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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 were 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.
Fleming met JFK just once, in 1960, before he was elected to the presidency, when the English writer was invited to a dinner party at Kennedy’s home in Washington DC. The conversation inevitably turned to Castro and Cuba. Fleming – with tongue, one suspects, firmly in cheek – suggested that leaflets be scattered over Cuba warning that radioactivity could lodge in beards and that they should all therefore shave, thus potentially ridiculing the famously over-bearded Castro. This sounds merely silly, and it was, but no sillier than the various lunatic efforts to dislodge the Cuban strong man that were being actively discussed within the CIA. Bizarrely, one of the other dinner party guests, a CIA agent, passed Fleming’s idea on to his boss. Once again, Fleming’s imagination merged with fantastic reality. The crucial, mutually advantageous relationship between Bond and Kennedy is illustrated by one final, perhaps apocryphal, detail. The night before he was assassinated in Dallas, the President is said to have been reading a James Bond novel; so was Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who would kill him the very next day.
If Fleming’s Cold War plots seemed outlandish at times, he was unapologetic. This was an age in which presidents read novels and novelists advised presidents, and it did not, for instance, seem impossible to the CIA that it could kill Fidel Castro by injecting his cigars with poison. The spy war was, at times, truly bizarre, and the more weird it was, the more Fleming was impelled to echo it in fiction. The attempt by SMERSH to assassinate Bond on the Orient Express in From Russia with Love was based directly on the death of Eugene Karp. A US naval attaché (and spy) in Romania, Karp was apparently on the run from Soviet assassins when he boarded the famous train in Bucharest in February 1950. His body was found later by ramblers in a railway tunnel near Salzburg. The train conductor had apparently been drugged, but officials claimed Karp had fallen out of a door; everyone else, including Fleming, believed he had been killed by Soviet assassins, a murder on the Orient Express. If that sounded like pure fantasy (Agatha Christie had published Murder on the Orient Express in 1934), Fleming was quick to point out that Cold War reality, and the espionage game, was stranger than any fiction he could invent:
My plots are fantastic, while often being based on truth. They go wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond the possible. Every now and then there will be a story in the newspapers that lifts a corner of the veil from Secret Service work. A tunnel from East to West Berlin so that our Secret Service can tap the Russian telephone system; Crabb’s frogman exploit to examine the hull of a Soviet cruiser; the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets . . . this is all true Secret Service history that is yet in the higher realm of fantasy, and James Bond’s ventures into this realm are perfectly legitimate.
These real events cited by Fleming are worth exploring in greater detail, since they reflect the remarkable dovetailing of truth and fiction in the Bond stories. The name of Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb will for ever be linked with the more outlandish antics of the British secret service. In 1956, this Royal Navy frogman was recruited by MI6 to inspect the hull of the Soviet cruiser that had brought Nikita Khrushchev on a state visit to Britain. Crabb’s mission was probably to search for mine-laying hatches and sonar equipment on the bottom of the Soviet ship as it lay in Portsmouth harbour. The MI6 officer in charge of the mission was Nicholas Elliott, a friend of Fleming’s. Crabb was unfit; the mission was idiotic, diplomatically unwise and exceedingly dangerous. It was, needless to say, a disaster. Crabb’s headless body was found off the coast fourteen months later. The Crabb affair prompted outrage, a diplomatic firestorm, the resignation of MI6 director John Sinclair, and a flood of speculation that continues unabated. But it proved to the public that the British secret service was still capable of the most extravagant adventures. Three years later, Fleming sent Bond out to investigate the hull of the Disco Volante in Thunderball; unlike Crabb, he returns intact, just.
