Operation Mincemeat

At dawn on an April morning in 1943,

with the Second World War at its height,

a young Spanish fisherman spotted a strange object

floating in the water here, off the south coast of Spain.

As he rowed closer, he saw it was the body of a dead man.

The corpse was wearing a life jacket over a British uniform.

A briefcase, attached to the wrist by a chain,

was floating alongside him.

The face had begun to rot, and the stench was overpowering.

The fisherman hauled the body onto his boat,

believing he had found a casualty of war.

In fact, he had just set in train Operation Mincemeat,

a deception plan that would change the course of the Second World War.

We all were terrified by the Official Secrets Act

and thought we'd end up in the Tower of London

if we gave anything away.

My father used to say that it brought out his natural bent

towards criminality and deception.

Extraordinary story.

My husband was always furious that he knew nothing about it.

Were you sworn to secrecy?

Well, everything was sworn to secrecy.

We were rather good secret-keepers.

In 1943, the men and women in this subterranean room

began work on an extraordinary plan

inspired by none other than Ian Fleming,

a young intelligence officer who would go on to create James Bond.

Three years earlier,

Fleming had worked on a list of 51 suggestions for deceiving the enemy,

including schemes too outlandish even for 007.

Number 28 on the list was headed

"A suggestion (not a very nice one).

"A corpse dressed as an airman with despatches in his pockets

"could be dropped on the coast.

"There is no difficulty in obtaining corpses,

"but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one."

This was the sort of idea that Winston Churchill loved.

He deliberately encouraged spies with corkscrew minds

because he knew that Hitler thought in straight lines.

British spymasters had a low opinion of their German counterparts,

regarding them as dull, humourless and predictable.

Early in 1943, that opinion would be put to the test.

After three years of fierce fighting, the Nazis still

occupied most of Europe and vast territories in the Soviet Union.

Hitler remained convinced that world domination

still lay within his grasp.

What the Allies now needed was a breakthrough.

The first crucial step would be an invasion of Sicily.

Thousands of British and American troops were now massing

in North Africa for the attack.

Victory in Sicily would punch

into the enemy's soft underbelly

in Europe. It might turn the tide of the war.

But there was a problem.

As Churchill put it,

"Anyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily."

The island was the obvious target,

and the Germans knew it.

It would a need deception of staggering daring

to convince them otherwise.

The job of British intelligence was to convince the Germans

that instead of attacking Sicily, the target was Greece.

Suddenly, Ian Fleming's mad idea seemed almost sane.

There were two men who were perfect for this sort of scheme.

They worked at the heart of British intelligence,

one an RAF pilot who didn't fly,

and the other a Royal Naval commander who didn't go to sea.

Together, they would assemble the plan

of planting fake documents on a corpse

and find a way of getting it to the Germans.

Churchill had his corkscrew thinkers.

Charles Cholmondeley was a 25-year-old air-force officer

with a magnificent waxed moustache and a very peculiar mind.

In his spare time, he studied the mating habits of insects

and hunted partridge with a revolver.

I'd spoken to him several times on the telephone in my work.

I was working for MI6 and he was in MI5.

And one day, by mistake, I sent him the wrong papers.

They were top secret.

And I had to get them back some way

and I was terribly worried about this.

And so I rang him up and said "I'm terribly sorry,

"I've sent you these wrong papers, what shall I do?"

And he suggested that I met him outside the Piccadilly Hotel

and had dinner with him one evening.

I was just standing there,

waiting on the pavement outside the hotel for a minute or two

and I saw this very tall man, who later described himself

as "toothpaste squeezed out from the tube".

He said, "My name is Cholmondeley, spelled C-H-O-L-M-O-N-D-E-L-E-Y."

And he always said,

"Charles Cholmondeley, C-H-O-L-M-O-N-D-E-L-E-Y."

He just seemed happy, very pleased and happy with life

as if life was one big adventure.

Cholmondeley was joined by Ewen Montagu,

a bold and ambitious Naval intelligence officer.

As a brilliant barrister before the war, Montagu could see

inside the minds of his opponents

and exploit their weaknesses ruthlessly.

He wanted to go to sea because he joined a supplementary reserve.

He wanted to go to sea

and then they found out

that he was a lawyer and an eminent barrister.

