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 was designed to wash up on the Spanish coast, was a complete fraud, but the lies he would carry from the British Admiralty all the way to Hitler's desk, and would help win the war. "
 

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

By Ben Macintyre;  Illustrated. 400 pp. Harmony Books. $25.99

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. 

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 I, 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. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/books/review/Conant-t.html
 
 
 

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