by John Pearson
Luckily, they chose her room. At 4 a.m. the hotel was shaken by an explosion. Bond's empty double room was totally destroyed. As the carabiniere told him later, the bomb had been put underneath his bed.
‘Fortunately,’ said Bond, ‘I sometimes sleep in other people's.’
The maresciallo from the carabiniere laughed, but before he left Milan, Bond sent the girl a golden bracelet with his heartfelt thanks; on this occasion he felt justified in charging it to his expenses.
But Bond was more disturbed than he let anybody see; especially when he had to give a personal report upon the incident to M. M. had nodded and said little. A few days later, May found a parcel in the post addressed to Bond which worried her. Something was loose inside it. Bond rang Scotland Yard; their experts later found that it contained sufficient thermite to have blown his head off. Again, M. was informed of what had happened.
Then came the final incident. Bond had been dining with his favourite married woman at the White Tower Restaurant in Percy Street. He had the Bentley and, as he drove her back to Chelsea, he noticed a small grey Austin in front which refused to let him pass. He hooted and flashed his lights, but the car stuck to the middle of the road. Bond swore. He was impatient to get home, and then, just by the exit from the park, the car jammed on its brakes and swung across the road. Another car was double-parked ahead and, as Bond struggled to avoid it, there was a rattle of machine-gun fire. The Bentley skidded to a halt. Bond was unhurt, but the woman beside him had been hit. Bond spent the next half hour seeing her safely into St George's hospital, and then coping with the police. There was a lot of coping to be done, and the evening ended, shortly before midnight, with a hurried conference with M. at the Regent's Park Headquarters.
It was the first time Bond had known him appear at such an hour, but the Chief of Staff had summoned him from home. Both of them looked grim when Bond appeared.
‘And how is the woman, Chief of Staff?’ said M.
‘The hospital say they've just removed the bullet from her pelvis. She's been in pain but she will live.’
‘Thank God for that,’ said M. ‘And her husband – did you succeed in quietening him down?’
‘Extremely difficult,’ said Chief of Staff. ‘Until I rang you, he was threatening to see the Home Secretary.’
‘Just tell me one thing, 007,’ said M. ‘If you must have these affairs of yours, why on earth do it with an M.P.'s wife? Isn't life difficult enough without bringing in the House of Commons?’
‘I thought,’ replied Bond stiffly, ‘that my private life remained my own.’
‘Private life?’ M. snorted. ‘When will you learn that while you work for me you have no private life.’
By next morning, things had calmed down, but M. still took a gloomy view of James Bond's future in the Secret Service.
‘We must face facts, James. This is a vendetta. Since you killed Oborin, Smersh have been out to get you. They have made you a marked man, and won't rest until they have totally destroyed you. It is a situation I have faced occasionally before. And I am afraid there's nothing to be done about it, James. I have no alternative but to suspend you from the 00 section, and get you some foreign posting until it all blows over. We'll have to discuss a suitable place for you. Where do you enjoy? The Bahamas? Strangways needs to be replaced in Jamaica – will that suit you?
Bond appreciated the attempt at kindness. But in a way it made the situation worse.
He knew that he was finished, just as he was getting into his stride. Smersh had beaten him – and he would never know whether the feud would rest. He would always be waiting for the bullet in the night, the poisoned cup of coffee. After the Vatican, Smersh possessed the longest memory in Europe.
Those next few days of semi-relegation were perhaps the bitterest of his life. He had to hand in his Beretta, that battered but efficient friend of many an assignment. And he no longer had that special status, that sense of being part of an lite. The way that everyone appeared so understanding simply made it worse. He began the melancholy business of packing – there seemed nothing else to do. Prepare expenses, close the files, make sure at least that everything is left in decent order.
He would store the Bentley when it was repaired – he couldn't bear the thought of selling it. And there would be no trouble subleasing the flat. He would have to pick his moment to tell May that he was leaving. He had never thought of her as a sensitive woman. One of her virtues was that she had always kept her life and worries quite apart from him, and left him free. She never varied.
But she seemed to know that there was something wrong.
‘P'raps ye'd be liking me to mix ye a drink?’ she said. Normally Bond prepared his own, but tonight he was grateful to the loyal old girl.
‘An’ by the way a friend of yours telephoned. The name of Fleming. Very polite an’ nice he was. Asked you to call him back – a Victoria number. I've left it on your desk.’
The Man and the Myth
11
Superbond
BOND STILL DOESN'T know why he called Fleming back. He was not in the mood to talk to anyone – least of all anybody as demanding as Ian Fleming. Besides, Fleming was a journalist. But when he did, that drawling voice from the far end of the telephone was strangely sympathetic.
‘Met your managing director out at lunch today. I'd heard about your previous spot of bother in the office, and he filled me in on your threatened change of employment. I had an idea which quite appealed to him. It might be something of a solution. He's coming to lunch with me at Blades tomorrow to discuss it further. I think you ought to come as well.’
