Operation Mincemeat

Although a nonfiction account of an actual WWII deception operation, Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat (2010) reads like a masterful spy thriller, complete with a “bizarre” plot and colorful characters. In 1943, British Intelligence officers concocted a ruse to lure Nazi forces to another corner of the Mediterranean while the Allies launched an invasion into Sicily. For bait, they used the corpse of a tramp, and the Germans took it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and the personal papers of Ewen Montagu, the operation’s main architect, Macintyre’s book illuminates what one historian has called “the most successful single deception” of WWII.

When the gambit at the center of  Macintyre’s narrative begins, it is May of 1943. Britain and the Allied forces have wrestled North Africa from Nazi control and are poised to invade southern Europe, or, in Churchill’s words, the “underbelly of the Axis.” Because “no major operation could be launched, maintained, or supplied until the enemy airfields and other bases in Sicily had been obliterated so as to allow free passage through the Mediterranean,” Sicily is the Allies’ logical point of attack. It is so obvious, that the Germans anticipate it and, as General Montgomery surmises, will wage “a hard and very bloody fight.” To improve their prospects for success in Sicily, the Allies must dupe Hitler into thinking that Greece is their target and that he should swiftly redirect the Nazi forces to that relatively unguarded front.

The British leaders need look only as far as their own counter-intelligence agency, MI5, to find creative thinkers ready and willing to invent a disinformation charade. Among these is a young intelligence officer named Ian Fleming, who would one day author James Bond novels, but for now is writing deception operation proposals. Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley, secretary for the committee that oversees double-agent activities, favors the proposal based on a novel by Basil Thomson, in which the vehicle for disinformation is a corpse planted with fake documents. With the committee’s approval, Cholmondeley joins Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu in his windowless office beneath Whitehall, where they put their “corkscrew minds” together to trick Hitler into turning his attention away from Sicily.



The success of “Operation Mincemeat,” as it is dubbed, depends on the persuasive powers of a man who doesn’t exist: Captain Bill Martin. To conjure up this Royal Marine, the plan calls for a corpse and a briefcase. Planted in the corpse’s pockets will be the trappings of his civilian life: theater tickets; fabricated letters from a father, a jeweler, and a solicitor; and photographs of a fiancée, Pam. His briefcase will hold top-secret documents containing “disinformation” about the Allies’ impending invasion of Greece. Captain Martin’s mission obliges him to wash up on the Spanish coastline, masquerading as a courier who drowned after his plane crashed in the water. If all goes according to plan, the established Nazi spy network crisscrossing Spain will intercept Martin’s documents and smuggle them up the chain of command to Hitler himself.

Securing a corpse that can pass for a victim of drowning or exposure proves challenging. Montagu recruits the services of Bentley Purchase, a London coroner, who eventually produces the body of a man found in a warehouse. Identified in Macintyre’s account as Glyndwr Michael, the Welsh vagrant apparently killed himself by ingesting rat poison, only traces of which remain in his body. Montagu and his team attempt to photograph the corpse to make an ID card for Captain Martin, but the picture is less than “life-like,” so they use one of a similar-looking British officer. Jean Leslie, a young MI5 secretary, volunteers to be “Pam,” lending herself for the fiancée photos to be found on Martin’s person. So swept up is Montagu in the story they are spinning, he falls in love with “Pam” and, by proxy, Jean Leslie. Montagu is married, however, so his attraction to Jean never goes further than his imagination.

After several unsatisfactory efforts to forge a letter from British General Nye to General Alexander, the Operation Mincemeat team finally enlists General Nye himself to compose it. The Allies’ strategy as outlined in Nye’s letter (and several others) amounts to a “lie [that] went as follows: The British Twelfth Army (which did not exist) would invade the Balkans in the summer of 1943, starting in Crete and the Peloponnese, bringing Turkey into the war against the Axis powers.” The Americans would lead a second invasion in Sardinia as the British pushed into Southern France, leaving Sicily completely untouched. These disinformation documents are sealed in Captain Martin’s briefcase, and he is ready to go.



Montagu and his crew remove Captain Martin from cold storage, packing him into the back of a truck. Because the corpse is decomposing and the weather is warming, Montagu has engaged a professional race-car driver to rush the truck to Scotland, where a submarine waits. Captain Martin is strapped into “the world’s first underwater corpse transporter,” which fits inside the submarine’s torpedo bay, and the submarine speeds to Spain’s shores.

To increase the likelihood that Martin’s “sensitive” documents will fall into the hands of Adolf Clauss, a notoriously crafty German spy, the corpse is launched along Spain’s southwest coast, where pro-German sentiment is strong. A fisherman finds the body—and the briefcase tethered to it—on April 30, 1940. The remains of Captain Martin are delivered to officials, who quickly recognize the value of the briefcase’s documents and transfer them to the Spanish navy.

Over the next two weeks, the British attaché in Madrid makes a pretense of recovering the briefcase, while Adolf Clauss and other German agents use their connections with Nazi-sympathizing Spanish officials to procure copies of the documents. These copies advance through the Nazi ranks until they reach the desk of Hitler’s most trusted advisor, Alexis Barone von Roenne. A committed Christian, von Roenne is secretly horrified by the cruelties of the Nazi regime. Macintyre observes, “Whatever his reasons, and despite his reputation as an intelligence guru, by 1943, von Roenne was deliberately passing information he knew to be false” into Hitler’s hands.



Thus, Operation Mincemeat ends triumphantly: von Roenne passes to Hitler the spurious intelligence planted in “Martin’s” briefcase; Hitler orders his troops to make haste to Greece, and the Allies capture Sicily with relative ease.

The story of Operation Mincemeat was recounted by Montagu himself in a 1953 memoir, The Man Who Never Was. A film adaptation of the book appeared in 1956. Extensively researched and containing heretofore undisclosed details, Macintyre’s book is, as one review in The Guardian declares, “the final word on this extraordinary episode.”