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

ALSO BY BEN MACINTYRE

Agent Zigzag:
A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

The Man Who Would Be King
The First American in Afghanistan

The Englishman’s Daughter
A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One

The Napoleon of Crime:
The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief

Forgotten Fatherland:
The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche

For
Kate & Melita
and
Magnus & Lucie

Who in war will not have
¹
his laugh amid the skulls?

—WINSTON CHURCHILL,
Closing the Ring

Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE:
The Sardine Spotter

CHAPTER TWO:
Corkscrew Minds

CHAPTER THREE:
Room 13

CHAPTER FOUR:
Target Sicily

CHAPTER FIVE:
The Man Who Was

CHAPTER SIX:
A Novel Approach

CHAPTER SEVEN:
Pam

CHAPTER EIGHT:
The Butterfly Collector

CHAPTER NINE:
My Dear Alex

Photo Insert 1

CHAPTER TEN:
Table-Tennis Traitor

CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Gold Prospector

CHAPTER TWELVE:
The Spy Who Baked Cakes

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
Mincemeat Sets Sail

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Bill’s Farewell

CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
Dulce et Decorum

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
Spanish Trails

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
Kühlenthal’s Coup

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
Mincemeat Digested

CHAPTER NINETEEN:
Hitler Loses Sleep

CHAPTER TWENTY:
Seraph
and Husky

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:
A Nice Cup of Tea

Photo Insert 2

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
Hook, Line, and Sinker

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:
Mincemeat Revealed

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:
Aftermath

APPENDIX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Preface

I
N THE EARLY HOURS
of July 10, 1943, British and North American troops stormed ashore on the coast of Sicily in the first assault against Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” In hindsight, the invasion of the Italian island was a triumph, a pivotal moment in the war, and a vital stepping-stone on the way to victory in Europe. It was nearly a disaster. The offensive—then the largest amphibious landing ever attempted—had been months in the planning, and although the fighting was fierce, the casualty rate among the Allies was limited. Of the 160,000 soldiers who took part in the invasion and conquest of Sicily, more than 153,000 were still alive at the end. That so many survived was due, in no small measure, to a man who had died seven months earlier. The success of the Sicilian invasion depended on overwhelming strength, logistics, secrecy, and surprise. But it also relied on a wide web of deception, and one deceit in particular: a spectacular trick dreamed up by a team of spies led by an English lawyer.

I first came across the remarkable Ewen Montagu while researching an earlier book,
Agent Zigzag
, about the wartime double agent Eddie Chapman. A barrister in civilian life, Montagu was a Naval Intelligence officer who had been one of Chapman’s handlers, but he was better known as the author, in 1953, of
The Man Who Never Was
, an account of the deception plan, code-named “Operation Mincemeat,” he had masterminded in 1943. In a later book,
Beyond Top Secret Ultra
, written in 1977, Montagu referred to “some memoranda which,
¹
in very special circumstances and for a very particular reason, I was allowed to keep.” That odd aside stuck in my memory. The “special circumstances,” I assumed, must refer to the writing of
The Man Who Never Was
, which was authorized and vetted by the Joint Intelligence Committee. But I could think of no other case in which a former intelligence officer had been “allowed to keep” classified documents. Indeed, retaining top secret material is exactly what intelligence officers are supposed not to do. And if Ewen Montagu had kept them for so many years after the war, where were they now?

Montagu died in 1985. None of the obituaries referred to his papers. I went to see his son, Jeremy Montagu, a distinguished authority on musical instruments at Oxford University. With an unmistakable twinkle, Jeremy led me to an upstairs room in his rambling home in Oxford and pulled a large and dusty wooden trunk from under a bed. Inside were bundles of files from MI5 (the Security Service, responsible for counterespionage), MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, responsible for gathering intelligence outside Britain), and the wartime Naval Intelligence Department (NID), some tied up with string and many stamped
TOP SECRET
. Jeremy explained that some of his father’s papers had been transferred after his death to the Imperial War Museum, where they had yet to be cataloged, but the rest were just as he had left them in the trunk: letters, memos, photographs, and operational notes relating to the 1943 deception plan, as well as the original, uncensored manuscripts of his books. Here, too, was Ewen Montagu’s unpublished two-hundred-page autobiography and, perhaps most important, a copy of the official, classified report on “Operation Mincemeat”—the boldest, strangest, and most successful deception of the war. The personal correspondence between Ewen Montagu and his wife, at least three letters a week throughout the war, was also made available to me by the Montagu family. Without their generous help, this book could not have been written. All quotations are cited in the endnotes, but for clarity, I have standardized spellings, avoided ellipses, and selectively used reported speech as direct speech.

