Licence To Hoax

‘The creation of real life intelligence operative and old Etonian Ian Fleming, Bond borrowed his 007 title from Dr John Dee. The 16th century British secret agent used the code for his messages to Queen Elizabeth I. The two zeros meant “for your eyes only”...’1
BBC News, November 22 2002

‘At the outbreak of war, the Beast found himself caught up in further intrigue as the occult and espionage worlds collided. Ian Fleming, working for naval intelligence in MI5, contacted him with an outlandish plan to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain by using mystical enchantments and astrology…’2
The Daily Telegraph, May 30 2009

‘Behind every great James Bond thriller there is a great Bond girl. The actress Eva Green is winning plaudits for her sultry portrayal of Vesper Lynd in the new film of Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel Casino Royale. But was this exotic femme fatale just a product of the author’s imagination?
As a noted womaniser who had worked in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, Fleming had plenty of personal experiences upon which to draw. He also enjoyed a cocktail called the Vesper. But more importantly, in the years immediately before writing Casino Royale, he had been regularly seeing a woman named Christine Granville.
She was really the Countess Krystyna Skarbek. When she was born, half-Jewish, in Warsaw on a stormy night, her father, an impoverished count, gave her the pet name “Vespérale”…’3
The Times, November 18, 2006

‘The story of beautiful wartime spy Christine Granville, who was Ian Fleming’s lover and the inspiration for the James Bond character Vesper Lynd, is to be made into a major film…’4
The Daily Mail, February 27, 2009

Newspapers love stories about James Bond. The world’s most popular secret agent provides several elements that attract readers: glamour, intrigue, sex and danger. Ian Fleming worked in intelligence during the Second World War, and knew a lot of people in the espionage world. This has led to dozens of articles over the years about his exploits and those of others he knew. Some of these have little truth to them, while some are based on outright fabrication.

In the last few years, I’ve noticed that a lot of newspaper articles about James Bond lead back to the same source: 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming by Donald McCormick. Billed on the cover as ‘the definitive biography with important new material’, this short book was published in 1993, 27 years after the publication of John Pearson’s biography of Fleming and three years before Andrew Lycett’s. Pearson and Lycett had both worked for The Sunday Times, and both had access to Fleming’s own papers, as well as interviewing many of the people Fleming had known.

On the face of it, McCormick was also well qualified to write a biography of Ian Fleming. A journalist and author of several decades standing, he had published over 50 non-fiction books about espionage, many under the pseudonym Richard Deacon. During the war he had been in the Royal Navy, and after it Fleming had hired him for the news agency Mercury, which was part of the Kemsley empire. For his biography of Fleming, McCormick did not have access to Ian Fleming’s papers, but he did make extensive use of newspaper archives, the papers of Ian Fleming’s brother Peter, and consulted several notable names in the Bond world, including Ian Fleming’s former literary agent Peter Janson-Smith.

But unknown to these people, McCormick was a fraud. Between the facts that had already been set out in John Pearson’s book and a sprinkling of new but not especially significant information, McCormick’s biography contained several elaborate hoaxes about the life and work of Ian Fleming, all of which have been reported in creditable newspapers and books, and continue to be to this day. I think it’s time to dismantle McCormick as a source on Ian Fleming once and for all, and to expose both his fraudulence, and how he did it.


McCormick has already been unmasked as a hoaxer in other fields. In 1959, the author and broadcaster Melvin Harris read McCormick’s book The Mystery Of Lord Kitchener’s Death and realized that its ‘only new evidence (telling first-person “revelations”) was simply manufactured.’5

Harris then turned his attention to McCormick’s book The Identity of Jack the Ripper, published the same year. He concluded that McCormick had fabricated key documents that he quoted in the book, claiming they were from the papers of a Dr Dutton, including a poem supposedly found in the police archives, ‘Eight Little Whores’. In advance of a TV programme on which McCormick would be exposed as a hoaxer, Harris called McCormick to tell him how he knew the Dutton documents were fake, that McCormick was the forger, and that he had fleshed out the rest of his book with ‘uncheckable and bogus documents and statements.’6 McCormick initially denied it, but after a while apparently became philosophical about his imminent exposure, especially as Harris softened the blow by saying he would not name him as the forger but was prepared to describe the hoax ‘as the work of a man with a wicked sense of humour’. The TV programme was cancelled, but Harris eventually met McCormick:

‘I asked him if he now wished to publicly name the faker of the poem, but he said he was not ready. He was still happy, though, for me to use the old formula, that it was faked by “A very clever man who enjoys his quiet fun”, and he winked as he said it! Yes, he was a likeable rogue. But he was trapped by his very likeability. Over the years he had kept up the bluff with so many people that he found it hard to disentangle himself, as I found out when I later wrote to him. He was, by then, unwilling to commit himself in writing, instead he wrote letters full of teasing, enigmatic clues.

Finally in October 1997 I wrote to him and asked him to stop the fooling and write a candid letter fit for publication. Sadly the reply that came back read “I have an ulcer on my right eye and have great difficulty in writing at present. Please let the matter drop.” I did and there was never to be a further chance. Within a short while I learned that he was dead.’7  

Harris himself died in 2004. He also wrote that McCormick told him that the starting point for his books was usually the Kemsley newspaper library, which contained cuttings dating back to the Victorian era: ‘Other newspapers, he advised, held similar archives. They saved him a journey and a search at Colindale.’8 This technique can be seen in 17F: dozens of newspaper articles are cited and often quoted at length. These make the book seem more authoritative and give McCormick lots of genuine sources to footnote, helping to disguise the fabrications woven around them.

I first realized McCormick was a hoaxer because of the Rudolf Hess story in 17F, which has been reported dozens of times in the press but is utterly preposterous. In his 1966 biography of Fleming, John Pearson had described how, following the unexpected landing of the Deputy Führer in Scotland in May 1941, Fleming had contacted the infamous black magician Aleister Crowley:

‘This immensely ugly old diabolist and self-advertiser had thrown himself into certain more unsavoury areas of the occult with a gusto that must have appealed to Fleming, and when the interrogators from British Intelligence began trying to make sense of the neurotic and highly superstitious Hess [Fleming] got the idea that Crowley might be able to help and tracked him down to a place near Torquay, where he was living harmlessly on his own and writing patriotic poetry to encourage the war effort.’9

According to Pearson, Crowley wrote a letter to the Director of Naval Intelligence offering to help, but nothing came of it:

‘It is a pity that this had to be one of Fleming’s bright ideas which never came off: understandably, there was hilarity in the department at the idea of the Great Beast 666 doing his bit for Britain.’10

Pearson deals with this episode in four paragraphs. McCormick took the ingredients of it – Fleming, Hess, Crowley and the occult – to invent an entirely new story. In his version, Fleming didn’t merely get the idea to approach Crowley after Hess had landed: Hess’ arrival in Scotland was itself the result of an elaborate operation hatched by Fleming to lure him to Britain by means of forged astrological charts. McCormick larded his story with details about meetings in Portugal and Switzerland, Hess’ ‘chief astrological adviser Ernst Schulte-Strathaus’ and the like, with footnotes referring to letters sent to him by several parties, and in one case saying ‘See German Intelligence Personnel Records’, with no indication as to where those might be.

