Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (37 page)

The letters had been handed over to Leissner, as head of the Abwehr in Spain, but it was Karl-Erich Kühlenthal who bore them back in triumph to Germany. The copied documents were far too secret and significant to be sent by wireless or telegram. As Leissner later observed, the decision to send Kühlenthal in person was a measure of “the importance attached to them.”
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It appears that Berlin may already have been informed that the documents had been intercepted and summoned the wunderkind of the Madrid station to bring them by hand. He, and only he, should present this new intelligence coup to the high command, and, since it came from Kühlenthal, it was far more likely to be believed. From the British point of view, this was ideal. The credibility of intelligence often depends less on its intrinsic value than on who finds it and who passes it on. Presentation is critical, and, from the British point of view, Major Martin’s documents were now in the hands of the ideal courier. Lieutenant Colonel Pardo of the Spanish General Staff was interviewed once more, in order to obtain more details about how and when the body and its hoard of secrets had been found. This information, written up sometime later, would go into a long report entitled “Drowned English Courier picked up at Huelva”:

On the 10th May, 1943, a further conversation with the case officer clarified the following questions:

1. The courier carried, clutched in his hand, an ordinary briefcase which contained the following documents:

a) An ordinary white paper as a cover for the letters addressed to General Alexander and Admiral Cunningham. This white paper carried no address.

The letters were contained each in its own envelope with the usual superscription and addressed personally to the recipients, and apparently sealed with the private seal of the sender (signet ring). The seals were intact.

The letters themselves, which I have already had replaced in their original envelopes, are in good condition. For the purposes of reproduction they were dried by artificial heat by the Spaniards, and thereafter were again placed for some 24 hours in salt water, without which their condition would undoubtedly have been altered.

b) In the portfolio there were also the proofs of the pamphlet on the functions of Combined Operations Command referred to by Mountbatten in his letter of the 22nd April, 1943, as also the photographs mentioned in the letter. The proofs are in excellent condition, but the photographs are completely ruined.

2. In addition the courier carried in his breast pocket a letter-case containing personal papers, among them his military papers with photographs. (These papers connect up with Mountbatten’s reference to Major Martin in his letter of 22nd April). There were, too, a letter to Major Martin from his fiancée and another from his Father, also a London night-club bill dated 27th April. Therefore Major Martin left London on the forenoon of the 28th April and during the afternoon of the same day the aircraft met with an accident in the neighbourhood of Huelva.

3. The British Consul was present at the discovery and knows all about it. On the pretext that anything found on the corpse, including all documents, must be made available to competent Spanish authorities, we anticipated representations which the British Consul would probably have made for the immediate delivery of the documents. All the documents were, after reproduction, replaced in their original condition in such a way that even I would have been convinced, and definitely give the impression that they have not been opened. In the course of the next few days they will be handed back to the British by the Spanish Foreign Office.

Enquiries regarding the remains of the pilot of the aircraft, presumably wounded in the crash, and interrogation of the same concerning other passengers, are already being put in hand by the Spanish General Staff.

The report was unsigned, but the phrase “even I would have been convinced” was typical of Kühlenthal’s braggadocio. Equally characteristic were the mistakes and exaggerations, the overstatement that was his Achilles’ heel. He implied that a pilot had been found and was being interrogated; he claimed to have overseen the reinsertion of the letters, a process at which he was merely an observer; he described the seals as personal signet ring seals, when they were standard military seals; he made no mention of the chain attaching the briefcase to the body, but instead added the melodramatic (and inaccurate) detail that the corpse had been found clutching the briefcase. Describing the theater tickets as nightclub receipts was an easy mistake to make, but getting the date wrong was not. The date on these was April 22, not April 27. The body was discovered on April 30. According to Kühlenthal’s report, the body had been immersed for less than three days when it was picked up, a time line flatly contradicted by the state of decomposition and the autopsy, which estimated that death had occurred at least eight days earlier.

Bletchley Park intercepted a message indicating that Kühlenthal “left Madrid hurriedly for Berlin
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in order to consult at the latter’s request with Oblt von Dewitz, the evaluator of KO [Abwehr] Spain’s reports at the Luftwaffenführungsstab.” Kühlenthal was booked into the Adlon Hotel in Berlin but apparently traveled directly to Abwehr headquarters, south of the city. On May 9, he presented his delighted bosses with the greatest intelligence feat of his career.

Oddly, the significance of Kühlenthal’s rushing to Berlin does not seem to have been picked up at the time. The intercept may have been accidentally backdated or decoded too late to be of use, and the dates in Kühlenthal’s MI5 files are contradictory. Montagu and Cholmondeley remained unaware that Kühlenthal had flown to Germany in a hurry: as far as they knew, the documents were still marooned somewhere in the byzantine Spanish bureaucracy.

On May 11, Admiral Alfonso Arriago Adam, the Spanish chief of Naval Staff, arrived at the British embassy carrying a black briefcase and a buff envelope and asked to see the naval attaché, Alan Hillgarth. The Spanish officer explained that the Spanish Navy minister, Rear Admiral Moreno, was currently away in Valencia but had given him instructions to hand over to Hillgarth in person “all the effects and papers”
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found on the body of the British officer. “They are all there,”
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said Admiral Arriago, with a knowing look. The key, removed from Major Martin’s key ring, was in the briefcase lock, and the case was unlocked. “From his manner it was obvious
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Chief of Naval Staff knew something [of the] contents,” wrote Hillgarth. “While expressing gratitude I showed both relief and concern. Neither [the] secretary nor I showed any wish to discuss [the] matter further.” Having handed over the envelope containing the wallet and other items, the Spanish admiral saluted crisply and departed.

