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
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (27 page)
Over the next three years, Agent Garbo sent 1,399 messages and 423 letters to his handlers in Spain. Three full-time MI5 case officers were needed to handle his traffic and the twenty-seven fictional characters in the Garbo network. Garbo’s subagents were British, Greek, American, South African, Portuguese, Venezuelan, and Spanish; some were officials, such as his mole in the Spanish Ministry of Information, some were disgruntled soldiers or pilots, and at least five were seamen recruited from different ports around the UK. Other recruits included a commercial traveler, housewives, waiters, office workers, a wireless mechanic, and an Indian poet named Rags who was part of a strange Aryan organization operating in Wales. Garbo’s agents had nothing in common except for the fact that they did not exist. The information they sent to Madrid was a careful concoction of nondangerous truths, half-truths, and untruths, and Kühlenthal happily passed it all on to Berlin, never once suspecting that he was being duped. “We have absolute trust in you,”
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he told his star spy, massaging the ego of the agent whose success was ensuring his own rapid promotion: “Your last efforts are all magnificent.”
Pujol’s messages to his Nazi handler were flights of pompous poetry. He never used one word where eight very long ones would do, and he showered Kühlenthal with a combination of flattery and Nazi bombast. “My dear friend and comrade,”
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Pujol wrote in a typical effusion, “we are two friends who share the same ideals and are fighting for the same ends. I have always had a very strong feeling of respect and admiration for your advice, full of good sense and calm. … I must be frank and open up my heart to you. These things can only be dealt with between men of spirit and tenacity, and by people who follow a doctrine, by fighting men and bold combatants. The unfolding of confidences can only be made between comrades. … Thus the great Germany has become what it is. Thus it has been able to deposit such great confidence in the man who governs it, knowing that he is not a democratic despot but a man of low birth who has only followed an ideal. … I feel more than ever a sensation of hatred, more than death, for our enemy and an ever increasing irresistible urge to destroy his entire existence.” For page after page, Garbo railed against “the democratic-Jewish-Masonic
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ideology,” urged the Germans to attack Britain (“England must be taken by arms,
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she must be fallen upon, destroyed, dominated”), and peppered his letters with Nazi jingoism: “With a raised arm I end this letter
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with a pious remembrance for all our dead.”
Kühlenthal swallowed the lot. “His characteristic German lack
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of sense of humour, in such serious circumstances as these, blinded him to the absurdities of the story we were unfolding,” wrote Garbo’s MI5 handler. The Abwehr officer openly boasted of his talented spy, code-named “Arabel,” who was sending top secret information from the heart of Britain. When Canaris, the Abwehr chief, visited Spain, Kühlenthal was “the star turn”
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and amused his boss with one story in particular. In March 1943, Agent Arabel had obtained a valuable handbook on RAF planes, which he had wrapped inside greaseproof paper and baked into a cake. On the top, in chocolate icing, he had inscribed “With good wishes to Odette.”
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Enclosed with the cake was a letter to make it seem that the gift came from a British seaman to a girlfriend in Lisbon. Kühlenthal explained to Canaris that the cake had been dropped off at a safe house in Lisbon, along with a covering note from Pujol, which he read to his delighted audience: “I did the lettering myself.
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I had to use several rationed products which I have given in a good cause. … Good Appetite.” Kühlenthal ended his performance with a lumbering joke, pointing out that although his agent “made cakes which were unpleasant
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in taste, their contents were excellent.” Canaris was impressed. Kühlenthal’s reputation went up another notch. (The cake, in fact, had been baked by Garbo’s wife, sent to Lisbon by diplomatic bag, and dropped off by an MI6 agent. The RAF pamphlet was out of date, and British intelligence knew the Abwehr had it already.)
By 1943, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, the star of the Madrid Abwehr, was eating out of Garbo’s hand and voracious for more. A separate office was set up to handle the “vast information”
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coming in, and running the “Felipe network” had become Kühlenthal’s principal job: “As a keen and efficient officer
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he did everything in his power to supply Garbo with ciphers, secret inks, and addresses of the highest grade to ensure his greater security. He was also forthcoming with considerable funds.” Through radio interceptions, the British watched with pleasure as Kühlenthal grew steadily more dependent on Garbo and his stock rose in Berlin. “We had the satisfaction of knowing
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through MSS [Most Secret Sources, or Ultra] that all GARBO material was being given priority and that every military report which reached Madrid from the GARBO network was immediately retransmitted to Berlin.” Garbo’s British handlers were amazed at how readily Kühlenthal believed “the many incredible things we ask
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them to believe.” Indeed, “the more sensational the reports,
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the more certain could we be of Madrid retransmitting them to headquarters.” Sometimes Kühlenthal seemed to pass on Garbo’s information without even reading it, let alone questioning it. “In some cases where messages
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appeared to be of extreme urgency they were retransmitted to Berlin with approximately one hour’s delay in Madrid.” Through Garbo and Kühlenthal, British intelligence was speaking directly to Berlin: “Felipe had become our mouthpiece.”
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Here, then, was “an invaluable channel
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through which we would be able to deceive the enemy.”
As they combed through Kühlenthal’s messages to Berlin, the British code breakers noticed something rather odd. Garbo’s intelligence was already sensational enough, but Kühlenthal was spicing it up still further, to lend extra weight. He was not above inventing his own subagents and adding them to the pot. Many of his elaborations were either wrong or meaningless. He also made some hilarious mistakes, including his “conviction that the Isle of Man
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is in the North of Ireland.” The added extras, MI5 concluded, were “invented by Felipe himself.”
