A dead body, fake identity papers and a far-fetched plan to fool the enemy – dreamed up by none other than Ian Fleming. When Ben Macintyre found a cache of secret documents, he knew the story would make a brilliant book. Next month Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen star in the film version.
On January 28, 1943, a Welsh tramp died in St Pancras Hospital in London. He had eaten a lump of stale bread laced with rat poison in an abandoned warehouse near King's Cross. Glyndwr Michael was 34. He was illiterate, homeless and probably mentally ill. His death was wholly unremarkable, just another small tragedy in the midst of a brutal war in which multitudes had already died and many more would perish.
But Michael's death would change the course of history. Because at the very moment he died, two British spies were hunting for a dead body to use in an elaborate military deception. Ewen Montagu of Naval Intelligence, a barrister in civilian life, and Charles Cholmondeley, an RAF officer seconded to MI5, had together hatched Operation Mincemeat, a plot so far-fetched that it sounds like a work of fiction – which, in many ways, it was.
In the spring of 1943, a vast Allied armada had assembled in North Africa for the next stage of the war, the invasion of Italy. Some 160,000 British, American and Commonwealth soldiers were poised to attack what Winston Churchill famously called Europe's "soft underbelly". The problem, from the Allied point of view, was that the obvious target for such an invasion would be Sicily: the island commanding the central Mediterranean.
The Axis troops were braced for an invasion. The task of the spooks, therefore, was to persuade Hitler that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allies would invade Greece, in the eastern Mediterranean, and Sardinia in the west.
Montagu and Cholmondeley (pronounced "Chumly") came up with a plan: they would obtain a dead body, provide it with a false identity as a military courier, equip it with fake documents indicating a looming attack on Greece, and float the corpse ashore somewhere the Germans could find it. In theory, Hitler and his Italian allies would then divert defensive troops from Sicily and redeploy them to Greece, thus ensuring a successful invasion with minimal loss of life.
The idea had come from Ian Fleming, then assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Sir John Godfrey (who would later be immortalised as M in the James Bond books). In a document known as "the Trout Memo", Fleming outlined various plots for bamboozling the enemy. Under the heading "A suggestion (not a very nice one)" he wrote, "A corpse, dressed as an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast." In fact, Fleming had lifted the plot from a 1937 novel, The Milliner's Hat Mystery, by Basil Thomson.
Almost everyone involved in Operation Mincemeat was either a fiction writer already or an aspiring novelist: the plot started as fiction, then became fact, then became fiction again after the war, then fact once again in a non-fiction book I wrote in 2010. And now that book has been adapted into a major film directed by John Madden and starring Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly Macdonald – an outcome so astonishing and wonderful that I sometimes cannot quite believe that this, too, is fact not fiction.
I first came across Operation Mincemeat in a book written after the war by Ewen Montagu, entitled The Man Who Never Was. He was only able to do so because Duff Cooper, Churchill's wartime minister of information, had already published a 1950 novel based on the case, entitled Operation Heartbreak, that gave away some of the key facts, disguised behind fiction.
The Man Who Never Was formed the basis for a film in 1956 with Clifton Webb, and the tale of the dead body used in a plot to fool Hitler soon became embedded in the national mythology. A postwar generation grew up with a black and white morality fable of ingenious Brits and gullible Germans.
But Montagu's version of events was itself partly deceptive. He had concealed the crucial role in the plot played by Bletchley Park intercepts and falsely claimed that he'd given a solemn promise to the family of the dead man never to reveal his identify – when the body of Glyndwr Michael had effectively been stolen with the help of the St Pancras coroner, Sir Bentley Purchase, wonderfully played in the film by the late Paul Ritter. The film of The Man Who Never Was also added a wholly invented subplot involving an IRA spy.
Writing my book would have been impossible without the government decision to begin declassifying top secret intelligence files in the 1990s. In '96, one of those files revealed the name of Glyndwr Michael. In all, the Mincemeat files are several feet thick.
In his book, Montagu had mentioned "some memoranda which, in very special circumstances and for a very particular reason, I was allowed to keep". Intelligence officers are not allowed to keep secret documents. Indeed, that is exactly what they are not supposed to do. And if Montagu had kept them, where were they?
I went to visit Montagu's son, Jeremy, in Oxford. In his spare bedroom was a trunk left by his father after his death in 1985. Inside were documents from MI5, MI6, Bletchley Park and the Naval Intelligence Department– the entire uncensored report on Operation Mincemeat, as well as photographs, diaries and letters. This astonishing secret trove allowed me to tell the full story for the first time.
As I wrote in the book, "If my discovery of these papers sounds like something out of a spy film, that may be no accident: Montagu himself had a rich sense of the dramatic. He must have known they would be found one day." Eleven years later, a spy film is exactly what they have produced.
The tale that emerged from these documents was more truly extraordinary and eccentric than anything I had imagined – a plot so twisted and complex that in fiction it would have been dismissed as far too improbable.
The stakes were almost unimaginably high: if the Germans rumbled what was happening, instead of diverting troops from Sicily they would reinforce the island and there would be a bloodbath. The plotters went ahead anyway. Churchill (played in the film by Simon Russell Beale) personally approved the plan, despite the scepticism of some senior advisers, and he dined out on it for years afterwards in direct contravention of the Official Secrets Act.
