Operation Mincemeat How a dead man and a bizarre plan fooled the Nazis and assured an allied victory

IN February of 1943, a cast of colorful oddballs developed and carried out one of the most elaborate deceptions of World War II, a plan to disguise the impending Allied invasion of Sicily, framed around the body of a dead man. The deceased, who would wash up on the Spanish coast, was a complete fraud, but the lies he would carry from Room 13 of the British Admiralty all the way to Hitler's desk would help win the war. "The defining feature of this spy would be his falsity," Ben Macintyre writes in "Operation Mincemeat." "He was a pure figment of imagination, a weapon in a war far removed from the traditional battle of bombs and bullets." To flesh out the corpse's fictional identity, a truly eclectic group of talents was assembled, including a brilliant barrister, an eccentric 25-year-old Royal Air Force officer, a future thriller writer, a pretty secretary and a coroner with the implausible name of Bentley Purchase. And that's just the beginning. Together, they conspired to invent a "credible courier," conjuring a person with a name, a personality and a past. While still working out the precise mechanics of the deception - whether to drop the body from a plane or over the side of a boat, for example - they labored, in the manner of novelists, to create a mythic and somewhat flawed hero they called Maj. William Martin, choosing everything from his clothes to his likes and dislikes, habits and hobbies, strengths and weaknesses. Beginning with little things like "wallet litter," the usual items everyone accumulates over time, "individually unimportant but vital corroborative detail," they constructed a troubled financial history, a slightly dippy girlfriend and a pedantic Edwardian father, all sketched in a series of carefully fabricated letters. No detail was too small, be it an artful ink splotch on a note or the exact tone of the forged letter between British admirals discussing the planned assault that was the cornerstone of the deception. The overall scheme was actually a brilliant "double bluff," Macintyre writes, designed to "not only divert the Germans from the real target but portray the real target as a 'cover target,' a mere decoy," Stay with me here. The invasion of Sicily (then, as Macintyre tells us, "the largest amphibious landing ever attempted") was months in the planning, and its success depended on surprise. The question was how to catch the enemy off guard. The British were working on the assumption that the suspicious Germans would invariably hear rumors about the preparations of any major assault being mounted in North Africa, and would assume Sicily to be a possible target. So the idea was to feed the Germans a false plan (targeting Greece) dressed as the real one, together with the real plan (targeting Sicily) disguised as the diversionary cover. It was a fantastic gamble. Yet the operation succeeded beyond wildest expectations, fooling the German high command into changing its Mediterranean defense strategy and allowing Allied forces to conquer Sicily with limited casualties. It was one of the most remarkable hoaxes in the history of espionage. Ewen Montagu was a principal organizer of Operation Mincemeat, in which a corpse dressed as a military officer was used to convey spurious documents to the Nazis. Macintyre, whose previous book chronicled the incredible exploits of Eddie Chapman, the crook turned spy known as Zigzag, excels at this sort of twisted narrative. He traces the origins of the operation to the top-secret "Trout Fisher" memo signed by Adm. John Godfrey, the director of Britain's naval intelligence, in September 1939, barely three weeks into the war. "The Trout Fisher," said the memo, in that peculiarly sporting style that only the English can pull off, "casts patiently all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures." Although issued under Godfrey's name, it was most likely the work of Ian Fleming, whose gift for intelligence planning and elaborate plots, most of which were too far-fetched to ever implement, later served him so well in his James Bond series. The memo was "a masterpiece of corkscrew thinking," Macintyre writes, laying out 51 schemes for deceiving the Germans at sea, including one to drop soccer balls coated with phosphorus to attract submarines, and another to set adrift tins of booby-trapped treats. Far down on the list of suggestions, No. 28 - "not a very nice one," the author(s) conceded - proposed using a corpse, dressed as an airman, carrying spurious secret documents. That this suggestion was in turn based on an idea used in a detective novel by Basil Thomson, an ex-policeman and former tutor to the King of Siam who made his name as a spy catcher in World War 1, only adds to the fantastic quality of Macintyre's entertaining tale. First Fleming, an ardent bibliophile, dusted off this quaint literary ploy; then the trout-fishing admiral, who always appreciated a good yarn, had the cunning to know that "the best stories are