From agent to writer

　　In 1952, Ian Fleming (1908-1964) created the first Bond novel “007 vs. Casino Royale”. It was the beginning of his writing career and the end of his less than legendary 007 experience.
The “Headlines” Controversy

　　At around 10 am on April 8, 1933, a train from Berlin arrived at Belorusskaya Station in Moscow. Among the passengers was a tall young man in a colorful suit who was very conspicuous. He got on the Lincoln car that picked him up and went to the “National Hotel”, looking at the streets and pedestrians in Moscow with great interest along the way. This young man is the British Reuters reporter Fleming, who came to the Soviet Union this time to report a large-scale lawsuit related to British engineers.
　　Fleming was twenty-five years old, a reporter who was neither famous nor hopeless. He was hired by Reuters under the arrangement of his mother (my mother is a friend of the wife of the head of the international department of the newspaper). Fleming’s father was a Conservative MP who died during World War I. The mother hopes that all four sons will be successful, but the second son, Fleming, is the most troublesome for her. After entering Eton, Fleming’s grades were poor, and he was only interested in sports and making girlfriends (among his lovers were teachers’ daughters and their wives). After leaving Eton, Fleming applied for the Royal Military Academy, but was unable to do so because he failed the medical examination. So he went to study in Austria, then to Germany, and then to Switzerland. In Switzerland he met a girl and made an engagement with her, which caused his mother a headache. She felt that a rich Swiss girl with no family background was not good enough for an English gentleman. After failing to apply for the British Foreign Office, Fleming appeared to be letting himself live as he pleased until his mother took control and arranged for him to work for Reuters, transcribing briefs from foreign journalists and covering motor races. Fleming’s language skills were good, but he didn’t have much enthusiasm for the job. Nevertheless, in March 1933 he became a major figure in a major event.
　　At a party, Fleming met Eton schoolmate Gerald Cook. Cook worked for the Metropolitan Vickers Company, responsible for the production and installation of electromechanical equipment. He whispered to Fleming that the previous week the Soviets had arrested several British citizens, six staff members of the Metropolitan Vickers office in the Soviet Union, and 12 Soviet nationals working for the company, accusing them of espionage. Vickers wants a diplomatic solution, so the matter has not been made public. Fleming returned to the editorial office immediately after leaving the party, wrote down what he had heard, and handed the manuscript to the editor early the next morning. The article caused an uproar in Britain: the people demanded to protect their compatriots, the parliament considered cutting off economic ties with the Soviet Union, and the prime minister declared the engineers innocent and demanded their release. The Soviet authorities ignored it and continued to prepare for the trial. Fleming was sent to Moscow to report on the trial. In Moscow, among other journalists, Fleming finally felt the thrill of the job.
　　The trial was held in public at the Union House on April 12, and the verdict was pronounced on April 18. Fleming was eager to get the word out first. He found a little boy he knew to stand by the court window so that he could pick up the ball of shorthand paper that Fleming threw out the window and hand it over to the Reuters reporter station quickly. For this reason, he bought the little boy a pair of tennis balls shoes, but the plan failed. Loudspeakers were installed in the courtroom, and the verdict could be heard throughout the room. It was first reported by a reporter from the Central News Agency, who had been calling the newspaper in the room prepared for the media during the trial. The Central News Agency reported 20 minutes earlier that 5 British engineers were found guilty, 3 of whom were deported and 2 were sentenced to 2-3 years in prison. Fleming’s boss was very angry, but Fleming didn’t care too much, because he was waiting for news from the Kremlin to interview Stalin, which would be another scoop.
　　On April 25, the Kremlin sent a typed note signed by Stalin: “Unfortunately, I am currently busy with official duties and cannot meet your request.” This is obviously not the result Fleming hoped for, but it is better than no result powerful.
　　After returning to England, Fleming immediately rushed to the Foreign Office, where people were waiting to hear his story about Moscow.
Got his wish and became a spy