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Kühlenthal was deceiving his Abwehr bosses by passing on invented intelligence along with the information he fervently believed to be true. “The information provided
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by his organisation up to date has been either untrue, useless, or provided by MI5 through the double agents under its control.” Guy Liddell of MI5 considered Kühlenthal to be “one of the people who make up
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most of their information.” He may also have been embezzling. Some within the Abwehr certainly thought so. According to one intercepted message, Kühlenthal was said to be running a very expensive agent in London, a Yugoslav diplomat, who had cost the Abwehr four hundred pounds over two years. “There are officers in Spain
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who are convinced that K is making half-part business i.e. splitting the monthly allowances between his and the Diplomat’s pocket.”
There was one other factor that made Garbo’s German spymaster ideally suited to receive the Mincemeat hoax: Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was Jewish.
The Abwehr officer had a Jewish grandmother. Kühlenthal did not consider himself Jewish. Marriage to a half-Jewish woman had not impeded his father’s military career. But that was before the rise of the Nazis. Under Hitler’s brutal racial policies, the one quarter of Jewish blood in Kühlenthal was enough to mark him out for discrimination, persecution, or worse. Kühlenthal would later claim that anti-Semitism had forced him to flee Germany, “leaving a good job as manager
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of a large champagne and wine cellar owned by his uncle.” His brother, an army officer, had left Germany for the same reason, winding up in Chile. It was Canaris who had intervened on behalf of his relative (the Abwehr chief had a record of helping Jews) and arranged for him to take up the post in Spain, since “he could not serve in the Army
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being half-blood Jew.” In Madrid, he was farther from Gestapo persecution, though hardly safe. In 1941, Canaris had his protégé “Aryanized”
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and formally declared to be of good German stock. Leissner, the chief of the Abwehr station, confirmed that Kühlenthal was now officially racially pure. In the minds of hard-line Nazis, however, either a person had Jewish blood, and was thereby corrupt and dangerous, or he did not. The attempt to tinker with Hitler’s race laws provoked a rebuke from Berlin: “He has been created an Aryan
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at the instigation of his station. A formulation of this nature is out of touch of all reality. Can JUAN [Leissner] state the legal foundation for such acts of state?” The Spanish branch of the SD, the SS intelligence organization, also questioned how Kühlenthal could simply be declared Aryan, “since there appeared to be no
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authority for such an act.” Canaris again intervened, and the SD in Madrid was instructed “to let the matter drop.”
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Kühlenthal’s colleagues in Spain knew of his Jewish ancestry and the attempt to expunge it. For some, this was prima facie evidence of treachery. Major Helm, the head of counterespionage in Spain, sent a confidential report to Canaris accusing Kühlenthal of being “in the pay of the British Secret Service.”
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The Abwehr chief “refused to take the report seriously.”
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Helm was transferred to another Abwehr station.
The British spies tracking Kühlenthal had noted that he seemed “cold and reserved”
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but also deeply uneasy: “Appearance
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: nervous, uncertain. Peculiarity: shifty eyes,” read one surveillance report. Kühlenthal had every reason to be anxious. His stock in Berlin was high, thanks to Pujol and the Felipe network, but if Canaris should fall from power or cease to defend him, or if something went wrong with his organization, his anti-Semitic enemies would pounce. Kühlenthal was deeply, and understandably, paranoid. Failure might well prove fatal. As one informer told British intelligence: “Kühlenthal is trembling to keep
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his position so as not to have to return to Germany and he is doing his utmost to please his superiors.”
Kühlenthal had already fallen for the elaborate con that was Agent Garbo. He was the ideal target for Operation Mincemeat: deeply gullible but admired and trusted by his bosses, including Himmler and Canaris; ambitious and determined but also frantically eager to please, ready to pass on anything that might consolidate his reputation and save him from the fate suffered by others of Jewish blood; he was also vain, possibly corrupt, and prepared to deceive those of higher rank to enhance his own standing. Kühlenthal perfectly exemplified the qualities that John Godfrey had identified as the two most dangerous flaws in a spy: “wishfulness” and “yesmanship.” He would believe anything he was fed, and he would do whatever he could to suck up to the boss and preserve his own skin.
To succeed, Operation Mincemeat needed to reach Hitler himself. The best way of doing that, Alan Hillgarth knew, was to get the information to Adolf Clauss in Huelva, from whom it was certain to pass into the hands of Karl-Erich Kühlenthal and then, with the blessing of that favored but gullible officer, up the German chain of command. Clauss was the perfect recipient because he was such an efficient spy. Kühlenthal was the ideal spy to pass the information on because he was worse than useless.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mincemeat Sets Sail
L
EVERTON
& S
ONS
, undertakers and funeral directors, began making coffins in the St. Pancras area of London around the time of the French Revolution. For two hundred years, the business was passed from father to son, along with the severe and formal cast of countenance required of officials in the death business. By 1943, the custodian of this long tradition, six generations on, was Ivor Leverton. His older brother Derrick was serving as a major with the Royal Artillery in North Africa and about to take part in the invasion of Europe that everyone knew was coming. Ivor had breathing difficulties and had been declared medically unfit for military service: he had therefore been left to run the family firm. Although only twenty-nine, Ivor took the traditions of the firm very seriously, ensuring that all clients, rich or poor, were treated with the same solemnity and dignity. But beneath that decorous exterior, like most undertakers, Ivor Leverton was a man of unflappable temperament and a bone-dry sense of humor. He felt a lingering guilt over being unable to fight on the front line. The closest he had come to seeing action was in 1941 when he went to collect a dead body from the Temperance Hospital and a German bomb came down the chimney, blasting shards of glass through his black “Anthony Eden” hat. Ivor longed to play his part. He was only too pleased, therefore, to be asked to transport a body, in the middle of the night, in deadly secrecy, as a task of “national importance.”
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