Our Man in New York - a review

Hear the words ‘America First’, ‘fake news’ and ‘agents of influence’, we would probably think of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan, the pernicious spread of disinformation via traditional news outlets and social media, and Russian interference in the US presidential election. To Ian Fleming, these phrases would have meant one thing – the British campaign, led by William Stephenson, to bring the United States into the Second World. In his new book, Henry Hemming reveals the full story of MI6’s head of station in New York and his audacious campaign, which till now has only partially been told.  

By June 1940, Britain was in trouble. France had fallen to the German forces as thousands of allied soldiers were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk. Merchant shipping, carrying vital supplies to the country across the Atlantic, faced constant threat from U-boat attack, and a German invasion of Britain seemed imminent. Winston Churchill knew that Britain would not win the war without America’s help. President Roosevelt was sympathetic to the cause, but his hands were tied; America was officially neutral and its population heavily anti-interventionist. Britain somehow had to overcome public opinion and break down powerful lobby groups. One man, MI6’s agent in New York, recognised that it had to be done by any means necessary. 

William Stephenson, a Canadian businessman and unlikely-looking spymaster, having brought himself to the attention of ‘C’, the head of MI6, was appointed to run an influence campaign in America. The work began uncertainly, but soon Stephenson knew what he had to do and in time built up an organisation – eventually given the cover name ‘British Security Coordination’ – that occupied an entire floor of New York’s Rockefeller Center. 

Henry Hemming has trawled through the archives and examined recently declassified files to reveal the full extent of Stephenson’s racket. The organisation run by Stephenson began rumours to discredit individuals sympathetic to Germany, devised opinion polls so that the results would appear more favourable, fed propaganda (and entirely false) stories to newspapers and radio stations, infiltrated campaign groups, set honey-traps and faked plans that seemed to put the Nazi threat on America’s doorstep. Stephenson himself cultivated a friendship with people close to the president, most importantly William Donovan, who would head-up the forerunner to the CIA.

As personal assistant to the Director of the Naval Intelligence, Ian Fleming weaves in and out of the narrative. Fleming’s part in the creation of what would become the CIA can be overplayed, and though Fleming was a key player, Hemming duly sets the record straight.
Hemming has not forgotten the Bond connection either. One of the two kills that earn James Bond his double-O status takes place at the Rockefeller Center. It’s worth noting, too, that William Stephenson would often meet people at the St Regis Hotel; James Bond stays there in the novel of Live and Let Die (1954).

There’s room, too, for other individuals who in time would leave a mark on James Bond lore. Ivar Bryce, Fleming’s friend and financial backer of the early attempts to bring Bond to the big screen, used his South American expertise during his time with BSC to fake a map that was almost decisive in bringing America into the war. (Interestingly, the same map is described as genuine in Room 3603, an earlier account of William Stephenson and the BSC. It’s fascinating to consider that Ian Fleming wrote a foreword to a book that he knew was far from the full story, as had been claimed on the dustjacket.) Roald Dahl, responsible for the screenplays of You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, also worked for the BSC. I would like to have read more about Roald Dahl’s knack for digging out scandal that could be used to Britain’s advantage, as well the adventures he and Fleming enjoyed during their time together in New York and Washington away from the office, but perhaps that’s another story.

Our Man in New York is a fascinating read as thrilling as any work of fiction. There aren’t many history books that you’ll want to read in one sitting, but this is one of them. Henry Hemming has written a superb book that deserves a place on every Fleming aficionado’s bookshelf. 

Our Man in New York by Henry Hemming is published by Quercus in the UK and in the US (as Agents of Influence) by PublicAffairs.

Finding Bond in the Imperial War Museum's Secret War exhibition

During a recent visit to the Imperial War Museum in London, I made a bee-line for the fascinating Secret War exhibition, where I saw some of the gadgets, weapons and other tricks of the trade of covert operations, and read of the exploits of SOE agents, special forces, and Cold War spies.

Even in an exhibition of real-life agents, James Bond is never far away. Visitors entering the exhibition are met by a display that includes a poster of Casino Royale (2006), which is accompanied by the words, 'It's easy to mistake spy fiction for reality'. Turning the corner takes visitors to a short film, in which the real begins to be separated from the fictional; the video is soundtracked by music from the Bond films, and various images from the films appear on screen.
 

At the entrance to the Secret War exhibition

The exhibition displays gadgets – many designed for use in the Second World War – that are echoed in the Bond films and to a much lesser extent in the books (although the name of Q Branch may well owe something to the 'Q gadgets’ created for SOE agents by Charles Fraser-Smith). Ordinary items such as fountain pens, clothes brushes, razors, shoes and so on were used to conceal maps, secret messages, compasses, invisible ink, wire, tools and much more, and can be seen in the display cases.
 

Some of the everyday objects used for secret work in WW2

There is information too on Second World War agents who become famous for their remarkable wartime stories, among them Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas and Fitzroy Maclean, both of whom have been claimed as inspirations for James Bond.

There was one other aspect that had a vague Bond link. During the Cold War, agents resident in the USSR and elsewhere and preparing to spy for Britain were provided with recognition guides to the weapons, equipment and other strategic features of those territories. One handbook, for example, is called 'A pictorial guide to bridge recognition'. I was especially interested in two other handbooks on display. Both, in brown covers and ring-bound, are decorated with a silhouette of a gun. 

Looking at image on the handbook intended for agents in the Middle East, I was naturally reminded of the gun symbol that was used on the posters of the early Bond films and adapted for the Pan paperbacks published in 1962 and 1963.
 

