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.
About The Reader
Michael Tudor Barnes. After reading Classics at London University, Michael Tudor Barnes trained
at RADA and for five years was a member of the National Theatre Company. He has also worked with
the RSC, has played leading roles both home and abroad and has over 600 radio broadcasts to his
credit. Television work includes The Bill and Softly, Softly; but he is probably best known to
viewers as Willy Roper in EastEnders.
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