007's Real Mission
007’S REAL MISSION
By William E. Kelly
The latest surge of interest in James Bond - Secret Agent 007 isn't because of a new Bond movie, or the speculation over who will play the next celluloid Bond, but rather the 70th anniversary of the publication of the first 007 novel Casino Royale, the reissue of the complete 007 series - sanitized to make them politically correct, and the release of yet another official biography, Nicholas Shakespeare's Ian Fleming – The Complete Man (Harvill Secker – Penguin Harper Collins, UK, March 2024).
Because it is described as "complete" and “definitive,” I expected Shakespeare to set the record straight on three key issues the previous biographies get wrong - the characterization of the real James Bond, the reason Fleming began writing the 007 novels, and the actual identities behind the characters that populate Fleming’s fiction.
The only real James Bond is the American naturalist and author of The Birds of the West Indies (Macmillan, 1948) from which Fleming acknowledges appropriating the name for his secret agent.
The real reason why Fleming began to write the 007 series wasn’t to “take his mind off his impending marriage,” the false mantra that has been often repeated, but rather he began Casino Royale in response to the betrayal of the Cambridge spy ring that Fleming was intimately attached to, salvage what he could of the operations they had betrayed, and restore the pride and dignity to the embarrassed British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
Then there’s the actual identities behind the characters in Fleming's stories, as I can attest that in addition to James Bond himself, most if not all of the so-called fictional Fleming characters can be easily identified with their real life counter-parts.
Shakespeare gets one out of three, and seems unconcerned about the others, as he focuses on Fleming’s private sex life, the theft of his friend’s wives, his association with celebrities like Churchill, Admiral Godfrey, Big Bill Donovan, Sir William Stephenson and President Kennedy, along with the overall popularity of the books and movies. It seems they gave the job to Shakespeare, a seasoned writer and journalist, in order promote the multiple other interests of the Ian Fleming estate, rather than develop the true story of James Bond and Ian Fleming.
As for the name of his
secret agent 007, Shakespeare and others have thrown out dozens of names of real
secret agents who they say were the model for 007, Shakespeare even comes up
with Rodney Bond, who once saved the life of Ian’s brother Peter. But as
Fleming himself acknowledged, there’s only one real James Bond, the author of
the book Birds of the West Indies, a
book he kept on his Jamaican breakfast table.
As Shakespeare depreciates it, “Most likely out of all the possible progenitors was another American James Bond, a pipe smoking old Harrovian ornithologist based in Philadelphia, whose white jacketed book Birds of the West Indies was, he quotes Fleming saying ‘one of my bibles….I thought, James Bond, that’s a pretty dull and quiet name, and so I stole it, and used it.”
The real James Bond was curator of birds at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, had attended St. Paul’s Academy in New England and then Cambridge University in England, where he was a member of the Pitt Club, that later also included double-agent and defector Guy Burgess. After working at a bank for awhile, Bond decided to devote his time to his primary interest – birds, and specialized on birds of the Caribbean
What is almost unbelievable is the mischaracterization of the real James Bond by all of Fleming’s biographers, who falsely claim that Bond looked on the whole 007 saga as something of a joke, when in fact the real Bond never read anything that Fleming wrote and deeply resented “the theft of his identify,” as it seriously interfered with his personal and professional life.
The real James Bond was not a doctor, as Shakespeare has anointed him, wrongfully referring to him as “Dr. Bond," when it would be more appropriate to give him a knighthood - Sir. James Bond, a title he would rightly deserve, as the life of the real James Bond was even more adventurous than his fictional namesake.
John Pearson, Fleming’s first official biographer, also wrote a fictional biography of the real James Bond that is truly fictional and has been recently reissued. Besides the books written about her husband by Mrs. Mary Wickham Bond (To James Bond, with Love; Far Afield in the Caribbean; How 007 Really Got His Name), there are a number of accurate biographies of the real Bond including The Private Life of James Bond by Chestnut Hill College History professor David Contosta and more recently The Real James Bond by James Wright, a New Jersey birder. Shakespeare even contacted Wright to ask him about Bond, but still doesn’t produce an accurate portrait.
Ironically James Bond also married late in life, at the age of 53 in 1953, the same year Fleming’s Casino Royale was published and Fleming himself got married.
