Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel

by Samantha Kate

  13 From 1913 to 1915, Hugh’s father, Basil Moneypenny, served as British High Commissioner in Zanzibar. As the island was just offshore from German East Africa, it was decided that the whole family would learn German – they hired a German governess, and spoke German exclusively at every meal for a year, by the end of which Hugh could speak the language near-flawlessly.

  14 Hampshire headquarters of the Royal Aircraft Establishment.

  15 RAF base, recruitment centre and equipment store in Bedfordshire

  16 Director of Naval Intelligence – the position held from 1939 to 1942 by Admiral John Godfrey. Regarded as one of the Navy’s most brilliant – if unorthodox – officers, he then commanded the Royal Indian Navy and retired in 1946, a year before the end of the Raj.

  17 Charles Henry George Howard, 20th Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire (1917–66), bomb and dirty-tricks expert for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), working out of its Baker Street HQ. Suffolk famously knew how to kill a man by biting him in the back of his neck.

  May

  1 In an earlier diary, JM describes the measures she has taken to detect whether her secret hiding-place has been discovered. These include hairs wedged into the door of the bathroom cabinet, behind which the secret cavity was located, and talcum powder on the inner rim of the cabinet handle and on the surface below, on which an intruder would have to balance in order to lift away the cabinet. The wall behind the cabinet was additionally covered in a false layer of wallpaper with an adhesive edge, which JM would replace after returning the diary to its secret niche, and the safe combination dial was coated in staining invisible ink which would be revealed under fluorescent light.

  2 Major Godfrey Boothroyd, head of Q:II, armourer to the secret service and internationally renowned small-arms expert. Sandy-haired, with wideset, clear grey eyes, he worked as a consultant to the service long beyond his official retirement age. Author of four manuals on the gun lore of close combat weapons, and designer of the new firing range at Bisley.

  3 JM was just seven years old when Hugh Moneypenny put a small rifle into her hands while they were out hunting game for their dinner. As she recalled in a later diary, he had told her it was important that she didn’t become sentimental about the wildlife, that one day she might need to kill in order to eat or to defend herself. He taught her to aim and fire, and, although she failed to bring down that first gazelle, before long she was having more success. After his death, she frequently shot wild game for the family pot.

  4 After a decade of faithful service, Bond’s Beretta misfired while he was grappling with Rosa Klebb. M ordered him to change his personal weapon and Boothroyd equipped him with a Walther PPK 7.65 mm, a .32 calibre weapon, still light but with considerable stopping power.

  5 Corporal Ken Hedges, Boothroyd’s number two, in charge of the day-today running of the firing range.

  6 In 1954, the Soviet Union established its largest weapons-testing grounds at Novaya Zemlya, a pair of Arctic islands separated by a narrow channel and located off the north coast of European Russia (between 70° 31’ and 770 6’ N, and 510 35’ and 69° 2’ E).

  7 From January 1958, when Explorer I was launched into earth’s orbit, the US had been receiving pictures of the earth’s surface taken from satellites – or ‘birds’, as they were colloquially known.

  8 The official repository of the coats of arms and pedigrees of English, Welsh, Northern Irish and Commonwealth families. On request – and for payment – a herald at the college, such as Basilisk, could undertake genealogical and heraldic work for private clients outside its normal geographical orbit.

  9 One of Blofeld’s guinea pigs at Piz Gloria, the daughter of chicken farmers from Lancashire. She was ‘cured’ of her allergy to chickens after answering an advertisement in the Poultry Farmer’s Gazette seeking volunteers to come to a Swiss research institute working on allergy correction.

  10 Solitaire, real name Simone Latrelle, black-haired daughter of a French colonial slave owner in Haiti. When her parents died, she worked as a fortune diviner in a Port au Prince cabaret, where she was discovered by Mr Big. She helped Bond evade Mr Big’s wrath, then escaped herself from his clutches and into Bond’s arms.

