Ian Fleming's Black Ops of WWII

Author Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, gleaned many of his fantastic thriller plots from real people and real experiences he had as a member of British Naval Intelligence during the Second World War.

He came from a privileged family whose father, Valentine Fleming, a Conservative MP and British Army officer, was killed in action during the First World War when Ian was eight years old. Churchill wrote Valentine's obituary. Ian was educated at Eton and Sandhurst. Sandhurst could have forged Fleming into an exclusive British soldier but Ian found the mechanization of the army without appeal and finished two of three required terms when he was forced to leave after contracting gonorrhea from a London prostitute.[i] The Flemings were familiar with war and its consequences: Ian's brother Peter distinguished himself as an officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE), an organization established in June 1940 charged with executing operations against Nazi Germany, kept secret until 1960 and considered the counterpart of the Gestapo. Their younger brother Richard was killed from injuries suffered at Dunkirk.

Ian developed his writing style with the Reuters news agency. He was sent to Moscow in 1933 to cover the trial of six British engineers from the Metropolitan-Vickers Company believed by the Russians to be spies. A Russian secretary charged in the Vickers trial was the basis for the character Tatiana of From Russian With Love. [ii] The name of Tatiana came from the typist of the manuscript. [iii] Occasionally, he would impishly add the names of friends (Robert Harley and Ivar Bryce [iv]) within the books and based the plot of Diamonds are Forever, and the group of newspaper articles later compiled into the book The Diamond Smugglers, on conversations with Sir Percy Sillitoe, a former MI5 agent who investigated illegal diamond trafficking in South Africa. [v] Biographer Andrew Lycett contends that Felix Leiter, Bond's CIA counterpart, was a composite of Ivar Bryce and Tommy Leiter, a hard-drinking heir to the Marshall Field department store in Chicago.[vi]

Stockbroker to Intelligence Agent

Admiral John Godfrey recruited Fleming into naval intelligence in 1939 as a thirty-one-year old who had spent his recent time as a stockbroker. As a special assistant to Godfrey, Fleming would come up with ideas like fake radio broadcasts. Godfrey was looking for wild plans, the more outrageous the better. Fleming took the rank of Lt. Commander, RNVR, with the codename of "17F." Admiral Godfrey would later say of Fleming's work that he was "a war-winner" and more suited to his own position as the chief of naval intelligence than he was.

Fleming created black propaganda operations for British intelligence during the Second World War. One of the most colorful operations involved the creation of a London radio studio that broadcasted German-speaking announcers gossiping about German high command interspersed with insults concerning Allied leaders and their political policy. To lend an air of authenticity and a true sense of Nazi racism, Churchill was denounced as a "fat syphilitic Jew." Though the British government found the broadcasts distasteful and questioned Fleming's motives, the operation proved to be successful when captured Germans told the British of hearing about German Generals buying their mistresses mink coats. The effect on the German soldier's morale was everything the British could have wanted.

30 Commando Assault Unit - Fleming's Red Indians

In late summer of 1941 Cmdr. Fleming became intrigued by the May 1941 capture of Crete by the Nazis. The capture wasn't so interesting as the special group of men headed by Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny's men targeted the British Headquarters of the island and captured maps, codes, orders, and other vital intelligence. Fleming recognized Skorzeny's special unit as the first intelligence commandos. Along with Lord Louis Montbatten, Fleming created a special commando unit called 30 Commando Assault Unit (aka Assault Unit Number 30).[vii] The unit was comprised of misfits with special talents and became known as Fleming's Private Navy and sometimes the "Red Indians" due to its successful beach reconnaissance. The unit was targeted for impossible missions. Missions for the unit included the retrieval of a vital cache of advanced military equipment from France during the German advancement, the destruction of U-Boats at Cherbourg, and the 1944 capture of a German radar station with its 300 German personnel. The capture of the German radar station, though never an exact source for any fictional accounts, has the same historical atmosphere as the E.M. Nathanson novel and movie The Dirty Dozen.[viii]

Fleming designed a plan similar to Montagu's Operation Mincemeat. He planned agents to survey beaches in Albania, north Greece, and other parts of the Balkans in hopes of raising Nazi suspicions that an Allied attack would come through the Balkans instead of Sicily. He would later use the intriguing past of the Balkans as part of his novel From Russia With Love.

