Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  I’m going to a rather dreary dance tonight with Jock & Hazel, I think they’ve got some other man coming. You know what their friends always turn out to be like, he’ll have the sweetest little Adam’s apple & the shiniest bald head! How beastly and ungrateful of me, but it isn’t really that—you know—don’t you?

  Look darling, I’ve got next Sunday & Monday off for Easter. I shall go home for it, of course, do come too if you possibly can, or even if you can’t get away from London I’ll dash up and we’ll have an evening of gaiety—(by the way Aunt Marian said to bring you to dinner next time I was up, but I think that might wait?)

  Here comes the Bloodhound, masses of love & a kiss from

  Pam

  Hester Leggett ended the second letter with a flourish, as Pam’s looping, girlish handwriting collapses into a hasty scrawl.

  For good measure, Montagu and Cholmondeley added to Martin’s wallet a bill for an engagement ring from S.J. Phillips of New Bond Street, for a whopping £53.0s.6d. The ring was engraved “P.L. from W.M. 14.4.43.”25

  Two more letters rounded off Martin’s personal cache. The first was from his solicitor, F. A. S. Gwatkin, of McKenna & Co., referring to his will and tax affairs: “We will insert the legacy of £5026 to your batman,” wrote Mr. Gwatkin, who regretted that he could not yet complete Martin’s tax return for 1941–1942: “We cannot find that we have ever had these particulars and shall, therefore, be grateful if you will let us have them.” On top of everything else, Major Martin’s tax return was overdue. Finally, there was another letter from John Martin, this time a copy of a letter to the family solicitor, discussing the terms of his son’s marriage settlement and insisting that “since the wife’s family will not27 be contributing to the settlement I do not think it proper that they should preserve, after William’s death, a life interest in the funds which I am providing. I should agree to this course only were there children of the marriage.”

  Montagu and Cholmondeley were delighted with the plot they had created, with its looming premonition of disaster, a dashing but flawed hero, a sexy, faintly dippy heroine, and a rich cast of comic supporting characters: The Bloodhound, Father, Fat Priscilla, and Whitley Jones the Bank Manager. But from a distance of nearly seventy years, the plot seems almost hackneyed. The sense of impending doom and Pam’s “foreboding” are thumpingly melodramatic: “Bill darling, don’t please let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do. …”

  Admiral John Godfrey was strict on the danger of “overcooking” an espionage ruse. “The nearer the approach28 to the ‘thriller’ type of intelligence the more must both the giver, and the recipient, be on their guard. Elegant trimmings should have no place in the intelligence officer’s vocabulary. On the other hand the man who cannot tell a good story is a dull dog.”

  By this time, the trout-fishing Admiral Godfrey was no longer on hand to offer his sage judgment, for in the midst of Operation Mincemeat, Montagu and Cholmondeley had lost their mentor. His sandpaper personality had finally proven too much for his superiors: he was removed from the NID, dispatched to naval command in India, and replaced by Commodore (later Rear Admiral) Edmund Rushbrooke, an able administrator but an officer with little of Godfrey’s fire and flair. “He is very old29 and lacking in energy after that human dynamo,” wrote Montagu, whose assessment of Godfrey was equally blunt: “He was the world’s prize shit,30 but a genius. … I had enormous admiration for him as an intelligence brain and organiser—the more sincere as I loathed him as a man.” The good news about Godfrey’s departure was that Montagu and Cholmondeley now had “the unhoped for benefit31 of an entirely free hand.” But it also meant that the “preparation and devising32 of Mincemeat,” in Montagu’s words, “was entirely unsupervised33 and unchecked.”

  Godfrey was one of the few senior officers who could—and probably would—have pointed out that the story contained a surfeit of elegant trimmings. The characters seem closer to caricatures: the beastly bank manager, the bullying boss, the cheerful gal about to be socked in the eye by fate. The doomed love affair, the stiff-upper-lipped warrior heading to death: these were the staples of popular culture in 1943. The Bill Martin story was the product of minds that had read too many romantic novels and seen too many films in which the hero pulls away in the train, never to be seen again. That may have been partly intentional, for this was not supposed to be a genuine collection of people and events aimed at convincing a British audience, but a story that a German might believe to be British. The task of the barrister, and the intelligence officer, in Montagu’s estimation, was to ask: “‘How will that argument34 or bit of evidence appeal to the hearer?’ And not ‘How does it appeal to me?’”

