But most crucially they chained to his wrist a briefcase containing official-looking documents, letters written from one general to another, which clearly indicated that the Allied armies massed in North Africa were aiming for Greece. Using false identity cards, faked personal letters, receipts, bills, photographs and other "wallet litter", they gave the dead man a father, a fiancee and a backstory. Then they set about creating an entirely new personality for the dead man, whom they designated William Martin, a major in the Royal marines. First, they obtained a dead body from a London coroner named Sir Bentley Purchase. The two masterminds of the operation were Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu, two men with what Churchill called "corkscrew minds".
From a windowless basement beneath Whitehall, the hoax travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany and ended up on Hitler's desk. Using fraud, imagination and seduction, Winston Churchill's team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate and so convincing that they began to believe it themselves.
The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister, this great deception involved an extraordinary cast of characters including Ian Fleming, who would go on to write the James Bond stories a famous forensic pathologist a beautiful secret service secretary a submarine captain three novelists an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing and a dead, Welsh tramp. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies would invade Greece. It hoodwinked Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops racing 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. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain, setting in train a course of events that would change the course of World War Two.
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