Are digested for those at sea,
The in-trays are all empty,
The dreary toil is done,
And with mental daze and bleary gaze
The Troglodytes see the sun.
The year after the war ended, Jean Leslie married a soldier, an officer in the Life Guards named William Gerard Leigh, a dashing and handsome polo player with a reputation as a “bold man to hounds.”31 He, too, had gone ashore at Sicily, and then “fought through Italy,”32 the unknowing beneficiary of a plot in which his future wife had played a crucial part. Gerard Leigh, known as “G,” was brave, upright, and utterly correct. He was not entirely unlike the gallant and doomed William Martin.
Jock Horsfall, the chauffeur on the night drive to Scotland, returned to motor racing after the war. He won the Belgian Grand Prix and then took second place in the British Empire Trophy Race in the Isle of Man. In 1947, he joined Aston Martin as a test driver, and in 1949 he entered the Spa 24 Hour Race and finished fourth out of a field of thirty-eight, covering 1,821 miles at an average speed of over seventy-three miles per hour. On August 20, 1949, he entered the Daily Express International Trophy Race at Silverstone; on the thirteenth lap, at the notorious Stowe Corner, the car left the track, hit a line of straw bales intended as a buffer, and flipped over. Horsfall’s neck was broken and he died at once. The St. John Horsfall Memorial Trophy, a race open only to Aston Martins, is held at Silverstone every year in his memory.
Ivor Montagu listed his activities in Who’s Who as “washing up, pottering about,33 sleeping through television.” This was not quite accurate, for “pottering” was never Ivor’s style: frenetic activity in multiple causes, both public and secret, was closer to the mark. In 1948 he cowrote the film Scott of the Antarctic with Walter Meade; he translated plays, novels, and films by a new generation of Soviet writers and filmmakers; he traveled extensively in Europe, China, and Mongolia; he wrote polemical pamphlets attacking capitalism and a book about Eisenstein; he championed cricket, Southampton United, and the Zoological Society; but his two greatest passions remained communism and table tennis, a dual obsession that earned him the lifelong suspicion of MI5. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union in 1959.
Ivor Montagu was never publicly exposed as Agent Intelligentsia. The Venona transcripts cease abruptly in 1942. Whether Montagu learned of Operation Mincemeat, and whether he passed on what he knew to Moscow, will never be known for sure unless or until the files of the Soviet secret services are finally opened to scrutiny.
What is certain is that Moscow knew all about Operation Mincemeat and very probably obtained its information before the operation took place. A secret report by the NKVD, Stalin’s intelligence service, dated May 1944 and entitled “Deception During the Current War,” provided an astonishingly detailed account of the operation, its code name, planning, execution, and success. The Soviet report described the precise contents of the letters and the exact location of the dummy attacks in Greece and noted that the operation had been “somewhat complicated by the fact34 that the papers ended up with the [Spanish] General Staff.” The author of the report also provided a description of the role of Ewen Montagu within British intelligence and noted his position on the Twenty Committee: “Captain [sic] Montagu is in charge35 of the dissemination of misinformation through intelligence channels. He is also engaged in researching special intelligence sources.” Moscow’s spymasters were in no doubt that Operation Mincemeat had worked: “The German General Staff apparently36 were convinced that the documents themselves were genuine,” the report concluded. “When the [invasion] was launched,37 it was clear that the German and Italian commands were somewhat taken by surprise and ill prepared to repel the attack.”
Much of the information on Operation Mincemeat was supplied to the Soviets by Anthony Blunt, the MI5 officer tasked with overseeing the illegal XXX (Triplex) Operation to extract material from the diplomatic bags of neutral missions in London. Blunt was recruited by the NKVD in 1934, and between 1940 and 1945 he passed huge volumes of secret material to his Soviet handlers. Two other members of the “Cambridge Five” spy ring probably supplied additional intelligence on the Sicily deception: John Cairncross, who had access to the Ultra decrypts at Bletchley Park, and Kim Philby, the most notorious Soviet mole of all, who headed the Iberian subsection of MI6’s counterintelligence branch. Some of the material in Soviet intelligence files on Operation Mincemeat may have come from Ivor Montagu.