  11 Tiffany Case, croupier and diamond smuggler. Her mother kept a brothel in San Francisco. When Tiffany was sixteen, after being gang-raped, she ran away from home, ending up in the employ of the Spang brothers, gangsters based in Las Vegas. She encountered Bond when, posing as a small-time criminal, he offered his services to her as a diamond ‘mule’ from London to New York.

  12 Corporal in the State Security Department and Greta Garbo look-alike, selected by Klebb to lure Bond into an assassination trap by professing her love for him. Unaware of the dark subtext of her assignment, she genuinely fell in love with Bond on the Orient Express between Istanbul and Paris.

  13 The Spektor – offered to Bond as an enticement to walk into the KGB trap.

  14 Government Communications Headquarters, since 1952 based in a heavily guarded complex in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. It has two main missions; sigint (signals intelligence – the monitoring and deciphering of enemy wireless transmissions), and information assurance (keeping the government’s information and communication systems safe from outside interference).

  15 Beautiful blonde shell-collector with a ‘figure of Venus’ and a broken nose, encountered by Bond on Crab Key while he was on the trail of Dr No. They managed to escape together from No’s fortress and returned to her home in Jamaica.

  16 Chief of Northern Europe, a career intelligence officer named Clive Mostyn.

  17 Attached to A Branch of MI5, the domestic intelligence – or security – service, the Watchers provided surveillance of foreign embassies, consulates and trade commissions. They photographed people going in and out and checked their identity against a mug-book of known diplomats and suspected intelligence operatives. On occasion, they tailed agents of particular interest, from suitably anonymous cars fitted with souped-up engines.

  June

  1 Browning .25 ACP, 6.35-mm miniature pistol, first introduced by Browning in 1905 and since then copied by numerous gun manufacturers.

  2 At the end of the Second World War the city of Berlin was divided into four zones: American, British, French and Soviet. The first three comprised West Berlin, essentially an island, situated 100 miles into Soviet-occupied East Germany and connected to the West by a narrow corridor. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was keen to see a peace treaty between the West, the USSR and the two Germanys. When the Western powers refused to accede to his terms, he threatened to sign a unilateral treaty with East Germany, leaving the East Germans to decide for themselves about the future of Western access to the divided city.

  3 New recruits to the Civil Service who might one day have access to ‘sensitive’ material have first to sign the Official Secrets Act. Passed into law in 1911, the Act comprises two sections: the first dealing with espionage, and the second making it illegal to disclose any information, on any subject, without authorisation – except when such disclosure is in the interest of the state.

  4 The Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), commonly known by the abbreviation ‘Stasi’, was, from April 1950 until it was disbanded in 1989, the secret police force of the Communist-controlled German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Its role included the collection of external intelligence, under its head of foreign intelligence, the renowned spymaster Markus Wolf. Its key targets included the U.S., British and French occupational forces in Berlin.

  5 The Komitet Gosudarstvennoye Bezhopaznosti (Committee for State Security), the main Soviet security and intelligence agency and secret police force. Formed on 13 March 1954, its tasks were external espionage, counterespionage, liquidation of anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary formations within the USSR, border security and guarding the leaders of the party and state and critical state property.

  July

  1 Robert Kennedy, younger brother of JFK.
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br />   2 An ongoing file of suspected enemy agents, distributed to all section and station heads, as well as to the Watchers.

  3 Peregrine ‘Perry’ Warhol, fellow of All Souls and former Professor of Political Thought.

  4 Younger brother of Cuban president Fidel Castro, and Cuban military supremo. A committed ideological Communist and long-serving member of the Cuban Communist Party. Small in stature, unlike his older brother, and not known to be a womaniser.

  5 Raul met with Khrushchev, among others. The unstated aim of his visit was to negotiate the mutual defence agreement that would establish the legal structure for the deployment of Soviet forces in Cuba.

