The Bond Code
Coming 2008
Book and Film
by Philip Gardiner

It was winter and the nights were long, dark and cold. There was nothing better to do on this particular night than to escape into the world of film. There was a revival of all things James Bond on the television and in the newspapers, and being a child of the Bond period I sat back and enjoyed a couple of films.

I rarely watch television, but sometimes, regardless of what one may think about mind manipulation, commercials and propaganda, it’s nice to relax. What I didn’t realise was that this simple act would set me off into a dark and sinister world that would reveal an incredible secret at the heart of the British Secret Service…

Ian Lancaster Fleming was born in Mayfair, London, to Valentine Fleming and Evelyn St. Croix-Rose Fleming on May 28th 1908. He died on August 12th 1964. His father was once a Member of the British Parliament who died in action in the Great War and his mother descended from Royal blood. His elder brother, Peter Fleming, would go on to become one of the worlds most famous travel writers and before Bond took off for Ian, Peter unintentionally eclipsed everything Ian did.

Ian Fleming was born into the class of Englishmen for whom every option is open and yet he managed to be able to close them down single-handedly. The family was wealthy, not least because his grandfather, Robert Fleming, was a successful Scottish banker. However, Valentine Fleming’s Will and Testament stipulated that Evelyn would only retain the family wealth so long as she never remarried and this caused ongoing family issues throughout Ian’s life. Another issue, which would cause problems, was the ghost of his father as the erudite parliamentarian and war hero. Ian Fleming grew from the age of eight without his father and under the dominance of his overbearing mother. The children used to say prayers and ask God that they be as good as their father.

Unfortunately Ian Fleming could not live up to these ideals and failed to be both a parliamentarian, which he did once run for, and an action war hero. On the other hand, his brother, Peter, succeeded and indeed excelled in everything he did, from sports to writing and even the role of all-action war hero. Ian Fleming’s education at Eton didn’t go so well as his elders brothers and so he was moved to ‘a more convenient’ situation at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. To the annoyance of his mother, ‘Val,’ he didn’t much take to Sandhurst and so she sent him abroad to ‘learn languages’ – a distinct cover story for failure.

He went to Austria where he spent time with the Adlerian disciple Forbes Dennis and his American wife, Phyllis Bottome. The cover story was to improve his German and other languages, but the truth was to try and fix this troublesome teenager. Following his time here he moved on and eventually disappointed everybody by finding a job as a sub-editor and journalist at the Reuters news agency. Later on he also worked as a stockbroker. At this time he took up residence in Belgravia, 22B Ebury Street, where he spent his time entertaining friends over dinner parties. He attempted to live the high life without the complete financial means and yet he always seemed to scrape by and offer up a façade that fooled everybody. Inside himself he was bored. The stock market offered no great excitement and he obviously envied his globe-trotting journalistic brother.

Nevertheless he collected books and started to grow an extensive network of friends that would be useful for his future life as a novelist, not least because they gave him a list of characters to choose from. Friends in the Foreign Office arranged for an exciting excursion for the young Fleming in 1939 and sent him off to Russia under the auspices of reporting for the Times newspaper. In fact he was spying for the Foreign Office the whole time and other journalists spotted the ruse but remained quiet. By May 1939 war had broken out across Europe. Ian Fleming needed a role and was soon to find himself recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, as his personal assistant. He moved from Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Lieutenant to Lieutenant Commander and then finally to Commander – the rank he would eventually give to James Bond. It seemed that the peculiar, arrogant, imaginative and forthright nature that was Ian Fleming, worked well for military intelligence just so long as it was kept on a leash. He worked tirelessly throughout the whole war and got to know every section well.

Personal assistant to the Rear Admiral was a huge responsibility and Fleming took to the role well and made sure he knew everything he possibly could, soaking it up like a sponge and storing it all unwittingly for later Bond novels. Between 1941 and 1942 Rear Admiral Godfrey along with Fleming made secret trips to the USA in-order to open and maintain dialogues between the various and newly formed intelligence agencies, meeting such classic figures as J. Edgar Hoover and William Stephenson. In 1941 the American General, William Donovan asked Fleming to write a memorandum outlining the structure of a proposed secret service. This set Fleming’s mind racing and his imagination on overdrive. He completed the task and was awarded a .38 Police Positive Colt pistol for his services inscribed “For Special Services.” The memorandum Fleming penned was actually used in part when the OSS was organised. The OSS or the Office of Strategic Services was the USA Intelligence agency formed during the Second World War and would later help to create the CIA.

Fleming also travelled to Ceylon, Jamaica, Australia, France, Spain and North Africa, visiting embassies and setting up Operation Goldeneye, which importantly, he named, to defend Gibralter.

By 1942 Ian Fleming had secured authority to set up his own elite spy-commando unit known as 30 Auxiliary Unit and which he nicknamed “Red Indians.” The men were trained very much like the later James Bond, with lock picking, explosives, firearms and combat training. They were all-round intelligent and brave men and were in fact the real and original James Bond characters, being sent in to enemy territory in-order to extricate ciphers and weapons of interest. After the war Fleming didn’t begin to write books. Instead he moved back into journalism and ended up at the Times. He spent the time socialising with various groups that he kept quite separate and some secret; continued collecting books, including first editions of Mein Kampf and On the Origin of Species and finding a new part-time home in Jamaica which he renamed Goldeneye – both the operation and the home being named by the same man and indicating a deep liking for the name as I was to discover.

By 1953 however he plucked up the courage to finally write his first novel and published Casino Royale. Ever since, people have fought over who the real James Bond was. It was a slow start however, with Fleming wondering if the books would ever take-off. In fact he did what all good authors have to do – he hustled. His constant hustling eventually paid off and the US market opened up for him and sales soared. With the backing it seemed of Kennedy in the USA there was now no stopping Ian Fleming using every ladder he could to climb to the top. His skills were multi-purpose. He now began a routine that was to stay with him for the rest of his short life.

In January each year he flew to Jamaica to avoid the bitter English weather and write his novels. He remained there with all his daily rituals until March when he would return and take up his normal day job at the Kemsley newspaper empire. Then he met Lady Anne Rothermere and they fell in love and were indeed lovers for several years. Anne eventually became pregnant with Fleming’s child and so she divorced Lord Rothermere and married Ian Fleming. She gave birth to Caspar, Ian’s only son, who himself died in 1975.

Fleming’s circle of friends was incredible and nobody has really ever written them all down, for Ian Fleming kept them all quite separate from one another in individual groups. Such great names as Noel Coward, Cyril Connolly, Edith Sitwell, William Plomer, Peter Quennell, Raymond Chandler, Kingsley Amis and even the American ‘royals’, the Kennedy’s. At one time his home on Jamaica was used by the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Anthony Eden, to recover from an illness.

Fleming wrote in total twelve novels and nine short stories, all featuring the infamous suave and sophisticated super spy. Many people are in fact then surprised to discover that Fleming also wrote the children’s novel, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang because the film was adapted by Roald Dahl and is quite different to the book. By 1961 Ian Fleming had sold the film rights for all his Bond books, present and future to Harry Saltzman. With Albert R. Broccoli or “Cubby” for short, Saltzman made the first Bond film, Dr. No in 1962 with Sean Connery in the lead. Fleming had actually wanted David Niven his close friend and had also asked that his second-cousin Christopher Lee be considered for the part of Dr. No. Of course, everybody who has seen the films will know that Christopher Lee did not in fact get the part of Dr No, but sometime after the death of Ian Fleming he was asked to play Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun.

Ian Fleming only lived just long enough to see the second Bond film, From Russia With Love, released in 1963. For decades he had smoked over sixty cigarettes a day and drank all-manner of alcohol. His doctor once insisted that he reduce the daily intake and cut the cigarettes by ten, from seventy.

“I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in a magnificent glow, than a sleeping and permanent planet. The proper function of life is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use the time.” The Life of Ian Fleming, John Pearson, Aurum, 2003, London.

He suffered a severe chest cold combined with pleurisy and this forced him to consider a slow recovery. This was beyond his mind, in the same way that a speedy recovery was beyond his body. Instead he slowed down a little, but still went to meetings.

Ian Fleming died on August 12th 1964 of heart attack in Canterbury Hospital, Kent at the all-too-young age of 56. He was buried in the churchyard cemetery of Sevenhampton village near Swindon, England. In 1975 his son Caspar joined his father and in 1981 his widow Anne did the same.

At the Times he called himself ‘atticus’ meaning, simplicity, purity and elegant wit. He was witty, he alluded to simplicity at Goldeneye, but he was far from pure.

The trail I found myself on revealed a whole new world spawned in the mind of this unique individual – a story as yet unknown…

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Philip Gardiner is the international best selling author of Gnosis: The Secret of Solomon’s Temple Revealed, The Ark, The Shroud and Mary, Secret Societies and many more. He is an award winning documentary maker and speaks at venues across the world. His website is http://www.gardinersworld.com

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SIS
Spy Information Service