Cooper’s somewhat dull novel was not submitted for security clearance prior to publication, and provoked outrage in Whitehall. Both MI5 and the Chiefs of Staff considered the book a highly damaging breach of the 1911 Official Secrets Act, in that it disclosed the workings of an operation which the intelligence services might wish to repeat, and quite rightly demanded that its author should be prosecuted. However Cooper was still living in Paris, and threatened to reveal that he had the story direct from Churchill, who ‘in his cups’ had not warned that national security might still be involved. Fearing an embarrassing political scandal involving a senior diplomat, the Attlee government had to content itself with a letter warning Cooper that if he dared to return to the United Kingdom as a civilian he would be charged, although in time the storm blew over, and in 1952 Cooper was made Viscount Norwich.
Duff Cooper died in 1954, but in the meantime several press reporters smelled a story and began to dig deeper. Interest was further spurred by a brief mention of ‘a clever enemy ruse’ involving ‘the body of a British courier washed ashore in Spain’ in the memoir of a former Wehrmacht general named Westphal. At the head of the press pack was Ian Colvin, then the foreign editor of the Sunday Express and later deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. Before the outbreak of war Colvin had been a press correspondent in Berlin, who had ‘plunged very deeply into German politics’ and kept Churchill in touch with developments there. After a hint dropped over dinner by an unnamed Cabinet Minister, Colvin concluded that the ‘mischievous reality’ of the deception scheme spelt out in ‘Operation Heartbreak’ must have some basis in fact, and late in 1952 set out on an arduous investigative trail which led him to the grave of Major William Martin, Royal Marines, in the Roman Catholic section of the cemetery outside the town of Huelva. The date of death on the slab was 24 April 1943, which tied with the invasion of Sicily, and in the light of further local enquiries Colvin knew he had his man.
Publication of the revelation was another matter, for Colvin had served as an officer in the Royal Marines and was therefore subject to the Official Secrets Act. The story is taken up by the celebrated scientist R.V. Jones in his memoir Most Secret War. In 1952 Jones had been recalled to the Ministry of Defence as Director of Scientific Intelligence, and thus took a seat on the Joint Intelligence Committee:
At my first meeting I heard a discussion about what should be done because Ian Colvin had worked out the facts of the operation, and had written a book which he had submitted for security clearance The JIC decided, very unsportingly, I thought, to hold back Colvin’s account while they invited Ewen Montagu, who had been in Naval Intelligence and was involved in the deception, to write an officially approved account which came out as The Man Who Never Was in 1953 … I had much sympathy for Colvin over his shabby treatment.
A barrister by profession, Ewen Montagu had taken silk six months before war was declared, and after a short spell with Humber Command as an acting Lieutenant-Commander, joined the Naval Intelligence Division. There he served as a liaison officer on the Twenty Committee, the body which ran German double agents, through which he met Charles Cholmondeley, a junior officer in B Division of MI5. Montagu’s own account of his wartime role in the operation is examined in detail below, but it is sufficient to state here that he returned to the Bar in 1945, and then sat as a judge on the Western Circuit. The call from the Joint Intelligence Committee in 1953 gave Montagu just three days to complete a sanitised account of Operation Mincemeat, which was to be serialised in the Sunday Express between 1 and 22 February. Montagu later recorded that his professional experience in preparing complex legal briefs at short notice equipped him well for the task, which was completed over a weekend at his cottage on the Solent. Following newspaper serialisation it was published in book form by Evans Brothers in July, and became an immediate best-seller.
