Ben Macintyre

A rather breathless review in The New York Times in May described Ewen Montagu, “The man who never was,” as a principal in a deception which tricked the Nazis into expecting an invasion of Greece rather than Sicily by the Allies in 1943, after having driven Rommel and the Afrika Korps from North Africa. The idea—which the Times implies was unheard of until now—was to drop a corpse where it would conveniently wash up on a Spanish beach, planted with false papers naming Greece as the invasion target and Sicily as the diversion. The Spaniards would hopefully place the false papers in German hands, and the Germans would shift their defenses to Greece and ignore Sicily—the real target.

The corpse was that of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh gardener, “The Man Who Never Was,” subject of a video and a website.

Improbable? Yet, the review continues,

…the operation succeeded beyond wildest expectations, fooling the German high command into changing its Mediterranean defense strategy and allowing Allied forces to conquer Sicily with limited casualties. It was one of the most remarkable hoaxes in the history of espionage.

According to the review, Operation Mincemeat, by Ben Macintyre, credits the deception to Ewen Montagu, “a shrewd criminal lawyer and workaholic with a prematurely receding hairline and a penchant for stinky cheese.” Wonderful stuff, but like many stories in the Churchill genre, this is not a new story but an old one, which Sir Martin Gilbert covered long ago—nearly a quarter century ago, in fact, in his Volume VII of the Churchill official biography, Road to Victory (1976).

The Times review omits the originator of the plan, who was not Ewen Montagu but Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondley (pronounced “Chumley”) of MI5, who had been acting as a liaison officer with Col. John Bevan’s deception team, the London Controlling Section. It was Bevan who secured the approval of the Prime Minister, albeit with some doubts. “Of course,” Churchill said, “there’s a possibility that the Spaniards might find out that this dead man was in fact not drowned at all from a crashed air-craft, but was a gardener in Wales who’d killed himself with weed-killer.” When Bevan added that the wind and tide might be wrong and the body might not wash up, Churchill replied, “…well, in that case you’ll have to take him on another swim, won’t you.” (Road to Victory, page 405.)

As Martin Gilbert’s book explains, Cholmondley had the idea and Montagu was put in charge of setting it up. Sir Martin does credit Montagu with “indispensable support” for the successful hoax.

While Sir Martin gives this story the three pages it deserves, I wonder if it’s the stuff of an entire book. A historian colleague writes: “It may be just a good story that exaggerates the importance of the deception, as intell operatives and officers invariably do. But to do more than suggest that would require research in the military intell files to detect just what the effect of the deception really was.”

Macintyre’s book perhaps does this. Among previous available information, none mentions any transfer of significant (or insignificant) numbers of troops from Italy to Greece. Minefields and port defenses in Greece hardly diverted resources from Sicily. The loss of a group of motor torpedo boats would not have had a signal effect on the invasion of Sicily. Sending Rommel to Greece was a sign that the Germans bought the deception—but Rommel he was no “defensive” general.

Martin Gilbert wrote that “Operation Mincemeat” was a successful enterprise. The Spaniards found the washed up body, allowed the Germans to copy the papers, and the German High Command “anticipated” Greece and the Balkans as the locations of Allied landings, with Sicily as a cover operation. Mussolini demurred, but according to Gilbert, Hitler rejected his ally’s wise skepticism. Wrote Admiral Doenitz: “The Fuehrer does not agree with the Duce that the most likely invasion point is Sicily.”

Tote one up to Mussolini, not famous for his military perspicacity, and another boner for Adolf Hitler. The story puts me in mind of what Churchill said when Hitler escaped assassination in July 1944:

When Herr Hitler escaped his bomb on July 20th he described his survival as providential; I think that from a purely military point of view we can all agree with him, for certainly it would be most unfortunate if the Allies were to be deprived, in the closing phases of the struggle, of that form of warlike genius by which Corporal Schicklgruber has so notably contributed to our victory.

