The Ian Fleming Files (6 page)

He tossed the magazine aside and went over to a corner
of his office where sketches of the hypothesized inside of an Enigma machine
were pinned to a bulletin board. On a small table sat a mock-up of an Enigma
which resembled a bulky typewriter.

On the board, blue twine followed the impossibly
complex, circuitous and repeated changes of electrical paths that ran through
an Enigma scrambler. A cable placed onto the plugboard connected letters up in
pair. When an operator pressed E, the signal was diverted to Q before entering
the rotors. Several such ‘steckered’ pairs, up to 13, might be used at one
time. However, normally only 10 pairs were used at any one time. Current flowed
from the keyboard through the plugboard, and proceeded to the entry-rotor or
Eintrittswalze
.

British code breakers had achieved great success in
the Great War of 1914-18, most notably decoding the famous “Zimmerman
Telegram,” which had proposed a German-Mexican alliance to attack the United
States.  When it was published, the public outcry helped bring America
into the war, guaranteeing a quick Allied victory soon thereafter.  But
since then, British code-breaking had slowed to a trickle owing to budget cuts,
and because the Germans had introduced an electrical enciphering machine called
the Enigma. 

There was a short rap on the door and then June Hayes
entered carrying a file. Fleming’s eyes were locked on the Enigma mock-up.

“You’ll never make sense of that you know. There’s a
whole floor of people trained in cryptanalysis working on Enigma.”

Fleming was undeterred. “I’m not trying to break it,
just understand it.”

“How does it work?” she asked.

Fleming directed her attention to the replica. It had
a keyboard like a typewriter but above it were several rows of lights, each
with a different letter of the alphabet. Where the carriage normally would be
located, three cylindrical rotors were mounted crosswise to the way the roller
would have been installed. The letters of the alphabet were inscribed around
the rim of each rotor.

“Type your name,” he suggested.

June pushed J. The letter S lit up and the rotor on
the right turned one stop. Then she pushed U, N and E, the rotor advancing with
each letter. The lights that winked on spelled SLJX. 

“Again,” he commanded her.

She repeated the functions and JUNE came out NBFZ. She
was fascinated.

“When you press a key,” he explained, “an electronic
pulse travels through these rotors and comes out with a different letter. The
way the wires inside each rotor are connected determines what you see. And each
time the rotor turns it produces a different circuit for the pulse to go
through, thus lighting up a different lettered bulb even if you keep pressing
the same letter key.” He then pushed Q four times and got PNYL.

“And how do they decode it on the receiving end?”

“Decrypt not decode,” Fleming corrected her. “They use
the same machine. They set up the rotors in the same way and just do the
reverse.” He turned the rotors back to their original position and typed NBFZ.
It came out JUNE. “But if you’re His Majesty’s Secret Service and you don’t
know how the Enigma rotors are wired or how the Germans install them or set
them up to begin with, the number of possible combinations for each letter is
twenty-six factorial.” 

She looked at him blankly.

Fleming went to a blackboard and wrote with relish:
“That is the number 403, 291, 461, 126, 605, 635, 584, 000, 000!”

She held up the file in her hand and sighed, unable to
fathom what her boss found so fascinating. “This is the information you
requested on Darlan from records.”

Fleming took the docket stamped ‘Eyes Only’ with
interest. A grainy mug shot of the French Admiral was clipped to the front.
Darlan’s black eyes burned back at him. “Thank you, Miss Hayes. Has Reg, I mean
Mr. Withers returned from next door?”

“He said Godfrey’s reading the docket and to give him
twenty minutes.” She smiled and waltzed off.

Fleming shut the door after her, switched his desk
lamp on, lit the twentieth cigarette of the day and settled back in his chair
to read.

‘JEAN LOUIS XAVIER FRANCOIS DARLAN.’ And underneath,
in lower-case type, ‘Admiral of the Fleet and Commander in Chief of the French
Navy. Darlan was born in Nérac, Lot-et-Garonne, to a family with a long
connection with the French Navy. His great-grandfather was killed at the Battle
of Trafalgar. He remained in the French Navy after World War I…”

Fleming skimmed the rest of the biography. There was a
clipping from
Le Monde
. “With a career beginning during the height of
France's imperial power to its current decline, Darlan is a guardian of naval
preparedness, a stout opponent of fascism, an earnest patron of the
Anglo-French Alliance, and an advocate of combined naval power in the
Mediterranean.”