Spy manual (left) and 007 logo from 1963

It seems highly unlikely that Joseph Caroff of United Artists, who had the idea for superimposing an image of a gun on the number 007, had seen the agents' handbooks, access to which was highly restricted. However, given that the handbooks were produced from the mid-1950s and into the 70s, it's not entirely impossible that the compilers of the handbooks were inspired by the posters. 

Whatever the case, the coincidence of practically the same device being used in relation to fictional and real-life spies is very pleasing.

James Bond goes commando

Journalists, historians and James Bond experts may have been arguing about the origins of James Bond for decades, but one thing is clear from the many interviews Ian Fleming gave: Bond was based on commandos Fleming had met during the Second World War. And naturally, since those interviews, the search has been on for individuals that may have inspired Fleming the most, individuals such as Patrick Dalzel-Job and Fitzroy Maclean.

Lately, though, I've begun to wonder whether this speculation is rather fruitless. Ian Fleming didn't, of course, mention any names, and, short of a long-lost document or interview containing the name, we can never be certain about any of our suggestions. What's more, Fleming's descriptions of Bond as a mixture of wartime commando types appear to date to the final two years of Fleming's life; before then, there is little hint of this origin. With this in mind, it could be argued that the commando inspiration was a narrative that Fleming gave to Bond retrospectively, a little like Bond's Scottish roots. Let's look at the evidence.

The interviews in which Fleming talks about the inspirations for Bond appear to date exclusively to 1963 and 1964. In an edition of the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 1963, Fleming told the presenter Roy Plomley that Bond was a 'mixture of commandos and secret service agents I met during the war.' Fleming confessed to CIA director Allen Dulles in 1964 that Bond 'is more a commando type' than a spy. In a Playboy interview dated 1964, Fleming regarded Bond as 'slightly more true to the type of modern hero, to the commandos of the last war' than to the heroes of ancient thrillers. Fleming told Daily Express journalist John Cruesemann in January 1964 that Bond was 'a compound of... commando types', and he said as much to Jack Fishman in an interview published in 1965.

Given Fleming's consistent explanation, it's curious that commandos are absent from earlier pieces. When Ian Fleming was in conversation with fellow writer Raymond Chandler for a BBC broadcast in 1958, he discussed the nature of literary heroes, his and Chandler's in particular, but didn't mention that Bond was inspired by the real heroism of wartime commandos. Fleming wrote of the work of the Secret Service, of frogman Buster Crabb, and secret tunnels in Berlin in a piece published in Broadsheet, the bulletin of World Books, in 1956 to illustrate how the fantastic events in his novels were not so unusual, but didn't include commandos in that list. In his piece, 'How to write a thriller', published in 1962, Fleming similarly described wartime secret service exploits, for example the Man who Never Was', and wrote in answer to the typical question of his readers, 'how do you manage to think of that?', that some incidences in Casino Royale were 'extracted' from his 'wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division'. But again, no commandos.

It's true that a commando dagger features on Richard Chopping's cover of The Spy who Loved Me (published in 1962), thus establishing a connection between commandos and Bond. Moreover, there are many aspects of the Bond books that are clearly drawn from the Second World War. It should also be noted that Fleming gave many more interviews in the final years of his life as Bond's popularity grew than he had done in the earlier stages in his career as a novelist. Faced with the demands of journalists, broadcasters and the like, Fleming may have introduced the commando explanation to add interest or to assuage complaints that his plots were implausible. And with each telling, the explanation become better established.

My trawl through the archives of Fleming's interviews is by no means exhaustive, and it is possible that there is some piece dating before 1963 that states that Bond was based on commando types that Fleming had met during the war. Judging from what I've assembled, however, the commando meme was a late development, and before then, the source of inspiration for Bond was more generally located in the Second World War and the Cold War (not to mention including a good dose of Fleming himself). Any search for 'the real James Bond', particularly from the pool of wartime commandos, is likely to be something of a wild goose chase. 

Postscript

I should add that I'm of course aware that Ian Fleming set up and ran a commando unit during the Second World War, and that the Bond books contain references to commandos and have Bond doing commando-like feats. My point, however, is this: Ian Fleming didn't write a series of commando adventures, and probably didn't even start out with a fully-formed character in mind, with all the memetic building blocks in place. Bond acquired commando-like traits, along with others (for example, the traits of the fictional American private eye), gradually over the course of the series. Casino Royale (1953) itself is different in many ways from the other books and draws most heavily on Ian Fleming's own experiences, and only obliquely, if at all, on the experiences of the commandos he directed.

In later years, Ian Fleming developed a coherent narrative to explain the origin of James Bond that doesn't quite reflect the somewhat unplanned evolution of the character. Why Fleming began to talk about commandos to such an extent in later interviews and articles is what I find particularly fascinating, and is what I'm chiefly commenting on in this post.

I dated the earliest use of the 'commando explanation' to 1963, but I've been informed that there is an earlier mention. I'm grateful to Jeremy Duns for alerting me to a 1959 edition of Books and Bookmen, in which Ian Fleming says that he 'wanted Bond to be... a composite figure made up of commando types and spies' he met during the war. I must also point out that Jeremy Duns has explored Bond's commando roots and the commando references in the books in his excellent piece, 'Commando Bond', published in the book, Diamonds in the Rough.

Who was the real James Bond?

Over the years, there has been no shortage of speculation about which commandos Ian Fleming meant when he said that James Bond was 'a compound of secret agent and commando types I had met [during the war]'. Among the usual names linked to Bond are Fitzroy Maclean, Patrick Dalzel-Job, Conrad O'Brien Ffrench, and Dusko Popov.

