James Bond/Ian Fleming

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James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 14, 2008 4:18 pm

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... inment/spe
cials/for_your_eyes_only/article3652410.ece

April 5, 2008
Was Ian Fleming the real 007?

The war heroes, spymasters and beautiful women who inspired Ian
Fleming to create James Bond

Ben Macintyre

One morning in February 1952, in a holiday hideaway on the island of
Jamaica, a middle-aged British journalist sat down at his desk and
set about inventing a fictional secret agent, a character that would
go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative
creations in literature. Ian Fleming had never written a novel
before. He had tried his hand at banking, stockbroking and working
as a newspaper correspondent. Only during the war, as an officer in
naval intelligence, had he found a task – dreaming up schemes to
bamboozle the enemy – worthy of his vivid imagination. By 1952, he
had settled into a job as a writer and manager on The Sunday Times,
a role that involved some enjoyable travel, a little work and a lot
of golf, women and lunch. Even his best friends would have snorted
at the notion that Ian Fleming was destined for immortality.

This, then, was the man who, after a morning swim to sluice out the
hangover of the night before, hunched over the desk in his Jamaican
home, "Goldeneye", and began to type, using six fingers, on his
elderly Royal portable typewriter. The opening line would read: "The
scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the
morning?" Fleming wrote fast, the words pouring out at the rate of
2,000 a day. A month after he had started writing, he tapped out the
words "the bitch is dead now." Casino Royale was complete, and James
Bond was born.

All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more
than most, firmly anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the
people, things and places he knew. The characters, plots, places,
machines and situations in the James Bond stories are so firmly
embedded in fact that it is often hard to spot where the real world
of Ian Fleming ends and the fictional world of James Bond begins.
Espionage is itself a shadowy trade between truth and untruth, a
complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality. As a
former intelligence officer, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote
like one.

Like the character he had created, Ian Fleming was a great deal more
complex than he seemed on first acquaintance. Beneath the sybaritic
exterior, he was a driven man, intensely observant, with an internal
sense of romance and drama that belied his public languor and
occasional cynicism. Bond is, in part, Fleming, and the exploits of
007 grew directly out of Fleming's knowledge of wartime intelligence
and espionage: he would teasingly refer to the Bond books
as "autobiography". Like every good journalist, Fleming was a
magpie, collecting material avidly and continuously: names, places,
plots, gadgets, faces, restaurant menus and phrases; details from
reality that would then be translated into fiction. He once
remarked, "Everything I write has a precedent in truth."

But Bond is also, in part, what Fleming was not. He was the fantasy
of what Fleming would like to have been – indeed, what every
Englishman raised on Bulldog Drummond and wartime derring-do would
like to have been. Bond is a grown-up romantic fairytale, a promise
that Britain, having triumphed in the World War, was still a force
to be reckoned with in the dull chill of the Cold War. In the grim
austerity of postwar Britain, here was a man dining on champagne and
caviar, enjoying guiltless sex, glamorous foreign travel and an
apparently unlimited expense account.

Thirteen more Bond books would follow Casino Royale. By the time of
his death, just 12 years later, Ian Fleming had sold more than 40
million copies, and given birth to a multibillion-dollar film
industry. Today, more than half the world's population has seen at
least one Bond film. Even at the height of his fame, Fleming
maintained an airy attitude toward his books. "I extracted them from
my wartime memories," he remarked, "dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book." This nonchalance
was the purest bluff, something that Fleming, as a lifelong card-
player and intelligence expert, was very good at. The idea for Bond
had been gestating in his mind, and his personality, for at least a
decade. Back in 1944, Fleming had told a friend in deep
earnestness, "I am going to write the spy story to end all spy
stories."

And that is exactly what he did.

Who was James Bond? Every acquaintance of Ian Fleming ran the risk
of ending up in one of his Bond books, and almost every character in
his fiction is based on a real person, even if only by name. He
plucked these monikers from his social circle, his memory, his
reading, his favourite newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, and his
imagination: old school friends (and enemies), clubmen, colleagues
in the City and Fleet Street, golfing partners, girlfriends and
others found themselves transported into Fleming's fiction. There
are several theories as to the origin of the name James Bond. The
most popular (and one that he publicly affirmed) is that Fleming,
sitting down to work at his desk in Goldeneye, simply lifted the
name from his bookshelves, his eye having alighted upon Field Guide
to Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, the standard reference
book.

People were named after things, and things were named after people.
His lover in later life, Blanche Blackwell, gave him a small boat
named Octopussy, which became the name of a man-eating pet octopus
in the short story. In rather ungallant return, Fleming named the
ancient guano tanker in Dr No the Blanche. The crime boss Marc-Ange
Draco in On Her Majesty's Secret Service is named after El Draco,
the Spanish name for Sir Francis Drake – a reference picked up years
later by J. K. Rowling for her Hogwarts antihero, Draco Malfoy. Rosa
Klebb (the Russian for bread) was partly based on Colonel Rybkin of
Soviet intelligence. Major Boothroyd, the secret service armourer,
is named in honour of Geoffrey Boothroyd, the gun expert who
provided Fleming with invaluable technical advice.

Like most fictional characters, James Bond is not one
individual. "He was a compound of all the secret agents and commando
types I met during the war," Fleming once declared. Chief among the
contenders is, of course, Fleming himself. The physical descriptions
of 007 recall his creator, with his "longish nose" and
slightly "cruel mouth". Fleming sometimes played up the
autobiographical aspects of Bond, and sometimes downplayed them. "I
couldn't possibly be James Bond," he told a friend. "He's got more
guts than I have. He's also considerably more handsome." Peter
Fleming, Ian's hero-worshipped elder brother, may have come a little
closer to that model, being good-looking, cultured, tough and, most
importantly, a secret agent, having been drafted into the world of
military intelligence and irregular warfare early in the war.

Behind the Flemings follows a parade of swashbuckling types, each
with a claim to a little of the Bond myth: Conrad O'Brien-Ffrench, a
spy Fleming had first met on the Austrian ski slopes in the Thirties
when the older man was gathering information on German troop
deployments as part of an amateur spy network made up of journalists
and businessmen. Another strong candidate is Patrick Dalzel-Job, who
served in the intelligence commando unit Fleming helped to establish
in the latter part of the War. Dalzel-Job was a superb marksman who
could ski backwards, parachute behind enemy lines and pilot a
miniature submarine. On assignment, he wore an airman's jacket with
a compass hidden inside one of the buttons, and smoked a pipe with a
hidden map-chamber. Serving in Norway in 1940, Dalzel-Job revealed a
Bond-like streak of rebellion when he disobeyed a direct order and
insisted on evacuating 5,000 Norwegian civilians from the town of
Narvik who were facing imminent Nazi retaliation. By the time
Fleming met him in 1944, Dalzel-Job had won a reputation for bravery
just this side of lunacy. Throughout his long life, Dalzel-Job was
credited with being the model for James Bond. He never denied the
association, but disarmingly pointed out: "I have never read a Bond
book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style? And I only ever
loved one woman, and I'm not a drinking man." Other contenders
include Michael Mason, a fur-trapper and successful boxer who
operated as an agent in Romania during the war. Also Wilfred "Biffy"
Dunderdale, the station chief of SIS (MI6) in Paris, whom Fleming
met in 1940. A regular at Maxim's on the Rue Royale, exquisite in
Cartier cufflinks and handmade suit, driving an armour-plated Rolls-
Royce through Paris, Dunderdale had much of Bond's style.

The real "M" may be easier to identify. The fictional Admiral Sir
Miles Messervy KCMG is based, in large part, on Admiral John
Godfrey, Fleming's boss at the Naval Intelligence Department. M is
grumpy, rude and every inch the naval martinet, with "damnably
clear" bright blue eyes; his underlings are terrified and loyal in
equal parts. All these traits were apparent in Godfrey. Fleming
described him as a "real war-winner". The admiral would eventually
ask Fleming to write his biography (Fleming declined), yet it seems
the inspiration for M was not entirely pleased to be immortalised as
the boss of a cold-blooded killer. "He turned me into that unsavoury
character, M," Godfrey complained after Fleming's death.

The original M may, in fact, have been Z. "Colonel Z", Lieutenant
Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the
shadowy Z network. The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful,
charming and slightly mad. He was first recruited as a spy during
the Boer War, and ended up a pivotal figure in the British secret
service. Two famous men who worked in wartime intelligence gave very
different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm Muggeridge called
Dansey "the only professional in MI6"; the historian Hugh Trevor-
Roper, however, considered him "an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent,
but with a certain low cunning".

Another contender as the original M was the strange MI5 spymaster
Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service
responsible for rooting out potential subversives in Britain. Knight
was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being
infiltrated by communist moles. He was a man of many parts, most of
them odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge spy
ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist who had been taught by
Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the
bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive
naturalist who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive
works as How to Keep a Gorilla. Maxwell Knight signed all his
memos "M", and was certainly well known to Fleming. After the war,
Knight would move effortlessly from a career in spying to a new
career as a naturalist, ending his life as "Uncle Max", a much-loved
BBC presenter of nature programmes for children.

There is one final intriguing hypothesis, advanced by John Pearson,
Fleming's first biographer, to the effect that M might conceivably
be modelled on Fleming's mother. Certainly, "M" was Fleming's
nickname for his mother from early childhood. She, like M, was by
turns strict and indulgent, loved and feared.

The principal model for the much-loved Moneypenny character appears
to have been a Miss Kathleen Pettigrew, who was the personal
assistant to Stewart Menzies, director general of MI6, or "C". In
the first draft of Casino Royale, M's secretary was "Miss Pettavel"
or "Petty", but Fleming clearly realised that was too close to
reality, and changed it. Miss Pettigrew was something of a legend in
espionage circles: anyone attempting to gain access to C had first
to pass through his terrifying secretary, who was brisk, efficient
and not remotely seductive. One former colleague described her as
a "formidable, grey-haired lady with the square jaw of the
battleship type".

Vera Atkins, executive officer with "F" (French) Section of the
Special Operations Executive (SOE), the espionage and sabotage
organisation organised by Churchill to "set Europe ablaze", was
described in her New York Times obituary in 2000 as "widely believed
to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny". Another strong
possibility is Victoire "Paddy" Bennett, who worked as a secretary
in Room 39 and knew Fleming well. Paddy Bennett once described her
former colleague, somewhat tartly, as "definitely James Bond, in his
mind". She went on to marry Sir Julian Ridsdale, the long-serving MP
for Harwich, and was made a Dame of the British Empire for her work
with the Parliamentary Wives Club – a role that has a distinctly
Moneypennyish ring to it.

