Operation Mincemeat chronicles a WWII espionage deception rooted in the established “haversack ruse,” a military tactic for planting fake documents in order to misdirect the enemy. The technique was pioneered in WWI by British spy Richard Meinertzhagen, who deliberately lost a bag containing false plans to mislead Turkish forces. As T. E. Lawrence observed, Meinertzhagen was a master of such strategies: “a silent laughing masterful man; who took a blithe pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest.” (Lawrence, T. E. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. 1926) After Meinertzhagen’s success, the practice of using a faked accident to deliver misleading intelligence became an important technique in British espionage.

The principle of the haversack ruse influenced British planners in WWII as they sought creative ways to misdirect the Nazis. This is evident in the 1939 “Trout Memo,” which proposed the macabre evolution of the tactic that would culminate in “Mincemeat.” Described as “not a very nice” idea (12), the memo suggested the novel aspect of using a body to carry the disinformation. As made explicit by its originator Ian Fleming—later famous as the author of the James Bond novels—the plan was directly inspired by literature: “The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with ‘despatches’ in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed” (12). The replacement of the haversack with a dead body created a more elaborate and convincing deception, as it took advantage of social taboos to encourage the Germans to take the corpse at face value. Operation Mincemeat became the ultimate example of this technique, showing how apparently outlandish ideas could be meticulously executed as espionage strategies.