Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  Initially, Ivor Montagu’s Soviet spymasters were unimpressed. “Intelligentsia has not yet found64 the people in the military finance department. He has promised to deliver documentary material from Professor Haldane who is working on an admiralty assignment concerned with submarines and their operation. We need a man of a different calibre and one who is bolder than Intelligentsia.”

  Professor J. B. S. Haldane was one of the most celebrated scientists in Britain. A pioneering and broad-ranging thinker, he developed a mathematical theory of population genetics, predicted that hydrogen-producing windmills would replace fossil fuel, explained nuclear fission, and suffered a perforated eardrum while testing a homemade decompression chamber: “Although one is somewhat deaf,”65 he wrote, “one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.” Haldane was a dedicated atheist and communist: “I think that Marxism66 is true,” he declared in 1938.

  Ivor Montagu and Jack Haldane had become friends at Cambridge, and soon after the outbreak of war, Ivor recruited the scientist into X Group. In 1940, Haldane was working at the navy’s secret underwater research establishment at Gosport, and in July he submitted a secret paper to the Admiralty entitled “Report on Effects of High Pressure, Carbon Dioxide and Cold, a study of long-term submersion in submarines.” Two months later, Kremer reported: “Intelligentsia has handed over67 a copy of Professor Haldane’s report to the Admiralty on his experiments relating to the length of time a man can stay underwater.”

  Under Kremer’s nagging guidance, Ivor Montagu’s X Group slowly expanded, and the quality of intelligence improved. By the autumn of 1940, Ivor had recruited “three military sources,”68 and an agent code-named “Baron,” probably a senior officer in the secret service of the Czechoslovakian government in exile, who furnished copious information on German forces in Czechoslovakia. MI5 later speculated that another of Ivor’s recruits, code-named “Bob,” was the future trade union leader Jack Jones. In October 1940, Ivor “reported that a girl69 working in a government establishment noticed in one document that the British had broken some Soviet code or other.” Kremer told Ivor “that this was a matter70 of exceptional importance and he should put to the [X] Group the business of developing this report.”

  By the end of 1940, X Group had become so productive that the handling of Ivor was taken over by the top GRU officer in London, Colonel Ivan Sklyarov, the Soviet military and air attaché, code-named “Brion.” The surviving X Group messages reveal a steady stream of military intelligence passing to Moscow, including troop movements, air-raid damage, technical information obtained from “an officer of the air ministry,”71 tank production and weapons, and reports on British preparations for a possible German invasion. “The coastal defence is72 based on a network of blockhouses that are weak in design with no allowance made for the manoeuvrability of strong artillery and tank equipment of the Sausage Dealers.” Such information was of great interest to Moscow, but it would have been of even greater importance to the Germans, then actively planning Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain.

  Ivor’s most valuable information was passed to Moscow on October 16, 1940, following an air raid on an aircraft factory near Bristol: “30 Sausage Dealer bombers73 and 30 fighters used a radio beam to fly from Northern France.”

  The aim of the Luftwaffe bombers had been steadily improving in recent months, prompting suspicion that the Germans had developed some sort of sophisticated guiding apparatus using radio beams. This was the “Knickebein” system: the German bombers followed a radio beam broadcast from France until the beam was intersected by another over the target, at which point the bombs were released. Churchill had formed a secret committee to try to discover how the system worked and how it might be countered. The problem was code-named “Headache;” the countermeasures, inevitably, were code-named “Aspirin.” In time, the RAF developed a technique for “bending” the radio beams to redirect the Luftwaffe’s bombs away from the intended targets: Headache was cured. But in October 1940, Headache was a highly classified secret, known only to a handful of intelligence chiefs, senior RAF officers, and government scientists. The X Group was now gathering intelligence from the very highest levels.

  Ivor Montagu was an idealist, but his actions were treasonable. He was not merely passing important military secrets to a foreign power, but to one that was bound in a friendly pact with the enemy. Ivor was a committed antifascist and would have been appalled at the accusation that he was aiding Nazism, but his commitment to the cause of communism was absolute and naive. If caught, he would certainly have been arrested and prosecuted under the Treason Act.

