For Your Eyes Only

by Ben MacIntyre

  While most of Fleming’s friends and acquaintances enjoyed appearing in the series, a few objected vehemently. In Diamonds Are Forever, Fleming described the homosexual villain ‘Boofy’ Kidd: ‘Kidd’s a pretty boy. His friends call him “Boofy” . . . some of these homos make the worst killers.’ This was all very well, but one of Fleming’s best friends (and a relative of his wife, Ann) was Arthur Gore, later the Earl of Arran, who was universally known by the distinctive nickname ‘Boofy’. Gore was livid and complained bitterly, to no avail.

  Another who strongly objected to seeing his name in a Bond novel was Ernö Goldfinger, the distinguished and controversial modernist architect. Fleming first heard the name from his golfing partner, John Blackwell, who was a cousin by marriage of Ernö Goldfinger and disliked him. Fleming is said to have objected to Goldfinger’s love of concrete and the destruction of Victorian houses to make way for his tower blocks. According to one theory, Fleming particularly hated a terrace of modern houses designed by Goldfinger on Willow Road in Hampstead, and so used his name for one of his most memorable evildoers: Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England; treasurer of the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, SMERSH; and a gold-obsessive who likes to paint his lovers with gold in order to make love to the substance he craves. When Ernö obtained a proof copy of Goldfinger, he gave it to his associate, Jacob Blacker, and asked him whether he should sue. Blacker read the book and reported that the only substantial difference was: ‘You’re called Ernö and he’s called Auric.’ This was rather rude, since Ernö was a visionary six-foot architect and Auric is a murderous five-foot megalomaniac. But, unlike most of Fleming’s name-borrowings, there are a few genuine similarities between the Goldfingers: both were Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe who liked fast cars, and both were Marxists, in Auric’s case by association with SMERSH. There is also a whiff of anti-Semitism in Fleming’s depiction of a Jewish billionaire with a gold fixation. The real Goldfinger was exceptionally unamused, summoned his lawyers, and threatened to halt publication. Equally angry, Fleming thought his publisher should insert an erratum slip, changing Goldfinger to ‘Goldprick’ throughout the book (a name originally suggested, unseriously, by the critic Cyril Connolly). A truce was established after Fleming’s publishers agreed that, in advertising the book, the name Goldfinger would be coupled with the name Auric wherever possible. Even so, for the rest of his life Ernö Goldfinger was plagued by people calling him on the telephone and saying, in the voice of Sean Connery, ‘Goldfinger? This is 007.’

  Ernö provided the name, unwittingly and unwillingly, but the character of Goldfinger may have been based on the extrovert and flashy American gold tycoon Charles W. Engelhard Jr, whom Fleming met in 1949 and remained friends with. Engelhard was owner of a huge mining and metals conglomerate, and a major racehorse owner. The gold magnate delighted in the general assumption that he was the inspiration for Goldfinger, turning up to parties dressed in orange and pretending that he had a stewardess named Pussy Galore on his private plane.

  ‘Q’, the head of research and development for the secret service and irascible provider of Bond’s gadgets and cars, would become a staple character in the films, but there is no Q character in the books. In Casino Royale, Bond is told to ‘see Q for any equipment you need’, but this is most likely to be a reference to ‘Q-Branch’, the real name of a shadowy department which supplied uniforms, gizmos and other unconventional weapons of war. Charles Fraser-Smith of Q-Branch had provided much of the equipment for Operation Ruthless, Fleming’s aborted plan to capture the Enigma codebook. A former missionary in Morocco, Fraser-Smith was nominally a civil servant with the Ministry of Supply’s Clothing and Textile Department, under cover of which he made equipment for secret agents, saboteurs and prisoners of war, such as miniature cameras, maps written in invisible ink and golf balls hollowed out to hide a compass. When this latter technique was used to conceal diamonds in the film of Diamonds Are Forever, Fraser-Smith was critical, pointing out that the golf balls he had designed during the war were ideal secret receptacles since they would still work as golf balls, whereas those imagined in the film would barely have got off the ground.

