Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (15 page)

Ewen Montagu, of course, was in the RNVR, the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He placed Pam’s photograph on his dressing table at Kensington Court.

Montagu had been apart from his wife since 1940, with only one brief reunion in America in 1941, when he was sent out to liaise with the FBI. In letters to his wife, Ewen referred openly to his dates with a young woman with lodgings in the Elms in Hampstead, although he never identified Jean Leslie by name. “The girl from the Elms
⁸
is one of Tar Robertson’s secretaries and is a very nice, very intelligent girl (22–24?),” he told Iris. “One of her appealing virtues
⁹
[is] she is such a good listener.” He added: “She has been much connected
¹⁰
with one side of my doings.” Iris had already broached the subject of whether she and the children should return to Britain. On March 15, 1943, Ewen wrote to her: “I took the girl from the Elms
¹¹
to dinner and we went to see ‘Desert Victory’ at the Astoria.” In the very same letter he observed: “I feel definitely that you ought
¹²
not to come back yet.”

If Iris was suspicious of Ewen’s relationship with this unnamed woman connected with her husband’s “doings,” she was not alone. Montagu later claimed his reason for placing Pam’s photograph, with its loving inscription, on his dressing table at Kensington Court, had been to see whether his inquisitive mother would react to it, or even remove it. “If Mother did touch my things
¹³
it would be the last straw. It is the only irritating thing she doesn’t do so far.” Lady Swaythling duly spotted the picture and demanded an explanation. “I told her truthfully that it was
¹⁴
a souvenir of something I had been doing. … I’m not entirely sure what she thought I meant by that!!” Montagu’s mother began sending coded warnings to her daughter-in-law in New York, “writing in her letters
¹⁵
that she felt that [Iris] should come home as soon as [her] job allowed it.”

The relationship between Ewen Montagu and Jean Leslie may have been mere romantic playacting, nothing more than flirtatious, joking banter. But when Iris later saw the photograph with its passionate dedication, Montagu insisted that it was a joke, part of a wartime operation, and that nothing had gone on between him (and his alter ego) and Jean (and hers). His wife may have believed him. He may have been telling the truth.

F
ORGING THE CHARACTER
of Major William Martin, and flirting with his fiancée, had been a most pleasurable challenge. Far more taxing—and more important—was the task of creating documentary evidence to be planted on the body. If the faked intelligence was too obvious, the Germans would spot the hoax; if it was too subtle, they might miss the clues altogether. At what level should the disinformation be pitched? Major Martin was supposed to be a serving officer whose plane had crashed en route from Britain to Gibraltar. He could not simply carry operational orders or battle plans, since these would never have been entrusted to a single messenger but instead sent by diplomatic pouch. Moreover, if a message contained highly classified information, it would tend to be transmitted by encrypted wireless message. The false information, it was decided, would have to be conveyed in the form of private letters between individual officers of sufficiently elevated rank to ensure the enemy took the information seriously. These had to be names the Germans would recognize. A communication from some minor member of the planning staff in London to a counterpart in Algiers “would not carry enough weight.”
¹⁶
The job, as Montagu saw it, was “to fake documents of a sufficiently
¹⁷
high level to have strategic effect, even after prolonged study and consideration by suspicious and highly-trained minds which would be reluctant to believe them.” Even more problematic was the question of how, exactly, to phrase the disinformation. If Sicily was identified as the cover target but the Germans somehow discovered the trick, then that would reveal Sicily as the real target. Instead of the enemy being misled, he would be tipped off.

Montagu approached the forging of the letters as if he were in court, briefing his opposing counsel with selective, invented evidence. It was, he later reflected, “a crooked lawyer’s dream of heaven.”
¹⁸
He set out three basic principles on which the letter or letters should be drafted:

1. That the planted target [i.e., Greece, Sardinia, or both] should be casually but definitively identified.
   

2. That two other places should be identified as cover, and that one of these should be Sicily itself and the other thrown in so that, if the Germans grasped that the document was a plant, Sicily should not be pinpointed.
   

3. That the letter should be “off the record” and of the type that would go by the hand of an officer but not in an official bag; it would have to have personal remarks and evidence of a personal discussion or arrangement that would prevent the message’s being sent by signal.
   

Montagu knocked out a first draft: a letter from General Sir Archibald “Archie” Nye, vice chief of the Imperial General Staff (VCIGS) to General Sir Harold Alexander in Tunisia. Nye was privy to all military operations. Alexander was in command of an army under General Dwight Eisenhower at Eighteenth Army Group Headquarters. The two British generals knew each other fairly well and were senior enough to be fully apprised of the battle plans. Harold Alexander had fought with distinction in the First World War but was widely perceived as not too bright. Indeed, one colleague unfairly described him as “bone from the neck up.”
¹⁹
Still, he was the epitome of British martial uprightness, ramrod stiff and always looking “as if he had just had a steam bath,
²⁰
a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home.” More important, he was probably Britain’s most famous soldier after Montgomery and was destined to become Eisenhower’s commander of ground forces in Sicily. The Germans would know instantly who, and how important, he was.

Montagu’s rough draft was a chatty, chummy letter between two members of the top brass, making no obvious reference to Allied intentions but dropping clues that no careful reader could miss. It implied a debate over whether Sicily or Marseilles should be the cover target; it referred to a choice of landing spots in Sardinia; it contained some apparently idle chat about the American allies (“Will Eisenhower go ahead
²¹
at his own speed?”), salutations from a mutual friend (“So and so—naming a general
²²
—sends his best”), and some lighthearted ribbing of Montgomery, the victor of El Alamein, for his bigheadedness.

