The illusionist, p.28
The Illusionist, page 28
Like a lot of brilliant individuals who believe they have an important idea, Montagu quickly became frustrated at the people he saw as obstructing him. When it came to naval deception, he was used to acting more or less as he saw fit. His main efforts thus far had been passing misleading information about the Navy’s ships and their equipment: that warships still being built were operational, or that weapons were more effective than they really were. Although he’d welcomed the idea of Bevan coordinating deception work, he doesn’t seem to have expected that this would include him.
But Bevan understood that deception needed one governing mind. At the London Controlling Section’s October conference, he’d raised the issue of Naval Intelligence, who ‘initiated their own deceptions in a small way’, and Clarke replied that he ‘considered this wrong in principle’. There could be no freelancers, and Naval Intelligence would have to start clearing their work with the LCS.
Bevan and Montagu had a fair amount in common: both came from wealthy backgrounds and enjoyed the sorts of countryside pursuits available to the English gentleman. Both were keen fly fishermen. And at first Montagu had been helpful to the new man. Part of his job was reading Ultra decrypts and parcelling them out within the Admiralty. Learning that MI6 was being slow to pass messages to the LCS, he had added Bevan to his distribution list on the sly.
But by the end of February 1943, he was furious with Bevan’s approach. He had been circulating increasingly grumpy attacks on the LCS, accusing it of inexperience – which was fair enough, but also a reflection of the way he’d blocked its work for most of the previous year – and not understanding the Abwehr – again, the result of the struggle to get access to intelligence material such as Ultra. Now, when he, Montagu, had come up with a marvellous means of confounding the enemy, Bevan was getting in his way, insisting that Clarke, as the man running Operation Barclay, would have to sign Mincemeat off. Montagu was fully aware of the circumstances of Clarke’s arrest in 1941, and may well have felt that such a ridiculous person had no right to a veto over his work.
As Bevan was preparing to head to Algiers to meet Clarke, Montagu was handed an Ultra decrypt that caused him to explode with frustration. It was an assessment from German Supreme Command. ‘It is apparent that the enemy is practising deception on a large scale,’ it began, although Montagu’s view was that they weren’t doing nearly enough. The message went on to say that the Mediterranean was likely to be the site of future action, with an attack on an island, ‘the order of probability being Sicily first, Crete second, and Sardinia and Corsica third.’
Crete’s presence in there, completely inaccurately, reflected a success for A Force, though Montagu is unlikely to have appreciated this. His anger was focused on the fact that Sicily was at the top of the list, and that Bevan seemed to be doing nothing about this.
Montagu drafted a furious five-page memo – followed up a few days later with a four-page appendix – denouncing Bevan. He was, he said, ‘almost completely ignorant of the German Intelligence Service, how they work and what they are likely to believe’. More than that, he was ‘completely inexperienced in any form of deception work’. He was charming, sure, but ‘he has not a first grade brain’. He had exaggerated the success of his work on Torch, and was good at sucking up to superiors, but all he did was ‘delay action’.
It was a rant that seems not to have left the Admiralty. Montagu’s superiors wisely decided to do nothing about it, probably taking the view that their man was venting his frustration that people were blocking his great project.
Montagu might have been a little more circumspect had he known that he too was capable of making mistakes. In particular, he was unaware that his own brother Ivor, a convinced and very public communist, was also a Soviet agent, who had for the previous two years been supplying scientific intelligence gathered by a spy ring he’d built up. He may also have been going through the secret documents that Ewen liked to bring home from the office. (By coincidence, Ivor Montagu had been the co-director, with camouflage chief Geoffrey Barkas, of Wings Over Everest. Surely no other 22-minute Oscar-winning film has had more connections to secret intelligence.)
Clarke and Bevan meanwhile held their mini summit in the middle of March in a garage in Algiers, because there was no room for them at the nearest hotel. They drew up a draft of Barclay, and discussed Mincemeat’s place in it.