Fleming's villains, like his heroes, are patchworks of different
people, names and traits. Le Chiffre, the Benzedrine-sniffing
villain of Casino Royale, is believed to be based on Aleister
Crowley, who gained notoriety in inter-war Britain as "the Wickedest
Man in the World". Crowley was a bisexual, sado-masochistic drug
addict. A master of Thelemic mysticism ("Do what thou wilt shall be
the whole of the Law"), he specialised in mountaineering,
interpreting the Ouija board, orgies and thrashing his lovers. The
press simultaneously adored and hated him. Crowley made Le Chiffre
seem positively sane.

Fleming plundered his school register ruthlessly in the quest for
names. Hugo Drax, the villain in Moonraker, was named after the
magnificently festooned Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly
Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, an old friend of Fleming's. Ernst Stavro
Blofeld, the super-villain without earlobes, was probably named
after another Old Etonian, Tom Blofeld, whose son Henry Blofeld is
the much-loved BBC cricket commentator. Francisco "Pistols"
Scaramanga, the triple-nippled gunman in The Man with the Golden
Gun, was named after yet another school contemporary, George
Scaramanga.

Some people objected to seeing their names in a Bond novel, most
notably Ernö Goldfinger, the distinguished modernist architect.
Fleming is said to have disapproved of Goldfinger's love of concrete
and the destruction of Victorian houses to make way for tower
blocks, and so used his name for one of his most memorable evil-
doers:

Auric Goldfinger, the gold-obsessed treasurer of Smersh. When Ernö
obtained a proof copy of Goldfinger, he was enraged: Ernö was a
visionary 6ft architect and Auric is a murderous 5ft megalomaniac.
There is also a whiff of anti-Semitism in Fleming's depiction of a
Jewish billionaire with a gold fixation. The real Goldfinger
threatened to halt publication. Equally angry, Fleming thought his
publisher should insert an erratum slip, changing Goldfinger
to "Goldprick" throughout the book. Fleming's publishers eventually
agreed that, in advertising the book, the name Goldfinger would be
coupled with the name Auric wherever possible. Even so, for the rest
of his life Ernö Goldfinger was plagued by people calling him on the
telephone and saying, in the voice of Sean Connery, "Goldfinger?
This is 007."

Bond's women were echoes of Fleming's women, and perhaps one woman above all. Muriel Wright was 26 and a fresh-faced English rose when Fleming met her in 1935. "Mu", as he called her, was an expert
rider, skied beautifully and was one of Britain's foremost polo
players. She came from the finest landed British bloodstock. With an
explosion of blonde hair that earned her the nickname "Honeytop",
she was also exceptionally beautiful and refreshingly
unconventional. She was rich enough not to have to work, but
nonetheless made a good deal of money modelling sportswear and,
almost scandalously, swimsuits on the beach at Monte Carlo. Muriel
loved horses, dogs, parties, gossip and fun; but most of all she
loved Ian Fleming, to the point of self-abasement. She would caddy
for him on the golf links, and rush to collect his custom-made
cigarettes when he ran out. One of his friends called her
Fleming's "slave".

Fleming enjoyed showing Mu off to his friends, and annoying his
family by introducing this slightly scatty beauty into weekend house
parties. But he undoubtedly treated her very badly. Fleming was
consistently unfaithful, and, unlike some of his lovers, she minded.
It is said that her lack of intellect stood in the way of his
commitment, but then there is no evidence Fleming considered brains
to be an attractive quality in a woman, and quite a lot to suggest
otherwise.

Then suddenly, like some character in a Bond movie, she was dead. On
March 14, 1944, Muriel Wright returned to her flat in Eaton Mews
(having just delivered Fleming his weekly package of cigarettes) and
went to bed. That night, there was an air raid: a chunk of masonry
hurtled through her window, striking Mu in the temple and killing
her at once. Fleming was called from the card table to identify the
body. He was distraught, and wracked with remorse at the way he had
treated her. Mu, he reflected sadly, had been "too good to be true".

The quality of being "too good to be true" is, of course, what
distinguishes the Bond Girls. Muriel Wright has a claim to be the
fons et origo of the species: pliant and undemanding, beautiful but
innocent, outdoorsy, physically tough, implicitly vulnerable and
uncomplaining, and then tragically dead, before or soon after
marriage.

Fleming's plots, like his characters, are rooted in reality,
emerging in many instances directly from the Second World War and
the Cold War. Fleming was quick to point out that the reality of the
espionage game was stranger than any fiction he could invent: "My
plots are fantastic, while often being based on truth. They go
wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond the possible."

The most pleasing irony is that MI6 itself is happy to blur the
question of where James Bond ends and real life begins. The official
MI6 website cannot bring itself to deny its greatest asset, pointing
out that recruits will enjoy "a stimulating and rewarding career
which, like Bond's, will be in the service of their country". James
Bond is an MI6 recruiter. A real spy agency, harnessing fiction,
based on fact, to recruit real spies: no one would have been more
flattered than Ian Fleming.

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre is
published by Bloomsbury on April 7 to coincide with an exhibition of
the same name at the Imperial War Museum from April 17 to March 1,
2009, and is available from BooksFirst priced £18 (RRP £20), free
p&p on 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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April 7, 2008
The spy who loved it

The creator of James Bond liked his women wealthy, double-jointed
and able to make an incomparable Bearnaise sauce. What went on in
the often dark sexual world of Bond girls and Ian Fleming?

Ben Macintyre

It is a mark of James Bond's cultural reach that, for better or
worse, a "Bond Girl" has attained a specific meaning in modern
parlance, with either positive or negative connotations depending on
your point of view (and, perhaps, your gender). A Bond Girl is
beautiful, for sure, and sassy and sporty; she is also sexually
available, and unlikely to make a fuss when she is killed off,
either literally or metaphorically, at the end of the last
instalment to make way for new love interest.

She tends to be good at one-liners, but less inclined to
intellectual conversation. In the books, at least, Bond's women are
often damaged, in need of male protection, and with some small
physical flaw. Like Bond's cars, they are attractive commodities,
subject to modifications and improvements, but they can also be
exchanged for newer, faster models without much regret. The Bond
Girl is a very specific postwar fantasy. Fleming had enjoyed an
expansive sex life before the war, and the war had loosened sexual
mores greatly. Here was a hero enjoying sex, not merely outside
marriage, but effectively without responsibilities or guilt.

Bond is the first major British thriller hero to lead an active sex
life. Bond's attitudes to women caused outrage, titillation and
amusement in roughly equal parts: they made a generation of men and
boys very overexcited, and a generation of feminists extremely
angry. But even those critics prepared to see Bond's bed-hopping for
the fantasy it was found something chilly and unpleasant in Bond's
sexual licence and emotional reserve. In the films, Bond's sex life
attained levels of priapism that would merit serious medical
attention or industrial supplies of Viagra in a real human being.
The Bond expert Henry Chancellor has calculated that Bond sleeps
with just 14 women in 12 books, between 1953 and 1964, of whom only
five disappear between one book and the next, compared with an
astonishing 58 conquests in the first 20 Bond films.

Bond's approach to sex grew directly out of Fleming's own
distinctive attitudes to women, which in turn were shaped by the
times he lived in, the class he occupied and his own psychological
and sexual preoccupations. Fleming might have been an easy lay, but
he was not an easy man. He has sometimes, somewhat unfairly, been
characterised as a philandering lounge lizard.

The truth is more complex. Fleming was certainly attracted to many
women; they were attracted to him, and he knew it. His charm, wit,
vulpine good looks, wealth, mysterious war record and slight air of
melancholy were powerfully seductive. He had many love affairs,
often with other people's wives, including those of close friends.
Certainly, he was more versed in seduction than courtship. "The
direct approach to sex has become the norm," he told one
interviewer. His own approach was direct to the point of bluntness.
He would ask a woman, often on slender acquaintance or first
meeting, to go to bed with him; if she declined, he would simply
move on, unashamed, unresentful and unembarrassed. He was successfulas often as not - odds which he seemed to find perfectly acceptable.

Sex was a sort of sport: "He looked on women as a schoolboy does.
They were remote, mysterious beings," said one family friend. "You
will never hope to understand them, but, if you're clever, you can
occasionally shoot one down."

Fleming was tremendously interested in sex. Indeed, he studied and
pursued the subject, in theory and in practice, with the same avid
interest he showed in gadgetry, rocketry, science and politics. He
assembled an impressive personal collection of erotica, which he
liked to show to visitors, particularly female ones. Flagellation,
which amateur psychologists like to trace back to his beatings at
school, held a particular fascination. A certain amount of jocular
whipping and slippering appear to have formed part of his marriage,
and there are several references to these practices in Bond. Agent
007 periodically threatens to spank various women, including, rather
courageously, Miss Moneypenny. Not one of the women seems remotely
surprised by the suggestion.

More unpleasantly, Bond's apparently insouciant attitude to rape has
long provoked debate. In Casino Royale, we learn of Vesper Lynd
that "the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in
her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape". Worse yet, in The
Spy Who Loved Me, the narrator Vivienne Michel opines: "All women
love semi-rape..." Fleming, under a barrage of criticism, tried to
argue that The Spy Who Loved Me was an attempt to show young people that Bond was not a good role model. My own view is that Fleming was not seriously defending rape, or even semi-rape, but trying to shock
by reinforcing the idea of Bond's essential cruelty: if so, he
shocked far more than he intended, and he still does, leaving a tang
of toleration for sexual violence that is very far from sweet.

Yet there was, as so often, another side to this careless sexual
conquistador. Fleming's longer-term relationships were not with the
cocktail party poppets and sexual silhouettes of the novels, but
with older, married women. He cultivated a roué air, but he also
longed for emotional stability. His relationship with his eventual
wife, Ann Rothermere (another wife of a friend, whom he married in
1952), was long, intense, complex and fierce, but also supportive
and, at times, deeply loving. At one tempestuous juncture in their
stormy marriage he wrote to Ann: "What we both want is more love and
warmth but that is a fire we both need to blow on if it is to burn."
Bond could never have said that. It is entirely possible that for
all his skirt-chasing, Fleming did not in the end like very many
women, and understood even fewer. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann
acutely observed: "The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with
women because he cannot get on with them."