Fleming scoffed and turned to the internal notes.

“DESCRIPTION: Age about 61. Height 5ft 5in. Weight 165
lbs. Eyes, dark brown. Hair brown in a crew cut. Round face with a little
mustache. Roman nose. Ears large and pointy. Hands manicured.

“ALSO: Wears a ring with a hidden garrote wire and
carries a cane with a concealed toxic sword tip.”

Fleming scanned the details and flipped through the
pages until he came to his favorite section.

     “ANALYSIS by X-12”

He lit another cigarette. What followed would be of
more interest than the facts that had preceded. The identity of ‘X-12’ was
rumored to be that of a Harley Street Adlerian psychiatrist. Analysis was a
relatively new section and one that Fleming had come to enjoy the most. He read
on avidly. 

     “It is my opinion that the
five foot five Jean Darlan exemplifies the classic Napoleon complex. Named
after the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte who was said to have compensated
for his short stature by seeking war, power and conquest, the Napoleon Complex
or Small Man Syndrome describes a type of psychological phenomenon said to
exist in persons, usually men, of short stature. 

     Technically it is a form of
inferiority complex in which the person attempts to overcompensate for their
perceived shortcoming. It is characterized by overly-aggressive or domineering
social behavior, and carries the implication that such behavior is compensatory
for the subjects' stature. Researchers have established that men who were 1.63
m (5 ft 4 in) were 50% more likely to show signs of jealousy than men who were
1.98 m (6 ft 6 in). Sociological experiments have shown that there are several
advantages to being tall in attracting a mate, and the small man syndrome is
believed to be an evolutionary adaptation.

     Of course the primary cause
of short man syndrome is the aforementioned overcompensation. This is one of
the ego defense mechanisms as described by Freud, the idea being that the
individual could this way protect themselves from the belief that they were
smaller in size. At the same time the lack of confidence regarding their height
might cause them to try and distract from it by proving themselves able to 'mix
with the big boys'.

     Short man complex has also
been linked to evolutionary psychology – which looks at our psychology as a
race and how it could have developed through evolution due to the survival
value of particular behavioral traits. In the case of short man syndrome it may
be that in the wild smaller individuals needed to make more noise and act more
aggressively in order to compete for food and mates. Indeed studies have
demonstrated that in the wild, smaller creatures often do attack first.

     Interestingly, and as it
relates to Darlan, other personality traits have also been linked to Napoleon
syndrome – for instance risk taking behavior and jealousy. While many suspect
his political leanings to be right of center, especially given his desire for a
strong state backed by a vast militia, the maverick Admiral has shown a
socialist side also, in his fight for increased pay scales for servicemen, but
rarely does he adhere like a partisan to any particular philosophy. As a short
man, he snubs institutions as he himself feels he has been snubbed by them.
Never part of the boy’s club, he has always been a loner, convinced that his
stature has somehow marked him for a lonelier life. This can be interpreted on
the subconscious level as a jealous rejection of the parent figure.

     As for risk-taking, one only
has to look at the war hero’s storied career. With his daring battery charge at
Verdun that earned him a bullet in the head, it is a miracle he is still alive.
To the Small Man, such risk taking comes from a deep-rooted inner feeling of
inferiority that borders on a sense of worthlessness.”

Fleming paused a moment to reflect. He thought about
his own height — six feet and four inches — and how that had been an advantage
in life, especially with women. He remembered a short fellow at Sandhurst who
was teased mercilessly and who longed to be a marine but had no chance of ever
making the height requirement. The boys were quite cruel to him. His nickname
was Shrimp which he hated. He used to cry himself to sleep every night. Poor
bastard. Fleming wondered where Shrimp was now. Probably doing all right if
X-12 was to be believed. The concept of short had suddenly lost all its
association with humor and pity. There must be thousands of Shrimps, millions,
taking it out on the world because nature screwed them. Darlan had everyone by
the balls and wasn’t about to let go. He was angry at a world he had to stand
on tiptoe to see. It was understandable, thought Fleming.

