Dead Man Washing

HISTORY

Spy Games

• Michael Idov
• April 30, 2010 | 12:00 am

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

by Ben Macintyre

Harmony Books, 387 pp., $25.99

There is a running joke in Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat about spydom’s inability to come up with meaningless code names: the wiliest operators across the globe appear powerless before the allure of a bad pun. Winston Churchill detested this: “[Operations] ought not to be given names of a frivolous character such as ‘Bunnyhug’ and ‘Ballyhoo,’” he wrote. “Intelligent thought will already supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names that do not suggest the character of the operation and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called ‘Bunnyhug.’” 

The great man may have unwittingly suggested a scenario for an excellent Monty Python skit, but keeping the names well-sounding was never the problem. It is “suggesting the character of the operation” that proved near-impossible to resist. During World War II, all sides punned with abandon. The Brits called Stalin, whose name roughly means “man of steel,” Glyptic, which roughly means “image of stone.” The Germans, in turn, dubbed their British invasion plans Sealion, a code a first-grader could crack if it fell into his hands.  

A nearly flawless true-life picaresque, Ben McIntyre’s new bookzeroes in on one of the few times in war history when excessive literary imagination, instead of hobbling a clandestine enterprise, worked beyond its authors’ wildest dreams. Predicated precisely on papers falling into the wrong hands—in spy-speak, “the Haversack Ruse”—Operation Mincemeat consisted of MI5 floating a dead body, dressed up as a British naval officer, off the Nazi-friendly coast of Spain. A supposed victim of an air crash, the body carried “top secret” letters indicating that the imminent Allied attack on Sicily was in fact targeting Greece. Inevitably intercepted by German spies, the letters made their way up the Nazi food chain onto Hitler’s desk, so influencing the Fuhrer that he moved whole divisions away from Italy; the Allies were able to take Sicily with a fraction of expected losses, substantially hastening the end of the war.  

This story, or a fraction of it, has been told before, in a tidied-up memoir by one of the protagonists and its 1950s Hollywood adaptation, The Man Who Never Was. Macintyre, working from a trove of original documents, fills in many fascinating lacunae, including the personal history of World War II’s least likely hero: the Welsh ne’er-do-well who provided the plotters with a corpse. But Operation Mincemeat is more than the sum of its Grand Guignol logistics. Along the way, this story of clever men in a cramped basement outsmarting an enemy horde becomes an entirely unexpected ode to intellect, civilization, and wit...