gladwell dot com - pandoras briefcase

gladwell dot com - pandoras briefcase: "The idea for Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre tells us, had its roots in a mystery story written by Basil Thomson, a former head of Scotland Yard's criminal-investigation unit. Thomson was the author of a dozen detective stories, and his 1937 book 'The Milliner's Hat Mystery' begins with the body of a dead man carrying a set of documents that turn out to be forged. 'The Milliner's Hat Mystery' was read by Ian Fleming, who worked for naval intelligence. Fleming helped create something called the Trout Memo, which contained a series of proposals for deceiving the Germans, including this idea of a dead man carrying forged documents. The memo was passed on to John Masterman, the head of the Twenty Committee—of which Montagu and Cholmondeley were members. Masterman, who also wrote mysteries on the side, starring an Oxford don and a Sherlock Holmes-like figure, loved the idea. Mincemeat, Macintyre writes, 'began as fiction, a plot twist in a long-forgotten novel, picked up by another novelist, and approved by a committee presided over by yet another novelist.'"