Bond had always envied Fleming's ease of manner when he talked to M. for, like many others in high places, M. had a soft spot for Fleming. This helps explain Fleming's own somewhat puzzling status at this time. Officially, he was a journalist who had had nothing at all to do with intelligence work for more than six years. But, unofficially, he was one of that handful of men who had M.'s confidence and whom he would consult. From the way they were talking when he arrived at Blades, Bond realized that M. had told Fleming all about him.
M. seemed on his best behaviour – with Fleming there, he was no longer quite the steely martinet of ‘Universal Export’. And Fleming was clearly buttering him up, as only Fleming could. He had already checked with Miss Moneypenny to make sure that they had M.'s favourite table – in the far corner of the room away from what he called ‘the noise and scrimmage’ of the younger members of the club. The chef had been alerted to provide M. with one of his favourite delicacies – a marrow-bone served on a special eighteenth-century silver dish. ‘Hope the “Infuriator's” up to scratch,’ said Fleming as he filled his glass. M. beamed. Bond recognized the Fleming treatment.
‘James,’ said M. pleasantly. ‘Ian and I have just been having quite a little chat. I can't say he's converted me, but he does have a very interesting – I might say startling – proposition. As it concerns you personally I'd value your views on it.’
Something about the tone of voice made Bond wary. M. was being far too kind for comfort.
‘You may recall,’ continued M., ‘that little piece of most successful deception we were responsible for in 1943. I believe Ewen Montagu wrote about it afterwards. He called his book, The Man Who Never Was. The idea was to trick the enemy by having the dead body of a British officer complete with certain documents washed up on the coast of Spain. The body was quite genuine – some poor fellow or other – but the uniform and documents were carefully prepared by British Intelligence. Ian here has this interesting idea that we could use you somewhat similarly – but by standing the whole idea on its head.’
‘I don't follow you,’ said Bond.
‘I hardly thought you would,’ said Fleming, butting in. ‘We're not proposing to use your corpse or anything like that, not yet at any rate. My idea is simply this. In the Montagu story, the resources of the Secret Service were used to convince the Germans that a mythical man was a reality. Now I suggest
that we should do the opposite, convince the opposition that a very real man is in fact a myth – or at least dead.’
Bond looked at Fleming. Fleming paused to savour the last mouthful of the club smoked salmon. Bond to this day remembers the strange smile, half cynical, half mocking, on his face.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘From what M. tells me, you have the honour, or misfortune, to have become Smersh's number one human target in the West. M. proposes to give in to Smersh, and have you posted to Station K in Jamaica in the hope that this will save your life. Now, I don't like being pessimistic, but I just don't see this working. Remember Trotsky and the ice-pick? Smersh destroyed him in the end – although in fact he had retired to Mexico City. I wouldn't give you any greater odds than Trotsky.’
Bond had stopped eating. He had passed his adult life facing the imminence of death. Even so, there was something chilling in the offhand way this gentlemanly Englishman predicted his demise.
‘So what do you suggest? Perhaps M. would like to keep me under lock and key inside the cellars at Headquarters for my own protection.’
M. smiled a wintry smile. Fleming laughed.
‘Nothing so drastic. No, I think that we should simply try convincing Smersh that you don't exist any more – better still – that you never existed. That you are a genuine man-who-never-was.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘By making you a character in fiction.’
‘Thanks very much. I'd rather take my chance with Smersh.’
M. cleared his throat.
‘Ian's idea may seem a little, shall we say, original, but it might work. Whatever happens you won't lose by it. What he proposes is that he should try his hand at writing one of these cloak-and-dagger thrillers about you. Make it as real as possible. Name you, describe you as you really are, and base it all on some genuine assignment. But at the same time he would try to make it sound like something out of Buchan. Sufficient fiction to make everybody think he's made the whole thing up. It'll take some doing, but if Ian here can pull it off everyone, and that includes our enemies in Smersh, could well end up convinced that you are now as real as Richard Hannay.’
‘But Smersh know that I exist. They have me on their records.’
‘They know that somebody from the British Secret Service did the things you did. If Ian's idea works, they won't believe that James Bond did them. Bond will have become a character in fiction.’
Possibly the Infuriator was as strong as M. had always claimed, but by the end of lunch, everyone was sold on the idea. Fleming was talking airily about the possibilities for the future.
‘It could be the perfect cover. You really would be able to get away with anything. It could become a classic exercise in pure deception.’
‘And M.,’ asked Bond, ‘he would be included?’
‘Of course. That would really worry all those gentlemen in Smersh.’
At first M. demurred, but Fleming knew exactly how to flatter him.
‘The book had better be damned good,’ said M.
‘It will be,’ Fleming said.
*
‘I'd never realized,’ said Bond, ‘just how hard old Ian worked – when he wanted to. I'd always thought he was a very lazy fellow. He liked to give one that impression; that tired way he had of talking, the long lunch hours, and so forth. But once he started on the story that became Casino Royale I was dealing with a very different Ian.’
To begin with we spent a fortnight, on and off, up at his brother's place in Oxfordshire – an ugly red-brick house set in a beech wood. There was a golf course down the road. We played together quite a lot.’
‘Who used to win?’
