In Fleming’s Footsteps

ON OCTOBER 5 1962, the first James Bond film, Dr No, had its world premiere in London – and the thriller would never be the same again. The Bond films would become the most successful film franchise of all time, and almost single-handedly led to the ‘spy-mania’ of the Sixties.

The Sydney Morning Herald, June 25 1961

As a result, nearly all discussion of Bond’s influence on the genre relates to the films. But long before Sean Connery, Terence Young or John Barry stepped onto the scene, James Bond was a by-word for excitement, glamour and adventure. Fleming was not merely a moderately successful writer whose work only became famous via screen adaptation: by any usual standards, his books were a wide-reaching cultural phenomenon (which is why the film rights were bought, of course). In Britain, Fleming’s novels were serialised as comic strips in the Daily Express from 1958 onwards, and the same year he became a talking point in the literary world when he was attacked as vulgar by the critic Bernard Bergonzi in the Twentieth Century and accused of being a purveyor of ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ by Paul Johnson in the New Statesman. 

In its review of Goldfinger on March 26 1959, The Times noted that:

‘A new novel by Mr. Ian Fleming is becoming something of an event, since James Bond has now established himself at the head of his profession, a secret service agent who indeed plays for England but who has much in common with the highly sexed “private eye” on the other side of the Atlantic.’

A less frequently discussed indication of Fleming’s success is that, even before Dr No came to the screen, other thriller-writers were being influenced by Bond. Just over a month after Dr No’s premiere, on 12 November 1962, Len Deighton’s novel The IPCRESS File was published by Hodder & Stoughton. Although Deighton wrote the book before Dr No’s release, Bond was nevertheless uppermost in his mind, as Michael Spencer Howard revealed in his 1971 book on the publisher Jonathan Cape:

‘Having studied the James Bond phenomenon, Deighton had devised his own formula on which to base efficiently successful thrillers, and was determined to write five of them to prove it.’1

The IPCRESS File was an unexpected smash, and Deighton defected from Hodder to Jonathan Cape, who published the sequel, Horse Under Water, the following year. Deighton later said that this ‘enraged some people, who claimed I was now going to be trained as the successor to Ian Fleming, who Cape also published.’2 This was an understandable view, as Deighton was certainly inspired by Fleming’s work: The IPCRESS File even closes with a mention of SMERSH, an organisation that had featured in Fleming novels but which would not appear on film until From Russia, With Love in 1963 – the screenplay of which Deighton worked on.3

The mention of SMERSH can only plausibly be the influence of Fleming, because although the organisation existed in real life, it had had little in common with Fleming’s fantastic depiction of it, and its existence was barely known before the publication of Casino Royale. Deighton placed the organisation’s headquarters in Moscow at 19 Stanislavskaya Street, whereas Fleming had it at 13 Sretenska Ulitsa. Despite the authoritative-sounding specificity, neither was right, as the organisation had been disbanded and its responsibilities handed over to the Main Administration of Counter-Intelligence (GUKR) of the MGB in 1946.4

~

LEN DEIGHTON wasn’t the only thriller-writer to toy with the Bond formula prior to the films. The Mythmaker by Sarah Gainham, published in 1957, featured a young, handsome half-British, half-Hungarian agent called Christian Quest. Bond was half-Scottish and half-Swiss in Fleming’s novels, and the name is an obvious play on the tradition of gallant spies fighting for God and country. Gainham was the pseudonym of Rachel Terry, the wife of the Sunday Times correspondent and MI6 officer Anthony Terry, a close friend and colleague of Fleming who had helped him with the research for The Living Daylights. According to Andrew Lycett, Rosa Klebb was partly inspired by an anecdote Rachel Terry had told Fleming about a hideous female Russian agent who had operated in Vienna.5

 

Several moments in The Mythmaker, published the same year as From Russia, With Love, appear to have been inspired by Fleming’s work, especially Casino Royale. Quest is a handsome, young, but somewhat arrogant novice in both the spy game and matters of the heart:

‘In Kit’s many small loves his main preoccupation had been to protect himself from involvement without losing his pleasure. A vulgar concern which was not his choice but simply the accepted attitude to love of nearly all young men of his kind, and the very worst preparation possible for the feelings that now filled him. Not only was Deli a member of his own world and therefore not to be trifled with without serious consequences, but he found with a momentary fear that only traces remained of his habitual self-defence against emotion, he was defenceless against her simply because she was unarmed and brave. Yet he could not at once give up the essentially hostile posture which had hitherto been his real attitude to the women he had desired and who had desired him. This fear and this reservation showed in his eyes after the first flash of recognition, and in answer to them a familiar smile of ironical understanding came into Deli’s eyes. Kit looked away from her, shamed that he had betrayed a coarse caution in a moment that could never return, and spoilt it for both of them.

‘Let’s dance,’ said Deli, still with the ironical smile.’

The dialogue and Deli’s ironical smiles are reminiscent of Vesper Lynd’s in Casino Royale, but the passage as a whole also echoes Bond’s changing attitude to women in that novel:

‘With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola – sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play – the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.

But with Vesper there could be none of this.’

Rachel Terry, alias Sarah Gainham

In the hint of Quest’s ‘real’ attitude to women – an ‘essentially hostile posture’ – he may also be a subtle portrait of Ian Fleming. Rachel Terry thought Fleming was ‘highly intelligent and accomplished’, but that his emotional age was ‘pre-puberty’.6 A couple of years after she wrote The Mythmaker, Fleming tried to seduce her on a trip to Berlin, when she had been estranged from her husband. She had been tempted, finding Fleming ‘tall, good-looking, highly presentable and with the slightly piratical air given by his broken nose’, but turned him down. In The Mythmaker, Quest is described as having a ‘narrow, aquiline handsome face with an arrogant but humorous expression, a mobile mouth and quick hazel eyes of unusual beauty’.

