Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  Section 17M expanded. First came Joan Saunders, a young woman married to the librarian of the House of Commons, “to do the detailed work44 of indexing, filing and research.” Joan was effectively Montagu’s chief assistant, a tall, strapping, scarily jolly woman with a booming voice and a personality to match. Joan had been a nurse in the early part of the war and had manned a nursing station at Dunkirk during the retreat. She was practical, bossy, and occasionally terrifying and wore a tiger-skin fur coat to work in winter. The other female staff called her “Auntie,”45 but never to her face. Her familiarity with dead bodies would prove to be most useful. “She is extraordinarily good,46 very methodical but also frightfully alert,” Montagu told his wife. “Very pleasant to work with, although not much to look at. I’m not lucky in assistants as regards looks.” Montagu was something of a connoisseur of female beauty.

  By 1943, 17M had swelled to fourteen people, including an artist, a yachting magazine journalist, another barrister, three secretaries, two shorthand typists, and two “watchkeepers”47 to monitor any night traffic. The working conditions were atrocious. Room 13 was “far too small,48 far too cluttered with safes, steel filing cabinets, tables, chairs etc. and especially far too low, with steel girders making it even lower. There was no fresh air, only potted air [and] conditions which would have been condemned instantly by any factories inspector.” The only light came from fluorescent strips, “which made everyone49 look mauve.” In theory, the staff “were not supposed to listen50 to what we said over the telephone or to each other.” In such a confined space, this was impossible: there were no secrets between the secret keepers of Room 13. Despite the rigors, Montagu’s unit was highly effective: they were, in the words of Admiral Godfrey, “a brilliant band of51 dedicated war winners.”

  As he had in the courtroom, Montagu delighted in burrowing into the minds of his opponents: the German saboteurs, spies, agents, and spymasters whose daily wireless exchanges—intercepted, decoded, and translated—poured into Section 17M. He came to recognize individual German intelligence officers among the traffic and, as he had his former rivals in court, he “began to regard some almost as friends”52—“They were so kind to us unconsciously.”53

  In New York, at Ewen’s instigation, Iris had begun working for British Security Co-ordination, the intelligence organization run by William Stephenson, the spymaster who reveled in the code name “Intrepid.” Behind a front as British Passport Control, Stephenson’s team ran black propaganda against Nazi sympathizers in the United States, organized espionage, and worked assiduously to prod America into the war, by fair means or foul. In a way, spying and concealment was already in Iris’s blood, for her father, the painter Solomon J. Solomon, had played an important role in the invention of military camouflage during the First World War. In 1916, Solomon had built a fake nine-foot tree out of steel plates shrouded in real bark, for use as an observation post on the western front. This was a family that understood the pleasure and challenge of making something appear to be what it was not. Ewen was pleased that his wife was now, as he put it, “in the racket”54 too. Ewen and Iris wrote to each other every day, although Montagu could never describe exactly what his day involved: “If I am killed there are55 four or five people who will be able after the war to tell you the sort of things I have been doing,” he wrote to Iris.

  Montagu’s role expanded once more when Godfrey placed him in charge of all naval deception through double agents—“the most fascinating job56 in the war,” in Montagu’s words. By means of the Ultra intercepts and other intelligence sources, Britain captured almost every spy sent to Britain by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization. Many of these were used as double agents, feeding misinformation back to the enemy. Montagu found himself at the very heart of the “Double Cross System,” helping Tar Robertson and John Masterman to deploy double agents wherever and whenever the navy was involved. He worked with Eddie Chapman, the crook turned spy code-named “Zigzag,” to send false information about submarine weaponry; he investigated astrology to see if Hitler’s apparent belief in such things could be used against him (“very entertaining but useless”57); and in November 1941 he traveled to the United States to help establish a system for handling double agent “Tricycle” (the Serbian playboy Dusko Popov) in the penetration of German spy rings operating in America. The Double Cross System also involved the creation of bogus spies, “a great number who58 did not really exist at all in real life, but were imaginary people notionally recruited as sub-agents by double agents whom we were already working.” In order to convince the enemy that these invented characters were real, every aspect of the fake personality had to be conjured into existence.

  Some of the material that crossed Montagu’s desk was strange beyond belief. In October 1941, Godfrey ordered Montagu to investigate why the Germans had suddenly imported one thousand rhesus monkeys, as well as a troop of Barbary apes. Godfrey speculated that “it might be an indication59 that the Germans intended to use gas or bacteriological warfare, or for experimental purposes.” Montagu consulted Lord Victor Rothschild, MI5’s expert on explosives, booby traps, and other unconventional forms of warfare. His lordship was doubtful that the large monkey imports were sinister. “Though I have kept60 a close eye on people applying for animals,” he wrote, “those cases so far investigated have proved innocuous. For example, an advertisement in The Times for 500 hedgehogs proved to be in connection with the experiments being done by the foot and mouth disease research section.” The mystery of Hitler’s monkeys remains unsolved.

