Operation Mincemeat
How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER o NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES o NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
"Pure catnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else." --Joseph Kanon, The Washington Post Book World
The "brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining" (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker) true story of the most successful--and certainly the strangest--deception ever carried out in World War II, from the acclaimed author of The Spy and the Traitor.
Near the end of World War II, two British naval officers came up with a brilliant and slightly mad scheme to mislead the Nazi armies about where the Allies would attack southern Europe. To carry out the plan, they would have to rely on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man.
Ben Macintyre's dazzling, critically acclaimed bestseller chronicles the extraordinary story of what happened after British officials planted this dead body--outfitted in a British military uniform with a briefcase containing false intelligence documents--in Nazi territory, and how this secret mission fooled Hitler into changing military positioning, paving the way for the Allies' drive to victory.
About this Author
Ben Macintyre is the multimillion-copy bestselling author of books including Colditz, Agent Sonya, Rogue Heroes, The Spy and the Traitor, Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, and A Spy Among Friends. He is a columnist and Associate Editor at The Times, and has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. Several of his books have been made into films and television series, including Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends, and Rogue Heroes.
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 448
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2020-09-29
Reviews
"Macintyre, whose previous book chronicles the incredible exploits of Eddie Chapman, the crook turned spy known as Zigzag, excels at this sort of twisted narrative. . . . Great fun." --New York Times Book Review
"Here, finally, is the complete story with its full cast of characters (not a dull one among them), pure catnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else." --Washington Post Book World
"A nearly flawless true-life picaresque . . . zeroes in on one of the few times in war history when excessive literary imagination, instead of hobbling a clandestine enterprise, worked beyond its authors' wildest dream. . . . Almost indelibly rich with literary truffles--doppelgangers, obsession, transgression, self-fashioning. . . . It is hard to overstate how cinematic this story really was." --New Republic
"Another true WWII tale that reads like something by Ian Fleming . . . the fullest account yet." --Entertainment Weekly
"Fascinating . . . and it's all true." --Seattle Times
"Macintyre's great achievement in recounting Operation Mincemeat is to strip away the veils of jingoistic self-satisfaction and official secrecy and tell the story . . . in precise detail and with conclusive accuracy. . . . He has the instincts of a novelist rather than an historian when it comes to elision, exposition, narration and pace, and his depiction of character is vividly alive to nuance and idiosyncrasy." --The Times
"A terrific book. . . . Macintyre offers a mass of new detail, and enchanting pen portraits of the British, Spanish and German participants. His book is a rollicking read for all those who enjoy a spy story so fanciful that Ian Fleming--himself an officer in Montagu's wartime department--would never have dared to invent it." --Sunday Times
"Macintyre is fast becoming a one-man industry in these updated tales of cunning, bravery and skulduggery. . . . It is hard to think of a better guide to keep beckoning us back to that fascinating world." --The Observer
"A chillingly good book. . . . Macintyre has taken a well-known story of wartime deception, embellished it, and shown that it was even more ingenious and even more risky than we had all supposed." --The Spectator
"Macintyre has a journalist's nose for a great story, and a novelist's skill in its narration. If anything, Operation Mincement is even more spellbinding than his previous story of wartime espionage, Agent Zigzag, with a cast-list every bit as dotty and colorful. . . . Macintyre is a master of the thumbnail character sketch." --Mail on Sunday
"Another well-researched, entertaining confection, rich in the odd characters and hocus-pocus of the spook world. Operation Mincemeat is more an eccentric detective mystery than a gory war story. . . . Operation Mincemeat, patterned like a novel and alert to its own fictiveness, suggests that the spy game is close to fantasy." --Times Literary Supplement
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