For Your Eyes Only (6 page)

A similar man of action was Fitzroy Maclean, the diplomat, writer and adventurer who carried out covert operations behind the lines in North Africa as part of the newly formed SAS, and later played a pivotal role liaising with Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia. In 1942, he abducted at gunpoint a Nazi sympathiser in Persia, General Zahidi, and spirited him out of the country. Fleming first met Maclean in Moscow in 1939, when he was on special assignment for
The Times
. Maclean, then serving as a junior diplomat at the Moscow embassy, was sent to summon Fleming to a dinner and found him in flagrante delicto in his hotel room with an attractive Russian woman (who turned out to be a Soviet plant, sent to spy on the journalist). Maclean told the dinner party hostess that Fleming could not attend as he was ‘very, very busy'. Despite their shared interests, the friendship between the two men appears to
have cooled after the war. Fleming later considered Maclean's superb book
Eastern Approaches
for serialisation in the
Sunday Times
, then rejected it rather pointedly, insisting that the author had claimed too much credit for himself – something Fleming would surely not have done had Maclean been the inspiration for Bond.

The playboy double agent Dušan ‘Duško' Popov, code-named ‘Tricycle' by the British, is yet another individual cited as a proto-Bond: certainly he shared many of Bond's (and for that matter Fleming's) tastes, including casinos, women, fast cars, expensive clothes and strong drink. Throughout the war, in the guise of an international businessman, Popov fed MI5-supplied disinformation to the German Abwehr, which continued to regard (and pay) him as one of its best spies. Fleming may well have known of Tricycle's exploits, but it is highly unlikely that they ever met. In one celebrated incident, Popov was gambling in Lisbon when he became irritated by the attitude of a large and vulgar Lithuanian, who kept showing off by calling ‘
Banque ouverte!
' whenever he held the bank, to indicate there was no upper limit on the stakes. Popov slapped $30,000 on the table – money which belonged to MI5. The Lithuanian, eyes bulging, declined the bet. Having successfully called his bluff, Popov tucked the money back in his dinner jacket and walked out. The incident became part of the Popov legend, and may have formed part of the inspiration for the gambling scenes in
Casino Royale
. Louche,
charming and insufferably vain, Popov was a nerveless secret agent who, like Bond, never hesitated in his duty and seemed to care not one whit for the victims and wronged women he left in his wake. In later life, when asked whether he was an inspiration for James Bond, Popov managed to imply that he was more Bond than Bond himself. In 1981, he told a group of Italian journalists: ‘I doubt whether a flesh and blood Bond would last forty-eight hours as a spy.'

In a similar mould was Wilfred ‘Biffy' Dunderdale, the station chief of SIS (MI6) in Paris, whom Fleming met in 1940. A regular at Maxim's restaurant on the rue Royale, exquisite in Cartier cufflinks and handmade suit, and driving an armour-plated Rolls-Royce through Paris, the fashionable multilingual Dunderdale had much of Bond's style. He was also a most effective spy, having played a key role in the intelligence work that led to the cracking of the Enigma code – arguably the greatest coup in espionage history.

No account of possible Bond prototypes would be complete without mentioning William Stephenson, the Canadian spy chief codenamed ‘Intrepid', who ran British intelligence in North America. We know that Fleming and Stephenson were friends and allies. Stephenson boosted the legend of Fleming as Bond, and the writer returned the compliment. In a letter to the
Sunday Times
in October 1962, Fleming declared: ‘James Bond is a highly romanticised version of a true spy. The real thing is . . . William
Stephenson.' This has been taken to imply that the ‘quiet Canadian' was the main inspiration for Bond, which is not exactly what Fleming was saying. Stephenson was, indeed, ‘the real thing'; he was, in Fleming's own assessment, ‘very tough, very rich, single-minded, patriotic and a man of few words'. He had had an extraordinary career in the First World War, during which he was gassed, learned to fly with the Royal Flying Corps, shot down Lothar von Richthofen, brother of the celebrated Red Baron, crashed, was captured and escaped. But by the second war he was middle-aged, and no longer the type to be indulging in car chases and love affairs. Working without a salary, under the official title of British Passport Control Officer, Stephenson used the so-called British Security Coordination (a front for British intelligence) to influence American opinion, channel top-secret information, and train secret agents at Camp X in Ontario. Some two thousand agents would pass through this camp during the course of the war, five of whom would go on to direct the CIA. Stephenson's plan (which never materialised) to obtain nearly three million dollars in gold belonging to the Vichy government from the Caribbean island of Martinique, may have inspired the plot of
Goldfinger
, in which the arch-villain seeks to empty Fort Knox. Stephenson's plot involved overthrowing the Vichy authorities on the island, getting the colony to declare for General de Gaulle, and then handing the gold reserves over to the Free French. Stephenson undoubtedly played a vital role in
Britain's wartime espionage and taught Fleming much of the craft he knew so well, but in many ways he is closer to M, the veteran spymaster, than to Bond himself.

