James Bond: The Authorised Biography (32 page)

From field reports it was soon clear that Smersh was baffled. They seemed to have called off their operations against Bond. M., in his turn, had given Bond instructions to lie low. (For several months after the publication of
Casino Royale
, Bond was in Tokyo, loosely attached to Station T and studying the Eastern network. He liked the women and the food, picked up a smattering of Japanese, and generally enjoyed himself. Not even Fleming now knew where he was.) But Urquhart was kept busy covering up Bond's tracks in London. He took a lot of trouble, and was extremely good at it. Some of his tasks were fairly obvious – like moving Aunt Charmian from Pett Bottom and sending May off to Scotland for a month or two. He also had an eye for detail, arranging such
minutiae
as erasing all records of Bond's membership of Blades and carefully removing his file from the secretary's office at Eton.

On the whole, Bond's few friends in England proved easier to deal with than he thought. Urquhart saw each of Bond's three married women, and told them just enough to keep them silent. He was a good psychologist, and did the same with other key acquaintances. And the strange thing was that as the books about James Bond became more popular, people who had known him seemed to forget that he
had
once existed. As Bond puts it, ‘I was beginning to get absorbed into the character of “James Bond, the Secret Agent of the Fleming books”. It became rather spooky, and I would sometimes wonder whether James Bond was real myself.’

But the main thing about the operation was that it worked. During his whole time in Japan, Bond had heard nothing of a threat from Smersh. On his return to London, M. confirmed that the manhunt by the enemy was over – for a while at least.

‘You owe your life to Ian Fleming,’ M. said when they met. ‘Don't forget it.’

‘Somehow I don't think I'll be able to,’ said Bond.

Discreetly, Bond resumed his duties. There were a few barbed comments from the Chief of Staff, but on the whole Bond's role in the Fleming books was treated as a private joke in the department. It made no difference to his work. By now May had returned from Glen Orchy, Bond resumed residence in Wellington Square and the Bentley emerged from storage. Then, late that autumn, Fleming told M. that it was time to be thinking of a fresh James Bond book.

To do M. justice he was a little taken aback at first.

‘You've written the damn book. It did its job magnificently. Surely that's that?’

But Fleming argued that he ought to keep the myth of James Bond's fictional personality alive. (He also gave M. more than a hint of what an excellent job the books were doing for the image of the British Secret Service. M. was beginning to be concerned with ‘images’.) The upshot was that Fleming was given permission to describe Bond's last big assignment before all the trouble – the battle in the States with Mr Big. Fleming wrote this early in 1954, and from the start Urquhart was worried that it gave too much away. True, Fleming did ‘trim it down a bit’ as Bond puts it. But, as usual, he got his way with M. over the parts that mattered, so that the story is in fact one of the fullest and most accurate accounts of all Bond's published adventures. Fleming entitled the book
Live and Let Die
.

But long before it appeared that autumn, Bond had resumed the very active service he was used to. Indeed, 1954 provided one of his busiest years to date. This was partly due to the mounting pressure on the 00 section, and also to a quirk of M.'s. M. always had been, in Bond's words, ‘a thorough-going slavedriver’. Hard with himself, he felt he had a right to be hard with others. He also thought that men respond to pressure and that more agents are destroyed by slackness than by the enemy. Around this time this attitude of M.'s grew worse. Bond himself agrees that there was an odd streak in him – he refuses to call it sadism – but M. had certainly inherited the attitude from the old navy that men need to be broken. He was almost happy when they did.

Throughout 1954 it seemed as if M. was determined to see how much work James Bond could bear. More and more interdepartmental work was thrust on him as well as regular assignments for the 00 section. (For the purpose of the fictional James Bond, Fleming has emphasized his hero's hatred of all office work. Bond denies this and insists that he is, in fact, a competent administrator. From what little I could judge of him during these weeks I would agree.)

There was a constant round of courses, training sessions, and straightforward practice to keep his skills up to the mark. This is another point that Bond makes. In the books, his success appears so effortless that people forget that a top-flight agent is always learning, training, picking up fresh techniques to go one better than the enemy.

