How To Fool Hitler - Operation Mincemeat Part I

00:00This is World's Greatest Con. I'm Brian Brushwood.

00:04I think I was 20 years old when this happened, and it was outside of a Home Depot parking lot.

00:11It was a white van pulls up, dude jumps out, in a vague uniform, not really a uniform, but the kind of jumpsuit that anyone from an exterminator to a Ghostbuster would wear.

00:23Spun this tale about how they had these studio monitors, high-end monitors that were supposed to go to a local strip club.

00:29I did know the strip club, so I knew that part wasn't a lie.

00:33And it seemed like it wasn't a lie that they were fancy monitors.

00:36I mean, they looked like big speakers.

00:38Dude even showed me a magazine article pointed to a price that said $2,000 per unit.

00:44Told me a story about how they were supposed to be four ordered, but he had six instead, and the rest were going to be shipped back.

00:51And I thought to myself, there is no way any of this is true.

00:56These are stolen speakers.

00:58And in that moment, I had already begun to rationalize.

01:02I was already thinking about sweet class warfare while getting ahead myself.

01:07Within 15 minutes, we both agreed on $300 for the pair of them.

01:13I went to the ATM with these assholes.

01:16I withdrew the money, gave them $300, and thanked them, and then turned to my friend and mouthed the words, Oh my God, because I had just stuck it to the man.

01:30I had just bought stolen studio monitors.

01:33And I was so freaking stoked.

01:37Brought them home, turned it up very loud.

01:43Very impressed with myself.

01:49Three weeks later, the girl I'm dating, I meet her brother.

01:57He's a student at law school, and I'm a bit shy about it, but I bring up the fact that I bought some speakers.

02:07And I get to the part where I mention the white van, and he nods and grins and says, Oh wow, so you saw one of those guys.

02:17And I was like, What?

02:18One of those guys?

02:19What are you talking about?

02:20He's like, Yeah, those guys, they sell the garbage speakers, they're garbage, but they make you think they're stolen.

02:28And that's when I realized I'd gotten got.

02:31I'd let the fantasy overtake the reality.

02:35The reality was, I was giddy at the prospect of sticking one to the man.

02:43The most beautiful thing about a con is how little the con man needs to do in the moment.

02:49He just has to set up the story, because the person who's going to obliterate his morals for the fantasy, that's me.

02:57And I won't find out for three weeks until I meet my girlfriend's brother.

03:04There's a common phrase in my line of work.

03:07You can't con an honest John.

03:09It's because the honest John is somebody in that situation wouldn't even consider letting his morals be compromised.

03:16It wouldn't even occur to him.

03:18He would walk right past it.

03:21How many of us are truly honest all of the time?

03:25Most of the effort of the con man goes into that first impression, the tableau.

03:30Sometimes it's a crisis or a fantasy.

03:33Whatever it is, it's personally tailored to you, the mark.

03:38I spent a lifetime studying these schemes.

03:42Which really means I've spent a lifetime studying desires, those very urges that make us human.

03:50You know, when I'm hanging out, sometimes a few beers in, somebody will ask me, what is the world's greatest con?

03:58It's a good question.

04:03I don't know if this is it, but here's a pretty good place to start. It's 1943.

04:10Allied forces are about to land their first boots on mainland Europe.

04:13If you do it successfully, you can defeat the Nazis.

04:16Botch it, and you allow the fascist war machine to keep on rolling.

04:19In a smoke-filled London basement sits a gang of con men.

04:22Now, they don't call themselves con men, since they're in the British military and all, or they're agents of deception, which, to be honest, is probably a better name than con men anyway.

04:33I'd like to be an agent of deception.

04:35Anyway, they got a plan, and if they pull this off, it will change the war.

04:40The British know that the Nazi expansion into the Eastern Front with Russia isn't going well.

04:45That means at the highest ranks of the German government, people need good news to bring the boss.

04:51That means the boss is eager to hear good news.

04:54So what if somebody fulfilled that fantasy, wrote that good news for them, put it in their hands, in a way that makes them feel lucky to have it?

