Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (40 page)

The Spanish staff officer had done his job well, interviewing most of the protagonists in the story, including the fishermen, the naval authorities, and the pathologist: his verbal report added numerous corroborating details and corrected others. “In contrast to the first statement
⁵⁰
of Oberst Lt. Pardo, that the corpse carried the brief case clutched in his hand, it appears that the above mentioned brief case was secured to the corpse by a strap around the waist. The attaché case was fastened to this strap by a hook.” The new report, sent from the Abwehr office in Spain to Colonel von Roenne at FHW, as well as the Abwehr chiefs, accurately described how the papers and briefcase had traveled up the Spanish chain of command, from Huelva to Cádiz to Madrid, before being presented to Admiral Moreno himself. “He (the Minister for Marine)
⁵¹
handed the whole collection—the courier’s brief case, together with all papers found in his breast pocket—to A.E.M. [Alto Estado Mayor, the Spanish General Staff] who undertook the opening, reproduction and resealing, and then returned them to him. He then gave the whole collection to the British Naval Attaché in Madrid.” The British plane carrying the courier seemed to have vanished into the sea without a trace, at least none that Adolf Clauss and his agents in Huelva could find. “A search for the remains
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of Major Martin’s aircraft and also for the corpses of any other passengers in this plane was unsuccessful.” But, as ever, Kühlenthal had an excuse: “The fishermen state
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that in the area where the corpse was found there are strong currents and other corpses together with parts of the aircraft might later on be found in other places.”

Far harder to explain away was how the body had so thoroughly decomposed in such a short time. But Kühlenthal was up to the task.

A medical examination
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of the corpse showed that there were no apparent wounds or marks which could have resulted from a blow or stab. According to medical evidence, death was due to drowning (lit: the swallowing of sea water). The corpse carried an English pattern life-belt and was in an advanced state of decomposition. According to medical opinion, it had been in the water from five to eight days. This contradicts the evidence provided by the discovery of a night club bill on the corpse dated 27th April, and the discovery of the corpse at 9.30 in the morning of the 30th April. It is, however, considered possible that the effect of the sun’s rays on the floating corpse accelerated the rate of decomposition. The doctors also stated that the corpse was identical with the photographs in its military papers with the sole exception that a bald patch on the temples was more pronounced than in the photographs. Either the photograph of Major Martin had been taken some two or three years ago or the baldness on the temples was due to the action of sea water.

Here was a classic example of willingness to believe, blended with self-deception and outright falsification. The earlier report had gotten the date of the theater tickets wrong, but rather than correct the error, this report fudged the time gap. The Spanish pathologists had concluded that death took place at least eight days before April 30, but in order to fit it in with his own (erroneous) timing, Kühlenthal changed this to between five and eight days. Two spurious but plausible-sounding scientific explanations were adduced to explain why the corpse was rotting and why Major Martin looked substantially older than his photograph. The Abwehr had decided from the outset that the discovery was genuine and marshaled the evidence, despite obvious flaws, toward that belief. Kühlenthal stood by his intelligence coup. With the information now swirling around the upper reaches of the Nazi war machine, he had no choice.

In the fetid basement of the Admiralty, Montagu and Cholmondeley were sweating over an entirely unforeseen development that would have been funny had it not been so deeply alarming: Major Martin’s briefcase had disappeared, again. Hillgarth had taken receipt of the case and other personal effects on May 11 and promised to send them in the diplomatic bag to London on May 14. By May 18, the package had still not arrived at Room 13, and the Mincemeat team was starting to panic. That evening, Hillgarth received a telegram in secret cipher: “Bag not yet arrived.
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Urgent that letters should be received earliest possible. Was bag sent by air or sea?” Hillgarth immediately replied that the items, packed in “a small, sealed bag,”
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had left Madrid for Lisbon, as planned, and should have arrived by air, addressed personally to Ewen Montagu. Here was a surreal situation: for months, they had been working to get the bag into the wrong hands, as if by accident. Now it might very well have fallen into the wrong hands, by accident.

In the same telegram, Montagu asked whether the rubber dinghy set adrift by the
Seraph
had ever washed up. He also passed on the news that initial signs seemed to show that Mincemeat was working: “Evidence that operation successful
⁵⁷
but vital that no suspicion should be aroused.” Hillgarth replied that there was no trace of the dinghy, which had almost certainly been appropriated by the fishermen of Punta Umbria.

From his own discreet investigations, Hillgarth already knew that the deception was taking satisfactory shape. Agent Andros had “reported that there was great excitement
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over some official documents found on the body of a British officer at Huelva.” The rumor mill was grinding away: “I naturally asked him to find out
⁵⁹
what he could.” A few days later, Hillgarth ran into Admiral Moreno at a cocktail party for foreign diplomats. The minister of marine brought up the subject of the documents unprompted and “said that immediately he heard
⁶⁰
they had reached Madrid (he was in Valencia) he gave Chief [of] Naval Staff orders to hand over to me at once.” This was a bald lie. German documents show that Moreno took personal custody of the papers, and then handed them, unopened, to the General Staff.

