'Operation Mincemeat'

 

[The musical Operation Mincemeat premièred at the New Diorama Theatre (near Regent’s Park in London) on 14 May 2019 and ran until 15 June. The cast featured writers Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming and Zoë Roberts (book, music, and lyrics) with Jak Malone and Rory Furey-King. 

[It then played on The Little stage at London’s Southwark Playhouse from 4 to 11 January 2020. A run on The Large stage began on 23 July 2021, where it was originally due to run until 7 August, however due to popular demand it was extended to 18 September. The musical ran for a final time at Southwark Playhouse from 14 January to 19 February 2022.

[Operation Mincemeat's final Off-West End run opened at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, from 28 April to 23 July 2022.

[The musical transferred to London’s West End, opening on 9 May 2023 at the Fortune Theatre. Originally scheduled to close after 9 July 2023, the production has been extended multiple times after receiving favorable reviews. It’s still running; after winning several awards for the Off-West End stagings, Operation Mincemeat, dubbed the best received show in the West End, won the 2024 Best New Musical Laurence Olivier Award (London’s counterpart of a Tony).

[The musical transferred to Broadway in 2025 for an originally slated 16-week limited run. Previews began on 15 February at the Golden Theatre and the show officially opened on 20 March to generally positive reviews. The original London cast reprised their roles on Broadway, and days after its first preview, the show announced an extended run due to popular demand, subsequently extended multiple times, and is still running. It was nominated for the 2025 Best Musical Tony Award, but didn’t win.

[There have been two feature-length movies based on the same material as the musical. The Man Who Never Was is a 1956 British espionage thriller film produced directed by Ronald Neame, based on the book of the same title (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1954) by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Operation Mincemeat is a 2021 war drama film directed by John Madden based on Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book (Bloomsbury) of the same name.

[Among the 80-odd characters portrayed by the five-actor cast, is, as David Gordon of TheaterMania describes him, “one of the most surprisingly real figures from this espionage mission: Ian Fleming, an eccentric intelligence officer in a black tux who’s writing a novel about a British secret agent with a penchant for martinis shaken, not stirred,” played by one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts.  (Says Gordon: she “kills it.”)] 

“HIS SPY SCHEMES CAME TO LIFE”
by Thomas Maier

[This article, which is more about Ian Fleming, his James Bond novels, and his real-life spy colleagues than it is about the London and Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat, ran in the New York Times of 24 August 2025 in the “Arts & Leisure” section.  It was posted as “How Ian Fleming and His Spy Scheme Inspired a Broadway Show” on the Times website on the same date.]

Even before 007, Ian Fleming concocted creative plots that aided wartime victories.

The James Bond spy novels dreamed up by Ian Fleming [British; 1908-64] were rooted in his World War II experiences as a British intelligence officer. In one instance, Fleming had an idea that was so wild it’s still hard to believe it actually worked. To misdirect the Nazis, he suggested outfitting a corpse with fake military plans and strategically placing it off the coast of Spain.

Because truth can be stranger than fiction, that scheme is now the subject of the rollicking Broadway musical “Operation Mincemeat.” The show, a hit in England before arriving in New York last spring, gets big laughs from this absurd tale of deception. In a rousing number, “God That’s Brilliant,” the conspiring spies sing rapturously as they plot to kill Hitler. (Fleming paints a picture of a martini-drinking, tuxedo-wearing assassin who “kills the guards, snogs the girl and says something cool.”)

[Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the Austrian-born German politician who became dictator of Germany in the Nazi era, from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader (Führer) of the Nazi Party, elected Chancellor (Kanzler; prime minister) of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. (Reich, as in Third Reich among other uses, in German means ‘empire,’ ‘kingdom,’ 'realm,' or ‘nation.’)

[Historians have identified at least 42 assassination plots on Hitler, starting before he held office. (There are probably more as some cases may be undocumented.) One was the famous 20 July plot, in which Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1891-1944; regarded as one of the ablest tank commanders of the war; known as the Desert Fox) was at least a supporter if not an active participant.

[This is the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler’s government and replace it, and the weapon was a briefcase bomb that exploded at a conference of high-ranking members of that government at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) in East Prussia. The bomb went off, killing 4 and injuring 20, but only wounding the Führer slightly.

