Stepping inside the spy network - book extract from Henry Chancellor
06-Jan-2006 • Literary
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It seems that Ian Fleming's longstanding interest in intelligence as a journalist helped him secure his wartime job. On May 24, 1939, by which time he was working in stockbroking, he was invited to the Carlton Grill to have lunch with two admirals.
This was remarkable in itself, and Fleming did not know that one of them, the clear-eyed, irascible John Godfrey, had just been appointed director of naval intelligence and was looking for a capable young man to act as his assistant. During lunch Fleming showed all his abilities in charming older men, and he impressed enough to ensure that several months later he became Lieutenant Ian Fleming in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, or "Wavy Navy", as it was known.
Broadly speaking, from his desk just outside the green-baize door to the DNI's office in Room 39 of the Admiralty, Fleming was responsible for realising much of the planning and imaginative thinking that came out of the department of Naval Intelligence during the war.
He was given remarkable powers by Godfrey, who was able, like Fleming himself, to delegate effectively, and so his role was far more than that of a straightforward assistant.
He would liaise on Godfrey's behalf with the Secret Intelligence Service, the Political Warfare Executive (charged with spreading rumour and propaganda in enemy countries), the Special Operations Executive (sabotage and subversion in enemy countries), the Joint Intelligence Committee and the press, as well as writing daily situation reports and fielding endless requests for information from prime minister Winston Churchill.
Fleming's job changed somewhat when Godfrey was unceremoniously sacked from his post in the autumn of 1942, and thereafter became admiral of the Royal Indian Navy.
Why Godfrey, who was never completely at home in the ants' nest of Whitehall, was removed has never been recorded, but his replacement, Admiral Edmund Rushbrooke, was a far less prickly character who had less need for Fleming's particular political skills. With his spiritual master gone, Fleming's power was gradually eroded. Nevertheless, as personal assistant to the DNI, he had found the best job of his life.
One of the reasons for Fleming's devotion to intelligence was finding himself in a world whose business was as exciting as any spy fiction. Naval Intelligence was a global, round-the-clock agency where anything and everything was considered. Months after he arrived at Room 39, the department produced a report into various ruses de guerre. The list of inspired suggestions included schemes to lure U-boats and German warships towards false shipwrecks surrounded by mines. There was also the "not very nice" suggestion No.28: "The following is contained in a book by Basil Thompson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed." This was the germ of the idea behind one of the famous stories of deception in World WarII: "the man who never was", devised by Ewen Montagu, also in Naval Intelligence.
This operation, in which Fleming assisted, involved floating a corpse with a briefcase containing misleading intelligence documents off a submarine near the Spanish coast.
During the last year of the war, the most significant event for Fleming had nothing to do with the crushing of Germany, as it concerned his own future. In the autumn of 1944 he was sent to Jamaica to attend a conference on the U-boat threat in the Caribbean, and he travelled down from Washington with his old school friend Ivar Bryce. With nothing but a bottle of grenadine syrup to drink, the two friends sat out on the veranda of Bryce's tumbledown house in the hills, watching the lightning breaking over the distant purple hills. The soft, warm melancholy of the place made a profound impression on Fleming.
By the following morning he had made up his mind that this was his idea of paradise, and he wanted a tropical hideaway of his own. A few months later, with Bryce's help, he found what he was looking for: an old donkey racetrack east of Oracabessa on the north shore of the island. There were no roads between the field and the sea, and it had a cliff that gave way to a small, secluded beach.
Back in Room 39, Fleming whiled away his office hours doodling designs on Admiralty blotting paper for the house he would build there, and when he had finished he christened it Goldeneye, the mysterious name that he had used for one of his wartime schemes. But ignoring all the raw material still fresh in his memory, when he left His Majesty's service on November 10, 1945, Ian turned his back on the notion of a romantic, impecunious life as a freelance writer in the Caribbean and accepted the post of foreign news manager of the Kemsley newspaper group. Bond, and Goldeneye, would have to wait a further seven years.
An edited extract from James Bond: The Man and his World by Henry Chancellor (John Murray, $39.95 AUD).
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