On April 30, 1943, the body of Glyndwr Michael, disguised as Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, was dropped into the sea off Huelva on the Spanish coast. In his briefcase were letters, meticulously faked by British intelligence officers to give the impression that the Allies intended to attack Greece, and not Sicily. Within hours the body was spotted by a young fisherman and brought to shore. The briefcase was taken into Spanish custody and Michael was buried under his assumed name in Huelva cemetery. Would the Spanish pass the documents to the Germans? And if they did, would the Germans take the bait?
Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, the masterminds of Operation Mincemeat, were becoming anxious. At the forefront of Montagu’s mind was the knowledge that thousands of Allied soldiers were massing on the coast of North Africa, whose future depended on a ruse that had once seemed like a jolly game, but was now a matter of life and death on a massive scale. “If I had made a slip in the preparation and devising of Mincemeat,” Montagu reflected, “I could have ballsed-up Husky” — the codename for the invasion of Sicily.
That anxiety would have been at least partially relieved had he been able to witness the frantic scenes taking place at German intelligence headquarters in Madrid, where the German spies, alerted to the mysterious cache of documents, were now focused on a single task: getting inside Major Martin’s briefcase. The documents, however, seemed to have vanished into the labyrinth of Spanish military officialdom. The Abwehr, German military intelligence, was desperate to get them; the British were equally determined that they should do so; the only obstacle was Spanish bureaucracy, inefficient, self-important and leisurely in the extreme.
Major Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, the most celebrated and successful German spy in Spain, was tying himself in knots trying to find out where the papers might be, and whom he needed to bribe in order to get them. The Spanish Navy, it seemed, had handed over everything to the Alto Estado Mayor, the Supreme General Staff. After that, the documents had apparently vanished. Even the Gestapo could not track them down, but by poking sticks into every corner of the Spanish military hierarchy, the Germans stirred up a swarm of speculation surrounding the missing briefcase. As “Andros”, a British agent deep within the Spanish military, reported: “Great interest was aroused ... to such an extent that eventually Lieutenant-Colonel Barr?n, Secretary General of the Directorate General of Security, took a personal interest in the matter.”
This was the turning point. Colonel Jos? L?pez Barr?n Cerruti was Spain’s most senior secret policeman, a keen fascist and an exceptionally tough cookie. He ran Franco’s security service with ruthlessness and guile and once Colonel Barr?n was on the scent, it was only a matter of time before the documents were located and made available to the Germans.
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Word of the elusive British attach? case had by now reached the upper echelons in Berlin, most notably Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, who was asked by Kuhlenthal to intervene personally to try to persuade the Spanish to surrender the documents.
But then, nine days after arriving in Spain, the faked letters landed in the Germans’ lap.
British intelligence would not discover the name of the man who had handed over the Mincemeat papers to the Germans for another two years. In April 1945, as the Nazis retreated, a group of British naval intelligence commandos, a unit set up by none other than Ian Fleming, captured the entire German admiralty archives at Tambach Castle, near Coburg.
Among the documents were several relating to Operation Mincemeat, including one revealing the identity of the officer on the Spanish General Staff who had presented the documents to the Abwehr: a Lieutenant-Colonel Ram?n Pardo Su?rez.
Years later Wilhelm Leissner, the Abwehr chief in Madrid, was still covering up Pardo’s identity, describing him merely as “my Spanish agent in the General Staff”. Pardo would go on to become a general, Governor of the Spanish Sahara and, finally, General Director of the Spanish Department of Public Health. Pardo was not acting alone. German documents clearly indicate that he was under instructions from a higher authority.
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Agent Andros indicates that pressure from the security chief Colonel Barr?n brought about the decision to pass over the documents. It may well have been agents of Barr?n’s security service who successfully extracted the letters from their envelopes.
The British later worked out exactly how the Spanish had performed this delicate and difficult task. The letters had been stuck down with gum and then secured with oval wax seals. “Those seals held the envelopes closed as all the gum had washed off.” By pressing on the top and bottom of the envelope, the lower flap of the envelope, which was larger than the top one, could be bent open. Inserting a thin metal double prong with a blunt metal hook into the gap, the Spanish spies snagged the bottom edge of the letter, wound the still-damp paper tightly around the probe into a cylindrical shape, and then pulled it out through the hole in the bottom half.
