Ben McIntyre

The Times’ Writer at Large on his best-selling account of the daring and fabulously-named spy story that changed the course of World War II: Operation Mincemeat.

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Ben Macintyre is a columnist, writer-at-large and also Associate Editor of The Times. He currently contributes a regular column, while his earlier roles at the paper have included editing the Weekend Review section, parliamentary sketchwriting and bureau chief in New York, Washington and Paris.

He is the author of a number of historical non-fiction books, including Forgotten Fatherland (1992); The Napoleon of Crime (1997), the true story of the Victorian master thief who was the model for Conan Doyle's Moriarty; A Foreign Field (2001); The Englishman’s Daughter (2002); The Man Who Would Be King (2004); Agent Zigzag, the extraordinary tale of Eddie Chapman, wartime double agent and Bond-alike, which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Tesco Biography of the Year at the 2008 Galaxy British Book Awards; and The Last Word: Tales from the Tip of the Mother Tongue, a witty collection of all things lexical, from Boris Johnson’s coining of the term 'bemerded' to mean 'to be fouled by a dog', to cracking the reviewers’ code: “what reviewers really mean when they say exhaustive (exhausting), compelling (I managed to finish it), detailed (has footnotes) and richly detailed (has lots of footnotes)”.

He lives in London with his wife (novelist and fellow novelist and Times columnist, Kate Muir), and their three children. His most recent book is Operation Mincemeat, the daring tale of the audacious spy operation that changed the course of World War II.


Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II
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.

Read more about Operation Mincemeat at Lovereading.co.uk