luckily there were few other cars about. Montagu and Cholmondeley took turns lying in the back and trying to sleep, as if that were possible when being driven at high speed by a myopic Grand Prix driver with no headlights. This was the closest either came to death in action during the war. It was still pitch dark as they hurtled across the border into Scotland.