Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (2 page)

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.

T
WO 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

D
ECEIVING 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 credible. 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 quicksilver
⁷
through a gorse bush with a long-handled spoon.”

The Trout Memo was a masterpiece of corkscrew thinking, with fifty-one suggestions for “introducing ideas
⁸
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 immaculate
¹⁰
medium”). One of the nastier ideas envisaged setting adrift tins of explosives disguised as food, “with instructions on the
¹¹
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.”

Basil Thomson, former assistant premier of Tonga, tutor to the King of Siam, ex-governor of Dartmoor prison, policeman, and novelist, had made his name as a spy catcher during the First World War. As head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Division and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, he took credit (only partly deserved) for tracking down German spies in Britain, many of whom were caught and executed. He interviewed Mata Hari (and concluded she was innocent) and distributed the “Black Diaries” of the Irish nationalist and revolutionary Sir Roger Casement, detailing his homosexual affairs: Casement was subsequently tried and executed for treason. Thomson was an early master of deception, and not just in his professional life. In 1925, the worthy police chief was convicted of an act of indecency with Miss Thelma de Laval on a London park bench and fined five pounds.

In between catching spies, carrying out surveillance of union leaders, and consorting with prostitutes (for the purposes of “research,”
¹³
as he explained to the court), Thomson found time to write twelve detective novels. Thomson’s hero, Inspector Richardson, inhabits a world peopled by fragrant damsels in distress, stiff upper lips, and excitable foreigners in need of British colonization. Most of Thomson’s novels, with titles such as
Death in the Bathroom
and
Richardson Scores Again
, were instantly forgettable. But in
The Milliner’s Hat Mystery
(an oddly tautological title), published in 1937, he planted a seed. The novel opens on a stormy night with the discovery of a dead man in a barn, carrying papers that identify him as “John Whitaker.” By dint of some distinctly plodding detective work, Inspector Richardson discovers that every document in the pockets of the dead man has been ingeniously forged: his visiting cards, his bills, and even his passport, on which the real name has been erased using a special ink remover and a fake one substituted. “I know the stuff
¹⁴
they use; they employed it a lot during the war,” says Inspector Richardson. “It will take out ink from any document without leaving a trace.” The remainder of the novel is spent unraveling, at inordinate length, the true identity of the body in the barn. “However improbable a story sounds we are trained to investigate it,” says Inspector Richardson. “Only that way can we arrive at the truth.” Inspector Richardson is always saying things like that.

The Milliner’s Hat
is not a classic of the detective genre. The public was unmoved by Inspector Richardson’s efforts, and the book sold very few copies. But the idea of creating a false identity for a dead body lodged in the mind of Ian Fleming, a confirmed bibliophile who owned all Thomson’s novels: from one spy and novelist it passed into the mind of another future spy/novelist, and in 1939, the year that Basil Thomson died, it formally entered the thinking of Britain’s spy chiefs as they embarked on a ferocious intelligence battle with the Nazis.

Godfrey, the trout-fishing admiral, loved nothing more than a good yarn, and he knew that the best stories are also true. He later wrote that “World War II offers
¹⁵
us far more interesting, amusing and subtle examples of intelligence work than any writer of spy stories can devise.” For almost four years, this “not very nice” idea would lie dormant, a bright lure cast by a fisherman/spy, waiting for someone to bite.

I
N LATE
S
EPTEMBER
1942, a frisson of alarm ran through British and American intelligence circles when it seemed that the date of the planned invasion of French North Africa might have fallen into German hands. On September 25, a British Catalina FP119 seaplane, flying from Plymouth to Gibraltar, crashed in a violent electrical storm off Cádiz on Spain’s Atlantic coast, killing all three passengers and seven crew members. Among these was Paymaster-Lieutenant James Hadden Turner, a Royal Navy courier, carrying a letter to the governor of Gibraltar informing him that General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, would be arriving on the rock immediately before the offensive and that “the target date
¹⁶
has now been set as 4th November.” A second letter, dated September 21, contained additional information on the upcoming invasion of North Africa.

The bodies washed ashore at La Barrosa, south of Cádiz, and were recovered by the Spanish authorities. After twenty-four hours Turner’s body, with the letter still in his pocket, was turned over to the local British consul by the Spanish admiral in command at Cádiz. As the war raged, Spain had maintained a neutrality of sorts, although the Allies were haunted by the fear that General Francisco Franco might throw in his lot with Hitler. Spanish official opinion was broadly in favor of the Axis powers, many Spanish officials were in contact with German intelligence, and the area around Cádiz, in particular, was known to be a hotbed of German spies. Was it possible that the letter, revealing the date of the Allied attack, had been passed into enemy hands? Eisenhower was said to be “extremely worried.”
¹⁷

The invasion of North Africa, code-named “Operation Torch,” had been in preparation for months. Major General George Patton was due to sail from Virginia on October 23 with the Western Task Force of thirty-five thousand men, heading for Casablanca in French Morocco. At the same time, British forces would attack Oran in French Algeria, while a joint Allied force invaded Algiers. The Germans were certainly aware that a major offensive was being planned. If the letter had been intercepted and passed on, they would now also know the date of the assault and that Gibraltar, the gateway to the Mediterranean and North Africa, would play a key role in it.