Quest travels to Vienna to find Otto Berger, a servant of Hitler’s thought to have escaped the Bunker in Berlin and hidden a cache of platinum and precious stones to be used to fund a neo-Nazi revival: the book ends with a chase through the Alps. In Fleming’s Moonraker (1954), the chief villain is Hugo Drax, revealed to have been a Nazi who survived the end of the war. Drax’s chief accomplice is called Krebs, the same name as Hitler’s last chief of staff in the Bunker.7

~

 

IN THE 1960s and 1970s, neo-Nazi revivals would become fertile ground for British thriller-writers. One lesser known example is The Testament of Caspar Schultz by Martin Fallon, published by Abelard-Schulman in Britain on May 18, 1962, nearly five months before the world premiere of Dr No. Fallon was an early pseudonym of Harry Patterson, a writer who would later become famous under another pseudonym: Jack Higgins.

While Gainham’s book was a literary thriller with a few nods to Fleming’s work, The Testament of Caspar Schultz is a full-bodied homage. In the first chapter, British secret agent Paul Chavasse is summoned in the early hours by telephone to see his superior, who works out of a building carrying the legend ‘Brown & Company – Importers & Exporters’ on a polished brass plate outside:

‘He went up the curving Regency staircase and passed along a thickly carpeted corridor. The only sound was a slight, persistent hum from the dynamo in the radio room…’

Chavasse briefly admires the Chief’s assistant, Jean Frazer, whose tweed skirt is of a ‘deceptively simple cut that moulded her rounded hips’, and lights up a cigarette: 

‘‘Now what’s all the fuss about? What’s the Chief got on his mind that’s so important it can’t wait until a respectable hour?’

She shrugged. ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s waiting for you inside.’

Chavasse cursed softly and got to his feet. ‘What does he think I’m made of – iron?’ Without waiting for a reply, he walked across to the far door, opened it and went in.

He frowned slightly. ‘Another job?’

She nodded. ‘I think it’s something pretty big.’

The room was half in shadow, the only light the shaded lamp which stood upon the desk by the window. The Chief was reading a sheaf of typewritten documents and he looked up quickly, a slight frown on his face.’

All of this reads very much like a version of the openings of several Fleming novels, such as this passage in Moonraker from 1955, in which James Bond enters a building in London in which ‘Universal Export Co.’ is on a bronze list of occupants in the entrance hall and makes his way to the ninth floor:

‘As Bond turned to the left outside the lift and walked along the softly carpeted corridor to the green baize door that led to the offices of M. and his personal staff, the only sound he heard was a thin high-pitched whine that was so faint that you almost had to listen for it. 

Without knocking he pushed through the green door and walked into the last room but one along the passage.

Miss Moneypenny, M.’s private secretary, looked up from her typewriter and smiled at him. They liked each other and she knew that Bond admired her looks. She was wearing the same model shirt as his own secretary, but with blue stripes. ‘New uniform, Penny?’ said Bond. She laughed. ‘Loelia and I share the same little woman,’ she said. ‘We tossed and I got blue.’ 

A snort came through the open door of the adjoining room. The Chief of Staff, a man of about Bond’s age, came out, a sardonic grin on his pale, overworked face.

‘Break it up,’ he said, ‘M.’s waiting. Lunch afterwards?’

‘Fine,’ said Bond. He turned to the door beside Miss Moneypenny, walked through and shut it after him. Above it, a green light went on. Miss Moneypenny raised her eyebrows at the Chief of Staff. He shook his head.

‘I don’t think it’s business, Penny,’ he said. ‘Just sent for him out of the blue.’ He went back into his own room and got on with the day’s work.

When Bond came through the door, M. was sitting at his broad desk, lighting a pipe. He made a vague gesture with the lighted match towards the chair on the other side of the desk and Bond walked over and sat down. M. glanced at him sharply through the smoke and then threw the box of matches on to the empty expanse of red leather in front of him.’

Stylistically, these are quite different: Fleming almost fetishised physical detail, whereas Higgins stripped them back to prioritise pace. However, the content is very similar, and the character of Chavasse is also like Bond in many respects: a handsome, ruthless, highly professional British secret agent who speaks several languages, is an expert at judo, and so on. The clearest indication that Higgins had Fleming in mind, however, is the following passage:

‘‘There are men like me working for every Great Power in the world. I’ve got more in common with my opposite number in SMERSH than I have with any normal citizen of my own country. If I’m told to do a thing, I get it done. I don’t ask questions. Men like me live by one code only – the job must come before anything else.’ He laughed harshly. ‘If I’d been born a few years earlier and a German, I’d probably have worked for the Gestapo.’’

Again, SMERSH was barely known before Fleming’s use of it in Casino Royale and subsequent novels, and in reality it had been a division of Soviet intelligence largely dedicated to interrogating suspected traitors. Like Fleming (and Deighton), Higgins treated it as though it were still operational, and a major Soviet intelligence organization.

Paul Chavasse is a half-British half-Breton secret agent. His mission in the novel is to find Caspar Schultz, a survivor of Hitler’s Bunker who has written a book naming the leaders of a neo-Nazi movement in Germany. In Higgins’ original draft, the testament’s author was Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann, but at his publisher’s insistence he changed this to the fictional Schultz.

Chavasse delivers his speech about SMERSH to an Israeli agent in a first-class sleeper compartment, in a scene that is highly reminiscent of Fleming’s From Russia, With Love (1958). In that book, SMERSH’s dossier on James Bond described him as ‘a dangerous professional terrorist and spy’, a neat alternate look at our hero. Higgins took this idea a step further. James Bond would never say of himself that he had more in common with a member of SMERSH than with British citizens, let alone that had he been born a German earlier he would probably have joined the Gestapo. Higgins was using Chavasse to play off and comment on Fleming’s creation. He’s an answer to a writer’s musings: Are all Germans and Russians bad? And: What would a real secret agent’s motivation be? Traditionally in thrillers of this kind, it is duty, either in the form of love of country or God or, sometimes, a woman. Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond started his career because he found peacetime dull, but he was nevertheless highly patriotic. For Chavasse, however, the job comes before anything else, and he recognises that he might have been attracted to the work whatever his nationality, and whatever the cause. This is an elaboration of a point made by Fleming in Casino Royale, in which Bond worries that Le Chiffe was right when he said Bond’s game of ‘Red Indians’ is over:

‘‘This country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date. Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.’’