The profusion of names, dates and sources were presumably to give credence to what is, on the face of it, a totally implausible story. McCormick claimed, for example, that Fleming and Crowley engaged in occult rites in Ashdown Forest involving a dummy dressed in a Nazi uniform on a throne-like chair. McCormick quoted at length on this ‘Amado Crowley, Aleister Crowley’s son’. He neglected to mention that Amado was in fact Andrew Standish, a writer on the occult who claimed to be Crowley’s secret illegitimate son and had changed his name as a result. Standish is generally recognized to have been a hoaxer himself.

On reading this chapter, I immediately suspected it was pure fabrication. But two sources cited by McCormick gave me pause for thought: Peter Fleming and Sefton Delmer. Delmer was a well-known journalist who had been a major force in British propaganda and psychological warfare against the Nazis, and who had known Ian Fleming fairly well. Peter was Ian’s older brother, and also a veteran of several ingenious deception operations during the war, a few of them somewhat surreal (although nowhere near as surreal as this episode). In 1940, Peter Fleming had published a best-selling comic novel called The Flying Visit about Hitler dropping into Britain. According to McCormick, Ian Fleming had urged Peter to write the book, ‘doubtless seeing it as a possible means of signalling to the Germans that the British might talk if someone were lured to Britain – if not Hitler or Hess, then possibly Canaris’:

‘When Hess himself enacted Peter Fleming’s fictitious ploy, no doubt it secretly delighted Ian, but the sheer coincidence of The Flying Visit narrative and Hess’s arrival must at the same time have been somewhat embarrassing for him.

However, there is no evidence that the brothers colluded in Ian’s secret operation. Peter Fleming stated long afterwards that Ian had not told him about ‘this idea’, which he described as ‘a new legend about my brother’. On the other hand, Sefton Delmer, who knew Ian Fleming well and had worked with him, commented: ‘As an idea, inducing Hess to fly to England by means of astrological hocus-pocus – and the bait of the Duke of Hamilton – was something that might have appealed to Ian Fleming, or even to have been conceived by him. I am quite ready to believe that.’

Later, anxious to stress that he had no knowledge of any such plans and, by implication, denying that his own novel had any connection with them, Peter Fleming affirmed that he did not believe ‘the elaborate ruses were ever carried out, or even planned’. None the less the undisputed fact remains that Fleming was anxious, once Hess had landed, to follow up his own hunches on the best way to handle him. He not only begged the authorities to allow Aleister Crowley to interview Hess, he even managed to persuade Crowley to offer his services for this purpose. Unfortunately the offer was not taken up…’11

And we have come full circle, back to the incident in John Pearson’s biography from which McCormick seems to have developed the entire story. McCormick footnoted his quotes from Delmer and Peter Fleming to issues of The Times from September 1969. I looked them up, and found that McCormick had omitted a rather salient fact: both Delmer and Peter Fleming had written about this incident in terms of dismissing an earlier telling of it. By none other than Donald McCormick.

In 1969, McCormick’s book A History of the British Secret Service was published under the pseudonym Richard Deacon. In it, he wrote that Ian Fleming had masterminded an operation to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain using fake astrological charts. Shortly before the book was published, The Times ran an article on this ‘remarkable claim’ but, very sensibly, sought out the opinions of Sefton Delmer and Peter Fleming on it. Both men dismissed McCormick’s story. Delmer admitted that the idea was the sort of thing that might have appealed to Ian Fleming, or even been conceived by him, as quoted above, but went on to say that he found the details of the story unconvincing:

‘It is all too pat and does not fit the fact that the flight on May 10 was not Hess’s first attempt to fly to Britain.’12

Peter Fleming said that Ian had never mentioned the idea to him, and indeed called it ‘a new legend about my brother’ – ie a legend created by Donald McCormick. Three days later, Peter wrote a letter to The Times explaining in greater detail why he thought the story was nonsense:

‘Sir, -- I agree with Mr. Sefton Delmer that the idea of decoying the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich, with the aid of astrology, to rendez-vous with a Duke in Scotland during the opening phase of the German offensive in Europe in May 1940 was one that my late brother, Ian, might well have conceived. But he did not conceive it, nor do I believe that the elaborate ruses described by Mr. Deacon in his History of the British Secret Service were ever carried out, or even planned…’13

Peter Fleming went on to explain that because he had written The Flying Visit, he thought it highly unlikely his brother would have neglected to mention to him that he had been involved with such a similar real-life event later on in the war. Peter did not mention, for security reasons, that he had himself been an important figure in deception operations during the war, so there was no question that Ian would not have trusted him with such information.

Ellic Howe, who had also been involved in deception and propaganda operations in the war, wrote to The Times on the same day to dismiss the story, reporting that he had discussed with Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, Hess’ supposed adviser on astrological matters, whether there might be any such esoteric background to the case, and he had said there wasn’t. In addition, Howe wrote, Schulte-Strathaus wasn’t Hess’ astrological adviser, ‘but merely talked to him occasionally about astrology’.14 Unfortunately, by discussing such nuances, Howe probably gave some readers the impression that there was something in McCormick’s story.

Undaunted by the three-pronged assault from Delmer, Howe and Peter Fleming, McCormick replied to The Times, insisting that he respected their views but asking them to wait for publication of his book before offering their final judgment on it.15

One of the advantages of fabricating information about intelligence operations is that it is very difficult for anyone to prove you wrong. It’s a further advantage if the people you’re making the claims about are dead, as Ian Fleming was in 1969. When McCormick revived his hoax 24 years later, Delmer, Howe and Peter Fleming had all since died. McCormick shamelessly quoted their dismissals of his fabrication as evidence to support it. In doing so, he altered some of their words. Peter Fleming wrote: ‘But he did not conceive it, nor do I believe that the elaborate ruses described by Mr. Deacon in his History of the British Secret Service were ever carried out, or even planned.’ McCormick altered this, for obvious reasons, quoting Peter Fleming as not believing ‘the elaborate ruses were ever carried out, or even planned’. No ellipses, either. In doing this, he was not simply misquoting Peter Fleming and disguising the context of his comments, which would have revealed that it was his story under discussion by Peter Fleming, and being dismissed by him. He was also subtly but offensively insinuating that Peter Fleming’s disbelief of his fabrication was in some way evidence that he had been covering up the ‘real’ conspiracy. This insinuation is in the words ‘anxious to stress’: he was suggesting that Peter Fleming had been protesting too much, and wanted to hide what had really happened.

In fact, Peter Fleming had had Donald McCormick pegged.

The Fleming-lured-Hess-to-Scotland-with-astrology story, despite being an obvious hoax, still pops up in the press sometimes, and often crops up online. Another of McCormick’s hoaxes that is blindly reported as fact is his claim that the 16th-century English mathematician John Dee was a spy for Queen Elizabeth I and signed his missives with a stylized 007. McCormick wrote that Aleister Crowley introduced Ian Fleming to the works of Dee, and that this was how James Bond got his codename.16

This was debunked by Teresa Burns in 2010, who wrote that McCormick’s 1968 book John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I, written under the Richard Deacon pseudonym, ‘seems the source of the persistent printed and Internet legend that John Dee signed his name “007.”’:

‘Did Dee really sign his name this way? A painstaking search through many, many Dee signatures has convinced this writer that he did not. His real signature took many forms, but looks more like a whirlwind than a 007.