If my discovery of these papers reads like something out of a spy film, that may be no accident: Montagu himself had a rich sense of the dramatic. He must have known they would be found one day.

More than half a century after publication,
The Man Who Never Was
has lost none of the flavor of wartime intrigue, but it is, and was always intended to be, incomplete. The book was written at the behest of the British government, in order to conceal certain facts; in parts, it is deliberately misleading. Now, with the relaxation of government rules surrounding official secrecy, the recent declassification of files in the National Archives, and the discovery of the contents of Ewen Montagu’s ancient trunk, the full story of Operation Mincemeat can be told for the first time.

The plan was born in the mind of a novelist and took shape through a most unlikely cast of characters: a brilliant barrister, a family of undertakers, a forensic pathologist, a gold prospector, an inventor, a submarine captain, a transvestite English spymaster, a rally driver, a pretty secretary, a credulous Nazi, and a grumpy admiral who loved fly-fishing.

This deception operation—which underpinned the invasion of Sicily and helped to win the war—was framed around a man who never was. But the people who invented him, and those who believed in him, and those who owed their lives to him, most certainly were.

This is their story.

Ben Macintyre
London, 2009

CHAPTER ONE
The Sardine Spotter

J
OSÉ
A
NTONIO
R
EY
M
ARÍA
had no intention of making history when he rowed out into the Atlantic from the coast of Andalusia in southwest Spain on April 30, 1943. He was merely looking for sardines.

José was proud of his reputation as the best fish spotter in Punta Umbria. On a clear day, he could pick out the telltale iridescent flash of sardines several fathoms deep. When he saw a shoal, José would mark the place with a buoy and then signal to Pepe Cordero and the other fishermen in the larger boat,
La Calina
, to row over swiftly with the horseshoe net.

But the weather today was bad for fish spotting. The sky was overcast, and an onshore wind ruffled the water’s surface. The fishermen of Punta Umbria had set out before dawn, but so far they had caught only anchovies and a few bream. Rowing Ana, his little skiff, in a wide arc, José scanned the water again, the rising sun warming his back. On the shore, he could see the little cluster of fishing huts beneath the dunes on Playa del Portil, his home. Beyond that, past the estuary where the rivers Odiel and Tinto flowed into the sea, lay the port of Huelva.

The war, now in its fourth year, had hardly touched this part of Spain. Sometimes José would come across strange flotsam in the water—fragments of charred wood, pools of oil, and other debris that told of battles somewhere out at sea. Earlier that morning, he had heard gunfire in the distance, and a loud explosion. Pepe said that the war was ruining the fishing business, as no one had any money, and he might have to sell
La Calina
and
Ana
. It was rumored that the captains of some of the larger fishing boats spied for the Germans or the British. But in most ways the hard lives of the fishermen continued as they had always done.

José had been born on the beach, in a hut made from driftwood, twenty-three years earlier. He had never traveled beyond Huelva. He had never been to school or learned to read and write. But no one in Punta Umbria was better at spotting fish.

It was midmorning when José noticed a “lump”
¹
above the surface of the water. At first he thought it must be a dead porpoise, but as he rowed closer the shape grew clearer, and then unmistakable. It was a body, floating facedown, buoyed by a yellow life jacket, the lower part of the torso invisible. The figure seemed to be dressed in uniform.

As he reached over the gunwale to grab the body, José caught a gust of putrefaction and found himself looking into the face of a man, or, rather, what had been the face of a man. The chin was entirely covered in green mold, while the upper part of the face was dark, as if tanned by the sun. José wondered if the dead man had been burned in some accident at sea. The skin on the nose and chin had begun to rot away.

José waved and shouted to the other fishermen. As
La Calina
drew alongside, Pepe and the crew clustered to the gunwale. José called for them to throw down a rope and haul the body aboard, but “no-one wanted
²
to touch it.” Annoyed, José realized he would have to bring it ashore himself. Seizing a handful of sodden uniform, he hauled the corpse onto the stern, and with the legs still trailing in the water, he rowed back to shore, trying not to breathe in the smell.

On the part of the beach called La Bota—the boot—José and Pepe dragged the body up to the dunes. A black briefcase, attached to the man by a chain, trailed in the sand behind them. They laid out the corpse in the shade of a pine tree. Children streamed out of the huts and gathered around the gruesome spectacle. The man was tall, at least six feet, dressed in a khaki tunic and trench coat, with large army boots. Seventeen-year-old Obdulia Serrano spotted a small silver chain with a cross around his neck. The dead man must have been a Roman Catholic.