The Testament of Caspar Schultz is a lean, sparsely written thriller, with one dominating theme: the conflict between conscience and the desire for adventure. At several points in the book, Chavasse is troubled by his own nature. He tells Israeli agent Anna Hartmann that he was recruited into intelligence work after bringing the relative of a friend out of Czechoslovakia:

‘‘I’d discovered things about myself that I never knew before. That I liked taking a calculated risk and pitting my wits against the opposition. On looking back on the Czechoslovakian business I realized that in some twisted kind of way I’d enjoyed it. Can you understand that?’

‘I’m not really sure,’ she said slowly. ‘Can anyone honestly say they enjoy staring death in the face each day?’

‘I don’t think of that side of it,’ he said, ‘any more than a Grand Prix motor racing driver does.’’

And he repeats what he told her colleague: ‘I’m a professional and work against professionals. Men like me obey one law only – the job must come first.’

While the use of this idea is rather heavy-handed in The Testament of Caspar Schultz, Higgins clearly felt it was important, developing it in five further novels featuring Chavasse. In The Keys of Hell (1965), for instance, on a mission in Albania, he says to another beautiful young woman he has fallen in love with:

‘‘If I’d been born in Germany twenty years earlier, I’d probably have ended up in the Gestapo. If I’d been born an Albanian, I might well have been a most efficient member of the Sigurmi. Who knows?’’

This concept eventually became one of the major themes of his work. In The Eagle Has Landed, published in 1975, Higgins did not simply have the hero remark how similar he is to a German – the heroes are German. Heroes and villains had in fact changed parts. In a 1987 interview, Higgins related how one publisher was not best pleased when he heard the premise of the book, telling him:

‘‘You can’t possibly expect the public to go for a book about a bunch of Krauts trying to kidnap Winston Churchill. You don’t have any heroes – these people are Nazis, for God’s sake!’’8

But the public did go for it. The Eagle Has Landed was Higgins’ breakthrough, and has sold over 50 million copies to date. Part of its appeal is precisely the friction of rooting for characters who were traditionally cast as antagonists. Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of The Jackal and Ken Follett’s The Eye of the Needle, two other landmark British thrillers of the post-war period, also featured highly professional yet curiously empathetic antagonists. Higgins’ other major success has been with the character Sean Dillon, a former IRA assassin who is periodically used by British intelligence.

In peacetime Britain, when the justification for what SMERSH would classify as terrorist action was less cut and dried than it had been during the war, there was a need for a new type of motivation for fictional secret agents. Higgins hit on the idea of an agent being driven not by traditional causes such as King, God or country, but by an addiction to the chase itself, a love of the profession. Chavasse’s other concern – the broader picture of human nature that allows him to empathise with the enemy and recognise himself in it – became a major theme of Higgins’ work. 

~ 
 

ANOTHER WRITER who was influenced by Fleming before the Bond films were made was Geoffrey Jenkins, a South African who had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times in the ’40s. In his first novel, A Twist of Sand (1959), we are introduced to Geoffrey Peace, a former Royal Navy submarine captain now involved in distinctly shadier business. A flashback to the war gives us another echo of a Bond/M scene:

‘The Admiralty looked bleak and cold in the late London spring; chill it seemed to me after being used to the friendly bite of the Mediterranean sun. Bleaker still looked those eyes over the top of the desk. They reminded me somehow of Rockall, the lonely isle in the Atlantic – they only changed their shade of greyness, sometimes stormy, sometimes still, but always grey and bleak with the chill of the near Arctic.’

During the war, as Jenkins would have known, Fleming worked at the Admiralty, and M is described as having ‘frosty, damnably clear, grey eyes’ in For Your Eyes Only.

Jenkins’ next book was The Watering Place of Good Peace (1960). The hero, Ian Ogilvie, is a Scot who was crippled by a shark, also while in the Royal Navy. He joins an organisation constructing anti-shark barriers ‘a fast car, a pretty girl, and half a dozen drinks’ after his accident. The plot features opium smuggling and a villain called John Barrow who is using a submarine to find uranium. Ogilvie also swims through the wreck of a ship with a beautiful woman who is naked but for goggles and scuba gear. Many of Jenkins’ subsequent novels featured such tips of the hat to his former mentor. After Fleming’s death, Jenkins was commissioned to write a Bond novel, which he did – Per Fine Ounce – but it was never published.

Many thriller-writers have been influenced by Ian Fleming, but most have probably come to his work through the films. But Deighton, Gainham, Higgins and Jenkins were all influenced by him before the first Bond film was released. Fleming was an influential thriller-writer in his own right, and James Bond a character that inspired his peers even before his transition to the silver screen.

UPDATE: Edward Milward-Oliver, whose The Len Deighton Companion I cite above and who is currently working on a biography of Deighton, writes to say:

‘Regarding your speculation about Len Deighton’s reference to SMERSH, to the best of my knowledge, he didn’t read any of Fleming’s novels until producer Harry Saltzman asked him to write the screenplay for From Russia With Love after Saltzman purchased the film rights to The IPCRESS File in late 1962.