In a way, Montagu was answering a question that Clarke had asked him and the rest of the Twenty Committee when he’d joined them back in 1941. Could they, he’d wanted to know, arrange to plant a document on the Germans? The reply had been that ‘a document could be planted through more than one channel provided that the document was available in this country, and that he could provide a reasonable story to account for its presence in this country and its availability to the selected agent.’ This was the difficulty of running double agents: you had to explain how they had access to the information they were passing over. There was no one on the Twenty Committee’s roster who would plausibly have been told the details of Allied plans in the Mediterranean, but here was a chance to pass just such information over.
Clarke, though, had his doubts. He must have been torn. At one level Mincemeat’s boldness and theatricality appealed to him. It’s not difficult to imagine him being annoyed he hadn’t thought of it first. But for all its appeal, this sort of flashy, complicated operation was a long way from his preferred approach.
The A Force deception method was to pass puzzle pieces to the enemy in a way that led them to assemble the wrong picture. Giving high-level documents felt more like simply passing them the picture all at once. On top of that, Clarke didn’t like to draw the enemy’s attention to the way he was giving them information. A stunt like this would by its nature be noticed, forcing the enemy to think about whether the letter was real, whether the corpse was genuine. It was always better not to have the target asking questions about their sources.
And if they realised they were being conned, it risked all the other work of Operation Barclay. ‘It would be a mistake to play for high deception stakes,’ he warned. He drafted a letter that the courier could carry which he deemed safe.
Montagu blew up – again – at this. What was the point of going to all this trouble to play for low stakes? Clarke’s draft contained ‘lowish grade innuendo’ that could easily be put over by a double agent. Mincemeat, on the other hand, was a one-off chance to plausibly pass over false information of the highest level, and they should take it.
And now Bevan, in the face of all the things Montagu had said of him, agreed. ‘We feel Mincemeat gives an unrivalled opportunity for providing definite information and consequently we can go further,’ he cabled Clarke.
British intelligence was like any large organisation, riddled with jealousies and internal factions periodically more enthusiastic about attacking each other than the enemy. There would certainly be tensions between the London Controlling Section and A Force as the war went on, and the older organisation saw itself eclipsed by its junior sibling. But Clarke, whatever his initial thoughts about Mincemeat, yielded to Bevan. Perhaps he felt it was important to support his colleague. Or perhaps he had decided that, on reflection, he liked the idea of Mincemeat more than he worried about it.
If it succeeded, he wrote, ‘the major part of the Barclay story would have been carried in one bound right into the inmost circles of the German war machine.’ So the important thing was to make it succeed.
Chapter 40
Montagu had grasped that the body on its own wouldn’t be enough to sell the deception. They had to create a story around it, so he began writing one. It was a tragic wartime tale of a Royal Marine, ‘Major Martin’, who had met a girl and fallen in love, only to die just as they had become engaged. He would carry letters from ‘Pam’, his fiancée, written with a possible excess of pathos, as well as theatre tickets, a letter from his father, and a receipt for an engagement ring he couldn’t afford. Cholmondeley was a similar build to the corpse, so he got himself fitted for a Royal Marines battledress, and dressed in it daily, to give it some wear.
It was thorough work, though open to the criticism that Montagu and Cholmondeley were trying a bit too hard, having a bit too much fun. The biggest danger with passing high-level deception documents to the enemy was that someone would suspect the information was too good. Such a suspicious mind might also wonder if the supporting evidence of Major Martin’s life was too perfect.
The deception letters themselves were the subject of intense debate. The first was to be a letter from General Archie Nye, the vice-chief of the general staff, to General Alexander in Cairo. It went through multiple drafts by different hands, with Montagu typically furious and frustrated. As it was to be a personal note, he wanted to put in personal jokes at Montgomery’s expense. His superiors, in the best traditions of anxious bureaucrats everywhere, forbade the mocking of Monty even in a false letter. In the end, they asked Nye, the general who was supposed to be writing the letter, to come up with a draft. Unsurprisingly, he did a better job, producing a letter to Alexander that had just the right level of behind-the-scenes gossip of the sort that someone might prefer to put into a private letter.
