Brilliant Real Espionage Story - Operation Mincemeat: How a dead tramp fooled Hitler

via bbc.co.uk

"During World War II, the Nazis fell for an audacious British plot to pass off a dead tramp as an officer carrying secret documents. How - and are such tactics still in use today?

Rat poison does not furnish the desperate with an easy death. But this was how Glyndwr Michael, jobless and homeless in the winter of 1943, ended his life.

Found in an abandoned warehouse in King's Cross, London, one cold January night, his death certificate noted the cause of death as "phosphorus poisoning. Took rat poison - bid [to] kill himself while of unsound mind".

He was not buried in the capital, nor his hometown in south Wales. Instead, the coroner said he was to be "removed out of England" for burial...

...Fittingly for a deception dreamed up by a novelist, the true story of the fictional officer was turned into a Hollywood film, The Man Who Never Was, in the 1950s, after Montagu wrote a book about the plot...."

Read the full article on the BBC

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales