The Operation Mincemeat aims to further fool the Nazis into thinking that Greece was indeed the target. It was done by planting supposedly classified, but fake documents into the hands of Nazi spies. Now, handing the enemies fabricated files was nothing new. The move was called the Haversack Ruse, which was already on practice years before. During the Sinai and the Palestinian campaign of the First World War, British intelligence officer Richard Meinertzhagen let a haversack filled with false battle plans fall into the Ottoman military. This fooled the Turkish planners, and the British scored a win in the Battle of Bersheeba and Gaza. In the events of the later war, the Haversack Ruse will influence many deception campaigns, like the Operation Mincemeat. This time however, the British added a twist. They will use a corpse to deliver the misleading papers to the Nazis.

The whole elaborate plot was the brainchild of Ian Fleming, the man who will later bring James Bond to the world through his works of fiction. Back then he was Lieutenant Commander in the British Naval Intelligence. It started with the Trout memo, a paper comparing enemy deception to fishing. Though it was published under Rear Admiral John Godfrey (Director of the British Naval Intelligence), it bore Flemings’ hallmarks. It had numbers of schemes to bait the Germans, and one is to plant phony papers on a corpse that would be found by the enemy later.