There is no definitive answer to the question, who was ‘the real Bond', since, as he is a fictional creation, there was no such thing. Teasing apart the claims and counterclaims is made harder by the fact that spies lie so easily, particularly when remembering their own lives. The entertaining memoirs of Popov, Minshall and Stephenson should all be taken with large quantities of salt. Bond is all of the above, and none of them: he possesses the cunning of William Stephenson, the sheer toughness of Michael Mason, the insouciant style of Popov, the disobedience of Dalzel-Job, the elegant cufflinks of Biffy Dunderdale, the courage of Merlin Minshall, and Fitzroy Maclean's intelligent heroism. Bond is all of these, but flavoured throughout with a healthy dollop of Fleming himself and his remarkable family. These intoxicating elements were then shaken up together, and stirred.

At first this seems a far easier question to answer, but, as with all Fleming stories, the plot is thicker than it seems. The fictional Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG (finally identified by name in
The Man with the Golden Gun
) is based, in large part, on John Godfrey, Fleming's boss at the Naval
Intelligence Department. M is grumpy, dedicated, rude and every inch the naval martinet, with ‘damnably clear' bright blue eyes; his underlings are terrified and loyal in equal parts. He ‘thinks in the language of battleships', and his voice is straight off the Quarterdeck (the name of his house). Kingsley Amis assiduously totted up the various ways M's voice is described by Fleming: angry (3); brutal, cold (7); curt, dry (5); gruff (7); stern, testy (5); and so on. Yet this is the voice Bond ‘loved and obeyed'. All these traits were apparent in Godfrey, who nonetheless ran a tight ship and proved a most effective spymaster. Fleming described him as a ‘real war-winner' with ‘the mind and character of a Bohemian mathematician'. Some found Godfrey impossible to deal with, and his abrupt sacking in 1942 (and lack of wartime decoration) has never been fully explained. But, like Bond, Fleming knew how to play his short-tempered boss, and was treated with similar indulgence: M lets Bond get away with, and periodically commissions him for, murder. In
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
, Fleming makes the M–Godfrey link most explicit, describing the door-knocker on M's house as the ship's bell clapper from ‘HMS
Repulse'
, which ‘had been M's final sea-going appointment'. Godfrey's last command, before taking over at NID, had been the
Repulse
.

In a strange case of truth following fiction, Godfrey would eventually ask Fleming to write his biography (Fleming declined), yet it seems the inspiration for M was not entirely pleased to be immortalised as the boss of a cold-blooded
killer, who was prepared to employ Bond to kill the crooks who had murdered his friends (in ‘For Your Eyes Only'). ‘He turned me into that unsavoury character, M,' Godfrey complained after Fleming's death. ‘Ian wanted people to take M seriously and questioned me closely about his notional age and career. The end result did not convince or thrill.'

The use of the single initial was a convention dating back to Mansfield Cumming-Smith, the first head of SIS (MI6), who became known as ‘C' after his habit of initialling papers he had read with a C written in green ink. In Somerset Maugham's
Ashenden
stories, another source of inspiration for Fleming, the same post is occupied by ‘R', the grim, amoral spy chief who is prepared to expend his agents ruthlessly without ever dirtying his own hands. Alongside the fictional R and the real C, there are three more Ms and one Z, all real, all known to Fleming, and all parts of the composite character that emerged as M.