To this list we can add Forest Yeo-Thomas, whom Sophie Jackson in her 2012 book, Churchill'sWhite Rabbit, has claimed was the real inspiration for Bond. As with the others, the evidence is at best circumstantial, but what is perhaps of more interest in this and other cases is the way that the perceived connection, however tenuous, provide selling points for books about the individuals.

It must be said that the wartime exploits of Forest Yeo-Thomas – a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who was parachuted into occupied France, captured by the Gestapo, imprisoned at Buchenwald, and made a daring escape – are the very stuff of Bondian-like adventure. What's more, Ian Fleming was aware of them.

During her research into Yeo-Thomas, Sophie Jackson uncovered a top-secret letter written in May 1945 by Fleming in which he expressed his happiness on learning that Yeo-Thomas, after being sent on his mission, was still alive and had escaped, and his thoughts about the publicity value of Yeo-Thomas' remarkable story.

While the letter proves that Fleming knew Yeo-Thomas and his exploits, it does no more, and the evidence Sophie Jackson offers in addition to the letter to suggest that Yeo-Thomas was the inspiration for Bond – Yeo-Thomas' capture, torture, and escape is worthy of Bond, as is his apparent popularity with women – is hardly conclusive.

But that's firm enough evidence for Sophie Jackson's publisher, The History Press, who makes the most of the connection. The book's subtitle is 'The true story of a real-life James Bond', while associated publicity states that the book reveals how Yeo-Thomas 'provided the inspiration for Ian Fleming's famous secret agent, James Bond.'

In that regard, the book is in good company. The subtitle of the 2002 edition of Patrick Dalzel-Job's autobiography, From Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy, is 'The war memoirs of the real James Bond'. (This is retained in the French edition, though the Bond connection is emphasised: Le Vrai James Bond. Des neiges de l'Arctique aux sables de la Normandie 1939-1945.) The back cover blurb of Penguin's 2009 edition of Fitzroy Maclean's classic Eastern Approaches begins, 'Fitzroy Maclean was one of the real-life inspirations for super-spy James Bond'. The back-cover text of Russell Miller's 2005 account of Dusko Popov, Operation Tricycle, is more cautious but mentions James Bond all the same.

As Henry Chancellor suggests, there is probably more of Ian Fleming in James Bond than any one commando (and to my mind, judging by statements made by Fleming and the style of the Bond books, a good dash of American private-eye thrown in for good measure). Nevertheless, the link between numerous wartime heroes and Bond remains strong, thanks in part to publishers' copy-writers and continued interest in the role of secret agents and commandos in the Second World War.

References:

Chancellor, H, 2005 James Bond: The Man and his World, John Murray

Macintyre, B, 2008 For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, Bloomsbury

Ian Fleming, Q Central and Q Branch

I was interested to learn recently of the history of Q Central, a British wartime establishment that was just as secret and vital to the war-effort as the code-breaking base at nearby Bletchley Park. What is especially intriguing is the likelihood that Ian Fleming was well-acquainted with the operations of Q Central and its satellite units.

Q Central was based at RAF Leighton Buzzard, a purpose-built station on the edge of the Bedfordshire town. Its importance cannot be overstated. The station served as the communications hub for all radio signals produced by the RAF, navy and army, and those of MI5, MI6 and MI8, as well as other secret units. Operators there also intercepted German radio traffic, which was then forwarded to Bletchley Park, and were responsible for transmitting coded messages and misinformation. It also operated, at the time, the largest telephone exchange in the world.

As personal assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence Division (NID), Ian Fleming would have been well aware of Q Central. He is likely to have known that signals sent by the Admiralty were routed through Section 2 of Q Central, and he was a regular visitor to other establishments in the area that were linked to Q Central.
 

Milton Bryan studios. Photo by Jayembee1969 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

One of these was, naturally, Bletchley Park. Another, perhaps lesser-known, location was Milton Bryan, a village eight miles north-east of Leighton Buzzard. This was home to the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), Britain's 'black propaganda' unit. Led by Sefton Delmer, a Daily Express journalist and friend of Ian Fleming, the unit recruited writers, foreign-language speakers, PoWs, and forgers to create and transmit material designed to demoralise the enemy.

Much of the information that formed the basis of radio broadcasts directed at the German navy was supplied by the NID. Ian Fleming, along with NID colleague Donald McLachlan, even set up two radio stations, which, from Milton Bryan, transmitted demoralising information to U-boat crews.

Fleming often visited the studios to see the work of the unit first-hand, and when broadcasts of propaganda to what had been occupied France ceased in April 1945, Fleming joined members of the PWE at Milton Bryan for an end-of-operations celebration.

The PWE at Milton Bryan was one of a number of secret and otherwise special establishments in the area, including No. 60 (Signals) Group, which operated radar stations, the Met Office, based at Dunstable, and USAAF Cheddington, whose crews flew sorties to drop propaganda leaflets. At the heart of all this activity was Q Central.

Given its name, and Ian Fleming's connection to the area, it is tempting to link Q Central with Q Branch of the James Bond books. There is no suggestion in the books that Q Branch was based on the wartime establishment – the role of Q Branch is one of supply, gadgets and equipment, rather than communications – but it's possible that Fleming had Q Central in mind when he came up with the name (it should be remembered that there is no Quartermaster in the books). This is, of course, highly speculative, but it seems just as likely as the alternative hypothesis that the name of Q Branch derived from the Q ships of the First World War.