Len Deighton was certainly familiar with James Bond and Fleming without having read the novels. The books had substantial sales prior to the films, and of course they were serialised in the Daily Express where the influential design director was Len’s good friend and fellow RCA student Ray Hawkey. Deighton disliked the fantasy world of James Bond and certainly The IPCRESS File was born of his desire to write something more convincing. Michael Howard is quite correct in that respect. However Deighton was (and remains) a steadfast researcher, and would not have turned to Fleming’s novels as a source! My guess is that SMERSH was an acronym that lived on in publicly available accounts of the Russian security services well past its demise.’

So I guess one could say Deighton was inspired by Ian Fleming without having read his novels, perhaps in a similar way as Adam Hall was inspired to create Quiller by reviews and discussion of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. According to Edward Milward-Oliver, Deighton started writing The IPCRESS File in September 1960. As far as I know, the only publicly available account of SMERSH at that time was Nicola Sinevirsky’s book, discussed here, which I believe was Ian Fleming’s main source of information about the organization. SMERSH was not ‘the counter-intelligence unit of the KGB’, as Deighton claimed in the novel (it was one of several), and had in fact been defunct for nearly 15 years. It had also featured in several Fleming novels and the Express serializations of From Russia, With Love and Goldfinger, and would have been known to thousands of readers as a result. It was barely known in the West before Fleming wrote about it. However, the difference in the addresses given for the organization suggests that, even if Len Deighton had seen the name mentioned in the papers or heard mention of it via James Bond, he researched the organization independently of its appearance in Fleming’s work.

Notes

1. Jonathan Cape, Publisher by Michael Spencer Howard (Penguin, 1971), p300.
2. The Len Deighton Companion by Edward Milward-Oliver (Grafton, 1987), p14.
3. ibid., p248. 
4. KGB: The Inside Story Of Its Foreign Operations From Lenin To Gorbachev by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky (Sceptre, 1991), pp350-1; and Nights Are Longest There: SMERSH From The Inside by A.I. Romanov (Hutchinson, 1972), p192.
5. Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett (Phoenix, 1996), p371.
6. ibid.
7. The Last Days of Hitler By Hugh Trevor-Roper, University of Chicago Press, 1987), p31.

8. Interviewed by Don Swaim on Book Beat, CBS Radio, January 16 1987. Available from: http://wiredforbooks.org/jackhiggins/index.htm.  

This article is part of 007 In Depth, a series of articles on Ian Fleming and James Bond.

SMERSH vs SMERSH

Described by Ian Fleming as the Soviet Union’s most powerful and feared organisation, James Bond's recurring enemy was also real. Spy novelist Jeremy Duns hunts down the truth behind SMERSH, and looks at how Fleming created his own version of it

‘SMERSH.’

The word just sounds sinister. It instantly conjures up an image of the Soviet Union, the Cold War and, of course, James Bond.

Many presume that the organisation was invented by Ian Fleming, but SMERSH really existed – albeit in a somewhat different form than that described in his novels. Fleming never revealed precisely where he learned about SMERSH, although according to John Pearson's biography, he first came across it in ‘a magazine article soon after the war, and he embroidered on what little information he had about the organization and introduced it melodramatically into Casino Royale.’

Pearson noted that experts on Soviet affairs were quick to point out that ‘SMERSH was really a body which worked very largely with the Red Army during the war, rounding up German spies and saboteurs and Russian traitors, that it was a mistake to think that it had operated outside the borders of the U.S.S.R., that it was never a counter-intelligence unit in the sense that it worked against enemy secret services, and that in any case it had changed its name at the end of the war. Fleming, who always knew a good thing when he met one, took no notice and continued to base himself on his outdated conception of SMERSH.’

The magazine article Fleming read was probably a review or excerpt of SMERSH by Nicola Sinevirsky. Published in English in 1950, this was the first book to name the organisation. Sinevirsky was a pseudonym for Mikhail Mondich, a Ruthenian member of an anti-communist group called the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, or NTS. He claimed to have infiltrated SMERSH and worked undercover in the organization for seven months before escaping to West Germany where, in 1948, the NTS newspaper Possev published his diary.

The 1950 English translation published by Henry Holt & Company (first edition pictured) was an edited version of Mondich's diary that had been put together by two American journalist brothers, Kermit and Milt Hill. The book was published in the United States at the height of McCarthyism and fears of Communism (pictured below is Red Channels, a 1950 pamphlet-style publication that claimed to document Communist influence in American radio and television). As a result, the emphasis was very much on the propaganda benefits of a first-hand account of Soviet brutality. The back cover hailed the book as being 'of vital significance to an America that is already engaged in a political struggle against Bolshevik aggression', while the flyleaf proclaimed:

'This book reveals for the first time the intimate details of Stalin's secret weapon – SMERSH. What is it? What does it mean? It means "Death to Spies" and is a contraction of the Russian words, Smert Shpionam… It is the new supersecret counter-espionage elite whose creed is "Let thousands of innocents die lest one guilty go free!" Its weapons are terror and fear and unbelievable brutality. It is the absolute of depravity, degeneration, and the power-corruption which is Russia today…'

It's not hard to see why this would have appealed to Ian Fleming – for an aspiring thriller-writer, a 'new supersecret counter-espionage elite' must have been like manna from heaven. As an experienced journalist, Fleming was constantly scouring the world around him for tidbits of information he could process and transform into gold. In his article How to Write a Thriller, published in Books and Bookmen in May 1963, he revealed a little of his methodology:

'You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.'

When Fleming started writing Casino Royale in early 1952, Mondich's book was the only account of SMERSH's activities to have been published anywhere in the world. However, he may also have had his own sources for information on the organisation: as the assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence during World War Two, he was well-placed to hear of counter-intelligence activities. Fleming also established 30 Assault Unit, an intelligence-gathering commando group that followed the Allied troops into Germany, Austria and elsewhere searching for documents and equipment left behind by the Nazis late in the war. SMERSH were active in the same area at the same time, hunting down suspected traitors to the Soviet Union – members of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, for instance, as well as Latvian and Ukrainian nationalists who had joined the Waffen SS and the Nazis' mobile killing squads. SMERSH screened over five million people during this time, including Soviet prisoners of war – many were transported to the gulags and died.