MI5 and MI6 continued to watch him and Hell closely. Kim Philby was partly responsible for coordinating reports on the shambolic figure of Ivor Montagu as he trailed through Vienna, Bucharest, and Budapest in 1946. In one report, Philby described Montagu as “intelligent and agreeable, and an expert38 at ping-pong.” Philby almost certainly knew more about Montagu than he let on. Montagu’s handler, the Soviet air attaché in London, Colonel Sklyarov, alias “Brion,” left London that year. Did Ivor Montagu continue to supply intelligence to the Soviet Union? If so, MI5 could find no hard evidence, although in 1948 it was reported that “information from secret sources39 shows that Montagu has recently been in touch with the Soviet Embassy.”
By the time the Venona transcripts were decoded in the mid-1960s and Agent Intelligentsia was identified as Ivor Montagu, it was impossible to do anything about him. Venona was simply too secret and too valuable to be revealed in court, and the spies it had unmasked could not be prosecuted. In spite of the many fruitless years spent trying to establish a link between table tennis and Soviet espionage, MI5 had been right all along. Montagu never knew he had been unmasked and took his role as Agent Intelligentsia to the grave, another double life concealed. Ivor Montagu died in Watford in 1984, leaving behind a clutch of Soviet decorations, his correspondence with Trotsky, and the unpublished second volume of his autobiography, misleadingly entitled Like It Was, which avoided any mention of his activities as a secret agent.
The second half of Charles Cholmondeley’s life was, perhaps, the most mysterious of all. The last reference made to him by Guy Liddell of MI5 noted that he was “somewhere in the Middle East, chasing locusts.” This was an accurate, although partial, description of what Cholmondeley was up to. In October 1945 he joined the “Middle East Anti-Locust Unit”40 as “First Locust Officer,” a job that involved chasing swarms of locusts all over the Arab states and feeding them bran laced with insecticide.
Another English locust hunter named George Walford met Cholmondeley in the desert in 1948 and described a man obsessed: “His objective was the destruction,41 at almost any price, of all living locusts in Arabia. It was an impossible task. Only a person with a rare combination of patience, tact and strength of purpose could have achieved any success at all.” The qualities that had served Cholmondeley so well as a wartime intelligence officer were now put to work waging war on the locust. For months on end, he would simply vanish into the desert, disguised as a Bedouin. In Yemen he visited villages so remote that when he arrived, women came out with hay offering to feed his jeep. From Arabia, he moved on, in 1949, to the International Council for the Control42 of the Red Locust in Rhodesia. Cholmondeley was certainly keen on killing locusts (“They are loathsome insects”43). Equally certainly, he was still working for the British secret service, using his cover as a locust officer for more clandestine work, although quite what this may have entailed has never been revealed.
Cholmondeley was appointed MBE in 1948, and two years later he signed up with the RAF for a five-year commission on “intelligence duties.”44 By December of that year he was in Malaya, using his “wide experience of deception work”45 to coordinate with MI5 and Special Branch on bamboozling a rather different enemy—the guerrillas of the Malayan National Liberation Army.
Charles Cholmondeley left MI5 in 1952. He moved to the West Country, married, and set up a business selling horticultural machinery. He regarded the vow of secrecy he had made on joining MI5 as a blood oath, and he never broke it. In the words of his wife, Alison, “He would
not give information to anyone46 who did not ‘need to know.’ Infuriatingly I found this included me.” He still enjoyed shooting with a handgun, although his deteriorating eyesight made this extremely hazardous, except for the birds. “He would take a revolver47 when we walked up partridges,” recalled his friend John Otter. “I never saw him hit one.” No one in the Somerset town of Wells had a clue that the tall, shortsighted, courtly gentleman who sold lawn mowers had once been an officer of the secret services, the inspiration behind the most audacious deception of the war. When the story of Operation Mincemeat finally emerged, he refused to be identified or accept any public credit. Cholmondeley died in June 1982. He never wanted to be recognized, let alone celebrated. Even his headstone is discreet and understated, simply bearing the initials “C.C.C.” An obituary letter written to the Times by Ewen Montagu drew attention to his “invaluable work during the war48 … work which, through circumstances and his innate modesty is not adequately known.” As Montagu observed: “Many who landed in Sicily owe their lives to Charles Cholmondeley.”
