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
The cemetery of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad sits on a small hill just outside Huelva, a high-walled compound surrounded by fields of sunflowers. Alongside it is the much smaller British cemetery, in which members of the Protestant German community, in a strange alliance of religion in defiance of politics, were also interred. The horse was sweating by the time the lumbering funeral carriage reached the cemetery. Waiting at the gates were Lieutenant Pascual del Pobil, the naval judge, with the briefcase under one arm. Alongside him stood Dr. Eduardo Fernández del Torno and his son, Dr. Eduardo Fernández Contioso, who would together carry out an autopsy. The final member of the reception committee was a young American pilot called Willie Watkins.
Three days before the body was brought ashore, an American P-39 Airacobra plane had crash-landed in a field in Punta Umbria. The pilot was Watkins, a twenty-six-year-old from Corpus Christi, Texas, who had been flying from North Africa to Portugal when his plane ran out of fuel. Unable to open the cockpit cover, Watkins had come down with his plane, escaping with only minor injuries. He had been taken into custody by the infantry detachment guarding the coast, briefly lodged at the Hotel La Granadina in Huelva, and then transferred to the home of Francis Haselden, the refuge of all Allied soldiers, since there was no American consulate in Huelva. Lieutenant Pascual del Pobil had requested that the American pilot be brought to the cemetery in case the dead body and the downed plane were connected in some way and Watkins might be able to identify the body.
The coffin was carried to the small building on the edge of the cemetery that served as a morgue. Glyndwr Michael’s body was lifted out and placed on the raised marble slab. Methodically, the mortuary attendant went through the pockets, extracted the contents, and laid them out on the table beside the locked attaché case: cash, sodden cigarettes, matches, keys, receipts, identity card, wallet, stamps, and theater ticket counterfoils. Pascual del Pobil barely glanced at these. Lunch was already beckoning. Haselden did his best to seem uninterested. The Spanish officer now turned his attention to the briefcase, which he unlocked with one of the dead man’s keys. The contents were soaked, but the writing on the envelopes was still clearly legible. Pascual del Pobil carefully “examined the names on the envelopes”
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and motioned Haselden over to look. Haselden had been told only the outline of Operation Mincemeat. But from the red seals and embossed envelopes, these were clearly confidential military letters. Pascual del Pobil also seems to have registered their importance, for he now did exactly what Montagu and Cholmondeley had hoped would not happen. He gestured toward the case and asked Haselden if he would like to take it. Since these items would have to be returned to the British eventually, would the vice-consul like to take custody now? Pascual del Pobil liked the English vice-consul; he believed he was doing Haselden a favor; and he wanted his lunch and siesta.
Haselden knew he had to “react swiftly.”
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Indeed, he had mentally prepared himself for the possibility that Pascual del Pobil would cut corners and simply hand over the attaché case. With as much nonchalance as he could muster, he said, “Well, your superior might not like
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that, so perhaps you should deliver it to him, and then bring it back to me, following the official route.” Pascual del Pobil shrugged and closed the briefcase.
Willie Watkins had observed this exchange. Although he spoke little Spanish, it was clear what was going on. Haselden’s “attitude, in refusing the briefcase,
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struck him as odd.” The American pilot was now beckoned over by Pascual del Pobil and asked if he could identify the dead man. Needless to say, he could not, and said so. The dead man’s life belt, he pointed out, was “of an English pattern,
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whereas he himself had flown an American plane, which carried a completely different type of life-belt.” Pascual del Pobil stated the obvious: “There are clearly two
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completely unconnected accidents.”
Packing up the briefcase, wallet, and other possessions, the naval judge explained that these would be formally handed over to his commanding officer, the naval commander of the port of Huelva. The tubby Spanish officer departed, taking the case and other items with him. Haselden casually announced that he would stay to watch the autopsy. If it seemed odd to Watkins that the British vice-consul should decline the offer of the briefcase, it was surely even odder that he should choose to remain in a broiling hut with a tin roof while two Spanish doctors cut up a half-rotted corpse. The American pilot was only too happy to escape the fetid room with its stench of death and smoke a cigarette in the shade of the willow tree outside.
The autopsy would usually have been carried out by a military pathologist, but since he was away, the task fell to Dr. Fernández, the civilian forensic pathologist, and his son Eduardo, a recent medical school graduate. Contrary to Spilsbury’s dismissive remark about the poor state of Spanish forensic expertise, Fernández was a good and experienced pathologist. A native of Seville, he had studied medicine at Seville University and then spent many years working as the company doctor for a large mining concern. Since 1921, he had been senior pathologist for the Huelva area. Fernández may not have been in Spilsbury’s forensic league, but he had a wide practical knowledge of dead bodies in general and, given his coastal location, of drowning victims in particular.
Haselden later described the autopsy. “On the first incision being made,
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there was a minor explosion, for while the body externally was in good preservation, the inside had deteriorated badly.” The lungs were filled with fluid, but given the state of decomposition and without further tests, Dr. Fernández would have been unable to say whether this was seawater. He examined the ears and hair of the corpse and its strangely discolored skin. Haselden knew nothing of the real circumstances surrounding the body, but he knew enough of the plot to realize that the more detailed the autopsy, the more likely it was that the pathologist would find some clue to the real cause of death. The British vice-consul was friendly with the Spanish doctor. The stench of putrefaction in the room was now almost overwhelming. With what was later described as “remarkable presence of mind,”
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he decided to intervene. “Since it was obvious the heat
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had done its worst,” he said, there was no need for a detailed autopsy. “On receiving this assurance
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from the VC that he was quite satisfied, the doctor, not without relief perhaps, agreed to call it a day and issued the necessary certificate.”
