Operation Mincemeat and the Lure of Fake News
In September of 1939, the man who would go on to write the James Bond novels was practically working as a spy himself. Specifically, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming was the personal assistant of Admiral John Godfrey, Britain’s wartime director of naval intelligence. As one might expect, Fleming had quite the flair for the dramatic, and the internal memo he likely wrote that September (although sent out under Godfrey’s name) was full of outlandish schemes of deception and fiction-telling.
Yet perhaps none of these plans was quite as outlandish, or quite as macabre, as number 28 on the list, a half-formed idea called “A Suggestion (not a very nice one).” It described how one might pass false information to the enemy by dressing a corpse as a military officer and dropping it in enemy territory. It was an idea pulled straight from a spy novel (literally), and like most of the other suggestions in the memo, it probably seemed destined to fizzle out before it was ever put into practice.
In a bizarre twist of fate, however, this particular suggestion would end up providing the spark for a plan whose effects would be felt at every level of every military in World War II, a plan that would fittingly go on to be called Operation Mincemeat.
About three years after Godfrey’s memo was sent out, on Halloween of 1942, Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumly”), a flight lieutenant who, as part of Britain’s Security Service, or M15, had been able to read Godfrey’s memo, presented an expanded version of the plan to British intelligence. Giving it the code name “Trojan Horse,” he described it as follows:
A body is obtained from one of the London hospitals… it is then dressed in army, naval, or air force uniform of suitable rank. The lungs are filled with water and the documents are disposed in an inside pocket… While the courier cannot be sure to get through, if he does succeed, information in the form of the documents can be of a far more secret nature than it would be possible to introduce through any normal B1A channel.
British intelligence officials, many of whom loved spy novels as much as Fleming ever could, were on board, and Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu was assigned to help Cholmondeley formulate a plan.
Around the same time, in January of 1943, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to Operation Husky, a massive Allied invasion of Sicily. Taking Sicily, as they knew very well, would be absolutely crucial to gaining control of the Mediterranean and, eventually, winning the war. The problem was that the necessity of an attack on Sicily was at least equally obvious to the Axis powers. It was practically impossible to think that they wouldn’t catch on and reinforce the island before any attack began. As Churchill himself quipped, “Everyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.”
The task given to British intelligence, then, was to trick the Germans into thinking that the attack would happen somewhere — anywhere — else.
One espionage operation, Operation Barclay, was launched to use spy networks and other tactics to give the impression that the real target of Husky would be the Greek Balkan Islands. At the same time, Cholmondeley and Montagu sought out a dead body for their own operation, now intended, like Barclay, to convince the Axis that Husky was headed for Greece.
The way they obtained that body wouldn’t exactly be pretty.
On January 26, 1943, a homeless and destitute man named Glyndwr Michael was found near King’s Cross after ingesting rat poison. Orphaned and virtually abandoned by his siblings, Michael, who may or may not have committed suicide, was an almost ideal candidate for “Trojan Horse”: a man no one would recognize or miss if he disappeared from the mortuary and turned up in Axis hands.
After the rather optimistic assertions of the coroner and a prominent doctor that no one in Axis-leaning Spain, where the body would be dropped, could possibly find any trace of the poison in an autopsy, Michael’s body was chosen for the operation. If Montagu and Cholmondeley looked into his family tree, it was only to make sure that he had no relatives who were likely to ask questions. His siblings were not consulted or located. Instead, his body was placed in a refrigerator and the coroner (illegally) informed the relevant authorities that the body was being taken out of the country for burial.
Cholmondeley and Montagu now had a body and the beginnings of a plan. If that plan was ever actually going to become a reality, though, it would need a new code name. “Trojan Horse” was too obvious; anyone with even a minimal understanding of what the name referred to would immediately suspect a ruse.
So, with a sense of humor typical of British intelligence officials, it was given the name “Operation Mincemeat.”
