Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
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Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans.In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose. Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller.Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war. The Barnes & Noble Review Ben Macintyre's exuberant, impious account of Operation Mincemeat puts on record again the debt British intelligence once owed to an upper-class infatuation with detective fiction. The scheme was nothing less than a glorious red herring: setting a body adrift kitted out as a British officer carrying false war plans to mislead the Germans. It was, as it happens, a ruse almost certainly suggested by Ian Fleming, assistant for a time to Admiral John Godfrey, head of British Naval intelligence. And it was eventually implemented by, among others, John Masterman, the chairman of the disinformation-disseminating Twenty Committee: an Oxford don in civilian life and author of detective novels. Until now the venture has been best known from the 1956 movie, The Man Who Never Was, itself based on the book of the same title by Ewen Montagu, one of the men involved in setting it up. But opened archives and Macintyre's penchant for questioning accepted versions of practically everything, have produced a brilliant revisionist history, one abounding in eccentrics, rum characters, and over-grown boys.
Preface 11Chapter 1 The Sardine Spotter 15Chapter 2 Corkscrew Minds 21Chapter 3 Room 13 39Chapter 4 Target Sicily 59Chapter 5 The Man Who Was 78Chapter 6 A Novel Approach 97Chapter 7 Pam 117Chapter 8 The Butterfly Collector 145Chapter 9 My Dear Alex 172Chapter 10 Table-Tennis Traitor 199Chapter 11 Gold Prospector 218Chapter 12 The Spy Who Baked Cakes 241Chapter 13 Mincemeat Sets Sail 257Chapter 14 Bill's Farewell 282Chapter 15 Dulce et Decorum 323Chapter 16 Spanish Trails 344Chapter 17 Kühlenthal's Coup 364Chapter 18 Mincemeat Digested 384Chapter 19 Hitler Loses Sleep 408Chapter 20 Seraph and Husky 430Chapter 21 A Nice Cup of Tea 451Chapter 22 Hook, Line, and Sinker 465Chapter 23 Mincemeat Revealed 483Chapter 24 Aftermath 502Appendix 529Acknowledgments 538Notes 541Select Bibliography 631Picture Index 637