  Some of Ivor’s information may have come, inadvertently, from his older brother. Ewen Montagu was aware of his brother’s politics (“he still seems to be going on with74 his meetings,” he told his wife) but entirely in the dark about his espionage activities. He had no idea how closely his sibling was being monitored by his own colleagues in MI5. Ivor, on the other hand, was aware that his brother worked in Naval Intelligence at a senior level and was undoubtedly interested in the contents of his locked briefcase. Did Ivor’s slavish adherence to the party, as noted by Trotsky, outweigh his brotherly affection?

  We will probably never know whether Ivor spied on his brother, because at the end of 1942, the Venona intercepts come to an abrupt halt. The traffic between the London rezidentura and Moscow continued unabated but was henceforth unreadable. The last translated report from Brion reads: “Intelligentsia has reported75 that his friend, a serviceman in a Liverpool regiment has handed over [unintelligible] German exercise, with dive bombers taking part [unintelligible] between Liverpool and Manchester everything—industry …” This was the last decipherable word from Agent Intelligentsia.

  By 1943, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were locked in mortal conflict, and there was now little danger that information from the X Group would be passed on to Berlin. But Ivor remained immersed in the spying game. Germany had spies operating within Soviet intelligence. Ewen had spent months now planning the most elaborate deception of the war. The person most likely to blow Operation Mincemeat, if he should ever discover it, was his own brother.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Butterfly Collector

  CHOLMONDELEY AND MONTAGU were convinced that they had created a fully credible character in William Martin. “We felt that we knew1 him just as one knows one’s best friend,” wrote Montagu. “We had come to feel that we had known Bill Martin from his earliest childhood, [knowing] his every thought and his probable reaction to any event that might occur in his life.”

  It is hardly surprising that Montagu and Cholmondeley felt they knew Bill Martin as well as they knew themselves, for in a way the personality they had created was their combined alter ego, the person they would have liked to be. One contemporary described Cholmondeley as “an incurable romantic2 of the old cloak and dagger school.” In Bill Martin he found an imaginary figure who could wear the cloak and wield the dagger on his behalf. Where Cholmondeley was earthbound by his eyesight and deskbound by his job, Bill Martin was a young warrior on the front line, heading to war with a girl waiting for him at home. Montagu once wrote that he “joined up to go to sea,3 to use my seamanship experience, and to fight.” Bill Martin was the active naval officer that he was not. But Montagu took the identification with Bill Martin a stage further.

  “Ewen lived the part,”4 according to Jean Leslie. “He was Willie Martin and I was Pam. He had the sort of mind that worked that way.” Ewen (as Bill) began to pay court to Jean (as Pam) in earnest. He took her to clubs, to films, and out to dinner. He gave her presents, jewelry, and a Royal Marines shirt collar, as a memento of “Bill.”

  “He wrote me endless letters,5 from Bill,” she remembered. Jean kept some of these letters from her imaginary fiancé. They are an extraordinary testament to one of the oddest love affairs imaginable, to the way that fiction was eliding into fact in an entirely unexpected way. Jean Leslie was not, it seems
, averse to Montagu’s advances or, perhaps more accurately, to those of Bill Martin. She had a copy of the bathing photograph enlarged and wrote on it: “Till death us do part,6 Your loving Pam,” and gave it to Montagu.

  Montagu wrote back:

  Pam dearest,7

  I just loved the photograph—so much so that I couldn’t bear the idea of anything happening to it and I have left it in the care of my best friend—I know you’ll like him a lot—he has done everything for me and made me what I am today.

  This sounds as if I have a foreboding—I have, and from your inscription on the photo I think you have the same fear.

  In case I don’t come back you may not like to wear the ring I gave you so I hope you will like this brooch. You can still wear that even if, as I hope you will, you meet someone worthier than me—I know he will understand if he is the sort of man you’ll like.

  Ever yours,

  Bill

  P.S. Try the RNVR next time.

  Ewen Montagu, of course, was in the RNVR, the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He placed Pam’s photograph on his dressing table at Kensington Court.

