The spy who finally came in from the cold - `Berlin to Bond and Beyond`

After Antony Terry’s death in 1992, Judith Lenart found herself sitting at her stepfather’s desk, arranging his funeral.

She came across a bundle of letters, which included a file marked ‘Fleming’ - reports Kent News.

Inside was a series of handwritten correspondence from Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

Reading through the letters, suspicion arose within her. Had her stepfather been a spy?

And so began an investigation into the background of a man who was at times a war hero, a foreign correspondent and, it seems, and agent for MI6.

Her painstaking inquiries led to her writing a book, now published, called Berlin to Bond and Beyond – The Story of a Fleming Man.

It tells how Terry had been recruited by Fleming as an intelligence officer and posted to various European countries under the guise of a foreign correspondent with the Sunday Times.

Fleming ran an intelligence agency called Mercury which used foreign correspondents working for the Sunday Times’ parent company Kemsley Newspapers, for which he was foreign manager, as spies.

The former SIS and MI6 agent Anthony Cavendish described the relationship in his book Inside Intelligence. He wrote: “At the end of the war a number of MI6 agents were sent abroad under the cover of newspapermen. Indeed the Kemsley Press allowed many of their foreign correspondents to cooperate with MI6 and even took on MI6 operatives as foreign correspondents.”

Fleming lived for a period in St Margaret’s Bay in a house he bought from his friend Noel Coward, who, it was revealed recently, also acted as a spy for the British in Europe and America.

While some readers believe the character of Bond was largely based on Terry, Miss Lenart claimed his influence was more keenly felt in Fleming’s more peripheral characters.

She told Kent on Sunday: “I see Antony Terry more as the sort of person who was helping Bond, rather than Bond himself.

“He would have been an authority who James Bond could rely on to know the scene and organise the right meetings in the right places. Like the journalist figure who helps Bond when he has his Japanese adventure in You Only Live Twice. That was Antony. Bond was much more Fleming himself.

“If you think of a spy as somebody on the payroll I don’t think it would be fair to label him that, but if you think of a spy as someone who has connections to intelligence agencies and provides them with information and, on occasion, gets information in return then I’d say that’s a pretty accurate description of Antony.”

Miss Lenart’s late mother Edith started seeing Terry in 1972 when they were both living in Paris; they married in 1985 and moved to New Zealand.

She did not know if her mother ever knew the full extent of her husband’s work. But, with hindsight, she said there were clues that she probably did.

“I honestly don’t know what my mother knew,” said Miss Lenart. “When I became more aware of his background, certain comments my mother had made to me made sense when they seemed innocuous at the time.

“She certainly knew he had a past in intelligence, but did she know he was still actively engaged right up until the day he died? I’m not sure.”

When going through the letters, it was only when she found correspondence with a man called Anthony Duvall that she realised Terry was a spy.

“It became clear he was the intermediary between Antony and MI6, he was organising the contacts in New Zealand. It seems to me like Antony never had a direct thing where he rang up the firm in London, at least not since the 1950s when his role as a full-time operative came to an end.

“I think he was in contact always through somebody else, and Anthony Duvall was one of those people.”

Finding the letters inspired Miss Lenart to tell Terry’s story in a book.

Born in London in 1913, he spent much of his early life in Berlin where his father worked at the British Consulate, learning German fluently in the process.

After a stint as a junior reporter on the London-based Sunday Dispatch, he volunteered for active service at the start of World War Two.

Two and was drafted into the intelligence service. He was made a lieutenant and put his language skills to good use interrogating German prisoners of war.

He was awarded the Military Cross for his actions in St Nazaire, France, and in German prisoner of war camps.

Immediately after the war he took part in the search and arrest of Nazi war criminals all over Europe.

In 1947 he started working for Fleming at Kemsley Newspapers and it is at this time Miss Lenart claims his spy work began.

He was posted to a number of European cities, including Berlin, Budapest and Vienna, as a foreign correspondent.

After the wedding in 1985, Terry moved to Edith’s native New Zealand, apparently to be closer to her children.

In 1988, Wellington Confidential published an article claiming Terry’s presence in New Zealand was “certain evidence of the rage Whitehall is maintaining over New Zealand’s nuclear-free defence policy”. He denied the story, claiming he had not worked in intelligence since 1949.

Miss Lenart refuted this, and claimed Terry had been working part-time for MI6 right up until his death, meeting a go-between in Wellington on a regular basis.

Private Eye also published an article about Terry in 1992 suggesting he may have had ulterior motives for being in New Zealand.

Despite an angry letter in response from the subject, the satirical publication did not print an apology.

Fleming had been recruited to work in naval intelligence during World War Two, rising to the rank of commander.

He was involved in the planning of many military operations, and it has been suggested he was behind the plan to lure Rudolph Hess to Scotland in May, 1941, for talks with Winston Churchill.

One of the letters Miss Lenart uncovered was from Fleming in 1963, in which he described Terry as “a good friend, and one of the finest foreign correspondents I have ever known – and I mean it”.

Miss Lenart said Fleming had been impressed with the young Mr Terry because he saw him as “a risk taker”.

“I think Ian thought that, but I wouldn’t describe him as that,” Miss Lenart added.

“He was a man who had little regard for his own personal safety. When he was in Budapest during the uprising in 1956 he would wander around in the street with Russian tanks just to see if a guy had a bazooka or not.

“When he got the Military Cross he had been running around in a German-occupied place with a handgun and had not been at all worried about his own safety.”

Terry proved a valuable source for Fleming when he was writing the Bond books, advising him about German V2 rockets for Moonraker and details of Berlin for The Living Daylights.

Having pieced together her stepfather’s life like “a vast jigsaw” from the letters, Miss Lenart set about finding a publisher.

She posted a copy of the manuscript to former British intelligence officer Geoffrey Elliott, author of I Spy and co-author of Secret Classrooms: An Untold Story of the Cold War, whom she knew to have connections at MI6, to check its veracity.

Mr Elliott came back to her with only minor changes and asked for some addresses to be removed.

Berlin to Bond and Beyond – The Story of a Fleming Man (Athena Press) is available now.

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