[Only one planned assassination attempt was hatched in the U.K.: Operation Foxley. This was a top-secret Allied plan by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in mid-1944 to kill Hitler at his Berghof retreat in the Bavarian Alps. The SOE considered various scenarios, including sniper attacks, poisoning the water supply on the Führer‘s private train, or a direct commando raid. The operation was meticulously planned but ultimately never executed, as intelligence revealed Hitler had relocated to Berlin and rarely visited the Berghof again after late 1944.

[Ian Fleming did not consult on any assassination plot against Hitler. As far as anyone has revealed.]

Though the show presents him as a sort of bumbling genius, the Fleming character helps to establish the complex story as a spy caper. He “is so respected and revered and made a huge contribution to British culture,” said one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts [b. 1985], who also plays Fleming and other characters. “It seemed like a huge opportunity to have a little bit of fun and poke a little fun at him.”

But the musical provides only a glimpse of Fleming’s life as a spy.

In reality, Fleming was a clever and sophisticated British intelligence officer, who worked on both sides of the Atlantic and gained a wealth of insider knowledge that he later transformed into colorful, action-packed fiction with his Bond novels. “Never say ‘no’ to adventures — always say ‘yes,’” he explained. “Otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”

The Operation Mincemeat ruse originated in 1939 — shortly after Britain declared war on Hitler’s Nazi Germany [3 September 1939] — with a lengthy memo by Fleming’s boss, Adm. John Godfrey [1888-1970], the director of naval intelligence. “It was issued under Godfrey’s name, but it bore all the hallmarks of his personal assistant Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming,” concluded the historian Ben Macintyre [b. 1963], who has written about the wartime caper and Fleming’s fictional character, the suave MI6 agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007, who was portrayed in a string of popular films by a series of actors.

[MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6) is the British Secret Intelligence Service, roughly equivalent to the CIA in the United States. (The Military Intelligence designation is a hold-over from its origin during World War I when espionage and intelligence were the province of the war ministry.) It handles foreign intelligence, covert operations, and international espionage outside the United Kingdom. and answers to the Foreign Secretary.

[It shouldn’t be confused with its sister agency, MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5), the Security Service, which handles domestic intelligence and security, focusing on counter-terrorism and counter-espionage within the U.K. It answers to the Home Secretary and is the approximate counterpart to our FBI—except that MI5 has no law-enforcement responsibility and no power to make arrests.

[The third leg of the British intelligence structure is GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters. It serves as the UK's signals intelligence, cybersecurity, and cryptanalysis agency, the direct equivalent of the NSA in the U.S.]

Though the schemes appeared to be implausible, the memo advised, “the more you examine them, the less fantastic they seem.” No. 28 envisioned that “a corpse dressed as an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.”

Fleming’s idea was later put into action by the British naval intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley [1917-82] and Ewen Montagu [1901-85]. (Both are leading characters in the musical, and properly given credit for their heroics. In 1953, Montagu published a book about it called “The Man Who Never Was.”) According to Macintyre, Fleming was “at least tangentially involved” in launching the plan, though these other spies carried it out.

Found on the corpse were documents identifying him as Capt. (Acting Major) William Martin [“b. 1907” (fictional)] — he was actually a vagrant named Glyndwr Michael [1907-43] who had died after ingesting rat poison — and paperwork that in time convinced Nazi forces that a 1943 Allied invasion of Italy through Sicily would instead take place at Sardinia. The deception helped make the Allies’ eventual victory in Italy easier and less bloody than expected.

Under Prime Minister Winston Churchill [1874-1965; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1940-45 and 1951-55], an advocate of espionage, sabotage and “ungentlemanly warfare,” Fleming was sent to Manhattan to join the spies working to persuade the United States to join the war. For several months before the Americans entered the war, in December 1941, the British Security Coordination (B.S.C. [part of MI6]), based on the 36th floor of the International Building at Rockefeller Center, used propaganda, political influence and media manipulation to secretly combat isolationists and the Nazi threat inside America.

Soon, the United States created its first spy agency — the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S. [1942-45]), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency [formed 1947] — with the help of Fleming, who impressed officials with his advice about espionage and his willingness to take chances. “The British are many things, but cowards they are not,” Ernest Cuneo [1905-88], a top O.S.S. official [1942-45], said after working with Fleming.

Ghastly but ingenious, Fleming’s Mincemeat plan — itself inspired by a detective book on his shelf involving a corpse with forged papers — wasn’t his only creative idea. “Fleming could always laugh when some stratagem misfired — he had plenty more to choose from,” observed John Pearson [1930-2021; English novelist and biographer], whose Fleming biography [The Life of Ian Fleming (Jonathan Cape, 1966)] appeared two years after Fleming’s death, in 1964 at the age of 56.

