The Suspect Prince in the World of James Bond
It was the early evening of a fine autumn day in the first half of October 1940 when Ian Fleming stepped from his parked car on a street in the inner London residential area of Lincoln’s Inn.1 This was the same Ian Fleming who, little more than a decade later, would become renowned as the creator of the literary world’s most famous spy, James Bond. In 1940, Fleming was a commander with Britain’s Royal Navy, just as James Bond would be in Fleming’s books. Like Bond, Fleming’s naval rank disguised his true role as a spy. A very senior and influential spy.
The tall, suave Fleming crossed the pavement and entered one of the eighteenth-century residential buildings lining the neat streets—the British call such buildings blocks of flats. Striding across the impressive entry foyer, Fleming trotted up the elegant 200-year-old staircase to the door of the flat occupied by London Daily Express reporter Sefton Delmer and his wife, Isabel. Delmer was aware that Fleming was involved with Britain’s secret intelligence services, although he didn’t know to what extent. The previous year, both men had been part of an official British government trade delegation to Moscow. Fleming had gone under the guise of reporting for the Times of London, but during the delegation’s stay in Russia, Delmer had worked out that his fellow journalist had a more covert purpose.
With kisses from Isabel and a handshake from her husband, Fleming was admitted to the large flat to join the Delmers’ other dinner guests. Leonard St. Clair Ingrams and his wife, Victoria, were there. Ingrams was undersecretary of state at Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, and Fleming had cultivated his friendship. Two attractive young women were also dinner guests. One was Martha Huysmans, daughter of Camille Huysmans, mayor of Antwerp and chairman of the lower house of the Belgian parliament before he and his family escaped to England in May ahead of the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries. The other female guest was Anna McLaren, a pretty British girl who had joined the Delmers to escape from France earlier in the year. The pair of unattached young women had been invited by the Delmers so that they might be company for the dashing Fleming and the evening’s eighth dinner guest—Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
Fleming knew a good deal about the twenty-nine-year-old Bernhard, the German-born husband of the heir to the Dutch throne. He knew that in 1936, at the Winter Olympic Games at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, Bernhard had met Juliana, only child of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Both Princess Juliana and Queen Wilhelmina had taken an instant liking to Bernhard, and the queen saw him as a potential consort for her daughter—Bernhard was a Protestant, as was the Dutch royal family, and he was already a prince from a royal house. Their engagement had been comparatively brief, and Juliana and Bernhard married at the beginning of 1937; their daughter Beatrix was born a year later. Fleming also knew that, after Bernhard had sent his wife and their two young daughters, Beatrix and Irene, to safety in Canada in June, he himself had stayed in England with his mother-in-law, the queen—whom he called “Mother”—declaring that he wished to join the war effort against Germany.
Fleming had made a point of getting to know Bernhard since the prince’s arrival in England. He had in fact ingratiated himself with the political and military leaders of numerous European refugee groups that had made England their home since German occupation of their homelands, such as the Free French and exiled Poles. So his friendship with the Dutch prince was a surprise to no one. Outwardly, Fleming was hobnobbing with the European social elite, which suited his rakish lifestyle handsomely. But with his spy’s hat on he was also using his high-level contacts to keep tabs on these Europeans and on what they were doing.
Tall, solidly built, with a round face and round spectacles, Bernhard was considered to be the most flamboyant, charming and amusing member of the Dutch royal family. But as Fleming knew all too well from experience in the intelligence game, you can’t judge a book by its glossy cover. Bernhard presented an interesting case for Fleming. The prince was, after all, a German by birth. And his younger brother, Aschwin, also a prince, was serving in the German army, fighting against the British. Yet, ever since his marriage to Princess Juliana in 1937, Bernhard had renounced his German citizenship and professed himself wholly Dutch; he had become very popular with the people of the Netherlands. This past June, three days after the fall of France, Bernhard had gone on BBC’s overseas radio service to publicly label Adolf Hitler a tyrant and to express his belief that Germany would be defeated in this war.
Shortly after arriving in England, Bernhard had asked the British government to permit him to join its intelligence services. With his German background, this request had immediately raised suspicions at Whitehall, and the advice given by the security chiefs to Prime Minister Winston Churchill was that such a move was, at best, premature. It had been suggested that the prince instead learn to fly a Spitfire fighter aircraft and join the Royal Air Force’s 322 Squadron, a fighter unit made up entirely of Dutch pilots. In the meantime, Fleming would befriend Bernhard and catch up with him frequently, giving his superiors reports on the prince and his trustworthiness. Most recently, just two weeks before the Delmer dinner party, the pair had lunched at the Carlton Hotel’s posh Carlton Grill. Over lunch, Bernhard had enjoyed his favorite cocktail, a vodka martini—shaken, not stirred—which would famously become James Bond’s preferred tipple.