Even the British, normally so dismissive of the espionage efforts of others, were impressed by the Spaniards’ ingenuity. The letters were then carefully dried with a heat lamp. They were taken by Pardo to the German Embassy and handed, in person, to Leissner, the Abwehr chief in Spain, who was told he had one hour to do whatever he wanted with them. Leissner understood English, while Kuhlenthal spoke and read the language fluently. The Germans immediately realised that they had stumbled on something explosive, an impression doubtless compounded by the difficulties they had in obtaining the documents.
They seemed to me to be of the highest importance,” Leissner later recalled. The letters not only indicated an imminent Allied landing in Greece, and possibly Sardinia too, but identified Sicily as a decoy target.
A short, white-haired man with a birdlike brightness of eye, Leissner gave more the impression of a diplomat than an intelligence officer. By 1943 he had been all but supplanted by the energetic Kuhlenthal, but he was no fool. Even on this first, swift reading, something about the documents struck him as odd: “These letters mentioned the operational name ‘Husky’. That stuck in my memory, because it seemed to me a dangerous thing, to name the codeword in the same document as discussed the possible destinations.” The German spies moved quickly, knowing that the documents must be returned within the hour. “I took them to the basement of the German Embassy,” Leissner later recalled, “and had my photographer photocopy them there. I even stood over him while he worked, so that he could not read the documents.”
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The original documents were now returned to Pardo, who took them back to the offices of the General Staff, accompanied by Kuhlenthal. The German spy observed as the Spanish technicians reinserted the letters into the envelopes, reversing the method used to extract them. It is hard enough to remove a damp letter from an envelope this way, but harder still to get one back in without creasing the paper, leaving telltale marks or breaking the seals. The Spanish spy responsible must have been astonishingly dextrous for, to the naked eye, “there was no trace whatever” to show that the letters had left their envelopes. The letters were then placed in salt water and soaked for 24 hours to return them to their damp condition. Finally, the envelopes were replaced in the attach? case, which was relocked, and then passed back to the Spanish Ministry of Marine, along with Major Martin’s wallet and other personal property. The entire process — opening the letters, transferring them to the Germans, the copying and restitution — was completed in less than two days.
On May 11 Admiral Alfonso Arriago Adam, the Spanish Chief of Naval Staff, arrived at the British Embassy in Madrid carrying a black briefcase and a buff envelope, and asked to see the naval attach?, Alan Hillgarth. The Spanish officer explained that he had instructions to hand over to Hillgarth in person “all the effects and papers” found on the body of the British officer. “They are all there,” said Admiral Arriago, with a knowing look. The key, removed from Major Martin’s keyring, was in the briefcase lock, and the case was unlocked. “From his manner it was obvious the Chief of Naval Staff knew something [of the] contents,” Hillgarth wrote.
Unbeknown to anyone on the British side, by the time the letters were back in British hands, the Germans had been poring over them for at least 48 hours.
On May 9 the Abwehr forwarded the letters to the German high command. The task of authenticating the letters would fall to the intelligence branch of the German Army’s high command, Fremde Heere West (Foreign Armies West) or FHW, the linchpin of German military intelligence. The FHW was presided over by Lieutenant-Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne, a small, bespectacled aristocrat and one of Hitler’s most trusted intelligence advisers. Von Roenne was a former banker, and still looked like one: he was meticulous, pedantic, snobbish, intensely Christian and glintingly intelligent. He also detested Hitler, and would be executed after the July Plot to assassinate the F?hrer. The first full German intelligence assessment of the documents was written on May 11, signed by Baron von Roenne himself and entitled, portentously, “Discovery of the English Courier”.
It concluded: “The circumstances of the discovery, together with the form and contents of the despatches, are absolutely convincing proof of the reliability of the letters.”
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Tomorrow: Mincemeat Swallowed Whole
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99 on Monday. Available from TimesBookshop for £15.29 (0845 2712134; www.tolbooks.co.uk )
Meet Ben Macintyre
Times+ members can hear Ben Macintyre discuss his new book, Operation Mincemeat, with Phil Reed, the director of the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms. A limited number of tickets include a tour, and there will be a Q&A and a book signing afterwards. Tickets cost £15 (for the talk) and £25 (for talk and tour) and can be booked on 0844 209 0371. The event is on February 23 at 7pm at the Cabinet War Rooms, Clive Steps, King Charles St, London, SW1A 2AQ.