  Montagu had been apart from his wife since 1940, with only one brief reunion in America in 1941, when he was sent out to liaise with the FBI. In letters to his wife, Ewen referred openly to his dates with a young woman with lodgings in the Elms in Hampstead, although he never identified Jean Leslie by name. “The girl from the Elms8 is one of Tar Robertson’s secretaries and is a very nice, very intelligent girl (22–24?),” he told Iris. “One of her appealing virtues9 [is] she is such a good listener.” He added: “She has been much connected10 with one side of my doings.” Iris had already broached the subject of whether she and the children should return to Britain. On March 15, 1943, Ewen wrote to her: “I took the girl from the Elms11 to dinner and we went to see ‘Desert Victory’ at the Astoria.” In the very same letter he observed: “I feel definitely that you ought12 not to come back yet.”

  If Iris was suspicious of Ewen’s relationship with this unnamed woman connected with her husband’s “doings,” she was not alone. Montagu later claimed his reason for placing Pam’s photograph, with its loving inscription, on his dressing table at Kensington Court, had been to see whether his inquisitive mother would react to it, or even remove it. “If Mother did touch my things13 it would be the last straw. It is the only irritating thing she doesn’t do so far.” Lady Swaythling duly spotted the picture and demanded an explanation. “I told her truthfully that it was14 a souvenir of something I had been doing. … I’m not entirely sure what she thought I meant by that!!” Montagu’s mother began sending coded warnings to her daughter-in-law in New York, “writing in her letters15 that she felt that [Iris] should come home as soon as [her] job allowed it.”

  The relationship between Ewen Montagu and Jean Leslie may have been mere romantic playacting, nothing more than flirtatious, joking banter. But when Iris later saw the photograph with its passionate dedication, Montagu insisted that it was a joke, part of a wartime operation, and that nothing had gone on between him (and his alter ego) and Jean (and hers). His wife may have believed him. He may have been telling the truth.

  FORGING THE CHARACTER of Major William Martin, and flirting with his fiancée, had been a most pleasurable challenge. Far more taxing—and more important—was the task of creating documentary evidence to be planted on the body. If the faked intelligence was too obvious, the Germans would spot the hoax; if it was too subtle, they might miss the clues altogether. At what level should the disinformation be pitched? Major Martin was supposed to be a serving officer whose plane had crashed en route from Britain to Gibraltar. He could not simply carry operational orders or battle plans, since these would never have been entrusted to a single messenger but instead sent by diplomatic pouch. Moreover, if a message contained highly classified information, it would tend to be transmitted by encrypted wireless message. The false information, it was decided, would have to be conveyed in the form of private letters between individual officers of sufficiently elevated rank to ensure the enemy took the information seriously. These had to be names the Germans would recognize. A communication from some minor member of the planning staff in London to a counterpart in Algiers “would not carry enough weight.”16 The job, as Montagu saw it, was “to fake documents of a sufficiently17 high level to have strategic effect, even after prolonged study and consideration by suspicious and highly-trained minds which would be reluctant to believe them.” Even more problematic was the question of how, exactly, to phrase the disinformation. If Sicily was identified as the cover target but the Germans somehow discovered the trick, then that would reveal Sicily as the real target. Instead of the enemy being misled, he would be tipped off.

  Montagu approached the forging of the letters as if he were in court, briefing his opposing counsel with selective, invented evidence. It was, he later reflected, “a crooked lawyer’s dream of heaven.”18 He set out three basic principles on which the letter or letters should be drafted:

  That the planted target [i.e., Greece, Sardinia, or both] should be casually but definitively identified.

  That two other places should be identified as cover, and that one of these should be Sicily itself and the other thrown in so that, if the Germans grasped that the document was a plant, Sicily should not be pinpointed.

  That the letter should be “off the record” and of the type that would go by the hand of an officer but not in an official bag; it would have to have personal remarks and evidence of a personal discussion or arrangement that would prevent the message’s being sent by signal.