Yet even this writer has fallen for that non-fact. Deacon footnotes works of natural philosopher Robert Hooke (1635-1703), including his Posthumous Works presented to Sir Isaac Newton (which does actually exist) and an alleged work called An Ingenious Cryptographical System, which, though quoted in several scholarly and non-scholarly works since, and listed in two of them as being among the “Gwydir Papers, Manuscript Collection,” seems not to exist at all.

Yet for one who has studied much of the Dee material which has become available after 1968, Deacon’s book reads like a blurred, excited rehashing of ideas slightly out of focus and in the service of someone else’s ego: he footnotes here and there as if for kicks, referring to letters and legend one can find no record of, but weaving a story that is almost plausible…’17

This is a good description of McCormick’s technique: alongside genuine material correctly sourced, he added elements he had invented, citing fictitious but authoritative-sounding sources. Much of 17F is recycled material from his earlier works, sometimes barely repackaged and often only tenuously linked to Ian Fleming. His account of the failed plan to block the Danube in 1940 is the same as the one he gave in The Silent War: A History of Western Naval Intelligence, published under the pseudonym Richard Deacon in 1988, with hardly a word changed. There is some justification for that: Fleming was heavily involved in that operation, so it makes some sense to recap his research. But in many cases McCormick repeated material from his previous books that had nothing whatsoever to do with Ian Fleming, and simply repackaged them with Fleming now playing a central role in the incidents in question.

The greatest example of this is chapter 9 of the book, which is about the celebrated SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek, better known as Christine Granville. McCormick had already written about Granville in both A History of the British Secret Service and Spyclopaedia, the latter published six years earlier, but in neither had he mentioned her in connection with Ian Fleming. In this chapter he repeated a lot of material about Granville from those books, and justified its inclusion in a biography of Ian Fleming by fabricating a story that Fleming had had an affair with her.

To bolster this story, McCormick presented several pieces of ‘evidence’. These included quotes and correspondence from Ed Howe, who had been a Kemsley correspondent in Istanbul. Howe and Granville had genuinely known each other, and perhaps it was this convenient fact that inspired McCormick’s tale, because it placed Granville a degree of separation from Ian Fleming. McCormick claimed that after the war Christine Granville had met Howe in Cairo and told him she was looking for work:

‘Howe told me: ‘As a long shot I gave her Fleming’s address, as I felt sure he would be interested in her – as a fascinating personality certainly and maybe as a correspondent somewhere or other.’’18

McCormick did not provide a date or any other reference for this quote, so we have to take it on trust that he accurately recalled Howe’s words – and that Howe even said any such a thing at all. McCormick claimed that Fleming was interested in Granville, and quotes a letter from Ian Fleming to Howe about her:

‘She literally shines with all the qualities and splendours of a fictitious character. How rarely one finds such types.’19

A letter by Fleming! If true, compelling evidence of a connection, at least. But it is not shown in the book. McCormick instead footnoted this quote, writing that the letter had been shown to him personally, and had been dated 12 May 1947. He did not reveal the current whereabouts of the letter, again leaving readers with just his word that it ever existed.

McCormick claimed Fleming met Granville for lunch at Bertorelli’s in London and that they went on to have an affair, his source being ‘one of Christine’s Polish friends’, Olga Bialoguski, who told him about it. Conveniently, Olga also revealed to McCormick that Granville was very secretive, often made up stories to cover her tracks so you could never know when she was telling the truth, and that she, Olga, was one of Granville’s only friends to know about the affair.

She’s also one of Granville’s only friends not to be mentioned in connection with Granville anywhere else. She has a convincingly Polish-sounding surname, though. It’s the same surname as Dr Michael Bialoguski, the Polish-born Australian agent who was instrumental in Vladimir Petrov’s defection in 1954, as related in the world’s press and by McCormick himself in his book Spyclopaedia, published a few years earlier. Perhaps Olga was related in some way to the doctor? If so, McCormick didn’t mention it. More likely, I think, is that McCormick wanted a second source, decided it would be a Polish friend of Granville’s and simply looked through his own work for a real Polish surname.

Olga also revealed to McCormick, in long fluent English quotes with no dates or other information given for them, that Granville had once confided to her that Fleming had taken her to a hotel named the Granville ‘somewhere in the region of Dover’. This brought back memories for McCormick, who recalled just such a hotel being mentioned in passing in Moonraker. After quoting the passage in question, he noted that ‘to introduce Christine to a hotel actually named after her would be just the kind of joke Fleming would enjoy.’20

Ian Fleming certainly knew of Christine Granville, as he mentioned her by name in The Diamond Smugglers when discussing different types of secret agents:

‘Then there are the colourful spies like Sorge, the brilliant, luxury-loving German who worked for Russia in Tokio, and girls like Christine Granville who was murdered by a love-crazed ship’s steward in a Kensington hotel in March 1952, after a fabulous record in wartime espionage for which she earned the George Medal.’21

Granville was well-known, and Fleming knew of her, but there is no evidence anywhere other than in Donald McCormick’s book that Ian Fleming ever even met her, let alone had an affair with her. Considering the access that both John Pearson and Andrew Lycett had, and the thoroughness of their research, one would have expected them to have mentioned a connection with such a well-known woman. All the more so, as someone Ian Fleming did have an affair with was Blanche Blackwell. Pearson didn’t mention this at all in his biography, perhaps because Ian’s widow Ann was still alive at the time he was writing, as was Blackwell. Writing in 1996, long after all the parties were dead, Andrew Lycett revealed the affair and the extent of it. But he didn’t mention Christine Granville once. Writing in 1993, McCormick devoted a whole chapter to the supposed affair with Granville, his only evidence for which was oral testimony from a friend of Granville’s who has never been identified elsewhere and a letter from Fleming to Edward Howe never seen anywhere else. But Blanche Blackwell isn’t mentioned once in the book.

McCormick went on to theorize that Granville had been the model for Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. His ‘evidence’ for this is very thin indeed. Yes, the description of Vesper sounds a little like Christine Granville, in that she was a beautiful dark-haired woman. The descriptions of Solitaire in Live and Let Die and Tatiana Romanova in From Russia, With Love are also rather similar. But there’s nothing out of the ordinary in the physical description of Vesper: she was standard fare for the genre.

McCormick noted that Vesper Lynd speaks French ‘like a native’, and that according to people who had known her, Granville was also fluent in French. But that’s hardly surprising for an SOE agent who was sent to France. McCormick reported that Granville thrived on disaster – just like Vesper in the novel. But that’s a passing comment from Bond, not a serious assessment of her character, and anyway, Vesper is also involved in espionage: one could say that James Bond thrives on disaster, too. McCormick also noted that Vesper is in love with a Pole in the R.A.F., while Granville had been great friends with a gallant Pole in the British Army (and was Polish herself). All of this is inconsequential, and a game that could be applied to dozens of people.

