Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  There was one other test. To extract the letters, the paper must have been tightly wound around a metal prong. The letters had been soaked again before being replaced inside the envelopes, and despite the delayed journey from Spain, they were still slightly damp. A piece of paper rolled up when wet will tend to curl up when dried out. The censors extracted the letters and then carefully watched to see whether or not the paper would lie flat. Sure enough, “as the letter began to dry72 naturally, outside the envelope, the edges began to curve upward, that is to say as they would if the letter had been rolled out of the back of the envelope.” Moreover, the rolling up must have happened when the letter was folded in three, since the examiners noted that “when the letter is folded up,73 it all curves the same way.” Here was solid physical proof that the letters had been opened, corroborating the evidence now appearing in the intercepted wireless messages.

  The Germans would be expecting the British to examine the returned letters carefully to see if they had been tampered with. The deception would be reinforced if the Germans could be made to believe that such an examination had been carried out and that the British scientists were satisfied the letters had never been opened. The best person to pass on that message would be the fickle Admiral Moreno.

  A message was drafted to Captain Hillgarth, referring to his earlier conversation with the admiral. “Inform Minister of Marine as soon74 as possible that sealed envelopes have been tested by experts and there was no trace of opening or tampering before they reached care of Spanish Navy and that you are instructed to express our deep appreciation for the efficiency and promptitude with which Spanish Navy took charge of all documents before any evilly disposed person could get at them. You should say that you may tell him in confidence that one of the letters was of the greatest importance and secrecy and the appreciation expressed at this token of friendship is most sincere.” This message was sent not in cipher but by naval cable. A second, secret, cable informed Hillgarth that the “letters [were] in fact opened,”75 but he should spread the word to anyone “likely to pass it on”76 that the British were confident the letters were never read in Spain. “Important there should be no77 repetition no suspicion that we believe letters were read so that present success may not be endangered.”

  Despite the misgivings of some at FHW, and Kühlenthal’s blustering excuses for the gaps and contradictions in the story, the lie had by now firmly embedded itself in German strategic thinking and was beginning to metastasize, spreading out through the veins of Axis intelligence. Important and exciting information, whether true or false, develops its own momentum. So far from being questioned, the expected attacks in Greece and Sardinia were fast becoming accepted wisdom.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Hitler Loses Sleep

  FOUR DAYS AFTER von Roenne’s initial analysis, one Captain Ullrich, an officer on the German General Staff, offered a fresh assessment of the intelligence. This report, dated May 14, “consisted of comments1 for the perusal of Admiral Doenitz;” Ullrich was, if anything, even more wildly enthusiastic about the Mincemeat information than von Roenne.

  “No further doubts remain2 regarding the reliability of the captured documents,” Ullrich wrote. “Examination as to whether they were intentionally put into our hands shows that this is most unlikely.” It is not clear what examination, if any, had been made in order to clear up “remaining doubts.” No new evidence had been found, and no formal investigation had been undertaken. Yet the impetus of wishful thinking was unstoppable.

  Captain Ullrich next addressed the question of “whether the enemy3 is aware of the interception by us of these documents or whether he is only aware of the loss of a plane over the sea.” The analyst was confident that Germany now had the upper hand. “It is possible that the enemy knows nothing of the capture of these documents but it is certain that he will know they have not reached their destination. Whether the enemy intend to alter the operations they have planned or accelerate the timing is not known but remains improbable.” The letter from Nye to Alexander was “urgent;”4 Alexander had been asked to “reply immediately5 ‘since we cannot postpone the matter any longer.’” On the other hand, there had been sufficient time to send the letter by air courier, rather than by wireless, and to await a response. “It is the opinion6 of the German General Staff that sufficient time remains for alteration in the planning of both the Eastern and Western Mediterranean operations.”

