The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister, this great deception involved an extraordinary cast of characters including Ian Fleming, who would go on to write the James Bond stories a famous forensic pathologist a beautiful secret service secretary a submarine captain three novelists an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing and a dead, Welsh tramp. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies would invade Greece. It hoodwinked Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops racing 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. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. (Oct.One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain, setting in train a course of events that would change the course of World War Two. provided invaluable intelligence,” but “it was never clear whether he was on the side of the angels or the devils.” Of the two Zigzag biographies this fall (the other, by Nicholas Booth, is reviewed below), this is clearly superior. In the end, the author concludes that Chapman “repeatedly risked his life.

Doubled by MI5 (the security service responsible for counterespionage), Chapman was used “to feed vital disinformation to the enemy” and was one of the few double agents “to delude their German handlers until the end of the war.” Meticulously researched-relying extensively on recently released wartime files of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service-Macintyre's biography often reads like a spy thriller. After undergoing German military intelligence training, Chapman parachuted into England in December 1942 with instructions to sabotage a De Havilland aircraft factory, but he surrendered after landing safely. Giving “little thought” to the morality of his decision, Chapman offered to work as a spy for the Germans in 1940 after his release from an English prison in the Channel Islands, then occupied by the Germans. ) adroitly dissects the enigmatic World War II British double agent Eddie Chapman in this intriguing and balanced biography. Associate editor Macintyre ( The Man Who Would Be King

Agent zigzag and operation mincemeat