Fleming did not begin his work in Room 39 of the Old Admiralty Building until mid-July, almost two months after his lunch at the Carlton Grill, because his employer, the brokerage firm Rowe and Pitman, only then granted him leave. Godfrey wanted all his staff in uniform, so he appointed Fleming a lieutenant in the Special Branch of the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve (RNVR). He appeared in the dark blue jacket of the “wavy navy,” with three undulating gold and emerald-green stripes on his sleeves, and Godfrey placed him right outside the green-baize door to his own office (Room 38). The larger space, the “cave” as its inhabitants called it, was crowded, noisy, blue with tobacco smoke, with telephones before every man at his desk and secretaries clattering along on typewriters or arranging documents in the endless rows of filing cabinets. Every window was adorned with the obligatory blackout curtains. A few years after the war ended, Godfrey remembered the scene fondly:
The staff in this room, which later developed into the coordination section, grew up from nothing in a very haphazard way. As far as I know it never had a head, nor would a “head,” in the way that the word is usually accepted in the service, be tolerated. I believe this has never been said before, and may come as a surprise to some. “Room 39” consisted at one time of two stockbrokers, a schoolmaster, a K.C. relieved by a most eminent barrister, a journalist, a collector of books on original thought, an Oxford classical don, a barrister’s clerk, an insurance agent, two regular naval officers, an artist, two women civilian officers, and several women assistants and typists. Ian had a brainwave and some other specimen arrived for trial and if he did not suit was mysteriously spirited away. There were many transitory types, both male and female, that came and went if Room 39 did not take kindly to them. But, there were habitués who stayed and stayed and became the elders of this community.
The atmosphere was more like that of a commune than one would expect in the nerve centre of an important division.
The noise in this room was terrific. It got so bad that I had a green baize door installed between Room 39 and my room [Room 38].
Everyone had a telephone of their own; some had two or three; they used them incessantly and relentlessly—almost savagely. They enjoyed the click, and clank of typewriters, and the ebb and flow of humanity, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I persuaded them to banish the typists and to institute some control over the nomadic marauders from other sections who camped out in the narrow defiles between the desks, or crowded round the fireplace.
Few of them met outside Room 39 … They worked like ants, and their combined output staggered the imagination.
To this section of interesting, and incongruous ingredients must be added the fatigue, fog, and frustration of war in an arena where the bad news was always known but could not be revealed, bad working conditions, fuggy rooms during the blackout, night work for some, blitz, and the friction caused by frayed nerves, and unsatisfactory personal relationships.
Given all these stresses and strains … how was it that Room 39 achieved such phenomenal success, and was so much admired inside and outside the Admiralty[?] The answer may be found in the mutual respect and the close personal friendships which grew rapidly between the naval officer and the civilian, whether in the uniform of the R.N.V.R. or not.21
Few of Ian Fleming’s close friends thought he would stay more than a month; the mundane administrative side of the work would, they said, “drive him mad.”22 It did not. Fleming was in his element and took everything in his lofty stride, later telling an interviewer, “I could not possibly have had a more exciting or interesting War … my job got me right into the inside of everything, including all the most secret affairs.”23 Sitting at his desk piled high with dockets stamped Most Secret or By hand of officer only, and with folders bristling with sheets of coloured paper to indicate a particular source or a security grading (such as orange for Ultra), Fleming was at the centre of wartime Britain. At any moment, one or both of his two personal phones—one red, the other green—could connect him internally with all branches of the NID or externally to many corners of the British war effort.
The view from his window overlooking Horse Guards Parade confirmed his position. From his perch, Fleming could survey the Foreign Office, which also housed the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, as well as the government offices of Great George Street, where the Air Ministry and Bomber Command toiled, and the neo-baroque War Office Building long used by the army and the Chief of the General Staff. Almost directly across sat Number 10 Downing Street, the unassuming official residence of the prime minister, and nearby Richmond Terrace, the eventual home of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters. In the distance he could just see Big Ben and the great clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, forever a symbol of London and the British Empire now fighting for its survival. In the long shadow of Big Ben, beneath Whitehall, lay the underground bunkers built to house, among other things, the Cabinet War Rooms, where the prime minister and the chiefs of staff gathered regularly to confer once Luftwaffe bombs began to fall in the summer of 1940. Surrounded by all this expanding power, Fleming knew he was at the hub.