But even with Fleming’s war work, it seems highly unlikely that he would have had the level of detailed knowledge about SMERSH's structure that is depicted in Mondich's book – especially as a study of it reveals that Fleming seems to have drawn his material in Casino Royale directly from it.

Mondich omitted the fact that SMERSH was no longer operating under that name by 1950 – it was disbanded and all its duties handed over to the Main Administration of Counter-Intelligence (GUKR) of the MGB in 1946 – presumably because any mention of this would have greatly lessened his book's impact. Casino Royale also features a still-active SMERSH, albeit with the proviso that it has been reduced in size. Mondich provided the basic background material on the organization, but Fleming made sure he adapted it to make it more thrilling.

In Chapter 6 of his book, Mondich gave a complete rundown of the organization’s structure:

‘SMERSH counter-intelligence, I learned, was divided into five departments.’

When it came to writing MI6's dossier on SMERSH in Casino Royale, Fleming followed these pages very closely:

‘The organization itself was thoroughly purged after the war and is now believed to consist of only a few hundred operatives of very high quality divided into five sections.’

According to Mondich, the First Department was attached directly to the front, where it monitored political trends inside the Red Army. Fleming rendered this as:

‘Department I: In charge of counter intelligence among Soviet organizations at home and abroad.’

This is both broader and vaguer in scope. Perhaps the idea of a super-secret elite working in ordinary uniforms as informers at the front didn’t seem as thrilling.

Fleming adapted the other departments' roles into similarly concise and exciting prose. The Second Department, according to Mondich, was Operations, which was responsible for seeking out ‘organised enemies of the system'. Anyone suspected of committing a crime against the Soviet Union ‘must die’. Fleming neatly summarised this as:

'Department II: Operations, including executions.'

Mondich claimed the Third Department was Administrative, but that he knew little about it, that the Fourth was the Investigation Department, and that the Fifth was the Prosecuting Department. Confusingly, he then mentioned two further departments, the Personnel Department and the Finance Department, which makes seven, not five. Fleming got round this by adding Finance to Department Three and Personnel to Department Four:

‘Department III: Administration and Finance.

Department IV: Investigations and legal work. Personnel.

Department V: Prosecutions: the section which passes final judgement on all victims.’

Mondich also claimed that SMERSH's headquarters were in Moscow. Perhaps this seemed too predictable, because Fleming placed them in Leningrad instead, with a sub-station in Moscow (although he would change this in From Russia, With Love). He also attributed Trotsky's assassination to the organisation, even though it took place a year before it was formed (a mistake many subsequent writers have repeated). And instead of being 'Stalin's secret weapon', Fleming wrote that it was 'believed to come under the personal direction of Beria'. (Fleming would refer back to this in Live and Let Die because – in events that would seem almost too fantastic for a James Bond novel – Beria was arrested at the push of a secret button at a meeting of the Praesidium in June 1953, and executed, possibly on suspicion of being a British agent, shortly after.)

One thing Fleming did not alter from Mondich’s book was its trumpeted information about the meaning of the organization's name:

'SMERSH is a conjunction of two Russian words: 'Smyert Shpionam', meaning roughly: "Death to Spies".'

As John Pearson noted, Ian Fleming knew a good thing when he met one.

Going rogue

Fleming's use of SMERSH in Casino Royale was a master-stroke: right at the start of the Cold War, he stole a march on the legions of thriller-writers who would follow him, almost all of whom would use branches of the MVD or the KGB as the enemy. By settling on a little-known Soviet intelligence group instead, Fleming invested his work with an aura of originality and inside knowledge that would 'ring true in fiction'. At the same time, he put his own stamp on the genre – nobody else could use SMERSH after him without seeming unoriginal.

Fleming also cleverly – and unusually for a thriller-writer of his era – ignored the crude propagandistic elements of his source material. In Chapter Nine of Casino Royale, we learn that in order to join the prestigious Double O Section of the British Secret Service James Bond assassinated two men, one of whom was a double agent. The elimination of treachery, then, is something that MI6's Double O Section has in common with SMERSH'S Department II, which seeks out 'organised enemies of the system' and kills them. (Coincidentally, the Russian phrase Osobyye Otdeli, meaning 'Special Departments', which was used for the group of organizations that preceded SMERSH in the Cheka, was commonly abbreviated to 'OO'.)

But Fleming didn't stop there: although Bond casually tells Vesper Lynd over caviar and hot toast that he has killed in cold blood, after he is tortured by the villain, Le Chiffre, he reappraises the situation, admitting to Mathis that the Norwegian traitor he killed 'just didn't die very quickly', and agonising over 'the nature of evil', as the chapter title puts it:

'Take our friend Le Chiffre. It's easy enough to say he's an evil man, at least it's simple enough for me because he did evil things to me. If he was here now, I wouldn't hesitate to kill him, but out of personal revenge and not, I'm afraid, for some high moral reason or for the sake of my country.'

Bond's anxieties here – and the confusion of hero and villain and patriotism and personal motive – may have been influenced by Geoffrey Household's classic 1939 thriller Rogue Male, in which the narrator, trapped in an underground burrow, is forced to face the fact that he is not morally superior to his tormentor, a tall, fair-haired Nazi officer who has taken on the cover role of an English gentleman, 'Major Quive-Smith', and repeatedly calls him 'my dear fellow'. In the first chapter of Rogue Male, the narrator tries to assassinate Hitler, but the shot misses due to a sudden change in the wind: later, as he is questioned by ‘Quive-Smith’ on his motivation for the assassination attempt, we learn that it was not out of a sense of patriotism or some high moral reason, but the fact that the Germans had shot his lover:

'I declared war upon the men who could commit such sacrilege, and above all upon the man who has given them their creed. How ridiculous that one person should declare war upon a nation! That was another reason I hid from myself what I was doing. My war was a futile cause to me, to be smiled at sympathetically just as I used to smile at her enthusiasms. Yet in fact my war is anything but futile. Its cost in lives and human suffering is low. Seek out and destroy the main body of the enemy – and I should have destroyed it but for a change of wind.'