But McCormick did provide one piece of information that seemed to point firmly and unequivocally to Christine Granville. In the novel, Vesper tells Bond that she was given her unusual name by her parents because she had been born on a stormy evening. This, McCormick revealed, was a secret clue:

‘Further inquiries established the fact that Christine Granville was born on a stormy night and that her father gave her the nickname of ‘Vespérale’, or, as he himself explained, ‘qui a rapport au soir claret vespérale.’22

McCormick provided a footnote for this, citing Madeleine Masson’s 1975 biography Christine: A Search for Christine Granville, but he didn’t provide the corresponding page number. There was a very good reason for that: that particular piece of information didn’t in fact appear anywhere in Masson’s book. Instead, Masson noted:

‘Count Jerzy was relieved when his daughter Krystyna, Christine, born in 1915, seemed to have inherited his own good looks.

From the start there was a complete rapport between father and daughter. He called her his ‘Happiness’ and his ‘Star’.’23

So the one piece of information McCormick gave that compellingly suggested Granville was the model for Vesper is not in the book McCormick claimed as his source for it. And instead, that book contradicts McCormick’s account, saying that her father nicknamed her Happiness and Star. And while vesper can refer to the evening star, that isn’t what McCormick wrote, and ‘Star’ is not a nickname one gives for being born on a stormy night.

This false citation completely undermines McCormick’s claim Vesper was based on Granville, both because he falsified it and because the rest of his evidence is so flimsy: there were plenty of dark-haired French-speaking beauties before, during and after the war on whom Fleming could have based the character, and he also might not have based her on anyone. One could find details in the biographies of many women who could be linked in this sort of way to Vesper Lynd’s first name, her surname, her appearance, or lines snipped from Casino Royale. Vesper is also the name for common kinds of bat, sparrow and mouse. The daring, beautiful, dark-haired, French-speaking SOE agent Violette Szabo used a code based on Three Blind Mice. ‘Vespers’ are evening prayers in various denominations. SOE agent Nancy Wake grew up in a strict religious background, and was known to the Gestapo as The White Mouse. One could claim any woman was born on a stormy night, or was known by friends to attend evening prayers, or anything else. But without any credible evidence to substantiate a claim of an affair or that Fleming based the character on a particular person, such as correspondence or other material by Granville or Fleming, there would be no reason to believe any such theory.

Why choose Christine Granville? Well, McCormick already knew quite a lot about her, having written about her twice before, and he had presumably sensed already that she was a good subject for his audience: beautiful, heroic, and fascinating to the public. So I think he created the tale of the affair, and to support it he pointed to a book that didn’t contain the evidence he claimed it did, invented a letter from Fleming to a friend who had died, and added a mysterious Polish friend Olga, who nobody’s ever seen. Presumably, he was hoping that the footnote pointing to Masson would in and of itself seem authoritative, and that nobody would bother to look it up, or that if they did would soon give up looking when they couldn’t find the reference, presuming it was in the book somewhere or other. And he was right: a lot of people have taken him a face value. Not everyone was fooled, though. In 2006, John Griswold published an exhaustive examination of Fleming and his work, and did look up McCormick’s reference to Masson’s book. But, he noted, he ‘could not find this information stated anywhere within it’.24


In 2004, a Canadian company, Queen Fine Arts, bought the film rights to Masson’s biogaphy of Christine Granville. The following year a new edition of her book was published by Virago, now retitled Christine: SOE Agent and Churchill’s Favourite Spy. In a new afterword, Masson discussed some developments that had taken place since the book had first been published in 1975:

‘Once it became known that my researches might become the basis for a film, a tide of new information about Christine alerted me to the fact that there were lacunae in my book that would need further digging and verification.’ 25

Chief among these lacunae was Granville’s SOE file, which had been declassified in 2003, the contents of which Masson discussed and quoted, and Donald McCormick’s claim that Granville had an affair with Ian Fleming, which Masson discussed at some length. She also mentioned the idea that Granville might have been the model for Vesper, noting their supposed similarities in appearance and that she tells Bond her name is the result of her being born on a stormy evening:

‘In fact, Countess Krystyna Skarbek was born on a stormy night, and her father, Count Jerzy Skarbek, had given his baby daughter the nickname Vespérale or, as he explained, ‘like the evening star’.

One of the many biographies of Fleming – Donald McCormick’s – majors on his affair with Christine. I cannot confirm that Fleming used Christine as the model for Vesper Lynd but there is a real passion in Fleming’s novel and his account of Vesper’s beauty and character adds up to a fair description of Christine.’ 26

Masson was in her nineties when she wrote this afterword, so allowances should be made. But there are several troubling aspects about it. Firstly, it seems that she didn’t dig very far or verify very much about this particular lacuna. She doesn’t seem to have realized that McCormick had given her as the source for Granville’s nickname being ‘Vespérale’ – or that that detail had not in fact been in her book. Instead, bizarrely, she repeated most of McCormick’s information, including the crucial detail he had supposedly got from her. More worrying is the way she did this: in the paragraphs before she mentioned McCormick. This gives the impression that she knew about the nickname some other way, omitting that her source was the same as for the affair she couldn’t confirm mentioned in the next paragraph. If she couldn’t confirm the affair, what was her evidence for the nickname? So in 1993 McCormick had disguised his fabrication by crediting Masson as his source when she wasn’t. And in 2005, Masson disguised the fact that she got all her new information about Fleming from… McCormick.

This isn’t anywhere near the same as McCormick’s fabrications, but it calls into serious question Masson’s reliability as a source on Christine Granville. Masson said she could not confirm the affair with Fleming – but devoted a couple of pages to it nevertheless. If she had been a thorough researcher, McCormick’s claims should have raised alarm bells at once, because: she herself was the cited source for the information; she wasn’t in fact the source for it; she hadn’t come across any evidence of an affair in writing the first edition of her book; and neither had any of Fleming’s other biographers come across it. In repeating McCormick’s story, she unwittingly extended his hoax beyond the grave. Now she can accurately be quoted as having mentioned the affair. (Her new edition also added one more myth to the mix: although the title now proclaimed Granville was ‘Churchill’s favourite spy’, that information is not mentioned at all in the book itself, let alone a reference for it cited.)


It is as a result of this sort of Chinese whispers that McCormick’s hoaxes about Ian Fleming and James Bond have survived to date. There’s a lot of other information in 17F that doesn’t appear in either John Pearson or Andrew Lycett’s biographies. Some of it is verifiably true, but in general the more interesting McCormick’s information, the harder it is to ascertain the source. In many cases, he simply states something as fact, as in that Charles Fraser-Smith was ‘unquestionably’ the brains behind Fleming’s Q Branch. Fraser-Smith certainly created ingenious gadgets during the Second World War, but he admits in his own memoir that he only knew Fleming slightly, and there were plenty of other boffins in British intelligence who worked in that line – SOE had a special workshop for them in Welwyn Garden City. McCormick also quotes a KGB file, apparently declassified after the fall of the Soviet Union, which discusses keeping an eye on Fleming’s work for any mentions of SMERSH, but gives no reference to the document’s whereabouts or reference number. There are dozens of such minor snippets of information in the book, many of which have been repeated and expanded on by other writers and in the process made firmer over the years. Unpicking them all would be impossible, but I hope that this article sheds light on some of McCormick’s most widely accepted myths and hoaxes about Ian Fleming and James Bond.


