Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #General, #Psychology, #Europe, #History, #Great Britain, #20th Century, #Political Freedom & Security, #Intelligence, #Political Freedom & Security - Intelligence, #Political Science, #Espionage, #Modern, #World War, #1939-1945, #Military, #Italy, #Naval, #World War II, #Secret service, #Sicily (Italy), #Deception, #Military - World War II, #War, #History - Military, #Military - Naval, #Military - 20th century, #World War; 1939-1945, #Deception - Spain - Atlantic Coast - History - 20th century, #Naval History - World War II, #Ewen, #Military - Intelligence, #World War; 1939-1945 - Secret service - Great Britain, #Sicily (Italy) - History; Military - 20th century, #1939-1945 - Secret service - Great Britain, #Atlantic Coast (Spain), #1939-1945 - Spain - Atlantic Coast, #1939-1945 - Campaigns - Italy - Sicily, #Intelligence Operations, #Deception - Great Britain - History - 20th century, #Atlantic Coast (Spain) - History, #Montagu, #Atlantic Coast (Spain) - History; Military - 20th century, #Sicily (Italy) - History, #World War; 1939-1945 - Campaigns - Italy - Sicily, #Operation Mincemeat, #Montagu; Ewen, #World War; 1939-1945 - Spain - Atlantic Coast
A “squarish man with conspicuously
8
high cheekbones and hard slate eyes,” Sanders was clearly fanatical in his quest, and utterly convincing. In a final flourish, he laid out his scientific proof. A German scientist named Charles Gladitz, of the New Process Company of Southall, Middlesex, claimed to have discovered that metals, including gold, give off rays that “record themselves on a photographic
9
plate of the ground under which this mineral lies.” Gladitz had examined Sanders’s photographs of the site and declared, unequivocally, that this was “the definite location of a strong
10
gold source.” Sanders believed the Jesuits had created the underground cavern by tunneling from the riverbank, but the water table had since risen and getting to the entrance would require large pumps, digging equipment, a lot of money, and a great deal of sweat.
Sanders invited Hillgarth to join him in what promised to be the greatest treasure hunt of all time. The twenty-eight-year-old accepted without hesitation.
The Sacambaya Exploration Company was duly formed. On the eve of the Great Crash, money could be minted from dreams, and investors flocked to a project promising returns of 48,000 percent.
Hillgarth and Sanders set about recruiting “men who had had considerable
11
experience of harsh conditions.” These were described in detail: “Sacambaya is a poisonous place,
12
a dark, dirty valley, shut in by hills that rise almost immediately to 4,000 feet. It is either very dry or you are flooded out. It is generally very hot by day and pretty near freezing at night. It abounds in bugs, fleas, flies, ants, mosquitoes, sand-flies, rattlesnakes and other kinds of snakes. It is famous among Indians as a plague spot of Malaria. There are also skunks.” There were also bandits, no certainty of success, and a high probability of death. But this was an age that revered Shackleton and Scott. The expedition was overwhelmed with applicants. Some twenty-four men were chosen on the basis of expertise, resilience, and amusement value, including a photographer, an expert Serbian miner called Joe Polkan, and, crucially, a doctor. An American engineer named Julius Nolte would be picked up en route in Bermuda.
On March 1, 1928, the expedition set sail from Liverpool on the first stage of the nine-thousand-mile journey from England to Sacambaya. The forty tons of equipment stashed in the hold included two Morris six-wheel tractors, four vast compressors to drive the pneumatic hoists, picks, spades, and drills, two pumps, six cranes, a petrol motor, winches, electric light plants, forges, tents, mosquito nets, and a circular saw to cut wood for the railway that would have to be built at the other end. Dr. P. B. P. Mellows, of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, brought, in addition to the usual medical supplies, twenty-eight thousand quinine tablets to fight malaria and five thousand aspirin. Hillgarth purchased twenty rifles and twenty automatic pistols, four shotguns, two automatic rifles, and enough ammunition to start a small war, as “protection against the often
13
extremely unpleasant individuals with whom one is always liable to come in contact in such places.” At sea, the captain of the SS
Orcoma
threw a celebratory dinner consisting of
coupe de viveurs à la moelle, filets de sole Sacambaya
, and
biscuit glacé Inquisivi
.
From the port of Arica in Chile, the expedition chartered a train to take them the 330 miles to La Paz, then south along the Antofagasta line as far as a station called Eucalyptus, where the line stopped. From here the road, such as it was, went as far as the town of Pongo, “across 20 miles of pretty
14
poisonous, gradually rising desert, then through a succession of extremely unpleasant mountains, until it crosses the snowline at about 17,000 [feet], finally to descend in a series of perfectly horrible zigzags, into a nasty little valley.”
