THE 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 Yorker
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April, 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. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different 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.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781526682574
Number of pages: 416
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
A rollicking read for all those who enjoy a spy story so fanciful that Ian Fleming - himself an officer in Montagu's wartime department - would never have dared to invent it - Max Hastings, Sunday Times
Ben Macintyre, also the author of the acclaimed Agent Zigzag, is fast becoming a one-man industry in these updated tales of cunning, bravery and skulduggery. With his mix of meticulous research and a good hack's eye for narrative, it is hard to think of a better guide to keep beckoning us back to that fascinating world - Observer
Macintyre has a journalist's nose for a great story, and a novelist's skill in its narration ... Even more spellbinding than his previous story of wartime espionage, Agent Zigzag, with a cast-list every bit as dotty and colourful ... Macintyre is a master of the thumbnail character sketch - Mail on Sunday
With its fantastic plot and its cast of eccentric characters, the book reads like the most improbable of spy stories. It is a tribute to Macintyre's skill that we never for a moment forget that it is actually all true - Daily Telegraph
Astonishing ... Sheds riveting new light on this breathtaking plan - Daily Mail
Brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining - Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker
A brilliant book, well written, that flys along like a thriller. Ben MacIntyre has the ability to suck you into a story. It's an extremely compelling true story that you won't be able to put down.
I was familiar with the operation concerning 'the man who never was' from the original 1950s book and film, but aware that some of the details had been suppressed or changed. This new account of a major and... More
I would agree whole heartedly with the customer reviews. This is easily accessible and deeply fascinating. I knew very little of the story but found the twists and turns thoroughly engaging. By the end I felt a little... More
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