Notes
1. Will the real James Bond stand up? By Chris Jones, BBC News, November 22, 2002. Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/2503023.stm
2. Aleister Crowley’s lives by Jake Arnott, May 30 2009, The Daily Telegraph. Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5407318/Aleister-Crowleys-lives.html
3. Larger than life adventures of a real Bond girl by Graham Stewart, The Times, November 18, 2006. Available from: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/graham_stewart/article640268.ece
4. Christine, the spy who loved Ian Fleming, gets her own movie by Jason Lewis, The Daily Mail, February 27, 2009. Available from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1145702/Christine-spy-loved-Ian-Fleming-gets-movie.html
5, 6, 7, 8. The Maybrick Hoax: Donald McCormick’s Legacy by Melvin Harris. Available from: http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/maybrick_diary/mb-mc.html
9, 10. pp117-118 The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson, Companion Book Club, 1966.
11. pp92-93 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming by Donald McCormick, Peter Owen, London, 1993.
12. Horoscope ‘lured’ Hess to Britain by Peter Hopkirk, The Times, September 15 1969.
13. Letter from Peter Fleming, The Times, September 18 1969.
14. Letter from Ellic Howe, The Times, September 18 1969
15. Letter from Richard Deacon, The Times, September 25 1969.
16. p203 17F, and ppx and 5 John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I by Richard Deacon, Muller, 1968.
17. A Golden Storm: Attempting to Recreate the Context of John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Angelic Material by Teresa Burns, Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, No. 19, Vol. 2. 2010. Available from: http://www.jwmt.org/v2n19/golden.html
18. p143 17F.
19. p141 17F.
20. p144 17F.
21. p54 The Diamond Smugglers by Ian Fleming, Pan, 1965.
22.p151 17F.
23. p7 Christine: A Search for Christine Granville by Madeleine Masson, Hamilton, 1975.
24. p60 Ian Fleming’s James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming’s Bond Stories by John Griswold, AuthorHouse, 2006.
25. p261 Christine: SOE Agent and Churchill’s Favourite Spy, Virago, 2005.
26. pp265-266 Christine: SOE Agent and Churchill’s Favourite Spy, Virago, 2005.

Commando Bond

Spy novelist Jeremy Duns takes an in-depth look at 007's ties to special forces

'MI6 looks for maladjusted young men who'd give little thought to sacrificing others to protect Queen and country. You know – former SAS types with easy smiles and expensive watches…'

So says Vesper Lynd to James Bond in the 2006 film Casino Royale. Although it doesn’t get as much mileage in the finished film as it did in the press before its release, Casino Royale took a daring approach to the Bond mythos, presenting an ‘origin story’ for the character. Bond is a newly appointed member of MI6’s Double O Section – the film opens with him earning his stripes by cold-bloodedly murdering a traitor – and it would appear from his reaction to Vesper’s comment that she has hit home and that he is in fact a 'former SAS type'. This was confirmed by the film's official website, which provided a chronology of Bond's pre-MI6 career, including a military dossier detailing his time at Britannia Royal Naval College, his intelligence role on HMS Exeter and special forces training at Plymouth and Brize Norton. The site even claimed Bond had been part of an invented outfit called '030 Special Forces Unit'.

Special forces have developed a particular image in popular culture in recent years. Britain's SAS is probably the world’s best known special forces outfit, having featured in dozens of films, books and magazine articles, many of them generated by the worldwide media interest surrounding the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 after terrorists took hostages inside, which was screened live on British television (pictured).

Members of the SAS have a popular image as gung-ho operators who shoot first and ask questions later: not really the type to create their own cocktails (or sport easy smiles). The use of tough SAS types in fiction has also become something of a cliché, with a whole genre being formed in the wake of Andy McNab's 1993 memoir of an SAS operation in Iraq, Bravo Two Zero. It's not quite James Bond territory. Or...?

In an article in Time published on November 10 2002, shortly before the release of Die Another Day, Lee Tamahori, the director of that film, made the following remark about the direction he felt the character had been taken in the previous few films:

‘“I was worried that he was turning into an SAS man, machine-gunning everyone,” says Tamahori. “I've been trying to make him more of an Ian Fleming Bond.”’

This is a misapprehension. While copious use of a machine gun is not a hallmark of Ian Fleming’s novels, the idea that James Bond might be an SAS man is not out of keeping with them. In fact, Fleming included several clues that point to James Bond having just such a type of background.

The Special Air Service did not always have the popular reputation it has today. The group was founded by David Stirling (left) in 1941 to undertake acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. The son of a Scottish general, Stirling began a degree in architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his studies were curtailed by his fondness for the local nightlife. He was eventually read out a list of 23 offences and asked to choose the three for which he wished to be sent down. He then decided to become the first man to climb Everest and enlisted in the Supplementary Reserves of the Scots Guards – he trained in the Swiss Alps and the Rockies. When war broke out he was 24, and was sent to the Guards Depot in Pirbright:

'Pirbright was a mere hour from the attractions of London. During one lecture, possibly after a night at White's Club or the gaming tables, Stirling fell asleep. He probably fell asleep in many, but on this occasion he was woken by the lecturer, asking him to repeat what had just been said. Stirling repeated it verbatim.'1

After this, Stirling volunteered for an expeditionary force setting off to fight a winter campaign in Finland – ski training was in Chamonix – before joining the commando group Layforce, after which he founded the SAS.

It is difficult to imagine a more 'James Bondish' background than this, but Stirling is one of the few leading commandos from World War Two not to have been claimed as a model for 007. Fleming was certainly inspired by the real-life experience of such men, however, as he made clear in an interview with Playboy published after his death:

'I think [Bond is] slightly more true to the type of modern hero, to the commandos of the last War, and so on, and to some of the secret-service men I've met, than to any of the rather cardboardy heroes of the ancient thrillers.'2

Fleming knew several heroic commandos and secret-service men who had served in the war. Perhaps the best known among them is Patrick Leigh Fermor, who worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Crete, where he led the party that kidnapped General Kreipe in 1944. That mission was immortalised in W Stanley Moss' book Ill Met By Moonlight, published in 1950, which was made into a film in 1957, with Dirk Bogarde playing Leigh Fermor.

In an afterword for the 2001 edition of Moss' book, Leigh Fermor wrote about the operation for the first time. He modestly refuted the 'Baroness Orczy - John Buchan - Dornford Yates' status that the episode has gained over the years, but at the same time revealed that during a prolonged stay in Cairo with SOE colleagues, the villa they had stayed in had been filled with gelignite disguised as goat's droppings, magnetised trouser buttons that turned into compasses and gossamer-thin maps stitched into the lining of clothing. Many of these items were created by a Major Jasper Maskelyne, who Leigh Fermor recognised as a stage magician he had seen perform in London as a child 3.

After the war, Leigh Fermor took up writing, drafting some of his first book, The Traveller's Tree, during a stay at Goldeneye in 1948. He loved Fleming's Jamaican retreat and commented in his book that it could become a model for new houses in the tropics 4. The two men became friends, and Fleming repaid Fermor’s plug for Goldeneye by quoting a long passage on voodoo from The Traveller's Tree in Live and Let Die.

