Operation Mincemeat / Double Cross / Agent Zigzag

by Ben Macintyre

Agent Zigzag: One December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort. His name was Eddie Chapman, but he would shortly become MI5's Agent Zigzag. Dashing and louche, courageous and unpredictable, inside the traitor was a hero, inside the villain, a man of conscience: the problem for Chapman, his many lovers and his spymasters, was knowing where one ended and the other began. Ben Macintyre weaves together diaries, letters, photographs, memories and top-secret MI5 files to create the exhilarating account of Britain's most sensational double agent.Operation Mincemeat:One overcast April morning in 1943, a fisherman notices a corpse floating in the sea off the coast of Spain. When the body is brought ashore, he is identified as a British soldier, Major William Martin of the Royal Marines. A leather attaché case, secured to his belt, reveals an intelligence goldmine: top-secret documents Allied invasion plans. But Major William Martin never existed. The body is that of a dead Welsh tramp and every single document is fake. Operation Mincemeat is the incredible true story of the most extraordinary deception ever planned by Churchill's spies - an outrageous lie that travelled from a Whitehall basement, all the way to Hitler's desk. Double Cross:D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit... At the heart of the deception was the 'Double Cross System', a team of double agents whose bravery, treachery, greed and inspiration succeeded in convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong Allied invasion force. These were not conventional warriors, but their masterpiece of deceit saved thousands of lives. Their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo. This is their story.

Genres: History

Paperback

First published November 7, 2012

About the author

Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (U.K.) and the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

Reviews

[Matty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great war stories of espionage and all the smoke and mirror operations to go with it. But a really long read! It's a fascinating and detailed read on operations, characters, dynamics and the ever changing playing chess game that intelligence communities play during war. I loved the detail on some of the successful but also unsuccessful operations. I also loved the description of the characters and their specific quirks. The downside of all this is that the details sometimes make it hard to progress and get through a book. On the flip side all the stories are intertwined as the same agents show up in different books, it really helps to build a better view of how things evolved and coincided. Ive reviewed zig-zag and mincemeat separately so I'll focus on double cross here; probably the biggest deception campaign we know of to date. It's about a relatively small eccentric group of people that are able to spin an elaborate web of lies and build and imaginary network of agents. Together they with a mission to feed the German intelligence false information but they end by completely owning the German spy network in the UK and influencing the war at a grand scale. it's a tale of agents, double, triple, quadruple and even quintuple agents. the ultimate success is the influence this campaign had on one of the most decisive days of the war: D-Day. And to top if off these stories are real, real people, real tragedy, real triumph, real heartbreak.

[Tony Dimartino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read all three of these books and they are absolutely brilliant.

[Garth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great Macintyre omnibus.