The Deputy Fuhrer and the British Beast

His one operation that resulted in the most celebrated outcome, though it was never publicly linked to Fleming, was luring Nazi Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess to fly to Scotland. Hess was one of Hitler's oldest friends. British intelligence had been informed that Hess was easily persuaded, highly superstitious, and a devotee of astrology. Fleming concocted astrological tables that would lead Hess to believe that his true destiny and greatness would be to fly to Britain alone and negotiate a peace.

Fleming convinced his skeptical superiors to pursue the incredible idea of luring Hess to Britain through a fake horoscope. One of Fleming's superiors, Maxwell Knight, toyed with the idea of getting the infamous British occultist, and self-proclaimed Beast, Aleister Crowley involved with the project. Crowley had been involved with British intelligence as early as World War I and may have met and worked with the legendary World War I Ace of Spies, Sidney Reilly. Fleming biographer John Pearson wrote that Casino Royale character LeChiffre's physical appearance was based on Crowley, as well as both having a tendency to frequently say "dear boy."

Though Crowley was never used, Fleming continued with the project. He "briefed an astrologer, via a Swiss contact, also an agent, to infiltrate Hess's occult circles in Germany." He passed on the vision that there were high-ranking British authorities, including the Duke of Hamilton, interested in negotiating a peace with Germany. Hamilton was allegedly a Scottish member of the Golden Dawn, a mysterious, English-created cult dedicated to the study of ritual magic (other members allegedly included the Irish poet W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley).

Hess was told that on May 10, 1941 six planets in the sign of Taurus coincided with the full moon. [ix] It was apparently all the news Hess needed for him to fly to Scotland in a Messerschmitt 110, parachute onto land owned by Scottish farmer David Maclean,[x] be captured, and spend the rest of his life until his death in 1987 either in the Tower of London, on trail at Nuremberg, or in Spandau prison. Crowley was again considered as a go-between for British intelligence and Hess. An interview between Crowley and Hess was eventually rejected, though Crowley was eager to help.[xi] Hess would tell fellow inmate Albert Speer at Spandau that the idea to fly to Britain was inspired in him by supernatural forces that presented themselves in a dream, though the crux of the mission might have rested with Hitler desperately trying to reach some kind of peaceful terms with Great Britain before he attacked his foremost enemy, Stalin's Russia.

SS Commando Otto Skorzeny wrote in his autobiography that Hess was tricked into believing that the Duke of Hamilton was interested in a peace deal that could be bartered by Hess involving the alliance of Germany and England against the Soviets. He also claimed that false letters were sent to Hess reputedly from Hamilton, a deception that could have been easily executed by British intelligence.[xii] Hess was eventually imprisoned in the Tower of London, went on trial at Nuremberg, and lived the rest of his 47 years in Spandau where he died, allegedly by his own hand, in 1987.

The Hess incident was not the only time astrology was used in espionage. In 1943, Louis de Wohl toured the U.S. as a Hungarian astrologist with an uncanny ability to see the future. He created headlines like "Seer Sees Nazi Doom if U.S. Acts in Eight Months." De Wohl was not Hungarian but actually a captain in the British Army assigned by British intelligence to help lure the U.S. into acting against Nazi Germany. He was fed information by British intelligence that allowed him to appear to "see the future."[xiii] He was made a part of the British Army because of his intimate knowledge of Hitler's favorite astrologer Karl Krafft.

