Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  Working quickly, Jewell inflated the “Mae West,” transferred the documents from envelope to briefcase, locked it, and placed the keys in the pocket of the corpse. He then selected the identity card picturing Ronnie Reed and added that to the pocket. Up on the bridge, Lieutenant Scott was becoming steadily more anxious. It was now four thirty, and a glimmer of dawn light was spreading over the water. More worrying, the wind was strengthening and the submarine was drifting closer to the shore. “We seemed to be practically54 on the beach.” The Seraph’s draft was twenty feet. The depth at low water in her current position was just fourteen feet. The tide was almost out, and the submarine was very nearly aground.

  Bill Jewell straightened, took off his officer’s cap, and, bending his head, briefly recited “what I could remember55 of the funeral service,” a fragment of the Psalm 39. The choice was oddly appropriate, given the extreme secrecy of their mission: “I will keep my mouth as if it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight. Held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.” The three officers then picked up the body and gently slipped it into the sea. Jewell turned to Scott on the bridge and gave the thumbs-up sign. “With some relief,”56 Scott jammed the submarine full speed astern. “The wash of the screws helped Major Martin on his way.” As the submarine headed seaward, Scott could just make out the gray shape, drifting toward the shore. In the official report on the operation, Jewell was praised for steering so close to the beach, even though the submarine had almost grounded: “He virtually assured success57 by approaching as close inshore as he did.”

  A half mile south, the half inflated rubber dinghy and oar were thrown overboard, while the officers stuffed the blankets, tapes, and dinghy packaging inside the canister. Still on the surface, powered by the quieter electric motor, Scott steered the submarine into deep, open water. Twelve miles out, the Seraph stopped for the last time and the canister was thrown overboard. The seafloor here was two hundred fathoms down. The canister would never be found. If, that is, it could be made to sink. Charles Fraser-Smith had made Major Martin’s capsule too well. “Because it had been designed58 to keep the ice from melting, it had pockets of air all the way around it.” The double skin acted as a built-in buoyancy tank. A Vickers gun was brought up from below, and the canister was “riddled by fire.”59 Still it would not go down and, worse, it was drifting toward the shore. Jewell then handed Scott a .455 service revolver and instructed him to stand on the fore planes while Jewell maneuvered the submarine until the canister was directly below him. “He did this with his usual skill,”60 Scott wrote, “and I fired all six shots into the top of the canister.” Still the steel tube bobbed defiantly on the surface. It was, Jewell reflected, “a hell of a time,”61 and time was now running out. “Daylight was fast approaching,62 and we could see some fishing boats not far off.” Jewell opted for radical measures. The steel tube, now resembling a large colander with some two hundred bullet holes in it, was hauled back onto the casing and packed with plastic explosive inside and out. The fuse was lit and the canister lowered overboard, and the submarine hastened to get out of the way. The resulting explosion was exceptionally loud. In Jewell’s laconic epitaph: “It then disappeared, finally.”63 Jewell was relieved, but he knew he had taken a risk. His orders were to sink the canister in one piece, not to blow it to smithereens. Fragments of the casing, or even bits of blanket and tape, might now wash ashore. Perhaps these would be assumed to be debris from the downed aircraft, but not necessarily. Moreover, even if the Spanish fishermen in the bay had not spotted the submarine setting off the explosion, they would surely have seen the flash and heard the sound echoing through the still dawn. In his final report, Jewell made no mention of having to explode the canister, merely observing that after being shot full of holes, “it was seen to sink.”64 Indeed, he did not tell anyone how the canister had been blown to shreds until 1991, when he was seventy-seven years old.

  “We dived and set course for Gibraltar,”65 wrote Scott. “Breakfast tasted wonderful, and so was the deep sleep into which I fell immediately afterwards.”

  At 7:15 a.m., Lieutenant Jewell of HMS Seraph sent a wireless message to the Admiralty in London: “Mincemeat Completed.”66 Back on land in Gibraltar, Jewell scribbled a postcard, which he posted to Montagu: “Parcel delivered safely.”67

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dulce et Decorum

  ALL MORNING the body lay in the dunes, beneath the pines, where the fisherman José Antonio Rey María had carried it. As the sun rose, the sand grew hotter and the smell grew worse. A series of important visitors came to look at the dead man.