  In one sense, the story of Bill Martin was too perfect. There were no loose ends. A person’s pockets and wallet will usually contain at least something that makes no obvious or immediate sense: an unidentified photo, an illegible note-to-self, paperclips, a button. In Martin’s pockets there was nothing stray or inexplicable, nothing unlikely or meaningless. The personal letters contain no obscure allusions to third persons, or in-jokes, or spelling mistakes: none of the qualities that distinguish real, as opposed to manufactured, correspondence. Everything tied together, everything added up. There was excessive detail. Would Pam really bother to identify that she worked in a “Government office”? Bill would surely know this. In the same way, would a jeweler trouble to replicate the words engraved on a ring when sending a bill? In the warped intelligence mentality, something that looks perfect is probably a fake.

  But then, the plot was not perfect. Indeed, it contained some potentially catastrophic mistakes. Major Martin left money to his “batman”: an officer in the Royal Marines would never have referred to a batman, but rather to his marine officer’s attendant, or MOA. Why did he pay cash for his shirts (at a military tailor that extended the most generous credit to serving officers) when he was deeply overdrawn and owed fifty-three pounds for an engagement ring?

  Far more dangerous, the plot would never have stood up to scrutiny if German spies in Britain had made even the most cursory checks on it. A single telephone call to Ogbourne St. George 242 would have established that no one by the name of Pam was known there. A glance at the hotel register for the Black Lion Hotel would have showed that no Mr. J. C. Martin had stayed there on the night of April 13. Even a moderately competent agent could have called S.J. Phillips of New Bond Street to check when payment for the ring was due and discovered that no such ring had been sold.

  Montagu and Cholmondeley were blasé about the danger of being found out by an enemy agent in Britain, for the simple reason that they did not believe there were any. “There was almost complete35 security,” wrote Montagu. “We were able to put over what we liked to the enemy.” True, of the several hundred enemy spies dropped, floated, or smuggled into Britain, all but one was picked up and arrested: the exception was found dead in a bunker after committing suicide. The Germans simply did not have an intelligence operation in Britain. By March 1943, there were so many double agents in the Double Cross System that “Masterman raised the question36 whether we ought not to ‘liquidate’ some of our agents, both for greater efficiency and for plausibility.” An “execution subcommittee37 was formed” to bump off a fake agent “every few months.”

  Montagu would cycle home every evening, his briefcase full of secrets, complacent that he was “the only deceptioneer38 in daily contact with the whole of special intelligence” and that his secrets were perfectly safe. Yet there were numerous spies living in London from supposedly neutral countries happy to furnish information to the Axis powers. Ewen Montagu never knew it, but there was one spy operating under his nose, a man with whom he shared a taste for exotic cheese, a love of table tennis, and both parents.

  Ivor Montagu was addicted to founding, and joining, different clubs. From the Cheese Eaters League and the English Table Tennis Association, he had graduated to the Association of Cine Technicians, the Zoological Society, Marylebone Cr
icket Club, the editorial board of Labour Monthly, the World Council of Peace, the Friends of the Soviet Union, Southampton United Football Club, the Society for Cultural Relations with Soviet Russia, and chairmanship of the Woolwich-Plumstead branch of the Anti-war Congress.

  He had also joined a less public and even more exclusive club, as an agent for Soviet military intelligence.

  In part to antagonize his patrician parents, Ivor Montagu had from an early age displayed a keen “enthusiasm for all things Russian”39 and a penchant for radical politics. In 1927, the twenty-three-year-old Ivor was contacted by Bob Stewart, a founding member of the British Communist Party and a recruiter of Soviet agents in Britain. Stewart told Ivor, “We have had a request40 from the Communist International for you to go at once to Moscow. How soon can you leave?” In Moscow, Ivor was feted and flattered: he played table tennis in the Comintern building with “the keenest players41 in Moscow,” went to the Bolshoi, and watched the revolutionary parade from a VIP stand in Red Square. Someone in the upper reaches of the Soviet state was taking good care of Ivor Montagu.

