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One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in one crucial respect, from any spy before or since: he was dead. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies planned to invade Greece. The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister, the great hoax involved an extraordinary cast of characters including a famous forensic pathologist, a gold-prospector, an inventor, a beautiful secret service secretary, a submarine captain, three novelists, a transvestite English spymaster, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, and a dead Welsh tramp. Using fraud, imagination and seduction, Churchill's team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate and so convincing that they began to believe it themselves.
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Richard & Judy's Review
Richard
Those over a certain age will probably have seen the film The Man Who Never Was, likely as not on TV on a wet Sunday afternoon. But when it was released in 1956, it caused a sensation.
The film revealed one of the biggest secrets of the second world war, and Ben Macintyre revisits the story in the beautifully researched and tautly written Operation Mincemeat. Mincemeat was the code name of the most audacious intelligence scam ever pulled off by the British secret services and it changed the course of the entire war.
In the spring of 1943, the British and American armies were poised to invade southern Europe. The outcome of the war rested on a knife-edge. The allies knew they could still lose to Hitler and the stakes were almost unimaginably high.
The Germans believed the blow would fall in either Greece or Sicily, with the smart money on Sicily. The smart money was right: Sicily was exactly where the allies planned landings. Somehow, Hitler - who always had the last word on strategy – had to be personally convinced that Greece was the target.
Macintyre’s account of how British intelligence conspired to dupe Hitler into moving his divisions to Greece is so fantastical that if Operation Mincemeat were a work of fiction, we might deride it as being hopelessly over the top. But this is a true story.
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Judy
I normally shy away from factual books about the last war, but this one is so rich in real-life characters and a plot that had me rubbing my eyes in sheer disbelief, that I was hooked from the first page. The opening paragraphs tell the story of a sardine fisherman off the coast of southwest Spain who, one overcast April morning 67 years ago, spotted the rotting body of a man floating in the water.
Once ashore, Spanish officials quickly established the dead man was a British intelligence officer carrying top-secret documents to a meeting in North Africa. It was assumed his plane had crashed at sea, en route. Fascist Spain was supposed to be neutral but Franco nodded to the Fuhrer and German spies were soon photographing the papers. Sensationally, they revealed the allies were about to invade Greece.
Hokum, all of it. The body was that of a Welsh tramp who had died after accidentally eating rat-poison; the documents were beautiful forgeries. The whole scam was the brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a ferociously intelligent Jewish barrister, with an unlikely backup team including a forensic pathologist and a transvestite English spymaster. In a somehow uniquely British piece of ‘corkscrew thinking’ they conjured out of thin air a man who never was. The hare-brained scheme began in a secret basement under Whitehall and ended up on Hitler’s desk.
Macintyre’s description of the misfits and geniuses who pulled the whole thing off is a delight to read and evokes a lost era of spooks and spies whose sheer ingenuity fooled Hitler into doing exactly what they wanted him to. A thrilling adventure story, and one that makes you proud to be British.
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Ben Macintyre Author Interview
Richard and Judy chat with 'Operation Mincemeat' author Ben Macintyre.
"Welcome back to the Richard and Judy Book Club, exclusive to WHSmith. There will be those of us above a certain generation who remember a film, shot in black and white, usually shown on Sunday afternoons, usually when it was raining, called 'The Man Who Never Was'. It was an abbreviated story of probably the most audacious intelligence scam probably ever pulled off by any intelligence service in the world..."
Ben Macintyre - Biography
Ben Macintyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times. He has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. He is the author of seven previous books including Agent Zigzag, the story of wartime double-agent Eddie Chapman, which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Galaxy British Book Award for Biography of the Year 2008. He lives in London with his wife and three children.
Ben Macintyre - WHSmith Q & A
Do you allow anyone to read your books before being published other than the publisher and is there a reason behind that?
My wife, Kate Muir, who is a novelist, is always the first to read the manuscript. Usually, I have to be in another room when she does so, as if even the smallest hint of confusion or concern appears on her face, I go into meltdown. But she is the ideal critic.
What literary inspirations do you draw from?
I suppose the first time I realised that history could be written at narrative pace, reading like a novel but true, was when reading Bruce Chatwin. Simon Schama's extraordinary historical brio is another inspiration, as he never for a moment fails to demonstrate that the essence of history is story.
What is the best book you have ever read and how did you come to that conclusion?
I love The Great Gatsby, although To Kill a Mockingbird comes a close second: both seem to me to capture something elemental, and optimistic, about America, a country with which I have conducted a long and tempestuous love affair. Gatsby seems to me to reflect the American Dream in all its mad, unfeasible energy, abundance and hope.
If you could work with any author who would it be?
Dead? That would have to be Chatwin, the ideal travelling companion although I imagine he would have been a difficult collaborator. Living? I am a huge admirer of Christopher Hitchens, whose sense of mischief is combined with such a depth of knowledge: working with him, I imagine, would involve some fabulous arguments, and drinking far too much.
How do you manage to get inside the heads of all your different characters in order to portray them truthfully?
One of the best aspects to writing about the Second World War is that everybody (or almost everybody) kept some sort of record: letters, diaries, memoirs, as well as all the abundant official material. Getting inside the heads of my characters is a matter of steeping oneself in anything and everything they have written, or had written about them.
Who is your favourite character from any book and why?
Of my own characters, Eddie Chapman, the crook and double agent, was a joy to write about. But elsewhere, in addition to Gatsby, I have always been deeply fond of Bertie Wooster: hopeless, baffled, kind, a sort of Every-Englishman for all seasons.
Do you have any little quirks or funny habits when you are writing?
I am entirely unable to write while wearing a tie. I quite often write standing up, which is bad for the back but good for the concentration. I used to smoke while writing, and reward myself with nicotine at certain key moments - such as ending paragraph. Having given up, I write much more slowly, but since I will probably live longer I imagine the effect will even out in the end.
How long did the book take you to write?
Operation Mincemeat took about 3 years to research and write.
What writing plans do you have for next year?
I am about to embark on another true tale of wartime espionage, but this one set in an entirely different context, with a very different protagonist.
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