  The officer in command of the First Company of the Second Battalion of the Seventy-second Infantry Regiment (in charge of coastal defense around Huelva), who had been drilling his men on the beach before the body was brought ashore, sent word to the police at Punta Umbria. The police duly informed the port authority at Huelva that a drowned soldier had washed up on the beach at La Bota. The case therefore came under the military jurisdiction of the port. In late morning, the rotund figure of navy lieutenant Mariano Pascual del Pobil Bensusan, second-in-command of the port and acting military judge, appeared at the beach in a canoe paddled by two Spanish seamen. Lieutenant Pascual del Pobil was sweating profusely and he wanted his lunch. With some distaste, he made a cursory examination of the body, noting the military uniform and the attaché case with the crest “G VI R and the royal crown”1 attached to the dead man by a chain “which had penetrated the muscles2 of the neck as a result of the swelling.” He also extracted the wallet and noted Major Martin’s name from his identity card. Pascual del Pobil then unclipped the locked case from its chain, ordered that the body be taken to Huelva, and climbed back into his boat, taking the case with him. He did not think to look in the dead man’s pocket for a key. The next to arrive, on foot, was a local doctor, José Pablo Vázquez Pérez, who came to certify that the body was really dead. The stench wafting from under the pines suggested this was not strictly necessary.

  There was no road to the dock at Punta Umbria, merely a sandy track winding five miles through the dunes. The body was loaded onto a donkey, which set off, led by a child, through the sweet afternoon scent of wild rosemary and jacaranda. Two infantrymen followed behind. In the late afternoon, the grim little procession arrived at the infantry headquarters by the dock, too late to arrange transport of the body across the estuary mouth. The corpse was placed in an outhouse, ready to be taken over to Huelva in the morning.

  Lieutenant Pascual del Pobil had by now sent word to the British consulate that a dead British officer, found on La Bota beach, would be arriving by motor launch at Huelva dock the next morning. Francis Haselden was profoundly relieved. For the last forty-eight hours the British vice-consul had been waiting anxiously, unaware that the delivery of the body had been delayed by the weather.

  Gómez-Beare had left Haselden with very specific instructions: as soon as he received word that the body had come ashore, the vice-consul “should telephone to him at Madrid3 and inform him of the finding of the body, its particulars, etc.” Gómez-Beare would then verbally instruct Haselden to arrange the burial while he notified London. A few days later, “when a signal from London might be expected to have reached him,” Gómez-Beare would call again to ask if anything had washed ashore with the body. The assistant naval attaché “would say that he could not talk4 on the phone but would come down to Huelva. He would then do so and make discreet inquiries whether any bag or paper had been washed ashore.” Gómez-Beare knew that the telephones at the Madrid embassy were bugged. It was likely that Adolf Clauss also had spies inside the consulate and that anything said on the telephone there would be reported back to the Germans. At the same time, Alan Hillgarth in Madrid would send cables to Huelva backing up the story, again in the knowledge that these would be intercepted at their source and relayed to Karl-Erich Kühlenthal and his colleagues at Abwehr headquarters in Madrid. The
entire performance was for German benefit: London and the embassy in Madrid should appear to be increasingly agitated about the loss of top secret documents. Parallel to these “breakable” messages, Hillgarth would dispatch “a separate series in his personal cipher,5 keeping London in the picture of what was going on.”

  Haselden must play the part of a harassed official under mounting pressure from his bosses to trace a missing briefcase. The role required nuance. Haselden would have to make inquiries, with increasing urgency, for the missing papers, but he must not do so too “energetically,”6 as this might lead to the documents’ actually being returned before they reached the Germans. In that case, Operation Mincemeat would have failed.

  Here lay an additional but crucial consideration. The British did want to get the documents back, intact, once the Germans had had a good look at them. Under international law, as a neutral country, Spain was obliged to return any property belonging to a British national who had died in Spain. The precedent of Lieutenant Turner suggested that the briefcase would, eventually, be returned by the Spaniards. But in reality, if top secret plans really had fallen into enemy hands, and the breach of security was detected, then those plans might well be abandoned, or at least substantially altered. The Germans must be made to believe that they had gained access to the documents undetected; they should be made to assume that the British believed the Spaniards had returned the documents unopened and unread. Operation Mincemeat would only work if the Germans could be fooled into believing that the British had been fooled. All of this would require the most careful stage management.

