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.
005
Gadgets, Guns, Gizmos and Gear-Sticks
005
Gadgets, Guns, Gizmos and Gear-sticks
Ian Fleming understood the extraordinary attraction of ‘things’. Not just material things (though Bond certainly appreciated those), but things that did things, for the 1950s was the great age of the machine: cars, domestic appliances, trains, planes, space-saving devices; machines to make life easier, faster and also, in the case of ever more sophisticated weapons, shorter. This was an age when domestic appliances – food mixers, teasmaids, televisions, fridges – were arriving in British homes in ever-increasing numbers.
Fleming adored gadgets. He was forever on the lookout for new inventions and new ideas, an interest reflected in his growing book collection with its emphasis on inventions and ideas that changed the world. When he took over the Atticus column at the Sunday Times, he rather pointedly changed the title from ‘People’ to ‘People and Things’. His love of cars was legendary and, occasionally, life-threatening. In his flat in Ebury Street he created a custom-made hatch, to enable the maid to serve food without being seen; in his bathroom, declaring a deep aversion to baths, he installed a modern shower (then a rarity) and a special soap dispenser. A customised object added a special glamour: after Bond proved a commercial success, Fleming rewarded himself with a gold typewriter, and even had a gold top made for his Bic biro. When describing technology or modes of transport in his books, Fleming worked hard to get the details right, and when he got them wrong (as he not infrequently did), he was grateful to readers for pointing out his mistakes. ‘I take very great pains over the technical and geographical background to James Bond’s adventures,’ he wrote. His notebooks were filled with jottings on machines and gizmos he had seen or heard about. Whenever possible, he consulted experts. ‘Facts,’ he wrote, ‘are clearer than people.’ Minute technical descriptions have since become a stock in trade of the thriller writer, but Fleming was among the first to realise that readers (particularly male readers) have an almost insatiable desire to be told the precise make, size, shape and structure of every machine – even if the details are forgotten the instant they are read. Fleming both shared and fed this hunger for detail: the boat owned by the villain in Thunderball, Emilio Largo, is no mere luxury yacht but rather a hundred-ton hydrofoil adapted from the Shertel-Sachsenberg system, with a hull of aluminium and magnesium alloy, twin Daimler-Benz four-stroke diesel engines with Brown-Boveri turbo superchargers capable of fifty knots and costing £200,000. Some machines were imaginary; most were based firmly on reality, giving the reader the important sense of being told a fiction based on truth. Kingsley Amis called this use of real information in a fictional world ‘The Fleming Effect’, and it proved highly successful.
Secret service gadgetry – masterminded by the irascible Q – plays a crucial role in
the James Bond films, reaching almost ludicrous levels of inventiveness with flame-throwing bagpipes, exploding toothpaste and invisible cars. But gizmos are also present in the books, courtesy of Q-Branch, the genuine wartime equipment unit under the extraordinary Charles Fraser-Smith. Based in a tiny office near St James’s Park, Fraser-Smith commissioned some three hundred firms around London to make an array of ingenious gadgets. He called them ‘Q gadgets’, after the British warships disguised as merchant vessels known as ‘Q ships’ in the First World War. None of the things created by Fraser-Smith was quite what it seemed: a hairbrush containing a map and a saw; magnetised matches that doubled as makeshift compasses; a pipe lined with asbestos that could be smoked without destroying the documents hidden inside (though it might well destroy the smoker); invisible ink; miniature cameras hidden in cigarette lighters; a shoelace that could also be a handy steel garrotte. Fraser-Smith was one of the great unsung lateral thinkers of the war: he devised chocolate laced with garlic so that agents dropped into France might swiftly acquire pungent breath, the better to mix with the locals, and a screw-off button with a special left-hand thread in which miniature documents could be hidden. This, he believed, would take advantage of the ‘unswerving logic of the German mind’, since no German would ever think of trying to unscrew something the wrong way.
For Your Eyes Only Page 7