While Mrs. Bond and Fleming engaged in some correspondence before hand, it wasn’t until years later when they met. On February 5, 1964 while on a birding expedition in Jamaica, James and Mary Bond stopped by Goldeneye unexpectedly and dropped in on Fleming, who was then being filmed by a Canadian Broadcasting Service TV documentary crew.
As Shakespeare puts it, “Dr. (sic) James Bond’s unexpected appearance was the further intrusion.”
Fleming’s housekeeper Violet, answered the door, and when Bond introduced himself, she appeared as if she was seeing a ghost. Mrs. Bond took a photo of Fleming greeting Bond at the door, as Fleming asked Bond if he was going to sue him. Over lunch, according to Shakespeare, “Mary chatted with Ian about her husband’s birdwatching adventures. Not lost on Ian was that “bird watcher’ was slang for ‘spy.’”
Bond was not a “birdwatcher,” did not use binoculars, but rather he studied the habitat and migratory patterns of birds, and was a collector of specimens of various types of birds that are now on display at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.
Also lost on Shakespeare was the fact that Bond actually resented Fleming’s “theft of identity” because of the phone calls by lonely girls at all hours of the night, as well as the problems Bond now had passing through borders with the tools of his trade – a shotgun to shoot birds, a scalpel to clean their hides and arsenic to coat them, - also the tools of an assassin.
But other than saying he hadn’t read any of Fleming’s books, (though Mrs. Bond read them all), Bond remained quiet, indifferent, and didn’t reflect his true resentful feelings. Fleming did get the message, and presented Bond with a copy of his latest novel inscribed, “To the REAL James Bond, from the thief of his identify, - Ian Fleming – February 5, 1964 – A Great Day!”
As for why Ian Fleming began writing the 007 books, the official story is that Fleming began to write "the spy story to end all spy stories" in order to "take his mind off an impending marriage.” While marriage for the life-long bachelor was certainly in the cards, other more important things were on his mind, and he had to deal with them accordingly, something Shakespeare now acknowledges.
Shakespeare writes that, “Bond was born out of a turmoil at a moment when the (Guy) Burgess and (Donald) Maclean story was still unsolved. The news of their disappearance was a seismic event for Ian…, So he created “a contemporary novel hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess-McClean defections, and reestablish the Secret Intelligence Service as the most dangerous Secret Service…”
So the real mission of Ian Fleming’s Secret Agent 007-James Bond was not to beat Le Chiffre at cards or to kill SPECTRE’s Blowfield and Dr. No, but to salvage British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from the treasonous betrayal of the Cambridge spy ring, recover some of the exposed operations, and increase the prestige and morale of the disgraced SIS. And according to most accounts he exceeded beyond all expectations.
Noel Coward, Fleming’s Jamaican neighbor, close friend and best man at his wedding, noted in his journal at the time that Fleming began writing his first 007 novel he was preoccupied with what they called “the case of the missing diplomats.” And Shakespeare devotes a chapter to it.
Those in the British Secret Intelligence Service were extremely concerned about and the media was preoccupied with the sudden disappearance of government civil servants Burgess and Maclean, both of whom possessed key intelligence secrets.
The fact that MacLean was suspected of being a Soviet KGB spy and was about to be arrested by MI-5 was a closely guarded secret and something that Burgess was unaware of. So they must have been tipped off by a mole, someone much higher in the intelligence service who warned McClean via Burgess. This person was referred to as “the Third Man.”
Burgess had been living in Washington D.C. with his good friend Kim Philby, the British SIS liaison with the American intelligence agencies, and Philby knew that MacLean had become suspect and MI5 was closing in on him. Because of his close association with Burgess, Philby became the primary, if not only suspect as the “Third Man.”
All three men – Philby, Burgess and Maclean had attended Cambridge together in the 1930s, and had expressed communist sympathies in the pre –World War II era when it was fashionable to be anti-fascist and pro-communist. But being sympathetic with communists fighting fascism was not the same as being a spy.
During the war Ian Fleming knew Philby when he served as the MI6 man in the Iberian peninsula (that included Spain and Portugal), at the same time Fleming was the Assistant to the Chief of British Naval Intelligence Admiral Godfrey. Fleming had to know Philby when he devised the plan for the defense of Gibraltar, that was code-named Operation Goldeneye.