　　After listening to Fleming’s words, the British Foreign Office looked at the note signed by Stalin and praised his ability, then stapled the note to his resume and put it in the folder of “people with Soviet work experience”. After this, Fleming went back to his normal life.
　　Journalists don’t earn much, and there won’t be any attractive travel assignments anytime soon. Fleming resigned from Reuters in the autumn of 1933 and took a job as a broker in the City of London. Fleming wasn’t interested in business, but he enjoyed taking clients to fancy restaurants and earning a decent and steady income. He moved out of his mother’s house, rented a small house in Belgravia, one of London’s most respectable and expensive areas, and turned it into a perfect bachelor’s refuge. He has two bookshelves in the living room, one filled with popular contemporary novels and spy DVDs, and the other with erotic novels (basically French), the latter of which should appeal to those Flemings often take home Come beauties. However, the unchanging life in the City of London soon lost its charm for Fleming, and he began to look for more interesting work.
　　At first he wanted to start a magazine, like the British “New Yorker”, but found no investors; later he wanted to go into politics, and attended several sessions of the House of Commons, but the results disappointed him: “Despicable Lies mixed with shameful adultery, and if that’s politics, then better not let me see how it happens.” Still, Fleming became increasingly interested in the darker side of politics, as well as intelligence agencies and espionage.
　　In March 1939, Britain planned to send a trade mission to the Soviet Union. After the “Metropolis Vickers Incident”, economic relations between Britain and the United States have not improved, and the British Foreign Office prefers to maintain friendship with the Soviet Union. Fleming decided to use this as an opportunity to renew the interest of the British Foreign Office. He took a leave of absence from his brokerage firm and became a reporter for The Times, begging the newspaper to let him go to the Soviet Union with the delegation.
　　The second trip to Moscow was not as pleasant as the last. Although the Soviet Union entertained them warmly, the atmosphere was depressing, because no matter where the British went, people from the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs followed. To entertain himself, Fleming staged a brief romance with a Soviet girl from whom he heard that the Soviet Union was producing and selling condoms. There is nothing special about this incident, because as early as 1929, the British Durex company had already produced latex condoms. But Soviet condoms may be of interest to economic intelligence, because studying this mass commodity provides insight into the speed and success of Soviet industrialization. So Fleming went into the pharmacy and bought several packs of condoms.

Ian Fleming and girlfriend Monique Panjord Porter (1931)

　　The delegation came to nothing, and Fleming was on his way home, where he met Sefton Delmer, a reporter for the British Daily Express, on the train. Delmer also wanted to take advantage of the business trip to unearth some information and provide it to intelligence agencies. As the train approached the Polish border, Delmer read what he had written before tearing it up and throwing it out the window. Fleming quipped that real agents would eat evidence. The Soviet border inspection did not check Delmer’s things, but showed great interest in Fleming’s box. After some inspection, they confiscated Fleming’s condoms. Delmer looked at the disappointed expression of his colleague, and joked, “Why didn’t you eat them?”

　　Immediately after returning to London, Fleming wrote an article for The Times analyzing Soviet military power and concluding that in the struggle against the Axis Powers, the Soviet Army was “of strategic value to the Allies “. But the editors of The Times were not interested in Fleming’s analysis and did not publish the article. Fleming thought for a while, and added a few more words: “Russia is an insidious ally, and if they have the opportunity, they will not hesitate to stab a knife in the back.” He sent the article to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the article was reprinted from The Foreign Office referred it to Major General John Henry Godfrey. Godfrey had just taken over as chief of British Naval Intelligence and was embarking on a reorganization of personnel. In the dining room of the Carlton Hotel on May 24, 1939, Godfrey finally officially recruited Ian Fleming.
Wrote “Code Guide” for U.S. intelligence agencies

