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contact with intelligence operatives in the United States, most notably the Canadian William Stephenson, head of British intelligence in North America, and William ‘Big Bill’ Donovan, the lawyer, First World War veteran and US government official who would play a crucial role in Anglo-American intelligence and the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which would later evolve into the CIA.
    In May 1941, Fleming accompanied Godfrey to the States, ostensibly to inspect security in US ports, but also to help William Stephenson and Donovan develop the intelligence relationship with America. On the way, they stopped at Estoril, near Lisbon, where Fleming gambled at the casino with some Portuguese businessmen, and lost. On leaving,Fleming remarked: ‘What if those men had been German secret service agents, and suppose we had cleaned them out of their money; now that would have been exciting.’ It was another glimpse into the workings of Fleming’s imagination. The scene would marinade in his mind for a decade before finding its way into the most memorable moment in
Casino Royale
, when Bond cleans out the repulsive communist agent Le Chiffre.
    In Washington, Godfrey and Fleming met J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, for exactly sixteen minutes, but soon afterwards Roosevelt followed British advice and made Bill Donovan head of the new government intelligence department that would later become the OSS. At Donovan’s request, Fleming penned a seventy-page memo with suggestions on the shape a US intelligence agency should take after the war. His description of the ideal secret agent has the unmistakable ring of Bond: ‘must have trained powers of observation, analysis and evaluation; absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty; language and wide experience, and be aged about 40 to 50’. Fleming would later claim, not entirely seriously, that this work had been instrumental in forming the CIA charter; even if this was not strictly true, Donovan was grateful enough to present Fleming with a .38 Colt revolver inscribed ‘For Special Services’. In later life, Fleming would stoke speculation by declining to say exactly what these services had been, while hinting that they had been very special indeed.
    Fleming made two more trips across the Atlantic, for conferences at which Churchill and Roosevelt discussed Allied strategy. The second, in Quebec in 1943, involved one of the odder moments in the Fleming–Bond biography. Bill Stephenson, the mastermind behind British intelligence in North America, would later claim that during this visit Fleming attended Camp X, the notoriously tough training centre near Toronto where SOE and OSS agents were put through their paces. More than that, Stephenson claimed that Fleming had excelled at the course, including unarmed combat, placing a fake bomb in a Toronto power station, swimming underwater to an offshore tanker and attaching a limpet mine to the hull (strongly reminiscent of a scene in
Live and Let Die
), and firing a Sten gun on the rifle range with ‘extraordinary relish’. Most bizarrely, at the end of the course, each trainee was supposedly issued with a revolver and told to kill a man at a specific address. According to Stephenson, this was the only aspect of the course Fleming flunked; he would later declare that he ‘could never kill a man in that way’.
    However, the historian of Camp X, David Stafford, could find no evidence that Ian Fleming had ever attended a course there. The courses described by Stephenson, at which his friend supposedly excelled, were not on the curriculum. It is certainly possible, even likely, that he visited the camp in 1943; he may even have taken part in a few training events. But the notion that Fleming outperformed the real spies atthe most demanding of all wartime spy camps is pure fiction, and soon would be.
    Despite the sudden sacking of Admiral Godfrey in December 1942, as