And so they whipped him out of that and shot him up to Naval intelligence

because that sort of mind is trained to cut through deception.

But of course, that's part of the job.

You deceive and you identify deception.

He was delightful.

He was enormously tall, had enormous feet and he used

to lope around and you'd see the feet

long before you saw his head.

He wanted everything done at once,

and of course, that was one of the secrets of his success.

Montagu ran the counter-espionage unit in Naval intelligence.

Housed in a stuffy, smoky, underground room deep inside

the Admiralty, the members of section 17M spent their days

gathering and analysing enemy intelligence.

It was really a small room.

We were sometimes 12 people in that room

and I should think there were air for six.

And we had this fluorescent lighting which made everyone look blue.

And people were allowed to smoke.

It was just a sea of smoke at times.

On Ewen's desk and on one or two of the other desks

in the room, there was what's called scrambler telephones.

So you get a call in and if you want to talk something secret,

you'd say, "Shall we scramble?" press a button

and the whole conversation would be scrambled up

so no spy could hear it.

Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley,

they thought of absolutely everything.

They could look around corners in the way that most people's minds

don't go round corners.

The invasion of Sicily was set for July 1943.

That gave Montagu and Cholmondeley just three months

to find a dead body, dress it up as a British officer,

plant false documents on it

and then leave it somewhere the Germans would find it.

You might think that finding a dead body

in the middle of the Second World War would be pretty easy.

In fact, finding the right sort of body would prove extremely tricky.

The most suitable sort of body would be somebody who'd perhaps drowned

or who had died an accidental death,

had the sort of injuries that would be in keeping with

an aircraft that had ditched and then

somebody had been injured and then drowned

or succumbed to their injuries in the water.

There was one man in wartime Britain

with an almost inexhaustible supply of dead bodies.

He went by the delightfully Dickensian name

of Sir Bentley Purchase.

As the coroner of St Pancras,

he was in charge of the largest mortuary in the country.

Sir Bentley Purchase knew more about death than any man living

and he found every aspect of death extremely amusing.

When Montagu asked to come and see him,

Purchase replied with complicated directions to the mortuary

but then he added, "An alternative method of getting here

"is, of course, to get run over."

Montagu asked the coroner to keep an eye open for a suitable corpse.

Sir Bentley Purchase was only too happy to oblige.

Bentley Purchase would have a large number of people

coming through his jurisdiction,

much the same as it would be now.

The problem would be finding a body which could be used for that purpose.

Perhaps the saddest chapter in Operation Mincemeat

begins in a grim Welsh mining town.

Aberbargoed was built on coal.

When the coal ran out, there was nothing left.

It was here that a man called Glyndwr Michael was born.

His father, an unemployed coal miner,

stabbed himself in the throat when Glyn was 15 years old.

The young boy signed his death certificate.

It is the only example of his handwriting that exists.

He was barely literate.

His mother died in 1940.

Alone in the world, his mind beginning to disintegrate,

Glyndwr drifted to London.

In January 1943, homeless, penniless and friendless,

Glyndwr Michael killed himself

with rat poison in a disused warehouse near King's Cross.

He was 34 years old.

He died unloved and unlamented,

but not unnoticed.

Ah, here's the entry. Glyndwr Michael. 34.

Male. Lunatic.

Phosphorous poisoning, taken orally.

Suicide.

Here was the perfect candidate.

Sir Bentley Purchase was waiting at the morgue.

Glyndwr Michael had no family.

There were no physical marks on him.

Above all he had died in the right way.

Bentley Purchase was adamant

the poison would never show up in an autopsy.

The body could be made to look as if it had died at sea

after an air crash.

The team who were dealing with the operation had been informed

that somebody who died of white phosphorus poisoning,

of essentially rat poisoning, would be good for this sort of operation

and that the state of pathology at that time was such

that they wouldn't be able to detect any inconsistencies

between the reality of this man's death

and the story that was being spun about it.

At last, Montagu and Cholmondeley had their body.

But they still needed a code name.

All this talk of corpses was having an effect.

And so they settled on a name that reflected

their black sense of humour - Operation Mincemeat.

The two men now began to invent an entirely new personality.

The more believable they could make him,

the more likely the Germans were to swallow the bait.

And so, over the next two months, with the body securely locked inside

the refrigerator, they set their imaginations to work

to create a fiction so dazzling

that the Germans would accept it as truth...

