Upon finishing Agent Zigzag by the same author a month ago, I started right away on Operation Mincemeat. I usually take less than a week to finish a paperback of 600 pages. However, April and May have been particularly busy months, and the weekends were no different. There was always one obligation after another. I was surprised to note that I took one month to finish Agent Zigzag and another month to finish Operation Mincemeat. At the rate I'm reading, it's going to take me more than one lifetime to finish all the books I have!
Operation Mincemeat was the codename of a very bizarre deception carried out by the British Intelligence to fool the Nazis. One of the person involved in the deception was Ian Fleming who was in Room 35 of the Admiralty, the nerve center of British naval intelligence. He later went on to write the James Bond spy novels.
And his colleague, Charles Fraser-Smith, was the inventor who provided Ian Fleming with equipment for his more outlandish plans. Needless to say, Charles Fraser-Smith was responsible for the character 'Q' in the James Bond novels while 'M' was based on Admiral John Godfrey.
The deception involved getting a corpse with no family and dressing it up as an officer and floating it off to the Spanish shores with planted intelligence documents to fool the Germans about the Allieds' invasion plans. I particularly enjoyed the first half of the book. Stephen King couldn't have been more macabre.
Bentley Purchase came up with a solution. "I've got it," said the coroner. "We'll get an electric fire and thaw out the feet only. As soon as the boots are on we'll pop him back in the refrigerator again and refreeze him.
The mouth of the corpse has fallen open. The skin around the nose has sunk, and the upper part of the face appears discoloured. The fingers of the left hand are bent, as if clawing in pain."....a person was formally pronounced dead without ever having been alive."
I don't normally quote paragraphs from the books I read, but those passages just stuck in my mind. Read together with Agent Zigzag and The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva, one has a better understanding and appreciation of how a war could be won even before it actually began. History lesson has never been so interesting, dead bodies do tell tales. And now I'm going to start on a fiction that has nothing to do with war....time to take a break from history. Should I read The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson or Snow by Orhan Pamuk, or......
A friend who read a review that I had written on The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva suggested that since I enjoyed reading about British double-cross espionage during World War II I might like Agent Zigzag, a true account of love, espionage and betrayal . And she was right.
While I had learned a fair bit about how the British concocted a very daring and remarkable deception plan to deceive the Nazis, Agent Zigzag completed my 'education' and I knew all the spy masters by name now, if not their complete personality, on both the British and German sides. Well, almost, anyway. There is one more deception, a very famous dead body operation called Operation Mincemeat, which I will write a review on when I'm finished with it.
Eddie Chapman was the most unlikely hero I had ever come across. He began his life as a criminal and was a member of the Jelly Gang who used chewing gum to stick the gelignite to the safes on their heists.
And yet, he was also a gentle criminal. He abhorred the use of violence in his crimes. He was also a very charming young man, and made friends easily, both of the female and male gender. This was a man with two fiancées at the same time!
He was serving a sentence in Jersey when the Nazis took control of the island. And so began a story that was more astounding than fiction. His British handlers codenamed him 'Zigzag' due to his erratic personality.
The book's account is taken from documents released by the British Secret Service MI5 to the UK National Archives in 2001 and is a must read for fans of espionage.
