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 (16 page)
A cable was sent to Captain Alan Hillgarth, the naval attaché at the Madrid embassy and Churchill’s intelligence chief in Spain, asking him to send a trusted lieutenant to London for an urgent conference. Salvador Augustus Gómez-Beare, assistant naval attaché at the British Embassy in Madrid, duly presented himself at the Admiralty, fresh off the plane from Madrid, and was ushered into Room 13.
Gómez-Beare, universally known by his nickname “Don,” was an Anglo-Spaniard from Gibraltar who perfectly straddled the two cultures. He was a British citizen, enjoyed a large private income, spoke pure upper-class English, and displayed impeccable English manners and habits as only someone who is not English can. He played bridge with Ian Fleming at the Portland Club and golf all year round. But in Spain he was Spanish and brown-skinned, spoke with a southern accent, and was invisible. In 1914, as a medical student in Philadelphia, he had volunteered to join the British army, and spent two years in the trenches before joining the Royal Flying Corps. During the Spanish civil war he had “worked in military intelligence
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for Franco’s army.” Gómez-Beare could reach places no Englishman could penetrate, “a Spaniard to Spaniards
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and an Englishman to the English, who served England with an intensity and thoroughness that no mere Anglo-Saxon could attain.” Hillgarth had recruited him in 1939, initially suggesting he be given the rank of captain in the Royal Marines “because of his enormous
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RAF moustache.” He was given the rank of lieutenant commander in the RNVR on condition he shave and despite having “no more than a smattering of sea experience,”
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but from the start of the war, Gómez-Beare could be found “padding about Madrid,
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driving up to San Sebastian, flitting over to Barcelona, hovering about Gibraltar, and smuggling British airmen out of France.” When Airey Neave escaped from Colditz in 1942, it was Gómez-Beare who smuggled him across the border to Gibraltar. He had a villa in Seville, a flat in Madrid, and spies in every corner of Spain. Gómez-Beare was Hillgarth’s primary recruiter and runner of secret agents.
Alan Hillgarth, as a senior member of the embassy staff in a neutral country, could not be seen to engage directly in espionage or recruit spies, but Gómez-Beare was under no such constraints. In Hillgarth’s words, he was “exceptionally favoured by character
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and linguistic attainments to cultivate such people, and in the majority of cases his contacts would not have agreed to work with anyone else.” Gómez-Beare’s spies ran through the Spanish bureaucracy like veins through marble: he had agents in the Spanish police, the security service, the Ministry of the Interior, the General Staff, and every branch of the military. He had informants in high society and low, from the salons of Madrid to the docks of Cádiz. These spies never met one another and only ever made contact through Gómez-Beare himself. “He was invaluable,”
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said Hillgarth. “It was he who handled our special contacts. His loyalty and discretion are unequalled and the Spaniards, particularly the Spanish Navy, love him.”
The Germans, by contrast, did not love Don Gómez-Beare. Britain’s assistant naval attaché narrowly escaped being blown up by a car bomb during a clandestine visit to Lisbon. Madrid was a festering nest of espionage and counterespionage, and for four years a fierce war had raged between British spies and German spies in Spain, undeclared, unofficial, and unrelenting. Both sides deployed bribery and corruption on a lavish scale. Abwehr agents spied on their British counterparts, who responded in kind; the Spaniards spied on both sides, rather inefficiently. At first, the odds seemed stacked against the British. The Germans simply had too many advantages, with numerous “privileges and facilities
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(of course unofficially)” provided by willing Spanish collaborators. The Abwehr infiltrated all branches of the civil service, police, government, and even business. But with time, the contest leveled out, as Hillgarth and Gómez-Beare extended their web of informants through a combination of charm, bribery, and skulduggery. “Spain contained a large
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number of German agents and plenty of Spaniards in German pay,” wrote Hillgarth. “They had some ingenious ideas. We did our best to learn their plans, and to some extent succeeded.” In this febrile atmosphere, it was impossible to be sure who was spying for whom. “Madrid was full of spies,”
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wrote Hillgarth. “No one is watched all the time, but everyone is watched some of the time.”
