StraitTales2

 

Operation Algeciras: the full story.                      

 The most recent military assault against Gibraltar took place around forty years ago, yet many of us knew little or nothing about it until well after the event. It happened during the Falklands campaign and this is how it came about.

At the start of 1982, the Argentinean junta faced almost insurmountable problems; the economy was on the brink of collapse and the population was baying for a return to democracy. Dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri considered his options and he favoured invading the Falklands. He could ride a wave of patriotic fervour and become a national hero overnight... he thought. Just like our neighbours, he would distract the populace from domestic problems, in his case by launching a daring military adventure. His logic was based on the mistaken belief that Britain would not respond. The military junta failed to comprehend the diplomatic double-talk common amongst northern European nations, particularly in the area of reading between the lines, to discern what was actually meant, from what was said. His confidence was bolstered by the fact that the islands were just a 1000 miles away – for ease of logistical support – but half the world away from Britain. We all know the outcome... though with hindsight many believe Maggie could have solved it with a few cruise missiles into their parliament, principal TV and power stations.

When the British assembled the task force (Operation Corporate), the junta determined that an attack on Britain was desirable but not achievable. A trawler full of explosives was unlikely to reach the Houses of Parliament even if it made it into the Thames. However, the British logistics tail was a long one and an attack against Gibraltar would result in ships being tasked to The Rock and so deplete the flotilla. That is how Operation Algeciras was conceived.

 

Admiral Jorge Anaya, former military junta member who commanded the Argentine navy at the time of war, expressly ordered the offensive against Gibraltar. He already had his man; his team leader was to be Maximo Nicoletti,   a man with an impressive CV for acts of terrorism. In 1974 a limpet mine killed the Argentine Federal Police Chief, Alberto Villar and his wife, whilst on board their yacht. Less than a year later, in 1975, a brand new Type 42 destroyer, the Santissima Trinidad, under construction in Rio Santiago shipyard, was sabotaged when a gelamon mine (a type of nitro glycerine) was detonated against her hull, sinking her as she was fitting out. The damage delayed completion for a year. Both attacks were carried out by Montoneros, a left wing terrorist group who opposed the military government.  The diver who led both attacks was Maximo Nicoletti, an underwater explosives expert. Incidentally, Maximo’s Italian father had served in the famous Decima Flottiglia MAS, the same commandos who attacked Gibraltar with Maiale human torpedoes during WW 2.

                      

                                                   Mussolini’s Decima Flottiglia MAS

 

Nicoletti was subsequently captured and tortured at the infamous Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada, (ESMA) where thousands of prisoners were tortured and killed. Others were drugged and thrown alive from aircraft into the Atlantic. Nicoletti was given the opportunity to save his skin by changing sides:

 “I negotiated for my life, we all had to do it” he said. Freed from ESMA in 1978, he then went to work for the junta assisting in a variety of covert operations against Venezuela and Chile, before being selected to lead Operation Algeciras.

This was the plan:

On April 24^th, two team members Nicoletti and Antonio Nelson Latorre, (el Pelado Diego) left Eziza airport Buenos Aires and flew to Paris. Their false passports were good, but not good enough, for the French Police suspected them. However they allowed them to board a flight to Madrid; and probably alerted the Spanish and British via Interpol. On arrival in Spain, the pair moved to an hotel in Estepona to await the arrival of the two remaining team members. The false passports were necessary as the team were officially disavowed by their government and told that if they were caught they should state that they were Argentine patriots working alone.

A few days later the other two commandos, ex-navy man Captain Hector Rosales, a spy, who had overall control of the operation, the liaison with Admiral Anaya and the only team member not an ex-Montonero, along with a man known-only as Marciano (the Martian) were met in Madrid and proceeded to the Argentine Embassy. There they collected two Italian made, 60 cms, hemispherical, limpet mines, each containing 25kg of tritonal (*). These had been shipped to Madrid via the diplomatic bag and were handed over to the team by the Argentine military attaché. Some have suggested that this occurred with the connivance of CESID, the (then) Spanish secret service, but no evidence has yet emerged. The explosives, re-breather sets and the rest of their kit was carefully transferred to Algeciras by car. Carefully, because at that time Spain was still on high alert. They had suffered an attempted coup a year earlier, when Antonio Tejero lead two hundred armed Guardia Civil into the Congress of Deputies. And Spain was now about to host the World Cup whilst simultaneously trying to run down Basque terrorists from ETA. This led the team to use three cars, sending scouts ahead to look for possible police checkpoints; just as the IRA did a few years later. After a narrow escape at a police roadblock, they switched to minor roads, diverting to Ronda and eventually entering San Roque via the station road. Switching hotels every few days, they always paid in US dollars and swapped their hire cars regularly. They purchased a rubber dinghy (from Corte Ingles) and fishing gear to provide their cover. Their intention was to paddle out into the Bay, apparently fishing, sink the dinghy and swim with the mines to their targets. After planting the mines on British ships in the dead of night, they were to swim ashore at La Linea, where Latorre would be waiting with a car, and drive to Barcelona without waiting to observe the explosions.

