One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and 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, 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, a transvestite English spymaster, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, and a dead Welsh tramp. Using fraud, imagination and seduction, Churchill''s team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate and 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. And it ended up on Hitler''s desk. Ben Macintyre, bestselling author of Agent Zigzag , weaves together private documents, photographs, memories, letters and diaries, as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 and Naval Intelligence, to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat.>

Vorwort
Ben Macintyre's thrilling true story of the greatest and most successful wartime deception ever attempted

Autorentext

Ben Macintyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times. He has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. He is the author of seven previous books including Agent Zigzag, the story of wartime double-agent Eddie Chapman, which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Galaxy British Book Award for Biography of the Year 2008. He lives in London with his wife and three children.

Klappentext

**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
***____________________

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.

Zusammenfassung
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 **____________________ ** 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.