Ben Macintyre talks about Operation Mincemeat

http://www.bloomsbury.com/operationmincemeat
Find out the secrets behind Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II. Interview with Ben Macintyre, author of the bestselling Agent Zigzag and, now, Operation Mincemeat.

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.

Read an extract from Operation Mincemeat here:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/operationmincemeat

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[MyVintageVictory]

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[Lacedaemonia]

Listening to the audiobook now. Quite like it, but this video would have put me off if I saw it first.

[01Sterlitz]

Sound is no good. Please re-do this video.

[PZK12]

Bad idea by the PR department at Bloomsbury to make this look like a WW2 footage. Stopped me watching it.

[piprobins]

i wonder if MacIntyre ever gets out enough ?

[floodofthecentury]

It sounds as if Ben Macintyre is entirely unaware this was a well-known story before he came across it. For example it was made into a movie in 1956 entitled THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS

[gunthaarz]

I knew about the outlines of this operation as a 16 year old (I'm 40 now) , granted there was a lot of world war two interest in Norway in the 70's and 80's but still. The body floating ashore with false documents was very well known world war two information among my friends, but yeah, it's gotta be retold to new generations..

[jrcadet4]

I was most of the way through Ben Macintyre's excellent book before I recalled that MY FATHER was in the first wave of American troops who went ashore on Sicily. Without Operation Mincemeat's success, it's quite possible that I wouldn't exist today. Thank you, Mr. Macintyre, for shedding light on such an extraordinary chapter in history.