A. AN OFFICER WHO HAD NEVER EXISTED
The briefcase the Spanish authorities recovered was a standard brown leather courier’s case, the kind that any officer carrying classified military correspondence might use. It was chained to the dead man’s body with a standard military security attachment. Inside were, among other items, two sealed letters marked in the conventions of wartime British military correspondence as personal and most secret.
The letters were dated April 23, 1943. They were signed by serving senior officers of the British armed forces. They described, in the kind of incidental, professionally assured language that one general might use when writing to another, military planning details that pointed toward a major Allied assault on Greece, with secondary operations aimed at Sardinia.
Those details were fabricated. Every word of them.
The actual Allied plan, approved at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 by Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff, was to invade Sicily, the large triangular island at the toe of Italy. Sicily was the logical next step after the North African campaign was concluded: it would open the Mediterranean to Allied shipping, it would knock Italy out of the war or at least bring it under enormous pressure, and it would open the path to what Churchill called the “soft underbelly of Europe.”
Sicily was so obvious as the next target that planners worried about it. Winston Churchill himself was credited in planning documents with asking whether it was possible to make the enemy look anywhere but Sicily. The answer, as it turned out, was yes. But it required a dead man.