Even though Bernhard was considerably older than the average rookie fighter pilot, he had always been interested in flying and eagerly embraced the idea of training to fly the Spitfire. No doubt, this October evening, he brought Fleming up to date on his latest flying exploits. He’d been allocated his own personal RAF trainer—Flight Lieutenant Murray Paine. Bernhard wasn’t exactly Paine’s star pupil, having wrecked two aircraft on landing, but he would eventually qualify as a fighter pilot, racking up 1,000 hours in the “Spit.”
As the party sat down to dinner, Fleming was his usual charming yet circumspect self. When Delmer asked him what he’d been up to lately, he passed off the question with a casual reference to a trip to the port city of Dover in Kent the previous week, where he’d had a close shave during a German air raid—a building had been demolished around him by a bomb, yet he’d walked away unscathed. He failed to reveal that the purpose of this Dover trip was to coordinate a potentially vital intelligence operation that he had devised, Operation Ruthless.
Fleming’s Operation Ruthless plan was like the plot for an adventure novel. A British crew would crash-land a captured German Heinkel 111 bomber in the North Sea near the coast of German-occupied Denmark; when a launch of the Seenotdienst, the German air-sea rescue service, arrived to pluck them from “the drink,” the British airmen would kill the crew and then speed the launch to an English port—complete with its top-secret naval radio code book. For, while Britain had already cracked Germany’s army and air force codes, which came to be code-named “Ultra” by the British, the naval code was still a mystery. Operation Ruthless would be postponed and later abandoned when it was realized that the Seenotdienst was an arm of the Luftwaffe and that its launches would be using the air force code, not the navy code. But Fleming would plot plenty of other daring schemes during the war. As for Germany’s naval code, that would eventually be cracked after code material was snatched from sinking U-boats in 1941 and 1942.
Dinner was proceeding splendidly in the Delmer flat when the sound of wailing air raid sirens met the diners’ ears. The Blitz, the now nighttime bombing of British cities by Germany’s Luftwaffe, was little more than a month old by this stage, and the brave and the bold had yet to take it entirely seriously. The air raids had forced Ian Fleming to move out of his own top-floor flat in Ebury Street because its large skylights couldn’t be effectively blacked out, and he was currently residing at several gentlemen’s clubs of which he was a member, the Lansdowne and the St. James’s.
There was a confident, impregnable air about the master spy that would stay with him throughout his life. Ignoring the sirens, he calmly lit another cigarette and resumed his conversation. “He had a very dominating personality,” observed Lady Ann O’Neill, who was having an adulterous affair with Fleming during this period and much later became his first wife.2 Taking Fleming’s lead, Prince Bernhard and the other guests stayed put, and the dinner continued, with no one bothering to retreat to the air raid shelter below. But, as Sefton Delmer himself would relate, a small and select bomb now dropped on his small and select dinner party.3 For the second time in a week, a building was shattered around Ian Fleming by a German bomb.
Yet, no one at the dinner table was hurt. Shaken, but not stirred, Prince Bernhard was the first to overcome the shock of the blast and rise to his feet. He led the way out the flat door to the landing outside, only to find that the bomb had detonated at the bottom of the building’s stairwell. The entry foyer had been demolished, as had a twenty-foot length of the ornate staircase. Undaunted, Bernhard lowered himself from the end of the severed staircase, then dropped athletically to the rubble-strewn floor below.
Looking up at the faces of his seven fellow dinner guests staring anxiously down at him from the landing, Prince Bernhard smiled and said, “Thank you for a most enjoyable evening.” Then he turned and departed.4
Ian Fleming, not to be outdone by the foreigner, followed the prince’s example and reached the ground in the same manner. He, too, thanked his hosts as they looked down from above, then walked out into the evening air, leaving the others waiting for the emergency services to arrive and rescue them with their ladders. As searchlight beams crisscrossed the sky, antiaircraft guns “crumped” nearby, and German bombers droned overhead, Fleming walked to his parked car, finding it covered with dust from the bombed building.
As Fleming drove back to the club where he was currently staying, he had no idea that, just several years before, Prince Bernhard had been a member of the Nazi Party and, quite probably, an active German spy while working for IG Farben. Or that, within another four years, Fleming would be called upon by Prime Minister Churchill to give the prince a security clearance—a clearance that would pave the way for Bernhard to set up a hugely unlikely and daring operation, an operation that would go down in the annals of the US Army Air Force as its most risky, most rewarding yet most unsung of the Second World War.