For Your Eyes Only (10 page)

From 1960 onwards, Bond's enemies are no longer the Soviet menace, but individual crooks and killers, gangsters
of the higher variety, and most notably SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), the crime syndicate staffed by exmembers of SMERSH, the Gestapo, the Mafia and the Black Tong of Peking, and run by Blofeld. The shift of focus is even more emphatic in the films. Where once Bond battled ideological foes, in his latter-day incarnations he takes on freelance bandits, mafia types and criminal megalomaniacs – terrifying but politically neutral. The Americans still need bailing out, but no longer is there any pretence of British supremacy. The enemies of the later novels brilliantly anticipate modern threats: Colombian drugs cartels and Russian mafia bosses, as well as the lone maverick megalomaniacs, Osama bin Ladens
avant la lettre
. Bond's evolution from Cold War warrior to international crime-fighter reflects the changing preoccupations of the times, but also Fleming's need to ensure that beneath the fantasy lay a realistic foundation: here were new battles, with new enemies that Bond and Britain could realistically fight and, more importantly, defeat.

Unlike his film incarnation, Bond is not immune to doubt, but the moments when he is on the back foot are rare indeed: his is a universe where Britain triumphs, America follows, the British secret service is supreme, communists and criminals are defeated, and the globe is a better place for it. One may dismiss all of this as propagandist fantasy (many did just that, particularly on the other side of the
Iron Curtain), but the world Fleming described was, in some deeper sense than mere reality, true. In the real world, secret agents did not go around sticking limpet mines on ships, torturing their enemies, or killing one another with poisoned bullets fired from cigarette cases. Except that they did, and they still do. As you read this, secret agents are working undercover to track down individuals mad enough to threaten the world by stealing atomic missiles or threatening biological warfare, in the manner of Blofeld. The fear of weapons of mass destruction permeates our world, just as it runs through the Bond books. And in London, an outspoken Russian defector dies after agents unknown slip radioactive poison into his food.

How much of James Bond is true? Fleming himself joked that ‘if the quality of these books, or their degree of veracity, had been any higher, the author would have certainly been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act'. Perhaps the most pleasing irony is that, even today, MI6 itself is a little ambivalent about where James Bond ends and real life begins. The official MI6 website (
www.sis.gov.uk
) asks, ‘How realistic is the depiction of SIS in the James Bond films?' but then only half-answers the question. ‘James Bond, as Ian Fleming originally conceived him, was based on reality . . . But any author needs to inject a level of glamour and excitement beyond reality in order to sell.' Yet the spy agency cannot bring itself to deny its greatest asset. ‘Nevertheless,' continues the article, ‘staff who join
SIS can look forward to a career that will have moments when the gap narrows just a little and the certainty of a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond's, will be in the service of their country.'

James Bond is now an MI6 recruiter. A real spy agency, harnessing fiction, based on fact, to recruit real spies: no one would have been more flattered than Ian Fleming.

 

005
Gadgets, Guns, Gizmos and Gear-sticks

Ian Fleming understood the extraordinary attraction of ‘things'. Not just material things (though Bond certainly appreciated those), but things that did things, for the 1950s was the great age of the machine: cars, domestic appliances, trains, planes, space-saving devices; machines to make life easier, faster and also, in the case of ever more sophisticated weapons, shorter. This was an age when domestic appliances – food mixers, teasmaids, televisions, fridges – were arriving in British homes in ever-increasing numbers.

