Mr Lü told me that the photo was of a young Vietnamese soldier, a man known to everyone as Hồ Hải Dương, even though his real name was Vĩ Phu. In life, the two were complete strangers, but in death they ‘cooperated’, in a manner of speaking, and performed a job that, to this day, Mr Lü considers a ‘masterpiece’. However, he was quite prepared to admit that it was not his own idea; he based it on the famous Operation Mincemeat that was carried out during the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the work of two British intelligence officers: Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley. The main protagonist of this operation was the corpse of a man named Glyndwr Michael, the time was the last day of April 1943, and the place was deep water off the coast of Huelva in Spain. On that day Michael’s body was faked up to make it look like the corpse of Captain William Martin of the Royal Marines and from that moment it took on new life – it became Montagu and Cholmondeley’s most important assistant. Indeed, this body accomplished its mission with a distinction that no living agent could have achieved. Mr Lü explained that he and this young Vietnamese man, Vĩ Phu, worked together in what was basically a replay of Operation Mincemeat. There was nothing new about it and even the ‘surprise ending’ was just the same.