THE ART OF DECEPTION
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| HMS Seraph 1944 |
Several months before, Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley RAF of Section B1(a) of MI5, suggested dropping a dead man attached to a badly-opened parachute in France with a radio set for the Germans to find. The idea was for the Germans to think that the Allies did not know the set was captured, and pretend to be Allied agents operating it, thus allowing the Allies to feed them misinformation. This was dismissed as unworkable; however the idea was taken up later by the Twenty Committee, the small inter-service, inter-departmental intelligence team in charge of double agents. Cholmondeley was on the Twenty Committee, as was Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, a Royal Navy intelligence officer.
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| Cholmondeley (left) and Montagu |
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| Fleming |
Cholmondeley got the idea from a 1939 memo written by Ian Fleming, later author of the James Bond novels. Fleming himself reportedly got the idea from a 1930s detective novel by Basil Thompson.
Montagu and Cholmondeley developed Cholmondeley's idea into a workable plan, using documents instead of a radio.
The actual body used was Glyndwr Michael (4 January 1909 - 24 January 1943) was an illiterate homeless man, born in Aberbargoed in Wales. His father, a coal miner, died when Michael was fifteen years old. His mother later died when he was thirty-one. Michael, homeless, friendless and with no money, drifted to London, where he lived on the streets. He died three years after his mother, when he was found in an abandoned warehouse close to King's Cross, after committing suicide by eating rat poison. Little is known of his life, save that he is buried in Huelva, Spain. The gravestone now reads:
"Glyndwr Michael; Served as Major William Martin, RM; Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori.”
The Latin phrase translates as "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."
I wonder.
As
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