As a young man, Fleming hopped from woman to woman with few regrets, except perhaps one. Fleming met Muriel Wright while skiing in
Kitzbühel in 1935. Aristocratic, sporty and fun-loving, "Mu"
worshipped Fleming; in return, he was consistently and blithely
unfaithful to her. Fleming's reputation was well known to Mu's
horrified family, and her brother Fitzherbert even turned up at
Fleming's home with a horse whip, intending to administer the
traditional punishment for cads, only to find that the couple had
vanished. When Mu was killed in an air raid in 1944, Fleming was
traumatised and guilt-ridden. Muriel Wright was the original Bond
girl, beautiful, simple, and doomed, and her sad fate runs
throughout Fleming's fiction.

Bond would have married Vesper Lynd, in Casino Royale, but she kills
herself. Ten books later, there are distinct elements of Muriel in
the well-born, golden-haired Countess Teresa (Tracy) di Vicenzo, in
On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond does marry Tracy, but soon
afterwards she, too, perishes. Bond's distress over Tracy's corpse
may be an echo of Fleming's anguish at Muriel's death so many years
earlier.

A year before he had met Muriel, Fleming first laid eyes on Ann (née
Charteris), the young wife of Shane, Baron O'Neill, and future wife
of Esmond, Lord Rothermere, and the woman Fleming would finally
marry in the same year he wrote his first Bond book. Ann was in many
ways the opposite of Mu, being dark, highly intelligent, waspish,
worldly, sophisticated, emotionally complicated and extraordinarily
good company. Fleming's love affair with Ann started during the war;
it continued after O'Neill's death and her marriage to Rothermere;
and it lasted, tumultuously, until the end of his life. "We are, of
course, totally unsuited," Fleming predicted on the eve of
marriage. "China will fly and there will be rage and tears."

There were, indeed, ample tears and flying crockery. Ann could be
wounding, referring to his writing as "pornography"; he, in turn,
made no secret of his dislike for her literary friends. After two
years of marriage, he was already complaining, only half in
jest: "In the old days I demanded or perhaps pleaded for three
things in a wife. She should have enough money to buy her own
clothes, she should be able to make incomparable Béarnaise sauce,
and she should be double-jointed. In the event I got none of these
things."

The rows grew furious, and the marriage colder. Fleming conducted a
long affair with a neighbour in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell; Ann did
the same with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party. She was
jealous; he, characteristically, was not. When they were apart, they
missed each other painfully. When they were together, they fought
viciously and, as self-absorbed people often do, publicly.

Shades of Fleming's turbulent marriage are reflected in Bond's
attitude to women. The "conventional parabola" of a Bond affair,
described in Casino Royale, is a statement of unalloyed
cynicism: "The meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his
flat, her flat, then the weekend by the sea, then the flats again,
then the furtive alibis and the angry farewell on some doorstep in
the rain." Bond points out that if he got married, he would first
need to divorce himself from M and the secret service. James Bond
has no children, no siblings, and no parents. He is the empty vessel
into which the reader decants his or her expectations. Women, Bond
declares, are for recreation; he has no desire to tote the emotional
baggage that comes from a serious relationship.

The qualities Bond admires are physical, practical and culinary: in
Bond's eyes, the ideal woman should be able to make a Béarnaise
sauce as well as they make love though not, presumably, at the same
time. Character or intellect are purely secondary in Bond's
estimation: "Gold hair. Grey eyes. A sinful mouth. Perfect figure.
And of course she's got to be witty and poised and know how to dress
and play cards..." Fleming was something of a connoisseur of women's
fashion, and often describes the clothing of Bond's lovers in lavish
detail. The wit is an interesting requirement, since the Bond of the
books is never remotely witty: the jokes and one-liners are purely
an invention of the films.

Some critics have got very hot under the collar at Bond's sexual
activity: "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism", screeched Paul Johnson in the
New Statesman, blasting the "mechanical, two-dimensional sex-
longings of a frustrated adolescent".

Bond girls are all, of course, intensely attractive, but each bears
some small imperfection, a mark of vulnerability: Honeychile Rider
has a broken nose; Domino Vitali has one slightly shorter leg. Their
names usually offer the hint of availability, and were often drawn
from people or things that Fleming knew: Honeychile was the nickname
of Pat Wilder, an American former dancer in Bob Hope's troupe who
married Prince Alex Hohenlohe, owner of an exclusive Alpine skiing
resort; "Solitaire" (Simone Latrelle in Live and Let Die) is named
after a Jamaican bird.

Bond is heterosexual from his brogues to his haircut (which cannot
quite be said of Fleming, who had many gay friends and could on
occasion be fantastically camp). 007 does not approve of homosexuals
("unhappy, sexual misfits"), or sexual equality, or even votes for
women. His books, Fleming declared, were "written for warm-blooded
heterosexuals".

Outside the more Jurassic corners of London clubland, it would be
hard, these days, to find anyone with the same views as James
Bond. "Doesn't do to get mixed up with neurotic women in this
business," M tells Bond gravely in From Russia with Love: "They hang
on to your gun-arm." All of this adds up to a very potent postwar
daydream for a particular sort of old-fashioned gent. Having played
a vital role in the war, women were asserting themselves in the home
and the workplace; they were even becoming secret agents, and had
been effective as such during the war, being rather better in that
line of work than men. Male dominance was under threat wherever you
looked, but not in Bond's world. Bond offered a reassuring fantasy,
old-fashioned in tone but modern in sexual liberty: men were still
the world's heroes, modern Saint Georges, who could slay the dragon
and then fall into the arms of an adoring, beautiful, slightly weak
woman, who would love him unquestioningly, and then whip up a
terrific Béarnaise sauce.
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Postby Nordic » Thu Aug 14, 2008 4:27 pm

Lately I've been thinking about one of the few James Bond books I've ever actually read, the title of which I cannot remember.

But the villian was a programmed assassin, a man who had been raised since childhood by an evil government specifically for that.

You know, CIA style. Only it was some Eastern-bloc baddie.

I've been wondering if Fleming didn't know about some of the mind-control programs of the CIA. You know, the John Hinckleys and the Chapmans and the Sirhan Sirhans ......
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Postby Stephen Morgan » Fri Aug 15, 2008 11:28 am

Nordic wrote:I've been wondering if Fleming didn't know about some of the mind-control programs of the CIA. You know, the John Hinckleys and the Chapmans and the Sirhan Sirhans ......


OT, but Barry Seal comes under this category too. Abusive parents, father in the KKK, quickly recruited by famed paedo Ferrie...
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
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John Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald and Ian Fleming

Postby MinM » Thu May 31, 2012 9:18 am

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What connects John Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Ian Fleming and the assassination?
Malcolm Ward wrote:Posted 30 May 2012 - 02:09 PM

JFK and LHO were reading one of Fleming's novels about this time.

Reading or re-reading the original Bond books is a wonderful way to while away the hours. These were the ultimate beach/holiday books of the 1950's and 1960's. Both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were each reading an Ian Fleming novel at the time of the assassination in November of 1963. The books are full of politically incorrect stereotypes and crude misogyny, but are also an enormous source of sheer reading pleasure. Flemings' books are clearly to the right of the Bond Movies--Fleming is a determined anti-communist. His first villain, Le Chiffre, is a sadistic communist paymaster who works as a go- between the Soviets and radical French trade Unions.

Source: http://americanconservativeinlondon.blo ... ondon.html
John Simkin wrote:Exactly right. Further details can be found in Andrew Lycett's, Ian Fleming (1996).

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry253852

The Death of Hugh Gaitskell and Ian Fleming

007, LHO & JFK
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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby Byrne » Thu May 31, 2012 10:34 am

From JFK researcher, Bill Kelly's blog:


Saturday, May 5, 2012

JFK, Michael Straight, Ian Fleming & Kim Philby

"In Washington (on September 10, 1963), Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn E. Thompson prepared a memo of his conversation with the Russians and JFK’s response. As described by Mark White, the editor The Kennedys and Cuba, 'In a secret message to JFK, Khrushchev makes clear that he is aware of the recent resumption of sabotage by the United States against Cuba. He also warns Kennedy that the Soviet Union will respond if Cuba is attacked.'”


Despite the official State Dept. declaration of March 1963 that no attacks would be made against Cuba from US Shores, the Special Group and JFK approved five such attacks that were proposed in April, approved in June and conducted in the fall of 1963. Most of the commandos infiltrated were immediately arrested by Cubans, much like the Frank Wisner's Albanians were rounded up when infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s. Kim Philby was identified as the security breach in the Albanian operation, and should be a suspect in the betrayal of the JMWAVE Cubans.


One of the reasons the government and CIA continue to resist the release of the records related to the assassination of President Kennedy is because of national security.


The CIA might oppose the release of 50 year old operational records related to the assassination of President Kennedy on grounds of national security, since Castro is still alive and the records are still relevant today, but the American people are the only ones being kept in the dark about what’s so secret since both Castro’s G2 infiltrated JMWAVE as sea level while Kim Philby penetrated the CIA at the highest levels in Washington.


Things might have continued on unabated had not President Kennedy appointed Michael Straight to a prominent post in the government, which set a series of events in motion that are still being felt to this day, and is at the heart of the government’s continued resistance to the opening of their records, not an attempt to keep the enemy from learning the most important secrets, because they already know, but to keep the American people from knowing the embarrassing truths.


JFK, MICHAEL STRAIGHT, IAN FLEMING AND KIM PHILBY

All of the official biographies of Ian Fleming acknowledge that he took the name for his fictional 007 hero from James Bond, the American author of the book Birds of the West Indies, but they also all falsely claim that Bond enjoyed the celebrity status Fleming gave him and took it as a joke, when in fact Bond was quite annoyed and deeply resented the “theft of his identity.”


So I also began to question the validity of the frequently repeated statement that Fleming began to write the 007 novels on a lark, to take his mind off his impending marriage, and considered the possibility that there was a more significant “operational” motive behind the literature. They could have been written either to boost the morale of the British Secret Service which was severely damaged by the betrayal of Kim Philby and the Cambridge spy ring or to salvage some of the operations they may have exposed.