‘Colonel Z', Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the shadowy Z network of which Conrad O'Brien-Ffrench was a part. The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful, charming and slightly mad. As a boy of sixteen, Dansey, who was not homosexual, was seduced by Oscar Wilde. His father threatened to prosecute, and then packed the young Claude off to Africa. He was first recruited as a spy during the Boer War, lost his money in the Wall Street Crash, performed various duties for British
intelligence before the Second World War, and then abruptly quit, allowing rumours to circulate that he had been sacked for stealing. Meanwhile, believing SIS to be ill-organised and inefficient, he set about building a parallel organisation behind the cover of a respectable import–export business in Bush House, recruiting part-time, usually unpaid agents, including journalists, businessmen, gamblers and playboys. Dansey's agents used the codename Z, and avoided using the wireless for messages. In 1939, the Z network was absorbed into SIS, and as assistant to the new ‘C', Stewart Menzies, Dansey helped to coordinate active espionage until the end of the war. Fleming gives him a namecheck in
From Russia with Love
, when Darko Kerim, Bond's friend who is murdered on the
Orient Express
, refers to ‘Major Dansey', his predecessor as Head of Section T. Two famous men who worked in wartime intelligence with the real Dansey gave very different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm Muggeridge called him ‘the only professional in MI6'; the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, however, considered him ‘an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning'.

Major-General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins was director of operations and training with SOE, and the creator of the auxiliary units on which Peter Fleming worked, intended to operate behind the lines in Britain in the event of a German invasion. An expert in guerrilla warfare, he was described by the cryptographer Leo Marks as ‘a real Highland
toughie, bloody brilliant . . . with a moustache which was as clipped as his delivery and eyes which didn't mirror his soul or any other such trivia. The general's eyes reflected the crossed swords on his shoulders, warning all comers not to cross them with him.' Since the initial C was already taken, and G is an initial commonly used as an army abbreviation, Gubbins signed himself by his middle initial: M.

Another contender is the equally strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting out potential extremist subversives in Britain, both fascist and communist. Knight broke up some of the most important spy rings in Britain, and was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles, but his warnings were fatally ignored. Knight was a man of many parts, most of them very odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge and elaborate spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist who had been taught by the great Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive and inspired naturalist who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive works as
How to Keep a Gorilla
. Ostensibly, Knight was a ladies' man: he was married three times (and briefly suspected of murdering one of his wives), filled his office with beautiful young women, ran two of the most successful female agents in British wartime history, and wrote a peculiar guide to running women agents, which
includes a section on using sex as bait, in so-called honey traps. ‘It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman-agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex,' he wrote. This slightly odd statement may perhaps be explained by the fact that Knight never consummated any of his marriages, and was probably homosexual. Maxwell Knight signed all his memos ‘M', and was certainly well known to Fleming, although they never worked together. After the war, Knight would move effortlessly from a career in spying to a new career as a naturalist, ending his life as a much-loved BBC presenter of nature programmes.

There is one last real-life ‘M', who may have helped to form the fictional M. William Melville, an Irish-born policeman who died in the last year of the First World War, has a good claim to be Britain's first secret service chief. Born in Kerry, Melville made his name foiling Fenian and anarchist bomb plots in Britain, and inspired the character of the detective in Joseph Conrad's
The Secret Agent
. Melville recruited Sidney Reilly, the so-called ‘Ace of Spies', learned the art of lock-picking from Harry Houdini, and foiled the 1887 Golden Jubilee Plot to assassinate Queen Victoria. On his ‘retirement' from the police in 1903, Melville founded a secret service, the forerunner of MI5, and adopted the codename ‘M'. Using the pseudonym William Morgan, he gathered intelligence for the War Office, and when the Secret Service Bureau was established in 1909 to coordinate both home and foreign
intelligence (later MI5 and MI6), Melville was recruited as chief detective. Fleming would certainly have been aware of the exploits of this other ‘M', which had become a part of intelligence legend by the time he arrived at NID.