The Times Magazine 51n January 28, 1943, a Welsh tramp
died in St Pancras Hospital in
London. He had eaten a lump of
stale bread laced with rat poison
in an abandoned warehouse near
King’s Cross. Glyndwr Michael was- He was illiterate, homeless and
probably mentally ill. His death
was wholly unremarkable, just
another small tragedy in the midst
of a brutal war in which multitudes had
already died and many more would perish.
But Michael’s death would change the course
of history. Because at the very moment he died,
two British spies were hunting for a dead body
to use in an elaborate military deception. Ewen
Montagu of Naval Intelligence, a barrister in
civilian life, and Charles Cholmondeley, an
RAF officer seconded to MI5, had together
hatched Operation Mincemeat, a plot so
far-fetched that it sounds like a work of fiction
- which, in many ways, it was.
In the spring of 1943, a vast Allied armada
had assembled in North Africa for the next
stage of the war, the invasion of Italy. Some
160,000 British, American and Commonwealth
soldiers were poised to attack what Winston
Churchill famously called Europe’s “soft
underbelly”. The problem, from the Allied
point of view, was that the obvious target for
such an invasion would be Sicily: the island
commanding the central Mediterranean.
The Axis troops were braced for an invasion.
The task of the spooks, therefore, was to
persuade Hitler that instead of attacking Sicily
the Allies would invade Greece, in the eastern
Mediterranean, and Sardinia in the west.
Montagu and Cholmondeley (pronounced
“Chumly”) came up with a plan: they would
obtain a dead body, provide it with a false
identity as a military courier, equip it with
fake documents indicating a looming attack
on Greece, and float the corpse ashore
somewhere the Germans could find it. In
theory, Hitler and his Italian allies would
then divert defensive troops from Sicily and
redeploy them to Greece, thus ensuring a
successful invasion with minimal loss of life.
The idea had come from Ian Fleming, then
assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence,
Admiral Sir John Godfrey (who would later be
immortalised as M in the James Bond books).
In a document known as “the Trout Memo”,
Fleming outlined various plots for bamboozling
the enemy. Under the heading “A suggestion
(not a very nice one)” he wrote, “A corpse,
dressed as an airman, with despatches in his
pockets, could be dropped on the coast.” In fact,
Fleming had lifted the plot from a 1937 novel,
The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, by Basil Thomson.
Almost everyone involved in Operation
Mincemeat was either a fiction writer already
or an aspiring novelist: the plot started as
fiction, then became fact, then became fiction
again after the war, then fact once again in
a non-fiction book I wrote in 2010. And now
that book has been adapted into a major
film directed by John Madden and starring
Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly
Macdonald – an outcome so astonishing and
wonderful that I sometimes cannot quite
believe that this, too, is fact not fiction.
I first came across Operation Mincemeat in
a book written after the war by Ewen Montagu
entitled The Man Who Never Was. He was only
able to do so because Duff Cooper, Churchill’s
wartime minister of information, had already
published a 1950 novel based on the case,
entitled Operation Heartbreak, that gave away
some of the key facts, disguised behind fiction.
The Man Who Never Was formed the basis
for a film in 1956 with Clifton Webb, and the
tale of the dead body used in a plot to fool
Hitler soon became embedded in the national
mythology. A postwar generation grew up
with a black and white morality fable of
ingenious Brits and gullible Germans.
But Montagu’s version of events was itself
partly deceptive. He had concealed the crucial
role in the plot played by Bletchley Park
intercepts, and falsely claimed that he’d given
a solemn promise to the family of the dead
man never to reveal his identify – when thebody of Glyndwr Michael had effectively been
stolen with the help of the St Pancras coroner,
Sir Bentley Purchase, wonderfully played in
the film by the late Paul Ritter. The film of
The Man Who Never Was also added a wholly
invented subplot involving an IRA spy.
Writing my book would have been
impossible without the government decision
to begin declassifying top secret intelligence
files in the Nineties. In 1996, one of those files
revealed the name of Glyndwr Michael. In
all, the Mincemeat files are several feet thick.
In his book, Montagu had mentioned “some
memoranda which, in very special circumstances
and for a very particular reason, I was allowed
to keep”. Intelligence officers are not allowed to
keep secret documents. Indeed, that is exactly
what they are not supposed to do. And if
Montagu had kept them, where were they?
I went to visit Montagu’s son, Jeremy, in
Oxford. In his spare bedroom was a trunk left
by his father after his death in 1985. Inside
were documents from MI5, MI6, Bletchley
Park and the Naval Intelligence Department- the entire uncensored report on Operation
Mincemeat, as well as photographs, diaries and
letters. This astonishing secret trove allowed
me to tell the full story for the first time.
As I wrote in the book, “If my discovery
O
THE PLOT WAS TWISTED AND COMPLEX. AS
FICTION, IT WOULD BE THOUGHT IMPROBABLE
Charles Cholmondeley, left, and Ewen MontaguThe body of Glyndwr
Michael, aka Major Martin
in the operation. Right:
Churchill’s go-ahead for
the project, from Ewen
Montagu’s private papersPREVIOUS SPREAD: IVAN DMITRI/GETTY IMAGES, IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM COLLECTION, WARNER BROS. THIS PAGE: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM COLLECTION, NATIONAL ARCHIVE, COURTESY JEREMY MONTAGU