All That Glitters Gold

Operation Goldeneye, an operation that was declassified in 1997, involved Fleming's plan to execute a series of sabotage operations against Nazi observation posts inside Spain. Fifty Spaniards were recruited to enter Spain and destroy infrared and thermal imaging equipment designed to observe British movements along the Straits of Gibraltar. Allied successes in North Africa proved the operation was not necessary. [xiv]

Fleming was involved in operations that involved the theft of Italian naval records and ciphers in North Africa, stole advanced aircraft engines in France, and captured German naval archives. He ran an operation to bankrupt an Abwehr chief at a Lisbon gambling casino, sounding similar to the episode in Casino Royale. William Stephenson's plan to steal Vichy French gold from Martinique, though it was never put into action, was the basis for Goldfinger's raid on Fort Knox. [xv] Fleming's novel Goldfinger and subsequent film, considered by many critics as the best Bond book and film, featured the eccentric antagonist Auric Goldfinger. The cinema Goldfinger was played by former violinist and stage decorator Gert Frobe. Frobe was an ex-Nazi soldier who had freely admitted in 1965 his past membership in the Nazi Party. A public uproar concerning Frobe's past was quelled when a Jewish survivor told of Frobe saving his life by hiding his family during the war.

Fleming drew the name Goldfinger from a modernist architect that he depised: Erno Goldfinger. Additionally, he based Honeychile Ryder, the beautiful beach girl played by Ursula Andress in Dr. No, on an American showgirl, Patricia Wilder, known as Honey or Honeychile. Wilder married Prince Alex Hohenlohe. The pair ran a sporting club in the Austrian Alps, Schloss Mittershill, which was used during World War II by the Nazis for pseudo-scientific experiments on Asians. The Schoss Mittershill was the model for Ernst Blofeld's research station in the Alps in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.[xvi]

The Bond films launched Sean Connery into superstardom but Connery, a Scotsman not an Englishman like Bond, was not Fleming's pick for the celluloid version of Bond. Fleming preferred to give the role to his friend David Niven, who eventually did play Bond in the bizarre spoof of Casino Royale. The film producers had initially offered the role to Cary Grant, who read the script, liked it, but wanted no part of a series. James Mason agreed to play 007 but would agree to only two films. Connery, a relatively unknown actor, impressed producers Broccoli and Saltzman and so he was offered 6,000 pounds for the first film, Dr. No. By the third film, Goldfinger, Connery was receiving 1500 fan letters a week.[xvii]

Not all of Fleming's operations met with success. One had comical repercussions. In an effort to rally Arab support for the Allies, something that countryman T. E. Lawrence had done so effectively in the previous war, Fleming created tens of thousands of leaflets to be dropped by the RAF over every Arab camp in North Africa with the words "Victory rests with the Allies." Unable to find an Arab language expert, Fleming employed a tea merchant to write the words. An American officer brought one of the leaflets to Fleming and asked him if he knew what it said. Fleming assured the Yank that it was a simple propaganda statement, "Victory rests with the Allies." The American informed Fleming that it actually said, "Buy Mohammed Ali's green tea."[xviii]

Plot to Kidnap Martin Bormann

What appears to be clearly the wildest scheme associated with Fleming, and established as a fraud by Nigel West, is the alleged kidnapping of Martin Bormann, Hitler's ruthless secretary whose affairs during and at the end of the war, as well as his death, remain controversial to this day. A recent study of his life claims he is the mysterious "Werther," the Russian mole who provided the Soviets highly classified information throughout the war, which would make Bormann one of the most successful double agents in espionage history. [xix]

A 1974 book by Ladislas Farago (Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich) claimed that Bormann had successfully escaped Nazi Germany to Argentina (like Eichmann, Mengele, and the Ustashan Ante Pavelic) and lived comfortably funded by 2,511 kilograms of gold and other treasures that amounted to an 800 million dollar fortune.[xx] Though DNA tests in 1998 seemed to have finally shown that he had been killed in a park not far from Hitler's Berlin Bunker in May of 1945, [xxi] a former British intelligence officer claimed that he, Fleming and a 150-man force were ordered by Churchill to bring Bormann to Britain to obtain information on the billions of dollars in stolen money kept by the Nazis in secret Swiss bank accounts. [xxii]