also true," and dispatched his team to turn fiction into reality. In many ways it was a very old story at that, as indicated by the operation's first code name, "Trojan Horse." A bit of gallows humor led to the plan's name being changed to the rather tasteless Operation Mincemeat. The unlikely hero of this wartime tale was Ewen Montagu, a shrewd criminal lawyer and workaholic with a prematurely receding hairline and a penchant for stinky cheese - proving once again that not all spies are dashing romantic figures. At 38, too old for active service, Montagu was recruited by Godfrey and joined what Godfrey called his "brilliant band of dedicated war winners." Just as he had relished the cut-and-thrust of the courtroom, Montagu delighted in matching wits with his new opponents: "the German saboteurs, spies, agents and spy masters whose daily wireless exchanges - intercepted, decoded and translated - poured into Section 17M." Macintyre's thumbnail sketches of Montagu and company are adroit, if at times dangerously close to being over the top. He ignores Godfrey's warning about the danger of "overcooking" an espionage ruse, but for the most part all the rich trimmings and flourishes make for great fun. No novelist could create a better character than Montagu, and Macintyre bases his book on Montagu's wartime memoir, "The Man Who Never Was," as well as on an unpublished autobiography and personal correspondence. (A 1956 movie, "The Man Who Never Was," starring Clifton Webb, was also based on the memoir.) A case could easily be made that Montagu's younger brother, Ivor, was even more worthy of a book. (The oldest, Stuart, was a pompous bore.) Born into a Jewish banking dynasty of "dazzling wealth," the boys spent an idyllic childhood in a redbrick palace in the heart of Kensington and attended the posh Westminster School before going on to Cambridge. While at university, the two brothers managed to invent the rules for table tennis (Ivor went on to found the International Table Tennis Federation and served as its president for 41 years) and, of slightly less historical import, the Cheese Eaters League. While Ewen pursued a career in law, Ivor rebelled and became a committed Communist and a Soviet operative. Throughout the war, the two brothers were in effect working for different sides, both immersed in the spying game. Amazingly, Ewen was "entirely in the dark" about this fraternal disloyalty, though it certainly concerned his colleagues in MI5, who closely monitored Ivor's activities. For all the traitors working inside British intelligence, the greatest threat to Ewen Montagu's espionage operations may have been his own brother. The invasion of Sicily depended on surprise. The question was how to catch the Germans off guard. Jennet Conant is the author of "The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington."

Attain a corpse, load it with forged secret documents, and drop it off the coast of Spain where Nazi spies would be certain to discover it. These were the bare-bone essentials of one of the most important yet largely unknown Allied missions of WWII, which changed the course of history and saved thousands of lives. John Lee dazzles listeners with his seamless delivery that never ceases to excite; his classically trained tone is assertive and determined, capturing the importance of the mission and the dedication of the men at its helm. His voice shifts slightly to capture various British dialects, each as excellently executed as the last. A rousing listen. A Harmony hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 12). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Macintyre (assoc. editor, Times of London; Agent Zigzag) takes readers on an exciting World War II adventure as he details one of the most famous military intelligence operations of the 20th century. In July 1943 the semidecomposed body of a man who seemed to be a British soldier was discovered floating off of southwestern Spain. When the body was examined by Spanish officials (Spain was neutral but sympathetic to Germany), they identified him as Royal Marine officer William Martin and passed on the information discovered in his belongings. It was all a deception that included love letters from a fiancee, her photograph, stubs of London theater tickets, bank notices, and so on. More crucially, Major Martin was carrying sealed letters to senior military figures in North Africa. When these documents reached Berlin they induced a response from the German military that greatly enabled the Allied invasion of Sicily. Mcintyre turns this successful Allied endeavor into a rousing story, recounting also the life of the Welshman who died down on his luck and became the body of "William Martin." VERDICT This retelling of a well-known part of World War II espionage history will appeal to military history buffs, especially those new to this particular episode, and to readers of adventure fiction, who will find it hard to put down.