Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory Review

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Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory ReviewI read an occasional spy book for their entertainment value. This one came highly recommended. I enjoyed it, but I did not find it nearly as great as many of the other reviewers.
It is the true story of a spy caper that is credited with diverting Hitler's attention away from the Allies invading Sicily in 1943. It is the same incident that was dramatized in an earlier book called "The Man Who Never Was," which was also turned into a movie back in the 50's. The author presents some new details these 50 years on that were suppressed in the original due to security considerations at the time.
There are certainly some interesting characters involved, including some of the leading lights of the British MI5 & MI6 operation. Ian Fleming makes a brief, but pivotal appearance, as do the real life inspirations for his "M" and "Q" characters in the James Bond novels. Kim Philby and Winston Churchill also make cameo appearances.
The gist of the spy story is the British secret service dropped a dead body off the coast of Spain rigged with phony letters designed to put the German army off the scent of the upcoming invasion of Sicily. The fact that this crackpot scheme worked certainly makes a good story. As in all books of this type, the British triumph, so there's not much in the way of suspense. There was a great deal of spycraft necessary to make this work that is elaborated in great detail, and there is certainly a lot of spying going on.
One of the more interesting ideas mentioned in the book was that the gambit's success may have hinged on the willingness on the head of the German intelligence effort, someone named von Renne, to swallow this "fish" story, not because he believed the story, but because he figured it for a plant. He wanted Hitler to fail, so he may have put his stamp of approval on the intelligence gathered in Spain because he doubted its probity. If this is true, it makes for a very different story. Unfortunately, it is not possible to do more than speculate about this possibility because von Renne was rounded up, tried and executed in the aftermath of the undersuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler known as "Operation Valkyrie." So we will never know, but it certainly seems fishy that he never asked the hard questions about the veracity of the original intelligence reports emanating from Spain, which is unusual behavior for a spymaster of his stature.
Another interesting aspect is how the British's Project Ultra that cracked the German navy's Enigma coding scheme allowed British Intelligence to monitor how well their ruse was actually working. The Ultra project gave the British access to all manner of secret military communications and was a pivotal to the success of the entire war effort. Operation Mincemeat is certainly an interesting episode, but Project Ultra was much more important and, at least, to this Reader, a more engrossing story.
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