Ian Fleming on Crime and Spy Fiction (and non-fiction!)

Intrepid: Silhouette of a Secret Agent (Sunday Times, October 21, 1962)

In the higher ranges of Secret Service work the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true. The Chief and the High Officers of the Secret Service revelled in these subterranean labyrinths, and pursued their task with cold and silent passion.

— Sir Winston Churchill in Thoughts and Adventures.

By Ian Fleming

In this era of the anti-hero, when anyone on a pedestal is assaulted (how has Nelson survived?), unfashionably and obstinately I have my heroes. Being a second son, I dare say this all started from hero-worshipping my elder brother Peter, who had to become head of the family, at the age of ten, when our father was killed in 1917.

But the habit stayed with me, and I now, naively no doubt, have a miscellaneous cohort of heroes, from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh through Sir Winston Churchill and on downwards to many Other Ranks, who would be surprised if they knew how much I admired them for such old-fashioned virtues as courage, fortitude, and service to a cause or a country. I suspect—I hope—that 99.9 per cent. of the population of these islands has heroes in their family or outside. I am convinced they are necessary companions through life.

High up on my list is one of the great secret agents of the last war who, at this moment, allowing for the time factor, will be sitting at a loaded desk in a small study in an expensive apartment block bordering the East River in New York.

It is not an inspiring room—ranged bookcases, a copy of the Annigoni portrait of the Queen, the Cecil Beaton photograph of Churchill, autographed, a straightforward print of General Donovan, two Krieghoffs, comfortably placed boxes of stale cigarettes, and an automatic telephone recorder that clicks from time to time and shows a light, and into which, exasperated, I used to speak indelicate limericks until asked to desist to spare the secretary, who transcribes the calls, her blushes.

The telephone number is unlisted. The cable address, as during the war, is INTREPID. A panelled bar leads off the study, and then a bathroom. My frequent complaints about the exiguous bar of Lux have proved fruitless. The occupant expects one to come to see him with clean hands.

People often ask me how closely the “hero” of my thrillers, James Bond, resembles a true, live secret agent. To begin with, James Bond is not in fact a hero, but an efficient and not very attractive blunt instrument in the hands of government, and though he is a meld of various qualities I noted among Secret Service men and commandos in the last war, he remains, of course, a highly romanticised version of the true spy. The real thing, who may be sitting next to you as you read this, is another kind of beast altogether.

We know, for instance, that Mr. Somerset Maugham and Sir Compton Mackenzie were spies in the first world war, and we now know, from Mr. Montgomery Hyde’s The Quiet Canadian, that Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., D.S.O., M.C., a member of White’s and the St. James’s, formerly of Eton and the Life Guards, was head of the Secret Service in the last war—news which will no doubt cause a delighted shudder to run down the spines of many fellow-members of his clubs and of his local hunt.

But the man sitting alone now in his study in New York is so much closer to the spy of fiction, and yet so far removed from James Bond or Our Man in Havana, that only the removal of the cloak of anonymity he has worn since 1940 allows us to realise to our astonishment that men of super qualities can exist, and that such men can be super-spies and, by any standard, heroes.

Such a man is “the Quiet Canadian,” otherwise Sir William Stephenson, M.C., D.F.C., known throughout the war to his subordinates and friends, and to the enemy, as “Little Bill.”

To strip him to his bare and formidable bones, he was born on January 11, 1896, at the junction of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, just outside Winnipeg, where the Scottish Highlanders established the first British settlement in the name of the Hudson’s Bay Company towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It was from one of these early Scottish settlers that “Little Bill” was descended. He was good at mathematics and boxing, but before he could choose a career it was August, 1914, and he went straight from school into the Royal Canadian Engineers, and was commissioned before his nineteenth birthday.

In 1915 he was badly gassed and invalided back to England, but during his convalescence he was seized by the flying bug and in due course received his wings in the Royal-Flying Corps. By the time he was shot down (in error by the French) he was credited with twenty German planes, including that of Lothar von Richthofen, brother of the famous German ace. These exploits earned him the M.C., D.F.C. and the Croix de Guerre with Palm.

Before he was shot down and captured by the Germans (he escaped, of course, from Holzminden), in his spare time, and fighting for the R.F.C., he won the Amateur Lightweight Championship of the World (he retired from the ring, undefeated, in 1923).

After the war, having built up a bit of capital, he went into business for himself in various technical companies, for one of which he invented a new system for the transmission of radio pictures and for another of which, in 1934, he entered the winning aircraft in the King’s Cup air race. In the City of London he will be particularly remembered for his connection with Sound City Films, Earl’s Court, Alpha Cement and Pressed Steel, and it was through private intelligence work in Germany connected with the latter that he was able to give his old friend Winston Churchill the figure of a German expenditure on armaments amounting to £800 million annually. This figure was used by Churchill in a Parliamentary question to Neville Chamberlain and was not denied by the latter.

“Little Bill” developed his sources of intelligence in Scandinavia and Germany, and it was quickly arranged that the fruit of these should be passed to the Secret Service with which, from then on, he became ever more closely associated , until he was appointed—by the then Colonel Menzies—Head of the British Secret Service for all the Americas. In the end it was Churchill who gave him his marching orders. Churchill told him, “Your duty lies there. You must go.”

He went. Well, that is the man who became one of the great secret agents of the last war, and it would be a foolish person who would argue his credentials; to which I would add, from my own experience, that he is a man of few words and has a magnetic personality and the quality of making anyone ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. (He also used to make the most powerful Martinis in America and serve them in quart glasses.)

I first met him in 1941 when I was on a plain-clothes mission to Washington with my chief, Rear-Admiral J.H. Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, the most inspired appointment to this office since “Blinker” Hall, because, when the days were dark and the going bleak, he worked so passionately, and made his subordinates do the same, to win the war. Our chief business was with the American Office of Naval Intelligence, but we quickly came within the orbit of “Little Bill” and of his American teammate, General “Wild Bill” Donovan (Congressional Medal of Honour), who was subsequently appointed head of the O.S.S., the first true American Secret Service.

This splendid American, being almost twice the size of Stephenson, though no match for him, I would guess, in unarmed combat, became known as “Big Bill,” and the two of them, in absolute partnership and with Mr. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I, as a formidable full-back, became the scourge of the enemy throughout the Americas.

As a result of that first meeting with these three men, the D.N.I, reported most favourably on our Secret Service tie-ups with Washington, and “Little Bill,” from his highly mechanized eyrie in the Rockefeller Centre and his quiet apartment in Dorset House, was able to render innumerable services to the Royal Navy that could not have been asked for, let alone executed, through the normal channels.

Bill Stephenson worked himself almost to death during the war, carrying out undercover operations and often dangerous assignments (they culminated with the Gouzenko case that put Fuchs in the bag) that can only be hinted at in the fascinating book that Mr. Montgomery Hyde has, for some reason, been allowed to write—the first book, so far as I know, about the British secret agent whose publication has received official blessing.

“Little Bill” was awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit, and I think he is the only non-American ever to receive this highest honour for a civilian. But it was surely the “Quiet Canadian’s” supreme reward, as David Bruce (today American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, but in those days one of the most formidable secret agents of the O.S.S.) records, that when Sir Winston Churchill recommended Bill Stephenson for a knighthood he should have minuted to King George VI, “This one is dear to my heart.”