05:02Can't be a regular leak or a fake double agent. That's regular espionage.

05:06No one gets excited when the normal happens.

05:09That would just fall flat.

05:13Remember what we said about the tableau.

05:17All the effort into the first impression.

05:20This kind of good news?

05:22Good news that moves armies?

05:24No, no, no, no.

05:25This has to be an act of God, the Lord himself, smiling on the fatherland.

05:30It needs to fall out of the sky.

05:34Literally, an officer of the Royal Marines is going to crash his plane in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Spain.

05:42His corpse is going to wash ashore.

05:44In his pockets will be a heartbreaking tale of young love, evidence of a vibrant life snuffed out too soon, and secret documents revealing the plans of the Allied forces.

05:56Those documents will be irresistible to the Nazi intelligence that happens to live on that shore.

06:03He'd be greatly rewarded for finding it.

06:05In fact, each rung of the ladder that passes it up the chain will be rewarded for finding it.

06:10The officer will be completely fictitious.

06:12The body, a corpse discarded by society.

06:15The documents, an intentional lie to devastate the German efforts.

06:22All of it to fool the ultimate mark, someone who is most certainly not an honest John.

06:33Khans don't fool us because we're stupid.

06:38They fool us because we're human.

06:41And this, this might be the world's greatest Khan.

06:57Hey, I'm Brian Brushwood, award-winning touring magician, creator of Scam School, Hacking the System, The Modern Rogue.

07:11I don't know where to begin.

07:13We could start with Winston Churchill, Joseph Goebbels, Goebbels, I never know how to say it.

07:19There's rat poison, there's submarines, there's learning what a smashed body looks like falling out of a plane.

07:28No, no, no, no, no, I got it. All right.

07:32This is really a story about fooling Hitler, right?

07:34What if I told you that the man who's going to fool Hitler is none other than... The name's Bond. Right? James Bond.

07:44James freaking Bond is going to defeat Hitler.

07:50That's what's going to happen in this story.

07:52I mean, technically, it'll be James Bond author Ian Fleming, and it'll be him setting in motion a bunch of events that will eventually lead to Hitler being fooled.

08:00But here's the important part.

08:02Now, at this moment, it's May of 1939, and Ian Fleming is new to British intelligence.

08:07He's supposed to be filling out a list of outside-the-box ideas to fool the Nazis, all this crazy blue-sky stuff, stuff that isn't just recruiting double agents or gathering intelligence or putting out propaganda.

08:17He's supposed to be coming up with the kind of ideas that nobody would see coming.

08:22Now, at this point, Fleming has yet to become a published novelist, but he is reading avidly, voraciously, and in one of these books, he discovers the real star of the story.

08:33Now, in the book he read, the body of a dead paratrooper is found, and his pockets are full of all kinds of information, and the hero of the book is the guy who figures out that all of this information is totally bogus.

08:45It was designed to fool them.

08:47The information itself was a poison pill that was just too delicious not to swallow.

08:53You know, like a Trojan horse.

08:56In fact, here are Fleming's actual words about it, in which he entitled it, a very Ian Fleming title, a suggestion, not a very nice one.

09:04Quote, A corpse, dressed as an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that has failed.

09:14I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the naval hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.

09:21Now, Fleming isn't a con man, but he definitely understands how the human mind works when it comes to theatrics.

09:27There's that feeling of electricity that runs through you when something out of the ordinary happens.

09:33There's that bizarre compulsion to be special.

09:35There's that moment that you feel the white-hot spotlight on your life in that moment, and you realize, this is what will make or break me.

09:45It's that seductive logic that betrays you.

09:47And it's all exploitable when you create the right event.

09:53For the record, Fleming loved the idea of a Trojan horse.

09:59Like, here's a quick side-jeg.

10:00He actually pitched at one point another version about a year later, and it's too awesome not to share.

10:06He called it Operation Ruthless.

10:07All right, for this one, you'll have to picture yourself as a low-level Nazi soldier.

10:12It's a boring night, and all of a sudden the radio crackles, and real excitement is happening.

10:18A Nazi plane has just gone down.

10:20You and your unit are going to go rescue them.

