For Your Eyes Only (9 page)

The clues to the Second World War are everywhere, yet Bond is fighting an emphatically new war, against a looming communist threat, in the shape of its most evil and ruthless manifestation, SMERSH. Once again, Fleming drew on reality and reshaped it to lend credibility to this imagined combat. The people, the weapons, the scenes, all carried deliberate echoes of real wartime events. The underwater trap door in the hull of the
Disco Volante
in
Thunderball
and the limpet-mining of Mr Big's boat in
Live and Let Die
may well be based on the extraordinary wartime activities of the 10th Light Flotilla, an elite unit of Italian navy frogmen, who used similar methods to attack Allied shipping off Gibraltar in what Fleming considered ‘the greatest piece of effrontery in the underwater war'. The assassination attempt on Bond in
Casino Royale
was, according to Fleming himself, based on the attempted Soviet assassination in 1942 of the former spymaster Franz von Papen, then Germany's ambassador to Turkey: in both fact and fiction, the assassins were Bulgarians acting as Soviet agents, and in both cases they failed to kill the target and blew themselves up instead.

If some of Fleming's plots transposed Second World War
events into a Cold War setting, others were drawn directly from the events of the Cold War itself. Real people, such as Lavrenty Beria, chief of Soviet security and one of Stalin's principal executioners, are mentioned to lend authenticity: the fall of Beria (executed on the orders of Khrushchev in 1953) enables Grubozaboyschikov to become head of SMERSH and allows Rosa Klebb to take over Otydel II, in charge of operation and execution. Interestingly, Fleming states that Beria ‘went to the gallows' on 13 January 1954, the official Soviet date of the execution; after the files were later opened, however, it was revealed that Beria had been shot almost a month earlier. Such mingling of fact and fiction is deliberate and highly effective. Fleming occupied a world radically divided between the communist East and the capitalist West, and one that was intensely paranoid. The
Thunderball
plot imagined Blofeld threatening to bomb Miami with stolen atomic weapons, eerily foreshadowing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. To contemporary readers, that menace seemed only too real. Indeed, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban crisis reinforced fear of the Soviet threat, and boosted the sales of Fleming's books.

Indeed, for a time Bond was physically as close to the action of the Cold War as it was possible to get: namely, on the bedside table of the President of the United States. John F. Kennedy was first introduced to Fleming's books in 1955, and read a copy of
Casino Royale
while convalescing
in New England. He remained a fan to the end of his life. In 1961, Kennedy named
From Russia with Love
in his top ten favourite books, an endorsement that did no harm to his image, and did wonders for Fleming's US sales. A subsequent advertisement featured a picture of the White House with a single window lit and the caption: ‘You can bet on it he's reading one of those Ian Fleming thrillers.' The enthusiasm was not limited to JFK: Robert Kennedy was also a keen reader, and their sister Eunice read every novel at least once. ‘The entire Kennedy family is crazy about James Bond,' Fleming was told. The President insisted on showing the film of
Dr No
at a private screening in the White House. Fleming returned the compliment: one of the few books Bond has in his library is Kennedy's
Profiles in Courage
. The Kennedys gave Bond an immense boost, but then 007 was useful, in turn, to the Kennedys: it did the President's reputation no harm whatever to be thought to be sitting up at night, reading novels about a tough, handsome anti-communist who was irresistible to women.

Fleming met JFK just once, in 1960, before he was elected to the presidency, when the English writer was invited to a dinner party at Kennedy's home in Washington DC. The conversation inevitably turned to Castro and Cuba. Fleming – with tongue, one suspects, firmly in cheek – suggested that leaflets be scattered over Cuba warning that radioactivity could lodge in beards and that they should all therefore shave, thus potentially ridiculing the famously over-bearded
Castro. This sounds merely silly, and it was, but no sillier than the various lunatic efforts to dislodge the Cuban strong man that were being actively discussed within the CIA. Bizarrely, one of the other dinner party guests, a CIA agent, passed Fleming's idea on to his boss. Once again, Fleming's imagination merged with fantastic reality. The crucial, mutually advantageous relationship between Bond and Kennedy is illustrated by one final, perhaps apocryphal, detail. The night before he was assassinated in Dallas, the President is said to have been reading a James Bond novel; so was Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who would kill him the very next day.

