Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  The plan envisaged dropping the dead body, with fake documents, from a plane, to give the impression that “a courier carrying important37 ‘hand of officer’ documents was en route for Algiers in an aircraft which crashed.” The overall scheme should not only divert the Germans from the real target but portray the real target as a “cover target,” a mere decoy. This was a brilliant piece of double bluff, for it would ensure that when the Germans found out about genuine preparations to attack Sicily, as they must, they would assume this was part of the deception plan. Sicily could not be left out of the equation altogether, for as Cholmondeley and Montagu pointed out, if “the real target is omitted from38 both the ‘operation plan’ and the ‘cover plan’ the Germans will almost certainly suspect, as not only is Sicily a very possible target, but the Germans are believed already to anticipate it as a possible target.” Since “the Germans will be looking39 with care for our cover-plan as well as our real plan,” Operation Mincemeat would feed them both a false real plan and a false cover plan—which would actually be the real plan.

  The outline did not go into specifics as to how this misinformation would be put across, nor where the body would be dropped, and warned that, once launched, it could not be delayed: “The body must be dropped40 within 24 hours of its being removed from its present place in London. The flight, once laid on, must not be cancelled or postponed.” The Twenty Committee pondered only briefly, before issuing a flurry of requests to the representatives of the different services. The Air Ministry should investigate finding a suitable plane, preferably one used by SOE; the draft plan should be shown to the intelligence chiefs of the army, navy, and RAF; Colonel Johnnie Bevan of the London Controlling Section should be asked for his approval; the Admiralty should “find out a suitable position41 for dropping the body;” and the War Office should look “into the question of providing42 the body with a name and necessary papers.” The naval attaché in Madrid, Captain Alan Hillgarth, should be informed of the plan, “so he will be able to cope43 with any unforeseen circumstances.”

  Montagu and Cholmondeley were instructed to “continue with preparations44 to give MINCEMEAT his necessary clothes, papers, letters, etc. etc.” Out of the officially nameless corpse in the mortuary they must conjure up a living person with a new name, a personality, and a past. Operation Mincemeat began as fiction, a plot twist in a long-forgotten novel, picked up by another novelist and approved by a committee presided over by yet another novelist. Now it was the turn of the spies to take the reality of a dead Welsh tramp, make him into a fiction, and so change reality.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Novel Approach

  MONTAGU AND CHOLMONDELEY had spent much of the previous three years nurturing, molding, and deploying spies who did not exist. The Twenty Committee and Section B1A of MI5 had turned the playing of double agents into an art form, but as the Double Cross System developed and expanded, more and more of the agents reporting back to Germany were purely fictional: Agent A (real) would notionally employ Agent B (unreal), who would in turn recruit other agents, C to Z (all equally imaginary). Juan Pujol García, Agent “Garbo,” the most famous double agent of them all, was eventually equipped with no fewer than twenty-seven subagents, each with a distinct character, friends, jobs, tastes, homes, and lovers. Garbo’s “active and well-distributed team1 of imaginary assistants” were a motley lot, including a Welsh Aryan supremacist, a communist, a Greek waiter, a wealthy Venezuelan student, a disaffected South African serviceman, and several crooks. In the words of John Masterman, the thriller-writing chairman of the Twenty Committee: “The one man band of Lisbon2 developed into an orchestra, and an orchestra which played a more and more ambitious programme.” Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer in West Africa, based his novel Our Man in Havana, about a spy who invents an entire network of bogus informants, on the Garbo story.

  Masterman, writing after the war, declared that “for deception, ‘notional’3 or imaginary agents were on the whole preferable” to living ones. Real agents tended to become truculent and demanding; they needed feeding, pampering, and paying. An imaginary agent, however, was infinitely pliable and willing to do the bidding of his German handlers at once and without question: “The Germans could seldom resist4 such a fly if it was accurately and skilfully cast,” wrote Masterman, who was also handy with a fly-fishing rod.