  With Germanic precision, Ullrich laid out his conclusions: the attacks in the east and west would be simultaneous, “since only in this case7 would Sicily be unsuitable as cover for both;” the troops attacking Greece would probably leave from Tobruk, in northeastern Libya; Alexandria would not be used as an embarkation point, since it would be “absurd”8 to pretend that such forces could reach Sicily, in conformity with the cover plan. (“This shows how wrong a staff9 can be, as Sicily was invaded from Alexandria,” Montagu remarked when Captain Ullrich’s report was eventually recovered.) It was possible, thought Ullrich, that the Fifth and Fifty-sixth Divisions would “comprise the whole of10 the assault forces” in the Peloponnese. As for the decoy attack on Sicily, this might be a brief commando-style assault followed by an immediate retreat but could also “be continued after the11 launching of the actual operation.” The report concluded by stressing that the German defensive focus should shift, emphatically, to Greece. “It must be especially12 emphasised that this document indicated extensive preparations in the Eastern Mediterranean. This is especially important because from that area, on account of the geographical situation, there has, up to this time, been considerably less news about preparations than from the area of Algiers.” There was, of course, another very good reason why the Germans had less evidence of an attack in the east: the Allies, in reality, had no plans to launch one. Once again, when the truth did not fit, the Germans willingly maneuvered the facts in favor of the deception.

  Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had been made commander in chief of the German navy three months earlier, undoubtedly read Captain Ullrich’s analysis, since he wrote on it. Among the documents seized at Tambach by Ian Fleming’s Red Indians in 1945 was Ullrich’s original report: in the margin, Dönitz’s “personal squiggle”13 is clearly visible, the initials indicating that he had read it and absorbed its contents. Dönitz was one of Hitler’s most trusted decision makers and would become his heir: his influence was critical.

  Benito Mussolini had long believed that the next Allied attack would be aimed at Sicily, the key strategic point for a full-scale assault on Italy. His German allies now set about convincing him otherwise. Dönitz returned from Rome and sent a report of his meeting with Mussolini to Hitler. In his official war diary for May 14, the German admiral noted, “The Führer does not agree14 with the Duce that the most likely invasion point is Sicily. Furthermore, he agrees that the discovered Anglo-Saxon order confirms the assumption that the planned attack will be directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnesus.” A few days later, Hitler wrote to Mussolini: “It is also clear from documents15 which have been found that they intend to invade the Peloponnese and will in fact do so. … If the British attempts are to be prevented, as they must be at all costs, this can only be done by a German division.” Hitler’s faith in his Italian ally was fading fast, and Italian troops could not be relied on to do the job. “Within the next few days16 or weeks, a large number of German divisions must be sent immediately to the Peloponnese.” With regard to the Balkan threat, the Nye letter had not changed Hitler’s mind; it had merely bolstered what he already, wrongly, believed. As the intelligence historian Michael Handel writes in his assessment of Operation Mincemeat: “It is very unusual and very difficult17 for deception to create new concepts for an enemy. It is much easier and more effective to reinforce those which already exist.”

  Corroborative tidbits flooded in from all sides as Mincemeat’s false information spread through German sources official and unofficial. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the RSHA—the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Security Main Office (the organization formed by Himmler’s combining the Security Service and the Gestapo)—told the foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that his spies in the British and American embassies in Madrid confirmed that “targets of enemy operation18 [are] Italy and her islands as well as Greece.” The Turkish embassies in London and Washington picked up the news and reported to Germany that “the Allies wanted to advance19 into the Balkans via Greece.” General Jodl was overheard on the telephone telling German commanders in Rome: “You can forget Sicily,20 we know it’s Greece.”

  Additional Ultra intercepts showed that the German Abwehr station in Rhodes, citing the Italian high command as its source, reported “that the Allied attack21 would be directed against Cape Araxos and Kalamata” and added a little embroidery of its own: “Allied submarines had received22 orders to assemble at an unknown assembly-point for massed operations.” The warning was passed from Athens to German commanders in the Aegean and on Crete, the army commander in southern Greece, and the Abwehr in Salonika, which “forwarded it to Belgrade and Sofia.”23 The deception was reinforcing itself, to London’s delight: “The reports coming from24 opposite quarters seemed to confirm each other and have evidently, for the time being at least, been accepted as true.”