References:
Brown, P and Herbert, E (eds), 2014 The secrets of Q Central: How Leighton Buzzard shortened the Second World War, The History Press 
Lycett, A, 1995 Ian Fleming: The man behind James Bond, Turner

The parallel lives of Peter and Ian Fleming

He was a journalist and best-selling author, he devised ingenious deceptions while working in intelligence during the Second World War, he travelled to parts of the world tourists don't normally see, and he was in awe of his brother. I could be describing Ian Fleming, but it's his older brother, Peter, who I have in mind. 

I've just finished reading Duff Hart-Davis' brilliant 1974 biography of Peter Fleming, and was struck by just how closely Ian's life mirrored Peter's. Of course, being brothers growing up together, one would expect their childhoods to be near-identical, but even in adulthood, their paths followed remarkably similar trajectories.

Both Ian and Peter developed an interest in writing from a young age and began their literary careers in journalism. Ian joined Reuters in 1931, while, in the same year, Peter started at The Spectator as assistant literary editor. The following year, Peter was preparing for an expedition to Brazil, ostensibly to search for the explorer Colonel Fawcett, who had gone missing some years before, and was approached by The Times to become its Special Correspondent and report on the mission. Ian was also a Special Correspondent for The Times, but in 1939, when he covered a British trade mission to Moscow (by then Peter was full-time on the staff of the paper).

Throughout their journalistic careers, Ian and Peter's output was to some extent similar. In 1937, The Times sent Peter on a tour of European cities: Paris, Rome, Prague, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow. Some twenty years later, Ian took his own tour of European cities, though on behalf of the The Sunday Times, visiting Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo. After the war, Peter returned to The Times as a writer of fourth leaders, which were generally light-hearted takes on the news of the day, while at The Spectator, he wrote humorous and idiosyncratic pieces under the pen-name Strix. Ian's Atticus column for The Sunday Times, written between 1953 and 1955, shared something of form and function of Peter's work. And curiously, both Ian and Peter managed to write articles about shaving, Peter's article being published in 1946, Ian's appearing in 1960.
 

Two of Peter Fleming's books in one volume

Peter Fleming is best known for his hugely successful travel books, among them Brazilian Adventure (1933), One's Company (1934), and News from Tartary (1936). One of his earliest forays into fiction was written during the early stages of the Second World War, when Britain was threatened by German invasion. The Flying Visit (1941) imagined a Britain in which the German plan had succeeded. Peter wrote it in bed while recovering from, ironically, German measles, and though the story was not a children's book, he dedicated it to his young son, Nicholas. Ian Fleming would similarly write a book – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964) – on his sick bed for his young son.

As for the Second World War, both Peter and Ian had what might be considered 'a good war'. Both worked in intelligence, which kept them away of frontline operations (although Peter would contrive, often unofficially, to be sent where the action was). Ian worked as assistant to the director of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID), while Peter, after a variety of roles, spent much of the war in the Far East running a unit known as GSI(d), which devised and executed methods of deception.

One of Peter's ruses was to take a corpse, provide it with the equipment of a British agent, including codes and a radio, and drop it into occupied Burma in the hope that the Japanese would find the body and start using the radio, which would transmit material back to British HQ in Delhi. If the plan seems familiar, then it may be because it was inspired by Operation Mincemeat, in which a body carrying disinformation was floated onto the Spanish coast for the Nazis to pick up. It's uncertain whether Peter was aware of it at the time, but he might have been amused to learn that the idea for that operation was Ian's.

Another wartime activity undertaken by both Ian and Peter was the setting up of commando units. Ian had his 'Red Indians', the 30 Assault Unit that would raid enemy territory to gather documents and other secret material. Peter, meanwhile, organised a commando unit in Greece on behalf of the SOE, and before that the XII Corps Observation Unit or Auxiliary Unit, which was a resistance force to counter a successful German invasion.
 

Ian Fleming alluded to Peter's wartime work in this collection

Among Peter's creations were underground hideouts, which were dug in woodland and concealed by vegetation and accessed by means of a trapdoor and rope ladder. The hideouts of course never saw hostile action, but Peter described them in his unpublished novel, The Sett, and they are likely to have provided the inspiration for the Soviet agents' underground bunker in Ian's short story, 'From a View to a Kill'. Indeed, Ian alludes to his brother's work in the story. Remarking on the sophistication of the Russian hideout, Bond considers that it was “far more brilliant than anything England had prepared to operate in the wake of a successful German invasion.”

After the war, Peter settled more comfortably into his estate in Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, while Ian built Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. Goldeneye was designed by Ian to admit as much of the outside – the breeze, the sounds, the smells, and occasionally the creatures – into the house as possible by means of large, spartan rooms and enormous unglazed windows. Merrimoles, Peter's house on the Nettlebed estate, was built in 1938/9 with much the same principles in mind. Peter wanted plenty of doors and french windows and, as a friend suggested, the inside of the house to be like the outside. 

More generally, Peter and Ian had a similar outlook on life. Both were fatalistic and essentially irreligious and had been immensely affected by the events and acts of heroism they witnessed in the Second World War. They believed that the war showed Britain at its best, and expressed disappointment with values of the post-war generation. As for how they regarded each other, Ian felt that he was in Peter's shadow and considered Peter a hero, while Peter looked up to Ian (quite literally, too – Ian was taller).

That's not to say that Ian and Peter saw eye-to-eye on everything. Peter was not fond of the Caribbean, while Ian detested shooting, unlike his brother, who shot throughout his life, and in fact died of a heart attack in 1971 while out shooting in Scotland.