..almost as if they were putting on a show.

From the tragic life of Glyndwr Michael,

they decided to forge a doomed hero.

First, their character needed a name.

Glyndwr Michael was erased from history.

In his place was William Martin,

a major in the royal marines,

an officer, a gentleman and the sort of chap who could be entrusted

with top-secret documents, even if he died in the process.

Which he would.

Getting hold of the right uniform was easy.

Far more tricky was finding the right underwear.

Help came from an unexpected quarter.

During the war, everything was rationed,

including underwear.

Neither Montagu nor Cholmondeley nor anyone else

was willing to surrender their own,

and so the underpants, vest and socks

would come from the University of Oxford.

Two years earlier, the warden of New College,

the immensely distinguished historian H A L Fisher,

had been run over by a truck.

Fisher had left behind a library of scholarly works

and an impressive collection of underwear.

This would now be commandeered for the war effort.

Now, I have in my hand a pair of ancient underpants

and we are in the warden's lodgings in New College, Oxford,

in the master bedroom that was once occupied

by the great historian H A L Fisher.

Well, these pants belonged to H A L Fisher, who was the warden

of New College, previously had been a cabinet member under Lloyd George.

A very, very distinguished historian.

And he died in 1940, so when the tramp was being carefully dressed

as Major Martin, the very clever men who were working on this thought,

"Well, any decent officer and a gentleman

"would have a proper pair of underpants and what could be better

"than the underpants of somebody who held the Order of Merit?"

What do you think he would have made of the fact that his underwear

was deployed in the war effort?

I think he would be appalled, if that is what he is mainly remembered for.

He was a man who was known to be rather proud

of his record and his achievements.

So I think he would have been mildly horrified that he should now be

remembered, in the 21st century, for his underwear.

There were no photographs of Glyndwr Michael

but they needed one for his identity card.

They tried photographing the corpse

but found that a dead man's face never looks anything but dead.

For weeks, Ewen Montagu scoured London looking for a lookalike.

Until he found one -

a fellow intelligence officer who was the spitting image

of the dead man right down to his spindly moustache.

With their hero fully dressed as Major William Martin of

the Royal Marines, the two men now set about filling his pockets.

If you look inside my wallet, you'll find all sorts of things

that tell you a little bit about who I am -

train tickets, business cards,

press card, unpaid parking fines.

In spy jargon, this is known as wallet litter.

Montagu and Cholmondeley now set about assembling the wallet litter

for Bill Martin. Receipts, bills, bus tickets, letters -

the small clues to his character.

The man they had in mind would be brave and romantic,

but disorganised and deeply in debt.

Dear Sir, I am given to understand

that in spite of repeated applications,

your overdraft amounting to £79.19s.2d still outstands.

Yours faithfully, Ernest Whitley Jones,

Joint General Manager, Lloyds Bank.

The bank manager's letter was added to the dead man's wallet.

They must've had a whale of a time.

The whole idea of fooling the Germans at the top of their bent.

Wouldn't you enjoy it?

Bill Martin now had a bank manager,

an overdraft and a clean set of underwear.

What he needed next was a girlfriend.

And so Montagu now invited the female staff of British intelligence

to submit photographs of themselves,

photographs that might be included in the dead man's wallet -

a sort of top-secret beauty contest.

From this fragrant line-up, Montagu chose the winner -

a photograph of Jean Leslie,

a young secretary in the MI5 typing pool.

Someone said, "Anybody got any photographs

"they can give us to use?"

So being always frightfully enthusiastic,

I leapt into my handbag where I found this one photograph taken,

it was actually taken squelching in cow mud

on the banks of the Thames.

I said, "I can't believe this is any use to you, is it,

"but you can have it if it is". And they took it.

Now 88, Jean Leslie is returning to the Oxfordshire countryside

where her photograph was taken.

She has not been back for almost 70 years.

So Jean, what happened on that day in 1942 when you came down here?

We walked down and we always got into the river, had a good swim.

And then your friend took a photograph?

Yes, he took a very... Great snapper.

He was a great snapper, was he? He was in the army, wasn't he?

Yes. He was an army snapper.

Did you have any idea that the photograph

might have any significance at all?

Not the very remotest.

