Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (36 page)

Major Kühlenthal was tying himself in knots trying to find out where the papers might be, and whom he needed to bribe in order to get them. Admiral Moreno, it seemed, had taken receipt of the attaché case personally and then handed over everything to the Alto Estado Mayor, the Supreme General Staff. Kühlenthal had several high-level contacts within the General Staff, but when enquiries were made there, the Abwehr was “informed that they had not
⁴³
received the documents or copies of them and in fact that they knew nothing at all about the matter.” Next stop was the Spanish Ministry of War, but the response was the same. The Abwehr now turned to the Gestapo, which maintained a permanent office in Spain. The Gestapo chief in Spain was asked to get in touch with his informants in the Dirección General de Seguridad, or DGS, the state security apparatus, and get them working on the case. “Again they failed,
⁴⁴
as nothing was known about the matter.” The last person known to have had the package was Admiral Moreno, who had received it from “an official of the [Cádiz] Marine
⁴⁵
Commandant’s Office;” but no one seemed to know whom he had passed it to, and the Germans “did not dare approach
⁴⁶
the Ministry of Marine” to ask him, as Moreno would almost certainly tip off the British to the hunt.

For help, the Germans turned to one of their most trusted spies, a Spanish air force officer named Captain Groizar, “an assiduous worker for the Germans,”
⁴⁷
in the words of Agent Andros, with wide-ranging military contacts. Groizar reported “that he had heard about the body
⁴⁸
and documents being washed ashore and promised to get into touch with the Army General Staff.” Groizar appears to have worked, in some undefined capacity, for Spanish intelligence, enjoying “many privileges and facilities
⁴⁹
to investigate anything in which he may be interested.” The Spanish captain went first to the General Staff, without success; he then applied to the DGS but was “unable to obtain any fresh
⁵⁰
information;” then he made contact with “certain high officials in the police,”
⁵¹
with the same negative result. Groizar’s enquiries produced nothing, but by poking sticks into every corner of the Spanish military hierarchy, the Germans stirred up a swarm of speculation surrounding the missing briefcase. “Great interest was aroused
⁵²
in these documents,” Andros later reported. “Groizar fostered this interest
⁵³
to such an extent that eventually Lt. Colonel Barron, Secretary General of the Directorate General of Security, took a personal interest in the matter.”

This was the turning point. Colonel José López Barrón Cerruti was Spain’s most senior secret policeman, a keen fascist, and an exceptionally tough cookie. He had fought in the Blue Division, the Spanish volunteer unit sent to the Russian front to fight alongside Hitler’s troops, and he now ran Franco’s security service with ruthlessness and guile. The Blue Division, formed in 1941 and so called for the color of its Falangist shirt, represented the high-water mark of Spanish military collaboration with Nazi Germany. If the Condor Legion, in which both Adolf Clauss and Kühlenthal had served, was Germany’s gift to Franco, then the Blue Division was Spain’s gift to Hitler. No other nonbelligerent country raised an entire division to fight in the war. Some forty-five thousand Spaniards volunteered to fight for fascism, and Barrón was among the first. Like all members of the division, he had sworn a personal military oath to Hitler. The Blue Division had fought fiercely on the eastern front in appalling conditions for over two years, leaving five thousand dead. “One can’t imagine
⁵⁴
more fearless fellows,” declared SS general Sepp Dietrich. Hitler had been so impressed by the division that he had ordered a special medal for its members. The unit had been formally disbanded in 1943. By then, José Barrón had become Franco’s head of security. Hillgarth had his own spies within the state security apparatus, but the prevailing attitude in the DGS was vigorously pro-German. Under Barrón, the unit actively worked to gather information for the Germans and ordered provincial governors to compile files on every Jew in Spain. Colonel Barrón, then, was a battle-hardened fascist veteran, an avowed Germanophile presiding over a secret police force riddled with spies and German sympathizers. Once Colonel Barrón was on the scent, it was only a matter of time before the documents were located and made available to the Germans.

Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, ambitious and paranoid, was becoming frantic. He was now in the same uncomfortable position in which he had placed Adolf Clauss, under growing pressure from above to produce documents he had promised but unable to deliver. Word of the elusive British attaché case had by now reached the upper echelons in Berlin, most notably Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. Canaris had close links with the Spanish government dating back to the First World War, when he had worked as a secret agent in Spain under civilian cover, gathering naval intelligence. In 1925, Canaris had established a German intelligence network in Spain. He spoke fluent Spanish and cultivated close relations with the Nationalists, including General Franco himself and Martínez Campos, his intelligence chief. It was almost certainly Kühlenthal, the Abwehr chief’s protégé, who informed Canaris of the so-far-fruitless hunt for the documents, “in the hope that he will come to Spain
⁵⁵
where they think he will be able to obtain copies because of his great friendship with many high military officers, especially General Vigon, Minister for Air, and General Asensio, Minister for War.” Juan Vigón, former head of the Supreme General Staff, had personally negotiated with Hitler, on behalf of Franco, in the early days of the war. Carlos Asensio was keenly pro-German and had long argued that Spain should enter the war in support of Hitler. According to a British intelligence report, “approaches were made by the Germans”
⁵⁶
to both men, but in the end, the aid of these two powerful generals, and the intercession of Canaris, proved unnecessary.