This thought occurred to me when I read Jim Houghan (in Secret Agenda – Watergate, Deep Throat & the CIA, Random House, 1984, p. 5-6) where he notes that:


“When (E. Howard) Hunt first approached Colson for work in the White House, he was still a part of the CIA. His retirement from the agency would not occur until April 30, 1970, and, considering his record, the possibility of his retirement was bogus is quite real. Indeed, this was the third time that Hunt had left the Central Intelligence Agency. The first occasion was in 1960, when he was issued fraudulent retirement papers to facilitate his liaison with anti-Castro exiles. When that invasion was launched, only to founder, Hunt returned to the agency’s staff – having never actually left its payroll. Five years later, in 1965, Hunt quit for a second time. The author of more than four dozen pulp thrillers and novels of the occult, Hunt left the agency in furtherance of a counterintelligence scheme that revolved around his literary efforts. The purpose of the scheme, according to government sources familiar with Hunt’s curriculum vitae at the agency, was to draw the KGB’s attention to books that Hunt was writing under the pseudonym David St. John. These spy novels alluded to actual CIA operations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and contained barely disguised portraits of political figures as diverse as Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It was the CIA’s intention that the KGB be led to believe that the books contained security breaches, and toward that end the agency created a phony ‘flap’ that was capped by Hunt’s supposedly ‘forced retirement.’ In his memoir of his years as a spy, Hunt does not mention the counterintelligence aspects of the David St. John novels, but writes, ‘I resigned from the CIA [this second time], and was at once rehired as a contract agent, responsible only to [the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, Thomas Karamessines.’”


Since it has also been acknowledged that E. Howard Hunt, in light of the success of Ian Fleming’s 007 books, had obtained official permission to write his spy-fiction novels as an intelligence operation, perhaps there is something to the idea that Fleming also began to write his novels as a counter-intelligence project as well.


Fleming began to write his first 007 novel within a year of the defection of Burgess and Maclean.


In January 1952, when Fleming sat down at his typewriter to begin his first 007 novel, “Casino Royale,” it was no longer a matter of speculation as to whether the British Secret Service had been betrayed by its own long standing members, it was only a matter of determining the severity of the damage and what could be done to rectify it.


When Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean disappeared the previous May, 1951, shortly before MacLean was to be confronted with the evidence he was a Soviet spy and interrogated, the speculation centered on the identity of the “third man” who had tipped them off and allowed them to flee. Since these secrets were tightly held by only a few men in the counter-intelligence field, the “third man” was certainly positioned in a high place within the Secret Service, and a major effort was made to identify him.


The investigation quickly focused on Kim Philby, a former Cambridge classmate of Burgess and Mclean, who at the time was serving in Washington D.C. as liaison to the CIA and FBI.


Both Burgess and Maclean had been posted to America and associated with Philby, and Burgess drew suspicion on himself and Philby by his outrageous behavior, sparking William Harvey “America’s James Bond,” to question whether Philby and Burgess were Soviet agents. But James Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence branch, discounted any such notions, especially after many three-martini lunches with Philby.


In November 1956 Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 visited Washington D.C. to brief the Americans about the missing diplomats and the Third Man affair. Driving Hollis around town, Richard Helms of the CIA asked Hollis, “Who’s this writer Ian Fleming?” Helms mentioned the recently published book Live and Let Die, but Hollis replied, “I don’t know.”


A few days later it was revealed that Prime Minister Anthony Eton had flown to Jamaica to spend some time at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye beach house, sparking Helms to assume, “The man lied. Hollis must have cleared the prime minister to stay with Fleming,” wrote Tim Bower [in The Perfect English Spy].


When President Kennedy, already familiar with the 007 novels, and having entertained Fleming at dinner at his home, requested to meet the “American James Bond,” he was presented with William Harvey, who insisted that Philby and Burgess were Soviet spies.


While Burgess’ treachery was confirmed by his disappearance, Philby weathered the storm and though relieved from his position as liaison to the American services, was eventually rehired by MI6 – the British foreign intelligence service.

President Kennedy then nominated Michael Straight to be the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, a move that unraveled a whole new line of inquiry that revitalized the spy hunt for the elusive “third man.”

Image
Michael Straight

Michael Straight, nominated by JFK to be the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, at first accepted and then turned it down after he feared a background investigation would uncover his association with the Cambridge University communist spy cell that also included Kim Philby, Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess.


At first Straight accepted the prestigious position, but when he realized that he would have to undergo a vigorous background check, he declined because he too was one of those recruited by the Soviets while a student at Cambridge. When he explained his dilemma to a friend he was advised to go to the FBI and tell them everything, which he did.


After writing the first 007 novel Casino Royale, Fleming and his wife returned to England for the birth of their son Casper. After dropping her off at the hospital, Fleming visited an old friend from their school days, the American born Whitney Straight, then chairman of BOAC airlines. Both Whitney Straight and his younger brother Michael had attended Cambridge and were personal friends with Guy Burgess, and according to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, the case of the Missing Diplomats is what they discussed.


Michael Straight was preceded at Cambridge by his older brother Whitney, a playboy race car driver who introduced Michael to the Pitt Club, which has been described as a “hunting and drinking” club, where he first met Guy Burgess, who Straight dismissed as “an alcoholic adventurer, a name dropper and gypsy.”


While most of the Cambridge spy ring were members of the Apostles, Michael Straight, Guy Burgess and James Bond himself, from some years earlier, were members of the Pitt Club, and continued their affiliation with the club years after they left Cambridge.


Among those who attended Cambridge, James Bond and Michael Straight, while years apart, stood out conspicuously as American “Yanks,” though they too were products of the British prep school system, Bond having attended St. Paul’s school in New Hampshire and then Harrow in England, while Michael and his older brother Whitney attended Dartington Hall in South Devon.


A month after his arrival at Cambridge Michael Straight was reluctantly recruited into the Cambridge Communist cell by Anthony Blunt, who would go on to become a member of the Secret Service as well as the surveyor of the Queen’s extensive art collection. Although he declined Blunt’s invitation to join them, Straight never betrayed his friends and assisted them in other ways.


Straight’s reluctance to willingly serve the Soviets did not prevent them from obtaining valuable use of him, especially when he returned to America and became editor and publisher of the New Republic, which published some of Philby’s commentaries.


J. E. Hover had ordered a complete investigation of all the American students who attended Cambridge in the 1930s to see if there were any more similar communist moles who had burrowed into the heart of the American government bureaucracy, the Straight brothers among them, but James Bond himself apparently avoided that dragnet since he had attended in the 1920s, even though the communist recruiters were busy at work there at that time too.


According to John Costello [Mask of Treachery – Spies, Lies and Betrayal, Warner Books, 1988], Straight “…was given a list of eighty-five Americans who attended Cambridge University between the years 1930 and 1934, from which he picked out one American who he knew casually at he Department of State. He then named two more Americans with whom he had studied at Cambridge between 1936 and 1937 and whom he knew to have been Trinity cell members and/or Communist sympathizers…The FBI representative in the U.S. Embassy in London recommended a full review of all Americans who had studied at either Oxford or Cambridge before the war.” [Costello would die suspiciously while engaged in his investigation of the Cambridge spy ring.]


Although J. E. Hover allegedly balked at “the political repercussions of an investigation of over 500 American citizens with no basis for such inquiry in fact,” the CIA reportedly changed his mind and “as a result, the records of nearly six hundred Americans who had attended Oxford or Cambridge before World War II were carefully compiled, examined and scrutinized.”


If James Bond was among those scrutinized, it wasn’t the first time he came to the attention of the counter-intelligence, counter-spies, as Bond had called attention to himself by providing information to the FBI about some German activity in the Caribbean during World War II.


According to Mrs. Mary W. Bond, in her book To James Bond With Love [Sutter House, 1980], while on a bird hunting expedition in Haiti, Bond had a run in with a reclusive and suspicious German on Morne La Selle mountain. When he returned home Bond “told his friend Brandon Barringer about the encounter with the German, and Brandon took it up with the authorities in Washington. Jim (Bond) was promptly visited at the Academy of Natural Sciences by Army, and then Navy intelligence officers.”


As Mrs. Bond related, “Fleming would have been intrigued with the final twist to the story. The intelligence people asked a lot of foolish questions and seemed far more suspicious about Jim’s reason for climbing Morne La Selle than about the German’s activities.”


Whether by intent or coincidence, James Bond’s Cambridge ties add credence to the theory that Ian Fleming wrote the 007 novels as part of a concerted psychological warfare operation rather than on a ‘lark,’ and the James Bond stories have more to do with actual covert operations than has been acknowledged.


One biographer, Andrew Lycett, [in The Man Behind James Bond, Turner, 1995] while mocking Fleming’s actual intentions and motives, acknowledged how Fleming’s first novel was inspired by the betrayals of the Cambridge spies when he wrote: “What raised Casino Royale out of the usual run of thrillers was Ian’s attempt to reflect the disturbing moral ambiguity of a post-war world that could produce such traitors like Burgess and Maclean. Although Bond is presented like Bulldog Drummond with all the trappings of a traditional fictional secret agent,…in fact he needs ‘Marshall Aid’ from Leiter (CIA) to enable him to continue his baccarat game with Le Chiffre. Bond is rescued from his kidnappers not by the British or the Americans but by the Russians, who complete the job he should of done by eliminating Le Chiffre. Bond does not even get the girl: [Vesper] she has been duplicitous throughout, betraying not only him personally but all Western Intelligence’s anti-Soviet operations. No wonder, feeling let down and abandoned, he fails to conceal his bitterness at the end and spits out, ‘The bitch is dead now.’”
.
If Casino Royale was Ian Fleming’s response to the betrayal of the Cambridge spy ring, then portraying the women who loved James Bond as the snake who actually worked for the opposition, was much like the sexual ambiguity and background of the Cambridge spies.


Although his official biographies hardly mention their names, Ian Fleming had many close associations with all three traitors – Philby, Burgess and Maclean.


The career paths of Ian Fleming and Kim Philby crossed more than once, but most certainly during World War II when Philby was responsible for MI-6 counter-intelligence for the Iberian peninsula – Spain and Portugal, which includes Gibralta, for which Fleming was given the responsibility of planning the defense of for the Admirality, a plan he codenamed “Goldeneye,” also the name of his Jamaican estate.


