In London, on January 28, 1943, a homeless, mentally unstable young Welshman named Glyndwr Michael managed to kill himself by eating rat poison. He was 34 years old. He had chosen to end a life many would have called worthless; but, by one of the particular ironies of history, this desperate, maladroit suicide would earn himself a form of immortality. The body of Michael was to become transformed into one of the most elaborate fictional constructs ever conceived: Glyndwr Michael was to be transmuted into Captain William Martin, Royal Marines, better known in the annals of Second World War history as “The Man Who Never Was”.
The Times writer Ben Macintyre’s fascinating new book tells this story — one of the most famous acts of espionage deception yet achieved. The broad outlines of the plot are relatively familiar. Several weeks before the invasion of Sicily in July, 1943, the semi-decomposed body of a British soldier was discovered floating offshore, not far from Huelva, southwestern Spain. When the corpse was examined, papers and personal documents were found identifying him as a Royal Marine officer named William Martin.
There were also letters from his bank manager, love letters from his fianc?e, bills, receipts and the stubs of London theatre tickets. More crucially, he was found to be carrying sealed letters to senior military figures in North Africa. German Abwehr (military intelligence) agents managed to get hold of these and copy them. Their contents were strategic dynamite. The subtext of the letters implied that the forthcoming Allied assault in the Mediterranean would strike not at Sicily, as everyone on the Axis side confidently supposed, but instead at Greece and Sardinia — any attack on Sicily was designed as a feint, to concentrate German and Italian forces on the island while the real invasions took place elsewhere.
The documents were rushed to Berlin, where they were examined by the intelligence branch of the German high command, the Fremde Heere West. Baron von Roenne, head of the FHW, a man trusted by Hitler, declared them authentic. Hitler, too, was convinced. Paranoid about the supposed vulnerability of the Balkans, he redirected troops to Greece, sending Rommel to take over command, and effectively called a halt to the world’s biggest tank battle at Kursk. All tactical analysis was concentrated on repelling this new two-pronged invasion. Sicily was left to fend for itself. On July 10 a huge Allied invasion force assaulted the Sicilian beaches and the island was captured within a month with comparatively few casualties.
The world has known since the 1950s that the drowned Royal Marine officer and the sealed documents he was carrying were part of a meticulously conceived and elaborate hoax — moreover, a hoax that met with spectacular success and arguably changed the course of the Second World War. “The Man Who Never Was” has become one of the abiding myths of that conflict, but like many myths the reality behind it is even more beguiling.
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Macintyre’s great achievement in recounting “Operation Mincemeat” (as the whole deception plan was known) is to strip away the veils of jingoistic self-satisfaction and official secrecy and tell the story of the “Glyndwr Michael Affair”, as we might call it now, in precise detail and with conclusive accuracy. He reveals the key dual personalities involved in the complex subterfuge — Ewen Montagu, a wealthy barrister-turned-intelligence officer, and Charles Cholmondeley, an eccentric MI5 “ideas man” who might have stepped from an Ealing Comedy. These were the two prime movers, the ones who invented the intricate and credible fiction that turned Glyndwr Michael into William Martin. But for the plan to succeed there were many others closely involved: the undertaker who illegally provided Michael’s corpse; the generals who wrote fake letters to each other; the British agents in Spain who played their Abwehr and Falangist counterparts with immaculate shrewdness; and the intrepid submarine commander who slipped the body into the Mediterranean on the night of April 30 and watched the tide carry it towards the Spanish shore.
It is perhaps no accident that among the other plotters there were four novelists — the most famous being Ian Fleming and J. C. Masterman. One of the telling resonances of Operation Mincemeat is that it underlines the intellectual links, the shared mental gears, that exist between those who create hoaxes, those who engage in espionage and those who write fiction. There is, perhaps, in all such types a basic and instinctive response to the deep allure of duplicity, to the seduction of the double and triple bluff, and the creation of beautiful lies. The more convincing your mendacity, the more successfully you will thrive in whatever medium you choose.
But Macintyre is too canny an investigator to see the success of Operation Mincemeat simply as a case of brilliant British minds outfoxing dim and unimaginative Nazi intelligence operatives. A significant amount of luck was involved and, as he points out, a little more diligence on the German side might easily have discovered the holes in the William Martin narrative.
Macintyre makes excellent use of a concept that Admiral Godfrey, head of the Naval Intelligence Division, which executed Operation Mincemeat, propounded. Godfrey believed that the most dangerous flaws in a spy — either in espionage or counter-intelligence — were what he called “wishfulness” and “yesmanship”; in other words, wishful thinking and a craven desire to please superiors. Operation Mincemeat succeeded not only because of the audacity and finesse of the original plan but also because of successive degrees of “wishfulness” and “yesmanship”, in Spain, where the key Abwehr agent was desperate to provide an intelligence coup, and in Berlin, where perhaps the greatest wishful thinker was Hitler himself, with his obsession about the danger posed to the Balkans by the invasion of Greece. Goebbels, interestingly, was always suspicious of the discovered documents — all too neat, too obviously a plant, he thought — but because of his innate “yesmanship” he recorded his scepticism only in his diary.
The complexities and the consequences of the story that Macintyre tells in Operation Mincemeat are compelling — a tribute to his impressive abilities as a sleuth (ones that we’ve witnessed in his previous books) and to his capacities as a writer. He has the instincts of a novelist rather than an historian when it comes to elision, exposition, narration and pace, and his depiction of character is vividly alive to nuance and idiosyncrasy. Like the best novelists, he understands that all people are fundamentally individual — odd and unique to themselves — and that stereotypes exist only in bad fiction, whether on the page or on screen.
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However, perhaps the key lesson to be learnt from Operation Mincemeat is that deception works best when it reinforces ideas and inclinations that already exist. It is a salutary point and one whose relevance is just as acute today.
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury, £16.99, Buy this book; 400pp)
William Boyd’s Second World War spy thriller Restless won the 2006 Costa Novel Award