Deception is a vital military art, and in the second world war the British were extremely good at it. The intelligence officers responsible adored their work: "turning" captured German spies, inventing fake agents, creating imaginary armies in the desert or (before D-Day) in southeast England.
The supreme example of the genre was Mincemeat, a 1943 operation to float ashore on the Spanish coast, for German consumption, the body of a supposed Royal Marine staff officer drowned after a plane crash. Going by the name of "Major Martin", this decoy carried papers that showed that the allies intended to launch amphibious landings in Greece and Sardinia rather than the real objective, Sicily.
One of the architects of the scheme, a peacetime lawyer named Ewen Montagu who spent the war in naval intelligence, wrote a bestselling account of the affair, The Man Who Never Was, which became a jolly 1950s movie. But Montagu told only half the story. He was forbidden, for instance, to reveal the role of Ultra decrypts of enemy signals, which allowed the British to monitor the Germans' every response to the amazing windfall of secrets that had dropped into their laps.
With his wife around, Montagu could also scarcely mention his own enthusiasm for Jean Leslie, the pretty MI5 secretary whose photograph was used as that of "Major Martin's" fiancée and planted on the body. In addition, Montagu lied flatly in his book, by claiming that next of kin of the corpse had given consent for its exploitation. In reality, he stitched up an entirely illicit deal with the St Pancras coroner, Bentley Purchase, to hijack the body of a Welsh drifter named Glyndwr Michael, who chanced to poison himself on Purchase's patch.
All this and much more is narrated with infectious glee by Ben Macintyre. My reservation about his last book, Agent Zigzag, on the wartime double agent Eddie Chapman, was that Chapman has always seemed to me a rogue who probably did little good or harm to either side. With Mincemeat, however, the cast of characters is irresistible, and Macintyre's enthusiasm for them richly merited.
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There was Charles Cholmondeley, a boundlessly imaginative RAF intelligence officer who liked to pot partridges with a revolver and compensated for being too shortsighted to fly by conceiving wizard wheezes to confound the Hun, of which Mincemeat was the most spectacular. The pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury advised on handling the corpse. Montagu himself was a scion of the prominent Anglo-Jewish banking family and threw himself eagerly into the task of inventing a life (including threatening correspondence from the bank, bills from nightclubs and suchlike) to adorn his dead creation.
A "skinny and embittered" woman in his department, Hester Leggett, cruelly nicknamed "the Spin" because she seemed so unlikely to get married, composed brilliantly plausible love letters from Martin's fiancée: "Darling, why did we have to go and meet in the middle of a war, such a silly thing for anybody to do - if it weren't for the war we might have been nearly married by now, going round together choosing curtains etc."
The pièce de résistance, though, was a letter written by the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Archie Nye, supposedly addressed to General Alexander in North Africa, outlining allied plans for descents on Greece and Sardinia, with a deception scheme aimed at Sicily. Nye penned this himself.
The plotters had much trouble securing appropriate underwear for Major Martin in clothes-rationed Britain. Finally, by a preposterous twist, the corpse set sail clad in the vest and drawers of Oxford historian HAL Fisher, recently run over by a truck. This appears to have been a droll joke perpetrated by John Masterman, a fellow don now working for MI5, who had loathed Fisher for years.
It was no joke dressing Martin, however, and even less of one launching him from the submarine Seraph off the Spanish coast on April 30, 1943. Despite weeks of careful freezing, and passage in a supposedly airtight container, the "major" was rapidly decomposing, and smelt terrible. The submarine's captain, the famous Lieutenant Bill Jewell, himself packed Martin's briefcase before pushing him overboard, and found it one of his nastier tasks of the war.
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Thereafter, everything worked like a dream. The corpse floated onto the beach at Huelva, the Spanish authorities lent its possessions to the Germans, who photographed them and rushed the priceless copies to Berlin. Alexis Baron von Roenne, head of German military intelligence, professed no doubts about its authenticity. Goebbels, alone among the Nazi hierarchy, expressed to his diary suspicions of a possible British ruse. Hitler, however, was convinced that the allies intended to descend on Greece, and dispatched important reinforcements to the Balkans. General Alfred Jodl, his chief of operations, signalled all senior German field commanders about the likelihood of allied landings in the eastern and western Mediterranean, adding that the information came from "a source which may be regarded as being absolutely reliable".
Montagu read Jodl's signal, decrypted by Bletchley Park. There were only two German divisions in Sicily when the allies began to land there on the night of July 9. The Mincemeat team was euphoric, and deserved to be.
There are, of course, many nuances to that bald outline. Macintyre notes that some Germans were troubled by the extent of the major's decomposition, given that he had supposedly drowned only a few days earlier. His identity-card photograph showed a head with much more hair than the corpse - unsurprising, since it depicted an MI5 officer, Ronnie Reed.
Macintyre suggests that Martin's personal documents and letters were too perfect to be convincing, the product of excessive romantic imagination in London. He raises the possibility that Roenne and other leading intelligence officers such as Admiral Canaris, committed anti-Nazis, recognised Martin as a plant, but chose to say nothing in order to sabotage the war effort. I am more inclined to suspect incompetence - the cock-up theory of history.
The book's publisher overstates the case by describing Mincemeat as an operation that "changed the course" of the second world war. It was a notable success, which fulfilled the requirements of good deceptions by fitting with what Hitler believed anyway - he was obsessed with defence of the Balkans. But it should be seen as part of a much wider strategic story, and of other allied deception schemes - which MacIntyre acknowledges.
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The author sometimes gets carried away by his fringe players. It was ironic that while Montagu was working for British intelligence, his brother Ivor, a communist filmmaker, was acting as a Soviet agent. But Ivor seems to deserve less space than Macintyre gives him in an account of Mincemeat. The Russians learnt of the operation, but almost certainly from MI5 traitor Anthony Blunt rather than from the filmmaker.
These are niggles, however, about a terrific book with exceptional photographs of everybody, including the corpse. Students of the second world war have been familiar with Mincemeat for many years, but Macintyre offers a mass of new detail, and enchanting pen portraits of the British, Spanish and German participants. His book is a rollicking read for all those who enjoy a spy story so fanciful that Ian Fleming - himself an officer in Montagu's wartime department - would never have dared to invent it.
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp400