The documents in Martin’s briefcase were written to do exactly this. They were not designed to announce a Greek invasion in neon lights. They were designed to be the kind of incidental confirmation that a professional intelligence reader would find more convincing precisely because it did not appear to be designed to be convincing.
C. THE PROPOSAL AND THE PEOPLE WHO DEVELOPED IT
The idea that eventually became Operation Mincemeat had been floating, in various forms, around British military thinking since at least 1939.
In September 1939, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, issued a memorandum since known as the Trout Memo. The memo was drafted, historians now generally believe, largely by Godfrey’s personal assistant, a Commander named Ian Fleming who would later create James Bond. The memo compared military deception to trout fishing: the fisherman sends out artificial flies, patiently waiting for a strike from an enemy who cannot resist what appears to be real.
The memo contained fifty-four specific suggestions for deceiving or confusing an enemy. Suggestion number 28 was labeled “A Suggestion (not a very nice one).” It proposed using a dead body carrying false documents to mislead an adversary, drawing on the plot of a detective novel by Basil Thomson. The memo was circulated, noted, and largely set aside.
Three years later, the idea resurfaced in a specific proposal by Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley, an RAF officer seconded to MI5. Cholmondeley served as secretary to the Twenty Committee, the inter-service body that coordinated British double-agent operations. In October 1942, he proposed to the committee what he called a “Trojan Horse” operation: placing documents in the possession of a dead body and allowing it to be found by the enemy.