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Sign up right now and get a free two-day shipping.
And take care of that thing.
>> Yeah, you don't have to go to the witch doctor.
You don't have to do the thing with the Tabasco sauce.
>> Quit living in the past.
>> Okay, best case scenario for what happens to your corpse
after you die.
What do you want to happen? What's the dream?
>> My fingernails are harvested and made into precise nubs,
and the world's greatest calligrapher
writes a letter of thank you to me.
>> Man, that is so weird.
[laughter]
>> Why? What were you going to say?
>> I don't know. >> Oh, I want to donate a kidney.
>> No, no, I want everyone at the services
to be armed with guns.
And then, at a moment during the services,
I rise up, animatronics all inside me,
and I start attacking the people at the funeral,
and they have to gun me down.
I hope you'll be there. >> And then you'll present them
with a writ from the grave written with my fingernails.
>> See, somehow, me being a robotic zombie is less weird
than this, whatever you're doing.
Why are you acting like a doctor with your beady eyes?
[laughter]
>> Alright, so you're in the middle of fighting World War II.
You're Harry S. Churchill, the S stands for Stalin--
>> I remember him.
>> And you want to really stick up the gooch of the Axis.
The best target, the most obvious one, is Sicily,
but you're thinking like, "Even Hitler could figure out
"that that's the most obvious target."
>> It was super obvious.
>> Is there a way to still attack Sicily,
but just get them to think you're headed somewhere else?
>> You need a Haversack ruse.
>> A Haversack ruse?
What does this mean? >> A Haversack ruse.
That is where you plant sensitive information
on the corpse of one of your own soldiers,
hoping that the enemy will find it
and think that it's legitimate information.
>> Kind of like a honey pot, right?
Where it's like, they think they have a treasured find,
and instead it's poisoned.
>> Exactly. >> Poisoned honey.
>> But there are a lot of moving parts,
and they got the inspiration from the Trout Memo,
a memo on deception in warfare
written by Admiral John Godfrey,
but it bares all the hallmarks of his personal assistant,
who everyone suspects actually wrote it, Ian Fleming.
>> Ian Fleming, who later created James Bond.
>> Yes, exactly, he was a secret agent.
Make no mistake, this guy knew what he was talking about.
So they used one of the ideas in the Trout Memo
as the basis for Operation Mincemeat.
[suspenseful music]
>> Operation Mincemeat, you begin with the idea,
we're going to plant some information on a corpse.
We're going to hope that the Nazis truly figure
that they've discovered it on their own.
So many things you've got to figure out.
First, you start with the backstory,
which means immediately, you come up with a name
and a title.
What was the guys name?
>> Jason: They came up with Captain William Martin,
and you know why they did that?
>> Brian: Oh, because Martin is a very popular surname,
and it would be harder to track down.
>> Exactly, so if German intelligence
found this body that they left
with this Captain William Martin,
they're going to check the records
and find any sort of information,
and find out that, yeah, sure, there are lots of Martins
and this isn't a made up person at all.
>> So at this point, you're spending months and months
of people essentially writing letters
to themselves to and from, like,
"How goes your travels," and whatever,
and you're working on this, building up the backstory,
because they don't know, necessarily, what communications
are being intercepted at any given time.
But they want to build up a backstory,
so that when they find this person,
they're like, "Yeah, of course he's a real person.
"We've been intercepting his stuff for years."
>> Yeah, they created this fully realized human being
that never existed.
>> At some point, you got to put the operation into action,
which means, you got to find a body.
Now, bodies are not in short supply, you're at war.
>> It's World War II, there are a lot of them.
>> But they're all very well cataloged,
so you need a very particular type of body.
It has to be somebody that looks vaguely
like the identification that you have,
has to be somebody that won't be missed or cataloged,
and in fact, when they first did find the body,
it turned out to be a homeless person.
They categorized him at the time
as sort of a faceless ne'er-do-well.
I think it's because it was so ghoulish,
what they were up to, but he died of rat poison.
What was his name?
>> Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh name,
forgive me if I'm mispronouncing that,
but yeah, he was a Welsh itinerant
that really had no ties to anyone.