  6 The US naval base, known colloquially as ‘Gitmo’, was first established in 1898, when the US obtained control of Cuba from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War. In February 1903 the US and Cuba (by then independent) signed a lease giving the US occupation rights in perpetuity, or until a mutually agreed breaking point. Under the terms of the 1903 lease – and a subsequent 1934 treaty – the US has ‘complete jurisdiction and control’ of the area, for which it pays a yearly rent of 2,000 gold coins (a little over $4,000 in today’s money). Up to the present day, it is the only US base in operation on Communist soil.

  7 A long-established cover organisation for British secret-service agents. Universal Exports, from the outside, was a functioning enterprise with offices around the world and a corresponding list of telephone numbers that were answered by efficient receptionists, able to verify the identity of any supposed employee. In 1964 its use was discontinued – its cover assumed to have been penetrated by opposing secret agencies

  8 The entire northern area of Novaya Zemlya is covered with a great ice sheet, while, further south, snowfields feed glaciers at the higher altitudes. The wind blows down from the Arctic and up from the Siberian steppes, making midsummer feel like an Alpine winter. The coast comprises fjordlike inlets, with sharp cliffs and rocky promontories, while the interior is mountainous, uninhabited and virtually unexplored. There is practically no vegetation, and virtually no animal or insect life save the odd vagrant bird, an ice fox, a brown or polar bear, and a few lemmings.

  9 In November 1960 a GRU officer named Oleg Penkovsky offered himself to the West as an agent-in-place. For the eighteen months that he was run by MI6 – under the code name Source Ironbark – he passed on innumerable top-secret documents, the most important of which spelled out the relative weakness of the Soviet nuclear capability. This contradicted the view of US hawks, who had long argued that the Soviets possessed superior nuclear power. However, from the beginning, Penkovsky was treated with scepticism: the CIA in particular regarded him as a plant, a channel for the information that Khrushchev wanted the West to know. On 22 October 1962 Penkovsky was arrested in Moscow. He confessed, and was tried, found guilty and apparently executed.

  10 From the mid-1950s the USA had been using the U-2 single-engine, single-seat, high-altitude reconnaissance plane, developed by Lockheed Martin for the CIA, to capture accurate photographic images of the Soviet Union.

  11 On I May 1960 CIA pilot Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlosk in the western USSR while on a top-secret reconnaissance mission to photograph military installations and other intelligence targets. By virtue of its high cruising altitude, the U-2 had been previously thought to be invulnerable to either enemy fighter planes or ground-to-air missiles. Powers ejected and was captured on landing, tried and convicted of espionage. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and seven years’ hard labour, but was freed twenty-one months later in exchange for a Soviet spy. On his return to the US, Powers was criticised by some for having failed to activate his aircraft’s self-destruct charge to destroy the camera, photographic film and related classified parts of his aircraft before capture – and by others for not using an optional CIA-issued suicide pin.

  12 The R-7/SS-6, with a maximum operational range of 5,000 miles, was the first Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) developed and programmed for operational deployment in the USSR. In October 1957 the R-7 launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit, thus revealing its power – far in excess of anything the United States could produce at the time.

  13 Also known as the SS-4 – a Medium Range Ballistic Missile (MRBM) with a maximum range of 1,400 miles – designed to be fitted with warheads with explosive yields of 200-700 kilotons (10-35 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb).

  14 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM), known in the West as the SS-6. Has a range of 2,800 miles with a payload yield of 200-800 kilotons.

  15 A major port on the Barents Sea, headquarters of the Soviet Northern Fleet.

  August

  1 Stored at the National Archives in CAB 159 (JIC minutes, 1947-68), CAB 163 (JIC secretariat files, 1939-77) and CAB 179 (JIC weekly reviews, 1956-63).

  2 The former Stasi officer who defected to the British in West Berlin on i February 1962, and was subsequently flown to Stockholm for interrogation.

  3 On 29 November 1961, John McCone – a staunch Republican, successful businessman and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission – had replaced the long-serving Allen Dulles as director of the CIA. McCone’s hawk-like instincts eventually brought him into conflict with the Kennedy White House.

