Review: Making 'Mincement' of the Nazis

OPERATION MINCEMEAT: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre. Harmony, 400 pp. $25.99.

Of all the many plots cooked up by British Intelligence during World War II, Operation Mincemeat is probably the best known and by now the most legendary. The story again, briefly: In 1943, a corpse disguised as a Maj. William Martin of the Royal Marines and carrying fake classified papers concerning Allied strategy in the Mediterranean is made to wash up on a beach in Spain, presumably the victim of a plane crash. The hope is that Spanish officials, ostensibly neutral but really pro-Axis, will pass the documents on to the Germans (they did), who will think they have stumbled on an intelligence gold mine (they did) and alter their Mediterranean defenses accordingly, thus easing the way for the Allied invasion of Sicily.

It was an implausible ruse that worked, with all the now classic elements of that era's spy fiction. The original germ of the plan, in fact, had been proposed to Naval Intelligence four years earlier by none other than Lt. Cmdr. Ian Fleming (the models for both "M" and "Q" in Fleming's James Bond novels make appearances here), who, in turn, got the idea from a 1937 thriller by Basil Thomson, once head of Scotland Yard's CID.

The story of Operation Mincemeat has been told before, but Ben Macintyre, an associate editor for the Times of London, is a first-rate journalist who seems to have talked to everyone connected with the operation (or their descendants) and worked his way through recently declassified documents in the National Archives. His most important source turned out to be the operation's deceased organizer, Ewen Montagu - or, more specifically, a dusty trunk Montagu left behind with bundles of intelligence files, letters, memos, photographs and original, uncensored drafts of his official 1953 book on the operation, "The Man Who Never Was."

Here, finally, is the complete story with its full cast of characters (not a dull one among them), pure catnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else.

We now learn that the dead man was actually Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welshman who committed suicide by swallowing rat poison in an abandoned warehouse near Kings Cross in London; that the coroner (the wonderfully named Bentley Purchase) bent the law to snatch the body for Montagu; that Montagu had a flirtation (if not more) with the secretary who posed as Maj. Martin's fiancee.

By extending the action from Whitehall to Spain and Berlin, Macintyre gives the story a sweep it's never had before. He throws in surprises: Montagu's brother Ivor was a Soviet agent, as neither Montagu nor MI5 knew at the time. He has a novelist's flair for detail, not only relevant (the entire operation cost about 200 pounds), but a few of the gee-whiz variety (American invasion forces were issued 144,000 condoms, fewer than two each), and even those that can make a scene leap to the eye, such as the American "who drove with one leg permanently hanging out of his Jeep."

But most of all, he gives us characters. There is a dashing submarine commander (his photo confirms the adjective) who once hunted treasure in the Bolivian jungles. There are gentlemanly rogues (Montagu said Fleming was "charming to be with, but would sell his own grandmother. I like him a lot"). And there is the intelligence officer, Dudley Wrangel Clarke, who is arrested in Madrid dressed as a woman, brassiere and all, but not as part of any operation.

Nothing here is humdrum. What might have been a routine trip - delivering the body to the submarine - becomes an action scene when the driver, a race car driver in civilian life ("Jock" Horsfall), goes so fast in the blackout that he fails to see a roundabout and sails over the grass circle in the middle.

Part of the great charm of the book is that Macintyre recognizes that the ruse, in all its colorful eccentricity, plays into Britain's mythology of World War II. He takes pains to remind us of its serious purpose - indeed, many lives were saved in Sicily - but at its heart, the story is the war in Technicolor. Could it really have been like this? Full of daring and self-effacing heroism and romantic conquests in Algiers? "Operation Mincemeat" suggests that it really was - at least some of the time.