Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (5 page)

After joining the bar in 1924, Ewen had developed into an exceptionally able lawyer. He learned to absorb detail, improvise, and mold the collective mind of a malleable jury. Ewen Montagu was born to argue. He would dispute with anyone, at any hour of the day, on almost any subject, and devastatingly, since he possessed the rare ability to read an interlocutor’s mind—the mark of the good lawyer, and the good liar. He became fascinated by the workings of the criminal mind and confessed to feeling “a certain sympathy with rogue characters.”
³⁰
He relished the cut and thrust of the courtroom, where victory depended on being able to “see the point of view,
³¹
and anticipate the reactions, of an equally astute opposing counsel.” Montagu was invariably kind to people below him in social status and capable of the most “gentle manners,”
³²
but he liked to cut those in authority down to size. He could be fabulously rude. Like many defense lawyers, he enjoyed the challenge of defending the apparently defenseless or indefensible. He had one client, a crooked solicitor, in whom he may have seen something of himself: “If he could see a really artistic lie,
³³
a gleam would come into his eye and he would tell it.” In 1939, Montagu was made a King’s Counsel.

Ewen was sailing his yacht off the coast of Brittany, six months after becoming a barrister, when he learned that war had been declared. The sailing trip had been delightful, “hard in the wind,
³⁴
in glorious weather and escorted by porpoises playing around our bow.” The prime minister interrupted with a grim wireless statement: “This morning the British
³⁵
Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.” On hearing the news, Ewen had swung the helm around and headed back to port, knowing that nothing in his gilded life would ever be as shiny again. He recalled “looking out to sea
³⁶
and realising all had gone smash for me. All had been going so well, as a new Silk [barrister] all looked promising, and in my family and private life all was so wonderful. And now full stop.”

Iris and the two children, Jeremy and Jennifer, would be packed off to the safety of America, away from the Luftwaffe bombs that would soon rain down on London. As one of the country’s most prominent Jewish banking families, Ewen knew the Montagu clan faced special peril in the event of a Nazi invasion.

At thirty-eight, Ewen was too old for active service, but he had already volunteered for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. With the outbreak of war, he was commissioned as lieutenant (acting lieutenant commander) and swiftly came to the attention of Admiral John Godfrey, the head of Naval Intelligence. “It is quite useless,
³⁷
and in fact dangerous to employ people of medium intelligence,” wrote Godfrey. “Only men with first class brains should be allowed to touch this stuff. If the right sort of people can’t be found, better keep out altogether.” In Montagu he knew he had the right sort of person.

Godfrey’s Naval Intelligence Department was an eclectic and unconventional body. In addition to Ian Fleming, his personal assistant, Godfrey employed “two stockbrokers, a schoolmaster,
³⁸
a journalist, a collector of books on original thought, an Oxford classical don, a barrister’s clerk, an insurance agent, two regular naval officers and several women assistants and typists.” This heterogeneous crew was crammed into Room 39, the Admiralty, which was permanently wreathed in tobacco smoke and frequently echoed with the sounds of Admiral Godfrey shouting and swearing. Fleming awarded Godfrey the heavily ironic nickname “Uncle John,” for seldom has there been a less avuncular boss. “The permanent inhabitants
³⁹
who finally settled in this cave,” he wrote, “were people of very different temperaments, ambitions, social status and home life, all with their particular irritabilities, hopes, fears, anguishes, loves, hates, animosities and blank spots.” Any and every item of intelligence relevant to the war at sea passed through Room 39, and though the atmosphere inside was often tense, Godfrey’s team “worked like ants,
⁴⁰
and their combined output was prodigious.” The ants under Godfrey were responsible not merely for gathering and disseminating secret intelligence but for running agents and double agents, as well as developing deception and counterespionage operations.

Godfrey had identified Montagu as a natural for this sort for work, and he was swiftly promoted. Soon, he not only represented the Naval Intelligence Department on most of the important intelligence bodies, including the Twenty Committee, but ran his own subsection of the department: the top secret Section 17M (for Montagu). Housed in Room 13, a low-ceilinged cavern twenty feet square, Section 17M was responsible for dealing with all “special intelligence” relating to naval matters, principally the “Ultra” intercepts, the enemy communications deciphered by the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park following the breaking of the German cipher machine Enigma. In the early days of 17M, the Ultra signals came in dribbles, but gradually the volume of secret information swelled to a torrent, with more than two hundred messages arriving every day, some a few words long but others covering pages. The work of understanding, collating, and disseminating this huge volume of information was like “learning a new language,”
⁴¹
according to Montagu, whose task it was to decide which items of intelligence should pass to other intelligence agencies and which merited inclusion in the Special Intelligence Summaries, “the cream of all intelligence,”
⁴²
while coordinating with MI5, Bletchley Park, the intelligence departments of the other services, and the prime minister. Montagu became fluent at reading this traffic, which, even after decoding, could be impossibly opaque. “The Germans have a passion
⁴³
for cross-references and for abbreviations, and they have an even greater passion (only equalled by their ineptitude in practice) for the use of code-names.”

Section 17M expanded. First came Joan Saunders, a young woman married to the librarian of the House of Commons, “to do the detailed work
⁴⁴
of indexing, filing and research.” Joan was effectively Montagu’s chief assistant, a tall, strapping, scarily jolly woman with a booming voice and a personality to match. Joan had been a nurse in the early part of the war and had manned a nursing station at Dunkirk during the retreat. She was practical, bossy, and occasionally terrifying and wore a tiger-skin fur coat to work in winter. The other female staff called her “Auntie,”
⁴⁵
but never to her face. Her familiarity with dead bodies would prove to be most useful. “She is extraordinarily good,
⁴⁶
very methodical but also frightfully alert,” Montagu told his wife. “Very pleasant to work with, although not much to look at. I’m not lucky in assistants as regards looks.” Montagu was something of a connoisseur of female beauty.

