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  In Fleming’s memory, Kitzbühel was a ‘golden time’, and it was followed by two more years away from England, first in Munich and then Geneva. The young Englishman cut a dashing figure: he drove a smart black two-seater Buick, developed an excellent command of French and German, and enjoyed himself thoroughly. He also became engaged, briefly, to a young Swiss woman named Monique Panchaud de Bottomes, until his mother intervened. In 1931 he took the Foreign Office exams, but did not win a place. Young Fleming had successively failed to live up to expectations at Eton and Sandhurst, and now in his bid to join the Foreign Service.

  At the age of twenty-one, Fleming was handsome in a somewhat vulpine way. A broken nose (acquired in a collision on the Eton football field with Henry Douglas-Home, brother of the future Prime Minister) added to his rakish allure. Here, then, was a man of athletic good looks and Scottish ancestry, dangerous to women, cultured and charming, with a taste for fast cars, expensive things and foreign adventures. His time at Eton had been an unmitigated failure, but he could ski beautifully, speak German fluently, and seduce effortlessly. Ernan Forbes Dennis said of his young pupil: ‘He has excellent taste . . . and a desire both for truth and knowledge. He is virile and ambitious, generous and kind-hearted.’ There was also something solitary and reserved about his character, a central hardness. All these things could be said of the young Fleming; in time, they would also be true of James Bond.

  Mrs Val stepped in once more. Ian, she decreed, would become a journalist. Strings were pulled, and in October 1931 he took paid employment for the first time at Reuters news agency. This would prove a crucial formative experience. ‘I learned to write fast, and above all, be accurate,’ he recalled. ‘In Reuters if you weren’t accurate you were fired, and that was the end of that.’ Accuracy, speed and facts – the more colourful the better – these were the three key elements of a technique that would come to fruition with the Bond books. In addition, journalism would introduce Fleming to the wider world of international politics and foreign travel, the background for what was to come. In his first year in the job, Fleming covered the Alpine motor trials, an assignment that confirmed a growing fascination with fast cars, motor-racing and the associated high life, plus a Stalinist show trial of six British engineers accused of spying. Fleming’s first taste of Moscow – gloomy, oppressive, granite-faced Communism – would inform his later images of Russian strength and menace. He loved it. With the chutzpah of youth, he formally requested an interview with Stalin; he was not surprised to be turned down, but was entirely astonished to received a note apparently signed by Stalin himself, explaining that he was simply too busy. The writer William Plomer, who met Fleming at this time, described him as ‘like a mettlesome young horse’ with ‘a promise of something dashing and daring’. He seemed, thought Plomer, to ‘smell some battle from afar’.

  Having found a job he was good at, and enjoyed, Fleming promptly abandoned journalism for an exceptionally boring job in the City. The decision was perhaps less peculiar than it first seems. Robert Fleming had died, leaving nothing to his grandsons, whom he expected to be provided for by their father’s estate. The nature of Val’s will, however, meant that they would not inherit anything unless or until their mother remarried, or died. Such wills were not uncommon at the time, but it had a profound and unintended effect on Val’s sons. The Fleming boys had been born to a world of money; the only problem was that they did not have very much of it. Ian Fleming, not for the last time in his life, decided to choose the more lucrative option and joined the merchant bank Cull & Co.