If Crabb was the Western spy who failed, then Nikolai Khokhlov was the Soviet spy who very nearly succeeded. A KGB spy whose exploits rival any of the models on which Bond was based, Khokhlov had fought behind the lines in the Second World War, and had taken part in the assassination of the Nazi official Wilhelm Kube, then Generalkommissar for White Russia. Khokhlov’s spymaster was Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the Administration for Special Tasks in the NKVD (which would become the KGB), in charge of sabotage and assassinations. From the seventh floor of the dreaded Lubyanka building, Sudoplatov plotted the deaths of those perceived as enemies of the regime, including the murder of Trotsky in 1940. In 1953, Khokhlov was selected by Sudoplatov to assassinate a prominent anti-Soviet Russian émigré in Berlin. Khokhlov, a man of conscience, found he could not carry out such a murder in cold blood, and instead defected to the West, bringing with him an extraordinary array of murderous gadgetry, including two guns housed in metal cigarette cases, which could fire up to four hollow steel bullets, and a miniature revolver that fired poisoned bullets. Khokhlov’s defection was a sensation, but perhaps still more astounding was the Soviet riposte: in 1957, while attending a conference in Frankfurt, Khokhlov drank a cup of coffee that had been laced with radioactive thallium. Its effects were terrifying. Khokhlov’s face erupted in black, brown and blue lumps, his eyes oozed a sticky liquid and his hair fell out in handfuls. The blood in his veins began to turn to plasma, as his bones crumbled. Astonishingly, Khokhlov survived, thanks to repeated transfusions by American doctors working around the clock. Khokhlov was still alive when this book was being written, living in quiet retirement in San Bernardino, California, an astonishing monument to Soviet ruthlessness and his own resilience. Khokhlov’s remarkable book, In the Name of Conscience, was published in 1959. A copy inevitably found its way on to Fleming’s bookshelves, and from there into his fiction. The gun concealed inside a copy of War and Peace and wielded by the Soviet assassin Red Grant in From Russia with Love owed its inception to the Khokhlov haul of assassination gadgetry. In an interview in 2006, Khokhlov told me: ‘The KGB decided to kill me . . . From this moment there was a general direction to hunt Khokhlov. The message was: “We will get the traitor, wherever he is in the world.”’ This, of course, was precisely the role of SMERSH, both in Fleming’s books, and in reality.
Thanks to James Bond, SMERSH became a household name, but few realise that such an organisation really existed, long before Fleming gave it wicked immortality. In the bewildering forest of acronyms that was the Soviet secret service, SMERSH was just one of many names by which the specialised counter-intelligence department of the Soviet Union was known. SMERSH, as Fleming writes, is formed by combining the Russian words ‘Smyert’ and ‘Shpionam’, meaning (approximately) ‘death to spies’. Within Soviet intelligence, this unit (which would eventually report directly to Stalin) was responsible for rooting out and killing spies, saboteurs and ‘criminal traitors’. Fleming had learned about SMERSH from Colonel Grigori Tokaty-Tokaev, a Soviet rocket specialist who defected to Britain in 1947. In fact, a year earlier, the real SMERSH had been absorbed into the People’s Commissariat of Military Forces, but Fleming decided to retain the chilling name. In this, his fiction may inadvertently have been shadowing the truth, for it is believed that certain elements within the original SMERSH continued to operate throughout the 1950s as assassination squads. In Live and Let Die, ‘Bond felt his spine crawl at the cold, brilliant efficiency of the Soviet machine, and at the fear of death and torture which made it work.’
This, then, is Bond’s political world: a world of ruthless Soviet killers, in which the pride of the British secret service hold back the horrors of communism and defend freedom almost single-handedly. True, Bond is prey to the odd flicker of doubt, and the occasional rueful political reflection, at least initially. In Casino Royale, he allows himself to wonder about the shifting sands of politics: ‘This country right-or-wrong business is getting a little out of date. Today we are fighting Communism . . . History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep changing parts.’ The reference to the fallout from the Burgess and Maclean scandal is clear. Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA ally, nonetheless ‘held the interests of his own organisation far above the mutual concerns of the North Atlantic Allies’. What is more, ‘Bond sympathised with him’, as well he might. Does Bond, in his heart, know that the British secret service is not quite all it is cracked up to be? M warns him, in an unguarded moment, that Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service, may have little respect for British intelligence: ‘People don’t these days,’ the spymaster reflects glumly. In You Only Live Twice, Tanaka voices Fleming’s own fears about a once-great country falling into post-colonial lethargy: a ‘vacuous, aimless, horde of seekers-after-pleasure’. Fleming feared that Britain had become a browbeaten nation of obedient people standing in line, the state of British malaise Churchill himself referred to as ‘Queuetopia’. Bond’s defence is not terribly convincing: ‘Balls to you, Tiger. You only judge people by your own jungle standards . . . the liberation of our colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win plenty of Nobel Prizes . . .’
