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He paused, then added, “And how do we do that?”
Montagu looked around the room while tapping his temple with his forefinger.
“By second-guessing the German mind,” Montagu went on. “We have to consider not what we necessarily know to be true but, rather, what we believe is the German perception of what we know. If they think, for example, that we are inclined to take Greece—even though we know that we aren’t—then it is easier to convince them that that is indeed what’s going to happen.”
“They already believe it,” Charity said, nodding her understanding. “They’re just looking for confirmation.”
“Yes,” Montagu said.
“Frankly,” Fleming added wryly, “we’re finding that second-guessing the German mind is not nearly as difficult as persuading our own superiors. And I’m not even including those in SOE!”
Ed Stevens made an exaggerated look of shock. “You mean to say you have trouble with your brass? And the exalted SOE!”
There were chuckles.
“I’m terribly afraid so,” Montagu said. “And it often has been for the reasons opposite those concerning perception. To use the same example, our people knew we weren’t invading Greece and then the Balkans, so this knowledge made it harder for them to believe our deception was solid.”
“Also, when we first ran the idea up,” Fleming explained, “everyone felt that they knew the German mind better than we did. It seemed that every part of our plan was questioned at one level or another. If it wasn’t for the mastiff-like tenacity of Ewen here, Mincemeat would have died a long time ago.”
Montagu looked at Fleming and appeared to take a quiet pride in the praise.
Montagu then turned to the others and went on: “We had made sure we had it pretty well worked out before we took it higher, to the head of British Naval Intelligence, then on up to Prime Minister Churchill, who ultimately approved it.”
He went to the side table and refreshed his cup of tea.
Niven signaled for Ustinov to do the same for everyone at the table and the batman nodded, got up, retrieved a teapot, and began pouring.
Montagu went on:
“For example, our first idea—feeding information through a doubled agent using a wireless—we dismissed almost as quickly as we first thought it. Too obvious. If the disinformation we sent was not quickly dismissed at a low level—such being the nature of mistrust in a double agent—then it would be dismissed—or even lost outright—somewhere along the chain long before it reached the High Command. And we simply did not have the time to wait and see if that worked.”
As Montagu took a sip of his tea, Fleming said:
“Likewise, another idea was to insert in occupied France an agent, similar to our man downstairs, but by parachute. He would carry a W/T, which we would expect the enemy to capture. They would then operate the radio as if the agent had in fact survived. This in essence would have been the equivalent of their running a double agent. They would act as if they were the agent, and we would play along, sending both genuine factual information—harmless intelligence that they could authenticate—with disinformation supporting the deception.”
“The first obstacle we found with that idea,” Montagu said, “was making the dead body look as if it had died during the parachuting—not before. The obvious solution was to rig the parachute so that it opened only partially. Such an impact with the ground would of course kill any man. Unfortunately, it also would very likely cause the destruction of the W/T.”
“And operation over,” Fleming added.
“But even if the radio survived,” Jamison said, “say, the chute snagged in a treetop, there would be another even bigger hole with that scenario. Agents don’t carry their codes, and so whoever captured the W/T would find it about as useful as a rock.”
“True,” Fleming put in. “Agents are not supposed to carry their codes. We looked for a plausible reason around that, to have what might be a, quote, careless and absentminded, unquote, agent carrying only his code, or even thinking himself somewhat clever by burying the real code in a list of fictitious ones. But, not surprisingly, we failed in that miserably. It would be considered suspicious immediately. So we’d have a situation where we could send all the telegraphy messages we wanted and they could decode them as best they could using their usual means. But if they didn’t have the unique code of the double agent, there would be no way for them to continue ‘his’ part of the conversation. So this idea also was dismissed with haste.”
“After much back-and-forth over months with everyone between us and the prime minister,” Montagu said, “we finally worked out a framework that was approved by all.”
“What about AFHQ?” Charity said. “I assume General Eisenhower has signed off on it.”
Montagu looked to Fleming, then to Stevens, for guidance.
Stevens and Fleming exchanged glances and seemed to have the same thought: Innocence out of the mouths of babes….
“Did I say something wrong?” Charity said.
There was no way that either Fleming or Stevens could get into the real reasons why Operation Mincemeat had devel
oped in the manner that it had. For that matter, damn near no one could—not unless they were privy to the personal communications between the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister.
Churchill was spending a great deal of time and effort trying to influence FDR—some said “manipulate the great manipulator”—trying to keep his focus on the war in Europe. There was more than a little reasonable fear in London that if the Americans accelerated the moving of assets to fight the growing war in the Pacific, the impact on Britain would be great—prolonging the war with Hitler perhaps to the point of losing it.