  Fleming was not a good banker and soon shifted to stockbroking, to which he was even less suited. Indeed, one friend described him as ‘the world’s worst stockbroker’. His plan was simply to ‘make a packet and then get out’ – an ambition often stated by financial folk that seldom comes to pass, and even more rarely produces satisfaction. Fleming spent money as fast as he made it, on golf, cards, books (he would become an avid bibliophile) and women: young women from the cocktail party circuit, including a ‘rather spiffing’ nightclub dancer (or ‘bubble girl’) called Storm, but also older women – these older women were often intelligent, with strong personalities, and by no means naive poppets or stereotypical Bond Girls; they also tended to be married, usually to people Fleming knew. Whereas Bond goes to bed with a particular type (and shape) of woman, Fleming was more catholic and perhaps less choosy in his tastes. As one girlfriend remarked, ‘For Ian, women were like fishcakes. Mind you he was very fond of fishcakes, but he never pretended there was any mystique about eating them.’ Bond dines on caviar and the finest fillet steak, and then sleeps with the most beautiful women; Fleming, sexually speaking, ‘ate fishcakes’, lots of them. He was not quite a cad, but he was certainly a lothario, a ladies’ man, yet one who preferred the easy, undemanding company of fellow clubmen. He bought a former Baptist chapel in Ebury Street, Belgravia, where the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley had lived, and painted the inside suit-grey. Fleming’s distinctive interior decor no doubt reinforced the seductive, melancholy image that many women found irresistible, but it also reflected an innate sense of style and a fascination with colour and composition (perhaps inherited from his fashionable mother) that would find expression in his writing: room interiors are often meticulously described in the books. In upper-class party circles he was known as ‘Glamour Boy’, and there is no evidence he ever objected to the nickname. ‘London has got its claws into me,’ he told Ernan Forbes Dennis. But Fleming also got his claws into London, living a life in the capital’s clubs and fleshpots of unalloyed pleasure that was expensive, pleasant, louche and intellectually unchallenging.

  For millions, the Second World War was a trial or a tragedy. For a certain sort of Englishman, however, it was dangerous and thrilling, an opportunity for excitement and fulfilment in a moral cause. Many looked back on the war years, despite the deprivation, fear and violence, as a formative experience that changed for ever their perception of the world and its possibilities. For Ian Fleming, the outbreak of war was, in retrospect, a godsend. Photographs taken before the war show a young blade with hooded lids and a cruel upper lip, running to seed at speed. From 1939 onwards, he was a man with a mission: specifically, naval intelligence and espionage.

  Quite how Fleming came by this mission is a small mystery. The clubland he inhabited had its share of spies, and he knew many men operating in that shadowland: Forbes Dennis had been a spy. While in Kitzbühel, Fleming had encountered Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench, a semi-independent operative in one of the shadowy spy networks, gathering information on German troop concentrations. His elder brother Peter had already begun to work for British military intelligence before the war. Some thought Ian had done likewise. In 1939, he obtained a leave of absence from his stockbroking firm in order to cover a British trade mission to Moscow as a special freelance correspondent for The Times. Sefton Delmer, another journalist reporting on the trade delegation, was convinced that the Times job was simply Ian’s cover for more secret activities. Delmer had himself been employed by British intelligence as the Daily Express correspondent in Berlin, and would go on to work with Fleming on ‘black propaganda’ during the war. On his return, Fleming wrote a report on Soviet politics, an annotated and revised version of an article The Times had declined to publish, which found its way to various Soviet experts at the Foreign Office: ‘Russia would be an exceedingly treacherous ally,’ Fleming warned. And he was almost certainly debriefed by MI6, the external arm of the British secret service, on his return from his earlier Moscow visit in 1933.

  Fleming was clearly attracted to the spy world. For some time before the outbreak of war, he had been providing titbits of intelligence gleaned during his skiing trips and part-time journalism. It is almost equally certain that these offerings were uninvited and, at least in some quarters, unwelcome and unappreciated. The military attaché in Berlin dismissed Fleming’s early intelligence-gathering efforts as ‘gullible and of poor and imbalanced judgment’.
Perhaps he had been actively recruited by British intelligence at some point in the 1930s, but if so, it seems likely that Fleming would have revealed as much in the end: like many people involved in espionage, he was not very good at keeping secrets. More probably, his well-connected mother told Montagu Norman, then Governor of the Bank of England, that her son was looking for an interesting war job, and Norman gave a nod to the right channels.

  According to the old saw, anyone who asks to be a spy cannot be a spy. However it came about – whether through formal or informal contact, the old spy network, the old boy network or family clout – Ian Fleming was living proof that if you really wanted to join the espionage and intelligence club, you could. On 24 May 1939, just four months before the declaration of war, Fleming sat down to lunch at the Carlton Grill with Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, the hard-driving Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) and the man responsible for gathering intelligence in all areas of the war related to British naval interests – in other words, just about everywhere. Godfrey, himself barely three months into the job, had put out the word that he needed an assistant. Fleming, he decided, would be the ideal candidate.