  Montagu knocked out a first draft: a letter from General Sir Archibald “Archie” Nye, vice chief of the Imperial General Staff (VCIGS) to General Sir Harold Alexander in Tunisia. Nye was privy to all military operations. Alexander was in command of an army under General Dwight Eisenhower at Eighteenth Army Group Headquarters. The two British generals knew each other fairly well and were senior enough to be fully apprised of the battle plans. Harold Alexander had fought with distinction in the First World War but was widely perceived as not too bright. Indeed, one colleague unfairly described him as “bone from the neck up.”19 Still, he was the epitome of British martial uprightness, ramrod stiff and always looking “as if he had just had a steam bath,20 a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home.” More important, he was probably Britain’s most famous soldier after Montgomery and was destined to become Eisenhower’s commander of ground forces in Sicily. The Germans would know instantly who, and how important, he was.

  Montagu’s rough draft was a chatty, chummy letter between two members of the top brass, making no obvious reference to Allied intentions but dropping clues that no careful reader could miss. It implied a debate over whether Sicily or Marseilles should be the cover target; it referred to a choice of landing spots in Sardinia; it contained some apparently idle chat about the American allies (“Will Eisenhower go ahead21 at his own speed?”), salutations from a mutual friend (“So and so—naming a general22—sends his best”), and some lighthearted ribbing of Montgomery, the victor of El Alamein, for his bigheadedness.

  Montagu thought his draft hit the perfect note, with just the right mix of “personal and ‘off the record’”23 information. He was very pleased with it. His immediate bosses, however, were not. The planners at the London Controlling Section (LCS), the committee in overall command of deception, suggested a less ambitious plan, arguing that “the contents of such a letter24 should be of the nuts and bolts variety and not on a high level.” On March 11, Johnnie Bevan, the head of the LCS, flew to Algiers for a meeting with Dudley Clarke, the officer in command of deception for Operation Husky, the assault on Sicily. Clarke also believed that Operation Mincemeat was aiming too high. He suggested that the letter should merely give a false indication of the date of a planned invasion, without pinpointing where this would take place.

  Over the next month, the letter would be repeatedly revised, redrafted, and rewritten, as senior intelli
gence officers, the Chiefs of Staff, and others added their two cents to the plan. One of the hazards of having a good idea is that intelligent people tend to realize it is a good idea and seek to play a part. Like most novelists, Montagu did not like the editing process. He did not like the way Operation Mincemeat was being watered down. He did not like senior officers pulling rank and tinkering with a project in which he had invested so much of his time, energy, and personality. But most of all, he did not like Johnnie Bevan.

  Montagu had once been a supporter of Bevan, the smooth, patrician chief of the London Controlling Section. But tensions rose quickly in the cramped and strained atmosphere of wartime deception planning. Soon after Bevan was appointed, they began to spar, which led to disagreements, and culminated in a titanic personality clash. Bevan took malicious pleasure in ordering Montagu about; Montagu responded with withering contempt. Early in March, in the midst of discussions over the form of Operation Mincemeat, Montagu mounted a full-scale assault on Bevan, accusing him of being incompetent, mendacious, inefficient, and “almost completely ignorant25 of the German Intelligence Service, how they work and what they are likely to believe.”

  When Montagu got the bit between his teeth, he was not easily reined in. Bevan, he protested, “is almost completely inexperienced26 in any form of deception work. He has a pleasant and likeable personality and can ‘sell himself’ well. He has not got a first grade brain. He can expound imposing platitudes such as ‘we want to contain the Germans in the West’ with great impressiveness. … I am sure he will not improve with experience. The remainder of the staff of the London Controlling Section are either unsuited to this sort of work (in which they are all wholly inexperienced) or are third rate brains.” This rant continued for several more pages. Montagu’s character assassination of Bevan was completely over the top. It was also wrong, because Bevan possessed a brain quite as supple as that of Ewen Montagu. The memo attacking Bevan was internally circulated to the chiefs of Naval Intelligence, but Montagu’s colleagues seem to have realized he was merely blowing off steam, and the document did not leave the NID—which was just as well, for if Montagu’s complaints had reached the ears of Churchill, who had complete faith in Bevan, he might well have been sacked. Some saw Montagu’s attitude toward Bevan as evidence of thwarted ambition and backstabbing. More likely, it was the overreaction of an obsessive perfectionist, frustrated at the way his pièce de résistance was being tampered with and deeply alarmed by what he saw as the leaden response to developments in the Mediterranean.