If Fleming's Cold War plots seemed outlandish at times, he was unapologetic. This was an age in which presidents read novels and novelists advised presidents, and it did not, for instance, seem impossible to the CIA that it could kill Fidel Castro by injecting his cigars with poison. The spy war was, at times, truly bizarre, and the more weird it was, the more Fleming was impelled to echo it in fiction. The attempt by SMERSH to assassinate Bond on the
Orient Express
in
From Russia with Love
was based directly on the death of Eugene Karp. A US naval attaché (and spy) in Romania, Karp was apparently on the run from Soviet assassins when he boarded the famous train in Bucharest in February 1950. His body was found later by ramblers in a railway tunnel near Salzburg. The train conductor had apparently been drugged, but officials claimed Karp had
fallen out of a door; everyone else, including Fleming, believed he had been killed by Soviet assassins, a murder on the
Orient Express
. If that sounded like pure fantasy (Agatha Christie had published
Murder on the Orient Express
in 1934), Fleming was quick to point out that Cold War reality, and the espionage game, was stranger than any fiction he could invent:

My plots are fantastic, while often being based on truth. They go wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond the possible. Every now and then there will be a story in the newspapers that lifts a corner of the veil from Secret Service work. A tunnel from East to West Berlin so that our Secret Service can tap the Russian telephone system; Crabb's frogman exploit to examine the hull of a Soviet cruiser; the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets . . . this is all true Secret Service history that is yet in the higher realm of fantasy, and James Bond's ventures into this realm are perfectly legitimate.

These real events cited by Fleming are worth exploring in greater detail, since they reflect the remarkable dovetailing of truth and fiction in the Bond stories. The name of Commander Lionel ‘Buster' Crabb will for ever be linked with the more outlandish antics of the British secret service.
In 1956, this Royal Navy frogman was recruited by MI6 to inspect the hull of the Soviet cruiser that had brought Nikita Khrushchev on a state visit to Britain. Crabb's mission was probably to search for mine-laying hatches and sonar equipment on the bottom of the Soviet ship as it lay in Portsmouth harbour. The MI6 officer in charge of the mission was Nicholas Elliott, a friend of Fleming's. Crabb was unfit; the mission was idiotic, diplomatically unwise and exceedingly dangerous. It was, needless to say, a disaster. Crabb's headless body was found off the coast fourteen months later. The Crabb affair prompted outrage, a diplomatic firestorm, the resignation of MI6 director John Sinclair, and a flood of speculation that continues unabated. But it proved to the public that the British secret service was still capable of the most extravagant adventures. Three years later, Fleming sent Bond out to investigate the hull of the
Disco Volante
in
Thunderball
; unlike Crabb, he returns intact, just.

If Crabb was the Western spy who failed, then Nikolai Khokhlov was the Soviet spy who very nearly succeeded. A KGB spy whose exploits rival any of the models on which Bond was based, Khokhlov had fought behind the lines in the Second World War, and had taken part in the assassination of the Nazi official Wilhelm Kube, then Generalkommissar for White Russia. Khokhlov's spymaster was Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the Administration for Special Tasks in the NKVD (which would become the KGB), in
charge of sabotage and assassinations. From the seventh floor of the dreaded Lubyanka building, Sudoplatov plotted the deaths of those perceived as enemies of the regime, including the murder of Trotsky in 1940. In 1953, Khokhlov was selected by Sudoplatov to assassinate a prominent anti-Soviet Russian émigré in Berlin. Khokhlov, a man of conscience, found he could not carry out such a murder in cold blood, and instead defected to the West, bringing with him an extraordinary array of murderous gadgetry, including two guns housed in metal cigarette cases, which could fire up to four hollow steel bullets, and a miniature revolver that fired poisoned bullets. Khokhlov's defection was a sensation, but perhaps still more astounding was the Soviet riposte: in 1957, while attending a conference in Frankfurt, Khokhlov drank a cup of coffee that had been laced with radioactive thallium. Its effects were terrifying. Khokhlov's face erupted in black, brown and blue lumps, his eyes oozed a sticky liquid and his hair fell out in handfuls. The blood in his veins began to turn to plasma, as his bones crumbled. Astonishingly, Khokhlov survived, thanks to repeated transfusions by American doctors working around the clock. Khokhlov was still alive when this book was being written, living in quiet retirement in San Bernardino, California, an astonishing monument to Soviet ruthlessness and his own resilience. Khokhlov's remarkable book,
In the Name of Conscience
, was published in 1959. A copy inevitably found its way on to Fleming's bookshelves,
and from there into his fiction. The gun concealed inside a copy of
War and Peace
and wielded by the Soviet assassin Red Grant in
From Russia with Love
owed its inception to the Khokhlov haul of assassination gadgetry. In an interview in 2006, Khokhlov told me: ‘The KGB decided to kill me . . . From this moment there was a general direction to hunt Khokhlov. The message was: “We will get the traitor, wherever he is in the world.”' This, of course, was precisely the role of SMERSH, both in Fleming's books, and in reality.