By 1943, 17M had swelled to fourteen people, including an artist, a yachting magazine journalist, another barrister, three secretaries, two shorthand typists, and two “watchkeepers”
⁴⁷
to monitor any night traffic. The working conditions were atrocious. Room 13 was “far too small,
⁴⁸
far too cluttered with safes, steel filing cabinets, tables, chairs etc. and especially far too low, with steel girders making it even lower. There was no fresh air, only potted air [and] conditions which would have been condemned instantly by any factories inspector.” The only light came from fluorescent strips, “which made everyone
⁴⁹
look mauve.” In theory, the staff “were not supposed to listen
⁵⁰
to what we said over the telephone or to each other.” In such a confined space, this was impossible: there were no secrets between the secret keepers of Room 13. Despite the rigors, Montagu’s unit was highly effective: they were, in the words of Admiral Godfrey, “a brilliant band of
⁵¹
dedicated war winners.”

As he had in the courtroom, Montagu delighted in burrowing into the minds of his opponents: the German saboteurs, spies, agents, and spymasters whose daily wireless exchanges—intercepted, decoded, and translated—poured into Section 17M. He came to recognize individual German intelligence officers among the traffic and, as he had his former rivals in court, he “began to regard some almost as friends”
⁵²
—“They were so kind to us unconsciously.”
⁵³

In New York, at Ewen’s instigation, Iris had begun working for British Security Co-ordination, the intelligence organization run by William Stephenson, the spymaster who reveled in the code name “Intrepid.” Behind a front as British Passport Control, Stephenson’s team ran black propaganda against Nazi sympathizers in the United States, organized espionage, and worked assiduously to prod America into the war, by fair means or foul. In a way, spying and concealment was already in Iris’s blood, for her father, the painter Solomon J. Solomon, had played an important role in the invention of military camouflage during the First World War. In 1916, Solomon had built a fake nine-foot tree out of steel plates shrouded in real bark, for use as an observation post on the western front. This was a family that understood the pleasure and challenge of making something appear to be what it was not. Ewen was pleased that his wife was now, as he put it, “in the racket”
⁵⁴
too. Ewen and Iris wrote to each other every day, although Montagu could never describe exactly what his day involved: “If I am killed there are
⁵⁵
four or five people who will be able after the war to tell you the sort of things I have been doing,” he wrote to Iris.

Montagu’s role expanded once more when Godfrey placed him in charge of all naval deception through double agents—“the most fascinating job
⁵⁶
in the war,” in Montagu’s words. By means of the Ultra intercepts and other intelligence sources, Britain captured almost every spy sent to Britain by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization. Many of these were used as double agents, feeding misinformation back to the enemy. Montagu found himself at the very heart of the “Double Cross System,” helping Tar Robertson and John Masterman to deploy double agents wherever and whenever the navy was involved. He worked with Eddie Chapman, the crook turned spy code-named “Zigzag,” to send false information about submarine weaponry; he investigated astrology to see if Hitler’s apparent belief in such things could be used against him (“very entertaining but useless”
⁵⁷
); and in November 1941 he traveled to the United States to help establish a system for handling double agent “Tricycle” (the Serbian playboy Dusko Popov) in the penetration of German spy rings operating in America. The Double Cross System also involved the creation of bogus spies, “a great number who
⁵⁸
did not really exist at all in real life, but were imaginary people notionally recruited as sub-agents by double agents whom we were already working.” In order to convince the enemy that these invented characters were real, every aspect of the fake personality had to be conjured into existence.

Some of the material that crossed Montagu’s desk was strange beyond belief. In October 1941, Godfrey ordered Montagu to investigate why the Germans had suddenly imported one thousand rhesus monkeys, as well as a troop of Barbary apes. Godfrey speculated that “it might be an indication
⁵⁹
that the Germans intended to use gas or bacteriological warfare, or for experimental purposes.” Montagu consulted Lord Victor Rothschild, MI5’s expert on explosives, booby traps, and other unconventional forms of warfare. His lordship was doubtful that the large monkey imports were sinister. “Though I have kept
⁶⁰
a close eye on people applying for animals,” he wrote, “those cases so far investigated have proved innocuous. For example, an advertisement in The Times for 500 hedgehogs proved to be in connection with the experiments being done by the foot and mouth disease research section.” The mystery of Hitler’s monkeys remains unsolved.

Montagu would never fight on the front line, but there was no doubting his personal bravery. When Britain was under threat of German invasion in 1940, he hit on the idea of trying to lead the invading force into a minefield, using himself as bait. The minefield off Britain’s east coast had gaps in it, to allow the fishing boats in and out. The Germans knew the approximate, but not the precise, location of these channels. If a chart could be gotten into their hands showing channels close enough to the real gaps to be believable, yet slightly wrong, then the invading fleet might be persuaded to ram confidently up the wrong route, and, with any luck, sink. Popov, Agent Tricycle, would pass the false chart to the Germans, claiming he had obtained it from a Jewish officer in the navy keen to curry favor with the Nazis. Popov would say that this man, a prominent lawyer in civilian life, “had heard and believed the propaganda
⁶¹
stories about the ill-treatment of Jews and did not want to face the risk of being handed over to the Gestapo.” The chart was his insurance policy, and he would only hand it over in return for a written guarantee that he would be safe in the event of a successful German invasion of Britain. Popov liked the plan and asked what name he should give the Germans for this treacherous naval officer. “I thought you had realised,”
⁶²
said Montagu. “Lieutenant Commander Montagu. They can look me up in the Law List and any of the Jewish Year Books.”