-Sheri Beth Scovil, Bartow Cty. Lib. Syst., Cartersville, GA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The exciting story of the ingenious British ruse that distracted the Nazis from the Allied Sicilian invasion. Although the invasion finally took place July 10, 1943, allowing the Allied forces an initial foothold into the German "Fortress Europe," the trick that kept the Nazis from fortifying Sicily took place months before. The dead body of a British major, "William Martin," had been hauled in on April 30 by fishermen off the port of Huelva, Spain, a pro-German outpost, his briefcase full of top-secret letters by British officers detailing the invasions of Greece and Sardinia and sure to land in the eager hands of the Germans. In fact, the body was a plant, a suicide victim actually named Glyndwr Michael. He had been plucked from a morgue in London, kept on ice for a few months, dressed in a well-used British Navy uniform, stocked with identification, fake official letters and correspondence from his father and fiance "Pam," and slipped into the Spanish waters by a British submarine. London Times writer at large Macintyre (Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal, 2007, etc.) skillfully unravels this crazy, brilliant plan by degrees. The "corkscrew minds" at British Navy Intelligence, headed by John Godfrey and his assistant, Ian Fleming (yes, of James Bond fame), put forth the germ of the idea, which was then developed to its fantastic implementation by RAF flight officer Charles Cholmondeley and Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu, first under the code name "Trojan Horse," then the more prosaic "Operation Mincemeat." The author's chronicle of how the last two intelligence officers lovingly created an entire personality for "Major Martin" makes for priceless reading. Astoundingly, as Winston Churchill noted exultantly, the Nazis swallowed the bait "rod, line and sinker." Macintyre spins a terrific yarn, full of details gleaned from painstaking detective work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter One The Sardine Spotter José Antonio Rey María had no intention of making history when he rowed out into the Atlantic from the coast of Andalusia in southwest Spain on April 30, 1943. He was merely looking for sardines. José was proud of his reputation as the best fish spotter in Punta Umbria. On a clear day, he could pick out the telltale iridescent flash of sardines several fathoms deep. When he saw a shoal, José would mark the place with a buoy and then signal to Pepe Cordero and the other fishermen in the larger boat, La Calina, to row over swiftly with the horseshoe net. But the weather today was bad for fish spotting. The sky was overcast, and an onshore wind ruffled the water's surface. The fishermen of Punta Umbria had set out before dawn, but so far they had caught only anchovies and a few bream. Rowing Ana, his little skiff, in a wide arc, José scanned the water again, the rising sun warming his back. On the shore, he could see the little cluster of fishing huts beneath the dunes on Playa del Portil, his home. Beyond that, past the estuary where the rivers Odiel and Tinto flowed into the sea, lay the port of Huelva. The war, now in its fourth year, had hardly touched this part of Spain. Sometimes José would come across strange flotsam in the water- fragments of charred wood, pools of oil, and other debris that told of battles somewhere out at sea. Earlier that morning, he had heard gunfire in the distance, and a loud explosion. Pepe said that the war was ruining the fishing business, as no one had any money, and he might have to sell La Calina and Ana. It was rumoured that the captains of some of the larger fishing boats spied for the Germans or the British. But in most ways the hard lives of the fishermen continued as they had always done. José had been born on the beach, in a hut made from driftwood, twenty- three years earlier. He had never traveled beyond Huelva. He had never been to school or learned to read and write. But no one in Punta Umbria was better at spotting fish. It was midmorning when José noticed a "lump" above the surface of the water. At first he thought it must be a dead porpoise, but as he rowed closer the shape grew clearer, and then unmistakable. It was a body, floating, facedown, buoyed by a yellow life jacket, the lower part of the torso invisible. The figure seemed to be dressed in uniform. As he reached over the gunwale to grab the body, José caught a gust of putrefaction and found himself looking into the face of a man, or, rather, what had been the face of a man. The chin was entirely covered in green mold, while the upper part of the face was dark, as if tanned by the sun. José wondered if the dead man had been burned in some accident at sea. The skin on the nose and chin had begun to rot away. José waved and shouted to the other fishermen. As La Calina drew alongside, Pepe and the crew clustered to the gunwale. José called for them to throw down a rope and haul the body aboard, but "no-one wanted to touch it." Annoyed, José realized he would have to bring it ashore himself. Seizing a