Having obtained the body, those in charge of the operation next had to give it an identity. The fake name assigned to the corpse was that of Captain (Acting Major) William Martin, a real member of the Royal Marines who happened to be stationed in America at the time. He was ranked highly enough to be able to carry extremely important documents, and his far-off location meant that he would be unlikely to get wind of the situation. Also, by pure chance, he had, months before, served aboard an aircraft carrier which had sunk, killing many of its passengers. Since a death notice would need to be printed in the British press for the Germans to see, the real Martin’s friends and family would assume that he had died aboard that aircraft carrier. It may not have been very nice, but then again, neither was any other part of the plan.
“Major Martin” needed more than just a name; he needed a fleshed-out, believable personality. Various objects were placed on the body to suggest that Martin was a pious Roman Catholic, as it was assumed that the natural reluctance of Catholic Spain to carry out surgical autopsies would increase if they believed that the body belonged to a fellow Catholic. Martin was also given letters and wallet litter: an overdraft notice from a bank manager, a letter from his “father” discussing the inadequacy of his hotel accommodations, a letter from a solicitor, and more.
Still, the operation’s planners decided that Martin needed something more, and so he was given a fiancee, a beautiful government worker by the name of Pam. She was modeled after Jean Leslie, an M15 secretary with whom the married Ewen Montagu was smitten. Martin’s body was given love letters, a receipt for an engagement ring, and a letter about a marriage settlement. At the same time, ostensibly acting as Major Martin, Montagu took Leslie out on dates, wrote her love letters, and gave her presents.
While Montagu and others were having fun crafting a personality for their false officer, the central piece of the deception had yet to come together. In time, the operation would be centered around two (entirely fake) letters: one sent from one prominent general to another and one from the chief of Combined Operations, of which Martin was supposedly part, to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, commander in chief in the Mediterranean.
The contents of these two letters were designed to state where two major attacks would supposedly land, and the language used needed to be obvious enough to be understood without being so obvious as to draw suspicion. They indicated that Husky was the code name for an attack on two locations in Greece, and that another (entirely fictional) operation aimed at Sardinia, Operation Brimstone, would have Sicily as its cover target. These letters were carried in a briefcase that was eventually chained to the body of “Major Martin,” since it would need to be relatively easy for the Spanish to pass the contents to German spies.
Mincemeat was ready to launch, but everyone involved knew that it was risky. If it was found out to be a plant, then all of Operation Barclay, which was also hard at work convincing the Germans that the real targets were Greece and Sardinia, might also be revealed to be an elaborate fraud. If that happened, Sicily would be heavily reinforced, and Husky would turn into a bloodbath with practically no chance of an Allied victory.
Still, all of the pieces of the puzzle were ready to put together, and no one was about to suggest turning back. Around 4:30 a.m. on April 30, 1943, the body was released into the water near the Spanish town of Huelva by Lieutenant Bill Jewell and the officers of the submarine HMS Seraph. Around mid-morning, it was found and brought ashore by a fisherman named Jose Antonio Rey Maria. Mincemeat had launched, for better or worse.
An autopsy done on the body near Huelva, rushed by the local British official entrusted with knowledge of the plan, listed the cause of death as drowning. As was hoped, the German spy network in Huelva and Madrid found out about the British officer who had apparently drowned after a plane crash and washed up carrying top-secret documents. News of the discovery traveled up the ranks, and every German spy with a chance to do so scrambled to obtain the documents and deliver them to the Nazis.
After a long, painful journey through the Spanish bureaucracy, copies of the most important documents ended up in the hands of Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, who was effectively the head of German espionage in Madrid and a favorite among his German handlers. Mincemeat had landed exactly where its planners most wanted it to go.
Eventually, the documents, spurred by various assertions of their credibility, made their way up the ranks of the German military until Hitler himself believed them. Mussolini’s government obtained them directly from Spain, and communications between the two Axis powers further solidified their growing conviction that Sicily was not really a target at all. Greece and Sardinia were reinforced, and Allied preparations on the African coast were considered to be aimed at exactly the wrong locations.
