Book description
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. I have never enjoyed a spy store more
Ben Macintyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times.
He has worked as the newspaper s correspondent in New York, Paris and
Washington. He is the author of eight previous books including Agent
Zigzag,
shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Galaxy British Book
Award for Biography of the Year 2008,
and the no. 1 bestseller Operation Mincemeat
. He lives in London with his wife and three children.
