NY Times
May 11, 2010
Floating a Wild Plan and a Dead Man to Defeat the Nazis
By DWIGHT GARNER
OPERATION MINCEMEAT
How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
By Ben Macintyre
Illustrated. 400 pages. Harmony Books. $25.99.
Excellent westerns have been composed by people who could barely ride a horse, and the best writers of sex scenes are often novelists you wouldn’t wish to see naked. But when it comes to spy fiction, life and art tend to collide fully: nearly all of the genre’s greatest practitioners worked in intelligence before signing their first book contract.
“W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand,” Ben Macintyre writes in his new book, “Operation Mincemeat.” “For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.” Both are lurkers, confounders, ironists, betrayers: in a word, they’re spooks.
Mr. Macintyre himself writes about spies so craftily, and so ebulliently, that you half suspect him of being some type of spook himself. It is apparently not so. He is a benign-seeming writer at large and associate editor at The Times of London, a father of three and the author of five previous, respected nonfiction books, including “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal” (2007). Perhaps he is also controlling predator drones and a flock of assassins from a basement compound. But, alas, I doubt it.
“Operation Mincemeat” is utterly, to employ a dead word, thrilling. But to call it thus is to miss the point slightly, in terms of admiring it properly. Mr. Macintyre has got his hands around a true story that’s so wind-swept, so weighty and so implausible that the staff of a college newspaper, high on glue sticks, could surely take its basic ingredients and not completely muck things up.
What makes “Operation Mincemeat” so winning, in addition to Mr. Macintyre’s meticulous research and the layers of his historical understanding, is his elegant, jaunty and very British high style. The major players in this spy story seem to have emerged from an Evelyn Waugh novel that’s been tweaked by P. G. Wodehouse. This isn’t to say that Mr. Macintyre has embellished his teeming cast of eccentrics. It’s to say that he fully appreciates them, and his fondness for them is contagious.
“Operation Mincemeat” unfurls in the weeks and months before July 10, 1943, the day Allied troops swept ashore along the coast of Sicily in the first major assault against Hitler’s forces in Europe. At the time, Mr. Macintyre writes, this invasion would be “the largest amphibious landing ever attempted.”
Here is what, in his words, would be arriving in Sicily in time for breakfast: “An armada of Homeric proportions — more than 3,000 freighters, frigates, tankers, transports, mine sweepers, and landing craft carrying 1,800 heavy guns, 400 tanks and an invasion force of 160,000 Allied soldiers, composed of the United States Seventh Army under General George Patton, and Montgomery’s British Eighth Army.”
For this attack to succeed, and for this force not to be repelled from Sicily, an element of surprise was crucial. Back in England, the intelligence service set to work and devised a fiendishly simple plan that would be fiendishly difficult to get exactly right.
It would find a corpse, create a false identity for it, plant misleading secret papers on its person and set it afloat off the coast of Spain, where German spies would most likely find it. If all went according to plan, the Germans would take the bait and believe what the faked papers declared: that the Allied attack would take place in Greece or Sardinia rather than Sicily. The operation took its gory code name, Mincemeat, from the fact that its protagonist was literally dead meat.
This story has been told before. Its outlines were the basis for the popular memoir “The Man Who Never Was” (1953), written by the British Naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu, who played a crucial role in creating this ruse. (That book was also made into a film of the same title.) But Mr. Montagu was not free to tell everything he knew. And Mr. Macintyre has benefited from a great deal of new information, including a trove of once-classified documents found in a trunk under a bed in the house of Mr. Montagu’s son.
Among those who worked alongside Mr. Montagu, an aristocratic barrister, was Charles Cholmondeley, an employee of M15, the British counterespionage service. He was a tall man with the type of “corkscrew mind” that was perfect for intelligence work. Mr. Macintyre describes him as “a distinctive figure around Whitehall, his arms flapping when animated, hopping along the pavement like a huge, flightless, myopic bird.”
But then, in Mr. Macintyre’s hands, all the men and women who revolve around the story of Operation Mincemeat are larger and stranger than life. About one he writes: “he loved Gilbert and Sullivan operas, toy trains, boiled eggs and his model piggery in Ipswich.” About another: “He was small, thin, greedy, clever, morally void and monstrously bent.”
Even the duller people pop cleanly from the page. About one general he writes: “He was the epitome of British martial uprightness, ramrod stiff and always looking ‘as if he had just had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home.’ ”
Among those who became intimately involved with Operation Mincemeat was a British intelligence official named Ian Fleming, the future author of the James Bond novels. (About him, Mr. Montagu said, “Fleming is charming to be with, but would sell his own grandmother.”) Also involved: Churchill and Eisenhower, who had to sign off on the scheme, and Hitler himself, upon whose desk the fake plans ultimately landed.
The scam at the heart of this book sounds like good fun, a bit of high-level high jinks. But it was no lark. If it backfired, thousands of lives would be at stake. The men and women involved had lumps in their throats for months.
Ultimately, the ruse did work, and it became, in the words of Michael Howard’s official history of British intelligence in World War II, “perhaps the most successful single deception of the entire war.” Among the lessons of “Operation Mincemeat” is this: during wartime, brawn helps. But wars are won, too, by passionate oddballs and nerds, the patriotic geekerati that help an army to live by its wits.
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