The Ian Fleming Miscellany (7 page)

Fleming had discussed Donovan's plans and needed time to write his blueprint; Godfrey wanted to confront Hoover of the FBI in Washington. Smithers was already there and by-passing the naval attaché, whose assistant he was, to gather secret intelligence about the Japanese and send it back to London.

Ian later told Ivar Bryce that when he got to Washington he was ‘locked in a room with pen and paper'. He produced a précis and a full seventy-page document:

… a detailed blueprint of the British service, using a century's experience of its aims, its methods and its security. It was a tour de force of organising and administrative ability, and demonstrated what I believe was Ian's greatest strength … For clearly expressed, practical, administrative talent, with no detail omitted, and no conceivable eventuality forgotten, he had no equal.

Godfrey saw that Americans liked Fleming, so he left him behind in Washington with a brief to do a lot of socialising and produce ‘clear and practical' memoirs for Donovan. He told Ian to emphasise the all-round vision required of the ideal intelligence officer, and the need to get your staff lined up before you opened shop. And of course he had to keep his collaboration with Donovan quiet. If Donovan should be seen as a British stooge, Roosevelt would never get the idea past Congress

Roosevelt gave Donovan some seed money, and Donovan gave Fleming a .38 Colt service revolver inscribed ‘for special services'. But Pearl Harbor had yet to happen and the Office for Strategic Services would not officially exist – or Donovan serve as its head – for another year.

Bryce, meanwhile, was still in South America under orders from Stephenson. Stephenson feared that the Germans could too easily invade Brazil from Senegal, across the South Atlantic. He was unconvinced that any South American government was fervently committed to freedom and democracy. Several Latin countries harboured Nazi cells. Mail to and from Europe was generally offloaded in the Caribbean and censored by the British (Conrad O'Brien Ffrench was in charge in Trinidad) before being sent on. The one regular, un-monitored channel of communication was a weekly plane from Dakar, Senegal, to Recife, Brazil, where it refuelled for the return journey. Stephenson wanted this service put out of action, which was easy enough if there was no fuel in Recife. Bryce tricked a friendly old caretaker at the airfield into allowing him to slip through to the fuel store, where he planted a bomb and left. The entire supply went up in a sheet of flame.

Bryce also ‘doodled' a map of what a Nazi South America would look like. Both he and his boss saw its potential as propaganda. They happened to know that Germans in Cuba maintained radio contact with U-boats in the Caribbean. They even knew where the German base was. They passed on that information to the FBI, but not before they'd planted a map there, forged by experts, very like the one Bryce had made. It added to the drip-feed of propaganda but still failed to undermine Middle America's opposition to war.

In June 1941 the Soviet Union came in on the Allied side. Ian wanted to be sent to Moscow, but the leader of the British military mission there wouldn't have him at any price. In his view, Fleming was gullible, a nuisance, and spoiled.

There is one odd postscript to Fleming's blueprint for the OSS. In July 1975
The Times
claimed in its obituary of Dick Ellis (later suspected of having been a double agent) that Ellis had been decorated by the Americans for the OSS blueprint.

Whoever wrote it, the contents must have boosted Donovan's campaign to start a secret service. He faced angry political opposition, because anything that smacked of a secret state sounded like Communism to Republicans, and Hoover, in charge of the FBI, was deeply suspicious on principle of anything the British liked. William Stephenson was well aware of this, but he urged Donovan to persist. The British needed America on side, but they didn't need an ally that leaked like a sieve.

When Fleming returned to England, he turned his attention to the Political Warfare Executive, the PWE. This was set up to feed ‘white propaganda' to the BBC German Service and to transmit black propaganda through its own radio station, GS1, Gustav Siegfried Eins, to encourage rumours to spread among the German population and U-boat crews in particular. Material from Naval Intelligence's interrogators inspired much of its output. Ian's friend Sefton Delmer, formerly of the
Express
, had been working for it since the start of the war. His parents were Australian, but his first language was German, and GS1 was presented by an imaginary Nazi. It was highly successful, although the convincing ‘Fake Nazi' caused a collective raising of eyebrows in Whitehall. Ian's own broadcasting career was short-lived and not wildly successful, since in December of 1941 he recorded a confident talk for the BBC German Service and the following day, HMS
Repulse
and HMS
Prince of Wales
were sunk off Malaya. Godfrey had commanded the
Repulse
for three years until 1939.

The winter of 1941–42 was relatively quiet. The Blitz was over and the V-1s and V-2s had not yet begun. At Christmas there was something to celebrate. Pearl Harbor had kicked the USA into action at last. In the spring, there were Americans in uniform everywhere, officers in the Berkeley Bar and ratings strolling through Piccadilly and Leicester Square.

Ian had moved to a tiny flat in Athenaeum Court, overlooking Green Park. He was seeing Anne O'Neill and several other upper class young women, as well as Maud Russell. Muriel Wright, for whom he'd found a Whitehall job, had been a model before the war. He found her rather dim, but he had persuaded her to take his 17-year-old sister Amaryllis riding regularly in Richmond Park.

Anne was resident mostly at the Dorchester, where Ian often played bridge with her and her lifelong friend Loelia Duchess of Westminster. The Duchess, who was separated from the Duke, had a crush on Ian that does not seem to have been reciprocated. She was six years older than him and had been a ‘bright young thing' in the 1920s. He never could take her seriously as a seductive older woman, but he did immortalise her as the matronly Loelia Ponsonby in the Bond books. It was Maud Russell for whom he had real respect and affection, and it seems to have been mutual. She gave him a keepsake that he treasured: a gold cigarette case, disguised by a coating of gunmetal. She understood his love of deceit.