‘I'd say we were very fairly matched. Neither of us was what you'd call a stylish player. I had a stronger drive: Ian was more cunning. We enjoyed it as a relaxation and for the rest of our time there we worked very hard. During the war you know he'd been an expert at interrogation. Well, he interrogated me – every detail of that wretched casino business until I'd had enough of it – what was I wearing, how did I feel at such and such a point, why did I do this and fail to do that?’
‘And about the girl?’
‘Yes, that as well. He was always very keen on dragging out what he used to call “the interesting bits”. I thought that he was what they used to call “a gentleman”. I should have known better.
‘But the real point about this whole operation was the care he took. He was a very clever devil, and he had it all worked out. He took more trouble with Casino Royale than with any other book – there were several versions before a final one was agreed on. Fleming left not a single thing to chance. Even the publisher's reader used to work with him in Naval Intelligence. And he took extra special trouble over the style and those touches that would convince the men at Smersh – and particularly some Englishmen advising them in Moscow – that it all was a piece of fiction. He had been reading Sapper, Buchan and that sort of thing since boyhood so it wasn't difficult, and a lot of what he slipped in the book was really quite a joke – details like Chiffre's concealed razor blades, and those hairs he always had me placing on door handles. We used to make them up and laugh at them. But I had no idea quite what was coming. Don't forget that I was very much in hiding. Smersh was quite definitely out to get me. Most of this period I was existing with an armed guard on the door, in one of the special flats we used to have behind Headquarters. It didn't help one's sense of judgement or reality.
‘This was around Christmas time at the end of 1952. Ian had just gone off with his notes and his typewriter to his house in Jamaica – Goldeneye. I remember how he came back at the end of March, with his manuscript, and how excited everybody was – M. in particular. I couldn't see a copy for a day or two. But when I did I nearly went through the roof. I was so appalled that I sat up all that night reading it. The facts were right, in essence, but he'd really gone to town on me. I still think he overdid it. There was no need to make me such a monster, such a cardboard zombie, such a humourless, idiotic prig.
‘That's what I told them all, at any rate when we had our meeting. Ian was there and M., and head of S, and quite a lot of top brass from the ministries. And, in fairness to Ian, I must say that all of them were most enthusiastic. There is a great deal of the schoolboy in the senior civil service mind, and Ian had got their tastes exactly. M., I might add, was secretly delighted at the way Ian painted him. And Ian made great play about the way the book would have to appeal to one man in particular – Guy Burgess. We knew by then that Burgess was advising Smersh on English matters, and Ian said, quite rightly as it turned out, that if we could once convince the wretched Burgess that this hero was completely fictional, we were home and dry.
‘I tried various objections, but they wouldn't really listen to me, and, as M. said, ‘This book is your one and only hope for a future in the service, 007’. There wasn't much that I could say to that.
‘They did agree to toning down some of the sexier passages with poor Vesper. I really didn't care for them. M. backed me, I'm glad to say. Ian was very cool and authorish about them, but as M. said, “there's no need to descend to the level of pornography, particularly as the girl is dead.” And, as you know, it went ahead.’
*
The operation was, as Urquhart told me at the start, a classic in its way, a daring piece of pure deception against a cunning, very ruthless enemy. Even Bond admits that its success was due entirely to one man – Ian Fleming. Just as his conception was original enough to fool the Russians, so his whole execution of the books must surely rank as something of a work of genius. He seemed to know exactly how to marry fact and fiction and his whole concept of the fictional James Bond had just the right amount of fantasy to fool a clever enemy.
But whilst one is finally able to give Fleming a little of the credit he deserves, one should not forget the role the Secret Service played in the deception. The few men in the secret played their part superbly, even to getting an advance copy of
the book to Moscow (via an ex-colleague of mine on the Sunday Times) and making sure that Burgess read it. Similarly, on publication day in London, there had to be elaborate precautions to make sure that none of the reviewers gave the game away. (In the event, the only one who nearly did was someone on the Yorkshire Post. Nobody seems to know how he was dealt with.)
And, of course, it worked. By all accounts, even Fleming was a little shaken by the way the Russians, the reviewers and the general public fell for Bond. Some months later, M. received a blow-by-blow report of the rumpus the arrival of that first copy of the book caused at Smersh headquarters. Burgess, apparently, was full of it. To start with, General Grubozaboyschikov took some convincing, but Burgess had underlined some passages from the book and read them, there and then, translating into Russian as he went.
When he had finished, the directorate of Smersh was silent. Who had slipped up? What idiot had first been taken in by the famous British sense of humour? All eyes were on the General.
‘Where does this character called James Bond come from then?’ the General asked.
‘I’d say,’ said Burgess, ‘that he was Sapper from the neck up and Spillane from the navel down.’
The General said he hadn't read Sapper or Spillane, and Burgess, according to the report, replied that it was time he did.
Of course there was more to the deception than this one successful meeting, and the book required a careful follow-up to be effective. This was apparently where friend Urquhart comes on the scene. He was quite right when he told me he had worked with Fleming in the war. In fact (I should have guessed it), he was a failed romantic novelist who worked with Sefton Delmer's famous ‘Black Propaganda’ deception against the Nazis. So, in a sense he was the ideal character to place in charge of what Bond calls ‘the nuts and bolts’ of his affair. He had a lot to do.