It was an excellent appointment. Fleming had a flair for administration, and he was quickly promoted from lieutenant to commander. Although they worked together for only three years, Godfrey became one of his lifelong friends and enthusiastic supporters. “Ian,” he would later write, “has achieved a unique worldwide acclaim and more publicity, I believe, than any other human being this century.”24 He bewailed the fact that, by the time of Fleming’s death in 1964, the man himself had been “overtaken by Bond,” with little more “than a screen of lampoons and parodies erected around him.” In short, he lamented, “Ian has disappeared.”25 And in some ways, Fleming the intelligence officer did disappear, cloaked by his own personal fame as a writer, while rumours, fallacies, half-truths and hyperbole have swarmed around his role in Naval Intelligence, leaving, perhaps on purpose, more than a hint of fantasy attached to all he touched in the discharge of his duties. He has been credited with carrying out dangerous and spectacular missions—kidnapping high-ranking Nazi officials, facilitating their defection as part of an Illuminati or other nefarious organization, performing political assassinations, sabotage and espionage missions or commando operations … The list goes on.
So polarized have the stories and arguments swirling around Fleming become that some historians have even denied that he had any knowledge whatsoever of the enigmatic world of signals intelligence, and particularly of Ultra. Nigel West, for instance, the renowned historian of the British secret services, wrote that “Fleming was almost certainly never indoctrinated into the valuable cryptographic source distributed as Ultra.”26 Yet in John Godfrey’s words, Fleming “participated in practically all the intelligence projects” during the Second World War. Clearly, as Godfrey’s personal assistant, Fleming handled a number of responsibilities, including Section 17 (the coordinating centre for Naval Intelligence in which staff used Ultra material in their daily operations), and he helped to plan pinch operations for the code-breakers at Bletchley Park. Fortunately, a document declassified only in 2002 clears up the confusion. According to this list, the only one of its kind in the public record, Fleming was among the fewer than seventy officers in the entire British Admiralty who knew of Ultra’s existence, and among the fewer than fifty permitted to use the original messages to accomplish their daily tasks.27
One of the sources of this confusion was Fleming himself, who, Godfrey recorded, “teasingly floated” the idea of James Bond as a veiled autobiography treading a fine line between fiction and fantasy, a notion that immediately raised alarm in the intelligence community. The concern was real enough: constrained by the provisions of the Official Secrets Act and by the gentleman’s agreement among members of Godfrey’s staff, Fleming could not reveal the true nature of his work. And without some knowledge of Ultra, it would have been impossible for Fleming to carry out the objectives of his loosely defi
ned job description as Godfrey’s personal assistant. Fleming acted as gatekeeper, fixer and principal “go-to” guy for the Director of Naval Intelligence—historically the senior intelligence service in Great Britain, whose tentacles spread over the entire globe.
