Trout Fishing for Spies

The Trout Memo, written in 1939, is a document that used trout fishing as a metaphor for luring the enemy into making bad decisions.

Issued in the name of Admiral John Godfrey, Britain's director of naval intelligence, it was almost certainly written by Godfrey's assistant, Ian Fleming, who later created the James Bond series of spy novels.

Fleming named his hero "James Bond" after the name of the author of Birds of the West Indies -- the book that happened to be on Ian Fleming's desk back in 1953 when he began writing Casino Royale while staying at Golden Eye, his villa in Jamaica.

Back to the Trout Memo: it suggested 54 ways that an enemy, like trout, could be fooled or lured in.

The Trout Fisher casts patiently all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures. If he has frightened a fish he may 'give the water a rest for half-an-hour,' but his main endeavour, viz. to attract fish by something he sends out from his boat, is incessant.

One suggestion gleaned by Fleming from a novel by author Basil Thomson (The Milliner's Hat Mystery) was to become the basis of  "Operation Mincemeat."

The idea was a simple one: produce an "accidental" body for the enemy that happened to carry with it fake documents, in this case battle plans. 

Whose body was actually used in this caper is still in question. It might have been a homeless man who died from ingesting rat poison, or a sailor who drowned during the sinking of a British aircraft carrier.

Whoever it was, the body was dressed as a Royal Marine and personal items were placed on him identifying him as a fictitious Captain (Acting Major) William Martin.

Correspondence between two British generals were placed in his pockets suggested the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily, with Sicily simply being the object of a feint. 

Loaded onto a submarine, the dead man's body and his forged documents were transported to the southern coast of Spain and released close to shore in expectation that the body would be found and turned over to local police who were paid informants for the Abwehr, German's military intelligence division.

Ultra decrypts of German messages showed the Germans fell for the ruse, and they subsequently sent military reinforcements to Greece and Sardinia, rather than Sicily.

A cable to Winston Churchill read: "Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker."

In 1953, Ewen Montagu, one of the intelligence officers who planned and carried out Operation Mincemeat, wrote a history which later became the basis for the 1956 British film The Man Who Never Was.

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