The chain of command above Montagu included Sir Charles Hambro and later Major General Colin Gubbins at the Special Operations Executive, and ultimately the chiefs of staff and the prime minister. Winston Churchill, who had a well-documented enthusiasm for unconventional and irregular warfare, was informed of the plan and approved it. His reported comment, “Anybody but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily,” was an acknowledgment of the strategic problem the deception was designed to solve — and implicitly a recognition that it was worth trying.
The Twenty Committee, officially known as the W Board and later the XX Committee (hence the nickname Double Cross), had been running double agents since the beginning of the war. By 1943, it had become extraordinarily effective. British intelligence had, through a combination of cryptanalysis, careful cultivation, and operational skill, effectively controlled the entire German espionage network operating in Britain. Every German agent who reached British soil was either captured, turned to work for British intelligence, or in some cases simply managed from a distance.
This gave British intelligence a capability that was extraordinary: the ability to feed false information to German intelligence through channels that German intelligence trusted implicitly. The double agents were the delivery mechanism for strategic deception, and the Twenty Committee was the body that managed them.
Mincemeat differed from the standard double-agent operation in an important way. The information was not being fed through a living agent with an established relationship with German intelligence. It was being planted in documents that would appear to have been accidentally discovered. This required a different kind of authenticity — not the accumulated trust of a long relationship, but the one-time authenticity of a physical document that appeared to have been written for a different purpose than it actually had.