Operation Mincemeat

Many years ago I read a book called The Man Who Never Was, by Ewen Montagu, about an espionage operation during World War II. A corpse washed ashore with secret papers that misled the Germans about invasion plans. The corpse had been given an identity, but the man never really existed.

That book has remained in print ever since it was published in the 1950s, but Ben Macintyre has written the complete story, called Operation Mincemeat, named after the code name of the operation. Montagu, one of the key intelligence officers involved in the deception, left some things out of his story. Most importantly, he left out the true identity of the corpse, which wasn't discovered until very recently.

After the Allies defeated the Axis in North Africa, the next step was Europe. The natural point of invasion was Sicily, but the problem was the Germans knew that, too. How to get the Germans to think the invasion might be somewhere else? One of the intelligence agents, Ian Fleming, had read a novel by a not-very-good mystery writer who used a plot of a phony person. Fleming presented the idea, which percolated among the intelligence community. Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley hatched the plan, which gained acceptance from Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower. First they had to find a body.

Macintyre reveals that it was Welsh man named Glyndwr Martin, a poor soul who presumably killed himself with rat poison. The British government appropriated the body (quite illegally) and set about creating a new identity of an officer named William Martin. They created a whole life for him, including parents and a fiancee. The plan was to have the body wash ashore, presumably drowned after an airplane crash, in Spain with classified documents that would suggest to whomever found him that the Allies were using Sicily as a decoy--they really planned to invade in Greece and Sardinia.

Macintyre covers the steps involved. He introduces us not only to the British participants, including an Admiral who was the basis for "M" in Fleming's James Bond novels (and the man who was the basis for "Q" as well) but also their German counterparts, including a gullible officer who swallowed the deception hook, line and sinker, and another one who Macintyre believes knew it was a phony, but said nothing because he was secretly acting against the Nazis.

It's a fascinating story, and certainly the case can be made that without Operation Mincemeat, a invasion of Southern Europe would have far more difficult (the Allies, partially under George Patton, took Sicily with minimal casualties).

Macintyre spins a great yarn, and has a droll touch. When discussing how "William Martin's" death was reported in the Times, he writes, "The Times was the place important people wanted to be seen dead in, and it is not possible to be deader than in the death columns of Britain's most venerable newspaper...This, however, was the first time in the newspaper's history that a person was formally pronounced dead without ever having been alive."

Then, when discussing the film version of Montagu's book, in which Montagu played a small role: "This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction."

Lovers of spy thrillers and World War II history will eat this up with a spoon, as will Anglophiles, as the British come off as smart and the Germans buffoons (except for Joseph Goebbels, who smelled a rat right away). The writing is distinctly for the general reader, and is a real page turner. Macintyre doesn't say so, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that the plot was an inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest, in that it's about a spy who doesn't exist.