Pongo was a one-eyed mining town built to service the Guggenheim mines, presided over by a formidable American woman named Alicia O’Reardon Overbeck, whom the team nicknamed “Mrs. Starbird.” “This is the furthest outpost
15
of what might be called civilization,” wrote Hillgarth. “This was the end of the road.” Sacambaya was still forty-five miles distant, along a track partly washed away by rains. Now the hard work began. The Morris trucks were abandoned, the equipment disassembled, and the smaller machinery packed into loads of up to five hundred pounds, and strapped on to reluctant mules. The largest items, including the compressors, each weighing one and a half tons, had to be dragged along the mountain tracks using manpower and oxen.
“This,” said Hillgarth, with echoing understatement, “was quite an undertaking.”
16
In places the track had to be rebuilt, cut out of the solid rock. In one twelve-mile stretch the river had to be crossed and recrossed twenty-seven times. At times, the heavy machinery had to be lowered with a block and tackle. One compressor, two oxen, and several men hurtled over the edge and were saved only by becoming entangled in trees thirty feet below. Hillgarth, five other white men, and twenty Indians successfully transferred all the equipment to Sacambaya in five weeks and four days. Hillgarth declared that the total losses en route amounted to “one case containing 200 lbs
17
of macaroni.”
That was the last piece of good news.
The treasure caves, Sanders calculated, must be about “100 feet into the hillside.”
18
Armed with modern technology and an ancient document, the Sacambaya Exploration Company now set about picking, drilling, pumping, and blasting its way into the earth in pursuit of Jesuit gold. For ten hours a day, six days a week, from June to October, the men hacked into the mountain. Some thirty-seven thousand tons of rock were removed to create an enormous hole.
Conditions at Sacambaya were quite as nasty as advertised. Within weeks, three quarters of the men had jiggers, small worms that burrow into the feet. Any injury became instantly infected in the soggy, fly-infested atmosphere of the camp. “A complete absence of fresh fruit
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and vegetables from our dietary [sic] has brought on chronic constipation, but a great range of purges varying in propulsive powers have catered for all tastes,” Dr. Mellows reported cheerily. The mules and oxen came under repeated attack from vampire bats, which were also partial to human gore if they could get it. “One of our party awakened
20
the other night and in the light of the full moon in his tent was startled to find a vampire bat tearing at his mosquito net.” Mellows identified a new ailment he named Sacambayaitis: “Claustrophobia brought on by
21
being shut up in an unhealthy valley between high mountains for month after month, working hard, living on a monotonous diet, with no diversions, subject to constant fear of possible attack by bandits, and day by day living on the edge of a psychical volcano.”
The only member of the team immune to Sacambayaitis was Alan Hillgarth. The photographs of the expedition show him fresh-faced and happy: digging, grinning, never without a tie, even when helping to perform a rustic appendectomy on a colleague. Hillgarth was unstoppable.
It was not the jiggers, the claustrophobia, the constipation, bats, or bandits that finally did for the Sacambaya Exploration Company, but water. It poured from the sky in sheets and bubbled up from the ground in gouts, filling every hole as soon as it was dug, despite the panting efforts of the pumps. The men built a makeshift dam out of empty petrol cans, flattened and reinforced with timber, spun yarn, and rope. Hillgarth worked up to his neck in water to try to bed the foot of the dam in the impermeable clay they believed was a few feet farther down, but still the water poured in. Finally, even Hillgarth had to admit defeat, despite believing that the cave wall might be just fifteen feet away.
The expedition had been an unmitigated, magnificent disaster. The company went spectacularly bust. Two of the team headed into the interior and were never seen again. The chief engineer was left behind in Pongo. “He has fallen seriously in love
22
with Mrs Starbird,” observed Sanders, “and apparently does not intend to leave.” Polkan, the Serbian miner, was poisoned in La Paz, “either by the hotel people or the police.”
23
Sanders was flung into a Bolivian jail. Some months earlier, he had realized the Bolivian police were intercepting his mail, so he had planted a fake letter referring to a shipment of mustard gas, to see if this would flush them out. The Bolivian authorities took the letter at face value: Sanders was accused of planning a coup against the Bolivian government and charged with smuggling arms into the country, including fifty machine guns and one hundred tons of poison gas.