Read in isolation, this hastily prepared official version appeared comprehensive. It explained that the ‘wild idea’ was first suggested by an officer identified only as ‘George’ (i.e. Charles Cholmondeley), and that after Mincemeat was approved at high level the pair set about procuring a suitable body. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the eminent Home Office pathologist, advised that a victim who had succumbed to pneumonia would be most appropriate, as the fluid in the lungs would suggest death by drowning. The coroner for the St Pancras district, William Bentley Purchase, was asked to locate a suitable unclaimed body, which was then put on ice while a plausible identity – ‘Major Martin RM’ – was manufactured, and the necessary documents forged. On 17 April 1943 the body of Major Martin was dressed in battledress in an unnamed London mortuary and driven by van 400 miles to Greenock in Scotland, where it was loaded onto HMS Seraph, the submarine that would drop the body off the Spanish coast en route to Gibraltar. Montagu gave details of the launching of the corpse, and also the text of the false documents carried. Operation Mincemeat was, he concluded, an unequivocal success, resulting in the strong but needless reinforcement of Axis forces in Greece, Sardinia and Corsica.
With the benefit of hindsight, The Man Who Never Was is no less interesting for what Montagu was obliged (or chose) to omit. Writing as he did in 1953, Montagu was unable to make any mention at all of Ultra decrypts, and the fact that intercepted enemy signals revealed that the Abwehr had accepted the false documents as genuine within three days of ‘Major Martin’ being released into the sea. And because Charles Cholmondeley was still a serving MI5 officer, he was referred to only as the pseudonymous George, and thus unfairly (but inevitably) relegated to a supporting role.
More surprising is the fact that Montagu failed to mention that the concept of Operation Mincemeat was far from new. During the First World War a ‘haversack ruse’ had been successfully employed by General Allenby’s forces in Palestine in October 1917, by which false documents were planted on the Turks, having been dropped between the lines by a mounted officer named Meinertzhagen who feigned a wound. This deception was described in detail in the Official History, although the War Office was more sensitive about plans on the Western Front to plant a forged diary on a German corpse, revealed by General John Charteris in 1925 and quickly suppressed. In August 1942 the haversack ruse was replicated in the Middle East when a false map was planted on the enemy shortly before the battle of Alam Halfa, supposedly with the aid of a corpse. The body was left in a wrecked scout car of the 11th Hussars on ground facing Afrika Korps forces south of Qaret el Abd, and primed with a map revealing ‘good going’ across a sector of desert where in fact the ground was bad. Accepting this false intelligence as genuine, a number of Rommel’s tanks were routed into an area of soft sand and bogged down. Add to this the possibility that managed corpses played a part in the myth of a failed German landing on the south coast of England in 1940, and one could be forgiven for concluding that by 1943 corpse deceptions were already an established military tactic. Indeed the same Mincemeat tactic would be repeated by Peter Fleming in Burma in 1944, albeit without success.
On 25 September 1942 an RAF Catalina flying boat carrying a naval courier named Lieutenant James Turner crashed off Cadiz during an electrical storm, after which his body was recovered by Spanish police from the beach at Tarifa. In Turner’s inner pocket was a letter from General Mark Clark to the Governor of Gibraltar, which named certain Free French agents in North Africa and gave the proposed date of the Allied landings codenamed Torch as 4 November, although in the event these were delayed until the 8th. For the Allies, this should have marked an intelligence disaster of epic proportions. However Turner’s body was returned by the Admiral of Cadiz with the letter still inside his jacket, and apparently unopened. A team of technicians was flown out from Britain in an effort to determine whether the papers had been examined, and concluded they had not, although doubts remained. Turner was buried on Gibraltar, but for reasons which remain obscure still featured in the Navy List for the rest of the war.
This earlier incident had become confused with Operation Mincemeat by the time Colvin interviewed sev
eral Spanish and German participants a decade later, which explains some of the more garbled aspects of his account, The Unknown Courier, published in 1953. Whatever the truth, it is inconceivable that the Cadiz incident was unknown to the planners of Mincemeat seven months later, or that they were ignorant of the earlier haversack ruse. Despite this, Montagu maintained to the end that the idea of floating a corpse ashore had been conceived by Cholmondeley independently. Not only is the supposed coincidence too great, but if in 1942 British intelligence were unsure whether the documents carried by Turner had been seen by the enemy, Operation Mincemeat could not realistically have been expected to work the following year, unless sympathetic Abwehr contacts were primed in advance.