　　I am afraid there is no one in the whole of Britain who is less suited to be a secret agent than Ian Fleming. He had never been a soldier, was a poor shooter, and had no respect for his superiors or discipline, but he quickly got the hang of the job.
　　Fleming made a lot of achievements in the first year after the war. He wrote an instruction manual listing 54 tricks to deceive the enemy; he figured out how to redeem German steamships in Spanish shipyards; He led the blockade of the Danube and cut off the oil supply from Romania to Germany; he learned how to shoot and studied the tools commonly used by agents, especially interested in hand saws, pistol pens and golf balls that can hide secret messages .
　　In September 1940, Fleming secured his first major project, “Operation Ruthless,” which he planned from start to finish.
　　At that time, the British intelligence agencies were most interested in the German cipher machine “Enigma”. At Bletchley Park, Britain’s main code-breaking center, a team of mathematicians, Egyptologists, linguists, chess masters and crossword champions has been working to crack Enigma. Alan Turing, one of the leaders of the team, believed that the only way to solve this problem was to obtain the “Enigma” prototype and its code manual used by the German Navy. However, it is impossible to intercept the prototype in a naval battle, because the secret documents are likely to be destroyed quickly when attacking the enemy. So Fleming came up with a solution.
　　His method required using a captured German bomber, forming a team of five, at least one of whom could speak fluent German, changing them into Luftwaffe uniforms, getting some blood on them, bandaging them, and using Aircraft bound for the English Channel. Somewhere over the Channel the pilot would shut down the engines, pretend there had been a major accident, and send a distress signal to the Germans. Once at the surface, the team members transferred to the lifeboats and waited for the German steamer to come to rescue them. When the German ship arrived, the operation team killed all the crew, seized the ship, and intercepted the “Enigma” cipher machine.
　　The Admiralty approved the operation and it was planned for early October 1940. But when everything was ready, it was forced to cancel because the task was difficult to achieve. The most frustrating ones were probably the translators at Bletchley Park. But Fleming didn’t feel sad for too long, and soon his attention shifted to the next task.
　　In early June 1941, Fleming and Godfrey left London for New York. Ostensibly to check the security of U.S. ports, it is actually cooperating with the U.S. on security issues, to be precise, providing support to the Director of Strategic Intelligence, William Donovan. Donovan is one of the few American state activists who believes that war is inevitable and should be prepared for. What disturbed Fleming and Godfrey was that U.S. intelligence was poorly run, with each military unit having its own intelligence unit but not exchanging information with each other, nor was the FBI sharing intelligence with other agencies. Donovan believes that the immediate priority is to create an intelligence agency. President Roosevelt agreed with him but had yet to take any action. One of the purposes of Godfrey’s visit to New York was to convince Roosevelt to solve the problem. Fortunately, the goal has been achieved – a week after Godfrey had dinner with the President of the United States, Roosevelt signed an order to establish a new intelligence agency “Information Cooperation Office”, and the person in charge was William Donovan; Later, the agency was reorganized into the Bureau of Strategic Services, which evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency after the war.
　　When the matter was over, Godfrey returned to London, and Fleming stayed on to write the operating instructions for the newly formed intelligence agency. In the guide, he described in detail how the intelligence agency should be organized, its institutional settings (such as who should be the leader and what kind of people should be recruited as agents), and he also suggested sending agents to U.S. embassies around the world. , they were supervised by British intelligence until the latter had gained sufficient experience. The most important thing is that he described in detail the characteristics that a “perfect agent” should possess: “Male aged 40-50, strong in observation, cautious in handling affairs, good at analysis, able to speak multiple languages, and always sober. Can’t take risks, live a decent life , a strong sense of responsibility, and unconditional loyalty to the motherland.” He handed over the operating instructions to Donovan, and the head of the US intelligence agency received $10 million in government funding. As a token of appreciation, Donovan gave Fleming a Colt engraved with “For Special Service” (“For Special Service”). In late July 1941, Fleming returned to England with the pistol.
False intelligence “bait” to catch big fish