{ 0 comments }

In his press conference of 29 April, in response to a question on the disclosure of top secret memos on the use of “enhanced interrogation methods,” Mr. Obama said:

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when the entire British—all of the British people—were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat….the reason was that Churchill understood — you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

While it’s nice to hear the President invoke Sir Winston, the quotation is unattributed and almost certainly incorrect. While Churchill did express such sentiments with regard to prison inmates, he said no such thing about prisoners of war, enemy combatants or terrorists, who were in fact tortured by British interrogators during World War II.

The word “torture” appears 156 times in my digital transcript of Churchill’s 15 million published words (books, articles, speeches, papers) and 35 million words about him—but not once in relation to interrogating enemy combatants. Similarly, key phrases like “character of a country” or “erodes the character” do not track.

Obama seems to have been misled by Andrew Sullivan’s recent article in The Atlantic, “Churchill vs. Cheney,” which calmly urges that Vice President Cheney be prosecuted. The British, Sullivan wrote,

captured over 500 enemy spies operating in Britain and elsewhere. Most went through Camp 020, a Victorian pile crammed with interrogators. As Britain’s very survival hung in the balance, as women and children were being killed on a daily basis and London turned into rubble, Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting….

“Churchill nonetheless knew” appears suddenly and with no evidence to back it up. Sullivan makes no other reference to Churchill, or to how he divined Churchill’s views on torture.

Sullivan likely picked this up in a three-year-old article about Camp 020’s chief interrogator, Col. Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens. In “The Truth that Tin Eye Saw,” by Ben Macintyre (London Times Online, 10 February 2006), Stephens is identified as an MI5 officer who extracted confessions out of Nazis: “a bristling, xenophobic martinet; in appearance, with his glinting monocle and cigarette holder, he looked exactly like the caricature Gestapo interrogator.” Stephens was terrifying, Macintyre wrote:

Suspects often left the interrogation cells legless with fear after an all-night grilling….he deployed threats, drugs, drink and deceit. But he never once resorted to violence….This was no squishy liberal: the eye was made of tin, and the rest of him out of tungsten. (Indeed, he was disappointed that only sixteen spies were executed during the war.) His motives were strictly practical. “Never strike a man. It is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise.”

Nowhere does Macintyre mention or quote Churchill. Incidentally, Stephens was cleared of a charge of “disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind” and told he was free to apply to rejoin his former employers at MI5.

The CIA argues that “enhanced interrogation” works, John McCain says it does not. Whoever is right, the “Tin Eye” Stephens story is not the whole story. According to recent research the British did use such methods: in the “London Cage,” a POW camp in the heart of London, “where SS and Gestapo captives were subject to beatings, sleep deprivation and starvation.”*

Churchill spoke frequently about torture, mostly enemy treatment of civilians. I thank Larry Kryske for this example, from Churchill’s World War I memoir, The World Crisis, vol. 1, page 11: “When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.” (His general sentiment is clear enough, though combined with “cannibalism,” this seems likely to refer to practices of invading armies.)

In World War II, when he had plenary authority, it is hard to imagine Churchill being unaware of activities at places like the “London Cage.” His daughter once told me, “He would have done anything to win the war, and I daresay he had to do some pretty rough things—but they didn’t unman him.”

If Churchill is on record specifically about “enhanced interrogation,” his words have yet to surface. The nearest I could come to his sentiments on torture technique refers not to terrorists or enemy combatants but to prison inmates. In 1938, responding to a constituent who urged him to help end the use of the “cat o’nine tails” in prisons, Churchill wrote: “the use of instruments of torture can never be regarded by any decent person as synonymous with justice.”**

If that line appeals to Mr. Obama, he can certainly use it with confidence.

Endnotes

* Ian Corbain, “The Secrets of the London Cage,” The Guardian, 12 November 2005. The Cage was kept secret, Corbain, wrote, though a censored account appeared in the memoirs of its commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland. Corbain does not mention Churchill, but to believe Churchill wasn’t aware of this activity would be asking a lot.

** Martin Gilbert, editor, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 3: Documents: The Coming of War 1936-1939. London, Heinemann: 1982, 1292. n.2.

Grateful acknowledgement to Larry Kryske for the World Crisis reference; to Alex Spillius, “Obama Likes Winston Churchill After All,” Daily Telegraph, 30 April 2009; and to Telegraph readers responding to his article.

{ 16 comments }