It seems that other and far greater men than me also have their heroes.


Note: This article was actually a reprint of Fleming’s introduction to the 1962 book The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson, by H. Montgomery Hyde (published in America as Room 3603: The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New York during World War II). Hyde had worked as a wartime censorship officer attached to BSC.

Rear-Admiral J.H. Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence was the “real” M, and General “Wild Bill” Donovan was the spymaster who gave Fleming the .38 Police Positive Colt revolver inscribed “For Special Services,” either as a reward for lobbying for Donovan’s selection as head of the O.S.S. or for writing that organization’s charter.

The “Gouzenko case that put Fuchs in the bag” refers to Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko (1919 – 1982) a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada. He defected in 1945 with treasure trove of documents that revealed the extent Soviet espionage activities in the U.S. and Canada and helped kickstart the Cold War.

The Canadians were initially skeptical of Gouzenko–an exception was William Stephenson, who argued strongly for taking in Gouzenko before his life was endangered. Stephenson arranged for Gouzenko to be taken into protective custody and transferred to Camp X, where the SOE and OSS trained their agents for secret service work.

Among the spies rumbled by Gouzenko was Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (1911 – 1988), a German theoretical physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and at Las Alamos. After the war Fuchs moved to Britain and head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment. In 1950 he was convicted of supplying information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union (to whom he’d given the principal theoretical outline for creating a hydrogen bomb) and imprisoned.

According to John Pearson, the shooting of the Japanese cipher expert in Casino Royale was inspired by one of Fleming’s adventures with Stephenson. A Japanese cipher expert, on the staff of the Japanese Consul-General in New York, was located in an office in Rockefeller Center on the floor below Stephenson, who had the Consul’s office cased and the movements of the cipher expert studied. After duplicate keys were prepared, Stephenson and Fleming, along with two assistants, entered the office at three in the morning to make microfilms of the Japanese code books.

Andrew Lycett notes that “Stephenson, in his dotage, made much of his claim that Fleming was a graduate of Camp X…Ian, according to his mentor, was supposed to have been the camp’s star pupil. He passed the key agent’s initiative test–placing a bomb in the main Toronto power station–by bluffing his way into the complex and disarming everyone with his plummiest Old Etonian accent. He did the self-defence and unarmed combat courses, and performed an arduous underwater swim at night from the camp to an old tanker moored offshore, where–shades of James Bond in Live and Let Die–he fixed a limpet mine against the hull. But the historian David Stafford, who examined these claims, found no evidence that Ian had ever completed a course at the camp. Ian may have taken a day-trip to view an important establishment and may even have participated in some training.”

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FOREWORD to Airline Detective

By Ian Fleming

One day in the summer of 1955 I was sitting in the innermost sanctum of Scotland Yard—the private office of the head of the C.I.D.—admiring, with Sir Ronald Howe, some forged five-pound notes and gossiping about crime in general. It was a chance, purposeless visit. I had had to do with Ronnie Howe during my wartime years in Naval Intelligence and the friendship had continued.

Ronnie Howe said that he would be flying to Istanbul in a few days’ time for the annual meeting of Interpol, why didn’t I come?

I had imagined that these meetings of Interpol would be top secret affairs held in remote and heavily guarded police headquarters. In fact it transpired that they were much like the meetings of other international organisations in smart hotels with banquets and speeches and open sessions during which the top policemen of the world read learned papers from flower-banked podiums. Their main object was friendly contact and, if secrets were discussed, they would be confined to private luncheon parties or hotel bedrooms.

Ronnie Howe said that the only other journalist who ever bothered to attend was Percy Hoskins of the Daily Express, and it crossed my mind that if he, by far the most brilliant crime reporter in England, thought these meetings worth while, so should I.

I was at that time Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times and, thanks to the kind heart of Lord Kemsley, more or less able to write my own ticket so far as foreign assignments were concerned. So I fixed things up and in due course flew off in the same plane as Ronnie Howe, Percy Hoskins and a man called Donald Fish who, it turned out, had something to do with airline security.

It was great fun in Istanbul and by scraping together fragments from official papers and speeches and tying them up with informed gossip, I was able to write two long dispatches on “The Secrets of Interpol” whose success was assisted by the Istanbul riots which took place conveniently over that week-end and on which I was able to give a scoop to my paper.

The next year I went again to the conference, this time at Vienna, but my “revelations” of the year before had put the police chiefs on their guard and, on this occasion, I was only able to produce a pretty thin three-quarters of a column. The learned papers read by the police chiefs had been more rigorously censored than before and were more carefully guarded, and the gossip dried up in my presence.

I skipped the next year’s meeting in Lisbon, and that was the end of my acquaintanceship with Interpol.

At the two earlier meetings the British quartet saw a lot of each other and I was interested, and rather annoyed, to note that on no occasion was I able to extract a single grain of news or information from Donald Fish. Ronnie Howe was always generous in providing Percy Hoskins and me with snippets of background, though he was always careful to distinguish between what was secret and what might be published. In fact I think he cannily used me on one occasion to warn the British public about forged travelers’ cheques. But at least he “gave,” and he realised that Percy Hoskins and I had somehow to justify our existence at these conferences.

Donald Fish couldn’t have cared less. No amount of wheedling or badgering would persuade him to yield one word of information about the work of his little air security sub-committee, which got on with its business far from the madding throng of the conference hall. He ate and drank and chatted with us, this tall, rangy man with the poker player’s eyes, but he revealed nothing, and both Percy Hoskins and I had to admire him for it, knowing what we had been able to extract from national police chiefs temporarily in their cups, or suffering from that suppressed vanity that affects men who know many secrets for which an audience is always forbidden them.

No, Donald Fish was one of the securest security men I have ever met, and now that he has retired and is free to tell some of his stories, the reader can be pretty certain he is getting the real stuff. There is nothing wishy-washy in these seventeen chapters, which are some of the best I have ever read in any language on police work.

Security, except when it becomes counter-espionage, is a dreary subject, and I have never envied the security men I have met in my life because so much of their work is of the “policeman on the beat” variety—testing door handles and window frames, and investigating mysterious noises that are always loose shutters. The reward for the work lies in the occasional scoop, and it is the hallmark of the true security officer that when the scoop comes along his mind is not so dulled by previous routine that he fails to recognise it.

Donald Fish and I had dinner together one evening at Sachers in Vienna at the end of the 1956 Interpol meeting, and he did admit that he had had exciting times with B.O.A.C. in between stretches of drudgery. He was due to retire in two or three years’ time and I urged him to think of writing his memoirs, but, like so many expert technicians, he admitted that he couldn’t really distinguish between the wood and the trees in his job, and that anyway there was something magical about writing, and he couldn’t master the art. This or that incident had of course been exciting, but he simply couldn’t get it down on paper. I told him not to despair, but just to do his best and then find a professional writer to smooth the corners of his prose and prune out the irrelevancies and the libel.

