Some men of what would become 30 AU got their first taste of action during the disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942, the major assault launched by six thousand British and Canadian troops to test the German defences on the northern coast of France. Fleming was allowed to accompany a Royal Marine Commando unit, but only as an observer. He watched the raid unfold from the deck of HMS Fernie, a Hunt-class destroyer eight hundred yards offshore, while the men of the unit waited to go ashore from a nearby gunboat. Fleming wrote a vivid account of the calamity, the confusion and, above all, the horrible cacophony, as the Allied attackers were pinned down by machine-gun fire, with the Canadian troops suffering particularly heavy losses. By mid-morning it had become clear that the unit was never going to be able to disembark from HMS Locust and reach the beach, and as the shattered raiding party prepared to withdraw, a shell struck HMS Fernie, killing one crewman and wounding several others. Fleming was happy enough when the captain of HMS Fernie decided the time had come to head home. He would later write sardonically: ‘I had been instructed to return to England independently directly a certain mission had been accomplished, and when it was clear that the gunboat was not going to be able to carry out her original instructions, the Government exhortation “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” came to my mind, heavily underlined by the shells from the shore batteries which came zipping through our rigging.’
Some three thousand British and Canadian troops were killed or captured in the Dieppe raid. This was the closest Ian Fleming would ever get to real war. His sister-in-law, the actress Celia Johnson, married to Peter, noted that this brief encounter with death had shaken even Ian’s capacity for understatement. It seemed, she said, as if ‘he had his breath taken away once or twice’. Fleming’s ironic tone does not exactly suggest a man itching for battle, but then opinion was (and remains) divided over whether Ian was simply an armchair warrior or a genuine warrior confined to an armchair against his will by the nature of his job. Edward Merrett, who shared Room 39 with Fleming in those years, dismissed the notion that his former colleague was keen to get to grips with the enemy, a danger-loving James Bond manqué. ‘He was a pen-pusher, like all of us,’ said Merrett. ‘If he was secretly longing for action I never saw any sign of it.’ But another colleague, Peter Smithers, may have been closer to the mark when he speculated that Ian’s creative urges sprang directly from having to imagine scenes of adventure and espionage, without actually witnessing the events in person. ‘Ian constantly longed to be personally engaged in the excitement. He was of an essentially aggressive nature. It was the repression of these desires by authority, quite rightly, which in my opinion fired the imagination engaged in his books.’ In the books, Fleming hints at Bond’s heroic wartime service, recording that he saw action in the Ardennes forest in 1944, operated ‘behind enemy lines’, and killed two enemy agents during the war – a Japanese code-breaker at the Rockefeller Center in New York and a Norwegian double agent whom he stabs to death in Stockholm. Whether Ian Fleming would have liked to play a similarly dramatic part in the war is moot. John Godfrey was not about to allow him to head off to places where he might be killed: Fleming was simply too useful where he was, and, as ‘the only officer who had a finger in practically every pie’, he knew too much to risk being captured.
In the Bond novels, 007 is described as having spent much of the war travelling the world on various missions. That was certainly Fleming’s lucky experience. Operation Golden Eye was the back-up plan to maintain communication with Gibraltar and launch sabotage operations in case the Nazis invaded Spain; setting up the plan, which never had to be used, took Fleming to Spain, Portugal, Tangiers and Gibraltar itself. It would also of course become the name of his Jamaican home. Fleming found himself in close contact with intelligence operatives in the United States, most notably the Canadian William Stephenson, head of British intelligence in North America, and William ‘Big Bill’ Donovan, the lawyer, First World War veteran and US government official who would play a crucial role in Anglo-American intelligence and the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which would later evolve into the CIA.
In May 1941, Fleming accompanied Godfrey to the States, ostensibly to inspect security in US ports, but also to help William Stephenson and Donovan develop the intelligence relationship with America. On the way, they stopped at Estoril, near Lisbon, where Fleming gambled at the casino with some Portuguese businessmen, and lost. On leaving, Fleming remarked: ‘What if those men had been German secret service agents, and suppose we had cleaned them out of their money; now that would have been exciting.’ It was another glimpse into the workings of Fleming’s imagination. The scene would marinade in his mind for a decade before finding its way into the most memorable moment in Casino Royale, when Bond cleans out the repulsive communist agent Le Chiffre.
In Washington, Godfrey and Fleming met J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, for exactly sixteen minutes, but soon afterwards Roosevelt followed British advice and made Bill Donovan head of the new government intelligence department that would later become the OSS. At Donovan’s request, Fleming penned a seventy-page memo with suggestions on the shape a US intelligence agency should take after the war. His description of the ideal secret agent has the unmistakable ring of Bond: ‘must have trained powers of observation, analysis and evaluation; absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty; language and wide experience, and be aged about 40 to 50’. Fleming would later claim, not entirely seriously, that this work had been instrumental in forming the CIA charter; even if this was not strictly true, Donovan was grateful enough to present Fleming with a .38 Colt revolver inscribed ‘For Special Services’. In later life, Fleming would stoke speculation by declining to say exactly what these services had been, while hinting that they had been very special indeed.
