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

by Ben Macintyre

Meinertzhagen knew that the key to an effective deceit is not merely to conceal what you are doing but to persuade the other side that what you are doing is the reverse of what you are actually doing.

He had that rare English ability to achieve impressive feats with a permanent air of embarrassment,

Purchase was puzzled, in a detached and scientific way: “It still surprised him9 how many people seemed to be utterly friendless and unwanted when they arrived in his mortuary.”

The greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing.

the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.

In the warped intelligence mentality, something that looks perfect is probably a fake.

One of the hazards of having a good idea is that intelligent people tend to realize it is a good idea and seek to play a part.

There was even a brief but fierce debate over how to spell the name of the Greek city Kalamata. The operation seemed to be running into a swamp of detail.

Sometimes even MI5 officers can go slightly mad looking at the same spot and imagine shadows where none exist. As Freud once said, when asked about the significance of his ever-present pipe, “Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.” And sometimes a table-tennis ball is just a table-tennis ball.

On the eve of the Great Crash, money could be minted from dreams, and investors flocked to a project promising returns of 48,000 percent.

otherwise entirely sensible people could be persuaded to believe, passionately, what they already wanted to believe.

in the waters off Norway, Jewell spotted a U-boat and blew it to pieces with a single torpedo. The Seraph’s first kill turned out to be a whale.

Glyndwr Michael had probably killed himself on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of insanity or by accident. The fatal dose of rat poison had carried him five hundred miles, into another country and another personality. The inscription on his tomb would eventually read, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” the line from Horace’s Odes: “It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.” There was nothing remotely decorous or patriotic about the way Glyndwr Michael had died.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

The Abwehr had decided from the outset that the discovery was genuine and marshaled the evidence, despite obvious flaws, toward that belief.

“It is very unusual and very difficult17 for deception to create new concepts for an enemy. It is much easier and more effective to reinforce those which already exist.”