In his fictional obituary of 007, Fleming notes that his James Bond attended Eton, as did many of those involved in these intrigues beginning with “C,” Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of the British Secret Service and on whose watch the Cambridge moles were recruited into it. Other former Eton students include Ian Fleming and Guy Burgess, and Eton headmaster Charles Elliot was the father of Fleming’s chief MI6 contact Nicholas Elliot. The old Eton ties facilitated recruitment into the British Secret Service when Menzies served as its head.


The day before Burgess embarked on his sudden journey to Moscow with Maclean, he returned to Cambridge where he visited a former history professor to explain a moral dilemma concerning his authorship of a biography of the Earl of Sandwich authorized by the family.


At the same time Maclean was in London where he met and had lunch with Fleming’s close associate Cyril Connolly, who after the defection, was assigned to write about the missing diplomats by Fleming’s Sunday Times.


According to Douglas Sutherland [in The Fourth Man – The Story of Blunt, Philby, Burgess and McLean, Arrow Books, 1980], “The late Cyril Connolly, the well-known Sunday Times book critic, was a close friend of Maclean’s and lunched with him the day before he left on 25 May, 1951.”


Sutherland quoted Connolly as saying: “I was very interested to read your remarks about Mclean and Burgess…because I knew them both and actually lunched with Maclean the day before he disappeared. The point I want to mention to you was that on that day I am sure he had no intention of leaving the way he did. He spoke to me so normally as to his private affairs…this makes me feel that, subsequent to meeting me on May 24th, he received some warning that he was under suspicion, and immediately left the country with Burgess. It may be, therefore, that someone in the Foreign Office told him on May 25th that you had authorized him to be questioned. Of course it was not until the Foreign Office knew that the security office knew as well.” Now we know that person was Kim Philby.


Cyril Connolly’s book on the affair was to have been published by Queen Anne’s Press, on his board of directors Ian Fleming served. The publishing company’s name did not disguise the nature of their interests, as Queen Anne’s Gate was where the offices of the British Secret Service were located.


Most intriguing among the connections between Fleming and the Cambridge moles is the sequence of events that resulted in Burgess and Maclean publicly surfacing in Moscow. While most people suspected they were in the Soviet Union, it wasn’t known for sure until Fleming’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Hughes urged the Russians to produce the two defectors before a major British-Soviet summit conference. At Fleming’s suggestion Hughes made an effort to contact the “missing diplomats,” succeeded in meeting the two in a Moscow hotel and obtained a formal statement from them. Hughes did so by making an official inquiry, suggesting that the scheduled summit conference would not be successful unless the matter of the missing diplomats was first explained.


Then after Burgess and Maclean publicly surfaced, the British-Soviet summit conference was disrupted by a botched covert operation, much like the Gary Powers-U2 incident wrecked the USA-Soviet summit in 1959. British frogman Buster Crabb disappeared while investigating the hull of Khrushchev’s ship in Portsmouth harbor, his body discovered a few days later. Fleming even wrote about the incident, which was a joint venture between MI6 and British Naval Intelligence, and reportedly directed by Fleming’s chief contact in MI6, Nicholas Elliot, and eventually led to the resignation of the director of MI6.


The resurfacing of Burgess and Maclean also called unwanted attention to Kim Philby, who somehow had reclaimed his job with MI6 and was working in Beruit, Lebanon with the cover job as a correspondent for two British publications.


When Philby arrived in Beruit the MI6 station chief there was his long time friend and faithful supporter, Nicholas Elliot, Fleming’s contact who was reportedly responsible for the botched Buster Crabb operation that led not only to the resignation of the head of MI6 but also brought about a change in the political party in power. That November, shortly before relinquishing power, outgoing Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife took a vacation to Jamaica, where they stayed at Fleming’s Goldeneye.


With the change in government, the Buster Crabb incident also forced a change in the leadership of both MI6, responsible for foreign intelligence, and MI5, counter-intelligence, with the director of MI5 Dick White assuming the position of director of MI6, the first time anyone had served both positions. White was astonished when he learned that Philby, after all the fuss over the “Third Man,” was still working for MI6 in Beruit.


Tom Bower [in The Perfect English Spy – a biography of Sir Dick White] wrote, “Even thirteen years later when he met Burgess in Washington, he (Michael Straight) volunteered that he had never betrayed his friends. But in 1963 Straight was offered a government post and, apparently fearful of exposure, he had spent June closeted with FBI officers, including Bill Sullivan, detailing Blunt’s futile attempt at recruitment. In January, 1964, Straight repeated the story to Arthur Martin. By any measure, the confession was a major breakthrough. Not surprisingly, the MI5 officer returned to Britain excited about the disclosure. The molehunt had been legitimized.”


While the earlier evidence was inconclusive, with the addition of Michael Straight’s confession and a number of Soviet defectors who had identified Philby as a Russian spy, the evidence was overwhelming, his longtime friend Nicholas Elliot was ordered to confront him. Elliot did extract a confession of sorts from Philby, but he did not get him to return to England, and instead Philby disappeared, resurfacing in Moscow with his Cambridge mates, Burgess and Maclean.


How he got there, while a mystery for some time, had something to do with his Armenian friends, a connection he shared with Fleming.


Of their life in Beirut, Philby’s wife Eleanor wrote: “People are constantly asking me how it was possible that I, who shared his daily life, could have remained so unaware of his secret work for Russia. Perhaps the answer is that I just was not looking for clues. Looking back over our life together in Beirut, I can see some significance in one or two odd incidents which I thought nothing of at the time. There was, for example, the occasion when Kim, after a few drinks too many, decided late in the evening to take me and a friend out to dinner. We took a taxi and Kim directed the driver outside the city to an Armenian shanty town which sprawls across the malodorous Beirut river. In one of the mean streets, we stopped outside a first-floor restaurant full of shabby people. The food was good, but Kim, fuddled with alcohol, seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. Some weeks later I suggested we return to the Armenian restaurant. ‘What Armenian restaurant?’ Kim asked, giving a sharp look. He strongly denied that we had ever been to any such place.” [p. 48 Kim Philby-The Spy I Married, Eleanor Philby, Ballentine, 1968]


In The Third Man – The Full Story of Kim Philby [by E. H. Cookridge, Berkley Medllion, 1968] the mystery deepens further into the Armenian mist. Cookridge wrote: “On one occasion, however, Philby was almost caught red-handed. He was observed on night on the terrace of his apartment waving a dark object to and fro in the air. The observer was a security agent of the Lebanese secret police, the head of which was Colonel Tewfik Jalbout, a trusted ally of the American CIA, whom he had rendered many services in the past…To find out who was at the receiving end, Colonel Jalbout sent out a posse of agents, but Philby’s house stood on a hill overlooking a fairly large part of the city. The receiver of the signals could be one of several hundred people, looking from any window. However, the search was narrowed down to two or three suspects, one of them an Armenian, believed to be a Soviet agent….On another occasion one of Jalbout’s detectives reported that he had seen Philby twice changing taxicabs and eventually arriving at a small sweetshop belonging to an Armenian in the old city. Soon after, the Soviet assistant military attaché entered the shop. The detective did not dare stop the two men, as he was afraid to cause a diplomatic incident. The fact that both Philby and a Soviet officer had gone to a dirty little sweet shop, whose regular customers were Arab children, was significant, particularly if considered in conjunction with the other incidents observed.”


Then in the Philby Conspiracy [by Bruce Page, Daid Leitch and Philip Knightley (Times Newspaper-Signet, 1968)] it is revealed: “How did Philby get to Moscow? We are able to reveal for the first time, that Philby arrived on Russian soil four days after he left Beirut, i.e. on January 27, 1963…He made his way across Syria into Turkey. From there on, using his knowledge of the country gained during his earlier periods there and his contacts with Armenians which he had built up in Cyprus, he walked into Soviet Armenia. Then, feeling safe for the first time in thirty years, he ‘went home’ to Moscow.”


Before Philby fled however, Ian Fleming himself visited Beirut, arriving in November 1960 on his way to Kuwait, where he had been commissioned to write the official history of the Gulf emirate by the Kuwait Oil Company. In Beirut he met up with his friend and MI6 contact Nichoals Elliot. According to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, “…Elliot was delighted to see him. Their conversation ranged over a variety of intelligence-related topics, including Kim Philby, a key participant in the Missing Diplomats affair, who had been working in Beirut as a newspaperman since 1956. Ian told Elliot that he had his own minor freelance intelligence assignment to perform: the then NID chief Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denning had asked him for information about the Iraq port of Basra…Ian did not delay…at 10:30 sharp he asked to leave, saying he had a rendezvous with an Armenian in the Place de Canons in the center of town.”


“Perhaps,” speculated Lycett, “Ian was meeting Philby, whom he had certainly met during the war. But Elliot had the distinct impression his dinner guest had arranged to see a pornographic film in full color and sound.”


As we see, even though Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean are hardly mentioned in the first two official biographies of Fleming and dismissed by Lycett, they played a major role in his life and work, as well as his fiction.


“Casino Royale,” Fleming’s first 007 book, concerns the betrayal of a fellow agent named Vesper, the snake, and John Pearson, who wrote The Life of Ian Fleming, the first official biography, also wrote a companion book, A Biography of James Bond, an ostensibly fictional work in which he acknowledges discovering the real James Bond while researching and writing Fleming’s biography.


According to this account, Fleming wrote the 007 books in order to salvage some important on-going operations and to make James Bond such a famous and outrageous super hero, the Soviets would not believe that he really existed. And it worked.


http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.co.uk/20 ... g-kim.html
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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby MinM » Fri Jun 01, 2012 4:03 pm

Byrne wrote:From JFK researcher, Bill Kelly's blog:

Bill Kelly on James Bond (Roger Moore) and JFK:
Posted 06 May 2012 - 01:03 AM

I also came across this.

Sir Roger Moore does an outstandingly revealing and fascinating commentary on all his Bond movies on their DVD editions.

His 2005 commentary of the Live & Let Die movie reveals that while filming in Louisiana in 1972, Attorney General Jim Garrison invited him and the crew to tour his headquarters and they were shown a 8mm copy of--presumably--the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. This is exactly what Sir Roger said beginning at 1:41 in the movie with his commentary turned on to superimpose over the soundtrack:

"One day when we were shooting in, eh...New Orleans, we were invited by Jim Garrison, who was the then District Attorney to visit the City Hall...we went and it was very Bond-like...we went into a garage and doors were shut behind us, elevator doors; we went up and the doors were shut in his office...and he then showed this 8mm footage of the assassination of President Kennedy...which backed-up his theory of....there being...shots from front and back....very Bond-like...