Montagu thought his draft hit the perfect note, with just the right mix of “personal and ‘off the record’”
²³
information. He was very pleased with it. His immediate bosses, however, were not. The planners at the London Controlling Section (LCS), the committee in overall command of deception, suggested a less ambitious plan, arguing that “the contents of such a letter
²⁴
should be of the nuts and bolts variety and not on a high level.” On March 11, Johnnie Bevan, the head of the LCS, flew to Algiers for a meeting with Dudley Clarke, the officer in command of deception for Operation Husky, the assault on Sicily. Clarke also believed that Operation Mincemeat was aiming too high. He suggested that the letter should merely give a false indication of the date of a planned invasion, without pinpointing where this would take place.

Over the next month, the letter would be repeatedly revised, redrafted, and rewritten, as senior intelligence officers, the Chiefs of Staff, and others added their two cents to the plan. One of the hazards of having a good idea is that intelligent people tend to realize it is a good idea and seek to play a part. Like most novelists, Montagu did not like the editing process. He did not like the way Operation Mincemeat was being watered down. He did not like senior officers pulling rank and tinkering with a project in which he had invested so much of his time, energy, and personality. But most of all, he did not like Johnnie Bevan.

Montagu had once been a supporter of Bevan, the smooth, patrician chief of the London Controlling Section. But tensions rose quickly in the cramped and strained atmosphere of wartime deception planning. Soon after Bevan was appointed, they began to spar, which led to disagreements, and culminated in a titanic personality clash. Bevan took malicious pleasure in ordering Montagu about; Montagu responded with withering contempt. Early in March, in the midst of discussions over the form of Operation Mincemeat, Montagu mounted a full-scale assault on Bevan, accusing him of being incompetent, mendacious, inefficient, and “almost completely ignorant
²⁵
of the German Intelligence Service, how they work and what they are likely to believe.”

When Montagu got the bit between his teeth, he was not easily reined in. Bevan, he protested, “is almost completely inexperienced
²⁶
in any form of deception work. He has a pleasant and likeable personality and can ‘sell himself’ well. He has not got a first grade brain. He can expound imposing platitudes such as ‘we want to contain the Germans in the West’ with great impressiveness. … I am sure he will not improve with experience. The remainder of the staff of the London Controlling Section are either unsuited to this sort of work (in which they are all wholly inexperienced) or are third rate brains.” This rant continued for several more pages. Montagu’s character assassination of Bevan was completely over the top. It was also wrong, because Bevan possessed a brain quite as supple as that of Ewen Montagu. The memo attacking Bevan was internally circulated to the chiefs of Naval Intelligence, but Montagu’s colleagues seem to have realized he was merely blowing off steam, and the document did not leave the NID—which was just as well, for if Montagu’s complaints had reached the ears of Churchill, who had complete faith in Bevan, he might well have been sacked. Some saw Montagu’s attitude toward Bevan as evidence of thwarted ambition and backstabbing. More likely, it was the overreaction of an obsessive perfectionist, frustrated at the way his pièce de résistance was being tampered with and deeply alarmed by what he saw as the leaden response to developments in the Mediterranean.

At the end of February, Bletchley Park deciphered a message from the Nazi high command to the German Command in Tunisia, assessing the situation in the Mediterranean. “From reports coming out
²⁷
about Anglo-American landing intentions it is apparent that the enemy is practicing deception on a large scale. In spite of this, a landing on a fairly large scale can be expected in March. It is thought the Mediterranean is the most probable theatre of operations and the first operation to be an attack against one of the large islands, the order of probability being Sicily first, Crete second, and Sardinia or Corsica third.” The Germans not only anticipated a deception operation but had correctly divined the intended target, and time was running out to change their minds. “Sicily has now been allowed
²⁸
to become our most probable target and will be hard to remove from the enemy’s minds,” warned Montagu. “It is much easier
²⁹
to persuade the Germans that we will attack X than it is to dissuade them from an appreciation already formed by them that we will attack Y.” Bevan seemed to be doing nothing: “He still has no deception
³⁰
plan for Husky. … Why, even now, weeks after HUSKY has been laid on, have we got no deception plan drafted, much less approved and started?” Mincemeat was pushing ahead, but if it did not work, there would be a “complete failure to
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deceive the Germans by any action of ours.” The Allies were on the verge of attacking a target that the Germans expected to be attacked. Britain and her allies, he warned, were “now in a highly dangerous situation.”
³²

Montagu wrote another letter to Tar Robertson, more temperate this time but flatly rejecting Bevan’s idea that a “nuts and bolts” letter would be sufficient: “It would be a very great pity
³³
if we used a letter on a low level. I do not feel that such a letter would impress either the Abwehr or the operational authorities.”

While Montagu fought it out with Bevan and the wrangling continued over the contents of the letters, a separate debate was under way to determine where the body should be floated ashore. After briefly toying with Portugal or the south coast of France, the planners had settled once more on Spain. Both Britain and Germany maintained embassies in Madrid, but pro-German and anti-British sentiment was rife, particularly within the armed forces and the Spanish bureaucracy. As one MI5 officer observed, parts of the Spanish state were effectively in German employ: “Spanish police records
³⁴
and officers of the Seguridad [the Spanish security service] were instructed to facilitate the Germans in all they required, passports to Spanish nationals were issued on German recommendation, or refused on their instructions. The Spanish press and radio services were under German control. The Spanish General Staff was collaborating to the maximum. The use of Spanish diplomatic bags was theirs for the asking.” If the misleading documents could be put into the right Spanish hands, then they would almost certainly be passed on to the Germans. But Spain was unpredictable, and there were plenty of Spaniards fundamentally opposed to the Nazis. The worst outcome would be if the body and its papers ended up with a British sympathizer and were handed back intact and unread. Where, then, was the most pro-German part of the Spanish coast?