10:22This is what you've trained for.

10:24This is your moment to shine.

10:26You rush on out there, sure enough, burning wreckage, big old swastikas on the side, I'd imagine.

10:30You kick open the door, ready to free your fellow countrymen, and you see a bunch of rifles aimed right at your chest.

10:37As they begin to fire on you, as you go down, you find it curious that they're all speaking English. British.

10:45These guys are British flying in a Nazi plane.

10:51They crashed a plane on purpose so that you would come rescue them.

10:57And now you're going to die.

10:59As consciousness begins to slip away, as the world is going black, I suppose there's some kind of pride you can feel.

11:08All this for me? Hell yeah! But no.

11:11As you drift away, the last thing you see is the soldiers step over your body to grab the vaunted Enigma machine.

11:20The single most important device in your entire arsenal.

11:24The ability for the Germans to communicate with complete impunity is now compromised.

11:31And it's all because you wanted to be a hero and rescue your fellow soldiers.

11:38That's your last thought before you die.

11:41And that's what it feels like to be the sucker.

11:47Or at least it would have been, if the plan ever got approved.

11:55Which, naturally, it wasn't.

11:57All this plan needed was a German plane and some soldiers just crazy enough to give it a try.

12:03But the higher-ups wouldn't approve it. Too dangerous. Too high risk.

12:06And I get it, man.

12:07Concepts that seem perfectly can't-miss in an office are going to run into real-world problems during the execution.

12:13In magic and in storytelling, I think of these as chaos vectors.

12:17Leadership might balk at putting top soldiers on a plane designed to crash.

12:21The plane might actually legitimately get shot down.

12:24Or they might lose the firefight with the Nazis.

12:27There are too many ways a plan like this can go wrong.

12:30And of course, the military, they're all about risk assessment.

12:33It's Fleming's job to push against it.

12:36And so he did.

12:37Fleming went on to have a brilliant military career.

12:41In fact, a few years after this plan gets rejected, he starts working on another new ambitious framework to fool the Nazis in Spain called, wait for it, yes, Operation GoldenEye.

12:49There's so much of the Bond DNA that comes from his real-life experience.

13:00For example, the Gadget Master Q.

13:02We're going to meet the actual guy that he based the character on.

13:05But let's go back to that first idea.

13:08The one where the military fills a corpse with lies and drops them out of a plane to fool the enemies.

13:14That idea was written by Fleming in something called the Trout Memo.

13:17It's called the Trout Memo because his boss loved trout fishing.

13:20As a matter of fact, this is the boss Fleming would later base James Bond's boss on, a. k. a. M.

13:26So M loves fishing.

13:27That's the important part.

13:29Calls it the Trout Memo.

13:31And he writes these words.

13:33The trout fisher casts patiently all day.

13:35He frequently changes his venue and his lures.

13:38If he's frightened of fish, he may give the water a rest for a half an hour.

13:44But his main endeavor, to attract fish by something he sends out from his boat, is incessant. Sound familiar?

13:51Just like a shy trout, this idea sat in a file cabinet for years, waiting for not only a time to use it, but the kind of desperate moment when the guys upstairs would be willing to take that risk.

14:05A moment when they needed a miracle. Okay, buckle in.

14:11We're at the Casablanca Conference. It's January 1943.

14:26And we are, for the first time in a while, in happy times for the Allies.

14:37They just curb-stomped Hitler in North Africa.

14:40I don't think that was a real phrase back then, but imagine that.

14:44This is the first time America has been part of the land war. Everyone's pretty pumped.

14:48They're kicking a lot of butt.

14:50But then again, these are savvy military men.

14:52You got Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

14:54You got the Supreme Commander.

14:55of the allied forces, Dwight D.

14:57Eisenhower, and they know that you're not just going to string one win after another, right?

15:02They're a good team that plays well, but they're already thinking, how do we play better next time?

15:07And that's the question, that next time, because they have to figure out at their first meeting after the big win in North Africa, where are we going to go next?

15:17That's up to them.

15:18That's at their discretion.

15:19So the allies have to choose where they're going to attack next.

