Title: Operation Mincemeat
Rating: 4 Stars
Most casual readers of WWII history know the basic facts about Operation Mincemeat, even if they don’t know the actual details or even the name of the operation.
The problem was that the Allied forces needed to somehow crack open Hitler’s Fortress Europe. USSR and Germany were in a titanic struggle in the East. To relieve Stalin, another front needed to be opened in Western Europe to divert German resources from the East.
Since the Allied forces had recently taken possession of North Africa, the most obvious point of entry was Italy. To successfully invade the Italian mainland, Sicily must first be invaded and conquered.
The problem was that this was also obvious to the Nazis. The Nazis had shored up Sicily’s defenses. Invading Sicily could easily end up being a disaster.
It became strategically important to the Allied forces that the Nazis be tricked into believing that the invasion was actually going to happen elsewhere. The decision was made to make it appear that the Allied forces were going to invade the Balkans through Greece with a second path going through Sardinia. Since you can scarcely hide the fact that a huge army was actually going to invade Sicily, that invasion was disguised as a feint to distract the Germans from the two other invasion points.
There was a massive disinformation effort to sell this to the Nazis. The subject of this book was a small part of that effort called Operation Mincemeat. It involved finding a recently deceased man, fitting him in a military uniform, forging some top secret documents that indicated the false invasion plans, and then throwing the body and documents off of the coast of Spain. The Spanish, theoretically neutral but with a definite fascist tilt (thanks, Franco!), would retrieve the body and let the Nazis get a look at these ‘lost’ top secret documents. This information, in conjunction with other disinformation efforts (eg hiring Greek translators and simulating a fake army), would convince the Nazis to shift their focus away from Sicily and to spread their forces thinly throughout the Mediterranean area.
Amazingly enough, it worked. The body was found by the Spanish. They did pass the documents onto the Nazis. The Nazis did add forces to defend the Balkans. They pulled troops away from the Eastern front at a crucial time that enabled the Soviets to gain a critical victory. The forces on Sicily consisted of a couple of tough Nazi regiments and a whole bunch of demoralized, unenthusiastic Italian soldiers that did not put up a lot of resistance. The invasion of Sicily was successful. That in turn led to a successful invasion of the Italian mainland.
The story behind Operation Mincemeat is quite interesting and as usual, Ben Macintyre does an excellent job telling it.
However, as I was reading it, I was struck, as usually happens when I read spy histories, by the thought, are spies really good or bad for a country? Would a country actually be better off if it didn’t actually engage in spying (other then counter spy activities to try to ferret out those trying to steal your secrets)?
If you need further proof of what I’m talking about, read a history of the CIA like Legacy of Ashes. Even though it’s not a polemic, every time I read it, I see a harsh condemnation of the art of spying.
For instance, even though the USSR was the biggest threat to the US for nearly a fifty year period and the huge bulk of the CIA was focused on it, pretty much no one at the CIA knew that the USSR had actually collapsed until they saw it on CNN. Even though they had no clear evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the CIA knew that Bush / Cheney wanted / needed / demanded proof that they existed, so the CIA did all that they could to bias their analysis to provide ‘proof’ that was used to justify the second Gulf War.
Let’s not even talk about the failures of 9/11. If the CIA has any job at all, it’s to identify external threats to the domestic front.
The essential challenge to spying is that even the honest spies are lying to someone. If you know for a fact that someone is lying, how do you know that they’re not also lying to you? For instance, there was a high level Soviet defector to the US. The US authorities could not figure out whether or not he was a double agent. He was placed under house arrest and interrogated for eighteen months. He turned out to be a legitimate defector. Whatever value he might have had was long lost.
Then of course there are spies like Aldrich Ames. He was a CIA agent that sold secrets, including the names of double agents in the USSR, to the Soviets for many years. Despite having all of the red flags that are supposed to identify possible espionage targets (eg flashy cars, money troubles, alcoholism, inappropriate system access), he secretly spied for the USSR for many years.
Reading Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre wants you to admire the ingenious British spies, and yes, they were very clever. However, the Nazis should have been able to see through the plan. There were a couple of reasons why they weren’t.
First of all, they were more interested in telling Hitler what he wanted to here instead of actual analysis. The fact that Hitler was obsessed with the fear of an Allied invasion through the Balkans made the Nazi spies bias their work towards that position. Since the dead soldier’s papers pointed towards an invasion of this type, that automatically gave it more weight than it should have had and they were more likely to discard evidence that would lead them to believe that it was a plant.
Secondly, they had great confidence in their most critical spy ring that they had embedded into the UK. Amusingly enough, this vaunted spy ring was nothing more than a set of fictional characters created by the British intelligence service. Unsurprisingly, this spy ring validated the dead man’s papers. The Nazis were fooled into thinking that this was an independent confirmation.
Finally there was Alexis von Roenne. He was the intelligence analyst most trusted by Hitler. He was widely respected for his intelligence and analytical acumen. He analyzed all of the Operation Mincemeat papers and pronounced them genuine. That was all of the confirmation that Hitler needed.
That wasn’t all von Roenne did. He also bought into the false story that the invasion of France was going to take place at Calais instead of the actual target Normandy. He also consistently overestimated Allied military strength by a factor of two, putting the Nazi military seemingly always at a disadvantage.
If he was such a smart analyst, then why did he make such crucial blunders? Well, although he was a patriotic German, he was also intensely religious. Those beliefs led him to despise what the Nazis were doing. It was believed that he consistently gave Hitler bad information so that he would lose the war and that Germany could somehow right itself from that defeat.
Although he wasn’t actually part of the 1944 assassination attempt of Hitler, he did get caught up in it because he knew the plotters. Ultimately, he was arrested and confessed to hating the Nazi principles. He was executed by being hung on a meat hook until death.
So, the Nazi intelligence service was completely bamboozled by a fake network of spies, analysis biased towards a predetermined decision, and betrayal in its top ranks.
All along the German military knew that the target of the invasion was going to be Sicily. They allowed themselves to be distracted by the actions of their intelligence service.
This brings me back to my original question, might the Nazis have been better off without all of the over analysis, distrust, and confusion that an intelligence service by its very nature brings?
Are spies really worth it?
dorkenstein 