Forget stealth helicopters and night vision. In 1943, one of the most audacious covert strikes of the Pacific war relied on brown skin dye, meticulous garbage sorting, and a foul-smelling 70-foot wooden fishing boat carrying 14 men into the heart of Japanese-held Singapore Harbor. This episode uses declassified archives and operational logs to explore Operation Jaywick, a raid by the Allied Z Special Unit that was a flawless tactical victory on paper and a catastrophe for the innocent people left behind.

We meet the mismatched planners, 28-year-old British officer Ivan Lyon and 61-year-old Australian civilian Bill Reynolds, whose former Japanese fish carrier became the Krait, named for a small venomous snake. We follow the defective collapsible canoes, the go fever that pushed the mission forward anyway, the voyage from Exmouth Gulf through ...