According to Shakespeare, Fleming’s main contact in the SIS was Nicholas Elliot, the son of Fleming’s headmaster at Eton. Elliot was Kim Philby’s best friend and SIs associate, as they are portrayed in the TV series Spy Among Friends. Fleming is only seen in one small segment with Elliot introducing Philby to Fleming as he unwraps a wet suit from a scuba diver revealing a nattily pressed tuxedoed diver, as depicted in the opening scene of Goldfinger. While Spy Among Friends ostensibly takes place during World War II, before Jacques Cousteau invented the scuba gear, the point is made – Fleming, Elliot and Philby worked together during the war. And according to Shakespeare Fleming did meet Cousteau, and did enjoy diving off the reef adjacent to his Jamaican retreat.
Fleming had christened his Jamaican beach house “Goldeneye,” after the wartime Operation Goldeneye, and that’s where he spent his two months vacation every January and February. And that’s where in 1952, he sat down at his Royal typewriter and began his first novel Casino Royale while consumed by the betrayal of the missing diplomats and the Cambridge spy ring.
Fleming’s first novel, and all subsequent stories featuring Secret Agent James Bond, are, in literary terms, a Roman a clef. That's French for “key” - a novel in which real people, places and events appear with fictious names or details, bluring the line between fiction, non-fiction and reality, a “key” to the truth.
I first came across a 1948 newspaper article about the real James Bond while researching the background of CIA bursar Cummins Catherwood, a multi-millionaire whose Catherwood foundation was used to finance CIA covert operations. Catherwood’s Fund also paid for the construction of a sailing yacht – the Vigilant, on which Bond accompanied Catherwood to some remote out islands of the Caribbean.
⁷That certainly associates the real Bond with the CIA, and it comes as a surprise that Bond was hunting for birds at the remote Baya de Conchos in Cuba, a few weeks before it became better known as the Bay of Pigs.
After Kim Philby showed up in Moscow, his book My Silent War was published in which he details his career as the most notorious double-agent of all time. He included the fact that former head of CIA’s Operations Division Frank Wisner once explained to him how the CIA was covering their expenses for covert operations by utilizing rich, patriotic Americans who created non-profit philanthropic foundations that served as a cover for the distribution of CIA funds. The CIA’s use of the Catherwood Fund for such purposes was first revealed in The Invisible Government (David Wise, Thomas Ross, Vintage, 1977, p. 247n.).
Fleming even alluded to this sort of CIA funding and must have also known or knew about Catherwood, as he based one of his villains – Milton Krest, on Catherwood’s unique profile. In the short story "Hildebrand Rarity" [in "For Your Eyes Only"] Fleming quotes "Krest" as explaining the Foundation system to James Bond while they are aboard Krest’s yacht fishing for rare species. "Ya see, fellers, it’s like this. In the states we have this foundation system for lucky guys that got plenty of dough and don’t happen to want to pay it into Uncle Sam’s Treasury. You make a Foundation – like this one, the Krest Foundation – for charitable purposes – charitable to anyone, to kids, sick folk, the cause of science – you just give the money away to anyone or anything except yourself and your dependents and you escape tax on it. So I put a matter of ten million dollars into the Krest Foundation, and since I happened to like yachting and seeing the world, I built this yacht with two million of the money and told the Smithsonian that I would go to any part of the world and collect specimens for them. So that makes me a scientific expedition, see?"
But the real Bond is not only associated with the CIA through Catherwood, he also attended Cambridge, the school of spies in England, and in 1938, he sailed on a tramp steamer with British author and spy Somerset Maugham. Bond told me that Maugham said he was on his way to Devil’s Island and I noticed that Bond kept a complete set of Maugham books on the shelf of his Philadelphia apartment.
Shakespeare tells us that Maugham refused Fleming’s request for a blurb for the jacket cover of Casino Royale, possibly because Maugham actually knew the real Bond, and may have recruited him into the SIS, a distinct possibility given their association. And Shakespeare writes, “Because like…Somerset Maugham before him, Ian was never allowed to write the truth about his war work, facts about his life are hard to see clearly…”
Besides Bond himself, and Catherwood-Krest, other Fleming characters have their real life counter-parts, including 007’s CIA associate Felix Leiter.