With the Prime Minister's backing, the authors of the deception approached it as if writing a work of fiction. Glyndwr Michael, on ice in St Pancras mortuary, was transformed into Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, a military courier with a nicotine habit, a bank manager, love letters and a lot of secret documents in the briefcase chained to his belt. They had originally intended to drop the corpse from a plane, to make it look as if the man had died in an air crash, but fearing it might disintegrate on impact with the water, opted instead to transport it by submarine.
The best place to float the body ashore, they concluded, was Huelva, on the coast of Spain. Franco's Spain was neutral but leaning towards the Axis powers, and Spanish officialdom was riddled with Nazi sympathisers. If Montagu and Cholmondeley could get the documents into Spanish hands, there was a good chance these would be passed to the Germans and eventually end up on Hitler's desk. That, at least, was the plan.
All the main participants in Operation Mincemeat are now dead, but at the time I was researching the book, some were alive. Patricia Trehearne had worked in Room 13 in the Admiralty basement, where the operation was conducted. Trehearne's future husband landed at Sicily, giving her a remarkable personal stake in the outcome of the deception.
I also interviewed Jean Leslie (played by Kelly Macdonald), the woman who supplied a photograph of herself in a bathing suit to represent "Pam", the imaginary girlfriend of the dead man. The relationship between Montagu and Leslie forms the emotional core of the film. I pushed Leslie in a wheelchair down to the very spot by the Thames where the photograph was taken. In her 80s, she was as funny, bright and flirtatious as she had been when a wartime secretary in MI5's counterintelligence department.
The organisers of the operation poured themselves into the ruse: Charles Cholmondeley wore the uniform that would go on the dead man, to ensure that it did not look too new; Hester Leggett, the unmarried head of the MI5 secretarial unit (played by Penelope Wilton), wrote the letters from the fictitious "Pam", imagining herself as a lovestruck young woman.
"Bill darling," she wrote. "Don't please let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do nowadays. Now that we've found each other out of the whole world, I don't think I could bear it … "
"Into the blue" was, of course, exactly where the invented Major Bill Martin was heading. The hint of impending tragedy might have seemed a little suspicious, but the members of the Mincemeat team were so caught up in their own fiction they failed to spot this.
They even put real ticket stubs from a show they had attended at the Prince of Wales Theatre into the "wallet litter" of the dead man. The main performer was the singer-dancer Sid Field, but further down the cast list were two theatrical hopefuls, aged 16 and 17: their names were Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.
Montagu wrote a bogus obituary to appear in the Times a few days after the body washed up. It described a man whose death "came as a complete surprise to many of his friends" and praised William Martin's "determined, if unorthodox, methods to prepare himself for active and dangerous work". This was the kind of joke Montagu liked: Glyndwr Michael had been prepared for active service in a way that was not just unorthodox but illegal, highly risky and at times absurd.
However, the Times would not run the fake obituary.
The way the team worked might best be described as "method espionage": they tried to live the parts they were imagining. Long after my book came out, I was still discovering how far they were prepared to go – the individuals' willingness to believe, and live, the parts they were playing is a central theme of the film.
During my research, I believed I had spotted a major mistake by the plotters. Among the letters in Major Martin's wallet was one from his "father" on notepaper from the Black Lion Hotel in Mold. This, I wrote, was a hostage to fortune. What if a German spy in Britain had consulted the hotel register at the Black Lion and discovered that there had been no John Martin staying at the hotel on April 13, 1943? If the Germans had found out that even one link of the chain was a falsification, the whole plot would have unravelled.
But then, after publication, I received a call from a man who had purchased the old hotel register at an auction. "If you look at the page for April 1943, you will clearly see the name JG Martin." Someone, probably Cholmondeley, had taken the trouble to go to north Wales and sign the register as the invented father of someone who did not exist, just in case someone came snooping. Now that is spycraft.
But perhaps the extraordinary part of the story was discovering the existence, short and grim as it was, of Glyndwr Michael. He had been born in Aberbargoed, the son of a miner, and grew up in abject poverty. The father stabbed himself in the throat when Michael was 10 and died soon after. Michael worked as a gardener and labourer, drifting to London in 1940 following the death of his mother.
War is traditionally depicted in terms of guns, bombs and bullets, strategy and tactics, battlefield manoeuvres and wartime economics. But there is another kind of conflict, fought in the shadows, a war of deception, intelligence and make-believe – in the sense of making someone else believe what you want them to believe, which is what spies, novelists and even film-makers do. That war is not fought by traditional warriors but by thinkers, spies, novelists and, in this case, a dead tramp.
The participants all had remarkable afterlives. Montagu became a notoriously outspoken judge. Leslie married a soldier who had also fought in Sicily. Cholmondeley left MI5 in 1952, set up a business selling farm machinery and refused, for the rest of his life, to discuss the operation in which he had played such a crucial part. But the most extraordinary afterlife of all was that of Glyndwr Michael. His real life never amounted to much; but his second life, though wholly unreal, was devoted to tricking Hitler, saving countless lives and turning the tide of war.
Operation Mincemeat is released in NZ cinemas on April 28, 2022.
Written by: Ben Macintyre
© The Times of London