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Episode Title: Operation Mincemeat — The Spy Who Never Lived

Season 1, Episode 6 — The Spies & Secret Wars

He had a fiancée. A bank manager who was annoyed with him. Theater ticket stubs from a night out in London. A locked briefcase full of secret documents, chained to his wrist.

He had never been alive.

In the spring of 1943, the body of "Major William Martin" washed up on a beach in neutral Spain — and within days, the documents in his briefcase had traveled from a Spanish fisherman, to Spanish naval intelligence, to the German embassy in Madrid, to Berlin, to Adolf Hitler's own desk. What those papers said convinced Hitler that the Allies were about to invade Greece and Sardinia — not Sicily, the target every map in Europe pointed to. He moved real divisions. He sent Erwin Rommel to guard a coastline that was never going to be attacked.

None of it was real. The man in the uniform had been a homeless Welshman named Glyndwr Michael, dead of rat poison, with no family to claim him. Every detail of "Major Martin's" life — his love letters, his overdraft, his engagement ring receipt — had been invented from scratch by two British intelligence officers with an almost obsessive eye for the small, unglamorous details that make a fake life feel real.

It is one of the most successful deception operations in the history of warfare — built entirely around a man who never lived a single day of the life that fooled Hitler's high command.

In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the planning, the boots that wouldn't fit a dead man's frozen feet, the nine agonizing days of waiting in Spain, and the captured German archives that finally proved the whole thing had worked.

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