In the event he followed my advice. Donald Fish teamed up with John Pearson of the Sunday Times to produce a text that reads true and yet is attractively written. A highly successful series in the Sunday Times resulted, a promising television series is in the offing, and there is this book.

Many people who have led exciting lives had talked to me, as they will with any author, “about writing something when they retire.” Donald Fish’s book, with its solid writing, unobtrusive background and local colour, is technically an example of how a man, himself untalented in story telling, can yet contrive a thoroughly expert distillation of some of the exciting things that have happened to him.

To say anything more about the book would be to write a review of it. This is not my task, and what I have written so far is merely to explain how I came to be asked to write this introduction. I will now leave Donald Fish and his book with my blessing and, quite out of context, tell two stories about “security” that have always stuck in my mind.

During the war one of the Assistant Directors of the Naval Intelligence Division in which I was employed was responsible for security—the physical security of ships and dockyards, the prevention of loose talk, the security of communications and so forth—thoroughly dull work that was often allotted to rather dull individuals. In 1942, Noel Coward had obtained Admiralty permission to use one of H.M. destroyers for the film In Which We Serve and he was naturally anxious to discover her name and when she would be available for filming.

Noel Coward, who told me this story, knew the Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence of that date and he frequently rang him up to find out when the ship would be available, but since the whereabouts of H.M. ships was deadly secret, he always received a dusty answer, until one day Coward was delighted to get a call from the Admiralty. The Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence himself was on the telephone, and immensely mysterious.
“I say, Noel, you know what they do in India, hunting I mean?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, you know people go on safari and they shoot things?”
“So I’m told.”
“Well, now, the thing they shoot will be available at Portsmouth next week.”
At last Noel Coward got the message. “Tigers!” he called excitedly. “You mean she’s called The Tiger?”
“For God’s sake be careful, dammit! This is an open line.”

Those who were in the war will have their own stories along these lines, but I think the saga of Mohammed Ali, the green tea merchant, was probably unique in its example of security gone mad.

The political warfare experts, picking up the strings from the end of the 1914-18 war, began dropping leaflets over Germany almost as soon as war was declared, and we all remember how asinine many of those leaflets were. For some idiotic security reason the leaflets were known by the code word of “Nickel,” though why they should have a code word at all nobody could understand. Anyway, when the time came for the invasion of Africa, it was decided that a “Nickel” should be prepared to rally the North African Arabs to the Allied cause. Something simple was devised with a crude picture of Winston Churchill on one side and Roosevelt on the other, and some such slogan as “Victory rests with the Allies.” In a “Top Secret” folder this project was put into the machinery of the Political Warfare Department, finally reaching, by devious routes and under a watertight cover story, the sole Arabic expert in the Political Warfare Department—a certain Mohammed Ali, a green-tea merchant from Casablanca who had rallied to the Free French and had come over to England after the collapse of France.

Mohammed Ali was instructed to translate the English slogan into Arabic characters and the finished product was then printed in its millions and trillions and shipped out to Gibraltar in cases marked “oranges” or “beer,” and carefully stored in some top-secret depot in the Rock in preparation for the great day.

When the day came, fighters from the Fleet Air Arm were loaded up with consignments of the vital “Nickel” and took off again and again all through the day of the landings, sprinkling the whole of Morocco and Algiers with the leaflets.

After the invasion had succeeded, an American intelligence officer who had taken part in the landings came over to Gibraltar and found his way to the leader of the Allied Political Warfare group. He had a handful of the leaflets and he said to the propagandist in charge, “What the hell’s this stuff you’ve been dropping all over the country?”
Stiffly the political warrior replied, “Those are leaflets to rally the Arabs.”
“Do you know what they say?” asked the American.
“Yes,” said the propagandist, “of course I do. They say ‘Victory rests with the Allies’.”
“No they don’t,” said the American. “They say ‘Buy Mohammed Ali’s Green Tea’.”

Well, those are two stories about “security”—the Evelyn Waugh model, so to speak. The Donald Fish marque is something very different indeed.

6th June, 1961

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Splendid, thank you for sharing this gem, @Revelator.

Very typical how Fleming smuggles two largely unrelated anecdotes into this foreword; most likely stuff he’s been dying to tell but didn’t manage to until this occasion presented itself.

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The Russians Make Mistakes, Too (Esquire, Nov. 1960)
Some Russian Intelligence boners that make the U-2 fiasco seem trivial

By Ian Fleming

Soviet Russia has the greatest espionage machine in all history. U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter said recently that the Communist countries had 300,000 agents operating throughout the world. I assume he was referring to centrally organized agents, each with a code number, a specific task and some kind of pay roll. But a powerful ideology such as communism has a vast unseen army of sympathizers. These may be more or less secretly convinced Communists who are “agin” their national government of the day, or they may be those hosts of faceless ones with a grudge. The small, mean man seeking revenge can strike his little blow by looking up the address of the nearest Soviet consul or ambassador in the telephone book and writing him a letter like this:

“Dear Sir: You may be interested to know that in Workshop No. 25, Department of Hydraulics, Aeronautics Division, of the Magnum Combine factory at Blankville, we are working on a lightweight fuel pump with the following specifications…

“Since my pals tell me this is probably designed as part of the fuel system of an Intercontinental missile I think you should know about it. A Well Wisher.”

This kind of letter in the hands of the central evaluating machine in Moscow or Leningrad can be worth diamonds, and it costs not a dime. And the interesting point about free-lance espionage is that it is chiefly one way from the Western bloc to the Eastern bloc.

The sort of Liberal Socialist society in which we in the West live seldom attracts the man who has a grudge he wants to work off by way of revenge. But communism is militant; the man with a grudge thinks “they” will know what to do with a letter like this. “They” will put it to good use and hit back with it, hurting my country, hurting my factory, hurting my foreman, who said yesterday that I was a useless incompetent.

This is only a tiny side issue in the great espionage battle between the East and the West—a small bonus the revolutionary always picks up from the camp of order and establishment. Russia has other advantages. She has almost complete control of her frontiers and of her communications and postal systems. She herself has one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn, while the cultivated Russian is probably the best linguist in the world. Apart from the Communist parties and organizations which democracy allows to flourish in her midst, Russia can call upon several nationalities—Poles, Czechs, Balts, Hungarians, for instance—who can disappear quite easily into the communities of these nations in the West, whereas to send a White Russian into such a highly stereotyped country as Russia is tantamount to murder.

Having all these cards in her hand, the weaknesses in the Russian espionage system are few, but often fatal. Probably the greatest is that the Russians, like the German Secret Service in the last war, are biased evaluators of Intelligence.

Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would attack him, despite documented warnings supplied him by the West. Excessive Nazi ravage of European Russia, with millions of unnecessary casualties, was the result.

Stalin refused to believe that the West would resist in Greece, Turkey and Berlin. Major defeats of Soviet purpose followed.

Stalin grievously misread the evidence of U.S. readiness to reply in Korea, despite the historical proof of the American “Pearl Harbor complex,” i.e. the sharp reaction to plain provocation.

The Soviets, whether under Stalin or Khrushchev, guessed wrong even in Communist countries—Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary, to name only their most drastic errors.

