Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  In the film, Montagu makes a cameo appearance as an air vice marshal with doubts about the plan’s feasibility. At one point in the film, Montagu leans over to Webb, looks him in the eye, and declares: “I suppose you realise, Montagu, that, if the Germans see through this, it will pinpoint Sicily.” This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

  The film was a box-office and critical success, winning a BAFTA for best British screenplay. Perhaps the ultimate accolade, the sign that Operation Mincemeat had truly and permanently entered British culture, came in 1956, when The Goon Show devoted an entire episode to the story. Monty saw the film in Holland and, rather missing the point, complained that Archie Nye had looked quite different. Adolf Clauss went to see The Man Who Never Was in Huelva’s Teatro Mora. He told his son: “There’s nothing true in it.72 It was nothing like that.” Someone tipped off the press to the identity of “Pam.” Jean Gerard Leigh was besieged by journalists and denied everything.

  Montagu had hoped that by framing his refusal to identify the body as a promise he could never break, he would end all attempts to attach a name to it. The very title of his book seemed to imply that the corpse had no previous existence worthy of mention. But there was a man, and the runaway success of the book and film ensured that the speculation over who he might have been started immediately. The body was variously identified as “a derelict alcoholic73 found beneath the arches of Charing Cross Bridge,” a professional soldier, and “the wastrel brother74 of an MP.” Numerous candidates were put forward, with evidence ranging from possible to wishful to fanciful. The conspiracy theories continue to this day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Aftermath

  THREE WEEKS AFTER the invasion of Sicily, Lieutenant Bill Jewell was reunited with Rosemary Galloway in Algiers; they immediately became engaged. While Rosemary went on to serve at Allied headquarters in Italy, Jewell continued to attack enemy shipping in the Mediterranean, eastern Atlantic, and Norwegian Sea. At the Normandy landings in June 1944, the Seraph once again guided the invading forces ashore. The same month, Bill Jewell and Rosemary were wed in a ceremony in Pinner. They remained married and “absolutely devoted to one another”1 for the next fifty-three years. For his part in Operation Husky, Jewell was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the American Legion of Merit, along with the French Croix de Guerre. He rose to the rank of captain in command of a submarine flotilla and died in 2004 at the age of ninety.

  HMS Seraph also remained in active service. In recognition of her role in the run-up to the invasion of North Africa, a brass plaque was nailed to the door of the submarine toilet: “General Mark Wayne Clark,2 Deputy Supreme Commander in North Africa, sat here.” She served as a training ship at Holy Loch on the Clyde, the port from which she had set off for Huelva in 1943. The submarine was decommissioned in 1963, twenty-one years to the day after her launch, and finally scrapped at Briton Ferry in South Wales, close to the birthplace of Glyndwr Michael. The Seraph’s conning tower, forward torpedo hatch, and periscope were all preserved and erected as a memorial to Anglo-American cooperation during the Second World War at the Citadel, the American military training college in South Carolina. U.S. and British flags fly jointly over the memorial, the only place in America permitted to fly the White Ensign.

  Lieutenant David Scott of the Seraph finished reading War and Peace shortly before the end of the war. He served on ten submarines, in war and peace, commanding five of them, and was promoted to rear admiral in 1971.

  Derrick Leverton fought through the Italian campaign, was mentioned in dispatches, took over command of his artillery regiment, and then returned to Britain to resume his rightful place, alongside his brother Ivor, in the family funeral business. Ivor Leverton would boast that he had “played a tiny part3 in ending the war.” He liked to tease Drick that he had saved his life on the beach at Sicily by taking a dead body to Hackney in the middle of the night. In a quiet way, he felt “redeemed”4 by the part he had played. Ivor’s sons took over the business and have since passed it on to an eighth generation of undertakers.

  Colonel Bill Darby of the U.S. Army Rangers was killed in northern Italy two days before the final German surrender in Italy. As Darby was giving orders to cut off the German retreat, an 88 mm shell burst outside his command post, killing him instantly. He was thirty-four. Darby was unable to turn down the promotion to brigadier general that was awarded to him posthumously. James Garner played Darby in the 1958 film Darby’s Rangers.

