Trout memo

{{Short description|1939 document}}

The Trout memo, written in 1939, is a document comparing the deception of an enemy in wartime with fly fishing.{{cite web|url=https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/meet-true-inspiration-james-bond-151937797.html|title=Meet The True Inspiration For James Bond: Triple Agent Dusan Popov|author=|date=|website=www.Yahoo.com|access-date=27 April 2019}} Issued under the name of Admiral John Godfrey, Britain's director of naval intelligence, according to the historian Ben Macintyre it bore the hallmarks of having been written by Godfrey's assistant Ian Fleming, who later created the James Bond series of spy novels.Ben MacIntyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, [https://books.google.com/books?id=E6ZiYhuEW1MC&dq=Operation+Mincemeat+trout+memo&pg=PA11 Chapter 2.]

The memo reads, in part: "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." The memo lists 54 ways that the enemy, like trout, may be fooled or lured.

The 28th suggestion, inspired by a novel written by Basil Thomson, was titled "A Suggestion (not a very nice one)."{{Cite news|url=https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127742365|title=Dead Man Floating: World War II's Oddest Operation|website=NPR.org}} This idea was the inspiration for Operation Mincemeat, a World War II plan developed by British military officers Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu, to plant misleading documents on a dead body to convince the Germans that the Allies would attack Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily in 1943. When the operation succeeded, confirmation was sent to Churchill: "Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker."