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
Kühlenthal explained that Pujol had been awarded the Iron Cross in recognition of his work for the Third Reich and that Hitler had “personally ordered
25
that the medal should be granted. Unfortunately the certificate in evidence of this had not reached Madrid prior to the German collapse.” Still, it is the thought that counts. As for himself, Kühlenthal explained that he was desperate to escape Spain and would not consider returning to Germany, where he was sure to be arrested. Pujol told Kühlenthal to “remain patiently in his hideout
26
until Garbo could evolve a plan to facilitate his escape.” Pujol was stern, telling his former spymaster “he should obey instructions
27
to the letter if he wished to save himself. … This Kühlenthal promised to do.” The Spanish spy explained that he planned to get to South America, via Portugal, and solemnly pledged to work for Germany again, should the Abwehr ever be restored. When Kühlenthal asked him how he intended to get out of the country, Pujol replied, truthfully, with one word: “Clandestinely.”
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MI5 concluded that Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was no threat to the postwar world. The former Abwehr chief waited, paranoid but patient, for word from his former protégé, but no message came. Like Clauss, he later put a rather different gloss on the past. He had stayed in Spain, he explained, because the country was “a melting pot
29
of many races, conveying an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding of human nature.” In truth, he was too terrified to budge, waiting for a message from the spy who had double-crossed him so spectacularly. Kühlenthal’s wife, Ellen, was heiress to the Dienz clothing company in Germany, and before 1939 Karl-Erich had worked in his wife’s family business. The company premises were bombed at the end of the war, but the business was slowly rebuilt. In 1950, the couple slipped back to Germany, moved into a house in Koblenz, and took over running the company. Kühlenthal turned out to be much better at buying and selling clothes than at buying and selling secrets. The house of Dienz prospered. In 1971, the former spy was elected president of the Federal Association of German Textile Retailers, representing about 95 percent of German textile retailers, with a purchasing power worth billions of dollars. He inaugurated the first pedestrian shopping zone in Koblenz. He gave long, dull speeches on the subjects of tax reform, business promotion, and parking in downtown Koblenz. No one ever enquired about his past. A more solid member of the German establishment it would be impossible to imagine—worthy, dependable, and predictable. The German spy and textile magnate died in 1975 still wondering, perhaps, whether his star agent would reappear from the past. The most interesting thing his obituary could find to say was that “he always tried to dress correctly
30
as an example to his colleagues.”
Kühlenthal’s life perfectly exemplified what Juan Pujol, Alexis von Roenne, and Glyndwr Michael had already proven: it is possible to fit at least two people into one life.
Agent Garbo went to ground. With a gratuity of fifteen thousand pounds from MI5 and an MBE, he moved to Venezuela and vanished. After he was tracked down by the spy writer Rupert Allason (Nigel West), he reemerged briefly to accept formal recognition at Buckingham Palace of the debt owed to him. He then disappeared into obscurity again. Garbo wanted to be alone. He died in Caracas in 1988.
With victory, the denizens of Room 13 emerged, blinking, into the light. An anonymous poet in Section 17M marked the occasion with a verse entitled “De Profundibus.”
In the depths of the fusty dungeons
,
In the bowels of NID
Where wild surmise or blatant lies
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,
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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 fact
34
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 charge
35
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 apparently
36
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 expert
38
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 sources
39
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 Control
42
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 anyone
46
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 revolver
47
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 war
48
… 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.”