Another of Fleming's friends mentioned in his novels was David Niven, whose manners Kissy Suzuki so admires that she names her cormorant after him. Niven also served as a commando of sorts in World War Two: while serving with 'Phantom', the regiment responsible for ferreting out information in forward areas and radioing it back to GHQ, he worked on joint operations with the SAS, whose command it came under from 1944 5.

Another friend, Antony Terry, was captured during Operation CHARIOT, the daring commando raid on the harbour installations at Saint-Nazaire in 1942, and was awarded the Military Cross for it 6. After the war, he worked for Fleming's Mercury News, as well as continuing his contacts with MI6, and in 1960, he guided Fleming around Berlin, helping him with much of the research for the short story The Living Daylights 7.

Closer to home, Ian Fleming's brother Peter was also engaged in commando work during the war. In 1940, he and 'Mad Mike' Calvert – who later found fame with the SAS – prepared for a guerrilla defence of Britain in the event of a German invasion. Later that year, Peter Fleming led a reconnaissance party into the Norwegian port of Namsos and the following year he formed and took a small commando team to Greece (the latter mission under the auspices of SOE). Neither expedition was a great success: Peter was reported to have been killed in Norway and an obituary even ran in The Daily Sketch, causing his family great distress until he arrived, alive and well, in Scotland. It may be that this episode later gave Ian the idea for Bond's false obituary in You Only Live Twice: it can be useful for a secret agent to have the world believe him dead.

In Greece, the Yak Mission, as Peter's group was nicknamed, wrecked the path of advancing German paratroops – Peter even booby-trapped a bridge by fitting a London double-decker bus with flame-throwers on it – before it was attacked from the air near the island of Milos. A 400-ton yacht that had been commandeered by the Navy burst into flames and sank, and Peter was again very lucky to come out alive 8.

Playing Red Indians

Peter Fleming was also a celebrated travel writer and journalist. His novel The Sixth Column, published in 1951, was a gentle send-up of the thrillers he had enjoyed growing up, and was dedicated to Ian, also an aficionado of the genre. One of the main characters is a former commando called Archie Strume, who has great success with a thriller based on his war-time experiences called Hackforth of The Commandos. Colonel Hackforth is always saying things like:

'Tell the Minister of Defence to have a midget submarine alongside the Harwich customs jetty not later than last light on Tuesday. It's important.’9

The Sixth Column may have been a spur for Ian Fleming to knuckle down and write his own thriller, which he had been promising to do since the war: he started writing Casino Royale just a few months after the publication of his brother’s book. Archie Strume and Colonel Hackforth were partially based on the author Dennis Wheatley – who Peter had become friends with during the war – and his secret agent character Gregory Sallust, but the references to wartime commando adventures involving midget submarines may have been for Ian’s eyes only.

In 1942, Ian Fleming set up what he liked to call his ‘Red Indians’. No. 30 Assault Unit was a small roving commando outfit made up of men from the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. Its task was to go in after the first wave of Allied attacks and scavenge for technical intelligence: codes, weapons, equipment, maps and documents left behind by the Germans. The commanding officers were Dunstan Curtis, who had played a leading role in the Saint Nazaire raid, and the Antarctic explorer Quentin Riley 10.

One of 30 AU’s most enterprising officers was Lieutenant-Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job RNVR, who led missions in France, Belgium and Germany in the latter stages of the war. Dalzel-Job had an unusual background: after the death of his father in the Somme, he spent his formative years in Switzerland, where he learned to cross-country ski and speak French fluently. While still in his twenties, he built his own schooner and sailed to Norway with his middle-aged mother and a Norwegian schoolgirl as his crew.

This experience stood him in good stead when the war came. In April 1940, when Peter Fleming was in Namsos, Dalzel-Job was in Narvik, where he countermanded orders not to evacuate civilians. Later on, he worked behind the scenes developing the Royal Navy’s midget submarines, used in the attack on the Tirpitz, and finally went behind enemy lines with 30 AU, where among other things, he accepted the formal surrender of the city of Bremen and captured the Nazis’ own midget submarines.

Dalzel-Job did not care overly for his boss back in London, finding Ian Fleming cold, austere and egotistical, although he appreciated his ‘amusing and pungent’ minutes on operational intelligence reports 11. Dalzel-Job’s ‘Nelson touch’ even brought him into conflict with Fleming at the end of the war, when he sent a signal to the British Flag Officer in Oslo as though it were from the Admiralty, sending himself on a fairly pointless mission to Norway so he could find the schoolgirl he had sailed with before the war. Fleming was furious at not being consulted, and gave Dalzel-Job an earful about it, but off he went, found the girl, and married her.

Another member of 30 AU who saw action in France was Tony Hugill. Also a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve , he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his part in D-Day and won the Distinguished Service Cross for taking the surrender of 280 troops under a Luftwaffe officer at a radio station near Brest. From 1945-6, he led the Forward Interrogation Unit in Hamburg, Germany.

After the war, Hugill went into the sugar industry, managing Tate and Lyle's West Indian operations between 1954 and 1966. In Fleming's last novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond is vouched for by local sugar executive Tony Hugill, who, we learn in Chapter 4, was in Naval Intelligence during the war: 'sort of Commando job'. Bond's cover name for this mission, Mark Hazard, may have been inspired by the title of Hugill's war memoirs, The Hazard Mesh, published in 1946, but if so Fleming either hadn't read the book or was in a generous mood, because Hugill's depiction of him (although he is not named) is not flattering:

'One of the Admiralty pundits signalled us that he was about to honour us with a visit. We none of us liked him much. He was one of those very superior professorial type R.N.V.R.s who got their claws into Their Lordships early in the war and have kept them in ever since. As our proprietary deity he felt himself entitled to demand offerings of Camembert and libations of captured cognac of the better sort (But my dear feller this stuff's undrinkable!) from time to time. He also interfered with us on a higher level.'12

In contrast to the popular perception of commandos today, the British commandos Fleming knew from the war were often, beneath their tough exteriors, cultured men of great sensitivity: Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Peter Fleming were both acclaimed travel writers, Tony Hugill’s memoirs are filled with poetry and Patrick Dalzel-Job’s autobiography is, at root, a love story.

Fleming never saw action in the field himself, although he may have liked to have done. John Pearson recounted in his biography that Fleming liked to tell people, Gatsby-ishly, that he had once killed a man, but that the story seemed to change with each telling 13, and some of his other claims of prowess have been similarly questioned.

This sense of inconsistency extended to James Bond. In his fiction, Fleming made use of those real-life episodes he found most fascinating and exciting; ensuring that all of his novels' re-imagined tidbits meshed together was of secondary concern. For example, Fleming fans the world over know that James Bond killed twice in cold blood to obtain his licence to kill – nobody cares to dwell on the irritatingly inconvenient sentence in Chapter 19 of From Russia, With Love in which Fleming baldly states:

'Bond had never killed in cold blood.'