  The information had all originated in the same place, but having trickled out in the form of gossip, rumor, and information passed from source to source, it now filtered back to Germany, confirming itself like an echo growing ever louder.

  On May 19, Hitler held a military conference in which he referred to the expected assault on Greece and the thrust up through the Balkans. The Führer’s “congenital obsession about the Balkans,”25 stoked by the Mincemeat letters, was keeping him awake. “In the last few days,26 and particularly last night, I have again been giving much thought to the consequences which would follow if we lost the Balkans, and there is no doubt that the results must be very serious.” The ravenous German war machine could not survive without raw materials from the Balkans and Romania, the source of half its oil, all its chrome, and three fifths of its bauxite. German commanders had emphasized the threat of an Allied offensive in Greece since the previous winter, and discussions between the Axis allies in February had concluded that Greece was vulnerable. The documents had crystalized Hitler’s preexisting anxieties (“the danger is that they will establish27 themselves in the Peloponnese”); he now proposed “as a precaution to take a further28 preventive measure against an eventual attack on the Peloponnese.” Partisan activity was increasing in the German-held Balkans, and from Hitler’s perspective the area seemed, in his own words, the “natural”29 target. Greece was the thin end of an exceedingly sharp wedge: “If a landing takes place30 in the Balkans, let us say the Peloponnese, then in a foreseeable time Crete will go,” he told his generals at the conference on May 19. “I have therefore decided31 whatever happens to transfer one armoured division to the Peloponnese.”

  While the fake letter from General Nye concentrated Hitler’s mind on Greece, Montagu’s joke about sardines focused German attention on Sardinia. “Sardinia is particularly threatened,”32 observed General Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of the operations staff. “In the event of the loss33 of Sardinia, the threat to Northern Italy is extremely acute. This is the key point for the whole of Italy.” German fears about the vulnerability of Greece and the Balkans were mirrored by Hitler’s anxiety over Sardinia: “He foresaw that from Sardinia34 the enemy could threaten Rome and the main ports of Genoa and Leghorn, strike simultaneously through upper Italy and at Southern France, and strike at the heart of the European fortress.”

  A British spy within Italian government circles, meanwhile, reported that the Mincemeat information had reached Rome “through the Spaniards and not directly35 through the Germans”—confirmation that the Spanish General Staff had made its own copies of the documents and passed these on to the Italians. “The Italian High Command36 have the details of the letter and have accepted it as genuine.” The Italian ambassador in Madrid told the Germans that he had obtained “information from an absolutely37 unimpeachable source that the enemy intend landing operations in Greece in the very near future.” The German ambassador in Rome passed on the news, now no longer new, to Berlin. It is an intriguing comment on the state of the Axis alliance that the Italians delivered this high-grade information to the Germans, but the Germans, who had known it for considerably longer, felt no such obligation to share intelligence with their Italian allies.

  Fragments of corroborative information were swirling around the diplomatic world. British intelligence discovered that the German ambassador in Ankara had informed the Turkish minister in Budapest that the German army would soon be reinforcing its military stance in Greece but that it had no hostile intentions toward neutral Turkey: “There would be troop and transport38 movements towards the south which will affect Greece but that the Turkish Government should not be worried in any way as these were not aimed against Turkey.” As always with whispers of gossip, the information tended to get mangled in transition. From Madrid, Hillgarth reported wryly: “German circles here have a story39 that they have obtained warning of our plans through papers found on a British officer in Tunis.” Soon after, Hillgarth received the report from Agent Andros describing, in minute detail, how the documents had reached German hands. “The degree of Spanish complicity”40 was laid bare: “This exchange of information with the Germans in fact took place at the highest levels in Madrid.” Andros confirmed that Leissner and Kühlenthal, the two most senior Abwehr officers, had been directly involved in obtaining the documents from the Spaniards, and the entire episode, as Montagu wrote to “C,” was “adding to our knowledge of German41 intrigues in Spain.”

