The people who made the decision were operating under extraordinary pressures, fighting a war against enemies who were at that point killing millions of civilians in occupied Europe. The moral calculus they applied was one in which using one dead man’s body to potentially save many living people’s lives was acceptable. Whether it was right, in a deeper sense, is a question that the historical record leaves open, and one that reasonable people may evaluate differently.
What the historical record does establish is that Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh laborer who died alone and poor in a London hospital, was given an elaborate military identity and used to carry false information to an enemy government, without his knowledge, consent, or any benefit to himself or his memory for more than fifty years after the fact.
E. THE SPECIFIC CREDIBILITY PROBLEMS OF MAJOR WILLIAM MARTIN — EXTENDED ANALYSIS
Creating a fictional military officer who could survive close scrutiny by a foreign intelligence service was not a simple task, and the specific problems involved in creating William Martin reveal a great deal about how Allied intelligence operated and what the planners assumed about German analytical capability.
The most fundamental problem was rank and service branch. The documents the planners wanted to carry had to be the kind that someone of Martin’s rank and service would plausibly be carrying. The decision to make him a Royal Marine officer was driven partly by the specific documents and partly by the cover story: a Royal Marine could be attached to a Combined Operations staff without this being unusual, and Combined Operations was the joint command responsible for planning amphibious assaults, which made it plausible for such an officer to be carrying sensitive material about invasion planning.