The alleged "intelligence officer," using a pseudonym of Christopher Creighton, documented the assertion in a 1997 book Op JB, claiming that Bormann died in 1989 in a small village where he used an assumed name of Peter Hartley. Creighton writes that he and Fleming were involved in a mission concerning a Bormann double, a meeting with Ribbentrop while they were dressed in SS uniforms, hiding in German safehouses, shooting the Bormann double to leave the appearance that Bormann had been killed, kayaking to safety over canals and rivers, then spiriting the real Bormann out of Germany to England in a Lysander aircraft. This fantastic tale has been resoundingly debunked by author Nigel West (CounterfeitSpies) noting that Fleming was in Jamaica during the time Creighton has him in Germany. West identifies Creighton as a John Ainsworth-Davis, who took in, among others, Brian Garfield, author of a novel based on Creighton's exploits (The Palladin). When Creighton's claims started to fail under scrutiny, he made a feeble attempt to stage a kidnapping only to be found by the film crew he had hired to interview him. [xxiii]

The Myth of Camp X

Two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a special school for training secret agents was opened by the Allies on the northern shore of Lake Ontario in Canada. From 1941 through 1944 the British, Americans, and Canadians trained over 500 students in the "art of secret war."[xxiv]

The school, also known as Special Training School 103, took on legendary status throughout the years after its demise. It was mistakenly associated with training the assassins of Nazi Reichsfuhrer Reinhardt Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst, in Operation Anthropoid, the Norwegian saboteurs of the Nazi heavy-water plant, as well as British radar specialists associated with the ill-fated Dieppe raid on August 1942. The training of Ian Fleming at Camp X, as biographer Pearson claims, seems to be another myth of the celebrated camp, which has been debunked by author David Stafford.

Fleming's biographers write of Fleming's training at Camp X as a pivotal part of his career as an intelligence officer. At Camp X he was to have excelled at self-defense, unarmed combat, handling a submachine gun, gaining illegal access to secured buildings, and especially underwater exercises like the one Bond engaged in during Fleming's second novel Live and Let Die. In an effort to facilitate the demise of Mr. Big, Bond attached a bomb to a ship's hull, supposedly the same kind of exercise Fleming performed at Camp X.

However, under scrutiny, Fleming's daring exploits at Camp X don't seem to match Bond's death-defying abilities. Two of the commandants at the camp, whose collective years as employees comprised its entire existence, never remembered Fleming's attendance though he was a special assistant to Britain's director of naval intelligence. Of course, he could have been there for a brief time but the legend spun by his biographers was that he was a star pupil whose only failure was a test of whether he could kill a man in cold blood. As Camp X authority David Stafford wrote could such "a high profile student - particularly one who was there by special invitation - really have passed unnoticed by the Camp's regular staff"?[xxv]

It seems to be more likely that Fleming was using his extraordinary imagination in creating a legend for himself rather than any possibility that he was part of the Camp X trainees. It is known that Fleming loved to regale his guests at Goldeneye, his Jamaican retreat, with tales of his naval intelligence exploits. After writing all day about his fictional alter ego, we can imagine a few cocktails at Goldeneye's veranda with friends in attendance, which might help Fleming invent more spectacular tales concerning his own life, after all the Bond boy was getting far too much attention. Camp X was the perfect place to spin the legends of both Fleming and Bond.[xxvi]

MI6 Station in New York

In 1941, Fleming worked at the MI6 station in New York with William Stephenson, the head of the British Security Coordination. The British Security Coordination office was located on New York City's famous 5^th Avenue directly across from St. Patrick's Cathedral. One of his operations concerned the Japanese Consulate General office, located one floor below Stephenson's office. It was here a Japanese cipher expert transmitted code to Tokyo. Though the cipher expert was not assassinated (ala Bond's first-kill referenced in Casino Royale) Fleming did recruit a team of safecrackers to open a safe so he could photograph codebooks and make impressions of keys. [xxvii]

Fleming may have gotten his idea of the "license-to-kill" agent from Stephenson. In the 1960's William Harvey of the C.I.A. supposedly began recruiting members of the Mafia to help organize assassination plots against Cuba's Castro. He asked a MI5 advisor on ideas and was told to approach Stephenson. The advisor told Harvey that Stephenson might have used a Mafia hitman to murder a German spy. In 1990, a British Security Coordination agent confirmed on the BBC "that the BSC had assassinated a German seaman who was operating as a spy in New York." [xxviii] The C.I.A.'s interest in this kind of political assassination may have been what Lyndon Johnson referred to as the "Murder Inc." that was being run in the Caribbean by the C.I.A. in the mid-twentieth century.

