Showing posts with label Man Who Never Was. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Man Who Never Was. Show all posts

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Dead Man Floating: World War II's oddest espionage and deception operation


I just heard an NPR All Things Considered interview with Ben Macintyre (seen in the below photo), the author of Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory.


The plan, which originated from an idea by Royal Navy Commander Ian Fleming (before he wrote the James Bond thrillers) and his boss, the Director of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey (the model for M in the James Bond stories), was to plant a corpse with an invented personal history as a Royal Marine officer on the Nazis during World War II.

The corpse, which had bogus classified papers on him indicating that the allies were about to attack Greece, rather than the true target, Sicily. The Nazis took the bait and reinforced Greece, taking vital defensive troops from Sicily.

This deception saved countless allied lives in the invasion of Sicily.

You can listen to the interview via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127742365

The below photos are of the planted corpse, "Major Martin," Commander Ian Fleming, Royal Air Force Major Charles Cholmondeley & Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu.



 
You can read an earlier post on Operation Mincemeat via the below link:
 

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II

Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom is publishing Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II.

The incredible war story is more commonly known as The Man Who Never Was, the title of another book and film based on the World War II events.

A video trailer for Macintyre's new book can be seen via the below link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlbSZspTkTs

Bloomsbury, the publisher of the new book, writes: "This is the thrilling true story of the greatest and most successful wartime deception ever attempted. 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. The deception started in a windowless basement beneath Whitehall. It travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany. And it ended up on Hitler’s desk.

Ben Macintyre (seen in below photo), bestselling author of Agent Zigzag, weaves together private documents, photographs, memories, letters and diaries, as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 and Naval Intelligence, to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat. "

Macintyre, a columnist and associate editor with The London Times, wrote about Operation Mincemeat in the newspaper here
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Macintyre can be viewed talking about his new book via the below link:
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Harmony will publish the book in the U.S. this May. Below is the Harmony cover.