Fleming adored gadgets. He was forever on the lookout for new inventions and new ideas, an interest reflected in his growing book collection with its emphasis on inventions and ideas that changed the world. When he took over the Atticus column at the
Sunday Times
, he rather pointedly changed the title from ‘People' to ‘People and Things'. His love of cars was legendary and, occasionally, life-threatening.
In his flat in Ebury Street he created a custom-made hatch, to enable the maid to serve food without being seen; in his bathroom, declaring a deep aversion to baths, he installed a modern shower (then a rarity) and a special soap dispenser. A customised object added a special glamour: after Bond proved a commercial success, Fleming rewarded himself with a gold typewriter, and even had a gold top made for his Bic biro. When describing technology or modes of transport in his books, Fleming worked hard to get the details right, and when he got them wrong (as he not infrequently did), he was grateful to readers for pointing out his mistakes. ‘I take very great pains over the technical and geographical background to James Bond's adventures,' he wrote. His notebooks were filled with jottings on machines and gizmos he had seen or heard about. Whenever possible, he consulted experts. ‘Facts,' he wrote, ‘are clearer than people.' Minute technical descriptions have since become a stock in trade of the thriller writer, but Fleming was among the first to realise that readers (particularly male readers) have an almost insatiable desire to be told the precise make, size, shape and structure of every machine – even if the details are forgotten the instant they are read. Fleming both shared and fed this hunger for detail: the boat owned by the villain in
Thunderball
, Emilio Largo, is no mere luxury yacht but rather a hundred-ton hydrofoil adapted from the Shertel-Sachsenberg system, with a hull of aluminium and magnesium alloy, twin Daimler-Benz four-stroke diesel engines with Brown-Boveri turbo superchargers
capable of fifty knots and costing £200,000. Some machines were imaginary; most were based firmly on reality, giving the reader the important sense of being told a fiction based on truth. Kingsley Amis called this use of real information in a fictional world ‘The Fleming Effect', and it proved highly successful.

Secret service gadgetry – masterminded by the irascible Q – plays a crucial role in the James Bond films, reaching almost ludicrous levels of inventiveness with flame-throwing bagpipes, exploding toothpaste and invisible cars. But gizmos are also present in the books, courtesy of Q-Branch, the genuine wartime equipment unit under the extraordinary Charles Fraser-Smith. Based in a tiny office near St James's Park, Fraser-Smith commissioned some three hundred firms around London to make an array of ingenious gadgets. He called them ‘Q gadgets', after the British warships disguised as merchant vessels known as ‘Q ships' in the First World War. None of the things created by Fraser-Smith was quite what it seemed: a hairbrush containing a map and a saw; magnetised matches that doubled as makeshift compasses; a pipe lined with asbestos that could be smoked without destroying the documents hidden inside (though it might well destroy the smoker); invisible ink; miniature cameras hidden in cigarette lighters; a shoelace that could also be a handy steel garrotte. Fraser-Smith was one of the great unsung lateral thinkers of the war: he devised chocolate laced with garlic so that agents dropped into France might swiftly
acquire pungent breath, the better to mix with the locals, and a screw-off button with a special left-hand thread in which miniature documents could be hidden. This, he believed, would take advantage of the ‘unswerving logic of the German mind', since no German would ever think of trying to unscrew something the wrong way.

Fleming worked with Fraser-Smith, and his books are peppered with references to ingenious kit. Technological wizardry is not confined to Bond and his allies: his communist and criminal enemies have an equal share of the elaborate gizmos. In
Casino Royale
, Le Chiffre conceals ‘Eversharp' razor blades in his hatband, shoe heel and cigarette case; a gun hidden in an innocent-looking cane is the first method employed to try to kill Bond; and a ‘small carpet of steel spikes' is used to stop his car. When, in
Live and Let Die
, he heads to Mr Big's island, Bond has a full underwater equipment shopping list: ‘Frogman suit complete with compressed-air bottle. Plenty of spares. And a couple of good underwater harpoon guns (the French ones called “Champion” are the best). Good underwater torch. A commando dagger . . . and some of the shark-repellent stuff the Americans used in the Pacific.' Plus a limpet mine and plenty of Benzedrine.

At various times, the Bond tool case included such necessaries as ‘Luminous Readers' – special glasses which picked up the invisible ink used on playing cards – fingerprint-powder spray, steel-capped shoes, the ‘Inspectoscope'
for airport inspections, a machine for the detection of contraband using fluoroscopic principles, and an ‘Identicast' machine to create a mock-up of Goldfinger's face. In
From Russia with Love
, Bond is kitted out with the full spy briefcase, a ‘smart-looking little bag', containing: fifty rounds of .25 ammunition between the leather and the lining of the spine; fifty golden sovereigns in the lid; a flat throwing knife in each of the sides; a cyanide suicide pill in the handle (which Bond flushes down the loo); and a tube of Palmolive shaving cream – the top of which unscrews to reveal the silencer for his Beretta, packed in cotton wool. Bond uses a ‘Homer' signal device planted in the tool compartment of Goldfinger's Rolls-Royce, and Goldfinger in return threatens to slice him up with a circular saw (which becomes a laser in the film).