  As, indeed, he was. To date, Fleming’s combination of imagination, intelligence and charm had found no more useful outlet than half-hearted money-making and full-hearted self-indulgence. He would make a superb aide to the Director of Naval Intelligence: his ability to get on with most people, particularly older, self-important men, made him the perfect liaison between the irascible Godfrey and the other parts of the British intelligence machine; his as yet unrealised literary skills lent him the resourceful thinking and imagination that is essential to effective espionage; his gambler’s instinct, his taste for adventure and his ability to read personality would all be honed and developed as the feckless bon viveur was transformed into Fleming of Naval Intelligence, a pivotal operative in Britain’s secret war at sea. Much of Fleming’s success was a consequence of his relationship with Godfrey: the admiral was M to Fleming’s Bond – an uncompromising, precise, short-tempered and loyal older man, faced with a young, gifted and unorthodox assistant, to whom he granted extraordinary licence. Years later, Godfrey, noting Fleming’s ‘marked flair’ for intelligence planning, would pay extravagant (and perhaps excessive) tribute to his protégé: ‘Ian should have been DNI and I his naval adviser.’ Reflecting years later on the inspiration for Bond, Fleming was precise: ‘My job got me right to the heart of things.’

  The Naval Intelligence Division (NID), operating out of Rooms 38 and 39 of the Admiralty, in Whitehall, was responsible for collecting, analysing and distributing intelligence for the Admiralty, and providing security and counter-intelligence to the Royal Navy for the war at sea. But its role was far wider than this suggests, just as Fleming was far more than merely an assistant to its boss. With two thousand personnel at its peak, and through a worldwide network of agents and attachés, NID assembled a vast amount of detailed information, but also formulated active deception plans and played an important part in the complex, fast-moving and dangerous game that is wartime espionage. In addition to signals intelligence and tracking U-boats and shipping, NID helped to run agents and double agents, and dealt in stolen documents, aerial photography, coastal surveillance and numerous ‘special operations’ against the Germans.

  In the smoky hive of Room 39, Fleming was Godfrey’s front man, and as such he operated with considerable freedom: he liaised with MI6 and SOE (responsible for sabotage and subversion); he worked with the Political Warfare Executive on propaganda, and handled the press; he fielded demands for information from above, and shielded Godfrey from interference from below. ‘I shared all secrets with him,’ Godfrey later wrote. Fleming was also allowed to evolve and manage his own plans, or ‘plots’, as he referred to them – the choice of word, given his later career as a novelist, seems significant. Some of Fleming’s ideas were run-of-the-mill, some were fantastical and impractical, and some, in the opinion of his colleagues, were simply mad. Even Godfrey noted that Fleming tended not to let practicalities get in the way of a good ‘plot’: ‘He had plenty of ideas and was anxious to carry them out but was not interested in, and would prefer to ignore, the extent of the logistics background inseparable to all projects.’ In a sense, Fleming’s task was to dream up espionage plans with convincing scenarios; others would then be charged with trying to turn fiction into reality. In this, he was preparing for, and precisely reversing, the process that would lead to the creation of James Bond.

  Among Fleming’s more remarkable ideas were: scuttling cement barges in the Danube at its most narrow point in order to block the waterway for German shipping; forging Reichsmarks to disrupt the German economy; dropping an observer (possibly Fleming himself) on the island of Heligoland to monitor the shipping outside Kiel; sinking a lump of concrete off Dieppe with men inside it to observe the German coastal defences; luring German secret agents to Monte Carlo and capturing them; and floating a radio ship in the North Sea to broadcast depressing and/or irritating propaganda to the Germans. ‘What nonsense they were,’ Fleming would later write, ‘those romantic Red Indian daydreams so many of us indulged in at the beginning of the war.’ They may have seemed nonsensical in retrospect, but at the time they were matters of life and death, and Ian treated his new job with a dedication he had never shown before, starting work at 6 a.m. and continuing late into the night. ‘It was deadly serious as well as intellectually stimulating,’ wrote one colleague. Lieutenant Fleming received wartime promotions to acting lieutenant commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, then acting commander – the same rank as James Bond.