  Fleming clearly derived great pleasure, and considerable devilry, from his choice of names, whether the subject was good, bad or inanimate. He had an extraordinary ear for names with a ring to them, a gift which later imitators have found hard to emulate. ‘He took immense trouble with names and plots, although the names sometimes came before the plots,’ said his friend Ivar Bryce (whose own name would be adopted by Bond as an alias in Live and Let Die). ‘He enjoyed using the names of his friends, or even those he only knew slightly.’ Or not at all. People were named after things, and things were named after people. His lover in later life, Blanche Blackwell, gave him a small boat named Octopussy, which became the name of a man-eating pet octopus in the short story. In rather ungallant return, Fleming named the ancient guano tanker in Dr No the Blanche. The crime boss Marc-Ange Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is named after El Draco, the Spanish name for the English privateer Sir Francis Drake – a reference picked up years later by J. K. Rowling for her Hogwarts antihero, Draco Malfoy. Rosa Klebb (the Russian for bread) was partly based on Colonel Rybkin of Soviet intelligence. Major Boothroyd, the secret service armourer, is named in honour of Geoffrey Boothroyd, the gun expert who provided Fleming with invaluable technical advice. Ernie Cuneo, a hard-nosed New York lawyer and friend of Fleming, found himself turned into Ernie Cureo, the Las Vegas taxi-driver and undercover CIA agent in Diamonds Are Forever; his American friends Tommy and Oatsie Leiter became Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA ally. One of the more charming christenings was that of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. One afternoon in Jamaica, Fleming and Ivar Bryce visited a romantically isolated mansion on the coast and were ushered in to meet ‘The Colonel’. A little later, a dusty butler appeared and announced, ‘Vespers are served’, while dishing up a powerful concoction of rum, herbs, fruit and ice. Ever after, Fleming associated the word Vesper with a heady sort of glamour, and made her Bond’s first lover. Darko Kerim, the extrovert secret service agent in From Russia with Love, was based on Nazim Kalkavan, Fleming’s guide to Istanbul when he covered an Interpol conference there in 1956.

  Fleming teased his friends and acquaintances by putting them, their names, or their characteristics in his books. But the character he most pillaged for material was himself. It is a measure of Fleming’s introspection that he could identify his own virtues as well as his vices, and inject them both into the personality of James Bond. In Bond’s obituary in The Times, from You Only Live Twice, Fleming cannot resist the opportunity to write his own epitaph, with a knowing glimmer of self-congratulation:

  To serve the confidential nature of his work, he was accorded the rank of lieutenant in the Special Branch of the RNVR, and it is a measure of the satisfaction his services gave to his superiors that he ended the war with the rank of commander.

  004

  The Plots: From Hot War to Cold War

  004

  The Plots: From Hot War to Cold War

  James Bond is a warrior of the Cold War. Yet in many ways – in attitude, sensibility and even equipment – he is a creation of the Second World War. As with Fleming himself, that war shaped and toughened him, and with the ending of that conflict, in common with many combatants, he finds himself adrift. In From Russia with Love, Bond’s war nostalgia is made explicit: ‘He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline.’

  Ian Fleming shared with his brother, Peter, a fear that Britain, having triumphed over Nazism, was becoming soft and irrelevant, a land of small minds and smaller dreams. In this, they echoed the views of a generation brought up to think of Britain as Great, but now doomed in peacetime to watch the American ascendancy, decolonisation, queues, bureaucracy, socialism and other perceived indignities as the Empire declined. In Fleming’s words: ‘The blubbery arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they w
ere slowly strangling him . . . in his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year, and peace was killing him.’ For many of the men and women who had fought Nazism for six long years, peace was an almost physical jolt. Amid the fear and deprivations of war, many had experienced excitement, danger and a freedom from the daily drudgery of normal life in ways that would never be repeated. Even men like Fleming, who had fought a relatively comfortable war of the intellect, had been stretched and challenged. Victory brought peace, but it also brought boredom: ‘The only vice Bond utterly condemned.’

  Fleming himself was easily bored. He was bored by shooting parties in Scotland, stockbroking, small talk and his wife’s literary soirées. He was bored as only a member of the upper class who has never had to work hard can be bored. He was temperamentally inclined to boredom, and alarmed by its effect on his moods. The very first lines of Casino Royale are suffused with ennui: ‘The soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of fear and greed and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.’ Fleming’s villains suffer from the affliction as well as his hero. ‘Mister Bond, I suffer from boredom,’ declares Mr Big in Live and Let Die. ‘I am a prey to what the early Christians called “accidie” – the deadly lethargy that envelops those who are sated . . .’ Fleming spent much of his life trying to escape boredom, seeking new thrills, new locations, new cars, new lovers. ‘There was only one way to deal with boredom – kick oneself out of it,’ he wrote in From Russia with Love. Fleming’s novels were a cure for boredom, his own and that of his readers: his inspiration was to take the reality and spirit of the Second World War – British self-belief, technological wizardry, and above all the sense of moral rectitude in an honourable cause – and apply it to the far more murky world of the Cold War.