  Francis Haselden was not an actor. Nor was he a spy, novelist, or fly-fisherman. He did not even particularly want to be a vice-consul but had inherited the post after the sudden death of his predecessor in 1940. He was a gentle, civilized, sixty-two-year-old mining engineer and businessman, who had settled in Huelva two decades earlier and might reasonably have expected to spend the rest of his life playing golf and running his mine supplies company, a pillar of the community in a small and sunny British outpost. War had made a new man of Haselden: he now ran an underground network helping escaped prisoners of war, harbored downed Allied pilots, monitored the nefarious doings of Adolf Clauss and his agents, and did everything he could to help the Allied secret services respond in kind. In most parts of Spain, Franco was content simply to monitor the espionage battle between the Germans and the British and leave the two sides to get on with it. But in Huelva the civilian governor, Joaquín Miranda González, was a keen member of the fascist Falange, strongly pro-German, and keen to help his friend Clauss root out British spies. To Haselden’s annoyance, three members of Huelva’s British community had already been expelled on suspicion of spying, including Montagu Brown, the head of a local railway company, and William Cluett, the manager of a British-owned electricity company. Here, then, was Haselden’s opportunity to strike back at Clauss and his Spanish allies by playing—but not overplaying—the part of a worthy functionary looking after the interests of a dead British serviceman. He rose to the occasion magnificently.

  Emilio Morales Candela, Huelva’s undertaker, was waiting at the jetty when the ferry from Punta Umbria pulled in the following morning, carrying a handful of passengers and one dead body. Beside him stood Francis Haselden, who had asked Candela to transport the body to the cemetery. The vice-consul had also, as instructed, made the first telephone call to Gómez-Beare in Madrid informing him that a dead British officer had washed ashore. The body was lifted into a wooden coffin and loaded onto the horse-drawn cart provided by La Magdalena funeral services of Huelva. (It would be another decade before the town had its own motorized hearse.) Pulled by an ancient horse and steered by Candela, the square wooden funeral carriage, locally known as the “Soup Bowl”7 (La Sopera), set off up the hill toward the cemetery, with Haselden following in his car. The route to Nuestra Señora de la Soledad cemetery led through the area of Huelva known as Concepción, little more than a cluster of fishing huts surrounding the ancient Torre de Vigilancia, one of the circular brick watchtowers built to spot sixteenth-century pirates. News spreads fast in a small town, and word that a dead British soldier had been found at La Bota traveled ahead of the slow-moving cortège. A small knot of people gathered outside the church of Nuestra Señora de Lourdes to watch it pass. Several made the sign of the cross. The priest, Father José Manuel Romero Bernal, muttered a prayer. The carriage continued through the center of the town and past the Teatro Mora, which was showing Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard. The sun was already baking.

  The cemetery of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad sits on a small hill just outside Huelva, a high-walled compound surrounded by fields of sunflowers. Alongside it is the much smaller British cemetery, in which members of the Protestant German community, in a strange alliance of religion in defiance of politics, were also interred. The horse was sweating by the time the lumbering funeral carriage reached the cemetery. Waiting at the gates were Lieutenant Pascual del Pobil, the naval judge, with the briefcase under one arm. Alongside him stood Dr. Eduardo Fernández del Torno and his son, Dr. Eduardo Fernández Contioso, who would together carry out an autopsy. The final member of the reception committee was a young American pilot called Willie Watkins.

  Three days before the body was brought ashore, an American P-39 Airacobra plane had crash-landed in a field in Punta Umbria. The pilot was Watkins, a twenty-six-year-old from Corpus Christi, Texas, who had been flying from North Africa to Portugal when his plane ran out of fuel. Unable to open the cockpit cover, Watkins had come down with his plane, escaping with only minor injuries. He had been taken into custody by the infantry detachment guarding the coast, briefly lodged at the Hotel La Granadina in Huelva, and then transferred to the home of Francis Haselden, the refuge of all Allied soldiers, since there was no American consulate in Huelva. Lieutenant Pascual del Pobil had requested that the American pilot be brought to the cemetery in case the dead body and the downed plane were connected in some way and Watkins might be able to identify the body.