15:22But the only problem is that the obvious choice is, well, obvious. Sicily.

15:26You know, the soccer ball that the boot of Italy is kicking.

15:33Given that the allies just won in North Africa, that would be the closest, most populated landing spot, so it'd be easy to get to.

15:42It would give them access to Europe and control of all the Mediterranean shipping lines, and that's going to be key for their supply as they push on north.

15:50Imagine the energy in this room, the biggest egos in the entire free world, all in one place, each one convinced they know the one true path to save freedom itself.

16:04In the middle of this chaos, Winston Churchill jumps up and shouts out, you would have to be a bloody fool to not think it was Sicily. All right, cool.

16:15So how about we attack the Balkans?

16:17I mean, Hitler will be expecting Sicily anyway.

16:20You could sacrifice less to get mainland Europe.

16:22I mean, it's farther east than Sicily, which means next place you'd have to take anyway would be Italy.

16:29But either way you go, you better hope Hitler bites because here's what they're really afraid of.

16:34The possibility of the Nazi stalemate. Quick history refresher.

16:38Hitler already stated his intention to invade the Soviet Union back in 1939.

16:46Like a lot of things in World War II, it stemmed from the lingering bitterness that Germany had towards how things worked out in World War I. Germany lost territory.

16:58Germany remembered how they'd starved at the end of the war.

17:01Hitler was determined not to let that happen again.

17:04In fact, Hitler says, quote, everything I undertake is directed against the Russians.

17:09If the West is too stupid and too blind to grasp this, then I shall be compelled to come to an agreement with the Russians, beat the West, and then after their defeat, turn against the Soviet Union with all my forces.

17:26I need the Ukraine so they can't starve us out, as happened in the last war.

17:31After an initial non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Hitler followed through on his threat and marshaled a blitzkrieg against Russia, believing their entire society would come crumbling down.

17:41Spoiler alert, it didn't.

17:42By the end of the war, the Eastern Front would account for 30 Nazis suffered their biggest defeat in Stalingrad.

17:59The Nazis had lost in North Africa to the Allies, and now they found themselves in a quagmire in the Soviet Union.

18:09In 1942, the Allies did know one thing that kept Hitler up at night.

18:16They knew that he needed the Balkan states to the east of Italy as a key resupply of raw materials for their war machine.

18:23And if Hitler was concerned about the Balkans, then the Allies could exploit that worry.

18:27In fact, if they played their cards right, they could even have a credible false landing spot for a completely fictitious invasion.

18:35Now remember what it's like in that room.

18:38History, we of course already know how things worked out for the Nazis. Not great.

18:45But in that room, think about the most terrifying outcome in their minds.

18:49The idea of a Nazi stalemate, a meat grinder, and millions upon millions dead with no end in sight.

18:57In that room, the Allies know whatever they decide to do, it has to be hard and it has to be unexpected if it's going to be decisive.

19:10Because if it's not decisive, you get stuck in that meat grinder.

19:14It's fool the Nazis or possibly live with them for the rest of your life.

19:20So two things are decided.

19:23First one's called Operation Husky.

19:25They are going to take Sicily.

19:27Just makes too much sense.

19:28The second is called Operation Barkley, a misinformation campaign designed specifically to make the Nazis believe that they are not going to take Sicily and instead attack the Balkans.

19:40When it came to Barkley, anything was on the table in terms of ideas, no stone unturned.

19:49The call goes out.

19:50Everybody in the intelligence community needs to be cranking out the proposals on how to throw Hitler off their scent.

19:56The time was right to launch one of the most audacious Trojan horses of all time.

20:54All right, Trojan horse.

20:55I keep saying it, not explaining it.

21:02I'm not saying that you fell asleep during Greek history class.

21:14Let's just say I did.

21:15Here are the cliff notes.

21:17So we're back at the Trojan Wars.

21:19There's a 10 year siege by the Greek army against the massive wooden horse as a gift to end the decades-long stalemate.

21:27The horse being the symbol of Troy, leadership of the city would be delighted at the sight of a trophy to their own brilliance and grit.