  With the success of Operation Mincemeat, and with the Mediterranean under Allied control, Alan Hillgarth looked to new pastures. At the end of 1943 he was transferred to Ceylon as chief of intelligence for the Eastern Fleet, going on to become head of Naval Intelligence for the entire eastern theater. There he “developed an intelligence organisation5 [that] materially aided the Allied war effort at sea against Japan.” Once more his intelligence advice was sent directly to Churchill.

  The war won, he retired from the navy and purchased an estate in Ireland, where he planted a forest. “He walked several miles a day,6 inspecting his trees.” But he also continued to cultivate exotic human flora, most notably Juan March, the dubious financier who had helped bribe the Spanish generals, and Winston Churchill. Through a series of questionable financial maneuvers, March’s fortune and notoriety expanded in tandem: by 1952 he was the seventh-richest man in the world. Hillgarth had once described March as “the most unscrupulous7 man in Spain,” but his own scruples did not prevent him from becoming director of the Helvetia Finance Company, March’s nominee business in London. It has been suggested that Hillgarth and MI6 may have helped smooth over March’s business dealings as payback for his help in paying off the Cavalry of St. George. March was killed in a car accident outside Madrid in 1962.

  While looking after March’s business interests, Hillgarth continued to act as Churchill’s unofficial adviser on intelligence. Between the end of the war and Churchill’s return to Downing Street in 1951, Hillgarth met regularly with the once and future prime minister at Chartwell, at his Hyde Park Gate apartment, and in Switzerland. Mining his intelligence and diplomatic contacts, Hillgarth briefed Churchill on Spanish affairs, American plans for atomic warfare, and, above all, the threat of Soviet espionage in Britain, which he described as a “quiet, cold-blooded war8 of brains in the background.” The Soviet codes would be far harder to crack than the German Enigma, Hillgarth warned: “The Russians are cleverer than the Germans.”9 Hillgarth’s secret correspondence with Churchill, now no longer in power and disguised under the code name “Sturdee,” lasted six years and played a crucial part in framing Churchill’s attitude in the early years of the Cold War.

  A few years after the war, Hillgarth received a letter from Edgar Sanders, his partner in the disastrous Sacambaya expedition, adding a postscript to that fiasco: according to Sanders, the American engineer, Julius Nolte, had spotted an entrance to the treasure cavern while everyone else was digging the huge hole but had not shared his discovery with the others. Nolte had returned to Sacambaya in 1938 with an American team of explorers and heavy digging equipment, extracted eight million dollars’ worth of gold, and then retired to California, where he built himself a castle. “Thus ends the story10 of the Sacambaya treasure,” wrote Sanders, who had visited Nolte and tried, unsuccessfully, to extract some money from him. “Crazy Nolte is rich,11 while you and I are poor, at least I am, certainly. Hell! Let’s have another drink.”

  Hillgarth had no idea whether to credit a word Sanders wrote. He had long ago learned not to believe what one reads in letters.

  Alan Hillgarth remained a close friend of Churchill, converted to Catholicism, never breathed a word about his wartime and postwar intelligence activities, and died in 1978 at Illannanagh in County Tipperary, surrounded by mystery—and trees.

  Salvador �
�Don” Gómez-Beare was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, although quite what for was never fully explained. He spent his retirement in Seville and Madrid, playing bridge and golf. When a British journalist asked him what he had done during the war, he responded with exquisite politeness: “I am sorry, but I am not12 free to discuss some subjects.”

