Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  The mood in the Admiralty basement changed instantly with the arrival of Most Secret Source message 2571. “Everyone jumped up and down.20 We were so thrilled,” recalled Pat Trehearne. The ladies hugged one another. The gentlemen shook hands. The fly had been taken, and the tension seemed to vanish.

  No corresponding message relating to the fake assault in the west on Sardinia was picked up, but the British concluded it was “almost certain”21 that German commanders in the western theater had received by teleprinter “similar details from the letter22 which concerned that area.” Jodl’s message was only the hors d’oeuvre. From this moment on, evidence steadily accumulated showing that “the Germans were reinforcing23 our imaginary invasion areas in Greece … and at the same time spreading their available forces into Sardinia.” These were, in Montagu’s words, “wonderful days.”24

  Winston Churchill was in Washington for the war conference code-named “Trident,” working on plans with Roosevelt for the invasion of Italy, the bombing of Germany, and the Pacific war. A telegram was immediately dispatched to the prime minister, stating cryptically that Mincemeat had reached “the right people and from best25 information they look like acting on it.”

  Cholmondeley was quietly jubilant. Montagu scribbled a celebratory note on a postcard and sent it to Bill Jewell of HMS Seraph: “You will be pleased to learn26 that the Major is now very comfortable.” He also wrote to Iris in New York: “Friday was almost too good27 to be true. I had marvellous news of the success of a job that I was doing (it was so good that I feel a snag must arise).” Montagu was deeply relieved, yet he remained cautious, knowing that the deception was still at an early stage. The Abwehr in Madrid had fallen for the hoax, and so, it seemed, had the intelligence analysts in Berlin. The initial messages, wrote Montagu, “proved that we had convinced them.28 Now would they convince the general staff?”

  He had no cause to fret, for back in Germany the Mincemeat lie was building up steam. On the day Jodl’s cable was sent to Germany’s Mediterranean commanders, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, the German ambassador in Madrid, sent a telegram to the Foreign Office in Berlin: “According to information29 just received from a wholly reliable source, the English and Americans will launch their big attack on Southern Europe in the next fortnight. The plan, as our informant was able to establish from English secret documents, is to launch two sham attacks on Sicily and the Dodecanese, while the real offensive is directed in two main thrusts against Crete and the Peloponnese.” Dieckhoff was clearly writing without the benefit of von Roenne’s analysis, for he missed the reference to Sardinia. An hour later, Dieckhoff sent another message, reporting that Francisco Gómez-Jordana y Souza, the Spanish foreign minister, had told him “in strict confidence”30 that Allied attacks should be expected in Greece and the western Mediterranean. The secret was now streaming through the upper echelons of the Spanish government and being fed back to the Germans. “Jordana begged me not to31 mention his name,” reported Dieckhoff, “especially as he wanted32 to exchange further information with me in the future. He considered the information wholly trustworthy, and felt it his duty to pass it on.”

  The Mincemeat letters were now, finally, homing in on the ultimate target. Three weeks and three thousand miles after their journey began, the forgeries finally landed on the desk of the man for whose eyes they had always been intended, the only person whose opinion really mattered.

  Adolf Hitler’s initial response was skeptical. Turning to General Eckhardt Christian, the Luftwaffe chief of staff, he remarked: “Christian, couldn’t this be a corpse33 they have deliberately planted on our hands?” General Christian’s response is not recorded, and by May 12, the day after von Roenne’s enthusiastic report, any doubts in Hitler’s mind had evaporated. That day, the Führer issued a general military directive: “It is to be expected that34 the Anglo-Americans will try to continue the operations in the Mediterranean in quick succession. The following are most endangered: in the Western Med, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily; in the Eastern Med, the Peloponnese and the Dodecanese. … Measures regarding Sardinia and the Peloponnese take precedence over everything else.” The orders reflected a dramatic shift in priorities since, as Montagu observed, “the original German appreciation35 had been that Sicily was more likely to be invaded than Sardinia.” Sicily now appeared to be, in German thinking, the least vulnerable of the Mediterranean islands, with the focus firmly trained on Greece and Sardinia. Hitler ordered “all German commands36 in the Mediterranean to utilise all forces and equipment to strengthen as much as possible the defences of these particularly endangered areas during the short time which is probably left to us.”

