RIP Agent 007s unlikely alter ego - Sir Peter Smithers

He was a secret agent, diploment and scholar, but few knew of Sir Peter Smithers' most exotice role: the likely model for Ian Fleming's James Bond - reports The Canberra Times.

Sir Peter Smithers died at his Swiss villa last month at age 93 precisely as he would have wished -- in the June sunshine in a garden that he himself had designed, holding plants and other living things that only he was licensed to kill.

A friend in Hong Kong commented, "I doubt that we'll see his like again."

His extraordinary CV covered the full gamut of a half-century of threats to civilisation -- from Nazi U-boats prowling the seas to terrorists with portable nuclear weapons. But his career was very much the product of troubled times.

We'd be lucky not to see other periods that produced his like again. However, as he once implied, during a chilling conversation that we had in Hong Kong two decades ago, we probably won't be so fortunate.

Sir Peter was a fprmer espionage agent, diplomat and Eurocrat and biographer of the 19th-century essayist James Addison. But all the newspaper obituaries highlighted his life story's most curious aspect -- the impression in many quarters that novelist Ian Fleming had made him the model for the elegant spy-about-town, James Bond.

Commander Fleming -- his good friend, fellow agent and wartime commanding officer -- was certainly one of the biggest influences on the young officer's life, but Sir Peter himself might have dismissed the notion that he was the original Bond. Afterall, Wikipedia now lists no fewer than eight possible real-life agent 007s. Nevertheless, there is some substance to the claim that the Fleet Street press has made on Sir Peter's behalf.

In the late 1930s both he and Fleming, who was four years his senior, were young Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officers who found themselves as intelligence agents caught up with the war in Europe. Narrowly escaping to Bordeaux from the Nazis' arrival in Paris, the pair in one afternoon commandeered seven merchant ships, then supervised the escape to England of hundreds of British refugees.

In London, bothe continued working in naval intelligence. Fleming was taught how to kill a man in combat by biting him on the back of theneck. In advance of a likely assignment in neutral but strategic Sweden, Lieutenant Smithers studied Swedish and how to pick locks. Fleming collaborated with Smithers in designing a commando dagger, and once gave his friend a pistol disguised as a pen.

Conventional combat eluded both men. Nevertheless, Smithers found himslf with an exciting enough task -- finding and debriefing German agents parachuted into Britain. Britain's official historians see agent interception as one of the country's greatest wartime accomplishments.

British security organisation MI5 reports on its website (www.mi5.gov.uk): "When captured German intelligence records were studied after 1945, it was found that almost all 115 or so agents targeted against Britain during the course of the war had been identified and caught. The only exception was an agent who committed suicide before capture."

A certain relief must have come with the young naval officer's next posting -- as an assistant naval attaché in the United States, a nation then still at peace. At first charged with spreading disinformation at Washington cocktail parties, he was later involved in passing to London decodings of japanese naval messages that the Americans were intercepting before and immediately after the Pearl Harbour attack, December 7, 1941.

He kept in his bathroom a photograph of the Imperial Navy's Yamato. (Ever the aesthete, he admired the graceful lines of this huge enemy warship sunk off Okinawa in 1945.) But his most important wartime work occured in and around Mexico.

Along the American seaboard and in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico during the first six months of 1942, German U-boats and mines sank 397 vessels, at the cost of some 5000 Allied lives -- more than twice the death tool at Peral Harbor. Historian Gerhard Weinberg has called the episode "The greatest single defeat suffered by American naval power".

Lieutenant-Commander Smithers was sent herriedly to Mexico City as naval attaché in Mexico, the Central American Republics and Panama charged with charting U-boat refueling operations. His espionage led to expertise in photography -- at first enemy shipping and later of flowers.

In Mexico he met and married after a three-week courtship Dojean Sayman, a divorced American heiress of part-Mexican ancestry who owned a gold typewriter. This machine made a cameo appearance in the Bond novel Goldfinger.

Other traces of Sir Peter turn up in the Bond oevre. A Smithers is an assistan to Q, agent 007's quartermaster in charge of inventive weapons and spycraft artifacts; he appears in For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy. Another Smithers is a villainous Bank of England representative in Goldfinger. And when the Daily Express asked the novelist to advise one of its cartoonists on Commander Bond's appearance for a new comic strip, the face that emerged resembled the younger Smithers.

After the war, the much-decorated ex-spy earned a doctorte at Oxford for his work on Addison. He liked to recall that the essayist had looked forward to dying in June surrounded by the beauties of nature, a wish fulfilled for boh men.

A seat in the House of Commons came in 1950 and he was later appointed as a British representaive to the Council of Europe, the pan-European parliamentary group. For five years from 1964 her was the council's secretary-general.

Knighted in 1970, Sir Peter retired to an abandoned vineyard overlooking Lake Lugarno in Switzerland. There he lovingly tended to 10,000 or so plants; he was particularly proud of his Lilium X "Vico Gold", bred from a lily that his stepson had found for him in Burma.

His global horticultural tours brought him occasionally to Hong Kong. During one of these visits I learned that, though Sir Peter might not still have been a spy, he remained active at the highest levels of defence planning. At a Boxing Day brunch at my Hong Kong apartment in 1983, our conversation turned to the bombing of a US Marine barracks in Beirut two months earlier. In one of the first instances of suicide bombinh, a terrorist had detonated a truck full of explosives, killing 241 Marines and wounding more than 100. The incident still rates as the deadliest post-World War II attack on Americans overseas.

Sir Peter revealed he had become a member of a House of Commons commitee that met regularly to assess what he called "the future defence of the realm". This brains trust of serving and retired defence and intelligence officers analysed unfolding events and identified areas in which Britain should strengthen security.

Sir Peter said something, much worse than the Beirut atrocity had been on committee members' minds for some time. Every meeting, he said, the group found itself returning to a discussion of what one of his colleagues had dubbed "the nuclear backpack".

Sir Peter elaborated, "One day someone will walk into the middle of a large city and detonate such a weapon. The bomber will disappear -- but so will about 10 city blocks. And no one will have any certain idea of who did it." He listed likely targets -- Washington, New York, London, Paris and Moscow.

From Time to time, when governments seem to be overreacting to terrorist events, I find it usedul to recall Sir Petr's words. We have entered a century in which the unthinkable keeps joining a list of the possible. Or, in Sir Peter's view, the probable. "Many of us wonder why those 10 city blocks haven't disappeared already," he said. That it hasn't happened in the 23 years since he made the remark is not, I find, a source of much comfort.

Thanks to `Vesper` for the alert.

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