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
Clauss’s first approach was the most direct one: he instructed his father, the elderly consul, Ludwig Clauss, to ask his friend and golfing partner, Captain Francisco Elvira Álvarez, to hand over the documents. Captain Elvira refused. Politely, he explained that these documents were now locked away in his safe at the navy office at 17 Avenida de Italia, where they would remain until he received orders from Cádiz about what should be done with them. Elvira was a cheerful, garrulous, and sociable man. He liked Clauss, was happy to eat the dinners laid on by the German consul, and enjoyed the hospitality he provided at Huelva Golf Club. But there is no evidence he was on Clauss’s payroll. Elvira was also a stickler for the rules, “a rigid disciplinarian,”
31
and a firm believer in hierarchy. He would await instructions from above.
At midday on May 2, 1943, a group of mourners, official and unofficial, public and secret, gathered for the funeral and burial of Major William Martin. It was a day of “suffocating heat,”
32
according to the local newspaper, yet the turnout was impressive. Representing Britain were Francis Haselden, the vice-consul, and Lancelot Shutte, a British mining company executive who had been expelled from Spain once already by Governor Miranda on suspicion of espionage. Here, too, was the Frenchman Pierre Desbrest, a Gaullist and close friend of Haselden. Officially, Desbrest was the representative in Spain of a French-owned pyrites company. Less officially, he organized an underground route for Free French forces from occupied France through Spain to North Africa and conspired with Haselden against the Germans. The port commander, Elvira, and the naval judge, Pascual del Pobil, attended in full naval uniform. The military governor of Huelva was in Seville meeting General Franco but sent an army lieutenant to represent the Spanish armed forces.
Glyndwr Michael had died without a single mourner. His funeral, as someone completely different, was carried out with full military honors and all the ceremony and solemnity Huelva could muster. In addition to the officials and military brass, a small crowd of civilians also gathered at Nuestra Señora de la Soledad cemetery: the curious, the pious, and the clandestine. Haselden does not seem to have spotted the tall, cadaverous figure of Adolf Clauss among the crowd. Clauss would later claim that he had only come to the funeral in his capacity as German vice-consul, “as a mark of respect
33
to the fallen soldier.” In truth, of course, he was there to observe, to see if he might pick up any useful information about the dead man and his intriguing briefcase.
The death certificate, filled out by funeral director Candela, formally marked the passing of “W. Martin, aged between 35 and 40,
34
native of Cardiff (England)
[sic]
, officer of the British marines, found on the beach known as ‘La Bota’ at half past nine on April 30th, 1943. Death by drowning.” After a brief funeral service in the cemetery chapel, the coffin was carried along a cobbled path, down a neat avenue of cypresses, to the section of the cemetery known as San Marco. Swallows dipped and dived among the palm trees, and the strong scent of jasmine trees rose in the midday heat. The funeral procession passed the large and imposing mausoleums of Huelva’s wealthiest Spanish families, marble tombs surrounded by iron railings. Here was the grave of Huelva’s most famous son, Miguel Biez, “El Litri,” a bullfighter famously gored to death in 1929. El Litri’s huge and ostentatious tomb depicted the matador wearing the “suit of lights.” As the procession neared the northwest corner of the cemetery, the graves grew smaller and humbler. The San Marco section was where the poor and ordinary folk of Huelva were buried. Haselden had ordered a “Class Five”
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burial, the cheapest available: total cost, including coffin, being just 250 pesetas. The British consulate contracted to pay the cost of renting and maintaining the grave in perpetuity. Major Martin was not the first tenant of grave number forty-six, in the fourteenth avenue of the San Marco section backing up to the cemetery wall. In 1938, a ten-year-old girl named Rosario Vilches had been buried there, but her parents had been unable to keep up payments on the plot, and two months earlier the body had been removed and reburied elsewhere.