handful of sodden uniform, he hauled the corpse onto the stern, and with the legs still trailing in the water, he rowed back to shore, trying not to breathe in the smell. On the part of the beach called La Bota-the boot-José and Pepe dragged the body up to the dunes. A black briefcase, attached to the man by a chain, trailed in the sand behind them. They laid out the corpse in the shade of a pine tree. Children streamed out of the huts and gathered around the gruesome spectacle. The man was tall, at least six feet, dressed in a khaki tunic and trench coat, with large army boots. Seventeen-year-old Obdulia Serrano spotted a small silver chain with a cross around his neck. The dead man must have been a Roman Catholic. Obdulia was sent to summon the officer from the defense unit guarding this part of the coast. A dozen men of Spain's Seventy-second Infantry Regiment had been marching up and down the beach earlier that morning, as they did, rather pointlessly, most mornings, and the soldiers were now taking a siesta under the trees. The officer ordered two of his men to stand guard over the body, in case someone tried to go through the dead man's pockets, and trudged off up the beach to find his commanding officer. The scent of the wild rosemary and jacaranda growing in the dunes could not mask the stench of decomposition. Flies buzzed around the body. The soldiers moved upwind. Somebody went to fetch a donkey to carry the body to the village of Punta Umbria four miles away. From there, it could be taken by boat across the estuary to Huelva. The children dispersed. José Antonio Rey María, perfectly unaware of the events he had just set in motion, pushed his little boat back into the sea and resumed his search for sardines. Two months earlier, in a tiny, tobacco-stained basement room beneath the Admiralty building in Whitehall, two men had sat puzzling over a conundrum of their own devising: how to create a person from nothing, a man who had never been. The younger man was tall and thin, with thick spectacles and an elaborate air-force mustache, which he twiddled in rapt concentration. The other, elegant and languid, was dressed in naval uniform and sucked on a curved pipe that fizzed and crackled evilly. The stuffy underground cavern lacked windows, natural light, and ventilation. The walls were covered in large maps and the ceiling stained a greasy nicotine yellow. It had once been a wine cellar. Now it was home to a section of the British Secret Service made up of four intelligence officers, seven secretaries and typists, six typewriters, a bank of locked filing cabinets, a dozen ashtrays, and two scrambler telephones. Section 17M was so secret that barely twenty people outside the room even knew of its existence. Room 13 of the Admiralty was a clearinghouse of secrets, lies, and whispers. Every day the most lethal and valuable intelligence-decoded messages, deception plans, enemy troop movements, coded spy reports, and other mysteries-poured into this little basement room, where they were analyzed, assessed, and dispatched to distant parts of the world, the armor and ammunition of a secret war. The two officers-Pipe and Mustache-were also responsible for running agents and double agents, espionage and counterespionage, intelligence, fakery, and fraud: they passed lies to the enemy that were false and damaging, as well as information that was true but harmless; they ran willing spies, reluctant spies pressed into service, and spies who did not exist at all. Now, with the war at its height, they set about creating a spy who was different from all the others and all that had come before: a secret agent who was not only fictional but dead. The defining feature of this spy would be his falsity. He was a pure figment of imagination, a weapon in a war far removed from the traditional battle of bombs and bullets. At its most visible, war is fought with leadership, courage, tactics, and brute force; this is the conventional war of attack and counterattack, lines on a map, numbers and luck. This war is usually painted in black, white, and blood red, with winners, losers, and casualties: the good, the bad, and the dead. Alongside that conflict is another, less visible species of war, played out in shades of gray, a battle of deception, seduction, and bad faith, of tricks and mirrors, in which the truth is protected, as Churchill put it, by a "bodyguard of lies." The combatants in this war of the imagination were seldom what they seemed to be, for the covert world, in which fiction and reality are sometimes enemies and sometimes allies, attracts minds that are subtle, supple, and often extremely strange. The man lying in the dunes at Punta Umbria was a fraud. The lies he carried would fly from London to Madrid to Berlin, traveling from a freezing Scottish loch to the shores of Sicily, from fiction to reality, and from Room 13 of the Admiralty all the way to Hitler's desk. Excerpted from Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben Macintyre All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.