By the 1960s, the myth of Britain taking on the Soviet menace was becoming impossible to sustain. As Fleming wrote in his 1960 short story ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’, ‘There were really only three powers. That was the big poker game and no other country had either the chips or the cards to come into it.’ The sentiment is expressed by the American villain Milton Krest, but it was a reality Fleming and Bond now had to accept. In another short story, ‘Quantum of Solace’, the British Empire is described as ‘crumbling’, and the plot of You Only Live Twice centres on Bond’s attempt to obtain secret information, to which the Americans will no longer allow Britain access, from the Japanese. ‘At home and abroad,’ Bond confides to Kerim in From Russia with Love, ‘we don’t show teeth any more – only gums.’
From 1960 onwards, Bond’s enemies are no longer the Soviet menace, but individual crooks and killers, gangsters of the higher variety, and most notably SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), the crime syndicate staffed by exmembers of SMERSH, the Gestapo, the Mafia and the Black Tong of Peking, and run by Blofeld. The shift of focus is even more emphatic in the films. Where once Bond battled ideological foes, in his latter-day incarnations he takes on freelance bandits, mafia types and criminal megalomaniacs – terrifying but politically neutral. The Americans still need bailing out, but no longer is there any pretence of British supremacy. The enemies of the later novels brilliantly anticipate modern threats: Colombian drugs cartels and Russian mafia bosses, as well as the lone maverick megalomaniacs, Osama bin Ladens avant la lettre. Bond’s evolution from Cold War warrior to international crime-fighter reflects the changing preoccupations of the times, but also Fleming’s need to ensure that beneath the fantasy lay a realistic foundation: here were new battles, with new enemies that Bond and Britain could realistically fight and, more importantly, defeat.
Unlike his film incarnation, Bond is not immune to doubt, but the moments when he is on the back foot are rare indeed: his is a universe where Britain triumphs, America follows, the British secret service is supreme, communists and criminals are defeated, and the globe is a better place for it. One may dismiss all of this as propagandist fantasy (many did just that, particularly on the other side of the Iron Curtain), but the world Fleming described was, in some deeper sense than mere reality, true. In the real world, secret agents did not go around sticking limpet mines on ships, torturing their enemies, or killing one another with poisoned bullets fired from cigarette cases. Except that they did, and they still do. As you read this, secret agents are working undercover to track down individuals mad enough to threaten the world by stealing atomic missiles or threatening biological warfare, in the manner of Blofeld. The fear of weapons of mass destruction permeates our world, just as it runs through the Bond books. And in London, an outspoken Russian defector dies after agents unknown slip radioactive poison into his food.
How much of James Bond is true? Fleming himself joked that ‘if the quality of these books, or their degree of veracity, had been any higher, the author would have certainly been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act’. Perhaps the most pleasing irony is that, even today, MI6 itself is a little ambivalent about where James Bond ends and real life begins. The official MI6 website (www.sis.gov.uk) asks, ‘How realistic is the depiction of SIS in the James Bond films?’ but then only half-answers the question. ‘James Bond, as Ian Fleming originally conceived him, was based on reality . . . But any author needs to inject a level of glamour and excitement beyond reality in order to sell.’ Yet the spy agency cannot bring itself to deny its greatest asset. ‘Nevertheless,’ continues the article, ‘staff who join SIS can look forward to a career that will have moments when the gap narrows just a little and the certainty of a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond’s, will be in the service of their country.’
James Bond is now an MI6 recruiter. A real spy agency, harnessing fiction, based on fact, to recruit real spies: no one would have been more flattered than Ian Fleming.