Preferring the “pretty picture,” the Russians too often will be given too pretty a picture by overzealous agents. (One of the chief dangers for Russia today is in allowing herself to underestimate the West by incorrect evaluation inspired, for instance, by the much publicized Nuclear Disarmers in England or by the equally publicized failure of individual American missiles, and, above all, by the constant breast-beating in the West.)

The other source of weakness for Russia is the intoxicating effect that contact with Western freedoms may have on even the most highly trained Soviet agent who was one hundred per cent Communist when he was posted as assistant military attaché to Ottawa, Washington. London, or Paris, but whose loyalty to the system gradually disintegrates. It is in this latter realm that the West has had some of its greatest victories in the espionage war.

The blackest day for the immense Russian spy organization was probably September 5, 1945, when a humble cipher clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa walked out with more than a hundred top Secret papers revealing the Soviet network in Canada.

Igor Gouzenko’s defection came like a thunderclap. At first Canadian officials would not take him seriously. But the Royal Commission which was eventually set up to investigate his revelations led to the conviction of six Canadian traitors, including a Communist M.P., Fred Rose, who was one of Russia’s key men in Canada.

But more than that—the Gouzenko defection not only alerted the U.S.A., Britain and Canada to the existence of a hitherto largely unsuspected Russian spy organization, it resulted in a remarkable chain reaction which in the end led to the discovery of more vital spy-traitors. Among those to whom Gouzenko eventually brought disaster were Dr. Klaus Fuchs, Dr. Allan Nunn May, Harry Gold, David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Today, Gouzenko is a Canadian. No picture or official description of him has ever been circulated. He lives with his wife and two children somewhere in one of Canada’s vast farmlands. Always within reach are the Canadian Mounted Police. He has a job and a life income of $100 monthly from a trust fund set up by a grateful Canadian millionaire. His autobiography, a best-seller which was made into a film, brought him well over $100,000.

It was the young Briton, Dr. Allan Nunn May, who was the first victim of Gouzenko’s revelations. Born on May 2nd, 1911, at Kings Norton, near Birmingham, England, May had a brilliant record at Cambridge. In 1942 he joined the Cavendish Laboratory there, where many early atomic discoveries were made. In 1943 he was moved to Canada and in due course saw much top-secret atomic experimental work in Chicago and various vital U.S. installations.

Colonel Zabotin, official the Russian military attaché in Ottawa, actually their chief spy in Canada, was instructed by Moscow to contact May, who had never made any secret of his left-wing sympathies. Zabotin used a subordinate, Lieutenant Pavel Angelov, to make the contact.

From then on May gave the Russians all the information on atomic research in the U.S.A. and Canada that he could find.

Then May was told he was to return to London, where elaborate arrangements were made by the Russians for renewed contact with him. He got back to London just after Gouzenko defected, but he never kept the appointments made for him. Did he fear that the net was closing? We shall never know. Five months after his return he was arrested. At the Old Bailey on May 1, 1946, he pleaded guilty to giving away secrets to “a foreign power.” He was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. The information he gave the Russians has been valued at a million pounds in terms of research costs. In return he received $700 and two bottles of Scotch.

May’s conviction was a blow to the Russians, but they also achieved some kind of gain. The U.S. clamped down for the time being on giving further secrets to their allies.

Klaus Fuchs has been described as the most deadly and baffling spy in all history; his capture came four wars after May’s.

Fuchs was born in 1911 near Frankfurt, Germany.

As a youth he joined the Young Communist League. After Hitler came to power and the Communists went underground, he came to Britain, where he was befriended, and studied at Bristol and Edinburgh universities. As an alien he was interned when war broke out, first in the Isle of Mann, then in Canada. He was later released and was brought back to England for scientific research. Shortly thereafter he made contact with Russian agents, and handed over information. In December, 1943, he went to America, and before long had a comprehensive picture of U.S. atomic projects.

This was a wonderful scoop for the Russians. They contacted him in New York through Harry Gold, whom Fuchs knew only as “Raymond.” Fuchs gave Gold a flow of major intelligence hidden in newspaper wrappings. Gold passed them on to Yokovlev, Russian
vice-consul in New York and top spy. Soon Fuchs was at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He told Gold, and thus Moscow, when the first trial of the atomic bomb was about to be held.

In 1946 Fuchs returned to Britain. He made no attempt to contact the Russians until early 1947 and then had eight meetings with their agents in two years, His illness in 1948 probably prevented him from having more.

By this time the F.B.I. was hot on the trail of the leakages which were now so apparent. All clues pointed to Fuchs. The British were told of America’s suspicions in 1949. But there was no evidence for action. There followed two strange interviews with the top British security officer, William Skardon. The first got nowhere. The second, a few months later in January, 1950, was at Fuchs’ own request. He talked. He was arrested. The Lord Chief Justice sentenced him to fourteen years, the maximum sentence possible.

Harry Gold was next to come under suspicion. He had joined the Russian network in the days of the great Depression, long before Stalin and the atom bomb. He was an old hand by 1943 and was regarded as a first-class operative. That was why he was chosen to contact Fuchs when the latter arrived in the United States.

He did his job with his usual cunning and resourcefulness. When Fuchs was sentenced he may have had some uneasy moments. But he had gotten away with it for twenty years: why not this time?

But Fuchs, in his prison cell, was still willing to talk. For hours F.B.I. men grilled him. Literally hundreds of pictures of suspects were shown to him in an effort to get him to identify his contact man. A picture of Gold, now under suspicion as a result of information from a woman, Elizabeth Bentley, who had become disillusioned with the Communist cause, was shown to Fuchs. He failed to recognize him. The F.B.I. then took moving pictures of Gold, and Fuchs recognized him from his walk and mannerisms of posture. Gold was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment.

Among Gold’s contacts had been a David Greenglass. He was a sergeant in the U.S. Army—a machinist technician. His sister, Ethel, had married Julius Rosenberg, a Communist. In 1944 Greenglass was sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on secret atomic work. The red network went into action. The Rosenbergs were asked to persuade Greenglass to “co-operate.” Although in a subordinate position, Greenglass was smart enough to glean many of the most vital details of the atom bomb.

When the war ended, Greenglass started an engineering concern with his brother and Rosenberg. He must have forgotten most of his spy work—until he read in the papers of Fuchs’ arrest. Rosenberg realized the danger: Gold would come under suspicion, then Greenglass. He gave the latter money to decamp to Mexico, but Greenglass preferred to stay in the U.S. In time he was arrested, pleaded guilty, and sentenced to fifteen years. Above all he talked, and that meant the end for the Rosenbergs.

Unlike Greenglass, the Rosenbergs fought to the end, but were sentenced to death on April 5, 1951, the first American citizens ever to receive the death sentence in peacetime for spying. Through legal delaying devices and appeals they avoided their fate for another two years. They died in June, 1953.

It was the end of the Fuchs spy ring. Who knows when it might have been discovered—if at all—but for Igor Gouzenko?

The bitter spy war went on. The F.B.I. picked up many useful small fry, but its next big catch, in August, 1957, was Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel of the Russian Counterintelligence Service. The F.B.I. triumphantly described him as “the highest-ranking Soviet national ever arrested in the United States as a spy.”

