Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

351 Pages·2010·4.57 MB·English

by  Macintyre Ben

ALSO BY BEN MACINTYRE
Agent Zigzag:
A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal
The Man Who Would Be King
The First American in Afghanistan
The Englishman’s Daughter
A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One
The Napoleon of Crime:
The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief
Forgotten Fatherland:
The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche

For
Kate & Melita
and
Magnus & Lucie
1
Who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls?
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, Closing the Ring
Contents
PREFACE
The Sardine Spotter
CHAPTER ONE:
Corkscrew Minds
CHAPTER TWO:
Room 13
CHAPTER THREE:
Target Sicily
CHAPTER FOUR:
The Man Who Was
CHAPTER FIVE:
A Novel Approach
CHAPTER SIX:
Pam
CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Butterfly Collector
CHAPTER EIGHT:
My Dear Alex
CHAPTER NINE:
Photo Insert 1
Table-Tennis Traitor
CHAPTER TEN:
Gold Prospector
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
The Spy Who Baked Cakes
CHAPTER TWELVE:
Mincemeat Sets Sail
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
Bill’s Farewell
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Dulce et Decorum
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
Spanish Trails
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
Kühlenthal’s Coup
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
Mincemeat Digested
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
Hitler Loses Sleep
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
Seraph and Husky
CHAPTER TWENTY:
A Nice Cup of Tea
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:
Photo Insert 2
Hook, Line, and Sinker
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
Mincemeat Revealed
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:
Aftermath
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:
APPENDIX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Preface
I of July 10, 1943, British and North American troops stormed
N THE EARLY HOURS
ashore on the coast of Sicily in the first assault against Hitler’s “Fortress
Europe.” In hindsight, the invasion of the Italian island was a triumph, a
pivotal moment in the war, and a vital stepping-stone on the way to victory in
Europe. It was nearly a disaster. The offensive—then the largest amphibious
landing ever attempted—had been months in the planning, and although the
fighting was fierce, the casualty rate among the Allies was limited. Of the
160,000 soldiers who took part in the invasion and conquest of Sicily, more
than 153,000 were still alive at the end. That so many survived was due, in no
small measure, to a man who had died seven months earlier. The success of
the Sicilian invasion depended on overwhelming strength, logistics, secrecy,
and surprise. But it also relied on a wide web of deception, and one deceit in
particular: a spectacular trick dreamed up by a team of spies led by an
English lawyer.
I first came across the remarkable Ewen Montagu while researching an
earlier book, Agent Zigzag, about the wartime double agent Eddie Chapman.
A barrister in civilian life, Montagu was a Naval Intelligence officer who had
been one of Chapman’s handlers, but he was better known as the author, in
1953, of The Man Who Never Was, an account of the deception plan, code-
named “Operation Mincemeat,” he had masterminded in 1943. In a later
book, Beyond Top Secret Ultra, written in 1977, Montagu referred to “some
memoranda which,1 in very special circumstances and for a very particular
reason, I was allowed to keep.” That odd aside stuck in my memory. The
“special circumstances,” I assumed, must refer to the writing of The Man
Who Never Was, which was authorized and vetted by the Joint Intelligence
Committee. But I could think of no other case in which a former intelligence
officer had been “allowed to keep” classified documents. Indeed, retaining
top secret material is exactly what intelligence officers are supposed not to
do. And if Ewen Montagu had kept them for so many years after the war,
where were they now?
Montagu died in 1985. None of the obituaries referred to his papers. I went
to see his son, Jeremy Montagu, a distinguished authority on musical
instruments at Oxford University. With an unmistakable twinkle, Jeremy led
me to an upstairs room in his rambling home in Oxford and pulled a large and
dusty wooden trunk from under a bed. Inside were bundles of files from MI5
(the Security Service, responsible for counterespionage), MI6 (the Secret
Intelligence Service, SIS, responsible for gathering intelligence outside
Britain), and the wartime Naval Intelligence Department (NID), some tied up
with string and many stamped . Jeremy explained that some of his
TOP SECRET
father’s papers had been transferred after his death to the Imperial War
Museum, where they had yet to be cataloged, but the rest were just as he had
left them in the trunk: letters, memos, photographs, and operational notes
relating to the 1943 deception plan, as well as the original, uncensored
manuscripts of his books. Here, too, was Ewen Montagu’s unpublished two-
hundred-page autobiography and, perhaps most important, a copy of the
official, classified report on “Operation Mincemeat”—the boldest, strangest,
and most successful deception of the war. The personal correspondence
between Ewen Montagu and his wife, at least three letters a week throughout
the war, was also made available to me by the Montagu family. Without their
generous help, this book could not have been written. All quotations are cited
in the endnotes, but for clarity, I have standardized spellings, avoided
ellipses, and selectively used reported speech as direct speech.
If my discovery of these papers reads like something out of a spy film, that
may be no accident: Montagu himself had a rich sense of the dramatic. He
must have known they would be found one day.
More than half a century after publication, The Man Who Never Was has
lost none of the flavor of wartime intrigue, but it is, and was always intended
to be, incomplete. The book was written at the behest of the British
government, in order to conceal certain facts; in parts, it is deliberately
misleading. Now, with the relaxation of government rules surrounding
official secrecy, the recent declassification of files in the National Archives,
and the discovery of the contents of Ewen Montagu’s ancient trunk, the full
story of Operation Mincemeat can be told for the first time.
The plan was born in the mind of a novelist and took shape through a most
unlikely cast of characters: a brilliant barrister, a family of undertakers, a
forensic pathologist, a gold prospector, an inventor, a submarine captain, a
transvestite English spymaster, a rally driver, a pretty secretary, a credulous
Nazi, and a grumpy admiral who loved fly-fishing.
This deception operation—which underpinned the invasion of Sicily and
helped to win the war—was framed around a man who never was. But the
people who invented him, and those who believed in him, and those who
owed their lives to him, most certainly were.
This is their story.
Ben Macintyre
London, 2009