  Months later, shards of the false intelligence continued to ricochet from one source to another, breaking up in the process. A spy in Stockholm reported that the local Germans had information from a British aircraft shot down in the Mediterranean with battle orders showing “simultaneous landings in Sardinia42 and the Peloponnese,” and a secondary attack on Sicily. Almost every other detail in the report was inaccurate, but it was plain that it had come, as the report put it, from “our refrigerated friend.”43

  One by one, Hitler’s key advisers were being drawn into the deception, either by access to the documents themselves or through independent “confirmation,” as the same intelligence arrived by other routes: Canaris, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Warlimont, von Roenne. By May 20, Mussolini “had come round to the same view.”44 A collective willingness to believe seems to have gripped the upper reaches of the Nazi war apparatus, driven by Hitler’s own belief. It takes a brave man to stand up to the boss in such circumstances. The men surrounding Hitler were not made of such stuff.

  Nazi confidence was in dire need of reinforcement—with the Axis powers defeated in North Africa, bogged down in blood on the eastern front, facing an increasingly confident Allied enemy. Before the arrival of the Mincemeat letters, the entire southern coast of Europe had appeared vulnerable. Now, instead of waiting for the Allied armies to attack somewhere, anywhere, the Germans and their Italian allies could lie in wait at Kalamata, Cape Araxos, and Sardinia and then hurl the British and Americans back into the sea. The papers washed up in Spain represented more than just an intelligence coup: here was a real chance to strike back. The tide of war was turning, but here, floating in on the waves, was an opportunity to reverse the current. Fate was smiling on Germany. No wonder they chose to believe.

  There was one man in Hitler’s circle who remained skeptical. Joseph Goebbels was alone among the Nazi elite in wondering whether the letters that had so conveniently arrived in German hands at this opportune moment were nothing more than “camouflage,”45 an elaborate effort by the British to put Germany off the scent. The Nazi propaganda minister knew better than most that reality, in war, is a malleable and fickle substance. “The truth is whatever helps bring victory,”46 he wrote. Goebbels had no faith in the Abwehr
, which made such extravagant claims for its spy networks but produced so little of real use. “Despite all the assertions,47 our political and military intelligence just stinks,” he complained. Having bungled and blustered its way through four years of war, the Abwehr was now trumpeting a “resounding”48 success with a set of letters that revealed Allied planning down to a comma. Goebbels thought he knew the British mind. He had the Times translated for him daily and complained about the newspaper exactly as if he were a retired general living in the Home Counties, rather than the master of Nazi propaganda. “The Times has once again sunk49 so low as to publish an almost pro-Bolshevik article,” he harrumphed. “It praised the Bolshevik revolution and used words that make one blush with shame.” Dr. Goebbels may have been one of the most repulsive creatures in the bestiary of Nazism, but he had a sensitive nose for a lie, and the British letters smelled wrong. To use the favorite expression of Admiral Cunningham, one of the notional recipients, something about the letters was just too “velvety-arsed and Rolls Royce.”50

  “I had a long discussion with51 Admiral Canaris about the data available for forecasting English intentions,” Goebbels wrote in his diary for May 25, 1943. “Canaris has gained possession of a letter written by the English General Staff to General Alexander. This letter is extremely informative and reveals English plans almost to the dotting of an ‘i.’ I don’t know whether the letter is merely camouflage—Canaris denies this energetically—or whether it actually corresponds to the facts.” Unlike most of Hitler’s advisers, and Hitler himself, Goebbels tried to test the reality presented in the letters against what he knew of British strategic thinking. “The general outline of English plans52 for this summer revealed here seems on the whole to tally. According to it, the English and Americans are planning several sham attacks during the coming months: one in the west, on Sicily, and one on the Dodecanese islands. These attacks are to immobilise our troops stationed there, thus enabling English forces to undertake other and more serious operations. These operations are to involve Sardinia and the Peloponnesus. On the whole this line of reasoning seems to be right. Hence, if the letter to General Alexander is the real thing, we shall have to prepare to repel a number of attacks which are partly serious and partly sham.” No other senior Nazi wondered if the letter was the real thing. Goebbels kept his doubts to himself, and his diary.