Abel had slipped into the United States illegally from Canada in 1948 and had used short-wave radio for direct communication with Moscow. It wasn’t until nine years later that he was given away by a self-confessed Russian spy who fed him information—Lieut. Colonel Reine Hayhanan. Abel was tried, found guilty and received concurrent sentences of thirty, ten and five years, and fines totaling $3,000. This was a nasty setback for the Russians.

In 1954 the Russians had another serious setback—this time in Europe. A Russian secret police agent and two East German secret police surrendered to the Americans. The Russian was Captain Nikolai Khokhlov of the M.V.D. He said he had been sent from Moscow to Frankfurt in West Germany to murder an anti-Communist Russian named Georgi Okolovich.

The three men carried guns disguised as cigarette cases. These guns had special silencers, were electrically fired, and for good measure their lead bullets held a deadly poison. The plan was named Operation Rhine.

Not only did Khokhlov give a full account of his mission, he gave much useful over-all information on the workings of the M.V.D. and details of the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. He said he surrendered to the West because his wife, whom he had left behind in Russia, told him she would have nothing to do with an assassin.

The same year, far away in Australia, the Russians had perhaps the worst setback of all. Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov, the forty-five-year-old third secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, asked for political asylum. It was the biggest break since the Gouzenko case, for Petrov was head of the Soviet Secret Police in Australia. Australia might seem unpromising ground for spying, but it held vital secrets in the 1,500-mile desert rocket-testing range at Woomera, the desert atom-testing ground at Emu field, the missile and rocket development establishment at Salisbury near Adelaide, and the great uranium mines at Rum Jungle and Radium Hill.

Following the Gouzenko precedent, Mr. Menzies, the Australian Premier, commissioned an investigation of Petrov’s revelations.

This time the Russians seemed really worried. As with Gouzenko they claimed that Petrov had embezzled money and should be handed over to them as a “criminal.” They charged the use of “brutal violations of the generally accepted norms of international law.” And they broke off diplomatic relations with Australia, hastily recalling their entire Canberra staff.

One of the first results of Petrov’s disclosures was the arrest in New Caledonia, France’s most distant colony, of a French woman diplomat, Madame Rose-Marie Ollier, who was named as having told Russia about arms shipments to Indo-China.

While Petrov’s disclosures showed that his spy ring had failed to secure any military or strategic information of vital importance, the great value of his evidence was its detailed description of the complicated setup of the Soviet spy organization, its efforts to secure informants, and its methods of keeping contact with Australians who had visited the Soviet Union. It resulted in a useful tightening up of Australian security methods.

Today the Petrovs are Australian citizens. Like the Gouzenkos in Canada, they are living quietly, having assumed another name.

It was five years before Moscow recovered from this rebuff and resumed diplomatic relations with Australia.

One man who duped the Russians successfully is Russian-born film producer Boris Morros. For twelve years he posed as a Soviet spy, and was a most successful American secret agent. He made some of the Laurel and Hardy films and won fame with his Carnegie Hall. He was born in St. Petersburg and came to the U.S. in 1922 as producer of Chauve-Souris, a musical comedy. He has said that in his counter-spying activities he made sixty-eight trips to Europe, including visits to Moscow and Berlin.

He was closely connected with the arrest in New York in 1957 of Jack Soble, his wife, Myra Penskaya Soble, and Jacob Albam on charges of handing over information to the Russians.

In 1957, Morros also named Mrs. Alfred Stern, formerlv Miss Martha Dodd, daughter of Professor William E. Dodd, a pre-war U.S. ambassador to Germany, as a Soviet spy. Before the Sterns could be arrested they escaped to Mexico, from where they are believed to have made their way to Russia.

Morros has stated that the Russians told him they had fifty-five business firms in the U.S. as spy covers. They wanted him to expand his Boris Morros Music Company in Los Angeles into another cover.

Morros first became entangled with the Soviet spy web in 1945, a few years after he accepted an offer made by a Russian to bring his father from the Soviet Union to join him in America. But he lost no time in informing the F.B.I. of his entanglement, and from then on played his perilous double game.

But what does all this amount to? Mr. Herter has proudly announced that in recent years some three hundred sixty persons in eleven free countries have been convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union. Two hundred forty-one were in West Germany, sixty-five in Finland, fifteen in Norway, thirteen in the United States, eleven in Sweden, seven in Denmark, six in Britain, two each in Turkey and Holland, one each in France and Japan.

Numerically, it should be noted, this haul, mostly from West Germany, amounts to only about one per cent of the Soviet espionage army at home and abroad. But statistics are meaningless in the matter of numbers, for Gouzenko, although only a cipher clerk, was worth a whole division of miscellaneous spies.

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Books of the Year (The Sunday Times)

Dec. 27, 1959:

Pirates and Predators By Col. R. Meinertzhagen, (Oliver & Boyd. 70s.)

This is rather a cheat. Pirates and Predators is not the most interesting book I read in 1959, but I am using it as a peg to introduce Colonel Meinertzhagen’s writing to a wider public, because his Kenya Diary, 1902-1906 (surely the flattest title of 1958?) was by far the most exciting autobiography I have read since the war.

Pirates and Predators is a book for “the naturalist who has everything.” It consists of highly personal and often bloodthirsty notes, with plenty of illustrations, of the chief gangsters among birds, divided by Colonel Meinertzhagen into professionals (hawks and owls) and amateurs (certain passerines, storks, herons, cormorants, gulls, etc.). The whole book adds up to a study of violence among birds.

Colonel Meinertzhagen was once more famous as a spy than as a naturalist, and there is a thrilling passage in T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom giving an account of one of Meinertzhagen’s most famous exploits—the planting of a false set of General Allenby’s plans on the Turks; and there is a quality of acute and highly intelligent observation in all his writing. He also has totally uninhibited views on everything from birds to humans and, on the first page of Pirates and Predators, he lets fly, typically, with “The greatest vermin of all is Man himself.” Just the stuff for the feather-pates in the featherbeds of today!

Dec. 25, 1960:

After the Shoals of Capricorn, South Latitude and Isle of Cloves, it has been a long wait for Dr. F. D. Ommanney’s fourth travel book Eastern Windows (Longmans), but he continues to write as beautifully, shrewdly and surprisingly as ever and, as usual, one can almost warm one’s hands at his zest for living.

For Thrillophiles, two crackerjack Westerners by something of a mystery man, Evan Evans, who was killed at Cassino—Song of the Whip and Montana Kid (Penguin).

Dec. 24, 1961:

My happiest discovery has been two real-life adventure stories by William Travis, a very odd fellow indeed who lives in the Seychelles—Shark for Sale and Beyond the Reefs— extremely intelligent, well written, out-of-this-world books which, for some incredible reason, have escaped the reviewers. George Allen and Unwin should put their shoulders behind this potentially best-selling writer.

Thrillers: The Wrong Side of the Sky by Gavin Lyall (Hodder & Stoughton); News of Murder by Anthony Lejeune (Macdonald); Season of Assassins by Geoffrey Wagner (Quadriga)—each for a different reason.