‘The assignments are quite simply the tip of the iceberg. Underneath are weeks and sometimes months of training.’

Scarcely a day went by without Bond firing some weapon, either on an open range or in the cellars under Regent's Park. Sometimes he spent weeks at a time mastering some new technique. His mind became a strange encyclopaedia of special knowledge – on poisons, on explosives, on changing fashions in subversion. His body was maintained in top condition like an athlete's. The whole routine built up towards the various assignments which were the point and purpose of his being.

During this time there were a lot of them. Most were routine – people to be protected, and sometimes silenced; enemies destroyed; attacks repulsed. As a professional, Bond always prided himself upon the speed with which he worked. ‘It's a trade, you know. One likes to take a pride in craftmanship.’

As usual, Bond is being over-modest when he speaks like this. Some of his operations at this time achieved an almost virtuoso brilliance, and have since become text-book cases in the Secret Service training schools. Most, by their very nature, must remain firmly on the secret list. The few that can be mentioned give just a small idea of the range and scope of his success.

One of Bond's so-called ‘copy-book affairs’ occasioned a swift visit to the Far East. 002, who for the previous three months had been inside a gaol in Canton, had broken free, killed several Chinese guards and somehow crossed the border between China and Portuguese Macao. In London it was realized that this was a situation that could all too easily get out of hand. But almost before the Chinese Communists had time to put pressure on the Portuguese for the ‘foreign murderer's’ return, Bond was in Macao. It was a perfectly planned and executed coup – so perfect that when 002 disappeared from the Portuguese police headquarters where he was being held, there was no shred of evidence of who had taken him. (This was in fact almost the first operational use of Oblivon, a safe but instantly effective sleep-inducing drug which had been recently developed in the laboratories of ‘Universal Export’.) The escaped agent travelled to Hong Kong – impeccably disguised as an ancient Hackar woman – on the morning ferry, and was back in London by the following midday.

Another mission Bond undertook this year led to the recovery of several pounds of top-grade uranium 235, and in doing so he saved the British Government from considerable international embarassment (to put it mildly). For the uranium had been stolen by mistake by a group of London gangsters from a consignment to an atomic power-station on the coast. The lorry had been hi-jacked. The thieves had clearly thought the uranium was gold or some other straightforward precious metal. But when the lorry was recovered, the uranium was missing. During the weeks that followed, Interpol was alerted. Rumours began to buzz around the underworld about the uranium being ‘on offer’ for a reputed million pounds. And the Government was suddenly shocked at the prospect of a group of criminals offering the raw material for an atomic bomb to anybody who could pay the price.

Bond spent some time in France, where he was operating in conjunction with his old friend Mathis. He took a lot of trouble building up his cover as an envoy from an Arab power wanting the uranium to be used against Israel. This was dangerous work, involving the penetration of at least one Arab underground network from North Africa. And in fact Bond finally did ‘purchase’ the uranium – from a villa on Lake Geneva for a million pounds in gold, provided on British Government orders by the Bank of England. The gold was recovered by Mathis and his men that same afternoon, whilst Bond and his lethal cargo were flown back from Switzerland to Gatwick by a special aircraft of R.A.F. Transport Command.

That autumn Bond returned to London just in time for the publication of Fleming's second book,
Live and Let Die
. It was obvious to Bond that Fleming was now getting in his stride as an established author. He was very proud of the dust-jacket for the book. Bond liked it too, but something about the author's attitude was troubling him. Fleming had actually suggested he should come to a publication party for the book. When Bond refused, Fleming replied ‘but why on earth not? It'll be amusing and no one will realize who you are.’

This, as Bond admits, was just the trouble. Arabs are wary of being photographed in case they lose their face: Bond began to feel that he was losing, not his face, but his whole personality. And Fleming was beginning to act as if James Bond were his creation. Bond told him so. Fleming replied, quite logically, that this was all part of the original deception. Bond had to agree, but still felt uneasy. This time he couldn't bring himself to read the book.