The two killings described in Casino Royale are both examples of operations usually undertaken by special forces: assassinations. Governments and conventional intelligence services cannot be seen to sanction extra-judicial murder, so such jobs inevitably fall to less accountable units. As Bond's second kill, in Stockholm, involved a Norwegian 'who was doubling against us for the Germans', it appears that both these missions took place during the war. According to MRD Foot’s official history of the SOE, Stockholm had been the initial base for that organisation’s activity in Scandinavia 14, so perhaps Fleming had heard of a similar operation through intelligence contacts and embellished it 15.

Bond's first 'wet job', in New York's Rockefeller Center, was inspired by Fleming's visit to the British Security Co-ordination's offices in the same building in June 1941; he accompanied BSC officers as they burgled a Japanese cipher clerk's office on the floor below theirs 16. The clerk was unharmed, but SOE, whose affairs in the Western hemisphere were controlled by the BSC in New York 17, did have an assassination capability. This was officially abandoned at the end of the war, but many SOE officers joined MI6, so the expertise may have remained in place 18. During the war, SOE operatives were commonly referred to as ‘terrorists’ by the Nazis; MRD Foot, who was a member of SAS during the war, recalls being captured and over-hearing one of his interrogators saying: ‘If he is a terrorist he is shot at once’ 19.

After the war, the SAS evolved into more of a counter-insurgency regiment; the 1969 Army Training manual stated that its tasks included 'the ambush and harassment of insurgents, the infiltration of sabotage, assassination and demolition parties into insurgent-held areas, border surveillance liaison with, and organisation of friendly guerrilla forces operating against the common enemy' 20. The SAS executed some of these responsibilities in the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s and in Aden in 1967 21. More recently, it has seen action in Aghanistan, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar and, latterly, Iraq.

Despite the above rather lurid description, members of the SAS have not always approved of assassination. When I asked former SAS sergeant Jacques Goffinet in 2005 if he had been tempted to assassinate Joachim von Ribbentrop when he discovered him in hiding in a flat in Hamburg in June 1945, he replied simply: 'That would have made me as bad as them.'22

James Bond is often concerned with the same dilemma: outside of the episodes mentioned in Casino Royale, he makes for a rather shaky assassin. In the short story Octopussy, he travels to Jamaica on a private war crimes investigation. His target is Dexter Smythe, who as a member of the Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau – a (fictional) wartime commando outfit formed by the Secret Service and Combined Operations – had murdered one of his early mentors. But while Bond had no qualms about murdering double agents or cipher clerks, this time he does not draw his weapon, leaving Smythe the options of suicide or disgrace.

In The Living Daylights, Bond's mission is strategically defensive – to stop another assassination – but here he also has reservations, and deliberately muffs the assignment because of the 'sharp pang of longing' he feels for his female target – a sackable offence, as he admits himself at the end of the story. In For Your Eyes Only, Bond undertakes the mission to assassinate Von Hammerstein as retribution for the murder of M's friends: an 'eye for an eye' job. In the event, however, the deed is done by the friends' daughter, although Bond kills another of the villains and comforts the girl afterwards. In The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond is a little less circumspect, eventually shooting Scaramanga five times.

The use of weapons

James Bond is neither straightforward assassin nor pure commando in Ian Fleming's novels: most of the time he works as a counter-espionage agent, sent by M to head off an emerging threat, rather than initiating offensive action against the enemy. Nevertheless, Fleming incorporated many details of war-time commandos into his novels: apart from the references to old colleagues and friends who had been involved in special forces, Q Branch's weapons and gadgets parallel the work done by similar departments in SOE and elsewhere. Bond's self-reliance and stamina are reminiscent of the commando ethic, as is his basic fitness regimen described in Chapter 11 of From Russia, With Love. His habit of taking Benzedrine was also common practice among commandos during the war, when remaining alert for long periods was often necessary.

Bond is also a martial arts aficionado – we know from M's obituary in You Only Live Twice that he founded the first judo class in a British public school. In Chapter 10 of the same novel, Tiger Tanaka tells Bond he will show him one of his service's secret ninja academies in the mountains, and Bond replies that MI6 also has a commando training school for unarmed combat attached to its headquarters. This is an example of Fleming carrying details across his books successfully, because in Chapter 8 of Moonraker Bond is happy to have his Unarmed Combat class with 'that dam' Commando chap' cancelled for a meeting with M. He is clearly a good student, though, because in the first chapter of Goldfinger we find him nursing the hand that has killed a Mexican with a 'Parry Defence against Underhand Thrust out of the book' and a hand-edge blow to the Adam's Apple that had been 'the standby of the Commandos'. A little later, in Chapter 5, we learn that Bond is writing Stay Alive!, a 'handbook of all methods of unarmed combat'.

But Bond also uses weapons, of course. In Chapter 18 of Live and Let Die, he tries to kill an octopus using a commando dagger 'of the type devised by Wilkinson's during the war'. This would be the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife (pictured), issued to the SAS and other special forces outfits and eventually adopted as the Commando Association's emblem. It is still made by Wilkinson's, still in use by British special forces 23 and is currently the shoulder-flash of the Royal Marine Commandos 24.

The idea that this character has had some sort of experience with special forces is not implausible – but what form might that have taken? In his book The James Bond Dossier, Kingsley Amis wondered what a Commander from Naval Intelligence had been doing in the Ardennes sector in 1944 25 (which Bond recollects in Chapter Nine of Dr No). This may simply have been an oversight on Fleming's part, like the 'cold blood' boo-boo in From Russia, With Love, but it may also have been deliberate. In his obituary in You Only Live Twice, M tells us that Bond joined the Special Branch of the RNVR in 1941. Between that date and 1944, Peter Fleming undertook missions for both MI R and SOE; army intelligence officer Antony Terry was captured in a naval commando raid; RAF men took part in 30 AU's amphibious landings with Royal Naval Commandos; and Patrick Leigh Fermor and SOE colleagues arranged for guides to help Special Boat Service (SBS) officers across the mountains of Crete 26.

World War Two was a time of irregular warfare, and resourceful young men barging into offices in Whitehall demanding to mount their own raids against the Nazis were surprisingly common. Dozens of small commando units were formed, changed names or were subsumed into larger groups during the war, and as a result some enterprising men had extremely varied resumes by the cessation of hostilities. Churchill also set up Combined Operations under Lord Mountbatten, which ensured that commando groups worked together (like Dexter Smythe's outfit in Octopussy). For Operation FRANKTON, for example, a raid on Bordeaux Harbour in December 1942, the Royal Marine Boom Patrol's Detachment used limpet mines that had been developed by SOE 27 – or 'those things our saboteurs used against ships in the war', as Bond describes them in Chapter 15 of Live and Let Die (later in the book he attaches a limpet mine to the hull of the Secatur). FRANKTON was masterminded by Herbert ‘Blondie’ Hasler, who went on to play a leading role in the founding of the Special Boat Service (SBS), a sister service to the SAS. The operation was the subject of the 1955 film The Cockleshell Heroes, produced by Cubby Broccoli and co-written by Richard Maibaum.