Unsurprisingly, in his published account Montagu failed to disclose the true identity of the corpse who served as Major William Martin. The body was said to be that of ‘a young man in his early thirties’ who had died of ‘pneumonia after exposure’ late in 1942 and was then kept on ice for six months. According to Montagu, relatives of the dead man agreed to release his body on condition that he was given a decent Christian burial, and that his name remain secret, on the ground that he had died insane. To preserve this supposedly sworn anonymity, Montagu went to considerable lengths to ensure that The Man Who Never Was would never be identified. The London mortuary in which Major Martin was dressed before his journey north was described as being south of the River Thames. Montagu also described how the driver of the van, a racing car driver named Jock Horsfall, almost rammed a ‘tram-standard’ after the driver caught sight of a queue outside a cinema ‘opposite’ the mortuary, at which a ‘spy film’ was being shown, and began laughing. In fact in 1986 the morgue was identified as Hackney, on the north side of the river and never adjacent to a tram route or cinema. In 1953, however, the convincing fiction of the near-accident lent the book added veritas.
Indeed, the appearance of The Man Who Never Was gave some the impression that Montagu had taken a brave decision to publish and be damned, as John Masterman later would in 1972. In his definitive history of the use and abuse of the 1911 Official Secrets Act, David Hooper describes Montagu’s book as having ‘slipped through the net’ while serving to ‘raise some Security Service eyebrows’. Nothing could be further from the truth, although it is interesting to note that, while sitting as a judge at Hampshire Quarter Sessions in 1951, Montagu heard an appeal by two junior employees from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, convicted of minor offences under Section 2 of the Act. In reducing their fines from £50 to £20, Montagu handed down a ruling which still stands as the sole occasion on which a sentence under Section 2 has been reduced on appeal. Whether the government’s failure to prosecute Duff Cooper the previous year had any bearing on this enlightened decision must remain a matter of conjecture. However some have suggested that Cooper may have first learned the facts of Operation Mincemeat from Montagu himself, a fellow student at Trinity College, and not from Churchill. It remains an intriguing possibility.
The Man Who Never Was boasted a classic title, the credit for which went to the editor of the Sunday Express, Howard Keeble. Colvin was awarded the inadequate sop of a written introduction to the newspaper serialisation, sight of two heavily weeded War Office files containing nothing not included in Montagu’s book, and permission to publish his own account of the operation, by then rendered largely redundant. Montagu’s book proved an immediate best-seller. A striking jacket design featuring a faceless Royal Marine stared out from posters and advertisements everywhere, and the book has remained in print ever since. Two years later a film version appeared, in which an American actor named Clifton Webb played Montagu, who in turn took a brief cameo role as a critical Air Vice-Marshal at a Chiefs of Staff conference. Charles Cholmondeley had to remain content with an uncredited role as technical advisor. Whether at any time he shared in any of the financial rewards enjoyed by Montagu is unknown.
Yet Cholmondeley must have been irritated. A fragment of Cholmondeley’s original proposal for Operation Mincemeat finally appeared in the Official History of wartime deception operations in 1990, revealing a detailed proposal by which he even anticipated purchasing a corpse from a London hospital for the ‘normal peacetime price’ of £10. Although Montagu gave ‘George’ credit for originating the scheme in The Man Who Never Was, the fact that Montagu alone wrote the book meant that his role as the public face of Operation Mincemeat left the impression that he was the sole architect. That impression was further expressed in the short introduction by Hastings Ismay, who wrote that Montagu had ‘originated’ the plan. The film version two years later served only to reinforce this myth, with ‘George Acres’ appearing as Montagu’s junior, working for and taking orders from him. Two years after publishing The Man Who Never Was, Evans Brothers published The Big Lie by John Baker White, which described Montagu alone as ‘the architect of the deception’ who ‘had the idea of creating a fictitious courier’ and was merely ‘aided’ by others unnamed. Little can be read in Montagu’s Hitchcock-like cameo in the 1955 film, yet the closing scene in which his character places his own MBE on the grave of Major Martin surely stretches dramatic licence too far. In fact Montagu never once visited Huelva before his death in 1985.