Fleming's villains concealed weapons in the most unlikely places: a gun inside Tolstoy's greatest work; a .45 pistol disguised as a keyhole in Mr Big's desk; and Rosa Klebb's poison-bladed shoes (and knitting needles). Blofeld displays a lethal grasp of science, growing the castor bean plant, which is used to make ricin, a deadly poison favoured by terrorists today. Dr No has a flame-throwing jeep, and Oddjob, famously, a hat with a lethal metal rim. Compared to the extraordinary machines provided by Q in the later films, such gizmos may seem simple, but to Fleming's readers they represented the cutting edge of Cold War espionage technology.

The larger machines invented by Fleming also have a firm
base in reality. The Spektor decoding machine, which Tatiana Romanova promises to defect with in
From Russia with Love
, recalled the Enigma wartime encryption device (though the public would not learn of the ‘Ultra Secret' until the 1970s). Drax's Moonraker missile was based on the German V-2 rocket bomb, the devastating missile deployed by Germany in the last stage of the war, which carried a ton of high explosive and had a range of over two hundred miles. Fleming later decided to give the threat even greater topicality by converting it into an intercontinental ballistic missile, which both the US and USSR were scrambling to develop at the time of the book's publication. Initially, the rocket is hailed as giving Britain ‘an independent say in the world'; only later does Bond discover that it is aimed at London. The issues of nuclear deterrence and Britain's vulnerability gave the book a modern relevance that would only increase as the nuclear arms race gathered pace.

Since the Cold War was, to a large extent, a war fought between scientists on opposing sides, Fleming was determined to get the science right. He contacted numerous experts to ensure his fictional rocket came as close as possible to the factual object, writing to the British Interplanetary Society and even to Arthur C. Clarke, the doyen of science-fiction writers. Similarly, Fleming's fascination with the underwater world and the technology involved in deep-sea diving dates from his contact with one of the great underwater experts, Jacques Cousteau. Fleming first met Cousteau at a publishing
party, when the French explorer invited the English author to visit him in the South of France, where he was then excavating the sunken remains of an ancient Greek ship. From boyhood, Fleming was driven, in his own words, by the ‘raging desire to go somewhere and dig for buried treasure', and he was fascinated by the ‘lonely and queer' underwater world Cousteau introduced him to. Two weeks spent scuba-diving and watching Cousteau's divers at work provided him with numerous details for later books. Most immediately, the extraordinary experience of loading up with thirty pounds of equipment and slipping into the ‘limitless grey depths' furnished the technical inspiration for Bond's memorable underwater adventures in
Live and Let Die
, his second novel.

Fleming's crooks also display a firm grip on high technology – high, at least, by the standards of the time. Seraffimo Spang, boss of the Spangled Mob in
Diamonds Are Forever
, has a Cadillac with the windscreen ground to the precise prescription of his glasses; this may have enabled Spang to drive without spectacles, but imagine the experience for a passenger of seeing the road coming towards you through someone else's prescription lenses. Clearly the disinclination to wear glasses was some of sort of criminal affectation in Fleming's (myopic) eyes: Dr No wears contact lenses and so does Blofeld, in the latter case tinted dark green. Contact lenses were still a new invention, the first corneal lenses having been developed as recently as 1949. Dr No has an
electric razor and a clock with luminous numbers; villains use walkie-talkies; the reader's attention is drawn to such technological luxuries as the seventeen-inch television in a Las Vegas hotel room, and the oxygen bar at Santa Fe airport. Today, such things seem fairly commonplace, but to readers of Bond in the 1950s they were marks of extreme technological sophistication. Bond, for example, drinks coffee made in an American Chemex. This was a one-piece, hourglass-shaped vessel of heat-resistant glass, an all-in-one coffee filter machine with a leather collar around its waist: the filter paper went in the top, and the coffee dripped through to the bottom. As a piece of domestic engineering, it was hardly complex, but it has since become a collector's item, displayed in design museums. The Chemex was invented in 1941 by a German chemist named Peter J. Schlumbohm (the sort of name that Fleming might have noted for future use). Very few readers today would know what a Chemex is; very few readers, in fact, would have known in 1955. But Fleming had tested and tasted coffee from a Chemex. It sounded modern and scientific, and it still does; and that, perhaps, is the point.