21:37Yo, let that thing in. We love horses. We're Troy.

21:40And what they don't know is that our boy Odysseus and a cadre of elite fighters would be inside.

21:46Once it was accepted inside the city gates, they'd wait for the middle of the night, jump out, slaughter everyone.

21:52And according to that's exactly what happened.

21:54Won the war for Greece.

21:55Now, closer to what we're talking about is what military circles, the idea of giving your enemy a gift that'll later kill them.

22:03They call that the Haversack Ruse, named for an incident in the first world war.

22:07And in that one, a British intelligence officer left a messenger bag or Haversack, if you're fancy and British, filled with fake intelligence for his enemies.

22:14They took it and the allies won the war.

22:17Haversack Ruse becomes famous, something that's now known in military strategy.

22:20But it's so crazy how the idea never changes.

22:23The Trojan horse lives on today.

22:25Here, for example, I got a buddy of mine who used to work as an aid in Congress.

22:31Like most young people, you want to get free drinks when you can. Right.

22:35I mean, I kind of built a career on it, but he figures out quite cleverly that there are these embassy mixers and he's able to get in.

22:42He feels like he pulled a fast one over on the man.

22:46The man in this case being, I don't know, insert your favorite superpower of choice.

22:50Not only is he getting free drinks, but they're also giving away tchotchkes, little gifts, branded USB thumb drives.

22:57How cool is that?

22:59There's this moment that my buddy, half drunk, looks around the room.

23:03Here's his buddy who works at the Pentagon.

23:06Here's somebody from the majority whip.

23:08But the point is he realizes these are power players.

23:11Even if you're too suspicious to plug in the drive yourself, it doesn't mean your kids not going to pick it up.

23:19It doesn't mean that you might not forget for just one moment just to transfer one file.

23:23Each one of those is a scratch off lottery ticket that could result in a virus injecting a foreign power at the heart of our military.

23:30My buddy, he always drank the booze, tossed the drives. Smart guy.

23:34You have to know where the traps are to avoid them and more to the point, know how effective they really could be, how ruinous they could be, which is how we meet the man who's going to free our idea and make it a reality.

23:51So we have this forgotten plan to drop a plane into the ocean filled with sensitive data, right?

24:38And part of the reason it should work is because the Nazis are starting to get a little bit desperate and they would love any advantage they can get.

24:45The only thing that stands in the way of this thing getting approved is the brass being willing to, you know, have some brass, take a chance in extraordinary conditions.

24:53And then this happens.

24:54In September of 1942, a plane carrying French and British military really did crash off the killing everyone on board.

25:07And among the wreckage was accurate correspondence between the Allied forces, revealing the true movements of Dwight Eisenhower himself.

25:15All this sound familiar?

25:16We got the body, we got the crash.

25:20But unfortunately, when the body of their man was returned to the Brits, they were able to determine that the sensitive letter on his person had been unopened.

25:30A notebook on one of the French officers was copied and transmitted to Nazi intelligence, but they dismissed it as disinformation.

25:37So the plan we followed this entire time actually happened in real life and it didn't work.

25:43Nazis didn't take the bait.

25:45They didn't buy it.

25:47They called it misinformation and it was the real stuff.

25:51Add to that the natural hesitancy of the military and the fact that this plan and others like it have been rejected time and time again for years now. That's the challenge.

26:02Facing the two men who represent the best last chance to make this Trojan horse work.

26:07Our first hero is Charles Chumling.

26:10He's the head of the 20 committee.

26:13The job of the 20 committee, they run double agents.

26:18They feed them information, taking in what they've learned, leveraging other people to join the fight, either willingly or not.

26:25The reality of espionage is it's a lot of paperwork.

26:28Fleming was actually really smart to add all the drinking, sex, shooting to the bond books.

26:33But the 20 committee wasn't a totally uncreative endeavor.

26:36Chumling and his team, they created all these totally fictitious double agents.

26:40Why would you create fake double agents?

26:42Think of it like this.

26:44Let's say there's a German version of the 20 committee and they intercept a full list of your agents.

26:51Do you want them to have the correct list?

