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Their task at hand is to convince the enemy that the Allied troops are most definitely planning to launch an offensive in Greece and Sardinia, whereas their true goal is the island of Sicily.

To do this, they come up with a daring solution: they pick up a corpse in the morgue, dress it up in the uniform of a British officer, chain it to a briefcase full of fabricated "top secret" documents and plant it on the enemy's coast!

As the author of this article remembers from a spy encyclopedia aimed at children, one of the most amazing things about the operation Mincemeat was creating a believable character for the non-existent officer. Indeed, for greater credibility, he had to have a distinct personality, a biography, a number of relatives and friends...

"It was decided that the officer would be a light-hearted and opportunistic fellow: therefore, they put in his pocket a theater ticket and a notification letter from the bank stating that his account had been overdrawn."

But, of course, in the book by Ben Macintyre, on which the film is based, this operation is described in much more detail than in the children's encyclopedia. Moreover, here, the main focus is on the operation's think tank, the British counterintelligence officers themselves, some of whom... have probably become too invested in the life of their non-existent colleague?