  ‘Operation Ruthless’, which Fleming concocted in September 1940, offers an excellent example of his talents as both an espionage planner and a novelist. The cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park had already broken the code used on the fabled Enigma machine by the German Abwehr, or military intelligence service, but they had not yet penetrated the mysteries of the code used by the German navy, which used a different coding machine. NID wanted a codebook, so Fleming came up with a plan. The Germans had begun operating a rescue boat in the English Channel to pick up downed pilots. If this boat, presumably carrying a codebook aboard, could be lured to pick up what looked like a downed German plane, the crew could be overpowered and the codebook seized. Fleming’s plan came in three acts:

  Obtain from the Air Ministry an air-worthy German bomber. Pick a tough crew of five, including pilot, W/T (wireless/telegraph) officer and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniforms, add blood and bandages to suit.

  Crash plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service.

  Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.

  Fleming added a Bond touch, insisting that the pilot be a ‘tough bachelor, able to swim’. A Heinkel He 111 bomber, shot down over Scotland and since repaired, was obtained, along with some German uniforms. The plan sounded simple, but, as with many Fleming plots, there were serious practical objections, not least the argument that a Heinkel crashed at speed might kill its crew on impact or sink so fast that all inside would drown. Undaunted, Ian proposed to accompany the crew in person, an idea that was flatly rejected by Godfrey: ‘Ian was someone who simply could not fall into enemy hands because he was privy to everything.’ To Fleming’s chagrin, ‘Operation Ruthless’ was first postponed and then abandoned.

  Despite such setbacks, Commander Fleming was not content to spend the war pushing paper from behind a desk, no matter how interesting the paper or how imposing the desk. In June 1940, Fleming apparently flew to Paris as France was collapsing under the German onslaught. There he is said to have extracted a large sum of money from the safe at the Rolls-Royce headquarters in Paris where MI6 kept its funds, before heading south to make contact with Admiral Jean-François Darlan, head of the French navy. Britain needed to know whether Darlan would come over to the British side, or whether his fleet might fall into German hands. God
frey wanted Fleming to find out.

  When Fleming arrived, Bordeaux was in chaos, teeming with refugees. The newly arrived naval lieutenant commander helped with evacuation, burned most of the papers at the British Consulate, and using a simple line of argument persuaded a number of French merchant vessels to help with the evacuation: ‘If you don’t take these people on board and transport them to England, I can promise you that if the Germans don’t sink you, the Royal Air Force will.’ Fleming made his way home via Madrid and Portugal, but before leaving France he came up with a typically imaginative suggestion for dealing with Darlan and the French fleet: ‘Why doesn’t His Majesty’s government offer Admiral Darlan the Isle of Wight for the duration of the war, and make it French territory under the French flag for the entire period?’ The suggestion, needless to say, was not taken up; instead, the British, unwilling to take any further chances with Darlan’s promises, shelled and torpedoed the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir to prevent the Germans from getting their hands on it. Fleming reflected ruefully that perhaps he should ‘leave the conduct of the war to older and conceivably wiser heads’. Conceivably, but then again, Fleming’s idea might have saved 1,250 French lives, removed a source of French animosity that lingers to this day, and changed the course of the war. How the residents of the Isle of Wight would have felt to discover that they had suddenly become French can only be imagined.

  One of Fleming’s most notable contributions to wartime intelligence was the creation of 30 Assault Unit (30 AU), a commando group dedicated to gathering intelligence in advance of the main British fighting force. Fleming and Bond expert Henry Chancellor has described 30 AU as ‘in effect, the private army of the Naval Intelligence Department’; if so, then Fleming was its general, though never in the field. He referred to them as his ‘Red Indians’ – somewhat to their annoyance, since a number of these warriors had little time for their self-styled chief. Recruited from other commando units, the men of 30 AU, which was initially only thirty strong but eventually more than five times that size, were trained in unarmed combat, safe-cracking, code-breaking and other nefarious arts. A similar force had been deployed by the Germans to capture Allied documents, codes and equipment; Fleming considered it ‘one of the most outstanding innovations in German intelligence’ and worked hard to copy it. Inevitably, 30 AU attracted men of a particular stamp: daring, independent-minded buccaneers, stylish in a brutal way and supremely tough. One member of the unit described them as ‘fairly piratical, especially with the women’. These ‘tough commando types’, as Fleming remembered them, would form the bedrock of James Bond’s character.