Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  The postmortem verdict was straightforward: “The young British officer fell in the water18 while still alive, showed no evidence of bruising, and drowned through asphyxia caused by submersion. The body had been in the water between eight and ten days.” The body was returned to its plain wooden coffin and formally transferred into the care of the British vice-consul.

  Fernández had missed the telltale discoloration of the skin, indicating phosphorus poisoning. He made only a cursory examination of the lungs and took no samples from the lungs, liver, or kidneys for testing. Yet there were other aspects of the case that troubled him. The doctor had examined hundreds of drowned fishermen over the years. In every case, there was evidence of “nibbling and bites by fish19 and crabs on the earlobes and other fleshy parts.” The ears of the British officer were untouched. On bodies that have been in seawater for more than week, the hair on the head becomes dull and brittle. “The shininess of the hair20 did not correspond to the time which he had supposedly spent in the water,” and there was also, in Fernández’s mind, some “doubt over the nature of the liquid21 in the man’s lungs.” Privately, Fernández also noted something peculiar about the clothing. The man’s uniform was waterlogged, but it had not attained the shapeless, soggy form of clothing that has been in seawater for a week. “He seemed very well dressed22 to be in the water for so many days,” the doctor reflected. The two doctors had also compared the photograph on the identity card with the dead man but concluded that these were “identical.”23 Yet even here there was room for doubt, for the father-and-son medical team noted “that a bald patch on the temples24 was more pronounced than in the photograph.” The William Martin in the photograph had a thick head of hair, but the one on the mortuary slab was thinning on top. Fernández concluded that “either the photograph was taken25 some two or three years ago or the baldness on the temples was due to the action of sea water.” This was an odd conclusion: seawater has many effects on the human body, but male-pattern baldness is not one of them. It is impossible to know how many of Fernández’s doubts found their way into his final report: the autopsy was passed to the port authority, filed in the archives by Pascual del Pobil, and then destroyed in a fire in 1976.

  There was one additional, far more glaring inconsistency, which Fernández did spot, although he did not realize its significance. The degree of decomposition, according to Fernández, indicated that the body had been at sea for a minimum of eight days, and possibly longer. According to the evidence in Major Martin’s pocket, he had flown from London late on April 24; and the body was retrieved in the early hours of April 30. The decayed state of the body was simply inconsistent with a body submerged in cold seawater for only a little more than five days. Fernández, of course, was unaware of the supposed timing of Major Martin’s death. That evidence was contained in his wallet, which was now in the possession of Captain Francisco Elvira Álvarez, commander of the port of Huelva and, as it happened, the best friend of Ludwig Clauss, Huelva’s elderly German consul.

  At eight thirty that evening, Francis Haselden sent a cable to Assistant Naval Attaché Don Gómez-Beare in Madrid: “With reference to my phone message26 today body is identified as Major W. Martin R.M. identity card 148228 dated 2nd Feb. 1943 Cardiff. Naval judge has taken possession of all papers. Death due to drowning probably 8 to 10 days at sea. I am having funeral Sunday noon.”

  Normally, in such circumstances, the naval attaché would have sent a message to the Admiralty in London, with the name and rank of the dead man. In this case, no such marine officer existed, and if the cable was distributed through normal channels someone in London might well spot the anomaly. Hillgarth had arranged that just before he was ready to send the telegram reporting the death of Major Martin, he would send a separate message, in code, to “C” at MI6, “so that the action for suppressing27 it could be taken.” The plan went wrong. The message to “C” duly arrived, but by the time MI6 got around to acting on it, the signal from Hillgarth had already begun to be distributed to various Admiralty departments: one of these might well be conversant with the names of Royal Marine officers and start making embarrassing enquiries. A flurry of telephone calls to the heads of the departments that had received the message ordered “the suppression of the signal28 on the excuse that the individual in question was not a naval officer, but had, with the authority of the First Sea Lord, been given the cover of rank in the Royal Marines when he was setting out on a secret and very special mission abroad. … The secrecy of his task rendered it necessary that the signal should be suppressed and no action taken on it.” In a way, the excuse was true.

  Haselden’s message was addressed to “Sadok,” Gómez-Beare’s cable name, but its intended recipient was Adolf Clauss, the senior Abwehr officer in Huelva and the man identified by Montagu as the “super-super-spy” most likely to intercept the documents. Clauss was living up to his billing, for he was already fully aware that the body of a British officer carrying letters had washed up in his bailiwick. It may have been Lieutenant Pascual del Pobil himself who told the German agent about the body and its accompanying briefcase, or the harbor master, or the mortuary attendant, or even Dr. Fernández, who had conducted the autopsy. Whoever it was, by the time the British vice-consul informed Madrid that the papers had arrived, Clauss had already mobilized his extensive spy network to intercept them.