26:53The complete list that tells them exactly how many you have or what they're saying?

26:57No, of course not.

26:58So you make fake double agents.

27:00You give them lives and motivations.

27:02And yes, I am certain that all day every day as a nine to five job, it seemed like a very silly storytelling gig.

27:10But these silly stories could be the difference between an entire operation going down or staying alive.

27:14If the Nazis spend any time chasing down a fake agent or changing their plans to avoid a fake agent succeeding, that would be a minor win.

27:24Every second they spend chasing phantoms is a second they're not doing actual Nazi-ing.

27:28Chumling knows the value of a fraud.

27:31He knows how damaging false information can be. Think about it.

27:35We've all lived this.

27:36Remember how stupid meeting up with someone was before cell phones?

27:40You would miss them by 15 minutes.

27:42Both of you would waste an hour standing in the wrong spot.

27:46Do you remember how dumb the world was when Siri didn't correct all of our clocks every daylight savings time?

27:51Bad information costs time, money, energy, and in war, lives.

27:54And now with Operation Barkley, Chumling knows the allies need something special.

28:00A deception that's not going to be some run of the mill hoax.

28:06It's going to take something crazy.

28:09He's going to need that trout memo.

28:11I mean, it's perfect.

28:12The 20 committee is built to feed misinformation.

28:14This could be the ideal delivery method.

28:16This could be that moment that the perfect idea hits at the perfect time.

28:21I mean, come on.

28:23The same risk-averse top brass that rejected Fleming's other awesome ideas would surely reject this one too.

28:30Still, Chumley believes in this idea.

28:31So he pitches it.

28:33He calls it Operation Trojan Horse for reals.

28:36Not exactly a shining example of originality, but here's how it reads.

28:41Quote, a body is obtained from one of the London hospitals.

28:45The lungs are filled with water and documents are disposed in an inside pocket.

28:51The body is then dropped by a coastal command aircraft on being found.

28:55A supposition in the enemy's mind may well be that one of our aircraft has either been shot or forced down and that this is one of their so bad.

29:04But to be honest, as a betting man, this pitch is a mixed bag.

29:10On the one hand, yes, we do know that Nazis can be fed false information.

29:19We also know they walk right past it when you do.

29:22We've watched this exact plan happen.

29:24We know the top brass is risk-averse, but we know that the fate of the free world depends on this.

29:30And this is the moment that word comes down from on high.

29:33Chumley gets the word.

29:35The plan is rejected.

29:36Back to the drawing board. Shit.

29:38Well, while it is rejected, it does get one final chance for survival.

29:45The powers that be, they gave Chumlee the resources to prep the plan for one final approval.

30:09God, could you imagine that?

30:12Through the entire life cycle of this idea, it's been slapped down again and again and again, and now you finally have to get it fully prepped, and at the 11th hour, you find out whether or not it lives or dies?

30:26But along with this opportunity, comes somebody who can add exactly what's missing.

30:29I mean, just think of the name that Chumlee came up with, Trojan Horse.

30:34Not only is it bland, it doesn't even do the job of a codename.

30:39I wonder what Operation Trojan Horse is up to.

30:42Probably not the thing it literally describes.

30:44Yes, Chumlee is an expert at making espionage a reality, and he is artistic enough to know how to highlight somebody else's creativity, but we need that spark, baby.

30:55We need somebody who could build that tableau.

30:57We need that seduction.

30:58We need to make this something that the Nazis can't look away from.

31:03How about an artistic drill sergeant who's going to take this promising pipsqueak to a war-changing ruse?

31:10That man is our second hero.

31:13Meet Ewan Montague, a civilian who volunteered to work with British Naval Intelligence, a Jew who sent his family to live in America during the war, knowing full well what would happen to them if Hitler ever toppled London.

31:31Ewan's a lot like Fleming.

31:32He fancied himself a writer, and more importantly, he knew that dropping a corpse into the sea and hoping some dry paperwork made it to Hitler's desk was not going to happen.

31:42Not only do you have to sell it, but you need the mark to sell themselves.

31:46We're back at that parking lot.

