Introducing Operation Mincemeat, the Sunday Times No.1 bestseller paperback book by historian Ben Macintyre. Thrilling and unputdownable, this is the true story of the greatest and most successful wartime deception ever attempted. It was a plan first conceived by Ian Fleming in the 1930s: use a dead body to float false plans into enemy territory.
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 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.
Ben Macintyre's book was the source of the 2021 Warner Brothers film of the same name starring Colin Firth.
'Brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining', The New Yorker
'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', The Observer'
Fascinating', The Guardian
'Astonishing, sheds riveting new light on this breath-taking plan', The Daily Mail
'A rollicking read', The Sunday Times
'Spellbinding', The Sunday Mail