  Montagu would never fight on the front line, but there was no doubting his personal bravery. When Britain was under threat of German invasion in 1940, he hit on the idea of trying to lead the invading force into a minefield, using himself as bait. The minefield off Britain’s east coast had gaps in it, to allow the fishing boats in and out. The Germans knew the approximate, but not the precise, location of these channels. If a chart could be gotten into their hands showing channels close enough to the real gaps to be believable, yet slightly wrong, then the invading fleet might be persuaded to ram confidently up the wrong route, and, with any luck, sink. Popov, Agent Tricycle, would pass the false chart to the Germans, claiming he had obtained it from a Jewish officer in the navy keen to curry favor with the Nazis. Popov would say that this man, a prominent lawyer in civilian life, “had heard and believed the propaganda61 stories about the ill-treatment of Jews and did not want to face the risk of being handed over to the Gestapo.” The chart was his insurance policy, and he would only hand it over in return for a written guarantee that he would be safe in the event of a successful German invasion of Britain. Popov liked the plan and asked what name he should give the Germans for this treacherous naval officer. “I thought you had realised,”62 said Montagu. “Lieutenant Commander Montagu. They can look me up in the Law List and any of the Jewish Year Books.”

  There was considerable courage in this act, although Montagu later denied it. If the Germans had invaded, they would have swiftly realized that the chart was phony, and Montagu would have been even more of a marked man than he was already. There was also the possibility that someone in British intelligence might hear of the chart and the treacherous Jewish lawyer prepared to sell secrets to save his own skin: at the very least, he would have had some complicated explaining to do. The plot made Montagu appear, to German eyes, to be “an out and out traitor.”63 He was unconcerned: what mattered was telling a convincing story.

  Before placing Montagu in charge of naval deception, Godfrey had passed him a copy of the Trout Memo written with Ian Fleming. Montagu considered Fleming “a four-letter man”64 and got on with him very well: “Fleming is charming65 to be with, but would sell his own grandmother. I like him a lot.” Years later, when both men were long retired, Godfrey gently reminded Montagu of the debt, and the origins of the operation: “The bare idea of the dead airman66 washed up on a beach was among those dozen or so notions which I gave you when 17M was formed
,” he wrote. Montagu replied blandly: “I quite honestly don’t remember67 your passing on this suggestion to me. Of course, what you said may have been in my subconscious and may have formed the link—but I can assure you that it was not conscious which shows the strange workings of fate (or something!).”

  The strange workings of fate had now thrown together, in Room 13, Montagu, the whip-smart lawyer, and Cholmondeley, the gentle, lanky, unpredictable ideas man, an ill-matched pair who would develop into the most remarkable double act in the history of deception. They had the backing of the Twenty Committee, they had plenty of precedents, and they had the outline of a plan; what they did not yet have was a clear idea of what to do with it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Target Sicily

  THE PLAN OF ACTION agreed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt when they met in Casablanca in January 1943 was, in some respects, blindingly obvious: after the successful North Africa campaign, the next target would be the island of Sicily.

  The Nazi war machine was at last beginning to stutter and misfire. The British Eighth Army under Montgomery had vanquished Rommel’s invincible Afrika Korps at El Alamein. The Allied invasion of Morocco and Tunisia had fatally weakened Germany’s grip, and with the liberation of Tunis, the Allies would control the coast of North Africa, its ports and airfields, from Casablanca to Alexandria. The time had come to lay siege to Hitler’s Fortress. But where?

  Sicily was the logical place from which to deliver the gut punch into what Churchill famously called the soft “underbelly of the Axis.”1 The island at the toe of Italy’s boot commanded the channel linking the two sides of the Mediterranean, just eighty miles from the Tunisian coast. If the combined British and American armies were to free Europe, prize Italy out of the fascist embrace, and roll back the Nazi behemoth, they would first have to take Sicily. The British in Malta and Allied convoys had been pummeled by Luftwaffe bombers taking off from the island, and, as Montagu remarked, “no major operation could be2 launched, maintained, or supplied until the enemy airfields and other bases in Sicily had been obliterated so as to allow free passage through the Mediterranean.” An invasion of Sicily would open the road to Rome, draw German troops from the eastern front to relieve the Red Army, allow for preparations to invade France, and perhaps knock a tottering Italy out of the war. Breaking up the “Pact of Steel” forged in 1939 by Hitler and Mussolini would shatter German morale, Churchill predicted, “and might be the beginning3 of their doom.” The Americans were initially dubious, wondering if Britain harbored imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean, but eventually they compromised: Sicily would be the target, the precursor to the invasion of mainland Europe.

  If the strategic importance of Sicily was clear to the Allies, it was surely equally obvious to Italy and Germany. Churchill was blunt about the choice of target: “Everyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.”4 And if the enemy was foolish enough not to see what was coming, he would surely cotton on when 160,000 British, American, and Commonwealth troops and an armada of 3,200 ships began assembling for the invasion. Sicily’s five-hundred-mile coastline was already defended by seven or eight enemy divisions. If Hitler correctly anticipated the Allies’ next move, then the island would be reinforced by thousands of German troops held in reserve in France. The soft underbelly would become a wall of muscle. The invasion could turn into a bloodbath.