What were you doing in those days, in 1942?

I was working in the War Office.

Which bit of the War Office?

-MI5.

-Are you allowed to tell us any more about that?

No, we'll leave it at that.

We'll leave it at that. Quite right too.

There was one thing that we were all rather jealous of.

We would have like to have been

the girl whose photograph went on the body.

We would have liked to have written the letter that

came from the girlfriend.

But that all went to the MI5 side, I'm afraid,

and we felt that was slightly unjust.

Alongside the photograph in his wallet, Bill Martin

would carry fake love letters from his fake girlfriend.

Her name was Pam.

I do think, dearest, that seeing people off at railway stations

is one of the poorer forms of sport.

A train going out can leave a howling great gap in one's life.

That lovely golden day we spent together...

Oh, I know it has been said before, but if only time could...

..stand still for just a minute...

The letters were actually written by Hester Leggett,

the head secretary of MI5.

She was stern, elderly and unmarried,

but she poured her heart into Pam's letters like a young woman in love.

Pull your socks up, Pam, and don't be a silly little fool.

Bill, darling, do let me know when you get fixed and can make some more

plans and don't please let them send you off into the blue

in that horrible way they do nowadays.

Now that we've found each other out of the whole world,

I don't think I could bear it.

BOTH: All my love, Pam.

We were all in on the plot.

Everyday, you know, we were told little bits and pieces

and everyday we had our little discussions.

We just were enthralled with the whole idea,

we didn't question anything.

If anything, we just wanted to elaborate it.

To complete this invented romance, Bill Martin would buy

a diamond engagement ring from the exclusive jewellers

Phillips of Bond Street.

A grand romantic gesture to seal this doomed love affair.

Now, we've got here a receipt for a diamond ring from 1943

for £53.10s.6d.

Which of these rings here would be equivalent to something like that?

I think that is probably the nearest to the description on the receipt.

What would the equivalent price of a ring like that be today?

-Well, the ring you're holding is £13,000.

-Wow.

So that was some gesture that Major W Martin, RM, was making.

It's a lot of money.

So, Nicholas, who do you think in the firm was in on the plot?

Well, I don't honestly know whether anybody in the firm

was in on the plot, because if it was meant to be a secret,

why would they have divulged any information to anybody

who was not absolutely vital?

Do you think they invested £53.10s.6d in buying a diamond ring?

The answer is no, because we can't find any ring

that was purchased by us that was sold for that amount of money.

Do you think this is a real invoice?

Well, it's a real invoice. Whether it refers to anything,

because if it does, we're still owed £53.

The receipt would join the rest of Bill Martin's wallet litter.

Cholmondeley and Montagu were falling in love

with their own creation.

Cholmondeley wore Bill Martin's uniform every day

to give it the right wear and tear.

But Montagu went one step further.

He got more and more convinced that he was Martin, Royal Marines.

He lived the part 100%.

As he'd decided I was Pam, because there was this

weird character called Pam, who was me,

I think he slightly expected me to respond.

Montagu was married with two children, but his family had

been evacuated to the United States at the beginning of the war.

We were shipped off to America because Ewen believed in

getting rid of useless mouths

because I suppose he had at the back of his mind

that he knew he was on the Gestapo list

as an eminent member of the Jewish community.

With his wife and children in America, Montagu now moved in

with his mother, here in the family home in Kensington.

He was now living a bachelor's life.

Jean Leslie was young, pretty and unattached.

We went to the cinema and we went dancing around somewhere.

He was a much, much older man,

and I had other gentlemen around at that age. I was only about 18, 19.

I suppose that I enjoyed the excitement of the whole thing.

I lived the part of Pam, yes.

Jean gave him a copy of the photograph.

On it she wrote, "Till death do us part, your loving Pam."

He placed it on his dressing table.

Here was the strangest romance imaginable.

Fiction was slipping into fact.

Privately, Montagu began writing love letters to Jean,

addressing her as Pam and signing himself Bill.

Pam, dearest, I just love the photograph.

It sounds as if you have a foreboding.

I have, and from your inscription on the photo

I think you have the same fear.

I hope you meet someone worthier than me.

Ever yours, Bill.

PS, try the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve next time.