I thought that he was very credible....

I still do...

007, LHO & JFK
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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby MinM » Fri Jul 27, 2012 3:17 pm

Before James Bond There Was Duckworth Drew

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Klint Finley

The latest issue of Wired has a small write-up by Marco Calavita on British novelist, propagandist and “paranoid xenophobe” William Le Queux and his creation Duckworth Drew, a character who may have influenced Ian Fleming’s creation of James Bond. The article isn’t on Wired’s website yet, and there’s surprisingly little about the Duckworth Drew character on the web.

From a Telegraph article on espionage:


What a strange bunch those early fictional spies seem now. One might expect that spy stories would feed on reality, but surely no reality can ever have touched Duckworth Drew of the Secret Service, the 1903 creation of William Le Queux. This was a man “upon whom rested the onerous and most perilous task of obtaining the well-guarded secrets of other nations and combating the machinations of England’s enemies”.

Duckworth Drew carried drugged cigars and poisoned pins to knock out the enemies of state long enough to read the secret treaty lying on the desk. England’s enemies reciprocated. Otto Kremplestein, chief of the German Secret Service, used to pop over the Channel to fox hunt in the shires as a cover...

http://technoccult.net/archives/2012/07 ... noccult%29

kenny July 27, 2012 7:32 PM

I'm assuming you're going to write up some more on your observations. Please shoot a link over here when you're done.

Just watched the James Bond and Queen thing. A world where the MI6 and CIA are ultimately the good guys. "God Save the Queen!"

http://kennysideshow.blogspot.com/2012/ ... mpics.html

viewtopic.php?p=471662#p471662

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 385x642308
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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby MinM » Tue Jul 31, 2012 11:19 am

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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby Hammer of Los » Tue Jul 31, 2012 12:02 pm

...

James Bond this, James Bond bloody that.

The BBC and just about every other media organ in the UK pushes James Bloody Bond like there was no tomorrow.

He's so british, dontcha know.

A national institution etc.

I guess the british film industry would be doing worse without him.

A womanising, charismatic, high living spy and assassin.

What a fu**in' role model that is.

On second thoughts.

You know that following every assertion with its negation thing?

I mean, on reflection it seems quite an enviable life style.

I don't fancy the killing people stuff though.

And guns scare me.

But the high living etc would make a nice change.

...
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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Nov 25, 2012 11:12 pm

.

I'll confess to liking the James Bond reboot, until this third lousy one. You could see the villain of the first as someone like Victor Bout, of the second as the Bechtel Corporation (trying to seize control of all the water in Bolivia), but in the third it turns into... Julian Assange! Rogue agent, beached-blonde hacker, his only motivation is revenge against The System. And the ambiguous Bond character of the first two by the end of the third has become a fully loyal Soldier for the UK, okay? Reporting to HQ for orders on sequels, sir! (Clearly the notion that this was a trilogy and that Bond might actually die was dispensed with, surprise surprise.)

Cockburn before his death wrote a surprisingly good piece on Bond, with a pretty obvious surrender on lone gunman theory (in bold).



http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/23/ ... nd-2/print

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.

Weekend Edition November 23-25, 2012

One From the Vault
50 Years of Bond, James Bond


by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The most successful saga in postwar popular culture got off to a conscientious start after breakfast on a tropical morning in Jamaica early in 1952. Ian Fleming, forty-three years old and ten weeks away from his first and last marriage, knocked out about 2,000 words on his Imperial portable claiming (falsely) that he was just passing time while his bride elect, Anne Rothermere, painted landscapes in the garden. In fact Fleming had been planning to write a spy thriller for years and he kept up the regimen of2,000 daily words until, two months later, he was done, with Commander James Bond recovering from a near lethal attack on his testicles from Le Chiffre’s carpet beater, Le Chiffre finished off by a Russian, Vesper Lynd dead by her own hand, and a major addition to the world’s cultural and political furniture under way.

On 16 January, 1962, ten years to the day after Fleming had typed those first words of Casino Royale (‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning’) filming began on Dr No at Palisadoes airport in Jamaica, with the British Secret Service and the CIA duly represented by Sean Connery and Jack Lord. Fleming lived long enough to see only two of the Bond films, Dr No and From Russia With Love, before dying in August, 1964 of a heart attack helped along by his seventy or so Morland’s Specials.

He has much to answer for. Without Fleming we would have had no OSS, hence no CIA. The cold war would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.


Doubtful thesis, but do go on!

Let those dubious of such assertions study the evidence. It was Fleming, assistant to the director of British naval intelligence during the Second World War, who visited Washington DC in 1941 and wrote a long memo of advice for General ‘Will Bill’ Donovan, President Roosevelt’s Co-ordinator of Information, whose duties included the collection of intelligence and the planning of various covert offensive operations. According to Ivar Bryce, a lifelong friend of Fleming’s who was working at the time for Sir William Stephenson, the director of Britain’s intelligence operations in the Americas, ‘Ian wrote out the charter for the COI at General Donovan’s request … He wrote it as a sort of imaginary exercise describing in detail all the arrangements necessary for financing, paying, organizing, controlling, and training a secret service in a country which had never had one before.’

Fleming’s memo was dashed down in long-hand over two days in the British Embassy with the diligence later exhibited in his imaginative stints after breakfast in Jamaica. It impressed Donovan who gave him a .38 Police Positive Colt inscribed with the words ‘For Special Services’ and went on to build the COI which later evolved into OSS and later still into the CIA.

So, you see, it was all Fleming’s fault. He had a riotous imagination utterly unsuited to serious intelligence collection and analysis. The offices of the British Admiralty often rang with laughter at his mad schemes. It was Fleming who suggested that British sailors be entombed in a giant lump of concrete off Dieppe, from which they could keep watch on Dieppe through periscopes. It was Fleming who proposed to send a cruiser into Nazi waters with a transmitter beamed to the German Navy’s wave-length which would, in his words, ‘keep up a torrent of abuse, challenging the German naval commanders by name to come out and do something about it. No sailor likes to be accused of cowardice, and Germans are always particularly touchy.’

Fortified by such boyish fantasies, the officers of OSS never wrought much damage to the foe, but, from Donovan and his subordinate Allen Dulles downwards, learned to exploit romantic public fantasies of what a secret service should be. Thus they ensured their survival, if not in the field then in the crucial bureaucratic battlegrounds of Washington.

At the end of the war the future of the OSS hung in the balance. Alert to the importance of publicity for their supposedly secret organization, Donovan and Dulles lent every assistance to Hollywood producers racing to be first in the theaters with an OSS movie. Paramount’s man in this race was Richard Maibaum, who, with Alan Ladd produced “OSS”. Donovan’s aid was later responsible for turning the Bond novels into film scripts. Maibaum recently recalled that ‘before we got done we had literally about ten technical agents all telling us marvelous stories of what had happened to them all over the world which we incorporated into the plot. There were foreshadowings of things in the Bond films, – the pipe that was a gun, and other gadgets. There were some things we couldn’t use, such as foul smelling stuff like an enormous fart that the OSS agents used to spray on people they wished to discredit, and thus cause them to be socially humiliated It was called Who, Me? We could never get it in, because the Johnson office would never let us use it.’

Soon the postwar audiences were enjoying Maibaum’s OSS along with Cloak and Dagger from Warner’s and 13, Rue Madeleine from Twentieth-Century Fox. This spy hype helped the OSS resist bureaucratic extinction and instead metastasize into the CIA.

Having engendered the OSS, Fleming now began to lure Anthony Eden down the path of fantasy. Like many in the small but enthusiastic fan club for Fleming’s early thrillers, Sir Anthony Eden rejoiced that in Fleming’s pages, if not in the real world, a Briton was capable of decisive, ruthless action. Eden, as prime minister, resolved that the fortunes of 007 would be reflected in bold deeds, undertaken by himself. In concert with France and Israel he invaded Egypt in 1956. He had not studied the works of his friend with sufficient care. Bond and his master, M, placed the highest priority upon acting at all times with the approval of the United States. In the case of Suez, President Eisenhower said the invasion had to stop and it did. Twelve days later Eden had an attack of what his spokesman called ‘severe overstrain’ and his doctors urged him to spend a few weeks in absolute seclusion and repose.

Once again Eden was overwhelmed by the fantasies of his friend. After the war Fleming had bought a plot of land on Jamaica’s North Shore and built a small house on it. To acquaintances trembling with cold in English winters Fleming would body forth ‘Goldeneye’, his Caribbean paradise. In the crisis, seeking rest, Eden and his wife decided to go to Goldeneye. Fleming was delighted, since it raised the rental value of the place and he was badly in need of cash. But for the Edens the trip was unfortunate. The quarters were unalluring. Gazing into the rafters of Goldeneye, the prime minister, already suffering bouts of paranoia, fancied he saw rats. He was right. He consumed days chasing them in the company of his two body-guards. Finally, harrowed by lack of sleep, broken in health, he returned to London, announced he was ‘fit to resume my duties’ and resigned three weeks later.

In 1958, Fleming wrote Dr No, which advanced the novel notion that Cuba, as the local representative of the international Communist conspiracy, had perfected a reactor-based instrument capable of sabotaging US missile tests, thus explaining the Soviets’ apparent advantage in space technology, as evidenced by the launching of the Sputnik. Having proposed a fictional Caribbean missile crisis, Fleming followed up in person. In the spring of 1960 he was taken to dinner at the Washington home of Senator and Democratic presidential candidate-elect Jack Kennedy. The conversation turned to the problem of Castro. How should he be dealt with? Fleming’s imagination sprang into action. As Fleming’s biographer, John Pierson, reported the conversation, he told the assembled company, which included a CIA man called John Bross, that the United States should send planes over Cuba dropping pamphlets, with the compliments of the Soviet Union, to the effect that owing to American atom bomb tests the atmosphere over the island had become radioactive; that radioactivity is held longest in beards; and that radioactivity makes men impotent. As a consequence the Cubans would shave off their beards, and without bearded Cubans there would be no revolution.

