A Body in Uniform

On the dusty shelves of World War Two movies, there is a 1956 Clifton Webb spy thriller called The Man Who Never Was, which tells a sanitized version of an extraordinary 1943 plot known as Operation Mincemeat, wherein British intelligence was able to pass misleading information to Hitler’s generals that led them down the garden path to an Allied victory in Sicily and to Germany’s ultimate defeat. With documents recently made available, historian Denis Smyth has been able to tell the whole “untold” story in his new book, Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat.

Seeds of the plot were sown back on September 26, 1942. An Allied transport plane crashed near the coast of fascist Spain. All the souls on board were lost, including a courier carrying official documents likely to tip off the Germans to an amphibious assault, code-named Torch. If the courier’s corpse floated onto Spanish shores, Torch might be betrayed to German intelligence. The global conf­lict had reached a decisive juncture. If Torch failed, said Winston Churchill, “I’m done for.” But Torch succeeded under cover of “amazing secrecy.” This near miss inspired RAF Lieutenant Charlie Cholmondeley to propose that an Allied corpse from a fake crash should be stuffed with misleading information and f­loated into hostile hands. Cholmondeley’s brain was “one of those subtle and ingenious minds.” But his scheme raised a multitude of issues demanding lengthy examination. Luckily he had a chum with an equally “cork-screw mind” who could push through an even more complex plan. This was Ewen Montagu, who began his war service as “the lowest-known form of marine life,” a probationary temporary acting sub-lieutenant. Montagu was part of London’s Anglo-Jewish aristocracy. He was also a barrister. His obstinacy and his experience in psyching out the thought processes of courtroom opponents led him into his “first excursion into crime.” His version of Cholmondeley’s scheme relied upon a penniless Welshman who, in this detailed account, won fame as a dead man who did tell tales. Montagu’s role, as he later wrote, gave him “an understanding of how fascinating a criminal’s life can be, and why some men and women prefer it to any other.” He had outwitted obstructive bureaucrats to help launch the Welsh vagrant’s corpse into waters where it would reach Spanish officials collaborating with Nazi agents.

This is not just another spy story, although Ian Fleming is one of many illustrious figures unveiled alongside unsung heroes like the Italian Jew Renato Levi, who built a wireless telegraphy set to transmit intelligence as a Nazi spy while serving the British cause. This is Second World War history, with characters both famous and obscure. Lord Louis Mountbatten appears along with the great forensic pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, who toiled night and day to anticipate what enemy intelligence might make of a desiccated body dressed as a Royal Marine courier whose kidneys would still carry traces of the rat poison taken by the Welsh vagrant to commit suicide. This was the end of the golden age of homicide in England, wrote George Orwell. A vast cast of characters gave substance to misinformation conveyed by the rotting corpse. Frank Foley, a British passport control officer in Berlin who gathered secret intelligence and saved thousands of Jews, had nipped out in time to interrogate Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, who f­lew to Scotland on a mission that might have deceived the British. Foley’s expertise helped Operation Mincemeat overcome objections from the Joint Planning Staff, denounced by Churchill as “the whole machinery of negation.” The streetwise novelist Anthony Powell called JPS “a really impregnable system of obstruction.”

Every conceivable weakness in the Mincemeat plot had to be anticipated. Time passed. The refrigerated corpse began to rot. Its fingers could not be unfrozen and then frozen again. Patricia Trehearne of naval intelligence placed her own fingerprints on an inner envelope containing a key letter, dated April 23, 1943, from the chief of the Imperial General Staff, reinforcing the pretence that Greece was to be the Allied objective. Pretty Jean Leslie of MI5 contributed an old snapshot of herself shivering in a swimsuit among love letters between herself as “Pam” and the dead courier. Minute details of his fake past were invented, discarded and recycled, until some plotters felt they were living the lie.

These many true-life characters will remind a new generation of what was at stake in the Second World War and how intricately woven were a multitude of highly secret agencies. Montagu wrote a highly censored book about the plot in the early 1950s, the one that got turned into the Hollywood thriller. But details were buried under draconian clauses in the secrecy act. Today, historians benefit from the United Kingdom’s reluctant passage of an overdue Freedom of Information Act. Men and women who served at every level of Operation Mincemeat are here identified. Its inspiration goes back to earlier wars. A British military hoaxer, Richard Meinertzhagen, tricked the Turks in 1917 into supposing his comrades planned to seize Gaza (yes, that Gaza). In 1943, a country squire’s journal, The Field, reminded the plotters of Meinertzhagen’s many other ways of outfoxing the enemy. The master magician Jasper Maskelyne there upon faked acts of sabotage to divert German attention. British special forces carried out real acts of sabotage in Spain to distract its fascists.

On the moonless night of April 29, 1943, the Royal Navy submarine Seraph ran silently through a fishing f­leet from south-western Spain. A container slid through a torpedo hatch and was lashed to the submarine’s side. Seraph’s commander trimmed down the vessel until it was virtually awash. Just before dawn, the dead Welshman was extracted. The face was heavily tanned, covered with mould from eyes to chin. A Mae West life jacket remained properly fitted to the military uniform. A black briefcase with the British royal insignia was confirmed as being still secured. The skipper read aloud parts of the Order for the Burial of the Dead: “I held my tongue, and spake nothing.” Soon the cadaver was drifting to a Spanish beach some 1,500 metres away.

The cadaver indeed spake nothing but turned German eyes to Greece. This paved the way for the largest armada to date: an Allied invasion f­leet of 3,200 vessels. These unloaded 180,000 troops, 18,000 military vehicles and 1,800 pieces of artillery on the real target: Sicily. It was the prelude to knocking out Italy, the most vulnerable gateway into Nazi-dominated Europe in 1943. In that year, Anglo-American warlords had to concede that a full-scale invasion of northwest Europe was not yet possible. Just how much was at stake is evident in Supreme Allied Commander General Eisenhower’s initial fear that chances of success for Operation Mincemeat were almost nil; he foresaw a major catastrophe if it fell apart. But it did not.

Some of Denis Smyth’s idiosyncratic English slang creeps into his story and adds an element of authenticity. He now graces the University of Toronto, which must surely treasure his grasp of the complexities and the falsehoods surrounding secret intelligence and its vital role, properly deployed by the quick and the dead, to ensure the survival of our way of life.