During the Second World War, Wheatley was a member of Winston Churchill’s Joint Planning Staff, employed to confuse the enemy by writing ‘plausible, official documents’ on various aspects of the war and current affairs. Two years later, in 1941 he was invited to join the Joint Planning Staff of the Cabinet Office which was responsible, among other things, for enemy deception. His fertile imagination was given full rein.
Wheatley became a member of the London Controlling Section which planned such covert operations as ‘The Man Who Never Was’ and ‘Monty’s Double’. Wheatley and the rest of the team came up with many deception plans to mislead the enemy including plans that would lead to the success of ‘Operation Torch’, the landing of a large force in North Africa in 1943, and the deception plans for ‘Operation Overlord’, the D-Day Normandy landings in June 1944.
Some of the deception plans that London Controlling Section were involved with:
November 1942, ‘Operation Torch’ was a deception plan to make the enemy believe that a large force was destined for Norway, when in fact, its destination was North Africa.
Another deception was ‘Operation Mincemeat’. The plan was to drop the dead body of an apparently senior officer off the coast of Spain carrying secret papers to indicate that the Allies were planning to invade Greece and Sardinia, rather than Sicily. The story is told in ‘The Man Who Never Was’. The author, Ewen Montagu, helped in the deception plan.
The following gallery gives information about his time in the army, other operations and non-fiction books.
Wing Commander Dennis Wheatley. ©DW 
The members of the London Controlling Section in 1943. ©DW 
The Man Who Never Was. The story of ‘Operation Mincemeat’, the deception plan to drop a dead body carrying secret papers. ©DW 
Another plan involved finding someone who looked like Montgomery, and passing him off as the General. ©DW 
Wheatley had been privy to a great deal of secret information that he could not directly use in his writing. However, in the 1950s, stories of Deception Planning began to be published and Stranger than Fiction, which included Wheatley’s activities as a deception planner, was published in 1959. ©DW 
Dennis with his wife Joan at the launch party for Stranger than Fiction. ©DW