Hillgarth returned to Britain to face the wrath of his investors and the knowledge that he had been thoroughly and comprehensively duped. Sanders’s documents, it transpired, were fakes. The words on them had not even been written by a Spanish speaker, since they contained numerous grammatical errors and modern English idioms directly translated into Spanish. Gladitz and the New Process Company had vanished.
The Sacambaya debacle had been a salutary experience. “No body of men could have
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done more than we did,” wrote Hillgarth. A very large hole in the Bolivian jungle was testament to the heroic pointlessness of that achievement, but it was also a lesson that Hillgarth would never forget: otherwise entirely sensible people could be persuaded to believe, passionately, what they already wanted to believe. All it required was a few carefully forged documents and some profoundly wishful thinking on the part of the reader. The Sacambaya trip formed the basis for Hillgarth’s fifth and most successful novel,
The Black Mountain
, published in 1933 to acclaim from, among others, Graham Greene.
By then, Hillgarth had settled in Majorca with his wife, Mary, and three children, becoming honorary British vice-consul and then consul in Palma. At the same time, “he doubled up as a spy.”
25
On the eve of the Spanish civil war, Winston Churchill met Hillgarth in Majorca, on his way to a holiday in Marrakech. They got on famously. When Clementine Churchill complained about the smell of the drains at their hotel, Hillgarth invited the Churchills to stay at his picturesque villa, Son Torella.
Hillgarth played a pivotal role as a go-between during the Spanish civil war, helping to arrange prisoner swaps between the two sides and successfully ensuring the bloodless handover of Minorca to Franco’s forces in 1939. The commander of Nationalist forces in the Balearic Islands was Rear Admiral Salvador Moreno Fernández, and it was through him that Hillgarth arranged for the Republican forces to leave the island, thus averting, in Hillgarth’s words, “an intense bombardment which
26
could have caused some 20,000 deaths.” Hillgarth’s prolonged negotiations with Moreno, a convivial and subtle politician, marked the start of a most fruitful partnership. When Captain John Godfrey of HMS
Repulse
wanted to dock in Barcelona, it was Hillgarth who ensured, through his navy contacts with Franco’s regime, that the British ship did not come under air attack.
As the newly appointed director of Naval Intelligence at the start of the war, Godfrey remembered Hillgarth and recommended his promotion to naval attaché in Madrid. It was an inspired appointment to a most difficult and sensitive job. Neutral Spain was pivotal to British interests, the key to the Mediterranean and Gibraltar. With the fall of France, there were German troops on Spain’s border. Franco was in debt to both Italy and Germany for arms. Would he side with the Axis powers, and if he did not, and Spain remained nonbelligerent, would Hitler invade? Hillgarth’s role was to combat Nazi influence, stymie German sabotage efforts, prevent U-Boats from refueling and resupplying at Spanish ports, and countering the pro-Axis Falange within Franco’s government. With Ian Fleming, he helped to plan the campaign of sabotage and guerrilla war that would erupt if Spain was invaded, code-named “Operation Goldeneye,” the name that Fleming would eventually bestow on his Caribbean home. British policy required a nuanced approach, and Hillgarth’s reports showed how well he understood that delicate balance: Franco was anxious to preserve his neutrality and freedom of action, Hillgarth reported, but “a decisive German victory over Russia
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might enable the Falange to take complete control [and] Spain would probably throw in her lot with Germany.”
Sir Samuel Hoare, a former Chamberlain loyalist appointed ambassador in Madrid by Churchill, played this tricky game at the diplomatic level. Hillgarth did so at a subterranean level, while simultaneously coordinating the operations of MI6, SOE, and his own network of agents. In all of this, Hillgarth had the personal backing of Winston Churchill (they were distinctly similar characters), who regarded him as a “very good”
28
man “equipped with a profound knowledge
29
of Spanish affairs.” The prime minister instructed Hillgarth to write to him “privately about anything interesting.”
30
Ian Fleming shared Churchill’s high opinion of Hillgarth, describing him as a “useful petard and a good war-winner.”
31
Despite contrasting personalities, Hoare and Hillgarth got on well and cooperated closely. Hoare called him “the embodiment of drive.”
32
By contrast, Kim Philby, who ran counterintelligence on the Iberian desk at MI6 and was later revealed as a Soviet spy, disliked Hillgarth intensely, believing that Churchill’s support, the “secret funds that were made available
33
to him for undercover activity,” and his direct access to “C,” Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, had all “helped to feed the gallant
34
officer’s illusions of grandeur.” Philby was particularly irked by Hillgarth’s choice of “Armada” as a code name, which he considered self-inflating.