And no one was watched more closely, or better at watching, than Don Gómez-Beare.
Once tea had been served in Room 13, Montagu and Cholmondeley laid out their plans before the Gibraltarian. Where, they asked, would be the best place to launch a dead body with false information into German hands? Gómez-Beare considered the problem. If the body washed up close to Cádiz, then it might simply be handed over to the British authorities in Gibraltar, which would scuttle the plan at the outset. There was also, he explained, a “danger of the body
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being recovered and/or dealt with by the Spanish Navy who might not cooperate with the Germans.” The navy, owing in part to the efforts of Gómez-Beare, was far more sympathetic to Britain than were other branches of the military, so if possible the body and its contents should be kept out of naval hands.
The ideal place, Gómez-Beare finally declared, would be somewhere near Huelva, the fishing port on Spain’s southwest coast where the River Tinto flows into the Atlantic. “German influence in Huelva
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is very strong,” explained Gómez-Beare, and the town was home to a large and patriotic German community. The British consul in Huelva, Francis Haselden, was “a reliable and helpful man”
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whose assistance would be needed for the ruse to succeed. Huelva also had a “very pro-German chief of police
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[who] would give the Germans access to anything of interest found on the body.”
But most importantly Huelva was the home turf of a particular—and particularly troublesome—German spy. The agent in question was “active and influential”
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across the region, as well as highly efficient, well connected, and perfectly ruthless. It would not merely be desirable to stitch this man up, Gómez-Beare observed with a smile, but a positive pleasure.
A
DOLF
C
LAUSS
collected butterflies. The walls of his large home were covered with cases of butterflies, each one carefully pinned and identified. He spent his days with a butterfly net, binoculars, and camera on the cliffs at Rábida, where the Odiel and the Tinto meet and flow into the sea, the spot from which Christopher Columbus prepared to set sail for the New World. Clauss owned a large farm at Rábida, where he grew enormous tomatoes and beets. He painted, played tennis in the evenings, and smoked filterless cigarettes whenever he was awake. He constructed elaborate wooden chairs that fell apart when you sat on them. Adolf was an extraordinary-looking man. A bout of malaria picked up while traveling in the Congo had rendered him cadaverously thin, and as the disease recurred, he grew ever more emaciated. His large ears stuck out at right angles. He looked like a corpse with two saucers attached. His tendency to appear at your shoulder, silently and without warning, earned him the nickname “The Shadow.”
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At forty-six, Clauss was said to have retired, although quite what he had retired from was a mystery.
The Clauss family was the richest in Huelva. Adolf’s father, Ludwig, was an industrialist and entrepreneur who had moved from Leipzig to Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. With his partner, Bruno Wetzig, Ludwig set up a company processing agricultural products, selling fish to the Madrid markets, and supplying food and other material to the workers in the British-owned Rio Tinto mines. Clauss and Wetzig made a fortune. With this Ludwig purchased land outside Huelva, built himself a large, walled compound, and became Germany’s honorary consul.
The German community was matched by the equally large, and even richer, British community. If the Clauss family ruled over the Germans of Huelva, then the Rio Tinto Company ruled everyone else, employing more than ten thousand workers and running the town like a corporate fiefdom. The mines were seventy miles inland, and the copper and pyrite were brought to the dock at Huelva by a specially constructed railway. The company bosses rode around on horseback and were referred to as “the viceroys,”
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so arrogant and regal was their bearing. The richer Spaniards aped British colonial manners, taking tea at five and playing bridge. Privately, the British were loathed and resented for extracting so much money from Spanish soil: “First the Romans
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mined it, then the British, then the Spanish, by which time there was nothing left.”
Like many colonists, the British and Germans tended to exaggerate their cultural distinctiveness. The British built a reproduction English village, which they called Queen Victoria Barrio, with gabled cottages and a village green. The Germans sent their children to be educated in Germany and maintained German traditions: Spain was home, but Germany was the fatherland. Before the war, the two communities had mixed on terms of social equality, playing golf and tennis together and attending one another’s functions. With the outbreak of war, all social contact ceased.