Rear-Admiral Godfrey was to be kicked upstairs at the end of September 1942; promoted to vice-admiral and sent to Bombay, his job at the Admiralty placed in safer hands. Like Cotton, he was a man who did his job outstandingly well but whose abrasive self-confidence caused offence. Ewen Montagu, who liked him, said he was ‘a shit, but a genius'. Before leaving his post, he found it necessary to go on Naval Intelligence business to New York, and he took Ian Fleming with him. They visited the thirty-sixth floor of the RCA building in Rockefeller Center, and at William Stephenson's apartment they met Ernest Cuneo, the lawyer and former footballer who would become Ian's lifelong friend. Ian was to be Naval Intelligence's liaison officer with the OSS in London, and in New York, Junius Morgan, of the banking family, was his opposite number.

Godfrey flew on to Canada, and Ian made his way to Washington. In October there was to be an Anglo-American joint conference in Jamaica. Ian had never visited the island, although both Conrad O'Brien Ffrench and his mother's lover, Augustus John, had been inspired to paint it, and he may well, before the war, have seen some of those paintings. And in the 1930s, Ivar Bryce had bought Bellevue, a mid-eighteenth-century plantation house, in Jamaica. He would be attending the conference too.

Bryce had just arrived, and was at the airfield to meet Fleming off the plane from Washington. With the coming of war, Bellevue had been largely unoccupied except for one live-in caretaker-housekeeper. Rather than leave him to sleep at the Myrtle Bank Hotel in Kingston with the others, he took him back there. It was a 10-mile drive away, in darkness over bad roads and in a tropical rainstorm. Bellevue, as the name indicates, was on a hilltop. When they arrived they had to park the car down the hill and haul their own suitcases up to the house before getting in, shaking themselves dry like dogs and awakening the housekeeper to provide some refreshment. It was hot and rainy ‘to the point that little toadstools appeared in our leather shoes during the night'. Bryce felt dreadful. He wished he hadn't suggested this.

That first night, they sat on the veranda drinking grenadine and water and waiting for the chicken to be cooked. They stared out at a deep starry sky through curtains of rain splashing relentlessly off the roof. Behind them was a tall gallery, 65ft wide by 65ft deep, with ‘a double door and two windows penetrating the bookshelves and giving access to the hurricane room' behind. Admiral Lord Nelson had convalesced there after a fever.

In the morning, the sky had cleared. They could look down the hill across miles of tropical flowers and trees to the port of Kingston and sunshine sparkling on the blue Caribbean.

They ate chicken and drank gin just about every night, and bought a lot of fruit. Ian seemed happy. He and Bryce left for Washington in the same plane. Bryce wrote:

Having gone over and over his notes with intense concentration for hours, he suddenly snapped his brief-box shut and turned to me sparkling with enthusiasm. He paused. ‘You know, Ivar, I have made a great decision.' I waited, nervous of the news to come. ‘When we have won this blasted war, I am going to live in Jamaica. Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books. That is what I want to do.'

He asked Bryce to find him 10 acres or so, away from towns and on the coast. Bryce promised to get his agent, Reggie Acquart, to look for somewhere. Then he forgot about it.

In London, Ian worked long hours. Anne O'Neill had been living in the country with her two children while her husband remained in Northern Ireland. She had seen less of Ian since the beginning of the war. She was still having an affair with Esmond Harmsworth, the second Viscount Rothermere, a divorcé with three children who was fifteen years older than she was. At the start of 1941 she had given a New Year party at the Dorchester, where she sometimes stayed; Ian was among the guests. Ian was lucky in the Blitz, although he had narrow escapes from raids at the Carlton, at Sefton Delmer's flat in Lincoln's Inn and in Dover. His flat at Ebury Street, with its skylight high on the roof, was not properly blacked out, so throughout the winter he stayed at clubs or hotels. One night, after a dinner and frightened by bombs falling in the West End, Anne decided to spend a night at the Lansdowne Club with him.

It was not a
ménage à trois
exactly; there was no
ménage
, but in the spring of 1941 there were
vacances à trois
, since according to Anne, she and Esmond and Ian took an unfortunate holiday in Cornwall together because Ian bullied them into it. They drove, and she was carsick all the way, and miserable. Perhaps Ian wanted to re-live the happy summers on West Country beaches that he had spent with his brothers, of whom only two were left.

When the Blitz had largely stopped and the Americans came into the war at the end of 1942, Ian watched as the most fascinating ruse of all took shape. When Ian first joined Naval Intelligence, he had written a long list of ideas for deception and sabotage, mostly original. Many of these had been considered and shelved or put into effect already, but one at least had seemed, perhaps, too bizarre to tackle on any occasion. On his list, Ian had credited it to a plot in a Basil Thomson novel of the 1920s, in which a dead body is left to be found, so that the information it is carrying will send the finders on a wild goose chase.

The plot was again put forward in the summer of 1942, this time by one Cholmondeley, from Montagu's team. Nothing much happened. But circumstances would make Naval Intelligence look again.

Donovan's new OSS was in place and still viewed with suspicion at home but in constant contact with British intelligence. Roosevelt wanted the attack on Germany to start in Europe, right now. The British were adamantly against this. If they could seize North Africa from Casablanca to Cairo, they would be able to invade Italy and fight northwards through the occupied lands of southern Europe, including France, before attacking closer to the Fatherland itself. Roosevelt saw the point and conceded it.

So in September 1942, the Allies were united in determination that Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, should go ahead as soon as possible. A date was set, and in September, a courier set off by plane from England to Gibraltar with secret documents: most importantly, a letter from General Clark, in charge of the Allied Expeditionary Force, to the island's governor that told him to expect Eisenhower on the ‘target date', 4 November. The plane crashed. A few days later the courier's body was washed up on a beach in Southern Spain. The letter from General Clark was still in his pocket, unopened.