I was recently in the WWII section of the DC public library and stumbled across Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat, a (very) long study of a famous British intelligence gambit written up decades earlier in The Man That Never Was. The Brits arranged for a corpse, ostensibly of a major in the Royal Marines, to wash up on the Spanish coast in 1943, carrying letters indicating that the Allies, having defeated the Germans in Africa, were intending next to invade both Greece and Sardinia. The Germans took the bait and wasted massive resources fortifying the two sites and were caught flat-footed (relatively) when the Allies invaded Sicily instead, en route to the Italian peninsula. If the Germans had guessed right instead of wrong, the Sicilian invasion could have been a disaster, given the superior performance of German troops over Allied forces throughout the entire Italian campaign.
It’s an interesting story, that could have been told in 20-30 pages rather than an entire book. Macintyre provides massive back story on each of the “colorful” characters involved, but what I found most interesting is 1) Operation Mincemeat should have been a failure rather than a success and 2) the reason it was a success was probably due to the activity of a traitor in German intelligence.
Macintyre notes that one of the most basic rules of intelligence, and one of the most frequently flouted, is that code names should not, repeat not, have any relation to the actual operation itself. In other words, if you’re mucking around with a dead body, don’t call the thing “Operation Mincemeat.” As Macintyre further notes, the Brits running the show—a pair of “typical” privileged British eccentrics, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley—constructed a grotesquely overwrought back story for their deceased major, giving full rein to their own fantasies and (naturally) using a photo of the prettiest secretary in the office for the major’s girlfriend.
If the Germans had been able to have any competent person examine the corpse, the ruse would have been blown immediately, but Spanish officialdom—taking bribes from everyone, naturally—proved equal to the task of ignoring the fact that the “major” was actually deceased by virtue of having eaten rat poison and that his body had been in the water a few hours rather than a few days and also succeeded in removing, copying, and replacing the all-important false letters on the major’s person, which then made their way to German intelligence.
The British backed up the letters with an elaborate disinformation campaign, creating a fake army poised to invade Greece, using radio chatter about ship movements, supply operations, etc., which was all repeated on a much larger scale prior to the invasion of Normandy in 1944, when Hitler delayed full commitment of German reserves for weeks, convinced that the “real” invasion was going to occur at Pas-de-Calais, the point on the French coast nearest to Britain.
When I read about the Normandy invasion, I always wondered how Hitler could have believed that such a massive operation was a mere “feint.” According to Macintyre, Hitler was systemically fed false information by Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne, chief intelligence analyst for the Germans. Von Roenne was an aristocratic German Catholic who appears to have been appalled by Nazi racial policies in Eastern Europe and worked diligently to undermine the German war effort. He was not directly involved in the famous plot against Hitler in 1945, but he was close friends with many who were, and he was one of those whom Hitler had hanged with piano wire. Von Roenne’s story appears to be very little known in the U.S. WWII is, after all, the autodidact’s paradise, and yet there’s no entry for him at all in Wikipedia. Wikipedia!
Afterwords
Malcolm Gladwell gives Macintyre an ecstatic review for the New Yorker, here and extracts his own set of morals as well.
