M R-D-Foot

Macabre success story

Ben Macintyre has taken a well-known story of wartime deception, embellished it, and shown that it was even more ingenious and even more risky than we had all supposed.

Any bright schoolchild could tell, from a glance at his or her atlas, where the Allies were going to land next, after they had conquered Tunis in 1943: it would have to be Sicily. The deception service persuaded the German highest command that Sicily was only the cover for an attack on southern Greece, after which the Balkans could be rolled up. Hitler was always nervous about the Balkans, from which his armaments industry got the bulk of its chrome and, more importantly, his armed forces half their oil; the trick worked.

Its main plank lay in the floating ashore on the coast of south-west Spain of a body dressed as a major in the Royal Marines, bearing, in a briefcase chained to his belt, letters from General Nye to General Alexander and from Lord Louis Mountbatten to General Eisenhower, from hints in which the Germans were to infer — and did infer — all that the deceivers wanted. The main architect of the plot was Lieutenant-Commander Ewen Montagu, RNVR, working from the cover address of NID 17 (M) at the Admiralty (Naval Intelligence Division). From Montagu’s hitherto unexplored papers, Macintyre has been able to get deep inside the plotting, and expounds a good deal that Montagu suppressed in his celebrated book, The Man Who Never Was, a world bestseller in the early 1950s.

Montagu himself explained 20 years later, in Beyond Top Secret U, one thing he had had to hush up in the earlier book: that we read the Abwehr’s signal traffic between Madrid and Berlin, so that we could follow in detail how the enemy took the bait. Macintyre identifies the actual body, that of Glyndwr Michael, a destitute Welshman who was found dead over Christmas 1942 in an alley near King’s Cross station after eating rat poison — perhaps on purpose, perhaps by accident.

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