  This was proving rather difficult, for the briefcase and its contents had fallen, from the point of view of both the British and the Germans, into the wrong hands. Had the case simply been handed over to the Huelva police, as the British intended, then Clauss would have obtained it within hours. The same thing would have happened had the documents ended up in the possession of Huelva’s civilian governor, the harbormaster, or the army authorities, for these, too, were in the pay of Clauss. Instead, the Spanish navy had them, and this was an altogether trickier nut for German espionage to crack. Montagu himself later admitted that the fact that the documents were “taken into naval custody”29 very nearly derailed the entire operation. Many Spanish naval officers were pro-British, and there was a tradition of mutual respect between the British and Spanish navies. The Navy Minister, Admiral Moreno, was a personal friend of Alan Hillgarth, who had made a point of cultivating naval officers: “The Spanish navy is not in German30 hands,” Hillgarth wrote.

  Clauss’s first approach was the most direct one: he instructed his father, the elderly consul, Ludwig Clauss, to ask his friend and golfing partner, Captain Francisco Elvira Álvarez, to hand over the documents. Captain Elvira refused. Politely, he explained that these documents were now locked away in his safe at the navy office at 17 Avenida de Italia, where they would remain until he received orders from Cádiz about what should be done with them. Elvira was a cheerful, garrulous, and sociable man. He liked Clauss, was happy to eat the dinners laid on by the German consul, and enjoyed the hospitality he provided at Huelva Golf Club. But there is no evidence he was on Clauss’s payroll. Elvira was also a stickler for the rules, “a rigid disciplinarian,”31 and a firm believer in hierarchy. He would await instructions from above.

  At midday on May 2, 1943, a group of mourners, official and unofficial, public and secret, gathered for the funeral and burial of Major William Martin. It was a day of “suffocating heat,”32 according to the local newspaper, yet the turnout was impressive. Representing Britain were Francis Haselden, the vice-consul, and Lancelot Shutte, a British mining company executive who had been expelled from Spain once already by Governor Miranda on suspicion of espionage. Here, too, was the Frenchman Pierre Desbrest, a Gaullist and close friend of Haselden. Officially, Desbrest was the representative in Spain of a French-owned pyrites company. Less officially, he organized an underground route for Free French forces from occupied France through Spain to North Africa and conspired with Haselden against the Germans. The port commander, Elvira, and the naval judge, Pascual del Pobil, attended in full naval uniform. The military governor of Huelva was in Seville meeting General Franco but sent an
army lieutenant to represent the Spanish armed forces.

  Glyndwr Michael had died without a single mourner. His funeral, as someone completely different, was carried out with full military honors and all the ceremony and solemnity Huelva could muster. In addition to the officials and military brass, a small crowd of civilians also gathered at Nuestra Señora de la Soledad cemetery: the curious, the pious, and the clandestine. Haselden does not seem to have spotted the tall, cadaverous figure of Adolf Clauss among the crowd. Clauss would later claim that he had only come to the funeral in his capacity as German vice-consul, “as a mark of respect33 to the fallen soldier.” In truth, of course, he was there to observe, to see if he might pick up any useful information about the dead man and his intriguing briefcase.

  The death certificate, filled out by funeral director Candela, formally marked the passing of “W. Martin, aged between 35 and 40,34 native of Cardiff (England) [sic], officer of the British marines, found on the beach known as ‘La Bota’ at half past nine on April 30th, 1943. Death by drowning.” After a brief funeral service in the cemetery chapel, the coffin was carried along a cobbled path, down a neat avenue of cypresses, to the section of the cemetery known as San Marco. Swallows dipped and dived among the palm trees, and the strong scent of jasmine trees rose in the midday heat. The funeral procession passed the large and imposing mausoleums of Huelva’s wealthiest Spanish families, marble tombs surrounded by iron railings. Here was the grave of Huelva’s most famous son, Miguel Biez, “El Litri,” a bullfighter famously gored to death in 1929. El Litri’s huge and ostentatious tomb depicted the matador wearing the “suit of lights.” As the procession neared the northwest corner of the cemetery, the graves grew smaller and humbler. The San Marco section was where the poor and ordinary folk of Huelva were buried. Haselden had ordered a “Class Five”35 burial, the cheapest available: total cost, including coffin, being just 250 pesetas. The British consulate contracted to pay the cost of renting and maintaining the grave in perpetuity. Major Martin was not the first tenant of grave number forty-six, in the fourteenth avenue of the San Marco section backing up to the cemetery wall. In 1938, a ten-year-old girl named Rosario Vilches had been buried there, but her parents had been unable to keep up payments on the plot, and two months earlier the body had been removed and reburied elsewhere.

  At half past twelve, the coffin was lowered into the grave. Of the official mourners, only Francis Haselden knew that the man inside had not died at sea, and even he was ignorant of the full scale of the imposture taking place: a Welsh Baptist in a Spanish Catholic grave, a derelict who had never worn a uniform accorded rank and honor, a man with no relatives (at least none who cared) invested with a parent to mourn him and buried with full military pomp by a grateful nation. Glyndwr Michael had probably killed himself on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of insanity or by accident. The fatal dose of rat poison had carried him five hundred miles, into another country and another personality. The inscription on his tomb would eventually read, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” the line from Horace’s Odes: “It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.” There was nothing remotely decorous or patriotic about the way Glyndwr Michael had died. Yet in a way, the epitaph was apt: Michael had, indeed, given his life to his country, even if he had been given no choice about it.

