Charles Cholmondeley OBE was a British intelligence officer known for his leading role in Operation Mincemeat, a critical military deception operation which misdirected German forces' attention away from the Allied Invasion of Sicily in Operation Husky.[1]
Biography[edit | edit source]
Cholmondeley was a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force (RAF) who had been seconded to MI5, Britain's domestic counter-intelligence and security service. He had been appointed as the secretary of the Twenty Committee, a small inter-service, inter-departmental intelligence team in charge of double agents. The Twenty Committee gained its name from the Roman numeral XX (twenty), a visual pun on the phrase "double cross".[2]
In November 1942, the Twenty Committee turned down Cholmondeley's Operation Mincemeat plan as being unworkable, but thought there may have been some potential in the idea. As there was a naval connection to the plan, John Masterman, the chairman of the committee, assigned Ewen Montagu, the naval representative, to work with Cholmondeley to develop the plan further.[3][4] Montagu – a peacetime lawyer and King's Counsel who had volunteered at the outbreak of the war – worked under Godfrey at the Naval Intelligence Division, where he ran NID 17(M), the sub-branch which handled counter-espionage work.[5] Godfrey had also appointed Montagu to oversee all naval deception involving double agents.[6] As part of his duties, Montagu had been briefed on the need for deception operations to aid the Allied war aims in a forthcoming invasion operation in the Mediterranean.[4]
In popular culture[edit | edit source]
- In the 2021 British war drama Operation Mincemeat, Cholmondeley is played by Matthew Macfadyen.
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ "The War on Paper: Operation Mincemeat".
- ↑ Macintyre 2010, p. 13.
- ↑ Macintyre 2010, pp. 19–20.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Smyth 2010, p. 28.
- ↑ Foot 2022.
- ↑ Macintyre 2010, p. 29.
Books[edit | edit source]
- Macintyre, Ben (2010). Operation Mincemeat. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4088-0921-1.
- Smyth, Denis (2010). Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-923398-4.
Journals, newspapers and magazines[edit | edit source]
- Foot, M. R. D. (2022). "Montagu, Ewen Edward Samuel (1901–1985)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31458. Template:ODNBsub