Ewen Montagu, needless to say,

was in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

My grandmother, who Ewen was living with at the time,

she must have got worried, because she wrote to my mother

expressing some sort of worry about,

"Perhaps you'd better come back soon,"

and things like that. Because Ewen had stuck up this photograph of Pam

with "love from Pam" or whatever it's got on it,

and was wondering what the hell Ewen was up to.

His poor wife came belting back from America, where she was evacuated to,

to get back and get this woman, whose photograph he had,

out of the way.

Montagu and Cholmondeley were having fun - maybe a little too much fun -

but their mission was deadly serious.

By April 1943, the Allied invasion of Sicily was only weeks away.

Anticipating the attack, the Germans were heavily

reinforcing the island, just as the Allies had feared.

Major William Martin must now play his part,

because all the little lies in Bill Martin's wallet litter

were there to underpin one big lie -

a single official letter he'd be carrying, clearly hinting

that the Allies were about to attack not Sicily, but Greece,

a letter so secret that the Germans would think Bill Martin was

a special courier and that his plane had crashed into the sea.

The letter would be signed by General Sir Archibald Nye,

and addressed to General Harold Alexander,

the British Commander in North Africa.

They went through draft,

after draft,

after draft,

until finally, they hit upon a solution that was inspired

and incredibly obvious.

They got the General to write it himself.

HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

"My Dear Alex,

"I am taking advantage of sending you this personal letter

"by one of Mountbatten's officers..."

'Carefully buried in General Nye's long and rambling letter was the bait -

'a hint, but an unmissable hint,

'that Sicily was not the real target at all,

'but merely the cover for a full-scale invasion of Greece.'

"..Best of luck. Yours ever, Archie Nye."

Ewen came in one day and came straight up to my desk.

I saw the feet first, of course, as one always did.

And he handed me a big envelope and said "Pat, will you write

"the address for General Alexander on this envelope?" which I did.

So I was slightly one-up on some of the others on that.

At least my handwriting went on the body, even if nothing else.

After months of preparation, Bill Martin was almost ready.

Pam's photograph, the love letters and all the rest of the wallet litter were placed in his pockets.

A single eyelash was inserted in the fold of General Nye's letter.

If it was returned to the British with the eyelash missing, that would prove the contents had been read.

The letter was then put in a briefcase,

which would later be chained to the dead man.

At midnight, on April 19th, 1943,

Montagu and Cholmondeley met at Hackney Mortuary

and extracted the corpse from the refrigerator.

But at the last moment

they encountered an unexpected problem.

The feet of the body had frozen stiff

and they couldn't get the boots on.

And so, in the most macabre moment of the entire saga,

they obtained a two-bar electric heater

and set about thawing the ankles of the dead man.

At last the boots slipped on.

Major William Martin of the Royal Marines was ready to go to war.

The body was inserted into a specially designed canister labelled "Optical Instruments"

and bolted shut.

It was so exciting. It was just like having an adventure story in your own life.

The first stop was Scotland where a submarine was waiting to take him to Spain.

ENGINE STARTS

To drive him there, they recruited

St John 'Jock' Horsfall,

an MI5 chauffeur who also happened to be the fastest racing driver in the country.

Horsfall was short-sighted and refused to wear spectacles.

He drove at terrifying speed through the blackout

in his own souped-up van while Montagu, Cholmondeley and the canister

rolled around in the back.

The three men drove all night and into the next day,

covering the 500 miles through villages and towns heading north.

On the way, the myopic driver failed to see a roundabout until too late

and shot over the grass circle.

This was the closest Montagu and Cholmondeley came to death in action during the war.

Once over the border, they stopped for a cup of tea

and even took souvenir photos of each other sitting on the canister.

On the west coast of Scotland, HMS Seraph was waiting for them.

The crew of HMS Seraph had no inkling of what they were loading through the torpedo hatch.

The only person who knew what the canister contained was the captain, Bill Jewell.

Lieutenant Norman Limbury Auchinleck Jewell, known as Bill,

was 30 years old with a cheerful grin and bright blue eyes.

Understated and charming, he was also tough as teak.

Dive, dive, dive.

The body was brought in a canister, right beside the torpedo,

put down the torpedo hatch.

No-one, except myself, knew that it was a body.

And it stayed there for our journey out

to put him down on the coast of Spain.