Everyone, including Senator Kennedy, laughed at the scheme. The next day Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, telephoned a friend of Fleming to express regrets that he had not been able to listen to Fleming’s plans in person. Within two years the Kennedy brothers along with Alien Dulles, director of the CIA, were hiring gangsters to help in either the murder or humiliation of Castro, with the latter being attempted by a dust which would cause his beard to fall out. The subculture of sabotage and assassination coaxed into being by the Kennedys finally, on November 22, 1963, turned back on the President.

Just as Eden helped raise the real estate value of Goldeneye, so did President Kennedy augment the fortunes of the fantasist. On 17 March, an article by Hugh Sidey in Life announced that President Kennedy could read at a rate of 1,200 words a minute and had ten favorite books. From Russia With Love was ninth, just ahead of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.

Bond became the embodiment of western discourse on the Cold War. The men who would later construct the Reaganite view of the universe turned time and again to their Bond for edification. From him they learned that the Russians use Bulgarians as “proxies” and thus the legend of the KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope was born. They watched Thunderball and conceived that terrorists, probably Libyans, would steal atomic bombs and attack American cities. They worried about germ warfare when they saw On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and about weather modificationwhen they saw The Man With the Golden Gun. But it was the lasers in Diamonds Are Forever, along with the space station in Moonraker that made the deepest impact. Could missiles be destroyed in space? Could there be such a thing as a space shield? To hand was a Bond sequel by John Gardner called For Special Services in which the villain announces on page 222 that -The Particle Beam once operational – will prevent any country from launching a conventional [sic] nuclear attack. Particle Beam means absolute neutralisation.- On March 23, 1983 President Reagan proposed a space-based defense system, known as SDI, which would use lasers and particle beams. Star Wars was born.

Bond was in poor ideological shape at the beginning, running badly to seed in a way that would have aroused the contempt of his fictional antecedent, the fascist Captain Bulldog Drummond. In an exchange in Casino Royale with the French agent Mathis, Bond unburdens himself of the following: “The villains and heroes all get mixed up. Of course … patriotism comes along and makes it seem fairly all right, but this country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out of date. Today we are fighting communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of conservatism we have today would have been damn near called communism, and we should have been told to go and fight that.’

It didn’t take too long for Bond to straighten himself out and declare unending war on evil in the manner prescribed by Mathis. As Maibaum puts it, ‘the basic success of Bond is lan Fleming’s James Bond syndrome: a ruthless killer who is also St George of England, a modern day combination of morality and immorality. In the age of the sick joke it clicked.’

Of course the Bond of the books was a bit of a sicko, held together mostly by his sanction from the state: licensed to kill. He could never keep any relationship together, and if Vesper Lynd hadn’t done herself in with a handful of Nembutals before they got married she probably would have got around to it in the end. What a prissy old autocrat of the breakfast table he would have been, howling for his perfectly brown egg, boiled for three and a third minutes and then put in its Minton cup, next to the Queen Anne coffee pot and the Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade!

There was something a bit common too in all this insistence on the very best, as though Bond knew that in the end he was, as the elegant Dr No put it in Maibaum’s line in the movie, ‘nothing but a stupid policeman,’ on hire to the ruling class. Hence the great scene in From Russia With Love, when the class impostor Bond, played by a working-class boy from Edinburgh with a Scots burr in his voice, comes up against the other class impostor and psychopath Red Grant, played by Robert Shaw. ‘Red wine with fish,’ says Connery, ‘I should have known.’ ‘I may take red wine with fish,’ Shaw hisses viciously, ‘but you’re the one on your knees now.’

Bond was in urgent need of a shrink. Fleming himself had the good fortune to be cared for in his troubled teens at Kitzbuhel in Switzerland by a couple called Forbes-Dennis, who were much influenced by Alfred Adler. Mrs Forbes Dennis, who wrote under the name Phyllis Bottome, thought the young Fleming proof of Adler’s theories, his impressive elder |g brother Peter being the Adlerian Gegenspieler. ‘The Gegenspieler; wrote Bottome in her book on Adler, ‘is a contemporary brother or sister by whom the child felt dethroned … in almost any intimate relationship that follows, the child as he develops into the man will build up the same perpetual antagonism between himself and any beloved person.’ The ^ subject, said Adler, pushes aside the world by a mechanism consisting of ‘hypersensitiveness and intolerance … the neurotic man employs a number of devices for enabling him to side-step the demands of reality.’

If Adler had lived long enough to visit Pinewood in 1982 when they were making Octopussy and Superman III he would have surely felt vindicated. Somewhere along the line, in their post-imperial fantasy life, the British got muddled about secrets and spying and sex and identity and the confusion has been causing them endless trouble ever since. On a one-week visit years ago to England I found the newspaper headlines were replete with spy and sex scandals. The Thatcher government was claiming that national security had been ‘compromised,’ by an article about a British spy satel¬ lite.

Another story concerned Mrs Payne, a woman on trial for running prostitutes, about whom Terry Jones, of the Monty Python crew, has produced a film. According to the account in The Independent, a tall man who dressed as a French maid at Cynthia Payne’s parties told yesterday how he was ‘touched up’ by a man he later learned was a ‘boisterous, tall and very fat’ undercover policeman. Keith Savage, with short cropped hair and a Geordie accent, told a jury that the bearded officer put his hand up his skirt and fondled his bottom. ‘I was a bit upset about the police bursting in and I thought this man was trying to console me. But he got a bit overfriendly … I think he had a motive of a sexual nature.’ Another policeman, he claimed, was dressed effeminately wearing eye make-up and a monocle.

* * *

The titular villains in the Bond books are always grotesques. Le Chiffre, in Casino Royale, set the tone, weighing in at 252 pounds at a height of 5’8″, with his ‘small, rather feminine mouth’, small hairy hands, small feet, small ears ‘with large lobes, indicating some Jewish blood’, ‘soft and even’ voice and white showing all round the iris of each eye, ‘large sexual appetites’ and ‘flagellant’ tastes. This, in admittedly baroque form, was our old friend the Father Figure, as evinced in the scene where Le Chiffre goes to work on Bond’s balls with the carpet beater and promises to chop them off with a carving knife.

Fleming inaugurates the torture scene thus: ‘”My dear boy”–Le Chiffre spoke like a father–”the game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups, and you have already found it a painful experience. You are not equipped, my dear boy, to play games with adults, and it was very foolish of your nanny in London to have sent you out here with your spade and bucket.’” But when Bond, manhood spared by the Russian executioner who dispatches Le Chiffre, recovers in hospital and then prepares–with Vesper Lynd’s help–to check that all physical systems are in working order, he discovers that she too is a villain.

This is less surprising when we realise that Bond’s women are often men, thinly disguised. This is progress from Buchan and Drummond where they were often horses. Vesper is introduced with the news that ‘her eyes were wide apart and deep blue and they gazed candidly back at Bond with a touch of ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he found he would like to shatter, roughly. Her skin was lightly suntanned and bore no trace of make-up except on her mouth which was wide and sensual. … the general impression of restraint in her appearance and movements was carried even to her fingernails, which wer unpainted and cut short.

Of course there was dutiful mention of Vesper’s “fine” breasts but Fleming does not seem to have been too interested in them. Four years later in From Russia With Love, Fleming scurries past Tatiana Romanova’s breasts with a mumbled “faultless” before assuming a hotly didactic tone on the matter of her ass: “A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man’s. A year later, after publication of Dr No Noel Coward wrote to Fleming, saying that he was slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile’s bottom was like a boy’s. “I know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?”

Fleming didn’t address the point in his response, but there is an answer in one of his notebooks from the thirties, a period when he looked, in one description, like someone who had walked out of the pages of The Romantic Agony: ‘Some women respond to the whip, some to the kiss. Most of them like a mixture of both, but none of them answer to the mind alone, to the intellectual demand, unless they are men dressed as women_ For Bond there were father figures lurking behind every shrub none more imposing than old M, with his damnably blue eyes, whom Bond tries kill in an Oedipal spasm at the start of OHMS. But here too we find that ambiguity discovered by the very fat policeman when he slipped his hand up Savage’s skirt. Fleming’s father was killed in the war when he was a boy. The dominant figure in lan’s life was his formidable mother Mrs Val. Like Holmes and Moriarty locked together over the Reichenbach Falls, motherand son maintained vigorous psychic combat until they died within two months of each other in l964, MrsVal going first in July. Fleming often called hiss mother M.

Always this terrible confusion! The real ‘M’ in the war was the head of MI5, a man called Maxwell Knight. He was loved by his secretary, Joan Miller. She died in 1984 but her daughter fought, over the desperate efforts of MI5 to suppress them, to publish her memoirs, which are now available in Ireland. There is a poignant passage in which Miller describes the object of her doomed love: “As I sat there watching this avowed opponent of homosexuality mince across the lawn, a number of things became clear to me. His tastes obviously inclined him in the direction of what, in a phrase not then current, is known as “rough trade”. It was plain that he’d taken himself that time, to the cinema tea room, instead of spending the afternoon with his wife in Oxford, in the hope of effecting a suitably scrubby pick up.”

If Bond’s women were men in the books, in the movies they are fish, starting with Honeychile who comes up out of the sea in Dr No in one of the most successful associations of woman with water since Botticelli stood Venus up on a clamshell. In the movies Bond is often to be found down in cold water or up in the snow. The problem for Maibaum and for the various directors was no doubt to find scenery to match or compensate for the distraught psychic landscapes of the books. They found the answer where Jules Verne so often did, in the soothingly amoral underworld of the sea. It didn’t always work. The underwater sequences in Thunderbolt are numbingly slow. But at their best, in the explicitly Verne-like Spy Who Loved Me with Curt Jurgens’ Atlantis on its tarantula legs, or in the lesbian fantasy, Octopussy, the movies do take on the surreal texture of a Max Ernst painting.

They also lightened everything up. The only time Bond really behaves like a licensed killer is at the start of Dr No, when he studies the renegade Strangeway’s empty gun, says ‘You’ve had your six’ and then kills him in cold blood. Maibaum gave Bond a sense of humor. The idea was to present the cold war as a necessary, but humorous–in the case of Moore, frivolous–ritual. Right from the start the film series stood in marked contrast to the books in being pro detente. The only bad Russians are renegades, part of SPECTER, intent on sowing distrust between the great powers, as in The Spy Who Loved Me, where Jurgens schemes to arrange mutual assured destruction of all great powers other than his own. Maibaum says now that starting with Dr No, ‘for some reason, looking at the very, very long-range future United Artists did not want the Russians to be out and out villains, so we made Dr No come from SPECTER rather than SMERSH. That was really done for reasons of motion picture distribution, thinking that maybe some day Bond might go to Russia.’