One of Pearson’s favorite stories was how Fleming and William Stephenson [1897-1989; Canadian soldier, fighter pilot, businessman, and spymaster; codename: Intrepid], overseer of Churchill’s spies in Manhattan, broke into the Japanese consul general’s office, located below the B.S.C. headquarters in Rockefeller Center. Stephenson, Fleming and two other spies entered the closed offices at 3 a.m. Fleming acted as a lookout. They picked a safe’s locks and “borrowed” the Japanese code book and other confidential documents. They ran upstairs to their own offices to microfilm the important material.

Then they returned the papers, leaving them in the same order they were found. “To Stephenson, it was a straightforward operation,” Pearson recounted in Life magazine, “to Fleming a great and gleeful adventure.”

[Japan’s Consul General in New York City from 1939 to 1942 was Morito Morishima (1896-1975; traditional Japanese name order: Morishima Morito). The office that Stephenson, Fleming, and the British agents broke into was the Morishima’s. The exact date of the raid is hard to verify because, for one reason, it’s possible it never actually happened.

[The story of the safe-cracking raid was popularized after the war by William Stephenson’s biographers. According to Stephenson, the raid was real, Fleming was the lookout, and the stolen codes successfully helped the Allies track Japanese and German maritime movements.

[Many of Ian Fleming’s official biographers and modern intelligence historians argue that the Rockefeller Center break-in may have been a “tall tale” or a piece of post-war bravado. They note that while Fleming certainly met with Stephenson in June 1941, there’s no mention of a physical break-in in British Naval Intelligence logs.

[Fun Fact: Whether the New York incursion was actual or not, the idea of cracking open Morishima’s safe ultimately inspired Fleming to pen Casino Royale (1953), the first Bond novel. In the book, Bond remembers his first kill and recounts that it happened in the Japanese Consulate in Rockefeller Center, New York. (See below.) Lest we forget, the “double-oh” in Bond’s code number is a “license to kill,” given to the agents of the “British Secret Service” who are authorized to use lethal force.]

Fleming told Godfrey, his former boss, about the successful break-in, hoping the story would reach the appreciative ears of Churchill, whose approval mattered to Fleming on a personal level. Churchill had been friendly with Fleming’s father, Valentine [1882-1917], a fellow Conservative in Parliament, who was killed by German shellfire in World War I when Fleming was only 9.

Years later, Fleming turned this spy scheme in Manhattan into fiction. In his first novel, “Casino Royale,” he introduced the assassin James Bond, who tracks down a Japanese cipher expert who was cracking British coded messages inside Rockefeller Center. Stationed in another building and equipped with a Remington rifle that had telescopic sights and silencer, Bond takes aim and shoots the Japanese agent. “It was a pretty sound job,” Bond summarized. “Nice and clean too.”

After the war, Fleming had felt at a loss, craving the intrigue and intensity of his spy work. “We almost suffered emotional ‘bends’ the day the war ended — tension went out like a power line turned off,” recalled Cuneo, who later ran a small newspaper syndicate with Fleming. “Aside from its horrors, you missed the frightful challenge of war. I think Fleming missed it as much as most; he seemed both grumpy and disconsolate.”

[In March 1951, Cuneo and a small group of investors purchased the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In addition, Cuneo and the Bell Syndicate-North American Newspaper Alliance group acquired the McClure Newspaper Syndicate in September 1952. Cuneo acquired full control over NANA in the mid-1950s and served as president until 1963 when he sold it, though he remained with NANA as a columnist and military analyst from 1963 to 1980.

[Because of Cuneo’s association with former members of American and British intelligence, including Fleming and Ivar Bryce (1906-85), and because some writers in the Cuneo era had alleged links to the CIA, critics have suggested that NANA under his tenure was a front for espionage. Cuneo, a staunch anti-communist, was involved with the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba, an anti-Castro organization formed in 1963.]

By January 1952, Fleming had turned most of his attention to writing spy novels. He modeled Bond on various real-life figures — notably Stephenson for his bold moves, inventive killing gadgets and coolheaded fearlessness. This fictional secret agent would have a boss called “M” — modeled after his own Royal Navy superior Admiral Godfrey. And Fleming dedicated his “Thunderball” novel [1961] to his American spy pal Cuneo.