The crew would be eating, working and sleeping around the corpse

as HMS Seraph took its secret cargo on a four-day voyage to the southern coast of Spain.

Spain was neutral, but its dictator General Franco

turned a blind eye to Nazi spies operating throughout the country.

If the fake documents could be got to the right spy

there was every chance they'd end up on the desk of the only man who really mattered - Adolf Hitler.

Ewen Montagu had already identified one Nazi spy who could be relied on to do the job.

He lived here...in the port of Huelva on the south coast of Spain.

Bill Martin would be floated right up to his doorstep.

In his spare time, Adolf Clauss grew giant tomatoes

and collected butterflies.

He also collected secrets.

Nicknamed the Shadow, he was the most effective German spy in Spain.

Clauss was a menace to British shipping.

He and his network of spies spotted ships off the coast

and passed this information on to the waiting U-boat wolf packs.

His activities had cost the allies countless lives.

Collecting his intelligence like butterflies,

he was systematic, meticulous

and deeply unimaginative.

Montagu and Cholmondeley knew their man.

Adolph Clauss thought in straight lines.

He was tailor-made to be duped.

At dawn, on April 30th, 1943,

HMS Seraph lay submerged, 500 metres off the coast of Huelva.

We were just about to surface

when a fishing fleet went over the top of us,

going out to collect sardines.

We surfaced behind them, close in-shore.

We took the end off this canister, brought the body out,

checked that he'd got his papers and everything on him.

We then slid him over the side,

went full astern on the motors so that he'd be pushed in the right direction.

We said what I could remember of the funeral service over him.

As Bill Martin floated to shore, Captain Jewell recited a passage from the psalms.

"I will keep my mouth as if it were with a bridle.

"Held my tongue and spake nothing.

"I kept silence."

TRANSLATION:

In the midday heat, the body was brought to the cemetery at Huelva.

In this tiny room, two Spanish doctors began to perform the autopsy.

First they emptied the dead man's pockets, to find out who he might be

and what he was doing floating in the sea, off the coast of Spain.

The wallet and letters were then put to one side to dry out

while the pathologist went to work on the body.

One of the witnesses was the British Consul who was in on the plot.

He knew that the longer the autopsy continued, the greater the risk that it would reveal the truth.

The real danger in this case

is that it would be identified immediately

that the body was in a more advanced state of decomposition.

Any experienced pathologist would be able to tell the difference between

a body that had been lying in a fridge for two to three months

and a body which had been in the Mediterranean for a matter of weeks.

And the risks of discovery were quite significant.

Operation Mincemeat was on a knife edge.

Thousands of lives now depended on the thoroughness of the Spanish doctors.

If the lie were exposed, it would prove beyond doubt

that the real target was Sicily.

The Allies could face catastrophe.

Montagu and Cholmondeley had foreseen this danger.

The British Consul knew what to do.

He now stepped in and suggested that with the heat and the stench,

the Spanish doctors might like to call it a day.

They readily agreed and signed a death certificate

that was both definitive and completely wrong.

Officially, Bill Martin had drowned.

As for the briefcase, it was removed unopened and handed to the Spanish navy for safekeeping.

That afternoon, a man who had never been recognised for anything during his lifetime

was buried in this cemetery

with full military honours.

Glyndwr Michael had achieved little during his short and unhappy life.

Now, in death,

he might change the course of history.

There was one other witness that day.

Adolf Clauss had got wind that a British courier carrying a briefcase stuffed with documents

had been washed up on the beach.

From a corner of the cemetery, the Shadow was watching.

And from room 13 in London, Montagu and Cholmondeley were watching the Shadow.

They knew he was already curious,

so they decided to give the pot a little stir.

British telegrams were routinely intercepted by German spies operating in Spain.

Montagu and Cholmondeley began to send a series of messages

demanding the British Consul find out what had happened to the missing documents.

"Secret papers probably in black briefcase.

"Earliest possible information required.

"It should be recovered at once.

"Care should be taken that it does not get into undesirable hands.

"Message ends. Stop."

The telegrams worked a treat.

Clauss now mobilised his entire network of spies for one purpose -

to get his "undesirable hands" on the briefcase.

The briefcase, meanwhile, remained securely locked

inside the safe of the Spanish naval authorities.

At this point, the plan hit an unexpected snag

because, instead of collaborating with the Nazis as they were supposed to,

the Spanish authorities declined to surrender the briefcase to Clauss.