  On December 16, 1947, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the great forensic scientist, dined alone at the Junior Carlton Club, then went to his rooms in University College London, locked the door, turned on the Bunsen burner tap, and gassed himself to death. Spilsbury had become increasingly conscious that his famed mental faculties were deserting him. He was making mistakes, and Sir Bernard did not tolerate mistakes. The scientist, who had studied, investigated, and cataloged so many thousands of deaths, left no note to explain his own. His friend Bentley Purchase, the coroner, examined Spilsbury’s body and pronounced a verdict of suicide: “His mind was not as it used to be.”13

  The cheerful coroner was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1949 and knighted in 1958. Purchase retired the following year, to look after his pigs and listen to Gilbert and Sullivan. He resisted writing his memoirs. “Every time I tell a story14 I am likely to rattle a skeleton in someone’s cupboard.” This applied particularly to his role in Operation Mincemeat. Sir Bentley Purchase died in 1961, after falling off his roof while fixing a television aerial. Having performed some twenty thousand inquests himself, Sir Bentley, typically, left behind a small post-mortem mystery: the coroner in his case could not tell whether he had suffered a fatal heart attack before or after falling off the roof.

  Adolf Clauss, the Huelva spy, also declined to discuss his wartime work, although for rather different reasons. At the end of the war, retribution against Germans who had been active in espionage was unevenly applied. Luis Clauss was accused of spying because his fishing fleet had been used to track Allied shipping, and he spent two dreary years under house arrest in the little village of Caldes de Malavella in northeast Spain. Don Adolfo, although far more senior in the Abwehr, was never punished. “His wife was the daughter15 of a powerful Spanish general, and so he was protected.” Clauss went back to collecting butterflies and building chairs that still broke if you sat on them. Years later, when the truth about Operation Mincemeat began to emerge, like the super-spy he was, Clauss invented a new version of reality. His son still insists: “He was always suspicious16 because the papers came into his hands too easily. He immediately realised it was a trick, and warned his superiors in Berlin and Madrid, but they refused to believe him. He thought the people in Berlin were useless for failing to realise they were being duped.” Wilhelm Leissner, alias Gustav Lenz, the Abwehr chief in Madrid, was more honest in defeat. He was arrested and interrogated by the Americans in 1946 but then permitted to return to Spain. When presented, ten years later, with the evidence of what British intelligence had done he “admitted the possibility17 with a long-drawn ‘Schön! Ach, if that is so, I really must congratulate them. … I take off my hat.’”18

  Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, the linchpin of the Abwehr in Spain, was far too busy trying to save his own skin to worry about keeping up appearances or admitting his own errors.

  The finest hour of Juan Pujol, Kühlenthal’s Agent Arabel and Britain’s Agent Garbo, came with the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. The deception plan covering the invasion was code-named “Fortitude;” its aim was to persuade the Nazis that instead of attacking Normandy, the main thrust would come in the Pasde-Calais. To this end, a vast fake U.S. Army was “assembled” in Kent, wireless traffic was concocted, and hints were dropped to less than reliable “neutral” diplomats. Many strands of deception were woven into Operation Fortitude, but none was more important than the network of double agents, and of these none was more vital than Agent Garbo. From the safe house in Crespigny Road, Hendon, Juan Pujol fired off more than five hundred radio messages between January 1944 and D-day, a fantastic web of deceit from his posse of bogus agents, tiny elements in a jigsaw that would only make sense once completed by the Germans. The deception was astonishingly successful. Six weeks after D-day, Pujol was awarded the Iron Cross by order of the Führer for “extraordinary services”19 to the Third Reich. He was also awarded the MBE, in secret.

  As the Nazi power structure crumbled, Garbo kept up a steady stream of Nazi jingoism in messages to his German spymaster. In response to a letter from Kühlenthal bemoaning “the heroic death20 of our beloved Fuhrer,” Garbo wrote with typical bombast: “News of the death21 of our dear chief shook our profound faith in the destiny which awaits our poor Europe, but his deeds and the story of his sacrifice will save the world. … The noble struggle will be revived which was started by him to save us from chaotic barbarism.” Kühlenthal told his star spy that he intended to go into hiding. Their roles had reversed. “If you find yourself in any danger22 let me know,” Pujol wrote. “Do not hesitate in confiding your difficulties fully in me. I only regret not being at your side to give you real help. Our struggle will not terminate with the present phase. We are entering a world civil war which will result in the disintegration of our enemies.” This was all part of an elaborate ruse to find out if remnants of the German intelligence service might be planning to reestablish some sort of underground Nazi network after the war. In the wake of the German defeat, Kühlenthal fled Madrid, having systematically destroyed the Abwehr’s records, and took refuge under an assumed name in Ávila, west of the capital. Britain’s MI5 dispatched Pujol to track him down and find out what the former golden boy of the Abwehr was planning to do next. Pujol traced Kühlenthal to Ávila and knocked on his door. “Kühlenthal was overcome23 with emotion when he welcomed Garbo into his sitting room.” The two men talked for three hours, with Pujol studiously maintaining his guise as a Nazi fanatic. “Kühlenthal made it abundantly clear,24 not only that he still believed in the genuineness of Garbo but that he looked upon him as a superman.”

