I spy with my little eye ...

Now who do you think these characters were?

[A] gawky giant named Charles Cholmondeley, who lifted the toes of his size-12 feet when he walked, and [...] “gazed at the world through thick round spectacles, from behind a remarkable moustache fully six inches long and waxed into magnificent points.”

Dudley Clarke [...] described as “unmarried, nocturnal and allergic to children.” In 1925, Clarke organized a pageant “depicting imperial artillery down the ages, which involved two elephants, thirty-seven guns and ‘fourteen of the biggest Nigerians he could find.’ He loved uniforms, disguises and dressing up.” In 1941, British authorities had to bail him out of a Spanish jail, dressed in “high heels, lipstick, pearls, and a chic cloche hat, his hands, in long opera gloves, demurely folded in his lap. He was not supposed to even be in Spain, but in Egypt.”

One's immediate response, I suppose, is that they were a couple of escaped loonies, or perhaps a couple of characters from the 'Theatre of the Absurd'.  Not so, they were, in fact, two top men in British intelligence during WWII and it prompts the not unreasonable question of how the hell we ever won the war!  They were aided in their endevours by:

Ewen Montagu, the son of a wealthy Jewish banker and the brother of Ivor Montagu, a pioneer of table tennis and also, in one of the many strange footnotes to the Mincemeat case, a Soviet spy. Ewen Montagu served on the so-called Twenty Committee [XX Committee - twenty but also 'double cross' - geddit?!] of the British intelligence services, and carried a briefcase full of classified documents on his bicycle as he rode to work each morning.

And also by this extraordinary pair of 'super agents':

Charles Fraser-Smith, whom Ian Fleming is thought to have used as the model for Q in the James Bond novels. Fraser-Smith was the inventor of, among other things, garlic-flavored chocolate intended to render authentic the breath of agents dropping into France and “a compass hidden in a button that unscrewed clockwise, based on the impeccable theory that the ‘unswerving logic of the German mind’ would never guess that something might unscrew the wrong way.” The job of transporting the container to the submarine that would take it to Spain was entrusted to one of England’s leading race-car drivers, St. John (Jock) Horsfall, who, Macintyre notes, “was short-sighted and astigmatic but declined to wear spectacles.” At one point during the journey, Horsfall nearly drove into a tram stop, and then “failed to see a roundabout until too late and shot over the grass circle in the middle.”

This motley crew carried out the hugely successful(?) deception plan whereby the body of a supposed major in the Royal Marines was washed up on a Spanish shore with a briefcase chained to his wrist containing documents pointing to Greece and Sardinia as the next targets for invasion by the Allies who had just cleared North Africa.  You will have noted, I'm sure, the question mark following my use of the word 'successful' because, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in a fascinating review in The New Yorker, the plan was not so much a deception as an aid to re-inforce a German predilection; Hitler, for example, was convinced the allies would first attack in the Balkans and thus the armoured division sent to Greece rather than Sicily might well have been sent there irrespective of the plant in Spain.

All this is history at its very best in the sense that it emphasises both the human and the absurd.  The particulars of the operation are told superbly, according to Gladwell, by Ben Macintyre in his recently published book Operation Mincemeat.  However, Gladwell is provoked by this tale to cast a sharp and sceptical eye over the whole field of intelligence agencies and issues an extremely cogent 'health warning' to those above us who might be tempted to rely upon their 'product' too heavily - now what and who does that bring to mind?  I do recommend Gladwell's essay highly - absolutely not to be missed!

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell?currentPage=all#ixzz0nRy7wMX8

 

Comments

[H]

I've read a lot about the Macintyre book lately and wonder, not having read it, how much it overlaps with the Nicholas Rankin book, which I have - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Churchills-Wizards-British-Deception-1914-1945/dp/0571221963/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273586554&sr=1-1 - and which I recommend. Full of interesting skullduggery and an account of Operation Mincemeat to boot.

[David Duff]

Sounds like a fascinating book, 'H'. I should point out that although MacIntyre's book has been highly praised one writer doubts an essential part of his story - the identity of the body used in the deception:

"However, it is worth noting a comment in the thread by a James Glover who claims that the emaciated body of a tramp would never have passed muster as a Royal Marine and that the real body was that of "a drowned sailor, John Melville - one of 379 men who died when HMS Dasher was sunk - was used. The Royal Navy commemorated Melville's role in the deception with a service on board the current HMS Dasher in 2004"."

http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2010/01/truth-will-come-to-light-.html#tp

[H]

Rankin says (p536 of the paperback), for what it's worth:
"Their first job was finding a dead body. They went to see the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury for advice, and the coroner Bentley Purchase [they don't name'em like that any more] pointed them in the direction of the body of a 34-year-old man, 'a bit of a ne'er-do-well' who had did in January 1943 'from pneumonia after exposure'. The corpse was kept on ice, and Montagu claimed that a relative gave permission for his body to be used on condition that his true identity never be divulged. In return, the family were promised that he would later get a proper burial, though under a false name. Sir Bernard assured them that no pathologist in Spain would be able to detect that the man's pleural effluvia did not come from drowning in an aircraft lost at sea." Rankin goes on to note the name Glyndwr Michael, which is on the William Martin tombstone, having been added much later.
I guess "a bit of a ne'er-do-well" might have the physique of a RM and is not quite the same as a tramp. No-one probably looks that fit after a couple of months on ice followed by a swim, although I claim no expertise.
I have also heard the drowned sailor explanation (on TV?) and guess it's at least as plausible as the "official" explanation, though quite what interest anyone has in concealing the truth at this remove in time is anyone's guess.

[David Duff]

"It's a mystery!"

My favourite expression from Stoppard's script for Shakespeare in Love.