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A Memorable History of Deception and Spy Capers

Khalid Elhassan June 7, 2020 34 min

Operation Mincemeat - World War II — Items recovered from Major Martin and his briefcase. BBC

36. Seeds of a Scam

Ian Fleming in uniform during WWII. Paul Davis on Crime

In late 1942, with Allied victory in North Africa seemingly just a matter of time, the question of “what next?” arose. With Africa cleared of the Axis, the entirety of southern Europe lay open for an Allied invasion. Sicily was the most obvious target, but because it was so obvious, the Allies wanted to trick the Axis into committing defenders elsewhere in the Mediterranean, instead of concentrating them in Sicily.

As early as 1939, a British intelligence memo, thought to have been written by Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, contained a useful deception ruse. It called for planting misleading papers on a corpse, that would then be found by the enemy. So in early 1943, British intelligence set out to find a corpse.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.