Dec. 23, 1962:

It has been a good year for the kind of thrillers I enjoy. The Hour of Maximum Danger, by James Barlow (Hamish Hamilton), was only spoilt for me by the author’s use of the word “toilets” after having run the gamut of most of the Lady Chatterley words. The Ipcress File, by Len Deighton (Hodder & Stoughton), was a brilliant firework, but rather too “scatty” for my taste. I don’t think thrillers should be “funny.”

Outstanding were Eric Ambler’s The Light of Day (Heinemann), full of vintage Amblerisms and a perfect example of the European thriller. Equally notable, in the transatlantic vein, was The Only Girl in the Game, by the ever reliable John MacDonald (Robert Hale).

Both these books, totally different in idiom, do what I think a thriller should do—see you through a train or aeroplane journey and provide temporary escape if you are ill.

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Gary Powers and the Big Lie (Sunday Times, March 11, 1962)

by Ian Fleming

I have strong views about the Powers Case. It will go down to history, I think, as one of the classical espionage cases, classical in the sense of its majestic mishandling. I have nothing against Powers himself. He wasn’t a spy, he was just an extremely good pilot employed to operate an espionage device, one of the finest ever invented, a high-altitude photographical reconnaissance aircraft called the U2.

In connection with this aircraft, which in fact was nothing but a very good “Spy in the Sky,” I have the impression that Americans can lie more safely in their beds today, and Englishmen, too, because of the intelligence brought back by planes of the U2 class piloted by young daredevils such as Powers. These planes, I believe, brought back target information whose possession by America, more voluminous and more accurate than could have been obtained by a million ground spies—if one could have got them in there and out again, which one couldn’t—has made it as possible as any other factor for America to negotiate from strength with Russia—to be able to tell Russia, or perhaps just to leak it discreetly, that in the case of a mass blast-off of I.C.B.M.s by Russia the sources of the attack and other military objectives in the U.S.S.R. could be devastated within minutes, bringing her, however much damage she might do to America and England, militarily to her knees.

So let us take off our hats to the Spy in the Sky and move on to what went wrong in the case of Powers.

Everyone knows that a spy gets paid danger-money for doing a very dangerous job. He knows that if he is caught he is going to get tortured in his most sensitive parts—and, believe me, it is those things the professional spy thinks of far more than of death itself—and then he is going to be killed. It has been so ever since the man from the opposition crept under the tent flap in the desert and listened to the plans of the enemy tribal chiefs and then, with luck, ran all night with the news, to where the camp fires of his own side were burning away in the hills. It has gone on like that through all history, and it is one of the most exciting of all human adventure stories—the single man, in the darkness, facing death alone for the sake of the great mass of his own countrymen.

But the essence of the game—for, in a way, it is a tremendous game—is that, if the spy is caught, and whatever truth is tortured out of him, he is totally disavowed by his own side. Spying is a dirty business, why I have never quite understood. But the convention has always been maintained. If you are in uniform, you are okay. If you’re in civilian clothes you’re a pariah. Smith? Never heard of him, and Bang! You’re dead.

Now every country in the world employs spies and always has done. Nowadays the big corporations employ them also, to spy on the other fellows’ plans and designs—but that is another story. And it is total hypocrisy for any country to adopt a holier-than-thou attitude, to get on a high horse if they catch one of the other fellow’s spies. They’re damned glad they caught him, and the chief of the Red secret service chuckles at the discomfiture of the chief of the Purple secret service, and that’s that.

But in the Powers case things went badly wrong. Powers was in fact a skilled pilot and not a spy—though he probably got plenty of security briefing and knew what he was in for, as he confessed straight away to the Russians, in accepting the huge sums of danger money. What went badly wrong was the handling of the case by the American Government (and here let me say that I am discussing this espionage case purely as a writer of spy thrillers. Let’s keep politics out of it. We in England made almighty fools of ourselves sending a middle-aged romantic called Crabbe out on a ten-mile underwater swim in Portland Bay to examine a Russian cruiser of the Sverdlov class. The only good thing that came out of that mess was that we kept our mouths shut and stuck to our story that we’d hardly ever heard of a man called Crabbe.)

What happened in the Powers case? The Russians broke the story first, though presumably the C.I.A. knew, or guessed, that something bad had happened to Powers (I am told, by the way, that two or perhaps three other U2 planes had been lost before this one, though in these cases the pilot had either been killed or taken his death pill). The next move was with America, and now was the time for The Big Lie.

This is how I, or rather M., the fictional head of the secret service in my James Bond stories, would have handled it. He would have said, through our Foreign Office, as follows, “Thank you very much indeed. One of our experimental aircraft is indeed missing from our Turkish base and your description of the pilot fits in with a man who escaped yesterday from detention at that base. This man Powers is a most unreliable person who has a girl friend in Paris (to explain the foreign currency Powers carried) and he hijacked our plane with the object, presumably, of flying to her. You are quite correct to hold him in detention, and he must clearly suffer all the rigours of Soviet law in the circumstances. Please return our plane and equipment in due course. Sorry you’ve been troubled. P.S.: Powers suffers from hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. Pay no attention to them.”

Or something like that—bland, courteous, firm, but throwing Powers cold-bloodedly to the dogs. After all, it was against a contingency like that that he had been paid several thousand dollars a month. That was danger money. He was expendable. Expend him!

Instead, what happened? Endless havering by the State Department, lies, half-truths and finally admissions from on high that led at least in part to the total collapse of the Summit meeting in Paris. If The Big Lie had been spoken, and stuck to, it would have been in the true traditions of espionage. The democratisation of espionage has muddied the ancient stream that dates back to the man crawling under the tent flap to spy in the sheikhs. Just look at the trouble it caused!

And, just by the way, I don’t for a moment believe that Powers was shot down at 68,000 feet by Russian rockets. I believe it was sabotage at the Turkish base—delayed action bombs in the tail section. Turkey is a bit too close to Bulgaria for comfort. And the Bulgars are the best bomb technicians in the world.

Finally, as an Englishman, I sincerely hope that a U3 is already flying and that a U4 is on the drawing-board. But may they be backed by the Big Lie as well as by young chauffeurs like Powers. This mess wasn’t Powers’s fault, or his plane’s—least of all that of Allen Dulles. It was the fault of the men who think that espionage is a dirty word. It isn’t. It has got to be done well, that’s all—from the Powers of this world, all the way up to the Presidents and the Prime Ministers.


Note: You can read more about the Powers-U2 incident at Wikipedia and the BBC. Fleming was completely wrong about the cause of the plane’s crash. The U2 was indeed brought down by an S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missile. The Soviets already knew about the U2 flights and were expecting Powers to show up.

The Americans attempted an elaborate cover-up and pretended the U2 was actually a NASA weather research plane. But they did this under the impression that Powers had died and his plane was destroyed. Khrushchev delayed revealing the truth to entrap and embarrass the Americans. He succeeded. Eisenhower found himself in the dilemma–admitting responsibility for the U-2 flight would sour the Four Powers summit in Paris, but denying it would indicate to the press and Congress that he did not control his own administration. Fleming kept politics out of his article, but domestic pressure played a large part in forcing Eisenhower’s hand.