The author amused himself by slightly changing the names and identities of his spy friends: Cuneo, for example, became Ernie Cureo, a taxi driver and secret C.I.A. informant, in “Diamonds Are Forever” [1956]. And the American spy Felix Leiter [C.I.A. agent], a recurring character who appears in “Live and Let Die” [1954] and “Goldfinger” [1958], gets his first name “Felix” from the actual middle name of Fleming’s childhood friend, the British spy Ivar Bryce.

[Personal Comment: I didn’t read the Bond novels until the 1960s, when I was a teenager. At the same time, my family moved to Europe when my father joined USIA and was assigned to Germany (see “An American Teen in Germany, Part 1” [9 March 2013] and “Part 2” [12 March 2013]) and I went to school in Geneva, Switzerland.

[As I was attending school in a French-speaking town, I read a couple of things in French just to see if I could. One was the translation of Thunderball—Opération Tonnerre (‘Operation thunder’) in French, published in 1962. (At this same time, I also remember watching the French-dubbed version of From Russia with Love, the 1963 Bond film. In French, it’s called Bons Baisers de Russie, which is a common idiom frequently written or printed on vacation post cards that means “Greetings from Russia,” “Best wishes from Russia,” or, as the movie has it, “With love from Russia.”  The phrase literally means “Good kisses from Russia.”)]

One of Fleming’s most enthusiastic readers was President John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63]. They met at a Washington dinner party the Kennedys were hosting in the spring of 1960, months before the election [8 November]. Kennedy was already a fan of the 007 novels. After dinner, he asked Fleming how he might handle Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover of Cuba.

[Castro (1926-2016), the Cuban revolutionary, was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008.  He overthrew right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901-73; President of Cuba: 1940-44 and 1952-59) on 1 January 1959 and assumed military and political power as Cuba's prime minister.

[Castro served as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008. A Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, Castro also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011.]

“Ridicule, chiefly,” Fleming replied wryly. He then outlined several Bond-like spy techniques that could “deflate” Castro’s reputation. Kennedy seemed amused by Fleming’s far-fetched suggestions. One called for American scientists shooting off a rocket intended to form a fiery cross in the sky, which might be interpreted as a heavenly sign that Castro should be replaced.

Apprised of Kennedy’s dinner conversation, the C.I.A. director Allen Dulles [1893-1969; lawyer who was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI – 1953-61)] later directed scientists in the agency to see if Bond’s fictional gadgets and high-tech killing devices could be adopted.

Fleming’s novels — already moderately successful — soared in popularity with a public endorsement by the new president. In March 1961, Life magazine listed Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” [1957] as one of Kennedy’s favorite books. The Kennedys later hosted a private screening of the Bond movie “Dr. No” [novel: 1958; film: 1962; first Bond film] at the White House.

[Kennedy watched Dr. No at the White House on 28 November 1962; the movie wasn’t released in the U.S. until 29 May 1963, though it had premièred in the U.K. on 5 October 1962. (Almost a year later, on 23 October 1963, the Kennedys returned to the White House Family Theater to watch From Russia With Love, making it one of the very last movies the president ever saw. The Kennedys flew to Dallas on 21 November, arriving just after 11 p.m. He was shot at 12:30 p.m. on the 23rd and declared dead a half hour later.)]

Around that time, Dulles received a copy of Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” from the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, with the inscription, “Here is a book you should have, Mr. Director.”

[Operation Mincemeat had at least one unexpected consequence.  In 1951, journalist, writer, and editor of books about theater Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. (1918-2001), who was fascinated by the Mincemeat deception, pitched an idea at a cocktail party to master suspense filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) about a civilian traveling and accidentally being mistaken for a fake intelligence agent, getting saddled with a dangerous identity.

[Hitchcock bought Guernsey’s treatment and, along with screenwriter and film producer Ernest Lehman (1915-2005), used that premise of a non-existent agent to create the 1959 spy thriller North by Northwest—one of my all-time favorite flicks.  

[In the film, Cary Grant’s (1904-86) character, ordinary advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (his initials, seen on his cufflinks on the train with Eva Marie Saint [b. 1924], are “ROT,” my nickname for this blog) is mistaken for George Kaplan—a government agent who doesn’t actually exist. (Thornhill appears to have answered a page for Kaplan in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.)

[Just as in Mincemeat, British intelligence used a fabricated marine officer to misguide the Germans, the American agents in North by Northwest intentionally perpetuate the illusion of Kaplan to protect a real double agent (Saint’s character) and trap enemy operatives.

[Thomas Maier is the author of The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II (Hanover Square Press [Toronto], 2025).]