All warfare is based on deception.
Sun Tzu
Deceit and violence – these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings. But deceit controls more subtly, for it works on belief as well as action.
When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe. We can do so through gesture, through disguise, by means of action or inaction, even through silence.
Sissela Bok – Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation
In 1943, after a successful campaign in North Africa, Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American president, agreed to neutralize Italy by invading Sicily. However, there was a significant concern among the Allies: Sicily was such an obvious target that Germany and Italy would amass extensive resistance on the island. So, the Allied strategists conceived one of the most stunning deception masterclasses since the Trojan Horse.
Operation Mincemeat convinced the Germans that the Allies planned to capture Sardinia and Greece instead of Sicily. Fake “top secret” documents about the Allied invasion schemes in Greece and Sardinia were planted in the suitcase of a corpse deliberately washed up on the shores of Spain as an apparent victim of an aircraft sea crash. Initially, neutral Spain tried to return the documents to the British consulate. Worried that the Germans didn’t know about the planted documents, the British contacted the Spanish through a communication line they knew was tapped by the Germans. Understanding the documents’ importance, the Germans approached all possible diplomatic ways with Spain to copy the precious papers. Once they believed that Sardinia and Greece were the attack targets of the Allies, the Germans moved their troops from Sicily. Months later after Operation Mincemeat, the invasion of Sicily occurred much faster and with much lower casualties. Mussolini, Italy’s dictator, was imprisoned, and the new Italian government started secret negotiations with the Allies.
There are two fantastic books about this operation, The Man Who Never Was, written in 1953 by the mastermind behind the plan, Ewen Montagu, and Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben Macintyre in 2010. There are also two movies, one from 1956, in which Montagu makes a cameo appearance, and one from 2022, released by Netflix.
Montagu’s book was a damage control narrative since important cabinet members who had access to the plans of Operation Mincemeat published books based on those drafts.
The powers that be have decided that an accurate story by me “under control” would be less dangerous than an inaccurate one which might lead anywhere.
Ewen Montagu – The Man Who Never Was
Of course, Montagu had to leave classified details out of his book, which due to pass of time, are disclosed in Macintyre’s book.
How Did Operation Mincemeat Succeed?
Before becoming a war analyst, Montagu was trained as a shrewd lawyer.
After joining the bar in 1924, Ewen [Montagu] had developed into an exceptionally able lawyer. He learned to absorb detail, improvise, and mould the collective mind of a malleable jury… He possessed the rare ability to read an interlocutor’s mind – the mark of a good lawyer, and the good liar. He became fascinated by the workings of the criminal mind and confessed to feeling ‘a certain sympathy with the rogue characters’. He relished the cut and thrust of the courtroom, where victory depended on being able to ‘see the point of view, and anticipate the reactions, of an equally astute opposing counsel’.
Ben Macintyre – Operation Mincemeat
The extent to which Montagu played certain aspects of Operation Mincemeat is astounding.
But it seemed to me that, as we would not have to rely on a series of leaks which might or might not reach the Germans, but could use a single document, there could be a second string to our bow. I felt that we could probably convince the Germans that Sir Henry Wilson’s army under General Montgomery was not going to take part in the same operation as General Eisenhower’s and that it was going to conduct an invasion of Greece and an advance up the Balkans. There did not seem to be any reason why they should not be led to believe in a double operation with an assault at each end of the Mediterranean [Greece and Sardinia], and if we could succeed in convincing them of this we could get a much wider dispersal of their forces than if we based our deception only on the “official” cover target of Sardinia.
I suggested also that the letter should reveal that we were going to try to convince the Germans that we were going to invade Sicily! It seemed to me that the beauty of this was that if there were any actual leakage of our real plans, the Germans would think that what was, in fact a leakage was only part of the cover that they had read about in the letter. If they swallowed our deception – that one letter – they would disbelieve any genuine information that might leak through.
Ewen Montagu – The Man Who Never Was
And did this ploy succeed! Hours after the invasion of Sicily started, twenty-one German aircraft left Sicily to strengthen Sardinia; weeks later, as Hitler was still convinced about the Balkans offensive, he sent General Rommel to defend the Greek territories.
Montagu referenced the failed Allied Dieppe raid to ensure the Germans would copy the papers.