  The officials climbed into their hot cars, the gravediggers began to fill in the hole, and the mourners trailed away down the hill toward the town. Adolf Clauss watched them leave and then headed back to the German consulate on foot. He did not sign the mourners’ book, and he spoke to no one, but his presence did not go unremarked. Among the other mourners was an innocuous-looking middle-aged man in a nondescript suit. The Spaniards had assumed he must be part of the official delegation. The officials assumed he was a local Spaniard. From the shade of a cypress tree, Don Gómez-Beare watched Adolf Clauss leave the cemetery and then quietly slipped out and followed him down the hill.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Spanish Trails

  ADOLF CLAUSS had much to occupy his mind. His attempts to obtain the briefcase had so far failed. The Spanish naval authorities were proving vigorously uncooperative. Perhaps they would be more amenable to an approach from a fellow Spaniard. Frustrated, the German spy resolved to try a more indirect approach. Lieutenant Colonel Santiago Garrigós was commander of the Guardia Civil, the Spanish paramilitary police, for the Huelva district and an enthusiastic recipient of German largesse. Clauss instructed Garrigós to “do everything necessary1 to obtain copies of the documents which were found in the brief case.” Garrigós may have been a keen collaborator, but he was also a coward, and knew that if he asked Elvira or Pascual del Pobil to show him the documents, they would conclude that he was on the German payroll and send him packing. “Notwithstanding his great desire2 to serve the Germans, this Lt Colonel apparently did not have the courage to approach the naval judge” and simply demand that he open the letters. Garrigós did, however, persuade someone in the naval office to tell him what was in the briefcase. He sent the list to Clauss:

  three British operation bulletins

  two plans

  thirty-three photographs

  three envelopes addressed to Cunningham, General Eisenhower, and General Alexander

  Helpfully, but unnecessarily, Garrigós added, “These three persons are in command3 of the Allied troops in North Africa.” Clauss knew that whatever was in that briefcase must be extremely interesting. Heavier guns were mobilized. The German consul, Ludwig Clauss, was once again wheeled out and asked by his son to approach his “intimate friend,”4 Joaquín Miranda González, the civilian governor of Huelva and head of the provincial Falange. A keen fascist, Miranda “nursed a profound antipathy5 towards the British, in common with the sentiment among most officials, and maintained excellent relations with the German consulate. … He treated the Germans with favouritism and the British with a heavy hand.” Miranda was anxious to help and made discreet enquiries at the naval office, but he too stopped short of demanding that the letters be opened. “This gentleman,” reported one of Hillgarth’s agents, “did not dare to ask the naval judge6 for copies of the documents.” Clauss received this fresh rebuff with mounting frustration and growing curiosity. He had spent a small fortune bribing the local officials. “In Huelva, Don Adolfo7 can open every door,” it was said. Yet the door to Captain Elvira’s safe remained firmly shut. A bag full of secret British documents had been sitting in Huelva for three days, and so far, these had been “neither copied nor photographed8 [and] were only seen and read in the naval judge’s office.” The three envelopes, which Clauss knew must contain the most important information, were still sealed.

  Back in London, Cholmondeley and Montagu were equally frustrated that the information appeared to have reached its target, only to become lodged in the annoyingly honest hands of the Spanish navy. They decided to give the pot a stir.

  Alan Hillgarth sent a cable to London, unencrypted, reporting that Major Martin of the Royal Marines had been laid to rest with due decorum: “I am glad to say the naval9 and military authorities were well represented and extremely sympathetic.” Two days after the funeral—enough time, it was estimated, for news of Major Martin’s death to filter through the British military bureaucracy—the Naval Intelligence Department in London sent a much less casual-sounding cable to Hillgarth in Madrid, numbered 04132. It was marked Top Secret but intended for German eyes and carefully flavored with rising anxiety. “Some of papers Major Martin10 had in his possession are of great importance and secrecy. Make formal demand for all papers and notify me by personal signal immediately of addressees of any official letters recovered. Such letters should be returned addressed to Commodore Rushbrooke, Personal, by fastest safe route and should not repetition not be opened or tampered with in any way. If no official letters are recovered make searching but discreet inquiries at Huelva and Madrid to find whether they were washed ashore and if so what has happened to them.”

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p; At the same time, Montagu sent a separate message to Hillgarth, using the secret personal cipher that was the only safe method of communication with the spy-riddled embassy in Madrid. “Carry out instructions11 in my Naval Signal as this is necessary cover but lack of success is desirable.” The message merely confirmed what Hillgarth already knew. The novelist/naval attaché would be creating a fiction especially for Kühlenthal and his informants, but, once again, this would need to be done with extreme subtlety. The Germans knew British diplomatic methods by now: if a bag full of secrets really had been lost, the British would still not rush in and demand its return, as this would tip off the Spanish to its importance. Hillgarth must start with an apparently routine enquiry and then gradually give the impression of greater and greater urgency. It was a tricky balancing act, since enquiries must be “kept on such a plane12 as (theoretically) not to arouse Spanish suspicions that we were really frightened that someone might get those documents, but in fact making it plain to them that we were so frightened.”