Lamh Foistenach Abu!
Posted on 05/04/2010 4:45:47 AM PDT by iowamark
JANUARY 1943. In a tiny, tobacco-stained basement room beneath the Admiralty building in London, two men sat puzzling over a conundrum of their own devising: how to create a person from nothing, a man who had never been...
The two officers were also responsible for running agents and double agents, espionage and counterespionage, intelligence, fakery and fraud. They passed lies to the enemy that were false and damaging, as well as information that was true but harmless; they ran willing spies, reluctant spies pressed into service and spies who did not exist at all. Now, with the war at its height, they sought to create a spy who was different from any that had come before: a secret agent who was not only fictional, but dead...
LT. CMDR. Ewen Montagu, the head of Section 17M, was assigned to help Cholmondeley to flesh out the idea...
In January 1943, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed that after the successful North Africa campaign, the next target would be Sicily. The island was the logical place from which to deliver the gut punch into what Churchill called the soft "underbelly of the Axis."
But if the strategic importance of Sicily was clear to the Allies, it was surely equally obvious to Italy and Germany. Churchill was blunt about the choice of target: "Everyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily."..
The result was "Operation Barclay," a complex, many-layered deception plan to convince the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece in the east, and the island of Sardinia, followed by southern France, in the west. The deception swung into action on a range of fronts, and Montagu and Cholmondeley went looking for a corpse...
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
First disclosed in Ewen Montagu's 1953 book:
The Man Who Never Was: World War II's Boldest Counter-Intelligence Operation
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
They made a movie about it too.
New Yorker review:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell
Another book on this topic due out in July:
“The Man Who Never Was”.
Damn good movie too!
The movie was a classic.
If this is about the dead man shot out of the torpedo tube of a submarine...
There was a great movie made about it..
Cant remember who was in it...
some big names...
Richard Attenborough ???
I read about it in High School. Fascinating. My favorite part was about looking for a suitable double for the photo ID. The corpse looked too dead to get a picture of him. However, at the last minute they found the exact double for the guy, got his picture taken, and the operation was able to go on.
Thanks...
I saw that movie when I was young...
I remember that in the movie they were particular about even his underwear, connected a briefcase to his wrist and made it look like he had got into the water from a plane crash...
Then the submarine got close to the beach and they shot him out of the torpedo tube...
My other big favorite WWII “espionage” story came from D-Day. Well known was the story of reporters sending their dispatches back to England from the beaches using carrier pigeons as they couldn't use radios. The pigeons got disoriented and flew the wrong way, into France. Often not included in the story was what happened next. German intelligence got the reports plus some film and decided it was all a ruse as nobody would be stupid enough to risk sending important information like that in such an unsecured manner.
I remember the movie too.
What a great story.
Just recently, a long time AP photographer who covered the war passed away. One of his photos, attached to one of those wrong way pigeons, was actually published in a German Army newspaper, which gave him credit for the photo.
HMS Seraph was the submarine which was used to deliver the body .. If your ever in Charleston SC have a look on the Citadel campus. The have the Periscope and torpedo loading hatch from the HMS Seraph. The loading hatch was actually used instead of the torpedo tubes because it was determined that the compressed air would impregnate his clothing, so they used the Loading hatch which was where the body was stored on the way to Spain.
http://www.citadel.edu/main/about/campusguide/virtualtour/monuments.html#seraph
Only in England would a name like Cholmondeley be pronounced “Chumly.”
Could this have been what Obama meant by “corpseman”? :)
IIRC, German military intelligence thought the whole thing was a fake, but Hitler bought it anyway. It’s been a long time since I read about it, though.
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Plausibility was helped by Churchill's previous bungling, the failed British defense of Greece, which prolonged the war in North Africa by a couple of years.The result was "Operation Barclay," a complex, many-layered deception plan to convince the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece in the east, and the island of Sardinia, followed by southern France, in the west.Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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