There then followed a most revealing conversation between Hillgarth and his Spanish friend.

“Why did you go to so much trouble?”
⁶¹
Hillgarth asked nonchalantly.

“I was anxious no one should have
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an unauthorised look at them,” Moreno replied. “Which might be a serious matter.”

Moreno had tripped himself up. Hillgarth had requested the return of the case through a third party but had never indicated that this was anything other than a routine matter, let alone that the contents were secret and should be kept from “unauthorised” eyes. “He obviously did not know
⁶³
the exact terms of my request which was verbal and could never alone have led him to say what he did,” Hillgarth reported to London. “It can be taken as a certainty
⁶⁴
that Spanish Government know contents of documents. I am not so certain they have reached the enemy. Yet they were more than a week in Huelva and Cadiz.”

The Spanish admiral was playing a dangerous double game. On May 19, the German ambassador Dieckhoff sent another message to Berlin, describing a meeting with Moreno: “He told me that all his information
⁶⁵
indicated that strong forces would be concentrated in preparation for an attack on Greece and Italy. … The Navy Minister regards an attack on Greece as especially likely.” While reassuring the British that their secrets were safe, Moreno was simultaneously passing those secrets to the Germans. The duplicitous Spanish admiral would make a very useful tool for reinforcing the deception. “The operation has given conclusive
⁶⁶
proof of the extent to which the Spaniards will go in assistance to the Axis.”

On May 21, to the intense relief of the Mincemeat team, the package containing Major Martin’s briefcase and other effects finally arrived in London. No satisfactory explanation was offered for its weeklong, heart-stopping disappearance. Spanish bureaucracy was not alone in moving in mysterious ways. The letters were immediately sent to the Special Examiners (censorship) for microscopic analysis. First they inspected the wax seals and found that despite all that had happened over the preceding weeks, these were still perfectly intact. “The seals were photographed
⁶⁷
and marked by us before they were despatched, and they have been photographed also after their return. They have not been altered in any way.”

But that was only part of the story. “Although we can say that there
⁶⁸
has been no tampering with the seals [it is] quite possible that the letters have been rolled out, from under the bottom flaps … as the bottom flap was very much deeper than the upper, there was plenty of room for the contents to be taken out.” The eyelash was missing from each envelope, but the examiners had laid another, rather more scientific, trap. Before being placed in the briefcase, back in April, each letter had been folded into three, symmetrically, just once. A letter when folded dry creates a crease that is noticeably “sharper than one made in it when
⁶⁹
it was well soaked and soft, more like that which would be made in a piece of cloth.” Under the microscope, it was revealed that at least one of the letters had been folded twice, “once symmetrically and secondly
⁷⁰
irregularly … while the letter was wet.” Thus, the examiners deduced that when the Spaniards had closed up the key letter, “it was not done on exactly
⁷¹
the same folds and there were damaged fibres in the paper minutely separate from the new folds.”

There was one other test. To extract the letters, the paper must have been tightly wound around a metal prong. The letters had been soaked again before being replaced inside the envelopes, and despite the delayed journey from Spain, they were still slightly damp. A piece of paper rolled up when wet will tend to curl up when dried out. The censors extracted the letters and then carefully watched to see whether or not the paper would lie flat. Sure enough, “as the letter began to dry
⁷²
naturally, outside the envelope, the edges began to curve upward, that is to say as they would if the letter had been rolled out of the back of the envelope.” Moreover, the rolling up must have happened when the letter was folded in three, since the examiners noted that “when the letter is folded up,
⁷³
it all curves the same way.” Here was solid physical proof that the letters had been opened, corroborating the evidence now appearing in the intercepted wireless messages.

The Germans would be expecting the British to examine the returned letters carefully to see if they had been tampered with. The deception would be reinforced if the Germans could be made to believe that such an examination had been carried out and that the British scientists were satisfied the letters had never been opened. The best person to pass on that message would be the fickle Admiral Moreno.

A message was drafted to Captain Hillgarth, referring to his earlier conversation with the admiral. “Inform Minister of Marine as soon
⁷⁴
as possible that sealed envelopes have been tested by experts and there was no trace of opening or tampering before they reached care of Spanish Navy and that you are instructed to express our deep appreciation for the efficiency and promptitude with which Spanish Navy took charge of all documents before any evilly disposed person could get at them. You should say that you may tell him in confidence that one of the letters was of the greatest importance and secrecy and the appreciation expressed at this token of friendship is most sincere.” This message was sent not in cipher but by naval cable. A second, secret, cable informed Hillgarth that the “letters [were] in fact opened,”
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but he should spread the word to anyone “likely to pass it on”
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that the British were confident the letters were never read in Spain. “Important there should be no
⁷⁷
repetition no suspicion that we believe letters were read so that present success may not be endangered.”