  Maintaining a small army of fake people required concerted attention to detail. “How difficult it was,”5 wrote Montagu, “to remember the characteristics and life pattern of each one of a mass of completely non-existent notional sub-agents.” These imaginary individuals had to suffer all the vagaries of normal life, such as getting ill, celebrating birthdays, and running out of money. They had to remain perfectly consistent in their behavior, attitudes, and emotions. As Montagu put it, the imaginary agent “must never step out of character.”6 The network of fake agents enabled British intelligence to supply the Germans with a steady stream of untruths and half-truths, and it lulled the Abwehr into believing it had a large and efficient espionage network in Britain, when it had nothing of the sort.

  Creating a personality to go with the corpse in the St. Pancras Morgue would require imaginative effort on an even greater scale. In his novel The Case of the Four Friends, Masterman’s sleuth, Ernest Brendel, observes that the key to detective work is anticipating the actions of the criminal: “To work out the crime7 before it is committed, to foresee how it will be arranged, and then to prevent it! That’s a triumph indeed.” With Masterman’s help, Montagu and Cholmondeley would now lay out the clues to a life that had never happened and frame a new death for a dead man.

  The fictitious agents so far invented by the Double Cross team all spoke for themselves, or rather through others, in wireless messages and letters to their handlers, but they were never seen; in the case of Operation Mincemeat, the fraudulent individual could communicate only through the clothes on his back, the contents of his pockets, and, most important, the letters in his possession. He would carry official typed letters to convey the core deception, but also handwritten personal letters to put across his personality. “The more real he appeared,8 the more convincing the whole affair would be,” reflected Montagu, since “every little detail would be studied by the Germans.”

  The information he carried would have to be credible, but also legible. “Would the ink of the manuscript9 letters, and the signatures on the others, not run so as to make the documents illegible?” Montagu wondered. Waterproof ink might be used, but that would “give the game away.”10 They turned to MI5’s scientists, and numerous tests were carried out by using different inks and typewriters and then immersing the letters in seawater for varying periods to test the effects. The results were encouraging: “Many inks on a freshly written11 letter will run at once if the surface is wetted. On the other hand, a lot of quite usual inks, if thoroughly dried, will stand a fair amount of wetting even if exposed directly to the water. When a document is inside an envelope, or inside a wallet which is itself inside a pocket, well dried inks of some quite normal types will often remain legible for a surprising length of time—quite long enough for our purpose.”

  The precise form of the deception would be decided in time: first they needed to create a credible courier.

  It is no accident that Montagu and Cholmondeley were both enthusiastic novel readers. The greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing. W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand. For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.

  As if constructing a character in a novel, Montagu and Cholmondeley, with the help of Joan Saunders in Section 17M, set about creating a personality with which to clothe their dead body. Hour after hour, in the Admiralty basement, they discussed and refined this imaginary person, his li
kes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses. In the evening, they repaired to the Gargoyle Club, a glamorous Soho dive of which Montagu was a member, to continue the odd process of creating a man from scratch. The project reflected all the possibilities and pitfalls of fiction: if they painted his personality too brightly or were inconsistent in the portrait, then the Germans would surely detect a hoax. But if the enemy could be made to believe in this British officer, then they were that much more likely to credit the documents he carried. Eventually, they came to believe in him themselves. “We talked about him until12 we did feel that he was an old friend,” wrote Montagu. “He became completely real to us.” They gave him a middle name, a nicotine habit, and a place of birth. They gave him a hometown, a rank, a regiment, and a love of fishing. He would be furnished with a watch, a bank manager, a solicitor, and cuff links. They gave him all the things that Glyndwr Michael had lacked in his luckless life, including a supportive family, money, friends, and love.

  But first he needed a name and, more important, a uniform. It was originally intended that the dropped body should appear to be that of an army officer ferrying important messages to the top brass in North Africa. An army officer could wear battle dress, a normal combat uniform, rather than a formal fitted uniform. Army officers did not carry identity cards with photographs when traveling outside England, which obviated the need to obtain a mug shot of Glyndwr Michael for a fake card. The director of Military Intelligence, however, pointed out that if the courier were an army officer, then the discovery of the body would have to be reported to the military attaché in Madrid and the information passed from there to London, increasing the number of people in the know and the danger of a leak. Since the idea had originated in Naval Intelligence, it was more sensible to make him a naval officer, thus keeping the secret within naval circles. A naval officer, however, would be unlikely to carry documents relating to the planned invasion, and such officers always traveled in full naval “display” uniform, complete with braid and badges of rank on the sleeve. The idea of getting the corpse measured up by a tailor was too ghoulish (and too dangerous) to contemplate. The secret services contained men of varied talents and occupations, but no gentlemen’s outfitters.