  In his novel The Sixth Column, published in 1951, Peter Fleming wrote of Britain’s need for a buccaneering hero ‘with the urbane, faintly swashbuckling sangfroid of Raffles’, as an ‘antidote to the restrictions and frustrations of life in England’. For Ian Fleming, the veteran of wartime intelligence, a patriotic spy at war, whether cold or hot, was simply ‘the most exciting of all human adventure stories – the single man, in the darkness, facing death alone for the sake of the great mass of his countrymen’. Bond is a worldsaver, just as Britain perceived itself to be during the war; American intelligence is secondary to that of Britain. Indeed, the Americans rely on Bond: when the evil forces of SMERSH seek to attack the West, their primary target is Bond, and Bond alone, who must be killed ‘with ignominy’. Fleming played on contemporary fears to give Bond modern relevance, but his hero harks back to wartime figures like Patrick Dalzel-Job and Fitzroy Maclean, the ideal antidote to Britain’s postwar austerity, rationing and the looming premonition of lost power.

  As the two superpowers, the USA and USSR, fought it out in an escalating arms race, Britons could, through Bond and his exploits, relive a fast-disappearing world where Britain called the shots, and won the war. ‘You underestimate the English,’ Bond warns Goldfinger. ‘They may be slow, but they get there.’ This was, of course, fantasy – Britain’s power was eroding fast, and in the great espionage confrontation between the CIA and the KGB, Britain’s SIS was no more than a minor player. In the 1950s, the British intelligence establishment was rocked by the exposure of an entire Soviet spy network within its ranks: the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean represented a body blow to the prestige and self-confidence of the British secret service. So far from dominating the espionage battle against communism, British intelligence was viewed with mounting, and entirely justified, suspicion by the CIA. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson ordered a secret investigation into the entire structure of British intelligence. For most of the war, Britain had conducted the espionage battle against Germany with remarkable results; by 1952, the conductor’s baton had passed to the US, and Britain was firmly in the position of second fiddle.

  Ian Fleming simply ignored this inconvenient fact. His fantasy of an omnipotent British secret service nourished millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic, and spread a legend of British espionage efficiency that persists to this day. In a now-notorious speech of 2003, President George W. Bush implicitly summoned up the ghost of James Bond when he cited British intelligence as a reason for invading Iraq: ‘The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ French spy work, say, or even American intelligence, would not have carried quite the same cachet. The information about African uranium was wrong, but that is not the point here: Fleming and Bond spread the belief that Britain produced the best spies in the world and, bizarrely, the myth stuck.

  Fleming’s characters and plots emerge, in many instances, directly from the Second World War. Even the demonology derives from that conflict: evildoers being, in approximate order of untrustworthiness, German, Russian, Japanese, Bulgarian, Korean and French. Characters are endowed with realistic, and often elaborate, past histories, to place them more firmly in the present. Polish-born Blofeld, we discover, spied for Germany during the war. The brutal communist Le Chiffre was found wandering in the Dachau displaced persons camp, apparently suffering from amnesia. He has no name; he is merely the number, ‘le chiffre’. The ghastly Rosa Klebb, the colonel in charge of operations and executions for SMERSH, is given an earlier career in the Spanish Civil War, working for Andrés Nin, the Spanish communist revolutionary. Nin was tortured and murdered, on Stalin’s orders, in 1937. Fleming implies that his murderer was the fictional Klebb.

  Many of the names chosen by Fleming were German, an unsubtle code to indicate that the Nazi menace was still at large: Egon Bartsch and Dr Walter are German scientists who worked on the Nazi rocket programme employed by Drax on the Moonraker project; Bruno Bayer is a former Gestapo agent now working for SPECTRE. Drax himself is really former Nazi officer Graf Hugo von der Drache (‘Drache’ being German for dragon), and his aide de camp is Willy Krebs, a name at least some of Fleming’s readers would have recognised – General Hans Krebs was Hitler’s army chief of staff, who committed suicide in the Führer’s bunker shortly after Hitler himself.