At half past twelve, the coffin was lowered into the grave. Of the official mourners, only Francis Haselden knew that the man inside had not died at sea, and even he was ignorant of the full scale of the imposture taking place: a Welsh Baptist in a Spanish Catholic grave, a derelict who had never worn a uniform accorded rank and honor, a man with no relatives (at least none who cared) invested with a parent to mourn him and buried with full military pomp by a grateful nation. Glyndwr Michael had probably killed himself on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of insanity or by accident. The fatal dose of rat poison had carried him five hundred miles, into another country and another personality. The inscription on his tomb would eventually read, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” the line from Horace’s
Odes:
“It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.” There was nothing remotely decorous or patriotic about the way Glyndwr Michael had died. Yet in a way, the epitaph was apt: Michael had, indeed, given his life to his country, even if he had been given no choice about it.
The officials climbed into their hot cars, the gravediggers began to fill in the hole, and the mourners trailed away down the hill toward the town. Adolf Clauss watched them leave and then headed back to the German consulate on foot. He did not sign the mourners’ book, and he spoke to no one, but his presence did not go unremarked. Among the other mourners was an innocuous-looking middle-aged man in a nondescript suit. The Spaniards had assumed he must be part of the official delegation. The officials assumed he was a local Spaniard. From the shade of a cypress tree, Don Gómez-Beare watched Adolf Clauss leave the cemetery and then quietly slipped out and followed him down the hill.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Spanish Trails
A
DOLF
C
LAUSS
had much to occupy his mind. His attempts to obtain the briefcase had so far failed. The Spanish naval authorities were proving vigorously uncooperative. Perhaps they would be more amenable to an approach from a fellow Spaniard. Frustrated, the German spy resolved to try a more indirect approach. Lieutenant Colonel Santiago Garrigós was commander of the Guardia Civil, the Spanish paramilitary police, for the Huelva district and an enthusiastic recipient of German largesse. Clauss instructed Garrigós to “do everything necessary
1
to obtain copies of the documents which were found in the brief case.” Garrigós may have been a keen collaborator, but he was also a coward, and knew that if he asked Elvira or Pascual del Pobil to show him the documents, they would conclude that he was on the German payroll and send him packing. “Notwithstanding his great desire
2
to serve the Germans, this Lt Colonel apparently did not have the courage to approach the naval judge” and simply demand that he open the letters. Garrigós did, however, persuade someone in the naval office to tell him what was in the briefcase. He sent the list to Clauss:
three British operation bulletins
two plans
thirty-three photographs
three envelopes addressed to Cunningham, General Eisenhower, and General Alexander
Helpfully, but unnecessarily, Garrigós added, “These three persons are in command
3
of the Allied troops in North Africa.” Clauss knew that whatever was in that briefcase must be extremely interesting. Heavier guns were mobilized. The German consul, Ludwig Clauss, was once again wheeled out and asked by his son to approach his “intimate friend,”
4
Joaquín Miranda González, the civilian governor of Huelva and head of the provincial Falange. A keen fascist, Miranda “nursed a profound antipathy
5
towards the British, in common with the sentiment among most officials, and maintained excellent relations with the German consulate. … He treated the Germans with favouritism and the British with a heavy hand.” Miranda was anxious to help and made discreet enquiries at the naval office, but he too stopped short of demanding that the letters be opened. “This gentleman,” reported one of Hillgarth’s agents, “did not dare to ask the naval judge
6
for copies of the documents.” Clauss received this fresh rebuff with mounting frustration and growing curiosity. He had spent a small fortune bribing the local officials. “In Huelva, Don Adolfo
7
can open every door,” it was said. Yet the door to Captain Elvira’s safe remained firmly shut. A bag full of secret British documents had been sitting in Huelva for three days, and so far, these had been “neither copied nor photographed
8
[and] were only seen and read in the naval judge’s office.” The three envelopes, which Clauss knew must contain the most important information, were still sealed.
Back in London, Cholmondeley and Montagu were equally frustrated that the information appeared to have reached its target, only to become lodged in the annoyingly honest hands of the Spanish navy. They decided to give the pot a stir.
