This book reveals the secret wartime role of the RAF's Special Duties Operators, employed to spy on and interfere with enemy radar and radio communications.

At the centre of the story is Ted Manners, who flew as the  secret ‘eighth man’ in an otherwise normal operational Lancaster bomber aircraft belonging to 101 Squadron. Using his specialist knowledge, equipment and training, his job was to intercept communications between Luftwaffe ground control and the night-fighter squadrons operating in the skies over Germany in 1944.  By listening into their communications it was possible  either to gain advance knowledge of the activities of enemy aircraft movements  in order to avoid them or issue spoof messages to send them in the wrong direction.  Other activities involve jamming their radio signals so that they could not communicate with ground control and jamming their radar direction finding equipment which they used to locate the whereabouts of RAF aircraft.

It is also the story of the remaining members of the Lancaster crew with whom Ted flew, on a tour of operations that included eight trips to Berlin as well as others to Nuremberg, Leipzig and Mailly-Le-Camp ... on one occasion surviving a mid-air collision over Belgium.

The book also gives an excellent insight into the wider activities of No.101 Special Duties Squadron, whose attrition rate at the time was so high that, in the course of their six-month period with the squadron, Ted and his colleagues were the only crew to complete a tour of 30 operations ... in the process winning two DFCs and a DFM between them.