Disappointed, Fleming put the thin file down and
turned the radio back on. His desk was covered in paperwork — cables from
America, intercepts that needed translating, internal dockets and other sundry
scraps of signals intelligence. He ripped the page off a small calendar,
revealing June 15. Almost one year exactly. One year since he was rescued from
entombment in a merchant bank and offered a position in the hallowed halls of
Admiralty H.Q.

He lit a cigarette and his eyes glazed over in
thought.

“You won’t be able to tell anyone about what you do
here,” the mysterious man in tweed at the Carlton Lounge had told him. “To the
world, you will be my assistant, with a broad portfolio ranging from dictation
to propaganda broadcasts. To support this cover you will carry out certain
administrative functions from time to time.

In reality, you will be focused on covert intelligence
gathering. I need someone with drive and imagination of the highest order.
Someone who knows a lot of people. This business is a business of
relationships. Ideally, this candidate should have a marked flair for
intelligence planning and be skilled at dreaming up plots to outfox the enemy.
The job involves deception,
ruses de guerre
, passing on false
information and so on. Gathering intelligence and distributing false
intelligence is like pushing quicksilver through a gorse bush with a
long-handled spoon. Understand?”

Fleming nodded fiercely. He was going to be a secret
agent! So what if he couldn’t talk about it. His brother Peter did enough
lollygagging for the two of them. Once the war was over he could tell the
world.

That was nearly a year ago. Most of his days were
spent in this small room mounting endless assaults on the hills of paperwork
that never stopped coming. Sightings of ships and aircraft by annoying
citizens, information from P.O.W.s, censored letters and captured documents,
merchant marine data from the Baltic exchange...

The intercom burred. Fleming threw the switch to hear
a triumphant sounding Withers: “He wasn’t too thrilled about your taking the
Mosquito for a joyride but I think he’s more concerned about Battersea’s
security than your, er, initiative. Anyway, he approves. Says the idea’s a bit
of a long shot but worth trying if the Treasury will foot the bill. And he’s
longing to get back at Darlan. Something to do with French naval exercises off
Gibraltar? Anyway you’re to discuss the mission parameters with him at once.”

“Thanks, Reg.”

“Hurry up, he’s waiting for you.”

Fleming felt a rush of adrenaline as he bustled to
Room 38 next door. He knocked gently and entered the small waiting antechamber
before the padded green baize door.

Miss Paddy Blythe, Godfrey’s twenty-eight year old
personal secretary, turned from a filing cabinet holding a file. Ethereal and
feral at once, Miss Blythe’s cool blue eyes crackled with an intellect and a
will that were not to be trifled with. Her desk was neat to the point of being
spartan, save for the essential items she needed to perform her tasks and one
single framed photograph of a white cat.

Miss Blythe’s whole demeanor instantly brightened upon
seeing her favorite agent. She spoke into the intercom. “17F is here, sir.”

“Send him in,” said the machine and the red light
above the padded portal turned green.

“You didn’t get a chance to flirt with me, Ian,” she
said seductively with an exaggerated pout.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Fleming retorted with a wink
before vanishing through the baize door, closing it softly behind him.

Miss Blythe sighed and returned to her paperwork. A
folded newspaper atop a low filing cabinet bore the headline “FRANCE ASKS USA
TO INTERVENE AS NAZIS OCCUPY PARIS.” 

Rear Admiral John Godfrey, 52, Director of National
Intelligence, was crouched before a marble fireplace stoking the flames.

His office had a warm, cozy feel. Ships in bottles, a
mounted binnacle, balls of colored glass trapped in netting. On the wall was a
framed snap of Godfrey in a long, flowing white robe and checked Arab
headdress, standing alongside T.E. Lawrence. Beside this was a poster of a
drowned sailor washed up on a shore under the legend “Loose Lips Sink Ships!”
In a corner, a black walnut hat-rack held a gray trilby and a wide,
putty-colored trenchcoat.