This theme is echoed in the final chapter of Casino Royale, in which James Bond vows to go after the men who engineered the death of his lover, Vesper Lynd:

'SMERSH was the spur. Be faithful, spy well, or you die. Inevitably and without question, you will be hunted down and killed.

It was the same with the whole Russian machine. Fear was the impulse. For them it was always safer to advance than retreat. Advance against the enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray, and the bullet would never miss.

But now he would attack the arm that held the whip and the gun. The business of espionage could be left to the white-collar boys. They could spy, and catch the spies. He would go after the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy.'

Such nuanced delineations are rare in espionage thrillers written so soon after World War Two, and the popular perception of Fleming as a gung-ho patriot often fails to address these moments in Casino Royale. This is partly of Fleming's own doing, though, because in his second novel, Live And Let Die, he discarded the hard-earned lessons Bond had learned in the first book. And just as the scar on Bond's hand is erased, so too is the research of the first novel: SMERSH did not employ foreign gangsters. In Live And Let Die, Fleming moved his depiction of the organization from broadly reflecting the role it played in reality – the hunter of enemies of the Soviet state – to a more amorphous, if still gloriously sinister-sounding, 'red menace'.

The very whisper of death

SMERSH is only tangential to the plot of Live And Let Die, but for its next appearance in a Bond novel it took centre-stage. In From Russia, With Love, Fleming brought all his skills to bear to create perhaps the most famous depiction of a villainous organisation in fiction. Fleming now used the Russian word 'Otdely' instead of Department, and heading up Otdely II – memorably described by Tatania Romanova as 'the very whisper of death' – he introduced the fearsome Rosa Klebb (pictured as played by Lotte Lenya in the 1963 film adaptation).

Fleming's interest in SMERSH had been reignited by the case of the Russian cipher expert Vladimir Petrov, who had defected to Australia in 1954. Writing about the case in his Sunday Times column Atticus, Fleming brought in his knowledge of Beria's 'messengers of death' and also mentioned a mysterious 'Madame Rybkin', who he thought might be the most powerful woman in espionage.

Colonel Zoya Rybkina (right), alias 'Madam Yartseva', was the head of the NKVD's German section throughout World War Two. She discovered the Nazis' plan to attack the Soviet Union in June 1941 and told Stalin about it five days before the invasion – he didn't believe her.

Under the name Zoya Voskresenskaya, Rybkina became famous in the Soviet Union after the war as a children's writer, penning a series of stories following the adventures of Lenin as a boy; two of her books were made into successful films. Fleming also seems to have been inspired by a description given to him of Emma Wolff, a hideous NKVD agent based in Vienna, adding some of her physical attributes to Klebb.

One final inspiration for Klebb may have been Major Tamara Nicolayeva Ivanova, one of Russian intelligence's 'few female high officials' and 'an over-worked nervous spinster', according to Soviet Spy Net by E.H. Cookridge. Cookridge was a pseudonym for former British agent Edward Spiro, and this book, published in Britain in 1955, was a highly coloured account of the activities of Russian intelligence agencies around the world. It only mentions SMERSH once, on the first page of its introduction, on which Spiro states that the organization no longer exists (in this, at least, he was right). But despite this, Fleming used it as a source to build up his imaginary version of the organization, as well as for many of his other ideas.

Major Ivanova is also only mentioned once in the book, but Spiro claimed she was an instructor of Nikolai Khokhlov, the Soviet agent who defected to the Americans in Germany in 1954, claiming to have been sent to assassinate the chairman of the NTS in Frankfurt.

Khokhlov is mentioned several times in From Russia, With Love, and is central to Fleming's construction of the book. In Chapter Three, the entirely fictional General Grubozaboyschikov tells the real Serov "We don't want another Khokhlov affair", while in Chapter 26, Bond is told that his current predicament will 'knock spots' off the Khokhlov case.

Spiro claimed that Khokhlov was a member of the MVD's 'Otydel for Terror and Diversion', and gave a graphic account of this division's activities, most of which has never appeared in any creditable non-fiction work about Soviet intelligence. Chapter Eight of the book is dedicated to training, and reveals the general syllabus taught to MVD agents between 1948 and 1953, including the principles of Marxism, the history of other systems of government, ‘the Problems of Negroes and other Colonial Peoples’, codes and ciphers, and physical training:

'Lt. Colonel Nicolai Godlovsky, director of the Cheka small arms section, is the Soviet rifle marksmanship champion… The training for the budding “executioners” is carried out in a barrack-like building on the corner of Metrostroveskaya Sreet and Turnaninsky Pereulok in Moscow. The director of this training establishment is Colonel of the M.V.D., Arkady Foyotev. The syllabus includes rifle and pistol shooting, driving (motor-cars and motor-cycles), judo, boxing, photography and elementary courses in radio technique. This course is only for beginners. Graduates of the “Section for Terror and Diversion” are trained at special establishment at Kuchino, a large country house outside Moscow, where they are prepared for their “special tasks”, and for which the syllabus includes the use of special weapons and poisons.'

Fleming used this chapter as the basis for Donovan 'Red' Grant's training, attributing the MVD’s methods to his imaginary version of a still-active SMERSH:

'The next year was spent, with only two other foreign students among several hundred Russians, at the School for Terror and Diversion at Kuchino, outside Moscow. Here Grant went triumphantly through courses in judo, boxing, athletics, photography and radio under the general supervision of the famous Colonel Arkady Fotoyev, father of the modern Soviet spy, and completed his small-arms instruction at the hands of Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolai Godlovsky, the Soviet Rifle Champion.'