He had taken his own life with a little bit of rat poison,
and they thought, "Hmm."
>> Now, all of a sudden, you have another element
to the calculus, which is, what are the odds
that they're going to find the rat poison
in what they intend to make look like an airplane crash?
>> They were going to leave him off the coast of Spain,
for reasons we'll get to in a minute,
but if they're leaving him off the coast of Spain,
the Spaniards are going to find him,
and that is largely a Roman Catholic country.
So the pathologist finding this body,
if they find a silver cross,
a medallion of Saint Christopher on there,
they're going to think he's Roman Catholic as well.
>> I'm Roman Catholic.
We're not into the whole carving up bodies
and doing autopsy thing.
>> So let's just let this guy slide,
and let's not dig in and find that he actually died
of rat poison.
>> So now the clock is ticking.
They've got to figure out a way to deliver this body
to the right place.
They wanted it to be Spain because they wanted it
to be someplace technically neutral,
but that they knew had heavy Nazi sympathizers--
>> Because they had done it before.
Spain had passed over information,
found from a body that was off the coast,
passed it on to the Nazis.
And so, the Allies thought, "I bet they're doing it again."
>> So now, they've got to get this body over,
but of course, bodies decay over time.
And if it's going to look like the plane crashed
just a day or two before, you can't have something
that clearly shows advanced decomposition on it.
So they have to refrigerate the body, but not freeze it,
in order to keep it preserved.
And along the way, this is their last chance
to sort of make sure that the glove truly fits.
They tried everything from
updating his photograph credentials,
but when they took photos, he was very clearly a corpse.
And they're like, "Yeah, we can't even do this."
So they took a previous photo,
and then they very clearly said, "This is a re-issue
"because you lost your ID recently."
And then, at this point, they start filling him
with pocket litter.
>> Yes, they filled out the complete illusion
of who Captain Martin William was.
They had stuff like tickets for the theater.
They had love letters in there, a picture of his fiance--
>> Brian: Stamps, a stub of pencil.
>> Yeah, they wanted to make this guy
look like an actual person.
And so they just filled out his life
and put it in his pockets.
>> And most importantly, they had the briefcase of intel
that allegedly was so super important
that, in fact, in the run up to this,
they start having those communications like,
"Oh, a certain somebody, good old M,
"he's on that mission.
"I sure hope those documents that are very important
"make it there."
And then, they decide, "Okay, this is the day
"that allegedly the plane must crash."
>> Yes, they took this body, loaded it up,
drove it across country, and put it on a submarine.
>> Specifically, inside this tank barrel
labeled optical equipment.
Nobody on this submarine knew
that they were ghoulishly transporting a body
for the purposes of deceiving the Nazis,
but they get to the mission spot.
They open it up, the canister, they dump out the body,
they say a prayer, they push it off to the side.
And then, when it comes time to get rid of the canister,
they're all like, "Oh, it's floating.
"We can't have that canister there."
So they're like, "Well, let's shoot it with machine guns."
They shoot it, still floating.
And they're like, "Oh that's a real problem."
And so finally, they load it with plastic explosives
and get the tank canister to sink,
while the body and the documents are away,
at which point, they just vanish into the night.
>> Now these documents, these are the key thing.
That's really want the enemy to get, right?
>> Brian: It's an exchange between--
>> From a British officer, and they're saying,
"We are actually going to attack Greece and Sardinia."
Operation Mincemeat, what you have to understand,
is it was all part of a larger operation,
which was also part of an even larger operation,
so this was a very small cog of deception
in an entire latticework
of intrigue and mystery. >> It's a long way to go
just to create a Quentin Tarantino movie.
[laughter]
>> Alright, so, they drop the body off.
It's later found by local fisherman.
It's brought to the local authorities.
They figure out, "Oh, this is an English officer.
"What's going on?"
The local coroner has to come on out.
Meanwhile, the Brits have to act like, they're,
"Oh my gosh, there's a certain briefcase that we really need
"and we need it immediately, and since you're neutral,
"you can't say no.
"We're on our way right now."