  Back in Europe, Ivor’s film career blossomed, as did his interests in table tennis, small rodents, and Soviet movies. At the same time, his commitment to communism deepened. In 1929, he began to correspond with Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary expelled from the Communist Party and now living in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo.

  “Dear Comrade Trotsky,”42 Ivor wrote on July 1. “Allow me to volunteer to be of service. … I should be glad to be of assistance in any way possible.” Trotsky replied in a friendly vein, and a most unlikely correspondence ensued. Ivor made plans to meet the exiled Soviet revolutionary in person. He would frame his trip to Prinkipo as the innocent journey of a young idealist studying the splits in Russian communism. It seems more likely that he was sent by Moscow to gain Trotsky’s confidence and report back on his activities. Ivor arrived in Istanbul in the pouring rain, “like Edinburgh at its worst,”43 and hired a boat to take him to the island. “Two Turkish policemen44 were guarding the villa. Mrs Trotsky, a short motherly woman with an air of distress, made me welcome. Trotsky appeared and we settled down to talk.”

  They talked deep into the night about Trotsky’s frustrations, his friends exiled to Siberia, and his desire to make contact with Christian Rakovsky, the Bulgarian Bolshevik who would eventually perish at the hands of Stalin’s executioners. At the end of the evening, Ivor was handed a loaded pistol “to put under my pillow45 as a precaution against assassins.” (Trotsky would be assassinated in Mexico in 1940.) Ivor could not sleep. “I did not know what precautions46 to take against the revolver, and was terrified.”

  The next morning, Trotsky and Ivor went fishing in the Sea of Marmara. The Turkish bodyguards rowed. The political conversation continued. The weather was atrocious. They caught nothing. “The memory I shall always47 retain of him,” wrote Ivor, “is of our little boat, perilously poised at the top of a wave, ready to crash down on top of a monstrous rock, Trotsky himself perched aquiline in the stern and in a voice and with an authority that might have commanded an army, repeating the Turkish equivalent of ‘in-out in-out’ as the policemen rowed for dear life.”

  The meeting with Trotsky marked a turning point. Ivor Montagu was attracted to this “fascinating and commanding48 personality” but “repelled by his self-admiration,”49 the raw ambition of the revolutionary in exile: “I felt I understood50 now why he was impossible in a party, that his personality swamped his judgement.” Ivor was not yet thirty, but he was already a party disciplinarian and a fully committed Stalinist. Trotsky knew that Ivor was a willing tool of the Soviet regime. In 1932, he wrote: “Ivor Montagu has,51 or had, some personal sympathy for me, but now he is even on that small scale paralysed by his adherence to the party.”

  That adherence was now absolute and permanent: he gave speeches, wrote pamphlets, and made films in support of communism. The more covert, and more dangerous, manifestations of that party obedience remained secret for the rest of his life.

  MI5 had started to take an interest in “the Hon. Ivor” back in 1926, after intercepting a letter he had written to a member of a visiting Soviet trade delegation requesting permission to visit Moscow. The snoopers immediately began to open Ivor’s mail and follow his movements, reporting that “Montagu has for some time52 been known to associate with the inner ring of the Communist Party.” His behavior was distinctly suspicious: he attended radical meetings, played table tennis, translated French plays, mixed with left-wing film actors and directors, wore a long Mongolian leather coat, and distributed Soviet films. The correspondence with Trotsky was copied and added to Ivor’s growing MI5 files. A report by Special Branch in 1931 was tinged with anti-Semitism: “Montagu has dark curly hair53 and is of distinctly Jewish appearance. His eyes are dark brown and his complexion is pale. He is generally rather dirty and untidy.”

