Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (4 page)

The ruse had already been updated and deployed during the Second World War. Before the battle of Alam Halfa in 1942, a corpse was placed in a blown-up scout car, clutching a map that appeared to show a “fair going”
⁴⁰
route through the desert, in the hope of misdirecting Rommel’s tanks into soft sand, where they might get bogged down. In another variation on the theme, a fake defense plan for Cyprus was left with a woman in Cairo who was known to be in contact with Axis intelligence. The most recent variant had been plotted, with pleasing symmetry, by Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s older brother, an intelligence officer serving under General Archibald Wavell, then Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East. Peter, who shared his brother’s vivid imagination and was already a successful writer, concocted his own haversack ruse, code-named “Error,” aimed at convincing the Japanese that Wavell himself had been injured in the retreat from Burma and had left behind various important documents in an abandoned car. In April 1942, the fake documents, a photograph of Wavell’s daughter, personal letters, novels, and other items were placed in a green Ford sedan and pushed over a slope at a bridge across the Irrawaddy River, just ahead of the advancing Japanese army. Operation Error had been great fun, but “there was never any evidence
⁴¹
that the Japanese had paid any attention to the car, much less that they drew any conclusions from its contents.”

This was the central problem with the haversack ruse: it was deeply embedded in intelligence folklore, the source of many an after-dinner anecdote, but there was precious little proof that it had ever actually worked.

CHAPTER THREE
Room 13

J
OHN
M
ASTERMAN
, the chairman of the Twenty Committee, wrote detective novels in his spare time. These featured an Oxford don, much like himself, and a sleuth in the Sherlock Holmes mold. The operation outlined by Cholmondeley appealed strongly to Masterman’s novelistic cast of mind, as a mystery to be constructed, scene by scene, with clues for the Germans to unravel. Despite some misgivings about its feasibility, the Twenty Committee instructed Cholmondeley to investigate the possibilities of utilizing the Trojan Horse plan in one of the theaters of war.

Spies, like generals, tend to fight the last battle. Axis intelligence had failed to act on the genuine documents that had washed up with Lieutenant Turner and so missed the opportunity to anticipate Operation Torch; they would be unlikely to make the same mistake twice. “The Germans, having cause to regret
¹
the ease with which they had been taken by surprise by the North African landings, would not again easily dismiss strategic Allied documents if and when they came into their possession.”

Since the body would be arriving by sea, the operation would fall principally under naval control, so the representative of the Naval Intelligence Department on the Twenty Committee, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, was assigned to help Cholmondeley flesh out the idea. Montagu had also read the Trout Memo. He “strongly supported”
²
the plan and volunteered to “go into the question of obtaining
³
the necessary body, the medical problems and the formulation of a plan.”

The choice of Ewen Montagu as Cholmondeley’s planning partner was largely accidental but inspired. A barrister and workaholic, Montagu possessed organizational skills and a mastery of detail that perfectly complemented Cholmondeley’s “fertile brain.”
⁴
Where Cholmondeley was awkward and charming, Montagu was smooth and sardonic, refined, romantic, and luminously intelligent.

Ewen Edwin Samuel Montagu had been born forty-two years earlier, the second of three sons born to Baron Swaythling and scion of a Jewish banking dynasty of quite dazzling wealth. The first half of his life had been almost uniformly pleasurable, materially and intellectually. “My memory is of
⁵
a continuous happy time,” he wrote, looking back on his early years. “We were lucky in every way.”

Montagu’s grandfather, founder of the family fortune, had changed his name from Samuel to the more aristocratic-sounding Montagu, prompting a cruel limerick by Hilaire Belloc:

Montagu, first Baron Swaythling
⁶
he
,

Thus is known to you and me
.

But the Devil down in Hell

Knows the man as Samuel
.

And though it may not sound the same

It is the blighter’s proper name
.

