In July 1998, the British Public Record Office declassified a 20-page dossier locked away for over half a century: a step-by-step blueprint for assassinating Adolf Hitler. This episode sifts through Operation Foxley and the wartime doctrine of the Special Operations Executive, formed to set Europe ablaze, to understand how British intelligence solved the tactical puzzle of killing Hitler in 1944, and why the trigger was never pulled.

The plan grew from Churchill's 1941 authorization to target Nazi leadership, the 1942 proof of concept in Operation Anthropoid against Reinhard Heydrich, and failed ideas about bombing Hitler's armored train, until a June 1944 tip to the SOE desk in Algiers and a German POW captured in Normandy, a former Berghof guard, revealed that Hitler took a solitary 20-minute walk every morning just after 10 a.m. from the ...