Operation Mincemeat Book

One April morning in 1943 a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a series of events that would change the course of the Second World War' ; ; Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted and certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different in one crucial respect from any spy before or since: he was dead. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily the Allied armies planned to invade Greece. ; ; The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister the great hoax involved an extraordinary cast of characters including a famous forensic pathologist a gold-prospector an inventor a beautiful secret service secretary a submarine captain three novelists a transvestite English spymaster an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing and a dead Welsh tramp. Using fraud imagination and seduction Churchill's team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate and so convincing that they began to believe it themselves. The deception started in a windowless basement beneath Whitehall. It travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany. And it ended up on Hitler's desk. ; ; Ben Macintyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times. He has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York Paris and Washington. He is the author of seven previous books including Agent Zigzag the story of wartime double-agent Eddie Chapman which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Galaxy British Book Award for Biography of the Year 2008. He lives in London with his wife and three children.

''Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II''.