Spanish opinion in Huelva was divided on Adolf Clauss, Ludwig’s younger son. Some said he was “the black sheep,”
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because he never seemed to do any work. Others reckoned he was “the only clever one in the family,”
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again, because he never seemed to do any work. Clauss was very clever indeed, and he was also probably working harder than anyone else in Huelva, spying for Hitler’s Reich.
Adolf Clauss had trained as an architect and industrial engineer in Germany. At age seventeen, with the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the army and volunteered for secret service work. Speaking impeccable Spanish, he was sent on a mission by submarine to blow up British factories in Cartagena. The rubber dinghy he set off in sank, owing to the weight of explosives on board, and Clauss was finally picked up by the Spanish navy after treading water for eight hours. He was briefly imprisoned and then sent back to Germany. The incident, oddly, seemed only to increase Clauss’s appetite for cloak-and-dagger work, and by 1920, although theoretically working as an agricultural technician, he was already the chief Abwehr agent in Huelva. Marriage to the daughter of a senior Spanish army officer gave Clauss entrée into the fascist Falange movement. When civil war erupted, he immediately enlisted as a captain in the Condor Legion, the German volunteer unit fighting for the Nationalists under General Franco. Most infamously, pilots of the Condor Legion carried out the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, an act of brutality immortalized in Pablo Picasso’s famous painting. For most of the conflict, Clauss acted as the personal interpreter for Colonel Wilhelm von Thoma, commander of the Condor Legion’s ground contingent. When Madrid fell to the Nationalists, Captain Clauss proudly rode into the captured capital on his tank. He was awarded the Red Cross for Military Merit by a grateful Franco regime, to add to the Iron Cross already awarded for his service to Germany in the First World War. He later earned another Iron Cross from Hitler’s Third Reich. Clauss would later claim, as many did, that he had fought for Germany, not for Hitler. But there is no evidence he ever questioned Nazi policy. A number of Abwehr officers shrank from Hitler’s barbarism. Clauss was not one of these. When war broke out, he was happy to offer his well-honed espionage talents, his high-level Spanish contacts, and his almost limitless energies to the Nazi cause.
By 1943, Adolf Clauss was running the largest and most efficient spy ring on the Spanish coast. Huelva, situated between the Portuguese frontier and Gibraltar, was of vital strategic importance in the war. From here, British merchant ships headed into the Atlantic heavily laden with raw materials from the mines, and from his farm, ideally situated on the coast, Clauss monitored every ship leaving port and every ship coming in. His informants up and down the coast completed the picture. Sometimes he would take photographs using a Minox camera and long-distance lens. The information was then relayed to Berlin by a team of Abwehr wireless operators, working out of the German consulate at 51 Avenida de Italia. Adolf’s older brother Luis was an equally enthusiastic supporter of Nazism. Since their father, Ludwig Clauss, the honorary German consul, was now in his eighties and almost stone deaf, consular duties were delegated to Luis. Both sons were named vice-consuls, and the consulate was placed at the disposal of the Abwehr. Luis had a fleet of fishing vessels with onboard radios to relay shipping movements.
The other main function of the Abwehr chief in Huelva, in addition to sabotage and target spotting for U-boats, was bribery. Every evening, thin-faced Adolf Clauss could be found at the Café de la Palma, a bar near the port, buying drinks but drinking little, meeting and massaging his contacts, and discreetly distributing large quantities of cash. Clauss bribed everyone who mattered, and many who did not. He bribed the harbormaster and the stevedores, the officers of the Guardia Civil and the police chief. Word soon got out that Don Adolfo was prepared to pay handsomely for information on the movement of shipping, the activities of the British in Huelva, and the comings and goings of Spanish officials. Nothing could be said, nothing could be whispered, in Huelva without news eventually reaching the preternaturally large ears of Adolf Clauss, who faithfully relayed everything he heard back to his Abwehr bosses in Madrid.