The plot was swiftly descending into farce.

The Germans were trying to get their hands on the briefcase.

The British were trying to help them get their hands on the briefcase.

But the Spanish flatly refused to hand the briefcase over to anyone.

Instead, they sent it to Madrid,

where the job of getting it now fell to the most feared German spy of all.

The MI5 files describe a man of elegance and refinement,

a champion tennis player with perfectly manicured nails.

His name was Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal

and he was Hitler's most trusted operative in Spain.

Kuhlenthal was the main operator in Spain.

He was collecting information and forwarding it on to Berlin and acting as the focal point.

We know about this because Bletchley was receiving messages

from Kuhlenthal and to Kuhlenthal throughout that period.

Bletchley Park, a country house in the heart of the Home Counties,

was the centre of code-breaking operations during the Second World War.

Here, some of the country's most brilliant academics and scientists

worked around the clock

deciphering the most secret messages

of the German High Command.

Bletchley was reading most of the signals from pretty near all of

the military and the civilian elements of the German war machine.

Primarily Germany, of course,

but from countries such as Greece and neutral countries such as Spain.

We'd been reading

all these messages and so we knew how they were reacting.

That was the important thing -

to know exactly whether your bait was being swallowed.

The codebreakers were on the alert for any enemy wireless traffic relating to Operation Mincemeat.

But the days passed and nothing appeared.

Montagu and Cholmondeley began to fear that the briefcase, along with its contents, had simply vanished.

Back in London, the tension mounted in room 13

as Montagu and Cholmondeley waited for news.

Had the gamble backfired?

Had the Germans rumbled the plot?

Had they even got hold of the briefcase?

Time was running out.

160,000 allied troops were gathering in North Africa

for the largest amphibious invasion the world had ever seen.

Their fate might depend on a briefcase

and no-one in room 13 had a clue what had happened to it.

But the Germans were also under pressure.

Clauss had missed his prey,

but Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal was determined

not to make the same mistake.

Nine days after the body was fished out of the water,

the fake letter landed in the lap of the Germans.

One of Kuhlenthal's agents inside the Spanish navy extracted

the official letters from their envelopes and handed them over.

The Germans were given exactly one hour to photograph everything.

Kuhlenthal realised at once that he'd stumbled on the scoop of his career.

The love letters, the identity card, the photograph of Pam,

the whole invented story

of Bill Martin and the crucial letter he carried.

Kuhlenthal believed it all.

He flew at once to Berlin, carrying the photographs of the documents

and handed them to his bosses in German intelligence,

never once doubting their authenticity.

Why?

Why didn't he ask the questions that any good intelligence officer should have asked?

Why didn't he authorise a second autopsy?

Why, in the end, did he believe in Bill Martin without a second thought?

The answer may lie in the MI5 surveillance files.

HITLER SPEAKS IN GERMAN

For Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal had a secret of his own -

his grandmother was Jewish.

As a German officer with Jewish blood,

he was understandably paranoid and desperate to please his superiors.

Perhaps, in the end, he believed the Mincemeat documents

because he needed to believe them.

But would his superiors believe them?

Over the following days, the documents were minutely scrutinised by Germany's espionage experts.

Each element was examined and re-examined.

Everything appeared to fit.

The intelligence was given the stamp of approval

and the lie began to spread up the German chain of command,

until it reached the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Goebbels had a sensitive nose for a lie

and the British letter smelled wrong.

Goebbels studied the British.

He read The Times every day, harrumphing about the paper

like a retired general living in the Home Counties.

"The Times has once again sunk so low

"as to publish an almost Bolshevik article.

"It makes one blush with shame."

In his private diary, Goebbels wondered whether the letter was an elaborate and very British hoax,

but he kept his doubts to himself.

If Hitler believed it, that was all that mattered.

Two weeks after Bill Martin was dropped off the coast of Spain,

the fake letter finally landed on Hitler's desk.

Everything now rested on this moment.

Would Hitler take the bait so carefully laid by Montagu and Cholmondeley?

Would their corkscrew thinking outwit the Fuhrer?

Would Churchill's gamble finally pay off?

On May 12th, 1943,

the codebreakers at Bletchley Park picked up a signal from German High Command.

