Where Did Ian Fleming's License-to-Kill Idea Come From?

James Bond creator, Ian 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-0" identification numbers. These agents were extremely rare, Bond being one of only three in the British Secret Service.[1]

In 1941, British Naval Cmdr. Ian Fleming worked at the MI6 station in New York City with William Stephenson, the head of the British Security Coordination. The Canadian William Stephenson, had the code name of "Intrepid" and was recognized by Churchill as a key player in British intelligence. He entered the war as a self-made millionaire who built airplanes and controlled the largest movie studio outside of Hollywood. With his connections to the film industry, he was able to employ the Swedish actress Greta Garbo in his desire to track vital materials, like heavy water, into Nazi Germany. Stephenson created a vast spy network in the Americas and paid many of his spies with his own money. 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. [2] Stephenson was one of the first people to read a draft of Fleming's first novel Casino Royale. He told Fleming that it wouldn't sell because the plot was based too much on realistic intelligence work - "truth is always less believable." [3] Fleming often dismissed his character Bond as a caricature of real spymasters -- a real spymaster being Stephenson himself.

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 Fleming's real 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. [4]

Fleming may have gleaned 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 may 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." [5] 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. [6] 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." [7] The SOE trained Czech agents to assassinate the heinous chief of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Nazi SS General 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. [8] 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.[9] 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.[10] 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. [11]

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

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

[3] De La Rue, Keith. "The Name's Fleming - Ian Fleming," July 23, 1999 http://www.users.bigpond.com/delelarue/5fleming.htm.

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

[5] Ibid., p. 611.

[6] 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.

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

[8] Ibid., p. 611.

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

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

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