TLS on a Corpse

on a corpse

Ben Macintyre
OPERATION MINCEMEAT

The true spy story that changed the course of World War II 400pp. Bloomsbury. £16.99. 9780747598688

"The most spectacular single episode in the history of deception", said Hugh Trevor-Roper, "was the now famous 'Operation Mincemeat' of 1943." This was the British stratagem of planting the dead body of a supposed officer, by submarine, off Spain, carrying (faked) top-secret letters falsely indicating that the Allies were going to invade Greece, rather than their true target, Sicily. This ghoulish variant of the haversack ruse, laying bait for Nazi Intelligence, was first revealed covertly in 1950 in Duff Cooper's only novel Operation Heartbreak, and then quasi-officially in Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was (1953), itself published as a spoiler of Ian Colvin's freelance investigation The Unknown Courier, which appeared in the same year.
Among the 50 million corpses of the Second World War, the courier cadaver still exerts a singular fascination. Who was he? Last year, Cardboard Citizens, a homeless people's theatre company, revived their play Mincemeat in an excellent promenade performance, moving through the floors of a deserted Shoreditch warehouse. The play shone an uncomfortable light on the life of the civilian "ne'er-do-well" or "pauper lunatic" whose snatched body played a vital role in military deception after his lonely death from eating rat poison. Roger J. Morgan, the researcher who first revealed in 1996 that the tall body of "Major Bill Martin, Royal Marines" was actually that of the Welsh labourer Glyn Michael, has written about the production for a recent issue of the magazine After the Battle. He refutes the claim that the body floated off Spain was that of a seaman from HMS Dasher, drowned when the converted aircraft carrier accidentally blew up in March 1943. A discussion of this corpse conspiracy also continues on ARRSE, the British Army Rumour Service website.
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Now, after more than fifty years, we have the first of two new full-length books on Operation Mincemeat. Professor Denis Smyth of Toronto University, an expert on Franco's wartime Spain whose book on the subject is due to be published in June, has been beaten to the draw by Ben Macintyre of The Times, and in the shoot-out of the shops Smyth may reprise the role of Nicholas Booth, whose book on the wartime deceiver Eddie Chapman was outgunned by Macintyre's faster-selling Agent Zigzag three years ago. Certainly, Macintyre is following that successful formula in this, his eighth book; it is another well-researched, entertaining confection, rich in the odd characters and hocus-pocus of the spook world.

Operation Mincemeat is more an eccentric detective mystery than a gory war story, concerned with the anxieties of thinking rather than the traumas of killing. Macintyre the journalist-historian follows Winston Churchill's advice that "strict chronology is the secret of good narrative". He organizes his material well, taking the reader step by step from the original idea, through all the practical problems of obtaining a dead body, of creating an authentic persona with an identity, a private life and "pocket-litter", of concocting a briefcase of high-level documents that have to speak volumes without saying too much. We then follow the strange submarine journey of "Major Martin" to his final destiny in enemy territory.

Macintyre's sifting of the archives and contacting of the families of the British, German and Spanish participants have added colour, depth and detail to all previous accounts. He restores the eager, gangling Charles Cholmondely of MI5 to his rightful place as co-author of the ploy; Montagu, an acerbic barrister, mostly wrote Cholmondely out of The Man Who Never Was, a highly self-serving work. Montagu did admit to being "a selfish shit", and the contrast that Macintyre draws between the wealthy Montagu and the wretched Glyndwr Michael is pointed and poignant.

What is new? Though it is not right to call the Naval Intelligence Division, as Macintyre does, "a section of the British Secret Service" (nor to call a Royal Marine a soldier, for that matter), the "true spy story" of the subtitle has some startling ramifications. Macintyre asserts that the younger brother of Lt-Cdr Ewen Montagu of Naval Intelligence, the cineast and Communist Ivor Montagu, was at this very time an active agent of the Soviet secret services (and identified as such in the Venona decrypts), with an MI5 file running to hundreds of pages. On the other side, Macintyre also suggests that the German intelligence officer Freiherr Alexis von Roenne may have been helping the Allies by deliberately accepting their order-of-battle deceptions because he was an anti-Nazi Christian.

The Spanish section of the espionage saga is well told, with more names and details than I have seen before. Macintyre describes how the false letters were extracted from their sealed envelopes, how their strategic disinformation moved up the food chain of enemy intelligence, from Huelva via Madrid to Berlin, and he tracks the operational consequences after the German high command swallowed the dodgy dossier. Operation Mincemeat, patterned like a novel and alert to its own fictiveness, suggests that the spy game is close to fantasy. The danger, for intelligence officers and their political masters, is always blending "yesmanship" with "wishfulness": the desire to please and believing what you want to believe.