On the morning of April 30, 1943, a Spanish fisherman spotted a body floating in the waters off Huelva, on Spain’s Atlantic coast. The man was wearing a British military uniform, a life preserver, and a trench coat. A briefcase was chained to his coat.
Within hours, Spanish naval authorities had taken custody of the body and its documents. Within days, senior German intelligence agents in Spain had seen the contents of that briefcase. Within weeks, Adolf Hitler had issued direct orders shifting German military defenses away from Sicily, the actual target of the largest Allied amphibious operation in history to that point, toward the coasts of Greece and Sardinia.
The man in the water was a Welsh laborer named Glyndwr Michael, who had died in a London hospital on January 28, 1943, and was buried in Huelva on May 2, 1943, under a name that had never belonged to him. The headstone read “Major William Martin, R.M.” Martin was a Royal Marines officer who had never existed. The documents in his briefcase described military operations that the Allies were not planning.
Everything about Major Martin, his rank, his assignment, his personal letters, his bank overdraft, his fiancée, the receipt for her engagement ring, was constructed in a London office by a small team of British intelligence officers working from an idea that had first appeared in a memo as “A Suggestion (not a very nice one).”
The suggestion worked. That is both the beginning and the end of the story. Everything in between is the question of how.