Citing an absolutely reliable source,

the message ordered Mediterranean commanders to prepare for an Allied attack...

on Greece.

Within hours, the intercepted message reached the Admiralty basement,

where Montagu and Cholmondeley were waiting.

Montagu was sitting at his desk leafing through the latest messages from Bletchley Park

when he suddenly banged the table and let out a whoop of triumph.

Here, at last, was the moment they had all been waiting for.

Montagu was made aware,

from decrypts received at Bletchley, that the German High Command

had been hoodwinked into believing that the story was in fact a true story.

We all simply jumped up and down

and it was unbelievable that this had come to a happy conclusion.

There wasn't such a lot of good news at that time

and this was a real triumph as far as we were concerned.

That evening, Churchill received a telegram from MI5.

It read, quite simply, "Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker."

You know, we were just ecstatic.

-Did you feel proud to know that?

-Well, it was rather satisfactory.

It really was...

..I think, the most exciting moment that I've ever had in my life when that came through.

Oh, well, of course it is, course it is.

Hitler moved an entire panzer division - 19,000 men - from France all the way to Greece.

The evidence came in fast and furious.

Other troop movements followed in short order.

Panzer division being sent to Greece.

Torpedo boats were redeployed to the Greek coast, along with

fresh fighter squadrons.

Gun emplacements being moved in Sicily.

The forces defending Greece jumped from one division to eight.

Hitler's army lurched sideways to defend against this new threat.

It showed that it was working.

Effectively, parts of the German army in the Mediterranean

were being controlled, not from Berlin,

but from a basement room here, under the Admiralty, in London.

It was the first chink of light, really,

the fact that we could get rid of those Germans.

On the night of July 9th, the field marshal in command of the German army

transmitted a warning labelled "Most Immediate"

that was picked up here at Bletchley.

It predicted a major attack on Greece.

The next morning, 160,000 Allied troops stormed ashore on the beaches of Sicily.

The British expected 10,000 casualties in the first week of the invasion.

In fact, just 1,400 were killed or wounded.

The Navy had feared losing up to 300 ships in the first two days.

Barely a dozen were sunk.

And in Greece, thousands of German troops

waited for an invasion that never happened.

Operation Mincemeat was the most successful deception of the Second World War,

perhaps the greatest military hoax since the Trojan Horse.

Instead of the bloodbath the Allies had once feared,

Sicily was conquered in just over a month.

My husband, whom I didn't know in those days,

landed three days before the main troops...er, landed.

And he would have probably been dead,

so I wouldn't have had a husband.

So in a way, Mincemeat played a role in your family too?

Yes, it did,

I wouldn't have ever got to meet him.

Thousands of lives had been saved.

Churchill's corkscrew thinkers had triumphed.

And their triumph went far beyond Sicily.

Mussolini was soon toppled from power,

and forced to confront this Allied invasion from the south,

Hitler called off a huge offensive against the Soviets.

The Germans were now on the back foot.

The Red Army did not stop until it reached Berlin.

But it had all hinged on one dead man,

a man whose real name was intended to remain a secret forever.

This is a true story...

In the years after the war, the man who never was became the stuff of legend...

It's the most outrageous, disgusting, preposterous, not to say barbaric idea!

..spawning books, a Hollywood movie

and countless myths.

But his true identity remained hidden

until, more than half a century later,

one man stumbled upon the truth.

I took to going to, as it was called then, the Public Records Office

and looking at the newly released files.

I became entranced with the idea of the British Government

requisitioning a corpse and keeping the name secret forever.

Eventually, I saw in one of these monthly binders,

number 20, "Mincemeat".

And really I didn't have any expectation

because Montagu had always kept the whole thing so secret that...

I mean, I believed, at that point,

in the oath of eternal secrecy.

And looking at the first page, scanning my eye down,

I saw "Glyndwr Michael".

It was an unbelievable feeling.

In this Spanish cemetery, one grave is different from all the others.

It tells of a double life.

One brief, sad and real, the other entirely invented and oddly heroic.

Grave number 1886 commemorates a gallant British officer

who washed up with a love letter from a girl who never existed pressed to his heart.

In reality, its occupant is a poor Welsh tramp

who killed himself with rat poison in a disused warehouse in London.

Finally, in 1998, the British Government gave him back his name.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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