The use of assassination by British secret services was employed in Sir Collin Gubbins's Special Operations Executive, SOE. [xxix] The SOE was "supposedly the only body competent enough to fake an accident" resulting in death though these "accidents" were euphemisms for assassination, which could still be considered "war crimes business." [xxx] The SOE trained Czech agents to assassinate General Reinhardt Heydrich in 1942 during Operation Anthropoid. To add to the dirty business, the SOE may have coated the anti-tank, hand grenades with botulin toxins, which entered Heydrich's wounds and eventually killed him. [xxxi] The SOE was also responsible for building and implementing a miniature submarine, the Sleeping Beauty, which was used by agents to secretly gain access to a shore.[xxxii] The Norwegian division of the SOE, the Norwegian Independent Company Number One, was responsible for the successful attack on the Nazi heavy-water plant in Vemork, Norway during the war.[xxxiii] It was a captured SOE bomb that Colonel Claus Stauffenberg used in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944.

Though there is no evidence that Fleming ever killed anyone, he liked to hint to his friends "that he had once been compelled to perform this terrible deed . . ." He told friends that he killed a man with a sand bag, or a small automatic pistol concealed in one of his old brown leather briefcases (one with an obvious hole in it), or shot an agent of the Vichy government and tipped him over the waterfront in Marseille. [xxxiv] Fleming created the license-to-kill agent for his fiction; they were agents that had killed or were "privileged to kill in active service," with "double-o" identification numbers. These agents were extremely rare, Bond being one of only three in the British Secret Service.[xxxv]

[i] Eastgate, R. "Soldier of Fortune," The Courier Mail, Brisbane, Australia, February 24, 1996, p. 7.

[ii] "The Man Behind Bond," http://news.bbc.co.uk/, BBC Online Network, November 19,1999.

[iii] McCormick, Donald. Who's Who in Spy Fiction, Elm Tree Books, London, 1977, p. 75.

[iv] Bryce wrote a memoir of his friendship with Ian and his brothers. Bryce, Ivar. You Only Live Once - Memories of Ian Fleming, Weldenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., G. Britain, 1984.

[v] McCormick, Donald. Who's Who in Spy Fiction, Elm Tree Books, London, 1977, p. 75.

[vi] Lycett, Andrew. "Ian Fleming: The Spy Who Loved Muriel," The Australian, September, 1, 2000, p. 13.

[vii] From the 30 Commando Assault Unit Web site [http://www30.brinkster.com/darkin100/]: "The unit was joint, with its men drawn from all three Services, and it included a sizable proportion of Royal Marines, This band of colorful and in some cases eccentric, characters was given intensive commando training before being dispatched on their often highly dangerous missions.

"The unit found itself operating in a number of campaigns throughout the world. Its achievements were considerable in that a large amount of invaluable intelligence material was sent back to the UK for analysis. By virtue of being in the van of the Allied advance, many members of the unit found themselves in some highly unusual situations including the offer of surrender of the city of Bremen by its Burgomaster as well as the surrender of Italian, German, and Japanese Admirals."

[viii] Nathanson's foreword for his novel The Dirty Dozen reads, "The story is fiction. I have heard a legend that there might have been men like them, but nowhere in the archives of the U.S. Government, or in its military history did I find it recorded." Of course, Fleming's Red Indians were part of British military history.

[ix] Master, Anthony. The Man Who Was M -- The Life of Maxwell Knight. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1984. p. 127-8.