  By the outbreak of war, Ivor Montagu had all but severed contact with his family, with the exception of Ewen. While his older brother continued to enjoy the services of the family butler at Kensington Court, Ivor lived in Brixton, sharing a grotty flat with a mongrel from Battersea Dogs Home called Betsy, his wife Hell, her daughter, Rowna, and his mother-in-law, who was addicted to cheese and pickles even though these gave her chronic indigestion. “What is the use of living54 if you cannot eat cheese and pickles?” she asked. As cofounder of the Cheese Eaters League, Ivor thought she had a point. The brothers Montagu could not have been more different personalities, nor have entertained more opposed political views. Yet they were friends and continued to meet at times throughout the war. Ewen Montagu sent Iris regular bulletins on Ivor’s activities, mocking but affectionate. “Last night Ivor came to dinner55 after the Prom at the Albert Hall,” he wrote in June 1942. “He is simply enormous,56 almost all tummy. Hell is well and digging for victory, which she hasn’t found yet.” He regarded Ivor’s politics as a harmless obsession. “Ivor is really bad57 on this war,” he told his wife. “He is busy working for the Russian58 government on Russian propaganda [and] writing anti-war or Communist letters to the papers.”

  MI5 was well aware that one of the country’s most senior intelligence officers—a man who, by his own account, “knew in advance practically59 every secret of the war, including the atom bomb”—was in regular contact with a brother who was a known Soviet sympathizer, corresponded with Russian revolutionaries, and opposed the war. By 1939, MI5 had started referring to “that particularly unpleasant60 communist, the Hon Ivor.” Ivor represented a major security risk. Ewen knew that there was an MI5 dossier on Ivor but had no idea that, by 1943, it extended to three volumes and hundreds of pages.

  In Ivor Montagu’s MI5 files, any explicit reference to Ewen has been weeded out, but as the older brother’s intelligence career developed and his responsibilities grew, so surveillance of the younger brother intensified. MI5 questioned Ivor’s neighbors, infiltrated the meetings he addressed, and analyzed his writings and speeches, yet it could find no hard evidence against him. That would take another two decades.

  Between 1940 and 1948, American cryptanalysts intercepted copies of thousands of telegrams passing between Moscow and its diplomatic missions abroad, written in a code that was theoretically unbreakable. Over the next forty years, Allied code breakers struggled to unpick the Soviet code in an operation initially known as “the Russian problem” and later code-named “Venona,” a project so secret that the CIA remained unaware of its existence until 1952. Large swaths of the correspondence were, and are still, unreadable, but finally some 2,900 messages were translated, a tiny fraction of the whole but an astonishing glimpse into Soviet espionage.

  These decrypted intercepts included 178 sent to and from the London office of the GRU, the military branch of Soviet intelligence, between March 1940 and April 1942.

  The messages were partial and fragmentary, and many were missing, but they revealed something quite remarkable: for at least two years, the Soviet Union had run an unde
tected British spy ring code-named “X Group” (known as “Gruppa iks”) under the leadership of an individual code-named “Intelligentsia.”

  Soviet spies, like their British and German counterparts, seemed to take perverse delight in selecting code names containing the most unsubtle hints. The Venona code for France was “Gastronomica;” the Germans were “Sausage Dealers” (“Kolbasniki”). The code name chosen for the spy in control of X Group was no exception. Agent Intelligentsia was the intellectually inclined Ivor Montagu.

  On July 25, 1940, Simon Davidovitch Kremer, secretary to the Soviet military attaché in London and a GRU spy handler, sent a message under the code name “Barch” to “Director” in Moscow: “I have met representatives61 of the X GROUP. This is IVOR MONTAGU (brother of Lord Montagu), the well-known local communist, journalist and lecturer. He has [unintelligible] contacts through his influential relatives. He reported that he had been detailed to organise work with me, but that he had not yet obtained a single contact. I came to an agreement with him about the work and pointed out the importance of speed.”

  The report went on to relay Ivor’s analysis of Hitler’s “Last Appeal to Reason,” his “peace offer” to Britain. Ivor, correctly, thought a peace deal unlikely: “Intelligentsia considers there is62 an anti–Sausage Dealer mood in the army.” The reference to Ivor’s “influential relatives”63 suggests that the GRU knew of Ewen Montagu’s senior status within British intelligence.

  Ewen and Ivor Montagu were now, in effect, spying for opposite sides in the war. Since 1939, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had been bound together in a formal nonaggression agreement, and until Hitler ruptured the pact in June 1941, information passed to Soviet intelligence could find its way into the hands of the Gestapo.