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.‎