　　After returning to the UK, Fleming did not concentrate on intelligence work, but devoted himself to counter-propaganda work (creating false intelligence to confuse the enemy). As mentioned earlier, when traveling in the Soviet Union, he met the British journalist Delmer. At this stage, he has resumed contact with Delmer and used his resources to provide black propaganda for the Naval Intelligence Headquarters.
　　At the beginning of the war, Delmer was engaged in anti-propaganda activities in the secret information department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pretending to be a German to set up a radio station, and disseminating false information to the German military and ordinary people, such as the defeat of fascism, Hitler’s illness, and various incidents that happened around Hitler. Trouble etc. Fleming, who is good at German, often went into the live broadcast of the radio, saying that the German submarine had leaked, or the German main battleship had sunk, and so on.
　　On May 20, 1941, the German army launched Operation Mercury to capture Crete. Crete is the last major base of the British Navy and Air Force in the Mediterranean. The Germans knew that landing on Crete by sea was impossible, since the waterfield was completely under the control of the British, so they decided to parachute paratroopers with gliders for transport equipment. Despite heavy losses, the Germans still managed to fully capture Crete in 11 days.
　　This action forced the Allies to consider the possibility of paratrooper combat. But what interested Fleming more was not the military strategy of the operation, but its reconnaissance strategy. In 1942, Fleming studied the Crete operation and found that in addition to the paratroopers, the enemy also parachuted a special reconnaissance team into Crete in order to infiltrate the staff and radio stations to steal documents, equipment, codes— They were the first to land on Crete and had completed their scouting missions before the raid began.
　　This airborne reconnaissance team left a deep impression on Fleming, and he immediately suggested to Godfrey to implement this “German innovative reconnaissance method”. Later, the United Kingdom selected a group of experienced experts from soldiers, police and even prisoners, and established the No.30 Commando Force composed of the Navy, Air Force, Infantry and Marine Corps. Fleming checks himself out, weeding out those he deems incompetent. Since November 1942, Commando No.30 has actively participated in the war, and organized hundreds of operations in three years, many of which were planned by Fleming himself, such as participating in the Normandy landing and being the first to enter the liberated Paris. Even the entire archive of the German Navy (about 300 tons) was seized in 1945.

　　As early as 1939, when he first joined the intelligence service, Fleming and Godfrey wrote a “salmon memo”. In the memo, they compared military reconnaissance operations to fishing—throwing hooks and changing baits at different places until the enemy takes the bait. The fishing metaphor was coined by Godfrey, and Fleming cast 54 “baits,” one of which formed the basis of “Operation Meat.”
　　The idea for “Operation Mince” was borrowed by Fleming from Basil Thomson’s detective novel “The Secret of the Funky Hat”. The novel tells the case of a dead man who was found with a large number of documents that detectives suspected were forged. In the “Salmon Memo”, Fleming also suggested using corpses and fake secret documents to confuse the enemy’s information. In 1943, his advice was used to distract the German army from Sicily (the Germans planned to invade Sicily). Fleming did not plan the operation himself, but he acted as an advisor. The task of this operation was to convince the Germans that the Allied forces were about to attack Greece and Sardinia and send troops there. They planned to provide false documents to the enemy and to create the illusion that these false documents fell into their hands by accident. For this purpose, a corpse was needed, and the corpse had to be changed into the uniform of a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, with a briefcase cuffed to the wrist, which contained a letter from Archibald Noe, deputy commander of the British General Headquarters, to Alexander, commander of the British and American Forces 18. A letter from the United States, ordering reinforcements for the attack on Greece and Sardinia. Not only did they name the body “William Martin” for credibility, but they also included in his pocket a picture of his “fiancée,” an engagement ring, a small piece of pencil, and a receipt for a new shirt , a few theater ticket stubs, a club bill, and two personal letters.

what was found on ‘william martin’

