Ian Fleming likely inspiration behind Operation Mincemeat: Report
By ANIThursday, January 14, 2010
LONDON - Ian Fleming, a British author and journalist best remembered for creating the character of James Bond, has emerged as the likely inspiration behind Operation Mincemeat, a very successful British deception plan during the World War II.
According to The Times report, in 1939, just a few weeks after war was declared, the Naval Intelligence Department issued a top-secret memo to Britain’s intelligence chiefs suggesting that a dead body be used to plant false information with the Germans.
Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, signed the memo, but it bore all the hallmarks of his personal assistant, Lieutenant-Commander Fleming, who would go on to immortalize Godfrey as “M” in the Bond novels.
The memo laid out 51 ideas for “introducing ideas into the heads of the Germans” through “deception, passing on false information and so on”, the report said.
Godfrey, by his own admission, lacked the sort of mind needed to plot such strange ideas, but Fleming did possess a “corkscrew mind”, as his subsequent career made clear to the world.
Idea No 28, which Fleming reportedly pitched in, read: “The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.”
The plan by Fleming was put into action four years later by Charles Cholmondeley, working for MI5, and Ewen Montagu, a colleague and friend of Fleming who ran the top secret section 17 M within Naval Intelligence. (ANI)