[x] Skorzeny wryly comments, with an air of forced irony and revenge that Hess " . . . landed in a field belonging to a farmer named David Maclean . . . with some imagination one could imagine that the brave Scottish farmer . . . belonged to the same clan as Donald Maclean, who passed important atomic secrets to the Soviets years later, in 1963, escaped to Russia after falling under suspicion." Skorzeny, Otto. My Commando Operations - The Memoirs of Hitler's Most Daring Commando, Schiffer Military History, Altgen, Pa., 1995, p. 70.

[xi] Sutin, Lawrence. Do What Though Wilt - A Life of Aleister Crowley, St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 2000, pp. 388-9.

[xii] Skorzeny, Otto. My Commando Operations - The Memoirs of Hitler's Most Daring Commando, Schiffer Military History, Altgen, Pa., 1995, pp. 64-74.

[xiii] Breuer, William. Deceptions in World War II, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 2001, p. 107.

[xiv] Smith, Michael. "How Fleming's 'Goldeneye' Hit the Rocks, http://www.telelgraph.co.uk, Electronic Telegraph, Issue 759, UK News, June 23, 1997.

[xv] De La Rue, Keith. "The Name's Fleming - Ian Fleming," July 23, 1999

[xvi] Lycett, Andrew. "Ian Fleming: The Spy Who Loved Muriel," The Australian, September, 1, 2000, p. 13.

[xvii] McCabe, Bob. Sean Connery, A Biography, Thunder's Mouth Press, London, 2000, pp. 41-2.

[xviii] Sullivan, Walter. "Bonding Fact, Fiction," The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, Australia, December 30, 1995, p. 64.

[xix] Kilzer, Louis. Hitler's Traitor, Presidio Press, Novato, Ca., 2000.

[xx] Farago, Ladislas. Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1974. Farago claims to have met Bormann in a hospital in Tupiza, Bolivia, though the meeting may have been nothing more than a ruse to embezzle a half a million dollars from Farago for "Bormann's memoirs," p. 428.

[xxi] "Martin Bormann's Remains Said to Be Verified. (DNA tests done on bones of private secretary of Adolf Hitler)." The New York Times, May 4, 1998, v. 147, p 10. DNA expert Wolfgang Eisenmenger compared genetic samples from Bormann relatives with the skeletal remains found in 1972 near the Weidenbammer Bridge, Berlin. Bormann was believed to have died there in the early morning hours of May 2, 1945.

[xxii] Vronsky, Jeanne. "Moscow News," December 29, 1995, n. 51 p. 14 (1).

[xxiii] Hartley's daughter, Norma Steen, claims that the story is ridiculous and has been debunked by the B.B.C. Though Hartley resembled Bormann, Steen believes that he had been trained as a Bormann look-alike by the British secret service and had carried the pretense long after the war. West, Nigel. Counterfeit Spies, St. Ermin's Press, London, 1998, p. 167.

[xxiv] Stafford, David. Camp X, Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1986, p. xvi.

[xxv] Ibid., p.281.

[xxvi] Ibid., p.284.

[xxvii] Dorrill, Stephen. MI6, Free Press, New York, 2000, p. 610.

[xxviii] Ibid., p. 611.

[xxix] Author Richard Deacon has defined the SOE as a special section of the British SIS created in 1938 under Col. Lawrence le Grand. Deacon also writes that the SOE was an "ill-considered organization with the vague aim of aiding Resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII." Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, MacDonald, London, 1987, p.190.

[xxx] Dorrill, Stephen. MI6, Free Press, New York, 2000, p. 611.

[xxxi] Ibid., p. 611.

[xxxii] Schlesinger, Hank. "For Your Eyes Only. (Keith Melton's Museum of Espionage Paraphernalia)," Smithsonian, July 2001, p. 48.

[xxxiii] Haukelid, Knut. Skis Against the Atom, North American Heritage Press, Minot, N.D., 1989.

[xxxiv] Pearson, John. The Life of Ian Fleming, McGraw Hill, 1966, New York, p. 173.

[xxxv] Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale, MJF Books, New York, p. 59.