Ewen Montagu (1901-1985) was a British barrister, naval intelligence officer, and the operational leader of Operation Mincemeat. As the officer in charge, Montagu co-devised and managed every stage of the operation, from securing the corpse to overseeing the creation of Major Martin’s persona and the forging of the all-important letters. A scion of a wealthy Jewish banking dynasty, Montagu was a King’s Counsel in civilian life before joining the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve at the start of the war. Brought to the attention of Naval Intelligence, he ran Section 17M and represented the Admiralty on the XX (Twenty) Committee. After the war, Montagu was instrumental in shaping the public’s understanding of the operation. At the behest of British intelligence, he wrote The Man Who Never Was (1953), a sanitized and partial account that became a bestseller and a successful film. While his book immortalized the story, it also concealed crucial details, such as the true identity of the body and the full extent of Spanish complicity.

In Operation Mincemeat, Montagu is portrayed as the central planner who transformed Charles Cholmondeley’s conceptual spark into a meticulously detailed and executable plan. His significance lies in his ability to navigate inter-service bureaucracy, orchestrate the complex logistics, and construct the elaborate fiction at the heart of the ruse. Macintyre casts Montagu as a brilliant, workaholic, and somewhat sardonic figure whose legal training made him a master of invention and enabled him to break normal rules. “It was,” Montagu later reflected, “a crooked lawyer’s dream of heaven” (97). He personally crafted the details of Major Martin’s “wallet litter,” the collection of personal items that lent the fictional officer his convincing backstory. His personal involvement extended to posing as Martin to write letters and even taking the fictional fiancée, “Pam,” on dates to maintain the character’s reality in his own mind.

Charles Cholmondeley (1917-1982) was a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force seconded to MI5 and the eccentric originator of Operation Mincemeat. Described by a colleague as having “one of those subtle and ingenious minds which is forever throwing up fantastic ideas” (18), Cholmondeley served as secretary of the XX Committee. Inspired by a 1939 intelligence memo and a real-life incident in which a plane crash delivered sensitive documents into Spanish hands, he proposed the plan of Operation Mincemeat to the Committee.

His significance in the book is as the often-overlooked creative genius whose imaginative leap provided the foundation for Mincemeat. Macintyre shows that his contribution was both conceptual and practical. Macintyre highlights Cholmondeley’s hands-on role in constructing the identity of “Major William Martin.” He measured the corpse for its uniform, obtained the correct Royal Marines battle dress from a military tailor, and personally wore the clothes for months to give them a lived-in appearance. He also gathered much of the “wallet litter,” such as theater ticket stubs, that helped make Martin’s fictitious life so convincing.

Despite his pivotal role, Cholmondeley remained a deeply secretive and modest man who sought no credit for his work. He was an unnamed character in Montagu’s book and refused to participate publicly when the story became famous after the war. Macintyre restores him to his rightful place as the plan’s primary architect, a brilliant and quirky ideas man whose strange imagination helped misdirect the German war machine at a critical moment. His contribution underscores the book’s theme that the war of deception was won by unconventional minds operating in the shadows.

Glyndwr Michael (1909-1943) was a Welsh laborer whose body was used by British intelligence to impersonate the fictional Major William Martin at the center of Mincemeat. Born into poverty in a Welsh mining town, Michael led a difficult and anonymous life, ending up destitute in London. In January 1943, at the age of 34, he died after ingesting rat poison. Michael’s age, cause of death, low social status, and dissolved family ties made his body ideal for use in Mincemeat, although this also raises moral questions about the ethics of using a vulnerable person’s body without consent.



Michael’s significance is both central and poignant, as his unrecognized death enabled the elaborate deception that saved thousands of Allied lives during the invasion of Sicily. He also remained unrecognized and uncommemorated until 1996, when an amateur historian accidentally discovered his name in declassified files. The British government subsequently added an inscription to Martin’s supposed gravestone to posthumously recognize Michael’s resting place and significance. Montagu claimed in his own book that he had promised the man’s family never to reveal his name, but Macintyre reveals this was a cover story, and no relatives were ever contacted. Montagu’s fabrication suggests awareness—and perhaps some shame—in relation to the use of Michael’s body without consent, the breaking of taboos and laws involved, and how this might be viewed by his readership.

In Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre takes pains to emphasize the reality and humanity of Michael and his body, while critiquing the opportunistic and sometimes dehumanizing ways in which his body was used and treated. The described physical reality of Michael’s corpse—its smell and state of decay—emphasizes his reality as the man at the heart of Mincemeat’s deception. The book also juxtaposes the attention and respect paid to the fictional Major Martin by the team, while Michael’s identity and contribution were overlooked, as well as overlaid.

Captain Alan Hillgarth (1899-1978) was the British naval attaché in Madrid and a key spymaster who orchestrated the Spanish phase of Operation Mincemeat. A former novelist and adventurer with deep connections in Spain, Hillgarth ran a wide network of agents and was Churchill’s personal intelligence chief in the country. His primary role in Mincemeat was to act as the stage manager in Spain, guiding events to ensure the documents found on Major Martin’s body reached German hands while preserving plausible deniability for the British. Using a series of coded and uncoded telegrams, Hillgarth created the impression of rising panic in London over the missing briefcase, a performance carefully designed to convince German eavesdroppers of the documents’ authenticity. Macintyre portrays him as a shrewd and experienced operator who understood the delicate espionage ecosystem of officially neutral Spain.

Lieutenant Norman “Bill” Jewell (1913-2004) was the commander of the submarine HMS Seraph and was tasked with the critical final stage of Operation Mincemeat: delivering the body of “Major Martin” into the sea off the coast of Spain. Jewell was a seasoned officer already experienced in clandestine missions, including transporting Allied generals for secret meetings. On the night of April 30, 1943, he navigated the Seraph to a precise point a mile off the coast of Huelva. Under cover of darkness, he and his officers released the body, along with a rubber dinghy, to simulate the wreckage of a plane crash. Jewell’s precise and courageous execution of this last-mile delivery was essential to the operation’s success, ensuring the body would be found by the Spanish and its false intelligence set in motion.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Sir Bentley Purchase are both examples of how members of the British establishment were brought into the periphery of secret intelligence operations. Macintyre shows how the patriarchal assumptions of 1940s Britain and the “gentlemanly” assumptions of honor enabled these individuals to be involved informally and without vetting, illuminating the ad-hoc and personality-driven methods of British intelligence at the time.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877-1947) was the preeminent Home Office pathologist of his day and a pioneer of modern forensics. His expert medical opinion was crucial to Operation Mincemeat’s credibility. Ewen Montagu consulted him to determine what cause of death would be plausible for a body found floating at sea after an apparent plane crash. He later assured Montagu that a Spanish postmortem would be unlikely to detect that Glyndwr Michael had died from poisoning, an overconfident pronouncement that Macintyre calls a “gamble,” and which is a key example of “yesmanship” on the British side.

Sir Bentley Purchase (1890-1961) was the coroner for St. Pancras, London, whose cooperation was essential to the physical execution of Operation Mincemeat. A cheerful and patriotic man “aching to get into the war” (45), he used his legal discretion to provide the corpse of Glyndwr Michael to Ewen Montagu. Purchase arranged the legal paperwork to certify that the body was being “removed out of England” for burial (54), effectively making it disappear from official records. He also oversaw the body’s long-term cold storage at the St. Pancras mortuary and assisted in dressing the corpse. His discreet, behind-the-scenes facilitation provided the legal and logistical cover that made the Mincemeat ruse possible. Macintyre uses Purchase’s files and biography to trace the movement of Michael’s body from the civilian world into secret military possession.

Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was an ambitious and high-ranking Abwehr (German military intelligence) officer stationed in Madrid. As the case officer for the famous double agent “Garbo,” he was already a key, albeit unwitting, channel for British deception. In Operation Mincemeat, he became a primary conduit for the false intelligence. After the documents were obtained by German agents in Spain, it was Kühlenthal who personally flew with the copies to Berlin to present them to the German high command. Macintyre portrays him as a perfect target for the deception: eager to please his superiors, trusted in Berlin, and deeply susceptible to what Admiral Godfrey called “wishfulness.” His enthusiastic endorsement of the documents’ authenticity helped ensure they were accepted at the highest levels of the Nazi regime, including by Hitler himself.