Letters for a Spy Read Free

the authenticity of the find and the manner in which it had come about.
    Berlin had been staggered. Had instantly initiated further enquiries and had considered all the answers supplied by Madrid as being unbelievably sound. Even quasi-miraculous. God was on the side of the Axis. (He was, at least, to those who were still happy to acknowledge his existence.)
    Sir Archibald’s letter, formerly en route to the headquarters of the 18 th Army Group, mightn’t have been seen, conclusively, as one of those tablets fierily inscribed upon Mount Sinai—but it carried a message practically as life-altering.
    Though, granted, a little more informal. Almost gossipy. Containing comments avowedly off-the-record.
    Its real point was this: that after mention of an eastern Mediterranean operation involving a landing in Greece (which obviously came as a surprise to no one) there followed a similarly casual reference to a hope that the ‘Boche’ would automatically assume the western Mediterranean operation would be in Sicily.
    “Indeed, we stand a very good chance of making him think we will go for Sicily—it is an obvious objective and one about which he must be nervous.”
    There was no allusion at all to Sardinia but what we had instead—in a shorter, accompanying letter—was a joky allusion to sardines, somewhat contrived. (“And the English,” scoffed Mannheim, “have the temerity to call our sense of humour heavy-handed!”) This accompanying letter was addressed to Sir Andrew Cunningham, at the Allied Forces HQ, Algiers.
    “Dear Admiral of the Fleet,
    “I promised VCIGS that Major Martin would arrange with you for the onward transmission of a letter he has with him for General Alexander. It is very urgent and very ‘hot’ and as there are some remarks in it that could not be seen by others in the War Office, it could not go by signal. I feel sure that you will see that it goes on safely and without delay.
    “I think you will find Martin the man you want. He is quiet and shy at first, but he really knows his stuff. He was more accurate than some of us about the probable run of events at Dieppe and he has been well in on the experiments with the latest barges and equipment which took place up in Scotland.
    “Let me have him back, please, as soon as the assault is over. He might bring some sardines with him—they are ‘on points’ here!
    “Yours sincerely,
    “Louis Mountbatten.”
    Although I had been shown this letter before and had been given several minutes in which to digest it, Mannheim now—in heavily accented English—reread to me the sentence referring to the dead man’s prophecy. He hadn’t needed to. The fact that Lord Louis Mountbatten himself, Chief of Combined Operations, should be tacitly admitting the raid on Dieppe had been nothing short of a fiasco was something which must strongly appeal to anyone here who saw it. And, indeed, by this time word of the admission must surely have filtered through to everybody in Intelligence. Morale-boosting! How the Führer himself must have gone into transports when he heard of it!
    “So Anders,” said Mannheim finally, “there you have it. In a nutshell!”
    Mannheim wasn’t known for his levity—well, certainly not at work; certainly not in wartime. But now he added:
    “Or should I say, perhaps … in a tin of sardines?”

3
    But no. There I didn’t have it at all, neither in a nutshell nor in a tin of sardines.
    “Sir? Going back to the post-mortem for a moment … How reliable would that have been?”
    Mannheim shrugged. “The findings were the expected ones … and presumably correct. The man had drowned. He’d been in the sea for anything between four and six days.”
    The man . For some reason I didn’t like the way he said the man .
    “Do we know if there was any evidence of the impact made on him—made on Major Martin—when his plane came down?”
    “None mentioned.”
    “Isn’t that a little strange?” I felt like a detective. (As a