British intelligence placed forged military documents on a corpse dressed as a Royal Marines officer and released it off Huelva, Spain. The papers falsely suggested that Allied forces would invade Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. German intelligence accepted the deception and diverted resources away from the true target.

The operation joined espionage to imaginative authorship: identity, letters and an entire private life were fabricated for a dead man. Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was turned the episode into influential narrative nonfiction and helped shape post-war spy literature.