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So to make that person appear representative of the fact that that guy came from somewhere.” The stolen body The sister showing up was a fictionalized element of the story. I loved that part of the story because I found it complicated and poignant and curious. “The fact that they need to do this, but there’s consequences if you just steal a person and stuff them in a life jacket and throw them in the water.

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“ to really try and find in the movie the messiness of war,” Ashford notes. We don’t know that Cholmondeley didn’t have a crush on Jean.” That doesn’t feel like a violation of the story.’ Because here’s the thing: We don’t know it didn’t happen. “When I ran this up the flagpole, everyone said, ‘That makes sense. “It was a two-hander that I turned into a three-hander,” Ashford explains. It didn’t feel like a stretch to introduce a love triangle.

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In reality, it’s uncertain if that affair really happened or whether Cholmondeley had feelings for Leslie.Īccording to Ashford, it is true that Montagu and Leslie wrote each other a series of letters as fictitious characters and they did sometimes go out. In the film, Montagu, who was married, becomes involved in an affair with Leslie, which prompts jealousy in Cholmondeley. The pair borrowed a photograph - now in England’s National Archives - from MI5 secretary Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald) to plant on their fake captain. Operation Mincemeat was led by Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) with the help of Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen). I love the idea that it comes from a novel and it’s picked up by another novelist.” He got the idea from a novel by a man no one ever reads these days called Basil Thomson, who was a pretty dreadful prewar novelist. 28, was the kernel of this idea, which was to get a dead body and to make it look as if it was an airman who had drowned at sea and equip it with false papers and ship it somewhere.

“One of the things that Fleming did was to draw up, with Godfrey, a memo called the Trout Memo, now quite famous in intelligence studies. Sir John Godfrey, who would become the model for M in the ‘James Bond’ stories,” Macintyre explains. “Ian Fleming was at that point assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence, Adm. Macintyre says Fleming’s involvement in the operation was “one of the most extraordinary discoveries of this story.” The person responsible for the Trout Memo was none other than James Bond novelist Ian Fleming, then a lieutenant commander. The inspiration for the operation dates back to 1939, when British intelligence put together the Trout Memo, a list of 54 possible ideas for how they could fool the enemy. And without it - you can’t calculate it - but many, many more lives would have been lost on Sicily’s beaches, including many American lives.” “Very rarely does spying make much of a difference, but Operation Mincemeat made an enormous difference. “The story of Operation Mincemeat is true,” explains Macintyre, who was involved in the process of making the film.

The film, directed by John Madden and written by Michelle Ashford, is based on Ben Macintyre’s expansive 2010 book “Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II.” It was dubbed Operation Mincemeat - a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that they were using a dead body - and this largely unknown spy operation is now the subject of a Netflix film of the same name. The idea, a notable example of tactical deception, was to trick Hitler into moving his forces so the Allies could regain control of Europe. In 1943, British intelligence acquired the corpse of Glyndwr Michael from a morgue and dressed him up as a fictitious officer named William Martin, planting fake documents in his clothes to suggest that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily.

The Allied victory in World War II hinged on many complex factors, but one of the most unlikely turning points involved the dead body of a Welsh homeless man.