Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II

Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom is publishing Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II.

The incredible war story is more commonly known as The Man Who Never Was, the title of another book and film based on the World War II events.

A video trailer for Macintyre's new book can be seen via the below link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlbSZspTkTs

Bloomsbury, the publisher of the new book, writes: "This is the thrilling true story of the greatest and most successful wartime deception ever attempted. 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 (seen in below photo), 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. "

Macintyre, a columnist and associate editor with The London Times, wrote about Operation Mincemeat in the newspaper here

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Macintyre can be viewed talking about his new book via the below link:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC2C-GiOQRE

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Harmony will publish the book in the U.S. this May. Below is the Harmony cover.