I could go into more detail, but that would get in the way of wishing all my fellow Fleming-fans a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I’ll be back with more Fleming in early January. Until then, Happy Holidays!

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Happy Holidays, Revelator! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year - always a pleasure to read these gems here!

That - and his own argument is also lacking a bit of consequence. To be discussed further…

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Revelator, indeed, another gem and greatly enjoyed. Happy Holidays.

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Girl’s Best Friend (Sunday Times, Dec. 09, 1956)

Diamond. By Emily Hahn. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson.18s.)

By Ian Fleming

I am one of those people who actually buy books. I think I have done this all my life because I like bookshops and booksellers, and I certainly used to like all the books I bought which, up to the war, were 90 per cent. fiction.

After the war I started buying books again, but the proportion of fiction dropped very rapidly. I don’t think it was because I was getting older, I think it was because novels became increasingly introspective and “difficult” and stopped having plots. Instead I read more stories of travel and adventure and reportage. In these there are no wastes of introspective dialogue and none of those contrived psychological situations which I, the hero, would have solved in the first chapter by emigrating to Canada and getting away from the dreadful woman.

So books like Diamond have become my escape-reading where, before the war, I would have bought, apart from the obvious ones, the latest T. F. Powys, Liam O’Flaherty or A. E. Coppard. Of course, the technique of reportage has improved out of all knowledge. Miss Emily Hahn is a graduate of the New Yorker Profile school, which has for thirty years been turning out the best contemporary history. She also holds degrees in mining engineering and mineralogy, which explains American advertisements describing Diamond as “the sparkling new book by the world’s most beautiful mining engineer.”

Miss Hahn’s story is not the whole history of the diamond. The Indian and Brazilian fields are barely mentioned. It is the story of the great diamond fields and mines of Africa where the first diamond was found in 1866 or 1867—by the Boer child who picked up the pretty pebble. The rush was slow in developing and expert geologists who scouted the Kimberley veld poured typically professional cold water on the myth of the pretty pebbles.

One of these, a. Mr. J. R. Gregory, representing a London diamond firm, reported dogmatically that the veld was not diamondiferous. The few stones that had been picked up, he announced, were brought to the locality in the crops of ostriches. His firm, without wondering where the ostrich had found the diamonds in the first place, accepted the expertise and dropped all interest in the veld. A year later the rush was on. And then came the great diamond names—Barnato, Belt, Joel, Dunkels, Robinson, Wernher, and, finally, the Oppenheimers, who head the industry today.

Emily Hahn examines them all with a sharp, neat pen. She quotes the music-hall lyrics about them at the tum of the century when the South African millionaires were collectively known as “Piggy.” “Piggy will pay, pay, pay!” the ladies of the chorus caroled blithely as they went through their dance routines.

She tells the story of the discovery of the Cullinan—a great heavy chunk of blue-white diamond so big that the finder could not close his hand over it—and of that other huge stone found a few years ago in the Premier mine that somehow got into the crusher and was pulverised. She writes about the early prospectors, IDB, and about Hannay, the man who “made” diamonds.

All the hot romance surrounding the hard, cold stone is in this book. The writing is clear, humorous, excited. This, to me, is the perfect literature of escape.

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Ian, you’re in a glass house, probably best you put that stone down.

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More about Emily Hahn. Quite the adventurer…

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Introduction to Herbert Yardley’s The Education of a Poker Player (1957)

By Ian Fleming

If it were possible to have worse laws than our sex laws they would be the laws that regulate gambling…To deal only with what is relevant to this brief note, while twenty million adults gamble on the football pools each week, ten million on horse-racing and five million on premium bonds, playing poker for money, a legal game over half the world including most of the British Commonwealth, is illegal. And really illegal. The Hamilton, a respectable private London card club, found this out in a police action which effectively warned the whole of England off the game. In 1945, at Bow Street, it cost them £500. The grounds for this action? That poker is not a game of skill! Of course an old woman who marks her football coupon and wins £70,000 for her shilling bet has done nothing but study football form for 50 years. No luck in that little gamble! Moreover, she and the other 20 million experts bring in £22 million a year to the Exchequer while the poker player brings in nothing. So the pools are legal and poker isn’t. Balderdash, and hypocritical balderdash at that, to the power of n.

Which brings me, after the smoke has cleared, to this book. It is a book whose publication in London I am proud to have fathered. The circumstances were these. Knowing that I love cards, a friend sent me a cutting from an American magazine that handsomely ‘trailed’ The Education of a Poker Player with some of the late Mr Yardley’s most intriguing hands. I at once sent to America for the book, was delighted with it and gave some copies away for Christmas. The next time I talked to my publishers, Messrs Jonathan Cape, I urged them to publish the book here. They demurred. No one in the British Isles played poker. It would not do well. I said that the book contained only a dozen pages of instruction—brilliant instruction—and that the rest was a hatful of some of the finest gambling stories I had ever read. It didn’t matter that the game was poker. These were wonderful, thrilling stories about cards. The book would certainly become a gambling classic. English card players would read it and love it. The book had zest, blood, sex, and a tough, wry humour reminiscent of Raymond Chandler. It was sharply, tautly written. It would be a bestseller—well, anyway, it would look very well on the backlist. The mention of this holy word in publishing was, I think, the clincher. Cape’s readers, that sapient, humorous, receptive duet, read the book. Yes, it was certainly all that I had said. Perhaps, if I would write a preface…I said I would and here it is and here is the book that Mr Yardley wrote.

Myself, as fine writers phrase it, I am not a good poker player. I drink and smoke and enjoy the game too much. You shouldn’t do any of these things if you want to win at poker. Poker is a cold-hearted, deadly game that breaks and bankrupts men today just as, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, écarté, backgammon, ombre and faro bankrupted our rakehelly ancestors. The last time I played poker, I lost more than I could afford in rich brassy company in a house at Sunningdale in what is now known as ‘The Canasta Belt’. These people would introduce variations which I was mocked for not understanding. In the end, numb with martinis and false bonhomie, I pretended I understood the intricacies of ‘Minnie Everley’. I remember the name but not the variation. It was named in memory of one of the Everley sisters, who in Chicago at the turn of the century kept the finest brothel America had ever known. The chamber pots were of solid gold and the sisters paraded their girls through the town, be-feathered and be-flounced, in open landaus, every Sunday morning when the bells were ringing and the quality of Chicago were on the streets and making for the churches. I learned all this afterwards. At the time and in the name of Minnie, I played a ragged, brash game that cost me dear. I was fleeced and deserved to be. I would not have been fleeced if I had read Mr Yardley’s book and if I had, above all, digested the card-playing philosophy which lies behind his stories and his instruction. Every fine card player I have ever known has this philosophy, but I will caution you that very few fine card players are the sort of people you and I would like to play with. It’s not fun playing against cold-hearted butchers, however soft their words, and as you read about them in these gay, smoke-filled pages I think you will often feel a chill of apprehension. But it will be an authentic chill. That is why, not as a poker player, but as a writer of thrillers, I can recommend this book to every consenting adult card player in Great Britain.