　　The body of “Martin” was unloaded from a submarine off the west coast of Spain on April 30, 1943, and was discovered by Spanish fishermen that day. These “secret” documents fell into the hands of Hitler in mid-May. Hitler believed it and ordered the assembly of SS and Axis troops to Greece and Sardinia. This fake operation was so realistic that when the Allied forces landed in Sicily on July 9, Hitler was still in no hurry to send troops there, always believing that the main battlefield was in Greece.
Passing the Baton to James Bond

　　After the war, Ian Fleming left British Naval Intelligence. The demobilization order was issued in May 1945, and he faced the problem of finding a job again. At first he wanted to go back to the City of London, then he took a clerical job in the Admiralty, and finally he went back to his old job as a reporter.
　　Fleming’s old friend, Viscount Gomel Kemsley, suggested that he take charge of the international department of Kemsley Newspapers Group, a newspaper, and offered a handsome salary of 4,500 pounds per year, plus 500 pounds per year for official duties Reimbursement and two months of paid time off. Fleming agreed, and set about overhauling the international network of journalists. Using the connections he had built up during his previous work in the intelligence services and the hundreds of comrades in arms who had become agents or intelligence officers after demobilization, he quickly assembled a group of influential figures who provided him with news leads from all over the world. Fleming did a good job and soon came to the attention of MI6 again, because the Cold War had begun and information was more important than ever.
　　With Kemsley’s consent, Fleming began providing his services to the intelligence agencies. Kemsley reporters carry out intelligence agency missions, and intelligence agency agents disguise themselves as Kemsley reporters. This is beneficial for all parties: On the one hand, Kemsley has expanded its financial resources and acquired dozens of employees from the secret service – although these people use the reporter as a cover, but they all provide a lot of information ; on the other hand, the intelligence services have acquired a large number of freelance agents, although they are now journalists, but they have all worked in the intelligence agencies and are always ready to contribute and make a profit. Fleming was the only one who was dissatisfied, because while the agents he recruited were adventuring all over the world, he sat alone in the office or at home, doing the job of administrator. This errand was less exciting. For a while, the bored Fleming bought a piece of land in Jamaica, got into diving, and passed the time among groups of guests and girlfriends.
　　At the beginning of 1952, the good times finally came to an end. Anne Chalgeris, Fleming’s on-and-off girlfriend of 13 years, told him she was pregnant. The idea that he must marry her as a gentleman terrified Fleming. To get rid of his troubles, Fleming began writing a novel, which he finished quickly—started on February 17, 1952, and finished at the end of March. Thus was born “007 vs. Casino Royale”, the first Bond novel!
　　It now appears that there are more than 20 people in the prototype of 007, including Henny Cotton, an Australian pilot and inventor who has taken a large number of aerial photos of German military installations; Patrick Dazell, who can speak multiple languages ​​and is proficient in naval affairs , who can skydive, dive, and ski; William Stephenson, who can make the strongest martinis out of vodka, and founded a disinformation agency in the United States; The leader of the spy agency, who drives racing cars, loves expensive clothes and Cartier accessories, and brings a new girlfriend with him every time he shows up; Forrester Io Thomas, who worked under the cover of a German officer in occupied France for intelligence work, A master of the trade… It should be said that James Bond is a composite of all the top-notch agents Fleming has ever known. However, many aspects of James Bond come directly from Fleming himself.
　　Bond’s chief (code-named M) is very much John Godfrey personified—he’s a wildly insane, hysterical major general who doesn’t get along with many people, but Fleming does, which is also true. Same as Bond. In addition, James Bond loves playing cards, golf, expensive cigarettes, fine clothes and beautiful cars, all of which are typical of his creator Ian Fleming.

Previous actors who played 007

　　Unlike Fleming, Bond lost his favorite in the first novel and changed his girlfriend recklessly in each subsequent novel; after Fleming finished “007 vs. Casino Royale”, Married Anne Chalgeris at the end of March 1952. His life of debauchery ended, and he passed it on to 007 and his countless fans for the next 12 years.