  Kühlenthal explained that Pujol had been awarded the Iron Cross in recognition of his work for the Third Reich and that Hitler had “personally ordered25 that the medal should be granted. Unfortunately the certificate in evidence of this had not reached Madrid prior to the German collapse.” Still, it is the thought that counts. As for himself, Kühlenthal explained that he was desperate to escape Spain and would not consider returning to Germany, where he was sure to be arrested. Pujol told Kühlenthal to “remain patiently in his hideout26 until Garbo could evolve a plan to facilitate his escape.” Pujol was stern, telling his former spymaster “he should obey instructions27 to the letter if he wished to save himself. … This Kühlenthal promised to do.” The Spanish spy explained that he planned to get to South America, via Portugal, and solemnly pledged to work for Germany again, should the Abwehr ever be restored. When Kühlenthal asked him how he intended to get out of the country, Pujol replied, truthfully, with one word: “Clandestinely.”28

  MI5 concluded that Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was no threat to the postwar world. The former Abwehr chief waited, paranoid but patient, for word from his former protégé, but no message came. Like Clauss, he later put a rather different gloss on the past. He had stayed in Spain, he explained, because the country was “a melting pot29 of many races, conveying an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding of human nature.” In truth, he was too terrified to budge, waiting for a message from the spy who had double-crossed him so spectacularly. Kühlenthal’s wife, Ellen, was heiress to the Dienz clothing company in Germany, and before 1939 Karl-Erich had worked in his wife’s family business. The company premises were bombed at the end of the war, but the business was slowly rebuilt. In 1950, the couple slipped back to Germany, moved into a house in Koblenz, and took over running the company. Kühlenthal turned out to be much better at buying and selling clothes than at buying and selling secrets. The house of Dienz prospered. In 1971, the former spy was elected president of the Federal Association of German Textile Retailers, representing about 95 percent of German textile retaile
rs, with a purchasing power worth billions of dollars. He inaugurated the first pedestrian shopping zone in Koblenz. He gave long, dull speeches on the subjects of tax reform, business promotion, and parking in downtown Koblenz. No one ever enquired about his past. A more solid member of the German establishment it would be impossible to imagine—worthy, dependable, and predictable. The German spy and textile magnate died in 1975 still wondering, perhaps, whether his star agent would reappear from the past. The most interesting thing his obituary could find to say was that “he always tried to dress correctly30 as an example to his colleagues.”

  Kühlenthal’s life perfectly exemplified what Juan Pujol, Alexis von Roenne, and Glyndwr Michael had already proven: it is possible to fit at least two people into one life.

  Agent Garbo went to ground. With a gratuity of fifteen thousand pounds from MI5 and an MBE, he moved to Venezuela and vanished. After he was tracked down by the spy writer Rupert Allason (Nigel West), he reemerged briefly to accept formal recognition at Buckingham Palace of the debt owed to him. He then disappeared into obscurity again. Garbo wanted to be alone. He died in Caracas in 1988.

  With victory, the denizens of Room 13 emerged, blinking, into the light. An anonymous poet in Section 17M marked the occasion with a verse entitled “De Profundibus.”

  In the depths of the fusty dungeons,

  In the bowels of NID

  Where wild surmise or blatant lies