I was sure that no German could resist passing on to his superiors what he would feel to be an admission by the Chief of the Combined Operations that our raid in Dieppe was not the success that we had hoped it would be.
Ewen Montagu – The Man Who Never Was
The story is entirely wild as Montagu describes the aspects of finding an unclaimed corpse with a plausible cause of death and creating a false British soldier identity from thin air with a family, fiancée, and senior rank to be entrusted with valuable papers but not senior enough that everyone would know him. Montagu’s relatively short book, which has never been out of print since the 50s, should be required reading for anyone interested in human nature as he was particularly savvy about the unwritten rules of social roles and interactions. Note the incisive remark about the address in one of the letters found in the pockets of the body:
I was sure that no German could resist the “Englishness” of such an address as “The Manor House, Ogbourne St. George, Marlborough, Wiltshire”.
Ewen Montagu – The Man Who Never Was
Undoubtedly, the British knew deception and how to play it. The Trout memo, written in 1939, compares deception in wartime to fly fishing. Issued by Admiral John Godfrey, but according to Macintyre, perhaps this memo was written by Godfrey’s personal assistant, Ian Fleming, the creator of the James Bond spy novels, the notice states:
The Trout Fisher casts patiently all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures. If he has frightened a fish he may ‘give the water a rest for half-an-hour,’ but his main endeavour, viz. to attract fish by something he sends out from his boat, is incessant.
Then, the memo describes fifty-four possible ways to lure the enemy. Suggestion #28 might sound familiar by now:
The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that has failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.
When the British confirmed the Germans had copied the papers from Operation Mincemeat, the “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker” message (another reference to the Trout memo) was sent to Churchill.
Reality can be indeed stranger than fiction.
But for deception on this scale to work, it’s not enough to understand the opponent’s psyche.
Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived. The betrayed lover sees only the signs of love and blocks out the evidence of faithlessness, however glaring.
Ben Macintyre – Operation Mincemeat
Key people from the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, failed to spot the Mincemeat deception. Some German agents were simply incompetent. Others hoped that by intercepting and copying the fake British letters, they would be in better graces with their bosses. They had a “wishfulness” (as Admiral John Godfrey called it) or a “self-inflicted ignorance” (as Sissela Bok names it) to see what they wanted to see and find what they wanted to find.
Glyndwr Michael (the poor homeless man used by the British Military Intelligence for Operation Mincemeat) died by ingesting rat poison. When the Spanish performed the autopsy, the degree of body decomposition was inconsistent with the short number of days the corpse was assumed to have spent in the sea. The Germans ignored the flagrant contradictions, wanting to believe the incredible luck in finding authentic and crucial British documents. Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, a German spy stationed in Spain, mistakenly stated in his reports to superiors that the body spent even fewer days than the Spanish postmortem report concluded. Perhaps other more efficient agents would have spotted the deception.
This kind of avoidance is not an act of idiocy but an act of self-preservation. It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial – a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake, and we have too much to lose.
Esther Perel – The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity
Kühlenthal had indeed too much to lose: he was “a half-blood Jew” with a Jewish grandmother, desperately trying to prove his worth. Blinded by confirmation bias, he “was the ideal spy to pass (dis)information, because he was worse than useless”.
Then, Operation Mincemeat succeeded because there were people like Alexis von Roenne, “Hitler’s favourite intelligence analyst”, who lived a double life as he was a staunch anti-Nazi and deliberately misled the German general staff by accepting the Allied hoax.
It is quite possible that Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne did not believe the Mincemeat deception for an instant.
He faithfully passed on every deception ruse fed to him, accepted the existence of every bogus unit regardless of evidence, and inflated forty-four divisions in Britain to an astonishing eighty-nine.
Ben Macintyre – Operation Mincemeat
In Parallel Lives, Plutarch cites an uplifting story from Roman history. During battle, when the famous consul Gaius Marius had his troops in an entrenched position, the commander of the enemy forces called to him, “If you are a great general, Marius, come down and fight it out.” To which Marius retorted, “If you are a great general, make me fight it out when I do not wish to do so!”
Amin Maalouf – Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way
The Allies did well to follow Marius’ example by choosing the date and time of the Sicilian invasion. And in no small part due to Operation Mincemeat, “the navy expected 300 ships would be sunk in the action, but they lost 12. The predicted 90-day campaign was over in 38.”
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