With the unwitting support of the German and Italian militaries, the invasion of Sicily, which began on July 10, 1943, was successful beyond all expectation. Sicily was conquered 38 days after Husky’s D-day, far sooner than expected. On July 25, Mussolini was permanently toppled from power. In September, Italy formally surrendered, although war would continue there for almost two more years. And perhaps most importantly, a week after the invasion, Hitler canceled Operation Citadel, a massive blitzkrieg attack on the eastern front, in favor of moving troops to Sicily and the Balkans (which he still feared would be attacked). As a result, the Russian Red Army was able to gain the upper hand, and it would not lose it until the end of the war. Without the success of Husky, the defeat of Nazi Germany might never have happened.
Operation Mincemeat was not, of course, solely responsible for the stunning victory in Sicily. The work of the soldiers, officers, planners, spies, and others involved in Husky, Barclay, and other operations was crucial. Additionally, Mincemeat itself likely would never have happened if not for the work of Alan Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, who decrypted the Germans’ most secret communications and tracked the success of Mincemeat from the day it landed.
Still, Operation Mincemeat may well have been one of the most successful deceptions of the war… but should it have been?
Why was Mincemeat, an operation which seemed to practically drop the Allies’ most secret plans right into the Germans’ laps, believed so easily? Was it because the plan was somehow airtight or foolproof? Well, no, despite the confidence of some of the people involved.
As it turns out, Mincemeat’s success probably came down to a few peculiar aspects of human psychology.
In retrospect, Operation Mincemeat was riddled with potentially fatal errors. Its designers’ love of a good story meant that the characters outlined in Martin’s letters were more like caricatures. The letters were full of tropes and melodrama. There was a lack of the usual loose ends (inside jokes, unexplained references, and other things that appear in real letters). Any fact-checking at all would’ve shown it was all fake: there was no “Pam” at her supposed address, the jeweler who “billed” Martin for the ring could’ve confirmed the bill was fake, and Martin’s father’s name was scrawled, out of order, in the margin of his hotel register.
Even if the Germans overlooked Martin’s less important documents, there were still clear issues with the plan. Ewen Montagu’s own brother was a spy for the Soviets, and if he’d gotten wind of the plan in any way, the whole thing would’ve fallen through. Even the two important letters, the ones subject to the most scrutiny, contained phrases that would’ve been suspicious upon close examination. Also, British officers never chained briefcases to themselves to carry documents. And that was nothing compared to the glaring inconsistency that was Glyndwr Michael’s body.
By the time of the autopsy performed in Spain, the body had the telltale jaundice of phosphorous poisoning, Michael’s real cause of death (via rat poison). The body’s degree of decomposition, although kept in check as much as possible before its release, was still inconsistent with the relatively short number of days it was supposed to have spent in the water. Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, in his report on the discovery of the body and the documents, even mistakenly reduced that timeline, stating with misplaced certainty that Martin had been in the water for several fewer days than the Spanish autopsy had stated to be necessary for that much decomposition to take place. While Kuhlenthal later tried to back up his claim with bogus science, others with more sense would’ve been able to easily detect foul play if they tried.
Churchill may not have been too concerned about Mincemeat’s failure. He even quipped, “In that case, we shall have to get the body back and give it another swim.” Doing so, though, would have been impossible, and if Mincemeat had failed, thousands more could have died.
With Mincemeat riddled with so many holes, why did the Germans buy into it so easily? One answer is that some member of Nazi intelligence deliberately passed on false and damaging information as truth in order to bring the Third Reich down. In a way, that’s true. Baron Alexis von Roenne, the German army’s chief intelligence analyst and a trusted advisor of Hitler’s, was strongly opposed to the Nazis, and he wrote an assessment that stated in no uncertain terms that he considered Martin’s letters to be absolutely reliable. In fact, he may not have believed the letters at all, instead opting to pass information he knew to be false to the superiors he hated.