  Bond’s allies have seen war service: Leiter is a former captain with the US Marines; in Moonraker, 008 has returned from Peenemunde, site of the wartime rocket research facility in northern Germany; even Mary Goodnight, Bond’s secretary, is an ex-Wren. Bond was born at a time when memoirs and biographies of Second World War personalities were being published in large numbers, revealing a real world of derring-do that came as a revelation to many readers. That individuals had carried out acts of unbelievable bravery in the war made Bond that much more believable. The Second World War provides the psychological backdrop for almost all the principal characters. ‘He was back there again fighting war,’ Fleming writes of Tiger Tanaka, the spy trained as a kamikaze pilot who heads the Japanese secret service in You Only Live Twice. ‘Bond knew the symptoms. He often visited this haunted forest of memory himself.’ Or as Bond remarks in Thunderball: ‘The war just doesn’t seem to have ended for us.’

  The clues to the Second World War are everywhere, yet Bond is fighting an emphatically new war, against a looming communist threat, in the shape of its most evil and ruthless manifestation, SMERSH. Once again, Fleming drew on reality and reshaped it to lend credibility to this imagined combat. The people, the weapons, the scenes, all carried deliberate echoes of real wartime events. The underwater trap door in the hull of the Disco Volante in Thunderball and the limpet-mining of Mr Big’s boat in Live and Let Die may well be based on the extraordinary wartime activities of the 10th Light Flotilla, an elite unit of Italian navy frogmen, who used similar methods to attack Allied shipping off Gibraltar in what Fleming considered ‘the greatest piece of effrontery in the underwater war’. The assassination attempt on Bond in Casino Royale was, according to Fleming himself, based on the attempted Soviet assassination in 1942 of the former spymaster Franz von Papen, then Germany’s ambassador
to Turkey: in both fact and fiction, the assassins were Bulgarians acting as Soviet agents, and in both cases they failed to kill the target and blew themselves up instead.

  If some of Fleming’s plots transposed Second World War events into a Cold War setting, others were drawn directly from the events of the Cold War itself. Real people, such as Lavrenty Beria, chief of Soviet security and one of Stalin’s principal executioners, are mentioned to lend authenticity: the fall of Beria (executed on the orders of Khrushchev in 1953) enables Grubozaboyschikov to become head of SMERSH and allows Rosa Klebb to take over Otydel II, in charge of operation and execution. Interestingly, Fleming states that Beria ‘went to the gallows’ on 13 January 1954, the official Soviet date of the execution; after the files were later opened, however, it was revealed that Beria had been shot almost a month earlier. Such mingling of fact and fiction is deliberate and highly effective. Fleming occupied a world radically divided between the communist East and the capitalist West, and one that was intensely paranoid. The Thunderball plot imagined Blofeld threatening to bomb Miami with stolen atomic weapons, eerily foreshadowing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. To contemporary readers, that menace seemed only too real. Indeed, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban crisis reinforced fear of the Soviet threat, and boosted the sales of Fleming’s books.

  Indeed, for a time Bond was physically as close to the action of the Cold War as it was possible to get: namely, on the bedside table of the President of the United States. John F. Kennedy was first introduced to Fleming’s books in 1955, and read a copy of Casino Royale while convalescing in New England. He remained a fan to the end of his life. In 1961, Kennedy named From Russia with Love in his top ten favourite books, an endorsement that did no harm to his image, and did wonders for Fleming’s US sales. A subsequent advertisement featured a picture of the White House with a single window lit and the caption: ‘You can bet on it he’s reading one of those Ian Fleming thrillers.’ The enthusiasm was not limited to JFK: Robert Kennedy was also a keen reader, and their sister Eunice read every novel at least once. ‘The entire Kennedy family is crazy about James Bond,’ Fleming was told. The President insisted on showing the film of Dr No at a private screening in the White House. Fleming returned the compliment: one of the few books Bond has in his library is Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. The Kennedys gave Bond an immense boost, but then 007 was useful, in turn, to the Kennedys: it did the President’s reputation no harm whatever to be thought to be sitting up at night, reading novels about a tough, handsome anti-communist who was irresistible to women.