Ewen Montagu was appointed OBE for his part in Operation Mincemeat. He returned to the law, as he had always intended, and in 1945 he was appointed judge advocate of the fleet, responsible for administering the court-martial system in the Royal Navy. He would hold that post for the next eighteen years, while also serving as a judge in Hampshire and Middlesex, and recorder, successively, of Devizes and Southampton. Montagu lived a double life; alongside the feared judge and pillar of Anglo-Jewish society was another Ewen Montagu: the dashing wartime intelligence officer with an extraordinary story to tell.
As a judge, Montagu proved scrupulously fair, wonderfully rude, and almost always embroiled in one controversy or another. The press nicknamed him “the Turbulent Judge.”49 In 1957, he remarked in court, while trying a merchant seaman: “Half the scum of England50 are going into the Merchant Navy to escape military service.” He apologized. Four years later, he told an audience of Rotarians: “A boy crook should have51 his trousers taken down and should be spanked by a policewoman with a hairbrush.” He apologized again. When deliberations in court displeased or bored him, he would groan, sigh, roll his eyes, and crack inappropriate jokes. Barristers complained often about his offensive behavior. He apologized and carried on. His corrosive humor was usually misunderstood; his wit was so sharp and sarcastic it could humble the most arrogant barrister, and did so, frequently. In 1967, a pimp appealed his conviction, arguing that Montagu had been so rude to his lawyer that he deserved a retrial. The appeal was rejected on the grounds that “discourtesy, even gross discourtesy52 to counsel, however regrettable, could not be a ground for quashing a conviction.”
Often he would impose a lenient sentence on an offender, acting on a hunch that the man or woman genuinely planned to go straight. His hunches were seldom wrong. “If a man can’t have a stroke of luck53 once in his life, it’s not much of a life.” But to those who should know better, or seemed incorrigible, he was merciless. Sentencing the actor Trevor Howard for drinking at least eight double whiskeys and then driving into a lamppost, he said: “The public needs protecting54 from you, you are a man who drinks vast quantities, every night, yet you have so little care for your fellow citizens that you are willing to drive.” Summing up his career, one contemporary wrote: “Few judges have trodden55 so hard on the corns of so many people’s dignity as this tall, witty, testy, wartime naval commander with the sensitive face and the turbulent tongue. But few judges have been so quick to apologise with the air of a boxer shaking hands after a fight.” Montagu was aware of his own shortcomings. “Perhaps I should have been more56 patient,” he once said. “It is fair, I think, to say that I don’t suffer fools gladly.” In truth, he did become more patient and tolerant with age. He also became more devout, plunged into numerous charitable works, and became president of the United Synagogue.
Montagu had lived an extraordinary life, as a lawyer, intelligence officer, and writer: a judge of deep seriousness, he had also retained a boyish side and a talent for self-mockery. Without his combination of “extreme caution and extreme daring,”57 Operation Mincemeat could never have happened. The entire plan was, in a way, a reflection of his sense of the ridiculous and his love of the macabre, of playing a part. In 1980, a photograph of Jean Gerard Leigh appeared in the Times after her husband was made CBE. “Dear58 ‘Pam,’” wrote Montagu, now seventy-nine years old. “It was a voice from the past to see you in today’s papers and I can’t resist being another such voice and sending you congratulations. Ever yours, Ewen (alias Major William Martin).”
Shortly before his death, Montagu received a letter from the father of two young Canadian girls, who had read of his wartime exploits, requesting a memento. He immediately replied, enclosing “one of the buttons I wore59 when carrying out Operation Mincemeat,” along with some advice: “Keep a real sense of humour.60 By real I don’t mean just to be able to see a joke, but to be able to really and truly laugh at oneself.”
Ewen Montagu died in 1985, at the age of eighty-four, believing he had successfully hidden, for all time, the identity of the body used in Operation Mincemeat.
Roger Morgan, a council planning officer and an indefatigable amateur historian, began researching the story of Operation Mincemeat in 1980. He wrote to Montagu and later met him and, like every other would-be sleuth, received a response that was as courteous as it was unhelpful. Like most others, Morgan concluded that the secret of Major Martin’s identity had died with Montagu: the man who never was would never be. But then, in 1996, Morgan was leafing through a newly declassified batch of government files when he came across a three-volume report on Ewen Montagu’s wartime activities, including a copy of the official account of Operation Mincemeat, written just before the end of the war. “There, at the end61 of the last volume, staring out at him was the answer to many sleepless nights.” The official censor, perhaps unaware of the extraordinary efforts of concealment made over the preceding half century, had failed to redact a name. “On 28th January there had died62 a labourer of no fixed abode. His name was Glyndwr Michael and he was 34 years old.”
