One 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."