The lives of Ian and Peter Fleming were different in a number of respects, yet both enjoyed similar careers and successes, and had a lasting cultural impact on the lives of many others. Parallel lives, indeed.

References:

Hart-Davis, D, 1987 Peter Fleming: a biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Lycett, A, 1995 Ian Fleming: the man behind James Bond, Turner Publishing, Atlanta

Universal Export: a bit of genuine tradecraft

In December 1940, British censorship examiners based in New York intercepted a letter addressed to a Mr Lothar Frederick of Berlin from someone who signed himself Joe K. The letter contained a list of shipping in New York harbour, and from this and several other clues in the letter, it was established that the sender was a Nazi agent.

The letter was passed to an MI6 officer, H Montgomery Hyde, attached to the censorship station, who in turn passed it to William Stephenson, director of the British Security Coordination, an organisation set up to gather intelligence about Nazi agents working in the US, spread disinformation, and support acts of sabotage against Nazi targets.

Censorship examiners were ordered to keep a look out for more correspondence from Joe K, which resulted in a haul of intelligence material. Many of the letters followed a characteristic pattern. Each letter usually contained a message written in invisible ink, while the visible text purported to be an ordinary business letter. Even this though in fact disguised information of interest. For example, one letter stated:

"Your order no. 5 is rather large - and I with my limited facilities and funds shall never be able to fill such an immense order completely. But I have already many numbers in stock, and shall ship whatever and whenever I can. I hope you have no objections to part shipments."

What Joe K meant was that the demand from his Nazi masters for information was too much for him to fulfil with his limited resources, but he would do what he could.

If this style of communication, full of double meaning, seems familiar to readers of the Bond novels, then that's because Ian Fleming had Bond communicate in a similar fashion.

In Live and Let Die, for example, Bond makes a call to the 'managing director' of Universal Export (ie M) to report that he "may need a bit of help with a difficult consignment", having gone "uptown to see our chief customer last night" Bond continues that "three of [the customer's] best men went sick" while Bond was there, and that Bond himself "got a slight chill". The chief customer is, of course, Mr Big and that 'sick' is a euphemism for 'dead'.

Bond makes a similar call in From Russia, With Love to report that his partner (Darko Kerim) had gone very sick; that is, he had been killed by the opposition.

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond communicates with M, not as a travelling salesman, but as a repesentative of the College of Arms. Revealing in a letter something of the organisation behind Blofeld, Bond writes of the "male staff of several nationalities" and of Fräulein Irma Bunt, who has told him that "she comes from Munich". Of the Count, Bond writes of his research on allergies and their causes, and tells the addressee, Sable Basilisk, that he has suggested to the count that a visit to Augsberg might be useful.

All valuable intelligence material between the lines for those officers back home working on the Blofeld case (Operation Corona), while the Augsberg trip is a ruse to get Blofeld out of Switzerland so that he can be snatched.

The Bond novels are often dismissed as spy stories, but the fantastic plots and thrilling, fast-paced narrative do disguise genuine tradecraft. Bond's communications under the auspices of Universal Export, which have their origins in the Second World War, if not earlier, are one example.

Reference

Montgomery Hyde, H, 1962, Room 3603: The story of the British Intelligence Centre in New York during World War II

James Bond and the frogmen of World War Two

I've long resigned myself to the fact that the chances of finding a first-edition Fleming at a jumble (or rummage) sale are very remote indeed, certainly since the emergence of Amazon and ebay. But I still go to jumble sales in a hopeful frame of mind, and invariably manage to pick up other items that are of peripheral interest to the world of James Bond. Recently, for example, I acquired a paperback copy of The Frogmen: The Story of the Wartime Underwater Operators (Pan, 1950), by T J Waldron and James Gleeson. Ian Fleming drew on the exploits of wartime divers and frogmen when describing James Bond's exciting underwater episodes in Live and Let Die (1954) and Thunderball (1960), and so I bought the book to find out more.

In chapter 10 of Thunderball, Fleming tells us that SPECTRE used a “two-men underwater chariot identical with those used by the Italians during the war” to tow a sled to transport the captured atomic weapons from the submerged Vindicator aircraft. Later, in chapter 23, as he leads a unit of US submariners in an underwater battle against Largo's men, Bond encounters Largo sitting astride the chariot.

As The Frogmen reveals, the Italians were the pioneers of the chariot when engaging in underwater sabotage, and it was only when Italian 'charioteers' in 1941 successfully attacked the Denbydale and other British ships in the Mediterranean that Britain first became aware of this special means of warfare.

The Italian chariot, or human torpedo, was a 22 foot-long cigar-shaped craft that incorporated a detachable warhead containing 500lb of explosives. Two men sat astride the chariot, and, by means of a battery-powered propeller and compressed-air tanks to regulate depth, they moved slowly toward the target ship. Once there, the frogmen fixed lines across the ship's hull, tied the warhead to the lines, released the warhead and made their escape.

Realising the threat from the Italians, and not without a little grudging admiration, British naval chiefs turned to their technical divisions in early 1942 to create a similar craft and a range of other equipment, including rubber wetsuits and breathing apparatus. The British had managed to acquire Italian machines – 'Buster' Crabb was one of the first Britons to test out the Italian chariot – but they knew that if they were to stand any chance against the maritime threat and also conduct their own underwater operations, in colder waters, as well as in the relative warmth of the Mediterranean, they needed to research and develop, practically from scratch, their own capability.