Nine days after arriving in Spain, the faked letters landed in the Germans’ lap.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kühlenthal’s Coup

B
RITISH INTELLIGENCE
would not discover the name of the man who had handed over the Mincemeat papers to the Germans for another two years. In April 1945, as the Nazis retreated, a group of British Naval Intelligence commandos, a unit set up by none other than Ian Fleming, captured the entire German admiralty archives at Tambach Castle near Coburg. Fleming himself traveled to Germany to supervise the unit he referred to as his “Red Indians”
¹
and ensure the safe return of the German files to Britain. Among the documents were several relating to Operation Mincemeat, including one revealing the identity of the officer on the Spanish General Staff who had presented the documents to the Abwehr: this was one Lieutenant Colonel Ramón Pardo Suárez, described by the Germans as “a Spanish Staff Officer
²
with well established connections” and an informant “with whom we have been in contact
³
for many years.” Years later, Wilhelm Leissner was still covering up Pardo’s identity, describing him merely as “my Spanish agent in the General Staff.”
⁴
Pardo’s brother, José, was civil governor of Zaragoza and Madrid, and a senior figure in the Franco regime. Ramón Pardo would go on to become a general, governor of the Spanish Sahara, and, finally, general director of the Spanish Department of Health.

Ramón Pardo was not acting alone, and German documents clearly indicate he was under instructions from a higher authority and may even have been assigned as “case officer”
⁵
to liaise between the General Staff and the Germans. Agent Andros indicates, though he does not state explicitly, that pressure from the security chief, Colonel Barrón, brought about the decision to pass over the documents. It may well have been agents of Barrón’s security service who successfully extracted the letters from their envelopes and then replaced them, leaving barely a trace.

The British later worked out exactly how the Spanish had performed this delicate and difficult task. The letters had been stuck down with gum and then secured with oval wax seals. “Those seals held the envelopes
⁶
closed as all the gum had washed off.” By pressing on the top and bottom of the envelope, the lower flap of the envelope, which was larger than the top one, could be bent open. Inserting a thin metal double prong with a blunt metal hook into the gap, the Spanish spies snagged the bottom edge of the letter, wound the still-damp paper tightly around the probe into a cylindrical shape, and then pulled it out through the hole in the bottom half. Even the British, normally so dismissive of the espionage efforts of others, were impressed by the Spaniards’ ingenuity: “It was possible to extract
⁷
all the letters through the envelopes by twisting them out [leaving] the seals intact and untampered with.”

The letters were then carefully dried with a heat lamp. No one, needless to say, noticed a microscopic eyelash falling out of the unfolded sheet of notepaper. The letters were then almost certainly copied by the Spanish officials, although no copies have ever come to light. “The Spaniards had, very intelligently,
⁸
not bothered to supply photographs of the letter to Eisenhower, which only dealt with the pamphlet on Combined Operations, and was mere padding.” The two other letters, however, were clearly very significant indeed.

These letters were taken by Lieutenant Colonel Pardo of the General Staff to the German embassy and handed, in person, to Leissner, the Abwehr chief in Spain, who was told he had one hour to do whatever he wanted with them. Leissner understood English, while Kühlenthal spoke and read the language fluently. The Germans immediately realized that they had stumbled on something explosive, an impression doubtless compounded by the difficulties they had encountered in obtaining the documents. “They seemed to me to be
⁹
of the highest importance,” Leissner later recalled. The letters not only indicated an imminent Allied landing in Greece, and possibly Sardinia too, but specifically identified Sicily as a decoy target.

“A short white-haired man
¹⁰
with a birdlike brightness of eye,” Leissner “gave more the impression of a diplomat than an intelligence officer.” By 1943, he had been all but supplanted by the energetic Kühlenthal, but he was no fool. Even on this first, swift reading, something about the documents struck him as odd: “These letters mentioned
¹¹
the operational name ‘Husky.’ That stuck in my memory, because it seemed to me a dangerous thing to name the code-word in the same document as discussed the possible destinations.” He was also cautious about drawing firm conclusions from a single letter and considered “the strategic considerations
¹²
not definite enough to suggest an already fixed target on the North Mediterranean coast. … The final choice seemed to be left to General Alexander.” Kühlenthal, by contrast, with the mixture of eagerness and gullibility that defined him, seems to have entertained no such doubts. Just as he had run the Garbo network for years without once questioning its veracity, so he believed the Mincemeat letters, instantly and unquestioningly.

The German spies moved quickly, knowing that the documents must be returned within the hour. “I took them to the basement
¹³
of the German Embassy,” Leissner later recalled, “and had my photographer photo-copy them there. I even stood over him while he worked, so that he could not read the documents.” Leissner informed Dieckhoff, the German ambassador to Spain, of the discovery and described the contents of the letters to him.

The original documents were now returned to Lieutenant Colonel Pardo, who took them back to the offices of the General Staff, accompanied by Kühlenthal. The German spy observed as the Spanish technicians reinserted the letters into the envelopes, reversing the method used to extract them. It is hard enough to remove a damp letter from an envelope this way, but harder still to get one back in without creasing the paper, leaving telltale marks, or breaking the seals. The Spanish spy responsible must have been astonishingly dextrous, for to the naked eye “there was no trace whatever”
¹⁴
to show that the letters had left their envelopes. The letters were then placed in salt water and soaked for twenty-four hours to return them to their damp condition. Finally, the envelopes and book proofs were replaced in the attaché case, which was relocked and then passed back to the Spanish Navy Ministry, along with Major Martin’s wallet and other personal property. The entire process—opening the letters, transferring them to the Germans, the copying, resealing, and restitution—was completed in less than two days. But even before the documents were back in Spanish hands, the copies were winging their way to Berlin.