  In Washington D.C., Roosevelt and Churchill were hammering out the next stage of the war, looking beyond Operation Husky. “Where do we go from Sicily?”37 the president asked. The Americans favored assembling a mighty army in Britain to attack across the Channel as soon as possible. Churchill and his advisers preferred an invasion of the Italian mainland itself, disemboweling the soft underbelly. “The main task which lies before us,”38 the British argued, “is the elimination of Italy”—this would force Hitler to divert troops from elsewhere and undermine German strength on both the eastern and western fronts. After three days in the presidential retreat in the mountains of Maryland, later named Camp David, Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress: “War is full of mysteries and surprises,”39 he said. “By singleness of purpose, by steadfastness of conduct, by tenacity and endurance—such as we have so far displayed—by this and only this can we discharge our duty to the future of the world and to the destiny of man.” The Anglo-American conference broke up with the agreement that Eisenhower would continue the fight in the south of Europe, while a great cross-Channel offensive would be prepared for the following May. But first, Sicily.

  At the press conference ending the Trident meeting, Churchill was asked: “What do you think is going40 on in Hitler’s mind?” There was laughter, and Churchill replied: “Appetite unbridled.41 Ambition unmeasured—all the world!” Secretly, Churchill now knew that in one corner of Hitler’s mind, another conviction had settled: that the Allied armies in North Africa were aiming at Greece in the east and Sardinia in the west, while Sicily would be left alone.

  With the effects of Operation Mincemeat appearing in intercepted German messages, Montagu raised a security issue. If someone outside the secret saw reports referring “to a document that had been42 captured from a dead body” there would be a serious “security flap,”43 and questions would be asked about why top secret documents had been carried abroad in this way, in defiance of wartime regulations. Bletchley Park had been instructed to ensure that any messages referring to the intercepted Mincemeat documents were initially sent only to “C,” the head of MI6, and to Montagu himself. “Arrangements could then be made44 to warn recipients or to limit the distribution.”

  Von Roenne had chosen to accept the documents at face value, and his analysis was now hurtling up the German power structure. Not everyone was entirely convinced. Major Percy Ernst Schramm, who kept the OKW war diary, recalled the intense discussion among senior officers over whether the letters might be forged: “We earnestly debated45 the question ‘Genuine or not? Perhaps genuine? Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, the Peloponnese?’ ” On May 13, a skeptical officer at FHW in Zossen, identified by the code name “Erizo,” sent a message to the Abwehr in Madrid demanding more details about the discovery of the documents. “The evaluation office attach special46 importance to a more detailed statement of the circumstances under which the material was found. Particular points of interest are, when the body was washed ashore, when and where the crash is presumed to have taken place. Whether aircraft and further bodies were observed, and other details. Urgent Reply by W/T [wireless] if necessary.”

  German analysts had now spent several days studying the letters and the accompanying reports. The demand for greater detail on the discovery suggests that the inconsistency between the postmortem, indicating at least e
ight days of decomposition, and Kühlenthal’s timing of just three days between crash and discovery had not gone unnoticed. The FHW also appears to have questioned how a decomposing corpse at sea for more than a week could still be holding a full briefcase when it reached the shore. And if a plane had crashed in the Mediterranean, where was the wreckage? The cable was followed by a telephone call from FHW, again pressing for more details.

  The Madrid Abwehr office replied, somewhat huffily, that it had already requested, four days earlier, a detailed report on the discovery from the Spanish General Staff: “The latter immediately despatched47 an officer to the spot. The results of the officer’s findings partly differ in detail from the facts of the case as first represented by the General Staff. Detailed report will arrive at Tempelhof [airport in Berlin] on evening of 15/5. Have it collected.”