This is an easy, comforting explanation. It seems to tell us that none of us could ever fall for something like Mincemeat, that the plan only worked because of one deadly smart opponent of Nazism. But the fact is that we fall for fake, and occasionally damaging, stories all the time. Studies have shown that, if anything, fake news is shared more than real news, not less. There was much more to why Mincemeat was able to fool the Nazis so well, and it may just explain why something like it might be able to fool all of us.
John Godfrey, the man who, with Ian Fleming, provided the first kernel of an idea for Mincemeat, once said that spies had two very dangerous qualities: “wishfulness” and “yesmanship.” “Wishfulness” refers to the tendency to believe something is true because it fits previously formed conceptions or a preferred view of a situation. “Yesmanship” is an eagerness to put out information to satisfy one’s boss(es), regardless of whether or not it’s 100% factual. Both of these qualities were epitomized by Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, and both of them still help to explain why everyone can believe lies under the right conditions.
Godfrey’s “wishfulness” is much like what psychologists now call “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning.” We naturally tend to seek out and interpret information in a way that confirms (or at least does not contradict) our existing beliefs. It’s a sort of survival mechanism: it’s much easier to reinforce a worldview you already have than it is to tear that worldview down. According to several studies, once people reach a conclusion, they are unlikely to change their minds, even when factual information disproves those beliefs and continuing to believe in them causes real harm.
In Operation Mincemeat, Kuhlenthal’s wishfulness meant that he ignored any evidence that didn’t fit the story presented in the letters. Kuhlenthal had a Jewish grandparent, which meant that, under Hitler’s strict rules of Aryan supremacy, he was under threat. If he could deliver the Allies’ exact plans to his superiors, that threat would be reduced. Therefore, it would be preferable if the letters were true, since they seemed to detail Allied assault plans so specifically, which meant that they became true in Kuhlenthal’s mind. After that, all he had to do was defend that “truth” against every attack. In the modern world, whether their reasons are partisan or personal, people tend to do the same.
Even Kuhlenthal’s yesmanship has modern-world parallels. We may not have reason to fear being fired or killed if we don’t produce information, but the desire to go viral or to gain more followers can be almost as powerful. If a story is likely to capture people’s interest and be shared widely, there is always going to be an incentive to share it, even if it hasn’t exactly been fact-checked. When any story can be placed in front of thousands of eager eyes with the click of a button, the desire to make sure that story is legitimate tends to fall by the wayside.
This, in turn, leads to what is called the “illusory truth effect.” Basically, we tend to assign greater credibility to information we’re exposed to repeatedly, regardless of whether or not it’s actually true. In Mincemeat, once the information contained in the documents filtered out to various Axis and Axis-leaning countries, the information began to be passed between them in a sort of game of telephone. The story may have changed somewhat along the way, but that only really enhanced the perceived truth of it, just as multiple witness accounts might provide more of a basis for a conviction than a single testimony, even if there are inconsistencies. Similarly, if the same story appears multiple times in our social media feeds, we are more likely to believe it, which makes us more likely to share it, which then magnifies the cycle of misinformation.
Finally, we are more likely to believe a story if it comes from a source we trust. Kuhlenthal was a favorite among his superiors. They tended to believe every story he fed them, even though he was never very good at differentiating between what was true and what was false. In day-to-day life, it may be that a fake story is shared by a favorite uncle or an intelligent friend. What matters is that we believe that the source is truthful, not that it actually is.
Wishfulness, yesmanship, the illusory truth effect, and blind trust: all of these contributed, in one way or another, to the smashing success of one of the most bizarre operations ever attempted. Today, they have a somewhat different effect, spreading fake news stories like wildfire across the Internet. They are natural psychological tendencies that have been there since the beginning, but the speed of modern communication makes it more important than ever that we try not to give in to them. Fact-checking, research, a healthy amount of skepticism, and more are all effective and necessary ways of fighting the tide of fake news.
Because yes, fake news can sometimes help to bring down a fascist regime, give hope to a generation of frightened people, and save countless lives.
But it can also do exactly the opposite.