Thanks to James Bond, SMERSH became a household name, but few realise that such an organisation really existed, long before Fleming gave it wicked immortality. In the bewildering forest of acronyms that was the Soviet secret service, SMERSH was just one of many names by which the specialised counter-intelligence department of the Soviet Union was known. SMERSH, as Fleming writes, is formed by combining the Russian words ‘
Smyert
' and ‘
Shpionam
', meaning (approximately) ‘death to spies'. Within Soviet intelligence, this unit (which would eventually report directly to Stalin) was responsible for rooting out and killing spies, saboteurs and ‘criminal traitors'. Fleming had learned about SMERSH from Colonel Grigori Tokaty-Tokaev, a Soviet rocket specialist who defected to Britain in 1947. In fact, a year earlier, the real SMERSH had been absorbed into the People's Commissariat of Military Forces, but Fleming decided to retain the chilling name. In this, his fiction may
inadvertently have been shadowing the truth, for it is believed that certain elements within the original SMERSH continued to operate throughout the 1950s as assassination squads. In
Live and Let Die
, ‘Bond felt his spine crawl at the cold, brilliant efficiency of the Soviet machine, and at the fear of death and torture which made it work.'

This, then, is Bond's political world: a world of ruthless Soviet killers, in which the pride of the British secret service hold back the horrors of communism and defend freedom almost single-handedly. True, Bond is prey to the odd flicker of doubt, and the occasional rueful political reflection, at least initially. In
Casino Royale
, he allows himself to wonder about the shifting sands of politics: ‘This country right-or-wrong business is getting a little out of date. Today we are fighting Communism . . . History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep changing parts.' The reference to the fallout from the Burgess and Maclean scandal is clear. Felix Leiter, Bond's CIA ally, nonetheless ‘held the interests of his own organisation far above the mutual concerns of the North Atlantic Allies'. What is more, ‘Bond sympathised with him', as well he might. Does Bond, in his heart, know that the British secret service is not quite all it is cracked up to be? M warns him, in an unguarded moment, that Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service, may have little respect for British intelligence: ‘People don't these days,' the spymaster reflects glumly. In
You Only Live Twice
, Tanaka voices Fleming's own fears about
a once-great country falling into post-colonial lethargy: a ‘vacuous, aimless, horde of seekers-after-pleasure'. Fleming feared that Britain had become a browbeaten nation of obedient people standing in line, the state of British malaise Churchill himself referred to as ‘Queuetopia'. Bond's defence is not terribly convincing: ‘Balls to you, Tiger. You only judge people by your own jungle standards . . . the liberation of our colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win plenty of Nobel Prizes . . .'

By the 1960s, the myth of Britain taking on the Soviet menace was becoming impossible to sustain. As Fleming wrote in his 1960 short story ‘The Hildebrand Rarity', ‘There were really only three powers. That was the big poker game and no other country had either the chips or the cards to come into it.' The sentiment is expressed by the American villain Milton Krest, but it was a reality Fleming and Bond now had to accept. In another short story, ‘Quantum of Solace', the British Empire is described as ‘crumbling', and the plot of
You Only Live Twice
centres on Bond's attempt to obtain secret information, to which the Americans will no longer allow Britain access, from the Japanese. ‘At home and abroad,' Bond confides to Kerim in
From Russia with Love
, ‘we don't show teeth any more – only gums.'