Ewen’s father had taken over the bank and made even more money. His uncle Edwin went into politics, becoming secretary of state for India. The family home, where Ewen Montagu was born in 1901, was a vast redbrick palace in the heart of Kensington, at 28 Kensington Court. The hall was paneled in old Spanish leather; the “small dining room”
⁷
seated twenty-four; for larger gatherings there was the Louis XVI drawing room, with silk-embroidered chairs, Art Deco moldings, and an “exquisite chandelier”
⁸
of unfeasible size. The Montagus entertained nightly and lavishly. Ewen summed up the daily guest list as “Statesmen (British and world),
⁹
diplomats, generals, admirals etc.” Presiding over these occasions were “Father” (vast, bearded, and stern), “Mother” (petite, artistic, and indefatigable), and “Granniemother,” dowager Lady Swaythling, who, in Ewen’s estimation, looked “like a very animated piece
¹⁰
of Dresden China” and “like most women of her milieu never did a hand’s turn for herself.”

Ewen and his brothers had been brought up surrounded by servants and treasures, but in a reflection of the ideological ferment of the time, each emerged from childhood utterly different from the others. The eldest son, Stuart, was pompous and unimaginative as only an English aristocratic heir can be; by contrast, Ewen’s younger brother, Ivor, rejected the family money and went on to become a committed communist, the pioneer of British table tennis, a collector of rare mice, and a radical filmmaker.

The house was equipped with a hydraulic lift, which the Montagu children never entered: “It was a servants’ lift,
¹¹
to carry trays or washing baskets or themselves invisibly past the gentlemanly regions when untimely menial presence might offend convention.” There were at least twenty servants (although no one was counting), including a butler and two footmen, a cook and kitchen maids, two housemaids, Mother’s personal maid, a nurse and nursemaid, a governess, a secretary, a Cockney coachman, a groom, and two chauffeurs. “Born as I was
¹²
into a very rich family, the servants abounded, and made one’s life entirely different,” wrote Ewen.

Ewen attended Westminster School, where he was clad in top hat and tails, educated superbly, and beaten only infrequently. Before going on to Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent a year at Harvard, studying English composition but mostly enjoying the Jazz Age in a way the Great Gatsby might have envied: he danced, he drank in defiance of the “idiotic”
¹³
proscriptions of Prohibition, and he met only rich and famous people. Touring America in a private railcar, he took in New York, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and Hollywood, where he lived, by his own account, “the sort of American social life
¹⁴
one saw in the films.” The experience turned Montagu into a lifelong Americanophile: “I felt a great debt
¹⁵
of gratitude to Americans for all their kindness to me and felt that I should try to repay it in some small measure.”

At Cambridge, the pleasure continued. Unlike most students, Ewen had a personal valet and a 1910 Lancia two-seater sports car he called “Steve.” He played golf, punted, and courted girls of his own class and religion, in a discreet and intensively chaperoned way. He dabbled in Labour politics and briefly edited a radical magazine but left the more extreme left-wing thinking to his brother Ivor, who followed him to Cambridge a year later and was already well on his way to becoming a committed Marxist. Despite their differing personalities and politics, Ewen and Ivor were close friends. “The ‘spread’ among us three
¹⁶
brothers was amusing,” Ewen reflected. Stuart “already had a banker’s attitude
¹⁷
to life,” whereas Ewen and Ivor had no intention of following the family career path. “He and I were much
¹⁸
closer than either of us [was] with Stuart as we had many more interests in common.”

At Cambridge “we had nothing to do
¹⁹
but enjoy ourselves,” Ewen reflected, “and, from time to time, work.” They did, however, find time to invent table tennis. Ivor was extremely good at Ping-Pong, and since the game had no real rules or regulations, he founded the English Ping Pong Association. Jaques, the sports manufacturer, got wind of the fledgling club, and stuffily pointed out that the company had copyrighted the name Ping-Pong. Ewen recalled: “I advised [Ivor] to choose
²⁰
another name for the game; as we bandied names at one another, one of us came up with table tennis.” Ivor would go on to found the International Table Tennis Federation in 1926, and served as its first president for the next forty-one years.