And they had to manufacture this moment that the coroner,
they contrived to leave them alone in the room
with the wag of a finger, saying,
"Don't you go looking in our secret things.
"You just do your coroner stuff."
>> And that was the whole risk.
They really were betting everything
that someone in the Spanish military
would take these documents, look at them, and go,
"Okay, now we have to get them back to the Germans."
If that didn't happen, it could be disastrous.
>> Which brings up a whole other thing,
because after the fact, you need to know
that they took the bait.
So they did things like, they put a single eyelash
inside the sealed envelope letter,
so that if it was taken out
and then put back in and resealed,
it's very unlikely that they would remember
to put the eyelash back in there as well.
So, Nazi-sympathizing, allegedly neutral dude
is left alone with it.
They're like, "Oh here's your untouched bunch of documents."
The immediately run it back on the British side
and go over every forensic detail, and they're like,
"Yeah, they definitely went through all of this.
"They definitely photographed everything."
And then, at that point, they're all like,
"Okay, fingers crossed."
>> Yeah, and through Ultra cracking the Enigma,
and all of the German communiques,
they were able to verify later,
"Oh yes, the German forces are actually relocating
"off of Sicily to Greek and Sardinia."
>> And so this is where we get the big payoff,
and it's unclear, there's no way to know for sure
how much of an impact it had,
but I know that they had expected losses
in the range of 30,000 troops for the invasion of Sicily,
and they had around 10,000.
So it's pretty easy to squint and say
that that was a success.
It's certainly a success for awesome Modern Rogue stories.
>> In July of 1943, 160,000 Allied troops invaded Sicily,
and they had it taken by like mid-August,
helping give the Allies an approach
to the soft underbelly of Europe and toppling Mussolini.
>> All by taking a homeless person's body,
who I'm so thrilled, eventually was given a name
and given all kinds of recognition
posthumously. >> A respectful burial
and everything.
>> So this ended up being a movie, right?
>> Yeah, it was called The Man Who Never Was.
I haven't seen it, but you read the book.
>> Yeah, it's called Operation Mincemeat, and it is riveting.
It is a heist tale that is exquisitely told,
and knowing that all of it is factual,
unlike our version of it here.
Like, we're telling a campfire ghost story.
It's very well researched in the book
and highly recommended, Operation Mincemeat,
it was amazing.
>> Cool.
>> This blows my mind.
Did you know that like 52% of all men over the age of 40
have some erectile dysfunction troubles, right?
That part I understand, that's biology.
We're all just decaying human flesh.
Of those people, 75% of them never talk to their doctor.
>> There's no reason for that.
It's a health condition, you talk to a health professional.
>> Okay, but it's super awkward.
You got to look them in the eye and explain all that stuff.
What you need is a way
to get erectile dysfunction medication
from a real doctor that doesn't involve
all that awkward weirdness.
>> But if you go to getroman.com/rogue,
you can actually talk to doctors online
from the privacy of your own home.
It's discreet and it's easy.
>> Yeah, take care of that thing
and you don't have to look them in the face
while you do it.
I wonder how many people don't even know
that they're not operating at peak performance.
A bunch of people thinking like,
"Ah, I'm sure it's fine."
It doesn't have to be fine.
It could be more awesome.
>> It can be choice.
Go to getroman.com/rogue, get free two day shipping.
>> Be at peak performance, so that you can peak
while you perform.
That's good, that's good, that's free.
That one's on me, folks.
>> It's easy, it's discreet, nobody has to know,
and even if they do know, who cares?
It's your life, fix it.
>> Get off my case, dad.
>> Your dad's on your case about that?
>> Too much? >> That's weird.
Tell him to mind his own business, I think.
>> Do you want to be more famous when you're alive
or when you're dead?
>> Dead, definitely dead.
>> Why?
>> Definitely dead.
I don't need people in my business right now.
>> Coming up and asking for selfies.
That's such a problem?
You're just like, "Ugh, would you knock it off?"
>> Listen, it's going to happen.
I'm going to be more famous when I'm dead.
I promise. >> Only because
you'll be an animatronic, uh dammit, sorry.