  After much discussion, it was decided that the body would be dressed as a member of the Royal Marines, the corps that forms the amphibious infantry of the Royal Navy. Marines always traveled in battle dress, made up of beret or cap, khaki blouse, trousers, gaiters, and boots. This uniform came in standard sizes. Since the Marines, unlike the army, traveled with photographic identity cards, one of these would have to be faked. This raised an additional problem. Although there were thousands of British army officers currently serving, the number of Royal Marine officers was comparatively small, and their names appeared on the Navy List, of which German intelligence undoubtedly possessed a copy. One of these would need to “lend” his name to the dead body.

  Casting his eye down the list of serving naval officers, Montagu noticed a large block of men with the surname Martin. No fewer than nine of these were Royal Marines, eight lieutenants and one captain, who had been promoted to acting major in 1941. The ferrying of important documents would be entrusted to a fairly senior officer, so Captain William Hynd Norrie Martin was unknowingly press-ganged into the job. The real Norrie Martin had joined up in 1937, becoming one of the Fleet Air Arm’s best pilots. In 1943, he was instructing American aircrew at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and thus unlikely to get wind of what was being done with his name. By pure coincidence, the real Martin had served aboard the aircraft carrier Hermes, which had been sunk by the Japanese in April 1942, with the loss of more than three hundred men. A death notice for the fake William Martin would need to be posted in the British press; the Germans would believe this referred to the body carrying the documents, but the real Major Martin’s friends and colleagues would probably assume he had died in the sinking of the Hermes, with his death only belatedly confirmed.

  Major William “Bill” Martin was duly issued identity card number 148228 by the Admiralty. He was made four years younger than Glyndwr Michael, but Cardiff was chosen as his place of birth, just ten miles from Michael’s birthplace in Aberbargoed. The card assigned Martin to “Combined Operations,” the force set up to harass the Germans by combined navy and army operations and directed by Lord Louis Mountbatten. The identity card was suspiciously shiny, so as an added precaution it was endorsed “issued in lieu of No. 09650 lost.” This was Montagu’s own identity card number, to ensure that anyone investigating this nonexistent officer with the fake identity card would eventually come to him. Losing an identity card was a serious lapse in wartime Britain, but as well as explaining its newness, the replacement card provided the first plank in the personality of Bill Martin: he was accident-prone. Montagu signed the card, the first of many occasions when he would stand in for Bill Martin.

  All that was needed to complete the card was a photograph. Glyndwr Michael had never had a passport or any other form of photographic identity card, and trying to obtain a recent photograph, if such a thing existed, would have involved contacting the Michael family. Montagu and Cholmondeley repaired to the St. Pancras mortuary with a camera and a tape measure. While Cholmondeley measured Glyndwr for the Royal Marine battle dress and boots, Montagu prepared him for his photograph. It was the first time they had seen the body: the face seemed thin and sickly, rather different from the strapping young warrior they had already framed in their minds. Still, as Montagu remarked, “He does not have to look like13 an officer—only like a staff officer,” and these were seldom the most impressive physical specimens. This was possibly the first time Glyndwr Michael had ever been photographed. The morbid modeling session was a “complete failure.”14 After only a few days, the eyes of a corpse in cold storage begin to sink into the skull and the facial muscles start to sag. It is simply impossible to take a photograph of the face of a dead person that looks anything other than entirely, unmistakably dead. Michael had been emaciated before he died. Every day he spent in the St. Pancras Mortuary, he looked slightly deader. No matter at what angle he was photographed, and under what light, the newly named William Martin resolutely refused to come alive for the camera. Back in the office, and in the street, Montagu and Cholmondeley surreptitiously scanned the faces of friends and strangers alike, in the hope of spotting someone who might stand in as Bill Martin’s double. Glyndwr Michael’s face was unremarkable, with graying hair, thinning in front. It was not, thought Montagu, an “appearance that would have15 singled him out in a crowd.” Yet finding someone who even vaguely resembled him was proving extraordinarily difficult.