Quite apart from switching all this to SMERSH, Fleming adapted Spiro's text in such a way that even if it had been true, it could no longer be. Spiro listed judo, boxing and so on as being taught to beginners, with only graduates moving on to Kuchino. Perhaps because the details of the beginners’ course were more compelling and more concrete than the much vaguer description of the graduate course, Fleming listed the beginners’ activities as being taught at the graduates’ school. In doing so, he got all the authentic-sounding material in – all the activities taught, the names of both instructors, the menacing name of the school and the place-name – even though it meant contradicting his source.

Fleming’s aim was not to describe the inner workings of Soviet espionage accurately, but convincingly. He was writing novels, not non-fiction, and he used artistic licence as and when he saw fit. The details he used sound authoritative, and lure us into believing we are in the hands of a true espionage insider.

Fleming also built cleverly on the true circumstances. Khokhlov was a genuine agent, but he had defected before completing his assassination mission. In Red Grant, Fleming created a rather less squeamish opponent for Bond:

'SMERSH has made one or two mistakes lately. That Khokhlov business for one. Remember the explosive cigarette case and all that? Gave it to the wrong man. Should have given it to me. I wouldn't have gone over to the Yanks.'

Khokhlov did not work for SMERSH, of course, but when he defected he brought with him an array of weapons, including a cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets through the tips and an electrically fired miniature revolver that could be hidden in the palm of a hand: it was a propaganda coup the Americans fully exploited, showing off both the would-be assassin and his paraphernalia at a packed press conference at the American High Commission in Bonn on April 22, 1954.

Spiro commented on the case as follows:

'It was said that if a popular writer of thrillers had invented a tale of disguised secret agents carrying such weapons to kill their victim in the centre of a European city, even ardent readers would say the story was incredible. But, in fact, these things have been done, and done successfully, by Cheka agents before.'

Such a sentiment must have been almost a provocation to Ian Fleming! Not only did he give Red Grant an even more fanciful weapon, hidden inside a copy of War and Peace, he took Spiro's line and ran with it. In How to Write a Thriller, he wrote that his plots were ‘fantastic, while being based upon truth’:

'They go wildly beyond the probable but not 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 West to East Berlin so that our Secret Service can tap the Russian telephone system: the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets; "The Man Who Never Was" – the corpse with the false invasion plans that we left for the Gestapo to find. 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.'

The idea of using a tunnel to listen in on the Russians also made its way into From Russia, With Love, incidentally, albeit on a much smaller scale than the technical feat that was Operation GOLD: Darko Kerim and James Bond eavesdrop on a Soviet meeting with a submarine periscope while standing in Istanbul’s sewers. Kerim mentions that Q Branch are trying to find a way to wire the periscope for sound.

Fleming’s insistence that his work was 'based upon truth' and ‘not beyond the possible’ is nevertheless intriguing. Firstly, Spiro's book was not the truth, and Fleming, an experienced journalist, must have suspected that. Even if he took it all to be true, Spiro only mentioned SMERSH once in his book, where he said it no longer exists. Fleming either didn't read Spiro's introduction or disregarded it, feeling that the defunct SMERSH sounded more exciting than the real MVD - and as he had already used it in Casino Royale, it was his organization, in a way.

A more ingenious example of the way Fleming used research is evident from Grant's cover identity, Captain Norman Nash. Grant posing as an English gentleman and repeatedly calling Bond 'old man' appears to be a further reference to Rogue Male and 'Major Quive-Smith'. Fleming took his surname from the glossary of terms in Spiro's book:

'“Nash”: “Ours”, Cheka description for a sympathiser or potential informant.'

Fleming has Tania tell Bond this, presaging the revelation that 'Nash' is not all he seems:

''What did you say his name is?'

'Nash. Norman Nash.'

She spelled it out. 'N.A.S.H.? Like that?'

'Yes.'

The girl's eyes were puzzled. 'I suppose you know what that means in Russian. Nash means "ours". In our Services, a man is nash when he is one of "our" men. He is svoi when he is one of "theirs" – when he belongs to the enemy. And this man calls himself Nash. That is not pleasant.'''

Tatiana Romanova does not appear to have any direct historical counterpart, but much of her background is also taken from Spiro's book; it contains a chapter on the Central Index, where Tania works, which we are told mostly employs women. This is also where Fleming found the information about the Russians' files, zapiski, the Russian for 'top secret', and many other details. But while most thriller-writers research to make their fiction as realistic as possible, Fleming was concerned if it was interesting first, and plausible second. He also used his research material as a jumping-off point for ideas. As well as providing a lot of authoritative-sounding jargon, Spiro's book seems to have triggered plot ideas. In a passage about the use of mercenary spies, Spiro wrote:

'The conflict of the hot and cold war ideologies since 1939 has resulted in the eclipse of the professional "free lance" spy, beloved of the pre-war thriller writers – the Mata Haris and the glamorous blondes of the Orient Express.'

There were indeed many thrillers predating the 1950s that featured beautiful female agents and the most famous train in the world – but perhaps this was the trigger for Fleming to write his own variation of the form.

A few lines later, Spiro discussed the exploits of the Switz Gang, a syndicate of spies who trapped leading French officials into revealing defence secrets, which they then sold to both the Nazis and the Soviets:

'It was as romantic as any thriller lover could desire. A few blonde hairs adhering to a roll of camera film, which fell into the hands of the Deuxième Bureau, was the clue that led counter-espionage agents, with the help of Scotland Yard, to Mrs. Marjorie Switz.'

As well as the echoes of the photo blackmail plot in From Russia, With Love, the Switz Gang also appears similar to the mercenary terrorist syndicate S.P.E.C.T.R.E. introduced in Thunderball.

