Ewen Montagu wrote his own account, The Man Who Never Was, in 1953, reportedly over a long weekend. The book was a bestseller, eventually selling approximately two million copies. Montagu was careful about what he included and what he omitted.
He did not describe the signals intelligence that had confirmed the deception’s success. The Ultra secret, the fact that Britain had been reading German military communications throughout the war, was still classified in 1953 and would remain so until Frederick Winterbotham’s 1974 book The Ultra Secret broke the story publicly. Montagu’s book therefore could not explain precisely how British intelligence had confirmed that the Mincemeat documents had reached the right people and been believed.
He also did not describe the broader systematic programme of Allied strategic deception operations, of which Mincemeat was one component. Operation Barclay and its relationship to Mincemeat were not publicly known.
A 1956 film adaptation starred Clifton Webb as Montagu, which helped fix the story in public consciousness while inevitably simplifying and dramatizing the operation’s details.
Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book Operation Mincemeat drew on declassified records, including documents at the National Archives, to produce the most comprehensive account of the operation available to a general reader. The book gave the most detailed account yet of Glyndwr Michael’s biography and the specific mechanics of the identity construction. A 2022 Netflix film based on Macintyre’s book, directed by John Macmillan and starring Colin Firth as Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen as Cholmondeley, brought the story to a new generation of viewers with the inevitable compressions and dramatic additions of narrative filmmaking.