  The coffin was carried to the small building on the edge of the cemetery that served as a morgue. Glyndwr Michael’s body was lifted out and placed on the raised marble slab. Methodically, the mortuary attendant went through the pockets, extracted the contents, and laid them out on the table beside the locked attaché case: cash, sodden cigarettes, matches, keys, receipts, identity card, wallet, stamps, and theater ticket counterfoils. Pascual del Pobil barely glanced at these. Lunch was already beckoning. Haselden did his best to seem uninterested. The Spanish officer now turned his attention to the briefcase, which he unlocked with one of the dead man’s keys. The contents were soaked, but the writing on the envelopes was still clearly legible. Pascual del Pobil carefully “examined the names on the envelopes”8 and motioned Haselden over to look. Haselden had been told only the outline of Operation Mincemeat. But from the red seals and embossed envelopes, these were clearly confidential military letters. Pascual del Pobil also seems to have registered their importance, for he now did exactly what Montagu and Cholmondeley had hoped would not happen. He gestured toward the case and asked Haselden if he would like to take it. Since these items would have to be returned to the British eventually, would the vice-consul like to take custody now? Pascual del Pobil liked the English vice-consul; he believed he was doing Haselden a favor; and he wanted his lunch and siesta.

  Haselden knew he had to “react swiftly.”9 Indeed, he had mentally prepared himself for the possibility that Pascual del Pobil would cut corners and simply hand over the attaché case. With as much nonchalance as he could muster, he said, “Well, your superior might not like10 that, so perhaps you should deliver it to him, and then bring it back to me, following the official route.” Pascual del Pobil shrugged and closed the briefcase.

  Willie Watkins had observed this exchange. Although he spoke little Spanish, it was clear what was going on. Haselden’s “attitude, in refusing the briefcase,11 struck him as odd.” The American pilot was now bec
koned over by Pascual del Pobil and asked if he could identify the dead man. Needless to say, he could not, and said so. The dead man’s life belt, he pointed out, was “of an English pattern,12 whereas he himself had flown an American plane, which carried a completely different type of life-belt.” Pascual del Pobil stated the obvious: “There are clearly two13 completely unconnected accidents.”

  Packing up the briefcase, wallet, and other possessions, the naval judge explained that these would be formally handed over to his commanding officer, the naval commander of the port of Huelva. The tubby Spanish officer departed, taking the case and other items with him. Haselden casually announced that he would stay to watch the autopsy. If it seemed odd to Watkins that the British vice-consul should decline the offer of the briefcase, it was surely even odder that he should choose to remain in a broiling hut with a tin roof while two Spanish doctors cut up a half-rotted corpse. The American pilot was only too happy to escape the fetid room with its stench of death and smoke a cigarette in the shade of the willow tree outside.

  The autopsy would usually have been carried out by a military pathologist, but since he was away, the task fell to Dr. Fernández, the civilian forensic pathologist, and his son Eduardo, a recent medical school graduate. Contrary to Spilsbury’s dismissive remark about the poor state of Spanish forensic expertise, Fernández was a good and experienced pathologist. A native of Seville, he had studied medicine at Seville University and then spent many years working as the company doctor for a large mining concern. Since 1921, he had been senior pathologist for the Huelva area. Fernández may not have been in Spilsbury’s forensic league, but he had a wide practical knowledge of dead bodies in general and, given his coastal location, of drowning victims in particular.

  Haselden later described the autopsy. “On the first incision being made,14 there was a minor explosion, for while the body externally was in good preservation, the inside had deteriorated badly.” The lungs were filled with fluid, but given the state of decomposition and without further tests, Dr. Fernández would have been unable to say whether this was seawater. He examined the ears and hair of the corpse and its strangely discolored skin. Haselden knew nothing of the real circumstances surrounding the body, but he knew enough of the plot to realize that the more detailed the autopsy, the more likely it was that the pathologist would find some clue to the real cause of death. The British vice-consul was friendly with the Spanish doctor. The stench of putrefaction in the room was now almost overwhelming. With what was later described as “remarkable presence of mind,”15 he decided to intervene. “Since it was obvious the heat16 had done its worst,” he said, there was no need for a detailed autopsy. “On receiving this assurance17 from the VC that he was quite satisfied, the doctor, not without relief perhaps, agreed to call it a day and issued the necessary certificate.”