A higher realm of fantasy

Fleming cheekily prefaced From Russia, With Love with a note insisting on the accuracy of the information about SMERSH contained within the novel. Apart from sheer bravado – the organization had been disbanded over a decade earlier – this may have been because he was helped with his research by the Russian rocket scientist Grigori Tokaev, who had defected to Britain in 1947. Tokaev – who later took the name Tokaty – was the only Soviet official to defect to Britain between 1945 and 1963. But while he had some knowledge of Russia's intelligence structure, he had never been a member of SMERSH; he also spent much of his time in Britain assisting the Information Research Department, a secret group within the Foreign Office that created anti-Communist propaganda.

Fleming was happy to chop and change information as it suited him. The truth was a starting point, and it was always more important that it sounded like it could be true than whether it was. And a little note at the start would be enough to convince most people that it was the truth, and that they had been given an insider's glimpse into the espionage world. As we can see, that was hardly the case. Far from being an accurate description of the workings of SMERSH, the 'most secret department of the Soviet government', as Fleming claimed in his Author's Note, From Russia, With Love in fact gives an exciting but rather inaccurate representation of the workings of another Soviet organization entirely, the MVD, based on a publicly available account that itself was dubious, even before he attributed its methods to the long-defunct SMERSH.

Regardless of historical accuracy, From Russia, With Love established SMERSH as spy fiction's greatest villains to date. Considering the wealth of projects that exploited the success of Bond in the '60s, it seems surprising that there weren't more books about SMERSH during this period. One reason, of course, was the difficulty in getting hold of first-hand information.

One book claiming to offer this is Nights Are Longest There: SMERSH From The Inside by A.I. Romanov, which was published in English in 1972. ‘Romanov’ – a fitting pseudonym – writes that he was recruited into Department I during the war, meaning that we get lots of insight into life on the front-lines, as well as a thorough history of the organisation. It's a world away from Fleming: Romanov spent most of his time questioning people about garrisons and troop movements in hutments, occasionally being dragged out to a forest with his comrades to witness an execution. And where Mikhail Mondich verged on the hysterical, Romanov takes understatement to excess:

'In Poland... I witnessed the execution of one of our officers, who had raped a young Polish girl in her parents' home. The order of sentence in this case was widely publicised, both to our forces and the local population. Later, in Budapest, I was present when a group of leaders of the Hungarian pro-fascist party 'Crossed Arrows' was hanged. All these scenes left me with an impression that can in no way be described as pleasant.'

Reactivated

Ian Fleming only used SMERSH once again: Auric Goldfinger is its treasurer. But here, as in Live And Let Die, this was more a convenient prop to explain Bond's interest in the mission than anything else. And in his next novel, Thunderball, Fleming finally did away with SMERSH altogether, replacing it with the wholly fictional SPECTRE. In an interview given to Playboy shortly before his death, Fleming gave his reasons:

'I closed down SMERSH, although I was devoted to the good old apparat, because, first of all, Khrushchev did in fact disband SMERSH himself, although its operations are still carried out by a subsection of the K.G.B., the Russian secret service. But in that book – I think it was Thunderball that I was writing at the time of the proposed summit meeting – I thought well, it's no good going on if we're going to make friends with the Russians. I know them, I like them personally, as anyone would, as anyone would like the Chinese if he knew them. I thought, I don't want to go on ragging them like this. So I invented SPECTRE as an international crime organisation which contained elements of SMERSH and the Gestapo and the Mafia – the cosy old Cosa Nostra – which, of course, is a much more elastic fictional device than SMERSH, which was no fictional device, but the real thing.'

The makers of the Bond films felt the same, preferring to use the elastic SPECTRE than the real-life SMERSH. But the idea that a 'subsection of the KGB' might still be carrying out SMERSH's duties (which, in fact, it had been before Fleming started writing about it) found favour with John Gardner when he came to write his James Bond novels. In Icebreaker, SMERSH was transformed into 'Department V'. This was a real subsection of the KGB, although it was in fact descended from the Special Administration of Special Tasks, a sabotage and assassination division during World War Two often confused with SMERSH, rather than from SMERSH itself. However, as with Fleming, historical accuracy was not the name of the game, and Gardner took his readers back to Fleming's original fascination with this strange, sinister Soviet group:

'"SMERSH has what I understand is called, in criminal parlance, a hit list. That list includes a number of names – people who are wanted, not dead but alive. Can you imagine whose name is number one on the chart, James Bond?"'

If such hit lists seem 'beyond the possible', one only has to consider the fate of Nikolai Khokhlov, whose case so inspired Fleming when writing From Russia, With Love. That novel ends with James Bond being poisoned by a kick from Rosa Klebb. Five months after it was published, in September 1957, Khokhlov himself was poisoned with the metal thallium, which had been inserted into a cup of coffee. He eventually recovered, but not before he had gone bald, blood had seeped through his pores and his entire body had become disfigured with black-and-blue swellings. The obvious similarities to the cases of both Viktor Yushchenko and Alexander Litvinenko suggest that Ian Fleming's conception of the Russian secret services may not have been so wide of the mark after all.

Select Bibliography

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999)
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (Allen Lane, 2005)
John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (Bantam, 1974)
Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World (John Murray, 2005)
E.H. Cookridge, Soviet Spy Net (Frederick Muller, 1955)
The works of Ian Fleming
John Gardner, Icebreaker (Berkley, 1983)
Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male (Penguin, 1985)
Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (Phoenix, 2002)
Ben Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond (Bloomsbury, 2008)
John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (The Companion Book Club, 1966)
Ken Purdy, The Playboy Interview: Ian Fleming (in Playboy, December 1964)
AI Romanov, Nights Are Longest There: Smersh from the Inside (Hutchinson, 1972)
Ronald Seth, The Executioners: The Story of SMERSH (Cassell, 1967)
Nicola Sinevirsky, SMERSH (Henry Holt & Co, 1950)