The postmortem verdict was straightforward: “The young British officer fell in the water
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while still alive, showed no evidence of bruising, and drowned through asphyxia caused by submersion. The body had been in the water between eight and ten days.” The body was returned to its plain wooden coffin and formally transferred into the care of the British vice-consul.
Fernández had missed the telltale discoloration of the skin, indicating phosphorus poisoning. He made only a cursory examination of the lungs and took no samples from the lungs, liver, or kidneys for testing. Yet there were other aspects of the case that troubled him. The doctor had examined hundreds of drowned fishermen over the years. In every case, there was evidence of “nibbling and bites by fish
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and crabs on the earlobes and other fleshy parts.” The ears of the British officer were untouched. On bodies that have been in seawater for more than week, the hair on the head becomes dull and brittle. “The shininess of the hair
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did not correspond to the time which he had supposedly spent in the water,” and there was also, in Fernández’s mind, some “doubt over the nature of the liquid
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in the man’s lungs.” Privately, Fernández also noted something peculiar about the clothing. The man’s uniform was waterlogged, but it had not attained the shapeless, soggy form of clothing that has been in seawater for a week. “He seemed very well dressed
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to be in the water for so many days,” the doctor reflected. The two doctors had also compared the photograph on the identity card with the dead man but concluded that these were “identical.”
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Yet even here there was room for doubt, for the father-and-son medical team noted “that a bald patch on the temples
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was more pronounced than in the photograph.” The William Martin in the photograph had a thick head of hair, but the one on the mortuary slab was thinning on top. Fernández concluded that “either the photograph was taken
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some two or three years ago or the baldness on the temples was due to the action of sea water.” This was an odd conclusion: seawater has many effects on the human body, but male-pattern baldness is not one of them. It is impossible to know how many of Fernández’s doubts found their way into his final report: the autopsy was passed to the port authority, filed in the archives by Pascual del Pobil, and then destroyed in a fire in 1976.
There was one additional, far more glaring inconsistency, which Fernández did spot, although he did not realize its significance. The degree of decomposition, according to Fernández, indicated that the body had been at sea for a minimum of eight days, and possibly longer. According to the evidence in Major Martin’s pocket, he had flown from London late on April 24; and the body was retrieved in the early hours of April 30. The decayed state of the body was simply inconsistent with a body submerged in cold seawater for only a little more than five days. Fernández, of course, was unaware of the supposed timing of Major Martin’s death. That evidence was contained in his wallet, which was now in the possession of Captain Francisco Elvira Álvarez, commander of the port of Huelva and, as it happened, the best friend of Ludwig Clauss, Huelva’s elderly German consul.
At eight thirty that evening, Francis Haselden sent a cable to Assistant Naval Attaché Don Gómez-Beare in Madrid: “With reference to my phone message
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today body is identified as Major W. Martin R.M. identity card 148228 dated 2nd Feb. 1943 Cardiff. Naval judge has taken possession of all papers. Death due to drowning probably 8 to 10 days at sea. I am having funeral Sunday noon.”
Normally, in such circumstances, the naval attaché would have sent a message to the Admiralty in London, with the name and rank of the dead man. In this case, no such marine officer existed, and if the cable was distributed through normal channels someone in London might well spot the anomaly. Hillgarth had arranged that just before he was ready to send the telegram reporting the death of Major Martin, he would send a separate message, in code, to “C” at MI6, “so that the action for suppressing
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it could be taken.” The plan went wrong. The message to “C” duly arrived, but by the time MI6 got around to acting on it, the signal from Hillgarth had already begun to be distributed to various Admiralty departments: one of these might well be conversant with the names of Royal Marine officers and start making embarrassing enquiries. A flurry of telephone calls to the heads of the departments that had received the message ordered “the suppression of the signal
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on the excuse that the individual in question was not a naval officer, but had, with the authority of the First Sea Lord, been given the cover of rank in the Royal Marines when he was setting out on a secret and very special mission abroad. … The secrecy of his task rendered it necessary that the signal should be suppressed and no action taken on it.” In a way, the excuse was true.
Haselden’s message was addressed to “Sadok,” Gómez-Beare’s cable name, but its intended recipient was Adolf Clauss, the senior Abwehr officer in Huelva and the man identified by Montagu as the “super-super-spy” most likely to intercept the documents. Clauss was living up to his billing, for he was already fully aware that the body of a British officer carrying letters had washed up in his bailiwick. It may have been Lieutenant Pascual del Pobil himself who told the German agent about the body and its accompanying briefcase, or the harbor master, or the mortuary attendant, or even Dr. Fernández, who had conducted the autopsy. Whoever it was, by the time the British vice-consul informed Madrid that the papers had arrived, Clauss had already mobilized his extensive spy network to intercept them.
This was proving rather difficult, for the briefcase and its contents had fallen, from the point of view of both the British and the Germans, into the wrong hands. Had the case simply been handed over to the Huelva police, as the British intended, then Clauss would have obtained it within hours. The same thing would have happened had the documents ended up in the possession of Huelva’s civilian governor, the harbormaster, or the army authorities, for these, too, were in the pay of Clauss. Instead, the Spanish navy had them, and this was an altogether trickier nut for German espionage to crack. Montagu himself later admitted that the fact that the documents were “taken into naval custody”
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very nearly derailed the entire operation. Many Spanish naval officers were pro-British, and there was a tradition of mutual respect between the British and Spanish navies. The Navy Minister, Admiral Moreno, was a personal friend of Alan Hillgarth, who had made a point of cultivating naval officers: “The Spanish navy is not in German
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hands,” Hillgarth wrote.