“I made a point of keeping Ian in touch with all aspects of NID work,” Godfrey wrote. “He was the only officer who had a finger in practically every pie. I shared all secrets with him so that if I got knocked out someone else would, we hoped, be left to pick up the bits and achieve some sort of continuity.”28 Unlike others in the NID who “knew a great deal about one subject,” Godfrey maintained that Fleming “knew a bit (and a big bit) about all.”29 Any misstep Fleming made with tongue or pen could inadvertently reveal the inner workings, even long-buried secrets, of British intelligence. As Godfrey would later record, had Fleming, who was only fifty-six when he died, known about the many attempts to write his biography, he would, like most of the senior intelligence operatives of integrity, “have drawn a veil” over his Second World War activities and been “100% uncooperative” or even “laid false trails.”30
Godfrey too played his role in this obfuscation: when a young author was commissioned to pen Fleming’s biography, Godfrey summoned him to lunch and explained firmly that certain aspects of his protagonist’s work, “such as sources of intelligence, cooperation with other intelligence agencies, and anything of a nature which could lead to political embarrassment or controversy … must never be revealed.”31 For all these reasons, a realistic version of Ian Fleming circa 1942 has remained cloaked in what Godfrey called a “security smokescreen of deception” where “reality and fantasy got so mixed up that those who ought to know better became deceived.”32
Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence from 1939 to 1942, who hired Ian Fleming to be his personal assistant, right-hand man and go- to guy on intelligence matters. A maverick, hot-tempered and arrogant, he was much loved and respected by his staff, who considered him brilliant, while others outside NID found him difficult to deal with and an insufferable intellectual bore. He was removed as DNI by Winston Churchill following the Dieppe Raid and given command of the Royal Indian Navy, which revolted under his command in 1946. (photo credits 2.3)
Fleming did not rival 007—one was a secret service field operative, the other an intelligence officer—but there is much more to Ian Fleming than authorities were prepared to admit in the mid-1960s when he died and the spotlight shifted to the man who was, and remains, one of the world’s most successful, bestselling authors. That is why it is crucial for any understanding of the Dieppe Raid to investigate Fleming’s true character and his role within the mysterious world of British naval intelligence.
Ian Fleming’s boss, Admiral John Godfrey, who was sacked as Director of Naval Intelligence following the failure of Dieppe, is perhaps one of the least known of the remarkable figures of the Second World War. A leader with wide interests, gifted with “an exceptionally powerful and original intellect,” he could suddenly “assume a demonic relenting smile at the end of the grilling that could make a strong man wet in the palms and weak in the bowels.”33 He cut an imposing figure in his smart admiral’s uniform, vigorous, stern in profile, and with steely blue, penetrating eyes. A grammar school boy from Birmingham rather than Eton, a graduate of the British Naval Academy HMS Britannia rather than Oxbridge, he was an experienced and respected career naval officer who had already spent all his adult life in His Majesty’s Royal Navy when the war broke out.
During the First World War, Godfrey served in the Mediterranean theatre, spending the entire Gallipoli campaign on board a cruiser before joining the staff ashore, where he earned high praise as an exceptional staff officer. He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded both the Légion d’honneur and the Order of the Nile. After the war, he served as the deputy director of the Naval Staff College and also as captain of several fighting vessels in the Pacific and on the China station. His last seagoing post was as commander of HMS Repulse, one of the darlings of the British fleet.34 In short, Godfrey had advanced by his own merit, not privileged birth.
Much like his new protegé Ian Fleming, Godfrey was a maverick, a commander who made it clear he “did not conform to the usual pattern of senior naval officers.”35 His abrasive manner, hot temper and intellectual arrogance often led to clashes with those he encountered above him and below, and he had as many enemies as admirers: to some he was brilliant, to others an over-intellectualized bore.36 After one frustrating session with Admiral Sir John Kelly, Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, in 1936, this item appeared in Godfrey’s file:
I cannot call to mind, since I reached Admiral’s rank, any Captain who impressed me less favourably. A real “Heavy Weather Jack.” He is reputed to be very “Brainy”: the only evidence I have had of this is his propensity for seeing difficulties and obstacles which less “Brainy” people like myself are unable to see … He is the first Captain whom I have ever had to discourage from coming to see me. He made a habit of coming, almost daily, with questions that a reasonably intelligent Lieutenant could have answered for himself—till I could stand it no longer. I was extremely glad to see the last of him and, consequently, of his Ship.37
Unfortunately, this brusque and uncompromising demeanour eventually turned his colleagues in the Joint Intelligence Committee against him, and after the Dieppe Raid they recommended that he be dismissed from his position.
Personally, however, Godfrey was a highly cultured man. His interests were reading and music rather than public school games. His wife, Margaret, a capable Cambridge-trained woman, went on to do valuable war work in intelligence herself, serving at Bletchley Park and later at her husband’s pet project, the Inter-Services Topographical Department (ISTD) located at Oxford University.