Against this background, it is not so unlikely for someone in the Special Branch of the RNVR to have heard machine-gun fire in the Ardennes. Unless Fleming meant for Bond to have been an infantry soldier at the Battle of the Bulge – which seems even more unlikely for someone in the RNVR – by far the most likely way for him to have been in the area would have been on a special forces mission. SOE's Operation CITRONELLE, which sought out maquis in the Ardennes in April 1944, for example: he could have been a member of one of the famous Jedburgh teams, all of which contained one Brit, one American and one Frenchman – early training for working with Felix Leiter and René Mathis, perhaps! SOE produced more than its fair share of successes during the war: one of its best-known agents was the Polish-born countess Krystyna Skarbek, best known as Christine Granville. 28

However, the most plausible explanation would be that Bond was seconded to the SAS: it drew and still draws men from all armed forces (the 'Air' in its name was used to fit in with an earlier deception operation), and undertook several missions in the Ardennes during 1944 29. Fleming may have heard about one of these operations from David Niven or another friend who had worked with the regiment, and stored it away as being a suitable field of operation for Bond during the war. 30 AU also undertook reconnaissance work in Belgium at around this time.

Post-Fleming, 007’s special forces ties have often been emphasized: John Gardner – who served in the Royal Marines’ 42 Commando during the war – had Bond train with the SAS and the SBS in his novels 30, and the relationship has been even more overt onscreen: the closing scenes of many of the films, for example, are spectacular commando-like raids on villains' lairs. HALO jumps, bungee jumps, parachute landings and shooting while skiing are all areas of special forces expertise. Casino Royale continues the series' habitual nods to special forces work: as well as Vesper's appraisal, Bond holds up an embassy single-handedly and engages in plenty of hand-to-hand combat – he seems to have paid attention in his classes with that dam' Commando.

In his introduction to the 2005 edition of Jane’s Specal Forces Recognition Guide, Lieutenant-Colonel Ewen Southby-Tailyour, a veteran of four commando outfits, wrote that the dividing line between forces – military, police, special and elite, intelligence-gathering or other – is often blurred, especially in the military, and pointed to the then- (and still-) current geo-political climate as a catalyst for the increasing use of special forces’ unconventional methods:

‘It might now be argued that with the general proliferation of worldwide terrorism all military forces and most police forces should be trained for unconventional operations: certainly there should be considerably more awareness of, and training for, asymmetric warfare.’31

The Bond novels and films have never purported to be plausible portrayals of clandestine work: they are fantastic adventures with one toe in the real world. James Bond is an amalgamation and elaboration of the most exciting bits of espionage and commando lore, filtered through the prodigious imagination of his creator. He is not, therefore, an out and out commando. But as a back story for the character, 'former SAS type' is not out of place: it is entirely fitting with his heritage.

I would like to thank MRD Foot and Lieutenant-Colonel Ewen Southby-Tailyour for their help and advice with this article.

References

1. p4 The Originals: The Secret History of The Birth of the SAS In Their Own Words by Gordon Stevens, Ebury Press, 2005.
2. The Playboy Interview: Ian Fleming by Ken Purdy, Playboy, December 1964.
3. pp193 and 205-206 Ill Met By Moonlight by W Stanley Moss, The Folio Society, 2001: afterword by Leigh Fermor.
4. p327 The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Penguin, 1984.
5. p139 The SAS: The Official History by Philip Warner, Sphere Books, 1983; and obituary of Captain Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, 13th May 2004.
6. p ix The Greatest Raid Of All by CE Lucas-Phillips, Little, Brown, 1960.
7. p371 Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett, Phoenix, 1996.
8. pp221-227 and 239-255, Peter Fleming: A Biography by Duff Hart Davis, Oxford University Press, 1987.
9. p23, The Sixth Column by Peter Fleming, Tandem, 1967.
10. p134, The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson, Companion Book Club, 1966.
11. p115 Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy: The Extraordinary Wartime Exploits of a Naval Special Agent by Patrick Dalzel-Job, Pen & Sword, 2005.
12. p60 The Hazard Mesh by JAC Hugill, Hurst & Blackett, 1946.
13. p210 Pearson.
14. p208 SOE: 1940-1946 by MRD Foot, BBC, 1984.
15. As well as his colleagues in Naval Intelligence, Fleming crossed paths with many people involved in clandestine work during the war. For example, on November 10 1942 he had dinner at the home of the thriller-writer Dennis Wheatley, who was then involved in devising deception operations with the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet. Fleming was accompanied by Joan Bright, an assistant to General Ismay, Churchill’s Chief of Staff; the two other guests were Roland Vintras, also of the JPS and later a Director of Air Intelligence, and Colin Gubbins, later head of SOE. One can imagine that such dining partners may have given the future thriller-writer many ideas. Phil Baker (Wheatley biographer), personal communication. For more on this, and Wheatley's influence on Fleming's work, see my article The Secret Origins of James Bond.
16. p124 Pearson.
17. p42 Foot.
18. pp 611-612 MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service by Stephen Dorril, Touchstone, 2000.
19. p57 Foot. James Bond is also described as a terrorist, of course, in his MGB file in Chapter Six of From Russia, With Love. Incidentally, Foot feels that Fleming was one of the few non-SOE officers in Britain’s wartime intelligence organisations to appreciate SOE’s worth (personal communication, November 17 2007).
20. British Army Land Operations Manual, volume 3, counter-revolutionary operations. Cited in British Intelligence and Covert Action by Jonathan Bloch and Pat Fitzgerald (London 1982), p42.
21. The SAS, their early days in Ireland and the Wilson Plot by Alexander Platow (Seán Mac Mathúna), first published in Lobster 18 (1989).
22. See Whisper Who Dares by Jeremy Duns, June 16 2005, The Bulletin, Brussels; reprinted in 5 SAS' Veterans' News, Issue 70, 2005, and at this site here.
23. p389 Jane's Special Forces Recognition Guide by Ewen Southby-Tailyour, Collins, 2005.
24. p47 British Commandos 1940-1946 by Tim Moreman, Osprey, 2006.
25. p17 The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis, Signet, 1966.
26. p194 Leigh Fermor afterword, Moss.
27. p36 Cockleshell Heroes by CE Lucas-Phillips, Pan, 1974.
28. Granville has been repeatedly claimed to have been Fleming’s model for Vesper Lynd following a post-war affair with the author. The source for this appears to be p151 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming by Donald McCormick, Peter Owen, London, 1993. McCormick was a hoaxer, notably on matters related to Jack the Ripper, and I believe that he fabricated the evidence for this plausible-sounding assumption. Regardless, there seem very few similarities between Granville and Vesper Lynd other than their both being beautiful female agents with dark hair.
29. Ewen Southby-Tailyour does not agree with me on this point, being adamant that Fleming’s Bond would have been more likely to have been SBS than SAS. He points to Bond’s naval background and the fact that every member of the SBS was trained in skiing, parachuting, mountaineering and combat (underwater) swimming – but very few members of the SAS undertook training in all of these (personal communication). However, the SAS often collaborated and exchanged personnel with naval units during the war, and the SBS never undertook any operations in the Ardennes.
30. p15, Icebreaker by John Gardner, Berkley, 1983; and p28 Scorpius by John Gardner, Charter, 1990.
31. pp6-7 Introduction, Jane's Special Forces Recognition Guide.