Crucially, it offered a few details of plans to invade Greece, and explained London had decided that Sicily wouldn’t be a plausible cover target for such an operation, because ‘there wasn’t much hope of persuading the Boche that the extensive preparations in the Eastern Mediterranean were also directed at Sicily’. Instead, Nye went on, Sicily would be the cover for another unspecified invasion at the western end of the Mediterranean.
The clue about the ‘real’ target was in another letter, explaining Major Martin’s supposed mission in North Africa, as an expert on landing craft. In its final line, requesting Martin return to London when the assault was over, was a suggestion that he ‘might bring some sardines with him’. Was it too heavy-handed a hint that the target was Sardinia? Montagu thought it was just heavy enough for humourless Germans to notice it.
Churchill, another fan of the theatrical and the macabre, gave enthusiastic approval to Mincemeat, and the unfortunate Glyndwr Michael, who in the weeks after his death received more attention from the British state than he ever had in life, was floated off the coast of Spain by a submarine at the end of April.
There would be more excitement to follow. The British representative in the region where the body washed up, Francis Haselden, played the role of anxious diplomat trying to recover lost documents. This was finely judged: he had to try hard, but not so hard that he actually got the letters back before they’d been copied and passed to the Germans. At one point he had to stop a Spaniard from simply handing them to him.
It was here that the whole operation nearly fell apart. Montagu had been assured, and had assured himself, that Spanish pathologists weren’t a patch on their British counterparts, and would never spot the issues with the dead body. But the man who carried out the work had seen a lot of drowning victims, and noticed some oddities about this corpse: there was no evidence that this body, which was supposed to have been in the water for several days, had been nibbled by fish, as would have been usual. Its hair and clothing didn’t show the sort of effects he expected from that level of soaking, either.
That there weren’t more questions was thanks in part to Haselden’s quick-thinking. The diplomat wasn’t in on the full Mincemeat story, but he knew the body needed to be accepted as drowned, and that the longer the autopsy went on, the more likely it was that a discrepancy would be spotted. The day was hot and the body stank. He told the pathologist that His Majesty’s Government was quite prepared to accept the circumstances of this poor man’s death, and given the state of the corpse, no further examination was needed. The pathologist, whatever his questions, was satisfied with the essential point: the man pulled dead from the water had drowned. That was, after all, the usual story with people pulled dead from water.
That evening, Haselden sent a telegram to the British embassy in Madrid. It was intended to be the message he would usually send in such circumstances. ‘Body is identified as Major W Martin RM,’ it said. ‘Naval judge has taken possession of all papers. Death due to drowning probably 8 to 10 days at sea.’
As far as Haselden was concerned, he was signalling a success. The body had been accepted as a drowning, and the Spaniards had the paperwork. It was actually a message that revealed the greatest danger to Mincemeat.
The pathologist had judged that the body was so decomposed that it must have been in the water at least eight days. He’d actually only been in the water a few hours, of course, but he’d been in a fridge in a London morgue for several weeks and then a submarine, so it was hardly surprising he was a little ripe. This was a problem because Montagu’s team had carefully loaded the body with a ticket stub putting Major Martin in London six days earlier. For anyone checking the story, it was an inconsistency that might lead to other questions.
If Mincemeat had been rumbled at this point, it could have backfired horribly. The Germans would have known they were the targets of a con, and have realised that the letters contained the opposite of the truth. Montagu spent a lot of time railing against the efforts of those he regarded as having lesser minds than his own – a category that seems to have included almost all of humanity – but he had, in his arrogance and his excitement, taken a terrible risk.
