The Corpse and the Haversack
WHEN Duff Cooper wrote Operation Heartbreak, the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty made a spirited attempt to get its publication stopped at the last minute on security grounds. It gave away, they truly said, much of the actual story of a successful ruse, known as 'Operation Mincemeat,' which had helped to deceive the Germans about Allied strategy at the time of the landings in Sicily; and they felt strongly that this should not be done, since in some future conflict we might wish to employ the same ruse again. Their views, which were understandable but specious, did not prevail.
Now a film, reviewed else'where.in this issue, has been made about 'Mincemeat' in Hollywood, and a Member of Parliament has said that he intends to ask the Minister of Defence if he will take steps to prevent it bein'g shown 'in the interests of national security.' The film is called The Man Who Never Was and is based on a successful book with the same title, in which Mr. Ewen Montagu, QC, gave a full and documentary account of a transaction in the planning of which he, as a war-time officer in NID, played a leading part. It involved 'planting' on the enemy, with the unwitting co-operation of the Spanish authorities, a corpse in the uniform of an officer of the Royal Marines; at the time of his death—notionally the result of an air-crash in the Bay of Biscay—this officer had been on a high- level liaison mission, and his brief-case bulged with interesting documents.
The idea, held by the would-be censors, that no public mention ought ever to be made of this ruse (variants of which are as old as war itself) is not really a sensible one. even if it were practicable. In war each side—but more especially, the weaker, having the greater need of such aid as cunning and dissimulation an inexpensively provide—will always try to deceive the other. One method of doing this is to fuynish your enemy with forged documentary evidence of what you are or are not going to do. It is not a very common or important method for several obvious reasons.
The documents you foist on him must, if they are to reveal something of your strategy, appear to emanate from a high level, and it is not normally at all easy to fabricate circum- stances in which (say) a paper written by the Chiefs of Staff or the minutes of a War Cabinet meeting can find their way into the enemy's hands without the transaction striking him as implausible and far-fetched. It can be done, but it is out- side the ordinary run of business.
Traffic in liked secret documents is one of the few forms of commerce in which the middleman runs a bigger risk than the principals. The beautiful foreign countess who arrives. panting, in Strelsau with a photostat copy of the British Plan for invading Ruritania from the north has to be very beautiful indeed to survive the damage done to her reputation for integrity when the British swarm, instead, across the now lightly defended southern frontier. It is best, on the whole, for the enemy to find the forged documents himself.
But where is he to find them? If you leave them behind— in a divisional headquarterg, say—during a withdrawal there is no guarantee that they will be found or, if found, correctly evaluated; it is as likely as not that they will be used to light a fire or for some other domestic purpose by a tired private soldier who cannot read the language they are written in and Would be very little wiser if he could. Short of throwing your pregnant paperasserie over the garden wall of the enemy's embassy in a neutral capital with a note saying, 'From an unknown well-wisher,' there really are precious few methods of putting him in the way of the windfall you have prepared for him.
The classic example of the successful 'planting' of false documentary evidence in war was, of course, the episode of Meinertzhagen's Haversack. This trick was part of Allenby's preparations for the Third Battle of Gaza in 1917. Its object was to convince the Turks that Allenby's main attack would, as in the two previous actions, be directed on Gaza; in fact the British planned an assault on Beersheba and the destruc- tion of the enemy's left flank.
British cavalry patrols periodically jogged across the wide and intricate no-man's-land about Beersheba. Meinertzhagen, then an intelligence officer on Allenby's staff, accompanied one of these, riding a grey to make himself more conspicuous. When the patrol came in view of the Turkish outposts Meinertzhagen, playing the role of an enterprising but clueless sightseer, pressed on until the Turks, or as many of them as were awake at the time, fired on him.
He slumped in his saddle, wheeled his horse and galloped away—a sagging, stricken figure from which some personal equipment was seen to fall. This included the celebrated haversack. Among its contents was a notebook full of data dealing with water and transport problems in the Beersheba area and making it clear that the maintenance in it of any large force was regarded by the. British staff as out of the question. Among the garnishings of this piece de resistance was a fairly large sum of money, in itself sufficient proof for the Turks that the 'haversack could not possibly have been abandoned on purpose. The ruse, which of course was sup- ported by other forms of deception, worked like a charm.
Between the wars this story was told in more than one popular book as well as in Wavell's history of the Palestine campaigns; but that did not prevent substantially the same trick being successfully played—by Wavell—in the last war, any more than the accounts of escapes from prisoner-of-war camps in 1914-18 prevented the same methods being used by escapers in 1939-45.
There is no point at all in transmitting forged documents to your enemy unless they are forged with the utmost skill and unless you have arranged for the conclusions you want him to draw from them to be supported by evidence from other sources. Granted these two conditions, the chances of his seriously questioning their authenticity (let alone proving them to be fakes) are surprisingly remote, and can be still further reduced if the documents inClude incidental matter which is discreditable to your cause and favourable to his, such as evidence of inter-allied dissensions or of some scandal or blunder committed in your own camp.
The man who found or acquired the documents, the man who first recognised their importance, the experts who evaluated them, the Director of Intelligence who reported his unexpected haul to the Chief of Staff—a whole pyramid of vested interests is on your side, partisans of authenticity. If at some stage a sour fellow pipes up and says : 'Look here. you think you've been very lucky, or very clever, or both, to get hold of this stuff. I think it's a plant. Don't you remember that they did very much the same last time?', the chances are that he will be returned to regimental duty before long. People like feeling that they are clever or lucky or (better still) both; and in war the forger, on the rare occasions when he gets a chance to dispose of his wares, should have no difficulty in giv- ing his enemy these agreeable sensations, however many prece- dents may exist for his method of delivering the goods. STR1X
Previous page