NUESTRA SEÑORA DE LA SOLEDAD cemetery is a ghostly but tranquil place at dusk. Swallows swoop over the cobbled paths, and the cypresses stand sentry. Far out in the bay, you can see the fishing boats bringing in the sardines. As the sun sinks and dusk settles, the graves seem to merge into one long field of engraved marble, stories of lives long and short, full and empty. One of the gravestones is different. It tells of a double life, one brief, sad, and real, the other a little longer, entirely invented, and oddly heroic. The body in this grave washed ashore wearing a fake uniform and the underwear of a dead Oxford don, with a love letter from a girl he had never known pressed to his long-dead heart. But he was not alone in fitting more than one personality into a single life. No one in this story was quite who they seemed to be. The Montagu brothers, Charles Cholmondeley, Jean Leslie, Alan Hillgarth, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, and Juan Pujol—each was born into one existence and imagined himself into a life quite different.
Grave number 1886 in Huelva cemetery was taken over by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1977. In a small local armistice, it is now maintained, on behalf of Britain, by the German consulate in Huelva. Every year, in April, an Englishwoman from the town lays flowers on the gravestone.
In 1997, half a century after Operation Mincemeat, the British government added a carved postscript to the marble slab:
Glyndwr Michael63
served as
Major William Martin, RM
Appendix
Acknowledgments
I am hugely indebted to the scores of people in five countries who have helped me in the writing of this book. In Britain, Germany, and Spain, the families of the participants in Operation Mincemeat have been extraordinarily generous with their time, memories, and documentary material: Jeremy Montagu, Jennifer Montagu, Rachel Montagu, Sarah Montagu, Tom Cholmondeley, Alison Cholmondeley, Jean Gerard Leigh, Jo
hn Gerard Leigh, John Michael, Paul Jewell, Nicholas Jewell, Tristan Hillgarth, Jocelyn Hillgarth, Juliette Kühlenthal, Federico Clauss, Andrew Leverton, Basil Leverton, and Sir Alan Urwick. Many others, either directly or indirectly involved, willingly contributed other material: the late Joan Bright-Astley, Gill Drake, Lady Victoire Ridsdale, Peggy Harmer, Patricia Davies, John Julius Norwich, Eve Streatfeild, Nicholas Reed, Isabelle Naylor, and Selina Fraser-Smith. Still others offered useful advice and contacts: Annabel Murello, Emma Crichton, Guy Liardet, Jack Baer, James Owen, Jan Dalley, John Scarlett, Ian Brunskill, Robert Hands, Fiona and Peter Mason, Stephen Walker, Sally George, and Robin Hunt.
I am grateful to numerous experts in various fields for their advice and guidance: Dr. Sacha Kolar on forensic pathology; Neil Cooke on Whitehall geography; Mary Teviot for her genealogical sleuthing; Pedro J. Ramirez, Javier Gómez, and the staff of El Mundo in Spain; Jesus Copeiro for a fascinating guided tour of Huelva and Punta Umbria; Graham Keeley for his work in Spain and Jo Carlill and Paul Bellshaw for their help with pictures.
Numerous historians and writers have also helped me to shape the book: Christopher Andrew, Michael Foot, Frank Stech, Andrew Rose, Roger Morgan, Tim Cottingham, John Follain, Thomas Boghardt, Andrew Lycett, and Martin Gilbert. I am particularly grateful to Peter Martland, Mark Seaman, and Terry Charman for reading the manuscript and saving me from some toe-curling errors. The remaining mistakes are all my own.
This book has involved many hours of archive research, and I have been helped immeasurably by a number of brilliant and dedicated archivists: Rod Sudderby of the Imperial War Museum; Howard Davies, Hugh Alexander, and the staff of the National Archives; David Sutcliffe at the Security Service Archives; James Beckett of the Formula One Archives; Neil F. Murray of the Aston Martin Club; Lesley Hall of the Wellcome Trust; Darren Treadwell of the People’s History Museum; and Caroline Herbert of the Churchill Archives Centre.
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