Why did Admiral Dudley Pound scatter Convoy PQ17 in the Barents Sea on the evening of 4th July 1942? Most of the merchant ships were destroyed while not a single one of the warships assigned to protect them was lost, casting a long shadow over subsequent events. Why did Pound act as he did? And why was this information an official secret for so long? It might have remained so, but for the revelations of a dead man talking.