  But the logic of Sicily was immutable. On January 22, Churchill and Roosevelt gave their joint blessing to “Operation Husky,” the invasion of Sicily, the next great set-piece offensive of the war. General Eisenhower was summoned to Casablanca and given his orders.

  All of which presented Allied intelligence chiefs with a fiendish conundrum: how to convince the enemy that the Allies were not going to do what anyone with an atlas could see they ought to do.

  The previous June, Churchill had established the London Controlling Section (a deliberately vague title) under a “controller of deception,” Lieutenant Colonel John H. Bevan, to “prepare deception plans5 on a worldwide basis with the object of causing the enemy to waste his military resources.” Bevan was responsible for the overall planning, supervision, and coordination of strategic deception, and immediately after the Casablanca conference, he was instructed to draw up a new deception policy to disguise the impending invasion of Sicily. The result was “Operation Barclay,” a complex, many-layered plan that would try to convince the Germans that black was white or, at the very least, gray.

  Johnnie Bevan was an Old Etonian and a stockbroker, an upright pillar of the establishment whose convivial and modest temperament belied an exceedingly sharp mind. He had that rare English ability to achieve impressive feats with a permanent air of embarrassment, and he tackled the monumental task of wartime deception in the same way that he played cricket: “When things were looking pretty bad6 for his side at cricket, he would shuffle in, about sixth wicket down, knock up 100 and shuffle out again looking rather ashamed of himself.” Bevan played with the straightest of straight bats, as honest and upright a team player as one could imagine—which was probably what made him such a superb deceiver.

  While Bevan controlled the business of deception from within the Cabinet War Rooms, the fortified underground bunker beneath Whitehall, his counterpart in the Mediterranean was Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, the chief of “A” Force, the deception unit based in Cairo. Clarke was another master of strategic deception, but of a very different stamp. Unmarried, nocturnal, and allergic to children, he was possessed of “an ingenious imagination7 and a photographic memory.” He also had a flair for the dramatic that invited trouble. For the Royal Tournament in 1925, he mounted a pageant depicting imperial artillery down the ages, which involved two elephants, thirty-seven guns, and “fourteen of the biggest Nigerians8 he could find.” He loved uniforms, disguises, and dressing up. Most of one ear was lopped off by a German bullet when he took part in the first commando raid on occupied France, and in 1940 he was summoned to Egypt at the express command of General Sir Archibald Wavell and ordered to set up a “special section of intelligence9 for deception.” Clarke and “A” Force had spent the last two years baffling and bamboozling the enemy in a variety of complicated and flamboyant ways.

  Between them, Lieutenant Colonels Bevan and Clarke would construct the most elaborate wartime web of deception ever spun. Yet in its essence, the aim of Operation Barclay was quite simple: to convince the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, in the middle of the Mediterranean, the Allies intended to invade Greece, in the east, and the island of Sardinia, followed by southern France, in the west. The lie went as follows: the British Twelfth Army (which did not exist) would invade the Balkans in the summer of 1943, starting in Crete and the Peloponnese, bringing Turkey into the war against the Axis powers, moving against Bulgaria and Romania, linking up with the Yugoslav resistance, and then finally uniting with the Soviet armies on the eastern front. The subsidiary lie was intended to convince the Germans that the British Eighth Army planned to land on France’s southern coast and then storm up the Rhône Valley once American troops under General Patton had attacked Corsica and Sardinia. Sicily would be bypassed.

  If Operation Barclay succeeded, the Germans would reinforce the Balkans, Sardinia, and southern France in preparation for invasions that would never materialize, while leaving Sicily only lightly defended. At the very least, enemy troops would be spread over a broad front and the German defensive shield would be weakened. By the time the real target became obvious, it would be too late to reinforce Sicily. The deception plan played directly on Hitler’s fears, for the Ultra intercepts had clearly revealed that the Führer, his staff, and local commanders in Greece all feared that the Balkans represented a vulnerable point on the Nazis’ southern flank. Even so, shifting German attention away from Sicily would not be easy, for the strategic importance of the island was self-evident. A German intelligence report produced in early February for the supreme command of the armed forces, the Oberkomma
ndo der Wehrmacht (OKW), was quite explicit, and accurate, about Allied intentions: “The idea of knocking10 Italy out of the war after the conclusion of the African campaign, by means of air attacks and a landing operation, looms large in Anglo-Saxon deliberations. … Sicily offers itself as the first target.” The deception operation would need to shift Hitler’s mind in two different directions: reducing his fears for Sicily, while stoking his anxiety about Sardinia, Greece, and the Balkans.

  “Uncle” John Godfrey identified what he called “wishfulness” and “yesmanship”11 as the twin frailties of German intelligence: “If the authorities were clamouring12 for reports on a certain subject the German Secret Intelligence Service was not above inventing reports based on what they thought probable.” The Nazi high command, at the same time, when presented with contradictory intelligence reports, was “inclined to believe the one13 that fits in best with their own previously formed conceptions.” If Hitler’s paranoid wishfulness and his underlings’ craven yesmanship could be exploited, then Operation Barclay might work: the Germans would deceive themselves.