A RICHARD & JUDY BOOK CLUB SELECTION 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.