Operation Mincemeat : The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II

A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB SELECTIONA SUNDAY TIMES NO 1. BESTSELLER’Astonishing … Sheds riveting new light on this breathtaking plan’ Daily Mail’A rollicking read’ Max Hastings, Sunday Times’Brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining’ Malcolm Gladwell, New YorkerApril, 1943: a sardine fisherman spots the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and sets off a train 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, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, and a dead Welsh tramp.

This is the true story of the most extraordinary deception ever planned by Churchill’s spies: an outrageous lie that travelled from a Whitehall basement all the way to Hitler’s desk.