Operation Mincemeat
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Chapter two Corkscrew Minds Deceiving the Enemy in Wartime thought Admiral John Godfrey, Britain's director of naval intelligence, was just like fishing. Specifically fly fishing for trout the trout Fisher, he wrote in a top secret memo, cast patiently all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures. If he's frightened of fish, he may give the water rest for half an hour. But his main endeavour is 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 September 29 1939 when the war was barely three weeks old. It was issued under God for his 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 God, for his words, Mark Flair, intelligence planning and was particularly skilled, as one might expect, dreaming of 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 deceptions, Rudiger passing on false information and the like. The ideas were extraordinarily imaginative and, like most of Fleming's writings, barely credible. The memo admitted as much at first sight, many of these appear somewhat fantastic, but nevertheless they contain germs of some good ideas. And the more you examine them, the less fantastic they appear. Godfrey was himself a most literal man, hard driving, irascible and indefatigable. He was a model for N. In Fleming's Bond stories, there was no one in naval intelligence with a keener appreciation, the peculiar mentality needed for espionage and counter espionage, the business of deception handling double agents, deliberate leakages and building up in the minds of the enemy. Confidence in the double agent needed the sort of corkscrew mind that I did not possess, he wrote. Gathering intelligence and distributing false intelligence was, he thought, like pushing quick silver through a gorse bush with a long handled spoon?