  Kühlenthal had clearly picked up the new note of skepticism in Berlin, and, as he always did when under pressure, he simultaneously covered his back and passed the buck: “Oberst Lt. Pardo on the 10th May,48 was emphatic that the answers he gave us were a complete story of the whole affair without reservations, but it seems, however, that this was not so.” The Spanish officer sent by the General Staff to Huelva to find out more about the discovery of the body and the papers had now returned to Madrid. “The result of his investigations49 was communicated to us this morning in the presence of Oberst Lt. Pardo’s commanding officer.”

  The Spanish staff officer had done his job well, interviewing most of the protagonists in the story, including the fishermen, the naval authorities, and the pathologist: his verbal report added numerous corroborating details and corrected others. “In contrast to the first statement50 of Oberst Lt. Pardo, that the corpse carried the brief case clutched in his hand, it appears that the above mentioned brief case was secured to the corpse by a strap around the waist. The attaché case was fastened to this strap by a hook.” The new report, sent from the Abwehr office in Spain to Colonel von Roenne at FHW, as well as the Abwehr chiefs, accurately described how the papers and briefcase had traveled up the Spanish chain of command, from Huelva to Cádiz to Madrid, before being presented to Admiral Moreno himself. “He (the Minister for Marine)51 handed the whole collection—the courier’s brief case, together with all papers found in his breast pocket—to A.E.M. [Alto Estado Mayor, the Spanish General Staff] who undertook the opening, reproduction and resealing, and then returned them to him. He then gave the whole collection to the British Naval Attaché in Madrid.” The British plane carrying the courier seemed to have vanished into the sea without a trace, at least none that Adolf Clauss and his agents in Huelva could find. “A search for the remains52 of Major Martin’s aircraft and also for the corpses of any other passengers in this plane was unsuccessful.” But, as ever, Kühlenthal had an excuse: “The fishermen state53 that in the area where the corpse was found there are strong currents and other corpses together with parts of the aircraft might later on be found in other places.”

  Far harder to explain away was how the body had so thoroughly decomposed in such a short time. But Kühlenthal was up to the task.

  A medical examination54 of the corpse showed that there were no apparent wounds or marks which could have resulted from a blow or stab. According to medical evidence, death was due to drowning (lit: the swallowing of sea water). The corpse carried an English pattern life-belt and was in an advanced state of decomposition. According to medical opinion, it had been in the water from five to eight days. This contradicts the evidence provided by the discovery of a night club bill on the corpse dated 27th April, and the discovery of the corpse at 9.30 in the morning of the 30th April. It is, however, considered possible that the effect of the sun’s rays on the floating corpse accelerated the rate of decomposition. The doctors also stated that the corpse was identical with the photographs in its military papers with the sole exception that a bald patch on the temples was more pronounced than in the photographs. Either the photograph of Major Martin had been taken some two or three years ago or the baldness on the temples was due to the action of sea water.

  Here was a classic example of willingness to believe, blended with self-deception and outright falsification. The earlier report had gotten the date of the theater tickets wrong, but rather than correct the error, this report fudged the time gap. The Spanish pathologists had concluded that death took place at least eight days before April 30, but in order to fit it in with his own (erroneous) timing, Kühlenthal changed this to between five and eight days. Two spurious but plausible-sounding scientific explanations were adduced to explain why the corpse was rotting and why Major Martin looked substantially older than his photograph. The Abwehr had decided from the outset that the discovery was genuine and marshaled the evidence, despite obvious flaws, toward that belief. Kühlenthal stood by his intelligence coup. With the information now swirling around the upper reaches of the Nazi war machine, he had no choice.

  In the fetid basement of the Admiralty, Montagu and Cholmondeley were sweating over an entirely unforeseen development that would have been funny had it not been so deeply alarming: Major Martin’s briefcase had disappeared, again. Hillgarth had taken receipt of the case and other personal effects on May 11 and promised to send them in the diplomatic bag to London on May 14. By May 18, the package had still not arrived at Room 13, and the Mincemeat team was starting to panic. That evening, Hillgarth received a telegram in secret cipher: “Bag not yet arrived.55 Urgent that letters should be received earliest possible. Was bag sent by air or sea?” Hillgarth immediately replied that the items, packed in “a small, sealed bag,”56 had left Madrid for Lisbon, as planned, and should have arrived by air, addressed personally to Ewen Montagu. Here was a surreal situation: for months, they had been working to get the bag into the wrong hands, as if by accident. Now it might very well have fallen into the wrong hands, by accident.