The sabotage team spent the next week reconnoitring and then saw their first target, a British minesweeper. This was turned down by Anaya as too small. Next, a Liberian flagged oil tanker was selected, but again refused by HQ as the environmental damage to adjacent Mediterranean coasts would enrage the Spanish government and trigger international reactions. Finally on the 2^nd May the frigate HMS Ariadne arrived and was selected for the attack, only to be told by Anaya that a peace settlement was in the offing and the attack was cancelled. That same day, HMS Conqueror sank the General Belgrano; talks of peace evaporated.

 

      

                                                             HMS Ariadne a Leander Class frigate.

The attack on Ariadne never materialised because at that moment their plans unravelled. As Rosales and Pelado visited the shop to extend the car-hire, their instructions to always pay cash, in US dollars, had alerted a suspicious proprietor, who called the police. At least that’s the official line… as always with these things there are several versions of the truth. Another version says the Guardia Civil had alerted car hire companies to watch out for suspicious South American customers.

The British claimed to have known about it all along, from deciphered telephone taps on the Argentine embassy in Madrid and after tense discussions in the war cabinet (about whether Spain could be trusted) alerted Spain at the last moment. The Spanish claim that they were looking for South American criminals known to be at large in the area. They say the whole operation was police and Ministry of Interior led, and had no CESID involvement. CESID would neither confirm nor deny anything… but were known to believe that campo Guardia Civil were too well connected with local smugglers and had they been informed, then the game would be up. One local legend says the Guardia Civil thought they were busting a new band of (unconnected) smugglers. So we will probably never know the actual truth. However, it is true that by whatever means, the Guardia Civil managed to frustrate what would have been a serious attack against Gibraltar.

What we do know is that is that Nicoletti and Marciano were asleep in bed at the Hotel Guadacorte, Los Barrios, and awoke to find a room full of policemen. Nicoletti was arrested but Marciano managed to escape and fled across country to reach the Arroyo de la Mujer, two kilometres from San Roque, where he met a police patrol coming towards him and was arrested.

Despite instructions, Nicoletti identified the team as Argentine agents with the perhaps surprising result that the police attitude softened when they realised that these were spies not crooks.  The Spanish police chose not to make the arrests public, nor did they see fit to inform their NATO ally, Britain, about the plot. After discovering the identity of their captives the police even dined out with them in a restaurant, at the prisoners’ invitation, en route to Malaga. They also allowed Nicoletti to handle his own explosives; since they were not qualified to do so. Eventually they were quietly escorted across Spain, first to Madrid then the Canary Islands before being allowed to leave on a flight to Buenos Aires on their known-to-be-false passports.

We all know the outcome of the conflict but what happened to Nicoletti? Well, he didn’t re-emerge publicly until March 1994, when he was imprisoned as leader of a six man team who robbed an armoured car of the TAB-Torres company. They fired on the truck using Belgian FAL automatic rifles and quickly relieved it of 1.8 million pesos which disappeared never to be seen again. After five years in prison, he was subsequently released, via some judicial loophole (reasons unclear) and is now trying to reclaim the both the weapons and 120K pesos that he claims were kidnapped from him at the time of his arrest. Truth, they say is stranger than fiction. Currently aged 70, he is now operating as a private investigator, for high net worth clients with dubious connections.

 (*) The explosive Tritonal is a castable mixture of 20-40% aluminium and 60-80% trinitrotoluene (TNT). It is around 18-20% more effective than TNT alone and ideal for limpet mines.

 

First published at History Society Chronicle 2020.    Paul Hodkinson.