  While Montagu searched for the right face, “rudely staring at anyone16 with whom we came into contact,” Cholmondeley went clothes shopping. Glyndwr Michael had been tall and thin, “almost the same build”17 as Cholmondeley himself. Cholmondeley first bought braces, gaiters, and standard-issue military boots, size twelve. Then, having obtained permission from Colonel Neville of the Royal Marines, he presented himself at Gieves, the military tailors in Piccadilly, to be fitted for a Royal Marines battle dress, complete with appropriate badges of rank, Royal Marine flashes, and the badge flashes of Combined Operations. The uniform was finished off with a trench coat and beret. The clothes would need the patina of wear, since if they were too stiff and new, the Germans might suspect a plant. So Cholmondeley climbed into the uniform and wore it every day for the next three months.

  Underwear was a more ticklish problem. Cholmondeley, understandably, was unwilling to surrender his own, since good underwear was hard to come by in rationed wartime Britain. They consulted John Masterman, Oxford academic and chairman of the Twenty Committee, who came up with a scholarly solution that was also personally satisfying. “The difficulty of obtaining18 underclothes, owing to the system of coupon rationing,” wrote Masterman, “was overcome by the acceptance of a gift of thick underwear from the wardrobe of the late Warden of New College, Oxford.” Major Mart
in would be kitted out with the flannel vest and underpants of none other than H. A. L. Fisher, the distinguished Oxford historian and former president of the Board of Education in Lloyd George’s Cabinet. John Masterman and Herbert Fisher had both taught history at Oxford in the 1920s and had long enjoyed a fierce academic rivalry. Fisher was a figure of ponderous grandeur and gravity who ran New College, according to one colleague, as “one enormous mausoleum.”19 Masterman considered him long-winded and pompous. Fisher had been run over and killed by a truck after attending a tribunal examining the appeals of conscientious objectors, of which he was chairman. The obituaries paid resounding tribute to his intellectual and academic stature, which nettled Masterman. Putting the great man’s underclothes on a dead body and floating it into German hands was just the sort of joke that appealed to his odd sense of humor. Masterman described the underwear as a “gift;”20 it seems far more likely that he simply arranged for the dead don’s drawers to be pressed into war service.

  Montagu and Cholmondeley were both, in different ways, adapting themselves to the part of Bill Martin. Montagu had forged his signature. Cholmondeley was wearing his clothes. Slowly, the personality of Major Martin was coming into focus, a character that would have to be revealed by whatever was in his wallet, pockets, and briefcase. Martin, it was decided, was the adored son of an upper-middle-class family from Wales. (His Welshness was virtually the only concession to the real identity of the body.) He was a Roman Catholic. Catholic countries were known to be more reluctant to carry out surgical autopsies, and this reluctance would presumably be compounded if the body was thought to be that of a coreligionist. The William Martin they conjured up was clever, even “brilliant,”21 industrious but forgetful, and inclined to the grand gesture. He liked a good time, enjoyed the theater and dancing, and spent more than he had, relying on his father to bail him out. His mother, Antonia, had died some years earlier. They began to ink in his past. He had been educated, they decided, at public school and university. He was a secret writer of considerable promise, though he had never published anything. After university, he had retired to the country to write, listen to music, and fish. He was something of a loner. With the outbreak of war, he had signed up with the Royal Marines but found himself consigned to an office, which he disliked. “Keen for more active and dangerous22 work,” he had escaped by switching to the Commandos and had distinguished himself by his aptitude for technical matters, notably the mechanics of landing craft. He had predicted that the Dieppe raid would be a disaster, and he had been right. Martin was, they concluded, “a thoroughly good chap,”23 romantic and dashing, but also somewhat feckless, unpunctual, and extravagant.