Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed The Course Of
World War II

Product Description

A RICHARD & JUDY BOOK CLUB SELECTIONOne April morning in 1943 a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain & set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted & certainly the strangest It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction & 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 & 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 & a dead Welsh tramp Using fraud imagination & seduction Churchill's team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate & 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 & it ended up on Hitler's desk Ben Macintyre bestselling author of Agent Zigzag weaves together private documents photographs memories letters & diaries as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 & Naval Intelligence to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat