Word: montague
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Never Was, by Ewen Montagu. A truthful shocker telling how British intelligence deceived the Germans about the invasion of Sicily by floating to them a corpse with pockets stuffed with false war plans (TIME, Feb.1...
...Grave in Huelva. Montagu had given his scheme the gruesome code name of Mincemeat. One day, not long after Martin's body had floated ashore at Huelva, Prime Minister Churchill, then in Washington, got a message from his chiefs of staff: "Mincemeat swallowed whole." But how gullible the Germans were was learned only after the war from captured documents. The Spaniards, behaving just as Montagu had expected, turned the papers over to a German, agent. Then, from echelon to echelon of command, went the German intelligence report: "The genuineness of the captured documents is above suspicion." Hitler himself believed...
...Damn Fools. Montagu, then a naval intelligence officer, had what seemed to him a brilliant idea. Why not drop a body dressed as a British officer off the coast of Spain where it would wash ashore? Let the officer carry papers indicating that an attack on Sicily would not be the real thing, that the real blows would fall on Sardinia and Greece. How would the Germans hear about it? Well, trust the Spaniards to tip them...
Then the practical difficulties began. Getting a body was not easy. It had to be someone recently dead, someone whose family would not object, someone who looked like an officer. Just as Montagu had decided that he might have to snatch a body from a graveyard, he found his corpse: a young man who had just died of pneumonia and whose relatives gave their permission on condition that his name never be divulged...
Intelligence Officer Montagu had complete respect for his German opposite numbers. To fool them, the bluff would have to be consummately prepared. "Major William Martin" got not only a foolproof identity card. He carried a picture of "Pam," the girl he was "engaged" to, her last touching love letters, stubs of theater tickets, a dunning letter from a bank, a letter from his "father" and the usual pocket impedimenta. His identity-card photograph was that of a man who looked like him. The letters he was os tensibly to have carried to North Africa in a plane that crashed were...