Shakespeare goes to great lengths to describe how Fleming came to meet and have dinner with then Senator John F. Kennedy. When he was recovering from back surgery Kennedy had received a copy of Casino Royale from Marion Oatsie Leiter, a Georgetown, Washington D.C. neighbor whose husband sold the land on which the new CIA headquarters was built.
She was also a Jamaican neighbor and friend of Fleming, and arranged for Fleming to accompany her to a dinner at Kennedy’s Georgetown home. At the dinner, JFK asked Fleming what James Bond would do about Fidel Castro, and Fleming replied, “ridicule him.”
While Shakespeare doesn’t bother mentioning it, Oatsie Leiter also supplied Fleming with the name for Felix Leiter, 007’s CIA sidekick in many of his adventures. In Live and Let Die, on their visit to Harlem, Fleming describes Felix Leiter as a classical and jazz music critic, as well as spy. That profile fits Henry Pleasants, another Philadelphian who served in the OSS during WWII, debriefed Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen and became the CIA officer in Bonn, Germany after the war, all the while writing classical and jazz music reviews.
In their book The Invisible Government, Wise and Ross also write: “Henry Pleasants, once the chief music critic of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and a contributor to the music pages of the New York Times, was a highly literate and respected musicologist. His wife Virginia was one of the world’s leading harpsichordists. He also probably had the distinction of being the only top U.S. spy to become the center of a literary storm. He had continued to write books after joining the CIA, and in 1953 his Agony of Modern Music (Simon & Schuster, N.Y.) caused considerable controversy for its attacks on all contemporary music except jazz.”
When I met Pleasants in New York and read him the excerpt from Fleming’s book, he confirmed that Fleming did indeed use him as a basis for Felix Leiter. And after thinking about it, told me that his harpsicordist playing wife Virginia once performed in the same chamber group as Fleming’s cello playing sister, so there was a direct connection that Fleming must have known about.
Now we have three Fleming characters known to be based on real persons – the ornithologist James Bond, his CIA millionaire associate Cummings Catherwood, and Henry Pleasants, whose fictional name is shared with Oatsie Leiter.
One actual associate of Fleming that Shakespeare acknowledges as a character in his books is Australian Mercury news correspondent Richard Hughes, who is portrayed in You Only Live Twice as Dikko Henderson, as well as featured in the non-fictional Thrilling Cities.
With the disappearance of Burgess and MacLean, “the missing diplomats,” Fleming sent Hughes to Moscow where it was arranged for him to meet Burgess and MacLean, confirming their defection.
Shakespeare quotes
Christopher Moran as saying “Mercury looks like a spy operation. It smells like
a spy operation, ergo, I think it is a spy operation.”
Though Shakespeare describes the Mercury news syndicate as a virtual spy network, he doesn’t do the same for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), owned by Fleming’s close friends and wartime associates Ivor Bryce (SIS) and Ernest Cuneo (OSS), whose names are also portrayed as characters in 007 novels. They hired Fleming as a foreign editor, and one of their correspondents Priscilla Johnson (McMillan) interviewed former US Marine defector Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow.
Shakespeare mentions Priscilla Johnson as the author of Lee and Marina, a book that portrays Oswald as a lone nut, but one who also, like President Kennedy, was an avid reader of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books.
“It was not merely John F. Kennedy who was overly influenced by Ian Fleming’s novels and engaged in secret plots. Another Bond fan was the emotionally disturbed young man who killed him. At 9 p.m. on Thursday 21 November 1963, a private screening of “From Russia With Love” was held for fifty guests in the White House projection room….”
Shakespeare says that Fleming named the SMERSH assassin Donovan Grand after Gen. William Donovan, head of the OSS, and that “Since August, Oswald had used the pseudonym ‘Alik James Hidell.’"
While everyone speculates that "Hidell" was meant to rime with Fidel, Shakespeare tells us, "The middle name ‘may have been taken from James Bond,’ according to his biographer, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who, who had interviewed Oswald in Moscow after his defection in October 1959,” But Shakespeare fails to note that at the time she was working for Bryce, Cuneo and Fleming at NANA.