By summer 1942, the British-built two-man chariot known as a jeep was ready for operations, along with other machines, such as 'X' craft, or four-man midget submarines, and single-seater underwater craft. (Incidentally, the smallest and least detectable of the single-seater craft was developed by a Quentin Reeves, known as Lieutenant-Colonel 'Q'.) At this time, a call went out for volunteers for 'special service', who, after a period of intense training, began their work.

British charioteers using a two-man torpedo

In Live and Let Die (chapters 18-19), Ian Fleming describes how Bond swims underwater to Mr Big's vessel, the Secatur, to plant a limpet mine. This was another weapon that saw much development during the Second World War; operatives became known as 'limpeteers'.

At one point during his swim, Bond is grabbed by an octopus and dragged towards its lair. Such a threat perhaps seems fanciful, but during the war, the risk to frogmen operating in the Far East from octopuses was considered serious enough by naval chiefs for guidance to be issued. This recommended that an operative grabbed by a tentacle stay absolutely motionless until the octopus become bored and let go. The guidelines added, not entirely seriously, that if the octopus became frightened, the operative should tickle the octopus underneath its armpits until it released its tentacles. Failing that, the frogman should jab it in the eye with a knife.

In his preparations for his underwater mission, James Bond orders cakes of shark repellent copper acetate and nigrosine dye, which had been developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory. Research by the Americans into anti-shark devices was active during the Second World War, and Waldron and Gleeson state that the products of that research – packets of black dye (the authors do not mention its ingredients) and containers of chemical crystals – were issued to British frogmen swimming through shark-infested waters.

Another of Bond's habits which alluded to wartime practices was his use of benzedrine tablets, which, in Live and Let Die, he takes ahead of his swim. Benzedrine is a form of amphetamine (colloquially known as speed), and during the Second World War its use was widespread, particularly by aircrews and frogmen on long, dangerous missions. Waldron and Gleeson describe how, for example, the crew of an 'X' craft engaged in a mission against a Japanese cruiser took benzedrine tablets to ward off sleep.

The Frogmen provided useful background information to episodes described in the Bond novels, but in reading it, I learned a lot about an extraordinary group of people, who undertook dangerous missions (such as clearing the waters off the northern French coast of mines before D-Day) using equipment that had been rushed into production with limited testing. I was certainly glad to have found a copy of the book in the jumble sale.

To the editor of The Times: Ian Fleming on the Munich Agreement

Ian Fleming's writing outside his James Bond novels provide fascinating insights into Fleming's world-view and the cultural environment of the day. For example, there is among the mass of his published material a letter to the editor of The Times published on Wednesday 28th September 1938. The date is significant, being the day before the signing of the infamous Munich Agreement, which ceded the Czechoslovakian territory of Sudetenland to Germany and heralded the full annexation of Czechoslovakia six months later. It was about the imminent meeting between the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler that Fleming wrote.

Ian Fleming began, “Since the immediate future of Europe appears to depend largely on Herr Hitler's intentions, it is most important that we should have a clear knowledge of exactly what those intentions are.” Revealing himself as something of a German expert (he had spent time in Germany, having enrolled at Munich University in 1928), Fleming drew attention to a rare document (a copy of which he had in his possession) produced by the National Socialist German Workers' Party on its foundation in 1920 that stated among other objectives a demand for “'the union of all Germans within a Greater-Germany'”. To Fleming, then, Hitler's territorial ambitions in 1938 had come as no surprise. But what was to be the response from the signatory powers of Britain, France and Italy?

Peace in Europe, it seemed to Fleming, would only be possible if the demands contained in the document of 1920 represented the full extent of Hitler's ambitions. “There will be no peace, no return of prosperity, and no happiness in Europe until England and France agree to the fulfilment of Herr Hitler's stated programme”, he wrote. The alternative was stark. Should Hitler refuse this settlement, Fleming continued, then “it will be time to organize this country on a war-time basis.”

The Munich Agreement, giving the mainly German-speaking Czechoslovakian region of Sudetenland to Germany, was signed in the early hours of Friday 30th September 1938. Neville Chamberlain returned to London, and outside 10 Downing Street told the assembled press that he believed the agreement represented “peace for our time”. The phrase would later haunt Chamberlain, who would come to be viewed as the architect of appeasement as Hitler's subsequent territorial aggression became clear. However, there was initial public support in Britain for the agreement, and judging by his letter, the outcome was for Fleming preferable to the alternative.

Ian Fleming's letter is of interest beyond historical curiosity. It demonstrates in Fleming a growing political awareness that he appears to have lacked, as biographer Andrew Lycett notes, even in Munich in 1928 when the Nazi Party was on the rise (although presumably it was there that Fleming acquired the copy of the document he described in his letter). This awareness was soon put to practical use in 1939 when Fleming was appointed as special correspondent for The Times to cover a British trade mission to the Soviet Union. Following the Second World War, Fleming's interest in global politics appeared to have waned, although it found a degree of expression in the James Bond novels as he pitted his hero against the Soviet Union.

Reference:

Fleming, I, 1938 Letter to the editor of The Times, The Times, 28 September 1938
Lycett, A, 1995 Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, Turner

Operation Crossbow and Ian Fleming

Last month saw the publication of Operation Crossbow: The Untold Story of Photographic Intelligence and the Search for Hitler's V Weapons. The book, by Allan Williams, describes how a team of top photographic interpreters and intelligence officers uncovered the secrets of Germany's long-range ballistic missile programme from millions of aerial photographs, which had been taken in daring reconnaissance missions by Spitfire and Mosquito pilots. The discovery of an aircraft on a ramp at Peenemünde in northern Germany was the breakthrough that allowed the allies to plan countermeasures and seek and destroy rocket bases.

Readers of Nicholas Rankin's Ian Fleming's Commandos (2011) will be familiar with Fleming's peripheral involvement in the operation. Days after the Allied landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, commandos of Fleming's 30 Assault Unit (30AU) joined a heavily-armed unit to investigate a possible V-weapon launch site. The site was confirmed, and the resulting intelligence sent back to London (and presumably transferred to Medmenham in Buckinghamshire, where photographic interpreters were based). Rankin also describes a later episode when Fleming visited members of 30AU at Carteret in Normandy and discussed V-weapons with some of the men.

In his book, Ian Fleming's Secret War (2008), Craig Cabell goes much further, suggesting that Fleming was responsible for much of the intelligence fed to 30AU about the location and structure of V-weapon launch sites, and claiming that Fleming had gathered his information from resistance groups and after poring over aerial photographs. What's more, Fleming's novel, Moonraker (1955), holds the clues to his involvement in Operation Crossbow and the search for German rockets. It cannot be denied that the novel, featuring as it does Nazi scientists and a V2-like rocket, took inspiration from wartime events. But then again, so too did Hergé's Destination Moon (1953), which sent Tintin into space – anyone writing about rockets in the 1940s/early 1950s can hardly have failed to turn to images of German technology – and indeed, Cabell admits that his argument for Fleming's involvement in Crossbow lacks evidence.

In contrast, Allan Williams' account makes no mention of Ian Fleming's involvement (which perhaps tells us something), but Fleming does appear twice. Williams mentions in passing that Frederick Sidney Cotton, pioneer of wartime aerial photography and reconnaissance, was the inspiration for Fleming's fictional head of MI6 research and development, Q. Cotton thus joins Charles Fraser-Smith and others identified as the real Q, despite there being no such character in the books, although Fleming and Cotton certainly knew each other and, indeed, were friends. (Incidentally, Cotton has the rare distinction of also being identified as a model for James Bond; again this seems highly unlikely.)

Ian Fleming is mentioned again later in Williams' book in connection with a map Bond uses in The Man with the Golden Gun (1965). The map, supplied by Mary Goodnight, is a 1:50,000 Overseas Survey Map made by the Directorate of Overseas Surveys (DOS). Maps prepared by DOS proved critical in the search for V-weapons, and the deputy director of DOS, John Wright, was said to have been thrilled by the oblique reference to his work.

While Ian Fleming's 30AU had been involved in the search for German missile launch sites, and Fleming had been inspired by events and German technology when he came to write Moonraker, the latest research suggests that Fleming's part in Operation Crossbow, beyond facilitating the gathering and distribution of intelligence, had been somewhat peripheral.

James Bond's SOE origins

There have been many claims to the true inspiration for James Bond. Largely seeing action in the Second World War, these have included 30 Assault Unit's Robert Harling, commando Patrick Dalzel-Job, and Colonel D T 'Bill' Hudson, a Secret Operations Executive (SOE) agent, who inspired Ian Fleming, according to Hudson's 1995 obituary in the Times, because he was 'tall and handsome, enjoyed an active social life and charmed the women of many nations', a description which could equally have applied to Fleming!

The latest hat, or rather hats, to be thrown into the ring, are those of some of the commandos who served in SOE. In his book, Ian Fleming and SOE's Operation Postmaster (2012, Pen and Sword) Brian Lett puts forward a number of individuals who took part in a daring mission to hijack two Axis ships harboured in Fernando Po, a Spanish island off the coast of West Africa. But for Brian Lett, SOE inspired more than Fleming's literary hero; it formed the basis for the secret service for which Bond worked, provided that service with its chief, and gave Bond his gadgets, among other claims. In short, the Bond books were Fleming's heavily disguised tribute to SOE. This post isn't the place to discuss all the claims in detail, but it is worth reviewing some of Lett's more plausible, as well as his less convincing, assertions.

Lett makes the reasonable suggestion that Fleming looked to SOE when locating the headquarters of the secret service. Fleming described Bond's office as 'a gloomy building overlooking Regent's Park'. The Secret Intelligence Service has never been based in that part of London, and so Fleming's location seems puzzling. However, when we consider that the headquarters of SOE was at 64 Baker Street, a stone's throw from Regent's Park, then Fleming's description could be regarded as a deliberate mistake. After all,  until 1994, SIS/MI6 didn't officially exist (whereas SOE had been disbanded in 1946), and Fleming had to be careful about what information he divulged.

A similar argument could be made for Fleming naming Bond's chief as M, rather than C, the head of SIS. Presumably Fleming wasn't permitted to acknowledge the head of SIS as C, and so may have taken M, the code name of SOE's head of operations and training, as a plausible alternative. Ignoring other possibilities – M may have been a nod to Somerset Maugham's fictional spy chief R, a reference to Fleming's mother, or simply a representation of the character's name, Sir Miles Messervy, following MI5 chief Maxwell Knight's habit of signing documents 'M' and Fleming's similar use of the letter 'F'  – Lett further suggests that the character of M was based on the first M of SOE, Major General Sir Colin Gubbins. While Fleming was certainly acquainted with Colin Gubbins and was aware of his role in SOE, Fleming's own chief, Admiral John Godfrey, still seems a more likely model for M.