Fleming made two more trips across the Atlantic, for conferences at which Churchill and Roosevelt discussed Allied strategy. The second, in Quebec in 1943, involved one of the odder moments in the Fleming–Bond biography. Bill Stephenson, the mastermind behind British intelligence in North America, would later claim that during this visit Fleming attended Camp X, the notoriously tough training centre near Toronto where SOE and OSS agents were put through their paces. More than that, Stephenson claimed that Fleming had excelled at the course, including unarmed combat, placing a fake bomb in a Toronto power station, swimming underwater to an offshore tanker and attaching a limpet mine to the hull (strongly reminiscent of a scene in Live and Let Die), and firing a Sten gun on the rifle range with ‘extraordinary relish’. Most bizarrely, at the end of the course, each trainee was supposedly issued with a revolver and told to kill a man at a specific address. According to Stephenson, this was the only aspect of the course Fleming flunked; he would later declare that he ‘could never kill a man in that way’.
However, the historian of Camp X, David Stafford, could find no evidence that Ian Fleming had ever attended a course there. The courses described by Stephenson, at which his friend supposedly excelled, were not on the curriculum. It is certainly possible, even likely, that he visited the camp in 1943; he may even have taken part in a few training events. But the notion that Fleming outperformed the real spies at the most demanding of all wartime spy camps is pure fiction, and soon would be.
Despite the sudden sacking of Admiral Godfrey in December 1942, as the war headed to its finale, Ian continued to play a prominent role in naval intelligence. His travels continued, including a round-the-world trip to coordinate intelligence for the new British Pacific Fleet that took him to Cairo, Ceylon, Australia and then home via Pearl Harbor. He also visited Jamaica to attend a conference on the U-boat threat in the Caribbean, and fell in love with the island. Here he would build his holiday home, Goldeneye, and here he would, in time, write every one of the Bond novels.
In March 1944, Fleming was charged with running the committee which channelled top-secret information to the Royal Navy units preparing to invade Normandy. The ‘Red Indians’, 30 AU, would be
part of the attack, and Fleming compiled lists of the sort of information and equipment to be scooped up ahead of the invasion force. As the German army retreated, 30 AU scoured after it. Later, the unit would be the first Allied force to enter the naval port of Kiel. Fleming’s ‘Red Indians’ picked up some astonishing technological booty: an acoustic homing torpedo hidden in a mushroom farm, an amphibious machine for exploding beach mines, and a one-man submarine – complete with decomposing crewman inside, one dead eye pressed to the periscope. At Tambach Castle, 30 AU came across the entire German naval archives dating back to 1870, under the care of three German admirals. Fleming himself travelled to Germany to ensure their safe return to Britain. As for the three admirals, according to one account, Fleming ordered that they be killed, but when the lieutenant charged with this refused, he relented. Something about this story does not ring true: whatever brutal qualities he might invest in his fictional agent, Fleming was not the killing kind.
Fleming never claimed to be James Bond. He did not have to: the critics and media did that for him. But he was careful not to deny it too forcefully either. He was only too happy to be photographed with gun in hand, and to hint at dark doings in his wartime spy days. He had travelled the world helping to spin the wartime spy web, and he had seen fighting at first hand. However, most of his war had taken place behind a London desk, dreaming up plots; his second successful career would involve the same process, but at a different desk. In later years, Fleming would refer to ‘school and war and other uncivilised experiences’; in truth, his war had been a remarkably civilised affair.
After six and a half years with naval intelligence, Fleming was no longer the callow, spoiled young man he had been in 1939. He had found a world, of secret agents and espionage, of adventure, violence and intrigue, that delighted him, satisfying both his intellect and romanticism. Churchill himself asserted that ‘in the higher ranges of Secret Service work, the actual facts of many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true.’ Fleming would later quote that passage with approval, having converted his own experience of the tangled world into novels. It would be another seven years before he sat down to create Bond, but much of the material was already in place. Fleming had met dangerous adventurers, and known subtle spies; in the midst of war, he had travelled to distant corners of the world; he had witnessed the remarkable power of modern gadgetry in the spy’s armoury; he had seen how secret agents are made; he had watched men die; and he had held the power of life and death in his own hands. Above all, his job with naval intelligence had taken place in a wartime world where anything seemed possible. Winning a war, like writing a novel, required one weapon above all others: imagination.
