Bond link with the man who never was

IT was a plot that could have come from a James Bond thriller - and indeed, intelligence officer Ian Fleming came up with it.

- BY EMMELINE SAUNDERS

But he could not have predicted the success of top-secret Operation Mincemeat, and how it would help shift the Second World War to the Allies' advantage.

The audacious story of how a dead man fooled Hitler was made into a 2021 film starring Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley, the British intelligence officers behind the genius ploy.

They plotted to trick the Nazi intelligence agency Abwehr into thinking it had discovered secret Allied plans to invade Greece and Sardinia, by planting false papers on the body of a British officer who had drowned after his plane crash-landed in the sea.

But the body was actually that of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless drifter who had died from eating rat poison.

"When Mincemeat was being devised in late 1942, the inspiration was taken from an earlier incident," explains Dr Will Butler, head of modern collections at the National Archives. There had been a plane crash [near Cadiz, involving a British courier carrying top-secret documents] and some intelligence was passed to the Abwehr from the Spanish."

By this stage, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was keen to attack Europe's "soft underbelly" following the Allied success in North Africa. The favoured option was Operation Husky: invading Sicily, opening up the Mediterranean Sea to Allied ships, and allowing the invasion of the continent through Italy.