  4 Robert F. Kennedy (1915-68), US Attorney-General from 1961 to 1964, when he resigned to stand for the US Senate. He was elected senator for New York and served until his assassination in Los Angeles on 6 June 1968, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.

  5 A former academic, decorated Second World War pilot and president of the Ford Motor Company, Robert McNamara (b. 1916) served as Secretary of Defense from January 1961 until 1968, when he resigned over policy disagreements with President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War.

  6 Brigadier-General Edward Lansdale (1908—87), acknowledged guerrilla expert and veteran of campaigns in the Philippines and Vietnam. Brought in by the Kennedys in November 1961 to spearhead the Cuba operation, he drew up plans for Operation Mongoose.

  7 After the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party and ruler of the USSR. A former miner who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, he owed his education to the October Revolution and was a firm believer in the benefits of a workers’ state. He became a member of the Central Committee in 1934 and of the ruling Politburo in 1939. In 1956 he stunned delegates at the Party’s Twentieth Congress when he denounced Stalin and the excesses of his era. He was certainly the most colourful of the Soviet leaders, fond of dramatic gestures designed to achieve propaganda gains. He reigned over the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, as well as the first dog, man and woman in space, leading the West to believe, for a while, that the USSR was ahead in the arms race. He was forced out of his position by opponents in the Politburo in 1964, and lived quietly in retirement until his death on 11 September 1971, aged seventy-seven.

  8 On 10 August, at a meeting of Kennedy’s security advisers – the Special Group (Augmented) – to discuss the latest developments in Operation Mongoose, McCone for the first time raised the possibility that the Soviets might have been in the process of deploying nuclear weapons in Cuba.

  9 A large complex designed to feel like a college campus, located in Langley, Virginia.

  10 Formerly personal assistant to Head of Section A in London; moved with him to Washington, before transferring on to the ambassador’s personal staff.

  11 Developed by Delco in conjunction with NASA and the CIA and brought into operational use in 1962, the 5300 was a solid-state, high-frequency transceiver, resembling a lunch box with a hinged lid. Smaller and thus more portable than its predecessors, it both transmitted and received on four (separate) crystal-controlled channels. It had additional features which made it well adapted to clandestine use: a switch that turned off the power automatically if the lid was closed, and a ‘whisper function’ to increase microphone sensitivity.

  Septemb
er

  1 Newly built in Osa, Japan, and registered in Vladivostok, the Omsk was a large-hatched ship over 500 feet in length and as tall as a ten-storey building. She had a reinforced bow for ploughing through icy Baltic waters and, inside her hull, eight giant compartments, each over sixty foot from side to side and as high as a house. When she set sail from the USSR she was equipped with every modern device, from radar and gyrocompasses to echo-sounding instruments; on her decks were all the weapons of modern warfare, including guided missile launchers to keep other ships at bay.

  2 Among the treasury of documents found in the National Archives, the relevant passages of which have been reproduced here.

  3 Developed in the 1950s, and originally named after the bird, these surfaceto-air missiles were saddled with the acronym ‘Homing All the Way Killer’, soon after they came online in 1960.

  4 Also known as Barbaroja, or Red Beard, Major-General Geraldo Gil was chief of the Cuban Directorate General of Intelligence (DGI) from 1959 to 1994. He died, of cirrhosis of the liver, in 2002.

  5 A South Beach landmark, first established in 1913, and as popular today. Appeared in Fleming’s Goldfinger, loosely disguised, as ‘Bill’s on the Beach’.

  6 A cancelled flight in 1958 led to a chance meeting with Junius Du Pont, whom Bond had first met six years earlier, at the casino in Royale. In Miami, Du Pont was being beaten heavily at cards by gold trader Auric Goldfinger, one of the world’s wealthiest men, who he suspected of cheating. He offered Bond $10,000 to discover how it was being done. Bond watched their game and soon discovered that the contents of Du Pont’s hands were being transmitted to Goldfinger through his ‘hearing aid’ by his secretary, who was sitting in the window of Goldfinger’s suite with a telescope trained on the game.