Station codes were another aspect of SOE that Fleming may have adopted. In the Bond novels, codes such as A for Austria or Australia, C for Canada or the Caribbean and S for the Soviet Union appear to have been Fleming's invention, as conventionally SIS applied a two-digit number to identify countries (Germany was 12, for example). However, as Brian Lett points out, Fleming's codes more closely resemble SOE country codes; F Section identified non-Gaullist France, X Section was Germany, T Section was Belgium and Luxembourg, and N Section was the Netherlands.

West Africa, the location of Operation Postmaster, was identified as section W, and the code was also used for the codes of individual agents. Commandos were given code names beginning W0 (thus, Captain Gus March-Phillipps, the operation leader, as W01, and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Geoffrey Appleyard was W02). For other, non-commando agents, the zero was dropped; for example, Major Dismore, based in SOE's Lagos office, was W39. Lett suggests that the W0 code, identified agents as 'licensed to kill', and inspired Fleming to create his own zero-based agent codes. It doesn't take much imagination, Lett argues, to turn W07 into 007. I am less convinced by this suggestion. Lett makes much of Postmaster's agents having a 'licence to kill', but in reality, didn't all commandos and other military personnel by definition have such licence? They were fighting a war, after all. In any case, there is no strong ground for doubting Ian Fleming's own explanation that the double-0 prefix was used on the Admiralty's top-secret signals during the Second World War, and he simply lifted this for his books.

As for the identity of the real James Bond, Brian Lett has no doubt that the individual is to be found among the commandos of Operation Postmaster, in particular agents Gus March-Phillips, Geoffrey Appleyard, Graham Hayes and Anders Lassen. Again, as Fleming was certainly aware of the operation and possibly of the men that took part in it, the idea cannot be dismissed entirely. But Fleming ran his own band of commandos, 30 Assault Unit, which doubtless too was filled with very brave and heroic men. It is unlikely that we'd be able to identify a single individual, or even a small group of individuals, as the 'real James Bond'. That is not to deny that Bond had commando origins; as Fleming acknowledged, Bond was 'a compound of secret agent and commando types' he had met during the war. And, of course, Fleming himself is part of that magical compound.

Brian Lett's book is a well-written and exciting page-turner about a daring coastal operation that succeeded against the odds. The story of the brave and resourceful individuals who took part in it deserves to be told. Fleming had his own small role in that operation, and the book is a must-read for Fleming aficionados for that reason. Fleming's SOE connection gives rise to potential links between Bond and SOE, but while some of these are intriguing and even plausible, others are very speculative and in need of further evidence. The search for Bond's origins (if indeed we need to search for them) continues.

James Bond PI: The American origins of 007. Third and final part.

Of course, Fleming had other influences, taken most notably from his wartime experiences. He recalled how, during the war, he controlled No. 30 Assault Unit, comprising a rough bunch of ‘courageous, amoral, wayward’ Royal Marines. Fleming’s intention was clear: not so much to draw James Bond as an American hero, though the parallels are close, but to disassociate Bond from the ‘stage Englishman’, returning virtues to the character that were gained in the war, but rapidly lost with the onset of peace and the dismantling of Empire. The solution was to combine the confident swagger of the American detective with the resolve and resourcefulness of the British Commando. With this in mind, the clues become obvious.

Beyond his anti-aristocratic name and un-gentlemanly way of killing, Bond is an arch-consumer, deliberately selecting and remaining loyal to brand-names – Hoffritz razors, Palmolive toiletries, Ronson cigarette lighter, among others – in defiance of post-war ration-book austerity. Instead of tea and beer, the most English of beverages, Bond drinks strong coffee and hard liquor. In an American bar, Fleming describes Bond paying for the check, not the bill. And, as if to reinforce his credentials, Bond reads the latest Raymond Chandler.

Another crucial element in reorientating the English hero was the locations. Just one novel – Moonraker ­– is set extensively in England. Of the remainder, five of Bond’s adventures are set to lesser or greater extents in the United States. Fleming was at pains to get the Americanisms right, especially the dialogue, and had an assistant librarian at Yale to check his text. The result is an authenticity that, if a little ridiculous in a modern light, nevertheless takes the reader far away from the milieu of the English gentleman-adventurer produced by the likes of Buchan. Fleming’s efforts brought their reward. Though sales were slow to begin – Casino Royale initially failed to find a US publisher, and both this novel and Moonraker were later retitled for the first paperback editions – his books became enormously popular in America. He was surprised at this, but admitted that Bond ‘must seem very American in so many ways – his likes, his dislikes, and his rather full sex life’.

This must have been deeply satisfying for Fleming, a patriotic Englishman determined to keep Britain at the top table with the US. At last there was a tough British hero stripped of stereotypical English traits who could compete on equal terms with Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade or Mickey Spillane. Fleming gained the admiration, famously, of Jack Kennedy and, more significantly for him, of Raymond Chandler. In a review of Diamonds Are Forever, Chandler wrote, ‘the scene is almost entirely American, and it rings true to an American. I am unaware of any other [English] writer who has accomplished this’. Chandler had deduced Fleming’s aim of writing an American-style thriller, recognising that, unlike other British crime stories, Fleming’s had a ‘hard, clean style’, devoid of waffle. Chandler, though, had his reservations. He noticed that Fleming wrote ‘of brutal things, as though he liked them’, but advised that ‘the best hard-boiled writers never try to be tough, they allow toughness to happen when it seems inevitable for its time, place and conditions’, pleading for Fleming not to ‘become a stunt writer, or he will end up no better than the rest of us’.