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In the midst of World War II, on a seemingly ordinary morning in April 1943, a Spanish fisherman named José Antonio Rey María made a discovery that would alter the course of the war. Floating off the coast of Huelva, Spain, was the body of a British Royal Marine officer, a briefcase chained to his wrist. This man, identified as Major William Martin, was not a real person but a carefully constructed fiction at the heart of Operation Mincemeat, one of history’s most audacious counterintelligence operations. The documents in his briefcase, detailing Allied plans to invade Greece, were meticulously forged. When they inevitably made their way to the German High Command, they were believed. The deception was so successful that when the Allies stormed the beaches of Sicily in July 1943, they met a vastly reduced German force, whose attention had been masterfully diverted to the wrong side of the