Alan Hillgarth sent a cable to London, unencrypted, reporting that Major Martin of the Royal Marines had been laid to rest with due decorum: “I am glad to say the naval
9
and military authorities were well represented and extremely sympathetic.” Two days after the funeral—enough time, it was estimated, for news of Major Martin’s death to filter through the British military bureaucracy—the Naval Intelligence Department in London sent a much less casual-sounding cable to Hillgarth in Madrid, numbered 04132. It was marked Top Secret but intended for German eyes and carefully flavored with rising anxiety. “Some of papers Major Martin
10
had in his possession are of great importance and secrecy. Make formal demand for all papers and notify me by personal signal immediately of addressees of any official letters recovered. Such letters should be returned addressed to Commodore Rushbrooke, Personal, by fastest safe route and should not repetition not be opened or tampered with in any way. If no official letters are recovered make searching but discreet inquiries at Huelva and Madrid to find whether they were washed ashore and if so what has happened to them.”
At the same time, Montagu sent a separate message to Hillgarth, using the secret personal cipher that was the only safe method of communication with the spy-riddled embassy in Madrid. “Carry out instructions
11
in my Naval Signal as this is necessary cover but lack of success is desirable.” The message merely confirmed what Hillgarth already knew. The novelist/naval attaché would be creating a fiction especially for Kühlenthal and his informants, but, once again, this would need to be done with extreme subtlety. The Germans knew British diplomatic methods by now: if a bag full of secrets really had been lost, the British would still not rush in and demand its return, as this would tip off the Spanish to its importance. Hillgarth must start with an apparently routine enquiry and then gradually give the impression of greater and greater urgency. It was a tricky balancing act, since enquiries must be “kept on such a plane
12
as (theoretically) not to arouse Spanish suspicions that we were really frightened that someone might get those documents, but in fact making it plain to them that we were so frightened.”
Hillgarth passed on London’s message to Haselden in Huelva, instructing him to make a “searching but discreet”
13
investigation into the whereabouts of these important and secret papers. At the same time, he set the first cog of Madrid’s mighty rumor mill grinding into action. In wartime Spain, practically the only commodity freely available everywhere was gossip: spies traded in it, the government was saturated with it, and just about everyone, from Franco down, indulged in it. Gossip was currency. Gossip was power. “Rumours are extremely easy
14
to spread in Spain,” wrote Hillgarth. “The country lives on word of mouth stories. A casual word in a club or café is often enough.” To get a rumor flying, he told London, all he need do was “select from among his acquaintance
15
the most inveterate gossips and, taking into account their connections, use them accordingly.” Hillgarth quietly began to spread word that the British were searching for an important set of documents in Huelva: he knew that, as in any game of “telephone,” the story would be mangled and inflated as it passed from one gossip to the next, and with any luck, it would soon reach the Germans, who would react accordingly.
The British naval attaché also made an unobtrusive approach to Rear Admiral Moreno, the Navy Minister. Hillgarth liked Moreno, believing him to be “sincerely anti-war.”
16
The two men were friends, although perfectly happy to use their friendship for mutual manipulation. On an earlier occasion, Hillgarth recalled, “I managed to make the Minister
17
of Marine so sorry for me because he could not do what I wanted that in the end he did it, at considerable hazard to himself, just because he felt he was letting a friend down if he didn’t.” Through a contact in the Spanish navy, Hillgarth sent word to the admiral, asking for assistance in securing the return of the attaché case. Hillgarth was careful to make the request a verbal one and commit nothing to paper. Moreno was a reliable and well-informed source and almost certainly one of the prime recipients of British gold. But Hillgarth also knew that the Spanish minister of marine, while professing his attachment to Britain and to Hillgarth personally, was in close contact with the German embassy and spoke frequently to the German ambassador, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff. Moreno was the ideal conduit: he was the government minister in command of the navy, and thus likely to see the documents sooner rather than later; he would make strenuous efforts to retrieve them and return them to Britain; but he could also be relied upon to pass on the information to the Germans, or at least enable access to the documents, thus ensuring the continued goodwill of both sides. Four days after the funeral of Major Martin, Hillgarth secretly reported to London “that the Minister of Marine,
18
who knew nothing of the papers or effects, was expecting an early report” from naval authorities in the south and had pledged to keep him abreast of developments. Hillgarth gave Moreno no indication of what might be in the briefcase and was careful to avoid any impression of undue anxiety.