Locking his office door, Hillgarth gingerly opened the case and peered inside. This was his first glimpse of the hard evidence he had worked so strenuously to pass to the Germans. He was under strict instructions not to open the letters or rearrange the contents in any way, since these would need to be microscopically studied back in London. The Spaniards did not disguise that the case had been opened. “It is obvious [that the] contents of [the] bag
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have been examined though some of the documents appear to be stuck together by sea water,” Hillgarth reported to London. He wrapped the case and other effects in paper, addressed the parcel to Ewen Montagu, Naval Intelligence Department, Whitehall, and sent a telegram explaining that the package would be included in the sealed diplomatic bag on the first flight to London, leaving Madrid on May 14. Hillgarth was convinced that the Spanish chief of Naval Staff knew what was in the case but added: “While I do not believe
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he will divulge his knowledge to the enemy it is clear [a] number of other people are in [on the] secret. It is to say the least extremely probable that it has been communicated to [the] enemy. In any case notes or copies have certainly been made.” Hillgarth also requested permission to ask the SIS head of station to try to find out through whose hands the documents had passed. “If you concur I will ask
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23000 to discover through his channels whether Germans have got them as he can do if they get to Combined General Staff (which they almost certainly will).” In fact, of course, the letters had come back to the naval authorities from the General Staff.

Hillgarth’s telegram was the first solidly good news since the body had come ashore, yet it did not amount to hard evidence that the Germans had obtained the documents, and still less that they believed the contents.

Unbeknownst to anyone on the British side, by the time the letters were back in British hands, the Germans had been poring over them for at least forty-eight hours. On May 9, 1943, the Abwehr forwarded the letters to the German high command, with an accompanying message stating that “the genuineness of the report
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is held as possible”—though that note of caution would swiftly evaporate. The task of authenticating the letters would fall to the intelligence branch of the German army’s high command, Fremde Heere West (Foreign Armies West), or FHW: the linchpin of German military intelligence. At its headquarters in a two-story bunker in Zossen, south of Berlin, FHW received and evaluated all intelligence connected to the Allied war effort. The unit was run by professional officers from the General Staff but also staffed by reserve personnel, journalists, businessmen, and bankers with the ability to think beyond structured military ideas. At FHW, every scrap of intelligence was subjected to scrutiny and analysis: Abwehr reports, communications intercepts, prisoner interrogations, reconnaissance data, and captured documents. FHW issued long-range assessments of enemy planning and, every two weeks, a detailed survey of the Allied armies and their dispositions, the order of battle. These top secret documents were distributed not only to Hitler and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, under Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, but also to German commanders in the field. Daily situation reports assessing Allied strength and intentions were sent directly to the Führer himself, together with information on troop movements, enemy activity, and any newly discovered intelligence. The FHW reports represented the cream of German intelligence and the most direct access route into Hitler’s mind.

The Führer was in need of some good news. In four months, Hitler had lost one eighth of his fighting men on the battlefields of North Africa and the eastern front. Fleets of bombers were tearing German cities and industries to shreds. Germany was now losing the underwater war: forty-seven U-boats were sunk in May, triple the number sunk in March, thanks to the code breakers’ pinpointing the “wolf pack.” Hitler blamed his military leaders. “He is absolutely sick of the generals,”
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Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary. “All generals lie. All generals are disloyal.” Hitler needed to be told something he could believe in, to counter the lies of his generals, to bolster the mad myth of his own invincibility. The German intelligence service would now oblige.

Presiding over FHW was Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne. A small, bespectacled aristocrat whose family had once ruled swaths of Baltic Germany, von Roenne was a former banker and still looked like one; he was meticulous, pedantic, snobbish, intensely Christian, and glintingly intelligent. “Behind his rimless spectacles
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and compressed lips there worked a brain as clear as glass,” wrote one historian. Von Roenne had volunteered to fight on the eastern front, suffered a serious wound, and been transferred back to military intelligence, where he ascended rapidly, developing his own intelligence technique, which involved piecing together a picture of the enemy, a
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, from tiny fragments of information. As a result, he enjoyed an almost mystical reputation for divining and predicting Allied intentions. The myth of von Roenne’s infallibility was largely undeserved, but, critically, it was believed by Hitler, who held von Roenne in the highest regard: when the command of FHW fell vacant in the spring of 1943, the Führer personally ordered the appointment of the small, clever, Latvian-born aristocrat. Von Roenne had been in control of the western intelligence arm of the German army for just two months when the Mincemeat letters landed on his desk at Zossen.

Montagu had rightly predicted that the Germans would examine such a trove of information with profound suspicion and extreme caution. The Spaniards had handed over the two crucial letters, but the Germans had also obtained a full inventory and description of every item in the briefcase, wallet, and pockets of the dead man: “The Germans studied each phrase
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of the material letters with great care and also were fully informed about the documentary build-up of Major Martin’s personality.”

The first full German intelligence assessment of the documents was written on May 11 and signed by Baron von Roenne himself. It was addressed to the OKW Operations Staff, or Wehrmachtführungsstab, headed by General Alfred Jodl, and entitled, portentously, “Discovery of the English Courier.”
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It began: “On the corpse of an English courier
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which was found on the Spanish coast, were three letters from senior British Officers to high Allied Officers in North Africa. … They give information concerning the decisions taken on the 23rd April, 1943, regarding Anglo-American strategy for the conduct of the war in the Mediterranean after the conclusion of the Tunisian campaign.” Major Martin is described as “an experienced specialist
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in amphibious operations.”