Back in London in 1946, Fleming returned to journalism and accepted the post of foreign news manager of the Kemsley newspaper group, which included the Sunday Times, the Empire News, the Sunday Graphic and a raft of local and regional newspapers. As the former press liaison officer for NID, he had struck up a close friendship with the proprietor, Lord Kemsley, during the war, and his contract was astonishingly generous: a fat wage for an undemanding job, a large expense account and, crucially, two months off in early spring of every year to spend in Jamaica. Fleming was manager of some eighty foreign correspondents, whose locations were indicated by a map behind his desk with a number of flashing lights. These correspondents (some of whom were also spies) were hired, fired, paid and commissioned by Fleming. Over the next fourteen years, he would perform numerous roles at the Sunday Times: manager, columnist and writer on subjects as diverse as gambling and travel. His was an easy, pleasant and unchallenging life. Fleming’s description in Moonraker of Bond’s daily routine when not on assignment is a fairly accurate depiction of his own easygoing existence in these years: ‘Elastic office hours from around ten to six, lunch . . . evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends . . . or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women, weekends playing golf for high stakes.’
But just as Bond secretly awaits the call from M, so Fleming was also preparing himself, perhaps subconsciously, for a belated call-up from his own muse: gathering material, honing his wartime memories, travelling the world, and preparing Bond’s life within his own.
003
Who was James Bond?
003
Who Was James Bond?
Every acquaintance of Ian Fleming ran the risk of ending up as a character, or a characteristic, in one of his Bond books. Fleming was, like most fiction writers, an avid collector of facts: he gathered names, plots, meals, venues and words from the places he had been and the people he had met. Reality underpins the fiction: while producing the stream of Bond books, Fleming would also find time to write two books of non-fiction, on diamonds and travel, both subjects which loom large in the novels. Almost every character in his fiction is based, to some extent, on a real person, even if only by name. He plucked these names from his social circle, his memory, his reading, his favourite Jamaican newspaper, the Daily Gleaner, and his imagination: old school friends (and enemies), clubmen, colleagues in the City and Fleet Street, golfing partners, girlfriends and others found themselves transported into Fleming’s fiction. This was all very well if you happened to be named after a heroic bit-part player or a curvaceous new lover, but several of Fleming’s acquaintances were mortally offended to discover that their names had been appropriated and attached to the most fearsome fictional villains. The Bond books are not romans-à-clef, straightforward fictionalisations of living people, but rather careful, teasing and often witty interleavings of fact and fiction, imagined people with real names, and real people with invented names in imagined situations. Working out who’s who in Bond, and who might be partially based on whom (as well as who later claimed to be whom, and probably wasn’t), is one of the most intriguing and complex aspects of the relationship between Ian Fleming and James Bond.
Where did James Bond – the name – come from? As with all aspects of the Bond stories, there are several theories and a number of speculations. The most popular (and one that he publicly affirmed) is that Fleming, sitting down to work at his desk in Goldeneye, simply lifted the name from his bookshelves, his eye having alighted upon Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, the standard reference book published by Macmillan in 1947. Fleming was fascinated by wildlife, and birds in particular: ‘For Your Eyes Only’ opens with a detailed description of the streamertail or doctor hummingbird, which again may be derived from the other James Bond. In 1964, long after his name had become a global brand, the American ornithologist paid a surprise visit to Fleming in Jamaica. A Canadian film crew happened to be conducting an interview with Fleming at the time, and with a happy flourish, the author introduced his unexpected guest as ‘the real James Bond’. In the film Die Another Day, starring Pierce Brosnan, Bond picks up a copy of Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies and disguises himself as an ornithologist, in elaborate homage to the origin of the name.
Though James Bond may have been christened after an expert bird-spotter plucked at random from a book spine, it is possible that the name was already stored somewhere in Fleming’s mind when he began to write Casino Royale. During the war, C. H. Forster, a friend who was then working in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, recalled a casual conversation in which Fleming described how he planned to come up with fictional names if he wrote a book. ‘That’s easy,’ he said. ‘I think of the first couple of names in my house at school and change their Christian names.’ Forster told him that the first names in his school register had been James Aitken and Harry Bond. ‘So you could have Harry Aitken and James Bond’. Fleming had allegedly remarked that ‘James Bond’ sounded better. There are
other possibilities. Peter Fleming knew an SIS officer named Rodney Bond, who had saved his life during a clandestine operation in Greece. According to the British diplomat Harold Caccia (who had been rescued by Rodney Bond in the same operation), when Ian Fleming was looking for a name for his fictional hero, it was his brother Peter who suggested he be named in honour of his wartime colleague. There is also a character named James Bond in the Agatha Christie short story ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’, published in 1934: Fleming may have read the story, leaving the name lodged somewhere in his subconscious. Bondologists have also noted that there is a church in Toronto called St James Bond, which Fleming might conceivably have seen on his visit to Canada during the war – although his Bond, of course, is no kind of saint.
For Your Eyes Only Page 3