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Corkscrew Minds Deceiving the enemy in wartime, thought Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, was just like fishing: specifically fly-fishing for trout. ‘The Trout Fisher,’ he wrote, in a top-secret memo, ‘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.’ Godfrey’s ‘Trout Memo’ was distributed to the other chiefs of wartime intelligence on 29 September 1939, when the war was barely three weeks old. It was issued under Godfrey’s name, but it bore all the hallmarks of his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who would go on to write the James Bond novels. Fleming had, in Godfrey’s words, a ‘marked flair’ for intelligence planning, and was particularly skilled, as one might expect, at dreaming up what he called ‘plots’ to outfox the enemy. Fleming called these plans ‘romantic Red Indian daydreams’, but they were deadly serious. The memo laid out numerous ideas for bamboozling the Germans at sea, the many ways that the fish might be trapped through ‘deception, ruses de guerre, passing on false information and so on’. The ideas were extraordinarily imaginative and, like most of Fleming’s writing, barely credible. The memo admitted as much. ‘At first sight, many of these appear somewhat fantastic, but nevertheless they
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