Dr No set the high standard for Bond villains. The best of these villains was probably Gert Frobe in Goldfinger and Maibaum gave him one of the best lines. ‘Do you expect me to talk?’ Connery grits as the laser slices towards his crotch. ‘No Mr Bond, I expect you to die.’ On the whole one feels rather sorry for the villains, cultured and bold, but thwarted in their schemes for world conquest by so mean an intellect as Bond’s. But films don’t have the juice that Fleming’s cold war fifties political stance gave the novels, which is no doubt why the films got more and more fantastical, as sea, snow and travelogue became substitutes for Fleming’s paranoid verve. It is not surprising, given the length of the Bond series, that the audiences now take so much pleasure in the expected, in Bond as ritual: the pre-credit sequence established in From Russia With Love; the encounter with Miss Moneypenny; the throw-away lines and polished dialogue; the gadgets produced by Q.

Ah yes, the gadgets: the briefcase with knives and gold sovereigns, the Aston Martin DBS with ejector seat and saw-blades in the wheel hubs … In the mid 1960s Umberto Eco wrote an interesting essay about Fleming in which he discussed the author’s stylistic technique. ‘Fleming takes time to convey the familiar with photographic accuracy,’ Eco wrote, ‘because it is upon the familiar that he can solicit our capacity for identification. Our credulity is solicited, blandished, directed to the region of possible and desirable things. Here the narration is realistic, the attention to detail intense; for the rest, so far as the unlikely is concerned, a few pages suffice and an implicit wink of the eye.’

Fleming, and through him, Bond, was acutely aware of commodities, mundane objects of desire. No previous thriller writer had ever accommodated himself to such an extent to the psychology of acquisition, of envy, to the spiritual rhythms of the advertising industry. The makers and marketers of Bond movies understood this aspect of Fleming’s appeal very well, and soon the world grew used to Bond’s pedantic lectures on Taittinger and Q’s proud demonstrations of the latest in British gadgetry. The movies are full of tie-ins, from Cartier watches to vodka to the trusty Aston Martin itself. Backdrop becomes commodified too, as the Bond producers scour the world for fresh locations and ministers of tourism plead for a visit.

In this matter of commodities the Bond films have been a somewhat ironic reverie of British omnipotence. The cycle of Bond films began just when the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was urging the nation to cast aside the archaic vestments of the past and bathe itself in the ‘white heat of technology’. Things worked in Bond movies but they didn’t work in Britain and as Kingsley Amis once sadly remarked, if Bond had really had to use his mini-submarine in combat conditions it would have surely taken him straight to the bottom. In 1983, just when Q gave Bond a staggering number of gadgets in Octopussy, Britain became for the first time in its history a net importer of industrial goods.

Noel Coward put the contrast between fantasy and reality well. ‘One of the things that still makes me laugh whenever I read Ian’s books is the contrast between the standard of living of dear old Bond and the sort of thing Ian used to put up with at Goldeneye. When Bond drinks his wine it has to be properly chambre, the tournedos slightly underdone, and so forth. But whenever I ate with Ian at Goldeneye the food was so abominable I used to cross myself before I took a mouthful. … I used to say, “Ian, it tastes like armpits.” And all the time you were eating there was an old lan smacking his lips for more while his guests remembered all those delicious meals he had put into the books.’

In that same weeklong visit to the UK years ago I turned on Channel 4 one evening. There was my friend Robin Blackburn, at that time editor of New Left Review, addressing the nation on the paramount necessity of Britain becoming truly socialist if it is to get out of its present mess. “The social horizon,” Robin said, “is still defined by institutions which serve British capital but which are not specifically capitalist and are not found in any other capitalist country. Our ruling institutions are the products of oligarchy and empire. Consecrated by time and custom they are like a dead weight on the imagination and aspirations of the living. Britain has become a living museum of obsolescence, whose most splendid trophy is nothing less than the world’s last ancien regime.”

Under prime ministers stretching back to Churchill, 007 has done his best, probably none better, to put Britain’s foot forward. He himself is, with the happy assistance of United Artists, one of Britain’s most successful exports. But if Bond is a fine example of world cultural integration at the level of kitsch, things have not always been in good shape on the home front. What has improved strongly is the coercive apparatus of the state. ‘You’re nothing but a stupid policeman,’ Dr No told Bond. If he had not had the misfortune to drown in his own nuclear well, the doctor would have been unhappy to discover that Bond’s trade–policing the British state–has fared better than most of the other props in the old museum. In this respect at least, the fantasy came true.

This article is reprinted from Serpents in the Garden by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Mon Nov 26, 2012 11:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby DrVolin » Mon Nov 26, 2012 9:53 am

At times a bit fuzzy on the direction of the cause-and-effect relationship, but a very interesting write up. He didn't mention one of my favourite Fleming wartime schemes: repair a crash landed Heinkel bomber, ditch it into the channels, have the crew rescued by an S-Boot, have the bomber crew kill the S-Boot crew and drive the boat back to England with its Enigma rotor machine. Apparently never implemented :)

I found that the villain in Skyfall was a major change from tradition in both the books and films. Bond villains can be psychopathic, yes, but they usually have a motive that is either mercenary or patriotic. Their foul deeds are almost never internally motivated, and they certainly don't tend to be suicidal. Bardem's performance is wonderful, but the character is not a bond villain.
all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars

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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby slimmouse » Sun Dec 02, 2012 12:25 am

Theres some nice historical context to the entire James Bond thing in the following longish article, which traces the history of the Elizabethan alchemist and mathematician John Dee , the original 007, on whom Fleming apparently based his own 20th Century character. Whilst I can't vouch for the author, which means its highly likely that its a very straight laced "official" narrative, it is nonetheless, quite interesting.

Image

Dee signed his letters with two circles symbolising his own two eyes and indicating that he was the secret eyes of the Queen.The two circles are guarded by what may be considered a square root sign or an elongated seven. For Dee, seven was a sacred cabbalistic and lucky number.(Richard Deacon)


Link ; http://www.sirbacon.org/links/dblohseven.html

Meanwhile, speaking of James Bond and baddies and all that, this board has yet again provided a source of inspiration (duly credited by return links) for a few of my own thoughts on how all that James Bond stuff works. Anyone interested, just hit the link in my sig.
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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby MinM » Mon Jun 10, 2013 1:51 pm

Image
@NitrateDiva: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Shirley Eaton on the set of GOLDFINGER

***
Image @Poynter: ICYMI: CIA invests in robot journalism: http://www.poynter.org/?post_type=post&p=215304Narrative Science has "raised an undisclosed amount of funding from In-Q-Tel"

CIA invests in robot journalism

Narrative Science has “raised an undisclosed amount of funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture firm that invests on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency, Peter Kafka reports.

In-Q-Tel also invests on behalf of other intelligence agencies. It was named after the James Bond character Q.

Narrative Science is somewhat known in journalism circles for its automated sports and finance articles, but in a fascinating profile last year, Steven Levy wrote about how the company “realized that it could produce much more than journalism.”

Indeed, anyone who needed to translate and explain large sets of data could benefit from its services. Requests poured in from people who were buried in spreadsheets and charts. It turned out that those people would pay to convert all that confusing information into a couple of readable paragraphs that hit the key points.

In regard to intelligence agencies, Kafka writes, “you can imagine lots of places where Narrative Science could go to work.”

Those guys have a lot of data, and it would probably be helpful to have some of that sorted into sentences and summaries. It’d be great to show you an example of that work, but obviously that’s not gonna happen.

In 2009 In-Q-Tel invested in Visible Technologies, a company that monitors social media, blogs and other forms of online communication.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/medi ... ournalism/

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RIP Roger Moore

Postby MinM » Tue May 23, 2017 10:56 am

@haaretzcom

In honor of Sir Roger Moore, James Bond 007's secret Jewish history
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MinM » Fri Jun 01, 2012 3:03 pm wrote:
Byrne wrote:From JFK researcher, Bill Kelly's blog:

Bill Kelly on James Bond (Roger Moore) and JFK:
Posted 06 May 2012 - 01:03 AM

I also came across this.

Sir Roger Moore does an outstandingly revealing and fascinating commentary on all his Bond movies on their DVD editions.

His 2005 commentary of the Live & Let Die movie reveals that while filming in Louisiana in 1972, Attorney General Jim Garrison invited him and the crew to tour his headquarters and they were shown a 8mm copy of--presumably--the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. This is exactly what Sir Roger said beginning at 1:41 in the movie with his commentary turned on to superimpose over the soundtrack:

"One day when we were shooting in, eh...New Orleans, we were invited by Jim Garrison, who was the then District Attorney to visit the City Hall...we went and it was very Bond-like...we went into a garage and doors were shut behind us, elevator doors; we went up and the doors were shut in his office...and he then showed this 8mm footage of the assassination of President Kennedy...which backed-up his theory of....there being...shots from front and back....very Bond-like...

I thought that he was very credible....

I still do...

007, LHO & JFK
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Re: James Bond/Ian Fleming

Postby smoking since 1879 » Wed May 24, 2017 6:37 am

Craig Murray

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/roger-moore-met/
The Roger Moore I Met 122
23 May, 2017 in Uncategorized by craig

A brief extract from my memoir The Catholic Orangemen of Togo

On the other side of the equation, Roger Moore came out as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Fiona and I hosted a small dinner party for him. He was charming and suave, just as you would expect, with a fund of brilliant stories beginning with lines like “One day Frank, Dean, Tony and I decided to play a trick on Marilyn…” But while he played the role of Roger Moore to perfection, there was much more to him than that. He was genuinely very well briefed about children’s issues in Ghana, and was prepared not just to do the PR stuff, but to get his hands dirty helping out in refugee camps without a camera in sight. I was impressed by Roger Moore.


When I said get his hands dirty, I meant dig latrines. He really was a much better man than people realised. A celebrity who did not seek personal publicity for his good works, quite the opposite. Remember this re foxhunting:
"Now that the assertive, the self-aggrandising, the arrogant and the self-opinionated have allowed their obnoxious foolishness to beggar us all I see no reason in listening to their drivelling nonsense any more." Stanilic
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