Bond was not the only member of the Secret Service to be worried at the course the books were taking. After the publication of this second book some very strange reports got back to Moscow. Urquhart was worried that someone in the press would stumble on the truth, and Fleming was summoned to an anxious meeting of the security committee in the ‘Universal Export’ building. Once again his ingenuity appeared to save the day.

‘If we're so afraid that Smersh will smell a rat,’ he said, ‘perhaps we ought to give them a really big one to sniff at.’

M. asked him what he meant.

‘I think the time has come to give them what they think they're getting – a piece of total fiction built around our famous superman. Something so obviously far-fetched that our old friend, Guy Burgess will have all the arguments he needs to convince his critics that Bond is pure and unadulterated fiction.’

This was the origin of his next book which he called
Moonraker
.

The plot was a favourite one of Fleming’s – a mammoth British rocket project built by a rich industrialist who plans to use it for his Russian masters. But he and Bond spent a weekend together to discuss it. By an odd coincidence, Fleming owned a house not far from James Bond's boyhood haunt at Pett Bottom – the Old Palace, Bekesbourne. They went to Fleming's club, the Royal St George's, Sandwich where they played a lot of golf and then sketched out the plot. Fleming's idea, like all the finest thriller plots, was just conceivable. His villain was an immensely rich industrialist who offered to use all his vast resources to build a British rocket – he called it ‘The Moonraker’. The project would go ahead, the villain would get praised for his vision and patriotism. And then, at the last minute, James Bond would discover that he wasn't what he seemed. In fact he was working for the enemy, and the Moonraker would be part of a plot to hold London to ransom – either the British Government would give in, or the Moonraker, complete with atomic warhead, would be fired directly at the heart of London. Bond was again impressed by Fleming's ingenuity, and also by his knack of welding fact to fiction. It was Bond's idea to place the rocket-launching base on the cliffs at Kingsdown. This was a stretch of coast that he knew well. He took Fleming there to get the atmosphere, and afterwards they stopped at the pub, The World Without Want on the Dover Road, which was to feature in the book. Here they discussed Bond's office routine, and M.'s latest fads. They even talked about the villain. He was based on a mutual acquaintance but, to avoid the libel laws, they had to find a different name for him. For some reason Bond remembered the dog he had owned as a boy in France – Drax.

‘Good name for a villain,’ Fleming said. ‘Villain's names must all be short and sharp and memorable.’

12

Bond Cocu

‘L
OVE?’ SAID JAMES Bond. ‘The best definition of it I ever heard came from a friend of Ian's, a man called Harling. Used to work with N.I.D. during the war and was supposed to have been a great expert on the subject in his day. He defined love as “a mixture of tenderness and lust”. I think I agree with him.’

‘And that's all?’ said Honeychile.

‘That's quite enough,’ said Bond. ‘For me at any rate.’

It had taken him several days to explain how the Bond books had started. During this time he had appeared distinctly tense and it had clearly been an effort to recount the facts of this strange story. I knew him well enough by now to recognize when he was ill at ease. The voice grew sharper and he became impatient at any interruption. Plainly the loss of his identity into the Fleming books still rankled. He seemed relieved when he could talk of other things; much to my surprise he even accepted an invitation from the indefatigable Mrs Schultz for a day's cruise aboard her yacht, the
Honeychile
, and suggested I should come along.

We set out early. The Schultz ‘Corniche’ picked us up from the hotel at eight. By eight-thirty the long white boat was gliding from the harbour to the open sea.

We spent that morning cruising between the islands and enjoying the immensity of sky and ocean. I had never seen Bond quite so happy. All his anxieties of the last few days seemed to have been left ashore; it was revealing to see how he took command. He looked every inch a sailor (or was it once again an actor playing the part of the distinguished naval officer?). He spent the morning at the helm, ordered the crew around, and even took over navigation from old Cullum, the
Honeychile
’s professional skipper. (Cullum, a philosophical man, didn't seem to mind. He must have been well trained by Honeychile.) Bond seemed most competent with charts and sextants and nobody resented his authority. True, Cullum smiled occasionally, but he addressed him as ‘Commander’ which Bond seemed to like. Honeychile played the part of Bond's devoted slave.