31:48We're looking at that van, but we're thinking about those speakers.

31:51In magic, we say the big move covers the small move.

31:54The small move is that somebody walks up and asks if you want to buy some speakers.

31:59That's weird and dumb and should make you suspicious, but it's covered by the big move, the social injustice, the fact that your day just got interesting.

32:07The big move covers the small move, and Ewan knows this.

32:11Chomley and Montague spent three months building not just a person, but a fascinating person with a rich backstory, creating a very, very big move to cover the very small move of a few envelopes of intel.

32:27Now, to repitch this to the top brass, Chomley and Montague, they're going to have to find a body, and it's going to have to be in good condition.

32:39Good enough that a medical professional can at least give it a cursory glance, hell, maybe even a full autopsy, but the body would have to move from London to wherever they could drop it.

32:48Then it has to be found by the right people.

32:50Those right people need to see evidence of a spectacular story.

32:53The big move covering the small move.

32:54This is a key.

32:55It's got to be a doozy.

32:57Romance, heartbreak, valor, tragedy, dazzling and engrossing everybody who runs across it.

33:01This razzle dazzle has to be enough to prime the right people for the hook.

33:06The misinformation would have to be even more impressive than the fake backstory, not just wartime correspondence.

33:11It would have to come from the right level of allied military leadership.

33:15It would have to be written by them so that nobody was suspected as being a fraud because buried in all of this big, big movement is the small move, the most important move, the one that changes worlds.

33:27The lie that the allied invasion of Sicily is the fraud and that the real attack will come for the Balkans.

33:34The desperation of the Nazis meeting that gift, that could turn the war, the perfect mark primed for the perfect con.

33:43This isn't a haversack ruse.

33:44It's far more elegant than Operation Ruthless and far more sophisticated than Operation Trojan Horse ever hoped to be. No, no, no.

33:52This idea has finally earned a name designed to live in infamy.

33:56Operation Mincemeat reporting for duty.

33:57Although fully formed, Mincemeat now had to do what none of its predecessors could.

34:03It had to get the sign off.

34:07On April 14th, 1943, the top brass reviewed Mincemeat.

34:11Unlike all the previous incarnations, they didn't see a bunch of loose ideas.

34:19They saw the actual machinery, they saw the corpse, they saw the method they used to get it ashore, the shore that they drop it on.

34:33But most importantly, they reviewed those documents.

34:36They noted the authenticity, how realistic the correspondence was from each of the commanding officers.

34:42They read about the life of our fictitious soldier.

34:45And just like that, it was approved.

34:48Only to face one final test.

34:51Two days later, representative has to go meet with Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

35:01Churchill's in freaking bed, wearing a gown, smoking a cigar.

35:07The representative patiently explains everything.

35:09It is entirely possible that all of this, the writing, the backstory, the presentation, the forensics, the smashing, the faking of the plane, all of that could result in a body that gets returned without a single envelope opened.

35:29Winston Churchill needs to understand that all of this could be for nothing.

35:35And after he hears every detail, Winston Churchill says, well, in that case, we'd have to get the body back and give it another swim.

35:49And in that moment, a dead man came to life to become a war hero.

35:56The con artists in the 20 committee were about to unleash months of painstaking work into the sea.

36:05How they did it, where they plan to drop it, and how the man who never was helped cripple the fascists.

36:12Next time on The World's Greatest Con.

36:15This episode of World's Greatest Con was written by Justin Robert Young and me, Brian Brushwood, your humble host.

36:28Produced by Dog and Pony Show Audio.

36:34Special credit goes to Operation Mincemeat by Ben McIntyre, the source of most of the material we have.

36:44By the way, of course, you've got questions.

36:47We want to give you answers.

36:49So send them in right now.

36:51To World's Greatest Con at gmail. com.

36:52In the next episode of World's Greatest Con, how do you write when the main character doesn't know his lines, doesn't know who he is and doesn't even understand how the world works?

37:05How do you shape a reality that forces a mark to do exactly what you want?

37:10That's coming up next episode.

37:12We'll see you then.

37:13Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

37:17Dog and Pony Show Audio.