No further details about Operation Mincemeat emerged until 1972, when John Masterman published The Double Cross System, his bombshell account of the work of the Twenty Committee. The text was written as an official report in 1945, and published in America 27 years later to avoid the necessity of Defence Notice Committee approval. Masterman revealed little not already disclosed by Montagu two decades earlier, but did reproduce an extract from Twenty Committee minutes for 4 February 1943 (also the date of the coroner’s inquest into the death of Glyndwr Michael), which named Montagu and Cholmondeley as the members responsible for ‘putting forward’ the plan. Tellingly, Masterman also confirmed that the earlier Cadiz incident played a part in the planning of Mincemeat:
Shortly before the invasion of North Africa an aeroplane had crashed, a body had been washed ashore in Spain, and some fortunately unimportant papers had been shown to the Germans. It therefore appeared that a similar incident might be faked and turned to good account before some suitable major operation.
Quite why Montagu continued to give a contrary account after The Double Cross System appeared in 1972 can only be guessed at. Two years later, Frederick Winterbotham’s unofficial but equally seismic book The Ultra Secret for the first time made public the breaking of the German Enigma codes, and the work of Bletchley Park. The dam had been broken, and having retired from the bench in 1973, Montagu wrote a more complete account of wartime activities, Beyond Top Secret U. In a short chapter devoted to Mincemeat, Montagu filled in some of the background to the deception, albeit still ignoring Cadiz, and finally credited Charles Cholmondeley by name, ‘George’ having by then retired from the Security Service to deal in horticultural machinery in Wells.
Cholmondeley at least now received due credit, albeit too little too late. Yet it was the identity of the original man who never was, Major William Martin, which continued to exercise the minds of several dedicated investigators, among them Roger Morgan, a civil servant, and Winston Ramsey, editor of After the Battle magazine. Both had approached Montagu independently, and both ran up against the former judge’s dubious assertions of universal legal copyright. In reply to a letter from Ramsey, Montagu stated in 1976 that there was ‘no other source other than my book from which the story can be obtained with any degree of accuracy’ while reserving the right to ‘pass’ anything written on the subject. There is no copyright in historical fact, and the official précis written by Masterman in 1945 can hardly be dismissed so lightly. Nevertheless, in 1974 Montagu had threatened to sue the publishers of a book by Janusz Piekalkiewicz, which included photographs purporting to show the body of ‘Major Martin’ in a London morgue, and on the deck of a Spanish launch after being retrieved from the sea. Although no writ was uttered, damages were paid, and in this irregular ma
nner Montagu was able to stifle the publication of further research until his death in July 1985.
Undeterred, in August 1986 Morgan finally succeeded in identifying the mortuary where ‘Major Martin’ was defrosted and dressed before his long journey north, in Hackney. In 1943 there had been no cinema within a reasonable distance showing a likely spy film, nor had enemy action since moved the mortuary north of the Thames, which underscored the lengths to which those in the know had gone to obscure the truth. Morgan also offered up a tentative candidate for the man who never was, one Reginald Harrison, a homeless man who had died of tubercular pneumonia in Archway Hospital in December 1942. Shortly afterwards, historian Martin Gilbert edged closer to the truth in suggesting that the dead man had been a Welsh gardener who had killed himself with weed killer, on the basis of a disclosure made by Colonel John Bevan some years before. In 1988 Colin Gibbon and James Rusbridger suggested that the body was that of a Welsh barman named Emlyn Howells, whose relatives, none the wiser, had attended the burial of an empty coffin in a cemetery at Treorchy, twenty miles from Cardiff. Rusbridger, who repeated the guess in his book The Intelligence Game the following year, died in 1994, but Gibbon eventually obtained an exhumation order from the Home Office, with the object of submitting Howells’s remains to an examination which might prove the validity of his candidate. However, this macabre exercise was called off following a surprise discovery by Roger Morgan in a file declassified by the Public Record Office in November 1995, indexed as ADM 223/794.
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 20