  In the same telegram, Montagu asked whether the rubber dinghy set adrift by the Seraph had ever washed up. He also passed on the news that initial signs seemed to show that Mincemeat was working: “Evidence that operation successful57 but vital that no suspicion should be aroused.” Hillgarth replied that there was no trace of the dinghy, which had almost certainly been appropriated by the fishermen of Punta Umbria.

  From his own discreet investigations, Hillgarth already knew that the deception was taking satisfactory shape. Agent Andros had “reported that there was great excitement58 over some official documents found on the body of a British officer at Huelva.” The rumor mill was grinding away: “I naturally asked him to find out59 what he could.” A few days later, Hillgarth ran into Admiral Moreno at a cocktail party for foreign diplomats. The minister of marine brought up the subject of the documents unprompted and “said that immediately he heard60 they had reached Madrid (he was in Valencia) he gave Chief [of] Naval Staff orders to hand over to me at once.” This was a bald lie. German documents show that Moreno took personal custody of the papers, and then handed them, unopened, to the General Staff.

  There then followed a most revealing conversation between Hillgarth and his Spanish friend.

  “Why did you go to so much trouble?”61 Hillgarth asked nonchalantly.

  “I was anxious no one should have62 an unauthorised look at them,” Moreno replied. “Which might be a serious matter.”

  Moreno had tripped himself up. Hillgarth had requested the return of the case through a third party but had never indicated that this was anything other than a routine matter, let alone that the contents were secret and should be kept from “unauthorised” eyes. “He obviously did not know63 the exact terms of my request which was verbal and could never alone have led him to say what he did,” Hillgarth reported to London. “It can be taken as a certainty64 that Spanish Government know contents of documents. I am not so certain they have reached the enemy. Yet they were more than a week in Huelva and Cadiz.”

  The Spanish admiral was playing a dangerous double game. On May 19, the German ambassador Dieckhoff sent another message
to Berlin, describing a meeting with Moreno: “He told me that all his information65 indicated that strong forces would be concentrated in preparation for an attack on Greece and Italy. … The Navy Minister regards an attack on Greece as especially likely.” While reassuring the British that their secrets were safe, Moreno was simultaneously passing those secrets to the Germans. The duplicitous Spanish admiral would make a very useful tool for reinforcing the deception. “The operation has given conclusive66 proof of the extent to which the Spaniards will go in assistance to the Axis.”

  On May 21, to the intense relief of the Mincemeat team, the package containing Major Martin’s briefcase and other effects finally arrived in London. No satisfactory explanation was offered for its weeklong, heart-stopping disappearance. Spanish bureaucracy was not alone in moving in mysterious ways. The letters were immediately sent to the Special Examiners (censorship) for microscopic analysis. First they inspected the wax seals and found that despite all that had happened over the preceding weeks, these were still perfectly intact. “The seals were photographed67 and marked by us before they were despatched, and they have been photographed also after their return. They have not been altered in any way.”

  But that was only part of the story. “Although we can say that there68 has been no tampering with the seals [it is] quite possible that the letters have been rolled out, from under the bottom flaps … as the bottom flap was very much deeper than the upper, there was plenty of room for the contents to be taken out.” The eyelash was missing from each envelope, but the examiners had laid another, rather more scientific, trap. Before being placed in the briefcase, back in April, each letter had been folded into three, symmetrically, just once. A letter when folded dry creates a crease that is noticeably “sharper than one made in it when69 it was well soaked and soft, more like that which would be made in a piece of cloth.” Under the microscope, it was revealed that at least one of the letters had been folded twice, “once symmetrically and secondly70 irregularly … while the letter was wet.” Thus, the examiners deduced that when the Spaniards had closed up the key letter, “it was not done on exactly71 the same folds and there were damaged fibres in the paper minutely separate from the new folds.”