Note: Herbert Yardley led a fascinating life and wore many hats: spy, father of American cryptography, whistle-blower (in his book The American Black Chamber), Hollywood scriptwriter, playboy, agent for hire by Canada and China, and accused traitor. For more, consult the article “Gambling with his Life” at Artistic Licence Renewed. For even more, consult “The Many Lives of Herbert O. Yardley,” uploaded by the National Security Ageny. And for a lot more, there’s the 2004 book The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking, by David Kahn.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise that a professional code-breaker and man of mercenary motives should turn out to one of the “cold-hearted butchers” gifted at poker. Neither Fleming nor Bond fit the quoted description, which is partly why poker doesn’t fit in their world. I wish someone had told the filmmakers that in 2006.

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They’d just made Die Another Day…are they really going to give a toss how one card game was perceived over another by Fleming in another books foreward in the 50’s?

Perhaps not, but the film did take pains to be faithful to much of the rest of the book. I’ve heard that the decision to go with poker in part resulted from Michael Wilson being a fan of the game, but of course there was also a poker craze at the time. The resulting film obviously leaped on that trend and that of the Bourne series.

In any case, the filmmakers wouldn’t have needed to read the introduction to know that poker plays no part in book Bond’s world.

As always Revelator, thank you for digging out these little gems and mounting them all for the rest of us to appreciate. I’ve waited years to read Fleming’s journalism and asides. You keep presenting fascinating little bits and pieces I’d no idea even existed. Thank you!

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Seconded.

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You’re very welcome! I’m delighted to share these articles with fellow connoisseurs and even more delighted by their responses.

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Brilliant stuff. Cheers!

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An Open Letter to The Transport Minister
(Copy to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and all borough and county councils). (Daily Graphic, Sept. 18, 1952)

By Frank Gray [Ian Fleming]

Dear Mr. Lennox Boyd —

With road casualties mounting towards the quarter of a million a year mark, there is genteel heart-searching in the public prints and a new coat of paint for the zebras.

The cosy fiction that “BLANKTOWN WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS” no more stems the tide of and shattered limbs and lives than do the other polite admonitions and mild scolds which greet the hasting family saloon on its merry way to that last rendezvous.

4,000 a week

It seems that so long as “MAJOR ROAD AHEAD” remains our most strident warning alike of a dangerous crossroad with a notorious death-roll and of a fairly innocent intersection, the price of myosis and well-bred understatement will continue to be about 4,000 casualties every week. (Five hundred casualties a day on our railways or air services would cause a bit of a stir!)

Even the compelling Black Widow poster, a most notable attempt by the authorities to make us think about keeping death off the roads, was the subject of so much squeamish clamour from our sensitive citizens that it was replaced by those folksy extortions, seen but not perceived, to do something about sudden death, civil defence, the Lord Mayor’s fund, or making fish-cakes out of barracuda—one never reads far enough to find out which.

Raise Voice

Are good manners more valuable than all these lives and all this misery? Is it not time to borrow a little emphasis from abroad and let our road-safety signs raise their voices a trifle?

In America, at black spots which have caused many deaths, there are skull and crossbones signs with the previous year’s casualty total inscribed above.
Different towns and districts and even private concerns have their own campaigns and slogans, the latter often on two or three hoardings some twenty yards apart, building up to a punch-line.

Here are some of them:

“DON’T LEARN SAFETY … BY ACCIDENT" “WANT TO DIE? … DRIVE CAREFULLY.” “LOSE A MINUTE … SAVE A LIFE.” "DRIVE CAREFULLY … THE LIFE YOU SAVE … MAY BE YOUR OWN,” and the poignant “DEATH IS SO PERMANENT.”

Wrecks or cars are left at dangerous corners with “HE DIDN’T MEAN TO” inscribed above them, and garages put out signs like this: “DANGEROUS CORNER…SLOW DOWN…WE’LL FIX YOUR WRECK…IF YOU DON’T.”

An undertaker has this: “STEEP HILL…BAD CURVE HALFWAY DOWN…WANT AN APPOINTMENT?..ZOKOWSKIS’ FUNERALS…WE’RE WATCHING YOU.”

At holidays

At holiday times you will see the following: “DON’T LET DEATH TAKE YOUR HOLIDAY,” “DON’T GIVE YOUR LIFE FOR CHRISTMAS,” “DON’T GO OUT WITH THE OLD YEAR.”

At pedestrian crossings: “DON’T KILL A PEDESTRIAN … BECAUSE HE IS WRONG,” and “LOOK FIRST … LIVE LONGER,” “DON’T TAKE A SHORT CUT … TO DEATH,” “THE SMALLER THE CHILD … THE BIGGER THE ACCIDENT,” “KIDS DON’T KNOW … HELP THEM … DRIVE CAREFULLY,” and so forth.

I admit these signs are strident, vulgar and ugly. But I really believe they’ll make the road-hog in his juggernaut and the motorcyclist trying to break through the sound barrier remember that he is aiming a loaded gun from the moment he leaves the garage—and that goes for the havering, crown-of-the-road, pride-of-the-family saloon, too.

Try Again

Incidentally, “BLANKTOWN WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS” was the fragrant thought (and the waste of paint) or another government.

I hope you’ll agree, Mr. Lennox-Boyd, that something more Winstonian should now be tried.

P.S. An afterthought—please declare illegal all stickers, celluloid canaries, pendant doilies and notices saying “KEEP OFF MY TAIL” on the windows of motor-cars. They obscure the vision, they are cheaply ostentatious and they diminish one’s love of one’s neighbour.


Fleming fans will of course recognize “the poignant ‘DEATH IS SO PERMANENT’” as the title of chapter 24 in Diamonds Are Forever.

Detail-oriented readers might also recognize that this article doesn’t actually have anything to do with the title of this thread, but I couldn’t resist sharing it with you.

If you’re curious why Fleming appeared under a pseudonym, Andrew Lycett has the details:

When not working on his book and his publishing interests [in 1952], Ian occupied himself with literary trivia…Another article burning a hole in his drawer concerned road safety. During his late-summer visit to the Bryces in the United States in 1950 he had become fascinated with the apocalyptic vision portrayed in the road signs. Americans were not afraid to suggest that car accidents led to deaths…On his return to Gray’s Inn Road, he asked Rodney Campbell, the New York correspondent of the Sunday Times, to do some further research which Ian used to write an article, “Death is so Permanent.” But the Sunday Times editor, Harry Hodson, was not impressed by Ian’s efforts. “I don’t think it quite makes the grade,” he told Ian stiffly.

Nearly two years later Ian rediscovered the text and decided that the most certain way of having it published was to enlist the support of his chairman. On 17 September he submitted it to Lord Kemsley with a polite covering note. The very next day, it was printed as a full-page spread in the Kemsley group’s tabloid, the Daily Graphic. His article had become “An Open Letter to the Transport Minister.” It listed some of the crassest of Campbell’s American road-safety signs – for example, “The Smaller the Child, the Bigger the Accident” – and suggested they should be copied in Britain…[though] he provided no evidence that the American way of doing things led to fewer road accidents…Although Ian had signed his original letter with his own name, in the Daily Graphic he became Frank Gray, an unaccustomed pseudonym.

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Thanks for sharing Revelator! Another great Fleming find.

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