But the police car that collected me took me to Wormwood Scrubs Prison. I remember it as the day I was called up. Most of us remember the seventh of September 1940 as the day the London docks were bombed and devastated by fire. Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war.Print The Spy Runner - Ronnie Reed and Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat and the Cambridge Spies Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.įilled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure.

The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.Ĭharles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated- Operation Mincemeat.

In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans. Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” ( New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” ( Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” ( Boston Globe).

Agent zigzag and operation mincemeat