Another project initiated by the Montagu brothers at Cambridge, of slightly less historical impact, was the Cheese Eaters League. Ivor and Ewen shared a passion for cheese and set up a dining club to import and taste the most exotic specimens from around the world: camel’s milk cheese, Middle Eastern goat cheese, cheese made from the milk of long-horned Afghan sheep. “Our great ambition was
²¹
to get whale’s milk cheese,” Ewen wrote, and to this end he contacted a whaling company to arrange that “if a mother whale was killed the milk should be ‘cheesed’ and sent to us.”

Montagu made the most of his privileged time at Cambridge, but he was already honing the intellectual muscles that would stand him in good stead, first as a lawyer, then as an intelligence officer, most notably the ability “to study something
²²
with little or no sleep intensively over a short period.” He was also physically tough. Once, when riding to hounds, his foot slipped out of a stirrup, which then swung up as the horse swerved, cutting a large gash in his chin and knocking out five teeth. Another huntsman picked up one of Ewen’s smashed teeth: “I put it in my pocket
²³
and rode on.” The accident left him with a lopsided smile, which he deployed charmingly but sparingly, and a useful dental ledge on which to hang his pipe.

While still at university, Ewen became engaged to Iris Solomon. It was, in many ways, a perfect match. Iris was the daughter of Solomon J. Solomon, the portrait painter; she was extremely vivacious, intelligent, and of just the right Anglo-Jewish stock. They married in 1923. A son soon arrived, followed by a daughter.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, the young lawyer and his wife lived a golden existence, in the interval between one devastating war and another. They socialized with the most powerful in the land; on weekends they repaired to Townhill, the Montagu estate near Southampton, where twenty-five gardeners tended exquisite gardens laid out by Gertrude Jekyll. Here they shot pheasants, hunted, and played table tennis. In summer they sailed Ewen’s forty-five-foot yacht on the Solent; in winter they skied in Switzerland. Most of all, Ewen loved to fish in the river and salmon pools at Townhill, tracking the sea trout as they flashed upstream and the wily little brown trout in the higher streams and pools of the estate. In later life, he would be described as “one of the best fly-fishermen
²⁴
in the realm;” he modestly denied this, insisting he was “never better than a mediocre
²⁵
if enthusiastic fisherman.” For Montagu there was no more satisfying experience than “the thrill of the strike
²⁶
and the joy of playing the fish.”

Ivor Montagu, meanwhile, was pursuing a different career path. By the age of twenty-two, he had founded the English Table Tennis Association, written
Table Tennis Today
, founded the British Film Society with Sidney Bernstein, and made two expeditions to the Soviet Union, where he perfected his Russian and searched for “an exceedingly primitive vole”
²⁷
found only in the Caucasus. The experience led to a zoological monograph on
Prometheomys
, the “Prometheus mouse,” and a lifelong faith in the Soviet machinery of state. In 1927 he married Frances Hellstern, universally known as “Hell” (and regarded as such by her mother-in-law)—an unmarried mother and the daughter of a boot maker from south London. The marriage made tabloid headlines: “Baron’s Son Weds Secretary.”
²⁸
Queen Mary wrote to Lady Swaythling: “Dear Gladys, I feel for you.
²⁹
May.” Ivor could not have cared less. In 1929, he linked up with the Soviet film director Sergey Eisenstein, and together they traveled to Hollywood, where Ivor became close friends with Charlie Chaplin, whom he taught to swear in Russian. The youngest Montagu brother would go on to work as a producer on five of Alfred Hitchcock’s British films. Ivor’s politics, meanwhile, marched steadily leftward, from the Fabian Society to the British Socialist Party to the Communist Party of Great Britain. He visited Spain during its civil war and in 1938 made a series of pro-Republican documentaries, including
In Defence of Madrid
and
Behind the Spanish Lines
. While Ewen hobnobbed with generals and ambassadors, Ivor mixed with the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. While Ewen lived in Kensington, Ivor cut himself off from his father’s money and moved with Hell to a terraced house in Brixton. Yet, for all their differences, the brothers remained close and saw each other often.