Ben Macintyre

British journalist (The Times) and historian of 20th-century espionage, author of Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two (2010) and several other narrative histories of WWII and Cold War intelligence operations.

He matters to this vault as the single most load-bearing source in its Operation Mincemeat / Trout Memo research thread: his book, drawing on Ewen Montagu's classified documents and unpublished autobiography and on National Archives material at Kew, is where the Trout Memo's own item-28 text — which names Basil Thomson's 1937 novel as the source of the corpse-with-forged-documents deception — survives in quotable form. Two Tier-3 magazine retellings had pointed at this book without the vault reading it directly; reading it (via an unauthorized full-text mirror, independently corroborated by a second critic's identical quotation) is what moved the underlying claim from inferred to directly sourced.

References

• claim-mincemeat-corpse-deception-lifted-from-basil-thomson-1937-novel — the claim his book's quoted memo text confirms.
• question-verify-mincemeat-thomson-novel-borrowing-against-primary — the verification question his book answered.