The Times Magazine 53of these papers sounds 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.” Eleven years later, a spy film is exactly
what they have produced.
The tale that emerged from these documents
was more truly extraordinary and eccentric
than anything I had imagined – a plot so
twisted and complex that in fiction it would
have been dismissed as far too improbable.
The stakes were almost unimaginably high:
if the Germans rumbled what was happening,
instead of diverting troops from Sicily they
would reinforce the island and there would be
a bloodbath. The plotters went ahead anyway.
Churchill (played in the film by Simon Russell
Beale) personally approved the plan, despite
the scepticism of some senior advisers, and he
dined out on it for years afterwards in direct
contravention of the Official Secrets Act.
With the prime minister’s backing, the
authors of the deception approached it as if
writing a work of fiction. Glyndwr Michael, on
ice in St Pancras mortuary, was transformed
into Major William Martin of the Royal
Marines, a military courier with a nicotine
habit, a bank manager, love letters and a lot of
secret documents in the briefcase chained to
his belt. They had originally intended to drop
the corpse from a plane, to make it look as if
the man had died in an air crash, but fearing it
might disintegrate on impact with the water,
opted instead to transport it by submarine.
The best place to float the body ashore,
they concluded, was Huelva, on the coast
of Spain. Franco’s Spain was neutral but
leaning towards the Axis powers, and
Spanish officialdom was riddled with Nazi
sympathisers. If Montagu and Cholmondeley
could get the documents into Spanish hands,
there was a good chance these would be
passed to the Germans and eventually end up
on Hitler’s desk. That, at least, was the plan.
All the main participants in Operation
Mincemeat are now dead, but at the time I was
researching the book, some were alive. Patricia
Trehearne had worked in Room 13 in the
Admiralty basement where the operation was
conducted. Trehearne’s future husband landed
at Sicily, giving her a remarkable personal
stake in the outcome of the deception.
I also interviewed Jean Leslie (played by
Kelly Macdonald), the woman who supplied
a photograph of herself in a bathing suit to
represent “Pam”, the imaginary girlfriend of the
dead man. The relationship between Montagu
and Jean Leslie forms the emotional core of
the film. I wheeled Leslie in a wheelchair
down to the very spot by the Thames where
the photograph was taken. Then in her
eighties she was as funny, bright and flirtatious
as she had been when a wartime secretary in
MI5’s counterintelligence department.The organisers of the operation poured
themselves into the ruse: Charles Cholmondeley
wore the uniform that would go on the dead
man, to ensure that it did not look too new;
Hester Leggett, the unmarried head of the MI5
secretarial unit (played by Penelope Wilton),
wrote the letters from the fictitious “Pam”,
imagining herself as a lovestruck young woman.
“Bill darling,” she wrote. “Don’t please let
them send you off into the blue the horrible
way they do nowadays. Now that we’ve found
each other out of the whole world, I don’t
think I could bear it...”
“Into the blue” was, of course, exactly where
the invented Major Bill Martin was heading.
The hint of impending tragedy might have
seemed a little suspicious, but the members
of the Mincemeat team were so caught up in
their own fiction they failed to spot this.
They even put real ticket stubs from a show
they had attended at the Prince of Wales
Theatre into the “wallet litter” of the dead man.
The main performer was the singer-dancer
Sid Field, but further down the cast list were
two theatrical hopefuls, aged 16 and 17: their
names were Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.
Montagu wrote a bogus obituary to appear
in The Times a few days after the body washed
up. It described a man whose death “came as
a complete surprise to many of his friends”
and praised William Martin’s “determined, if
unorthodox, methods to prepare himself for
active and dangerous work”. This was the kind
of joke Montagu liked: Glyndwr Michael had
been prepared for active service in a way that
was not just unorthodox but illegal, highly
risky and at times absurd.
The Times did not run the obituary. This
paper never publishes fake news.
The way the team worked might best be
described as “method espionage”: they tried to
live the parts they were imagining. Long after
my book came out, I was still discovering how
far they were prepared to go – the individuals’
willingness to believe, and live, the parts they
were playing is a central theme of the film.During my research I believed I had spotted
a major mistake by the plotters. Among the
letters in Major Martin’s wallet was one from
his “father” on notepaper from the Black Lion
Hotel in Mold. This, I wrote, was a hostage to
fortune. What if a German spy in Britain had
consulted the hotel register at the Black Lion
and discovered that there had been no John
Martin staying at the hotel on April 13, 1943?
If the Germans had found out that even one
link of the chain was a falsification, the whole
plot would have unravelled.
But then, after publication, I received a call
from a man who had purchased the old hotel
register at an auction. “If you look at the page
for April 1943, you will clearly see the name
JG Martin.” Someone, probably Cholmondeley,
had taken the trouble to go to north Wales
and sign the register as the invented father
of someone who did not exist, just in case
someone came snooping. Now that is spycraft.
But perhaps the extraordinary part of the
story was discovering the existence, short and
grim as it was, of Glyndwr Michael. He had
been born in Aberbargoed, the son of a miner,
and grew up in abject poverty. The father
stabbed himself in the throat when Michael
was ten and died soon after. Michael worked
as a gardener and labourer, drifting to London
in 1940 following the death of his mother.
War is traditionally depicted in terms of
guns, bombs and bullets, strategy and tactics,
battlefield manoeuvres and wartime economics.
But there is another kind of conflict, fought in
the shadows, a war of deception, intelligence
and make-believe – in the sense of making
someone else believe what you want them
to believe, which is what spies, novelists and
even film-makers do. That war is not fought
by traditional warriors but by thinkers, spies,
novelists and, in this case, a dead tramp.
The participants all had remarkable
afterlives. Montagu became a notoriously
outspoken judge. Leslie married a soldier who
had also fought in Sicily. Cholmondeley left
MI5 in 1952, set up a business selling farm
machinery and refused, for the rest of his life,
to discuss the operation in which he had
played such a crucial part. But the most
extraordinary afterlife of all was that of
Glyndwr Michael. His real life never amounted
to much; but his second life, though wholly
unreal, was devoted to tricking Hitler, saving
countless lives and turning the tide of war. nOperation Mincemeat is released on January 14.
Join Ben Macintyre online on January 13 as he
discusses the making of the film. Register at
mytimesplus.co.uk/eventsTHEY LIVED THE ROLES THEY WERE FAKING,
POSING FOR PHOTOS, WEARING THE CLOTHES
Kelly Macdonald and Matthew Macfadyen as Jean Leslie
and Charles Cholmondeley in Operation MincemeatWARNER BROS