Sunday, August 15, 2010

By Reviewed by John French

"Operation Mincemeat"

By Ben Macintyre

Harmony Books, $25.99

Assume, for a moment, that the date is April 30, 1943, and you are Jose Antonio Rey Maria, a Spanish sardine fisherman. You row your small boat into the Atlantic Ocean in search of sardines. Instead, you find a "lump" which turns out to be the body of a dead man dressed in a uniform.

You haul the body back to shore. Everyone in the village streams down to the beach. Police and soldiers congregate.

You return to your boat and resume your search for sardines, completely unaware that you have accidentally played an essential part in implementing the most successful espionage fraud of World War II.

The plot in which you have unwittingly performed was concocted by a team from the British Secret Service that included two novelists and, for good measure, Ian Fleming, who subsequently created the most celebrated spy of all, James Bond.

So opens "Operation Mincemeat" by Ben Macintyre. If the story sounds familiar it is because parts were made into a successful movie called "The Man Who Never Was," starring Clifton Webb. If you saw that film please do not - repeat, do not - let that fact deter you from reading "Operation Mincemeat." The book is the actual riveting truth, whereas the movie is riddled with pure fiction, ranging from the steps taken to acquire the body used in the scheme to the parts written in for Gloria Grahame and Stephen Boyd to play characters who never existed.

The title of Macintyre's book is taken from the code name of the remarkable deception it describes. The need for the deception arose because, by the spring of 1943, the Allies had conquered most of North Africa and were considering where to strike the forces of Hitler and Mussolini next.

Unfortunately, the best target was obvious. As Winston Churchill observed, "Everyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily." This meant the Germans would be reinforcing Sicily, which would turn an Allied invasion into a bloodbath.

Somehow the Germans and Italians had to be convinced that the next Anglo-American thrust would be elsewhere. Not surprisingly, multiple diversionary efforts were mounted but the centerpiece was Operation Mincemeat. The idea was to persuade the Axis powers that the next major attack would be launched against Greece with a secondary thrust at Sardinia.

The point men in this effort were the eccentric, often harebrained, Flight Lieutenant Charles Christopher Cholmondeley (pronounced "Chumley") and the fabulously wealthy Jewish banker-aristocrat, Ewen Edwin Samuel Montagu. These and the other leading characters in the book (both British and German) are among the most interesting and, indeed, bizarre that you will meet in non-fiction literature.

The plan they devised was to plant phony information dismissing Sicily and implicating Greece and Sardinia as prime targets on a corpse the Germans were likely to find and whose authenticity they were likely to believe. This was a monumentally difficult undertaking. The German Abwehr, the equivalent of the British Secret Service, was staffed by able, experienced officers who could be expected to see through any but the finest deception.

At every step of the way the possibility of error loomed. Human bodies belong to their living relatives. Obtaining one for espionage was not going to be easy. Moreover, the body had to be a suitable stand-in for a British officer. Ultimately the conspirators had to settle for the corpse of a man who had poisoned himself, even though a thorough autopsy would have revealed the cause of death and flagged the deception.

Well before acquiring a body, the Secret Service had to develop a minutely detailed plan for its use. For instance, how and where to get it into German hands? Answer: Look for a "neutral" place sprinkled with spies of every sort, but leaning pro-German, and make it appear that the body had arrived by accident. Solution: The southwest corner of Spain, where many Nazi spies and sympathizers lurked, and where the ocean tides were favorable to getting a body to shore by submarine in a manner suggesting an airplane accident.

And the body had to appear to be a person of interest. It needed to be given a name (Major William Martin) and fitted for a uniform (difficult with a corpse suffering rigor mortis). And its pockets and briefcase (chained to its belt) had to contain items of interest, like ostensibly top-secret messages to British officers in the Mediterranean plus personal items, like ticket stubs for a London theater and correspondence with "Pam," the fictional Major Martin's fictional fiancée.

The British had to appear to be worried about Major Martin - for example in wireless messages the Germans could intercept - and they had to press Spanish authorities for the return of his body, but not so quickly as to prevent the Germans from getting a look at the documents it carried.

Every step in this convoluted process could have inadvertently revealed the fraud. Amazingly, none did. Almost all of the Nazis who learned about Major Martin, including, most importantly, Adolf Hitler, were fooled. Even after the invasion of Sicily was launched, the renowned German field marshal, Erwin Rommel, was awaiting an attack in Greece.

One wonders why the makers of the film "The Man Who Never Was" opted for so much fiction. The true story of Operation Mincemeat beats fiction hands down.