Operation Mincemeat Read online

  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 have1 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

  IN 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

  JOSÉ ANTONIO REY MARÍA 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 li
ttle 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 wanted2 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.

  Obdulia was sent to summon the officer from the defense unit guarding this part of the coast. A dozen men of Spain’s Seventy-second Infantry Regiment had been marching up and down the beach earlier that morning, as they did, rather pointlessly, most mornings, and the soldiers were now taking a siesta under the trees. The officer ordered two of his men to stand guard over the body, in case someone tried to go through the dead man’s pockets, and trudged off up the beach to find his commanding officer.

  The scent of the wild rosemary and jacaranda growing in the dunes could not mask the stench of decomposition. Flies buzzed around the body. The soldiers moved upwind. Somebody went to fetch a donkey to carry the body to the village of Punta Umbria four miles away. From there, it could be taken by boat across the estuary to Huelva. The children dispersed.

  José Antonio Rey María, perfectly unaware of the events he had just set in motion, pushed his little boat back into the sea and resumed his search for sardines.

  TWO MONTHS EARLIER, in a tiny, tobacco-stained basement room beneath the Admiralty building in Whitehall, two men had sat puzzling over a conundrum of their own devising: how to create a person from nothing, a man who had never been. The younger man was tall and thin, with thick spectacles and an elaborate air-force mustache, which he twiddled in rapt concentration. The other, elegant and languid, was dressed in naval uniform and sucked on a curved pipe that fizzed and crackled evilly. The stuffy underground cavern lacked windows, natural light, and ventilation. The walls were covered in large maps and the ceiling stained a greasy nicotine yellow. It had once been a wine cellar. Now it was home to a section of the British Secret Service made up of four intelligence officers, seven secretaries and typists, six typewriters, a bank of locked filing cabinets, a dozen ashtrays, and two scrambler telephones. Section 17M was so secret that barely twenty people outside the room even knew of its existence.

  Room 13 of the Admiralty was a clearinghouse of secrets, lies, and whispers. Every day the most lethal and valuable intelligence—decoded messages, deception plans, enemy troop movements, coded spy reports, and other mysteries—poured into this little basement room, where they were analyzed, assessed, and dispatched to distant parts of the world, the armor and ammunition of a secret war.

  The two officers—Pipe and Mustache—were also responsible for running agents and double agents, espionage and counterespionage, intelligence, fakery, and fraud: they passed lies to the enemy that were false and damaging, as well as information that was true but harmless; they ran willing spies, reluctant spies pressed into service, and spies who did not exist at all. Now, with the war at its height, they set about creating a spy who was different from all the others and all who had come before: a secret agent who was not only fictional but dead.

  The defining feature of this spy would be his falsity. He was a pure figment of imagination, a weapon in a war far removed from the traditional battle of bombs and bullets. At its most visible, war is fought with leadership, courage, tactics, and brute force; this is the conventional war of attack and counterattack, lines on a map, numbers and luck. This war is usually painted in black, white, and blood red, with winners, losers, and casualties: the good, the bad, and the dead. Alongside that conflict is another, less visible species of war, played out in shades of gray, a battle of deception, seduction, and bad faith, of tricks and mirrors, in which the truth is protected, as Churchill put it, by a “bodyguard of lies.” The combatants in this war of the imagination were seldom what they seemed to be, for the covert world, in which fiction and reality are sometimes enemies and sometimes allies, attracts minds that are subtle, supple, and often extremely strange.

  The man lying in the dunes at Punta Umbria was a fraud. The lies he carried would fly from London to Madrid to Berlin, traveling from a freezing Scottish loch to the shores of Sicily, from fiction to reality, and from Room 13 of the Admiralty all the way to Hitler’s desk.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Corkscrew Minds

  DECEIVING THE ENEMY IN WARTIME, thought Admiral John Godfrey, Britain’s director of naval intelligence, was just like fishing: specifically fly-fishing, for trout. “The Trout Fisher,”1 he wrote in a top secret memo, “casts patiently all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures. If he has frightened a fish he may ‘give the water a rest for half-an-hour,’ but his main endeavour, viz. to attract fish by something he sends out from his boat, is incessant.”

  Godfrey’s “Trout Memo” was distributed to the other chiefs of wartime intelligence on September 29, 1939, when the war was barely three weeks old. It was issued under Godfrey’s name, but it bore all the hallmarks of his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who would go on to write the James Bond novels. Fleming had, in Godfrey’s words, a “marked flair”2 for intelligence planning and was particularly skilled, as one might expect, at dreaming up what he called “plots” to outfox the enemy. Fleming called these plans “romantic Red Indian daydreams,”3 but they were deadly serious. The memo laid out numerous ideas for bamboozling the Germans at sea, the many ways that the fish might be trapped through “deception, ruses de guerre,4 passing on false information and so on.” The ideas were extraordinarily imaginative and, like most of Fleming’s writing, barely cr
edible. The memo admitted as much: “At first sight,5 many of these appear somewhat fantastic, but nevertheless they contain germs of some good ideas; and the more you examine them, the less fantastic they seem to appear.”

  Godfrey was himself a most literal man. Hard-driving, irascible, and indefatigable, he was the model for “M” in Fleming’s Bond stories. There was no one in naval intelligence with a keener appreciation of the peculiar mentality needed for espionage and counterespionage. “The business of deception,6 handling double agents, deliberate leakages and building up in the minds of the enemy confidence in a double agent, needed the sort of corkscrew mind which I did not possess,” he wrote. Gathering intelligence and distributing false intelligence, was, he thought, like “pushing quicksilver7 through a gorse bush with a long-handled spoon.”

  The Trout Memo was a masterpiece of corkscrew thinking, with fifty-one suggestions for “introducing ideas8 into the heads of the Germans,” ranging from the possible to the wacky. These included dropping footballs painted with luminous paint to attract submarines; distributing messages in bottles from a fictitious U-boat captain cursing Hitler’s Reich; sending out a fake “treasure ship”9 packed with commandos; and disseminating false information through bogus copies of the Times (“an unimpeachable and immaculate10 medium”). One of the nastier ideas envisaged setting adrift tins of explosives disguised as food, “with instructions on the11 outside in many languages,” in the hope that hungry enemy sailors or submariners would pick them up, try to cook the tins, and blow themselves up.

  Though none of these plans ever came to fruition, buried deep in the memo was the kernel of another idea, number 28 on the list, fantastic in every sense. Under the heading “A Suggestion (not a very nice one)”12 Godfrey and Fleming wrote: “The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.”