“It is not unreasonable to suppose,” writes Shakespeare, “that once Oswald returned to America in June 1962,tail between his legs, and learned of the President’s widely publicized reading habits, the fictional career of Donovan as ‘the chief executioner’ of SMERSH offered an alternative vision of how his defection was to have played out. Kennedy saw himself as Bond, and Oswald, in a warped version, as example of Bond’s would-be assassin, Donovan Grant – only successful, like the sniper in the window of Ian’s story ‘The Living Daylights’.
Shakespeare makes much of the fact that Fleming's From Russia With Love was listed among President Kennedys ten favorite books. While his wife did read them, and passed copies on to both CIA director Allen Dulles and the President, a speed reader who could read a Fleming book in one sitting, it was Mrs. Evelyn Luncoln, JFK's secretary who added the Fleming novel to the list of mainly boring history books.
Soon after becoming President JFK requested that the CIA send over “America’s James Bond” and the portly, pear shaped William Harvey showed up at the oval office, leaving his pistols with the Secret Service at the door. While Harvey didn’t look like James Bond, he was just as lethal, and even considered a suspect in the murder of JFK. Harvey also was one of the first to claim, after attending a party at Philby’s apartment, that Philby and Burgess were Soviet spies, and JFK did play an unintentional role in the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring.
As President JFK appointed Michael Straight to head a new arts commission, but when Straight found his background was to be closely vetted by the FBI, he confessed that there was an attempt to recruit him into the Cambridge spy ring while he was a student there. Besides Philby, Burgess, McClean, Straight threw another name into the spy ring – Sir Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.
While Straight claimed not to have provided them with any useful information, as publisher of his family’s liberal New Republic magazine, he did print some of Philby’s articles.
After Fleming visited his wife in a London hospital when she was having their son Casper, he went to see the American millionaire Whitney Straight, brother of Michael Straight. Fleming wanted to discuss the case of the missing diplomats, as Straight also knew them at Cambridge.
With Michael Straight’s confession, passed on to the British MI5, it was decided to have Philby’s closest friend Nicholas Elliott confront Philby, get him to admit his sins and in exchange for a full pardon, get a full accounting of everything he knew. While Elliot did get a sort of confession, he also allowed time for Philby to disappear.
Shakespeare puts Fleming in the upper echelons of the SIS during WWII, saying that both Ian and his brother Peter were in on the fact that the allies had broken the Nazi German Enigma coding machine, a fact that was kept from the general public for thirty years after the war. And was something that Fleming alluded to in From Russia With Love, having 007 steal a similar Soviet Lector device.
Some of America’s biggest intelligence secrets were filed away as “The Family Jewels,” and when finally released, one of the items that raised public concern was the CIA’s use of journalists as spies.
The Fleming brothers, Ivor Bryce, Ernest Cuneo, Graham Green, Somerset Maugham, Richard Hughes, Kim Philby and other journalist-spies, are only the tip of this iceberg, as Shakespeare says, “The precise nature of the inter-relationship between journalists and MI6 is known only to those involved.” Well, now it is time to look more closely at these inter-relationships, but you can’t depend on Shakespeare to do it.
Both of the real Bond’s biographers – Professor David Contosta and James Wright both told me they think Shakespeare is just a sloppy researcher, but I think it is deliberate. I don’t think future editions will correct the mistakes, like Shakespeare anointing the real Bond with a doctorate. Shakespeare was selected for this assignment because he will keep the deception going. He’s keeping 007 on his original mission of obfustication and sowing confusion, except now it’s aimed at the general public instead of deceiving the opposition intelligence services,
The Cold War may be over but the psychological war continues, and James Bond is still in the middle of the fray.
It is now quite clear that a correct characterization of the real Bond, the details of the secret operations betrayed by the Cambridge spy ring, the identities of the Fleming’s fictional characters, and the real story of James Bond and Ian Fleming still contain secrets that have yet to be revealed, and those stories have yet to be published.
William Kelly is a
journalist and historian from New Jersey who has written two published regional
history books, 300 Years at the Point – A History of Somers Point, N.J. and Birth
of the Birdie – 100 Years History of Golf at the Atlantic City Country Club.
His Waiting on the Angels – the Long Cool Summer of ’65 Revisited is
in publication. Kelly’s blog on intelligence matters is http://JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com and his
manuscript The Mystery of Goldeneye – James Bond and Ian Fleming – the
Men and the Myth awaits a publisher. He can be reached at: Billkelly3@gmail.com
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