Godfrey would stamp his individual leadership style on the Naval Intelligence Division in the first three years of the war, though he himself had been heavily influenced by two First World War admirals. He worked for five years under the first, Admiral Rudolf Burmester, who was at Gallipoli and served as chief of staff for the Mediterranean fleet. Burmester preached against the dominant “remote control” style of leadership common in the navy, choosing instead to take his staff and subordinates into his confidence and “throw on them full power and responsibility, avoiding any appearance of interference.”38 Godfrey adopted this style too, thinking it the “only method” likely to achieve success in the current fast-paced, multi-dimensional world of naval intelligence.
The second and more profound influence was “Blinker” Hall, who had headed Naval Intelligence from 1914 to 1919 and, with Churchill’s help, put cryptography and signals intelligence on the map. In his famous Room 40 in the Old Admiralty Building, he and his team intercepted and decrypted coded German diplomatic, military and naval messages. He quickly became a legend when, almost immediately after the first shots were fired in August 1914, they received a code book stolen from the German cruiser Magdeburg and, within days, cracked the code of the German High Seas Fleet. That breakthrough greatly aided the British in their command of the oceans and their efforts to keep the German fleet bottled up in home ports for most of the war. The team then turned to diplomatic traffic and, in 1917, intercepted and deciphered the famous Zimmermann telegram, in which the Germans urged Mexico to declare war on the United States. That invitation so enraged the Americans that they too entered the war, enabling the Allies finally to defeat the Central Powers.
Admiral Sir William Reginald “Blinker” Hall, former Director of Naval Intelligence, who guided the division through the Great War and became its de facto godfather thereafter. He believed that situations were never hopeless—problems lay only with “men who become hopeless about them.” He would strongly influence John Godfrey’s actions, as the new director, when war was again imminent. (photo credits 2.4)
At his first meeting with Blinker Hall, in 1917, Godfrey, then a young staff officer, was taken by the older man’s gambling nature. As he late
r recalled, Hall’s mantra “boldness always pays” struck him to the core. “Mistakes,” Hall used to preach, “may be forgiven, but even God himself cannot forgive the hanger-back.”39 Godfrey shared his mentor’s vision that situations were never hopeless. The problem lay, rather, with “men who become hopeless about them.”40
Godfrey soon put this philosophy to use when he was appointed Director of Naval Intelligence in 1939. This division, along with the intelligence arms of the other two services—air and land—had been much neglected in the years since the Great War. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, had essentially scuttled the German navy, and Britain, exhausted by its enormous war effort, relaxed into passive complacency. With war imminent once again, Blinker Hall urged Godfrey to revive his division swiftly. The two men met regularly, with the septuagenarian Hall playing the role of patron and even lending Godfrey his flat at 36 Curzon Street—well serviced by his house-keeper—for the duration of the hostilities. It was just a short walk across Green Park from his office. As Godfrey wrote later: “He very unobtrusively offered me full access to his great store of knowledge and judgment on this strange commodity, Intelligence, about which I knew hardly anything.” 41 His counsel would be crucial since intelligence, particularly signals intelligence, would again rocket to the forefront in the new war as England struggled to hold command of the seas.
Although Hall urged Godfrey to pick his own team and shape his division for the new war as he saw fit, he was anxious to help resuscitate his old fiefdom. Never fully out of the game, despite giving up active duty in 1919 and serving as a Conservative member of Parliament in Stanley Baldwin’s postwar government, Hall introduced Godfrey to his old code-breaking team in Room 40—brilliant men such as Oxford scholar Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox—who were now in the process of setting up shop at Bletchley Park for the new war.42 What fascinated Godfrey was the unique position of power and independence that Blinker Hall had carved out for himself during his time as director. His special position as head of Naval Intelligence had been recognized throughout Whitehall and had enabled him to deal directly with Cabinet ministers and high officials in various government departments outside his own. In what turned out to be sage advice, he counselled Godfrey to “act on his own initiative, obtaining permission, if necessary, afterwards … the DNI is entitled to enlist the help of anyone inside or outside the country from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the General of the Jesuits downwards,” including leading bankers and corporate heads.43
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