The Man Who Never Was: Operation Mincemeat

The problem in 1943 was that Sicily was obvious. It was the natural stepping stone from North Africa to Italy, and Churchill remarked that anyone but a damned fool would know it was Sicily.

The solution came from a note in the Trout Memo, a 1939 list of deception ideas circulated under the name of the head of naval intelligence and probably written in part by his assistant Ian Fleming. Idea number twenty-eight suggested planting a corpse carrying misleading papers where the enemy would find it.

Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley of the Twenty Committee built it out.

They obtained the body of a man who had died in London — Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welshman who had ingested rat poison — and gave him an identity. Acting Major William Martin of the Royal Marines. And then they gave the identity a life.

This is the part that matters. The body carried a photograph of a fiancée called Pam, two love letters from her, a bill from a jeweller for an engagement ring, an overdrawn notice from Lloyds Bank, ticket stubs from a London theatre dated shortly before he supposedly flew, a receipt for a new shirt, a letter from his father, an expired identity card with a replacement, and a set of keys. The theatre stubs were selected so that the dates would place him in London at a plausible moment.

The operational documents were the point of the exercise: a private letter from one general to another, discussing an Allied plan to attack Greece and Sardinia and noting that Sicily was to be the cover target.

He was released from a submarine off Huelva on 30 April 1943, in Spanish waters, where a pro-German intelligence apparatus operated and the material would be passed to the Abwehr.

Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley of the Twenty Committee built it out.

Two mechanisms made it work.

Effort. Information a target believes it has obtained by its own effort, or by the enemy's mistake, is weighted far more heavily than the same information offered. Nothing was given to the Germans; they took it, and taking it was a small achievement they had earned.

And schema fit. The pocket litter is not corroboration in any evidentiary sense — a forged document and a forged theatre stub have identical evidentiary value, which is none. What the litter does is make the person coherent, and coherence is what people use as a proxy for truth when verification is impossible. The Germans were not evaluating documents. They were recognizing a man.

Hitler ordered reinforcements to Greece and Sardinia. When Sicily was invaded on 10 July, the initial German assessment was that it was the diversion.