He got away with it partly because of what happened next. In the days that followed, there was a farce as German intelligence tried desperately to get hold of the contents of Martin’s briefcase, and British intelligence tried to look like they wanted to stop them. In a further unforeseen problem, the letters were in the hands of the Spanish Navy, which was more pro-British than much of the government, and more resistant to the Abwehr. In London, Montagu went spare. In Madrid the naval attaché – last seen obtaining embarrassing pictures of Dudley Clarke for Churchill – played the straight spy, apparently doing his best to get the briefcase back, while making sure he didn’t accidentally succeed until the enemy had taken a look inside. The result of this battle was that by the time the Abwehr finally got sight of the letters, they had fully convinced themselves of their importance and authenticity.
So much so, in fact, that even when they misread the ticket stub’s date so that they believed Martin had been in London less than three days before he was found, the Abwehr persuaded themselves this was consistent with the state of the body, reasoning that ‘the effect of the sun’s rays on the floating corpse accelerated the rate of decomposition’.
Mincemeat was accepted all the way up the German intelligence chain, to Hitler himself. The Abwehr had no incentive to question what seemed to be a great coup, and those in military intelligence who might have raised doubts didn’t. Only Joseph Goebbels seems to have had questions, but he didn’t press them. So persuaded were senior officials of the tale of the ‘English courier’ that they became concerned the British would realise the letters had been opened and change their plans. The Abwehr gave assurances that the briefcase had been returned with no sign that the letters had been read.
The result would become known as one of the great intelligence triumphs of the war. There were proofs of success: at the start of March, the Axis had had eight divisions in the Balkans, one of them in Greece. Four months later there were eighteen, nine of them in Greece. In southern France the strength had been raised from two to three divisions, and two more had been sent to Sardinia and Corsica.
Mincemeat was indeed a great tale and a cunning operation, even if the risks associated with it hadn’t been properly understood before it began. Bevan, showing a fair amount of grace in the circumstances, recommended Montagu and Cholmondeley for decorations.
Montagu was in no doubt that it was Mincemeat which made the difference. In his report of the operation, Sicily was the obvious target until ‘Major Martin’ floated off Huelva, at which point the Axis command changed their minds and started looking at Sardinia and Greece instead. He worked hard to ensure this became the accepted account within the military and government. Not that much work was needed: it was such a good tale.
But Montagu had fallen into the deception trap that Clarke had begun to identify two years earlier: the question isn’t what you want your enemy to think – where Mincemeat was a huge triumph – but what you want him to do.
Even Montagu only claimed that one of the German divisions had moved as a result of Mincemeat. With the understandable focus on the body floating off the Spanish coast, the wider deception work gets lost: the reconnaissance of ‘target’ beaches, the bombing of Sardinia, the fake troop build-up in Libya, the double agents both in Britain and North Africa feeding a steady stream of misinformation back to Berlin, the intensifying SOE operations in Greece.
In suggesting they were going for the Balkans, the Allied deceivers were pushing at an open door. It was far easier to reinforce a mistaken belief than to lead someone to abandon a correct one, and Hitler was already worried about the Balkans.
Meanwhile there were many reasons Hitler didn’t want to send too many soldiers to Sicily. He doubted – correctly, it would turn out – how committed the Italians really were to his war. Troops sent to an island off the southern tip of Italy were at serious risk of getting trapped there if things went wrong or his ally switched sides.
And the achievement of surprise on the night of the Sicily invasion itself owed more to A Force’s work to build up the idea that any attack would come in the dark of the moon. The Italian army had never believed in Mincemeat. On the ground in Sicily, the soldiers knew they were the obvious target. It was, well, obvious. Where they were mistaken was on timing. Their commanders had believed the invasion was likeliest in the first ten days of the month, so the assault at the end of that period had come just as the defenders were relaxing.
Mincemeat’s biggest flaw was the thing Montagu most liked about it: it was a great story. The body in the water carrying the secret letter drew everyone’s attention. The moment it became clear to the Germans that Sicily had been the target all along, they were bound to question how they might have thought otherwise. In previous deceptions, A Force had given the enemy an ‘out’, allowing them to believe they’d simply drawn the wrong conclusion from their observations, or that plans had changed at the last minute.
