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the war headed to its finale, Ian continued to play a prominent role in naval intelligence. His travels continued, including a round-the-world trip to coordinate intelligence for the new British Pacific Fleet that took him to Cairo, Ceylon, Australia and then home via Pearl Harbor. He also visited Jamaica to attend a conference on the U-boat threat in the Caribbean, and fell in love with the island. Here he would build his holiday home, Goldeneye, and here he would, in time, write every one of the Bond novels.
    In March 1944, Fleming was charged with running the committee which channelled top-secret information to the Royal Navy units preparing to invade Normandy. The ‘Red Indians’, 30 AU, would be part of the attack, and Fleming compiled lists of the sort of information and equipment to be scooped up ahead of the invasion force. As the German army retreated, 30 AU scoured after it. Later, the unit would be the first Allied force to enter the naval port of Kiel. Fleming’s ‘Red Indians’ picked up some astonishing technological booty: an acoustic homing torpedo hidden in a mushroom farm, an amphibious machine for exploding beach mines, and a one-man submarine – complete with decomposing crewman inside, one dead eye pressed to the periscope. At Tambach Castle, 30 AU came across the entire Germannaval archives dating back to 1870, under the care of three German admirals. Fleming himself travelled to Germany to ensure their safe return to Britain. As for the three admirals, according to one account, Fleming ordered that they be killed, but when the lieutenant charged with this refused, he relented. Something about this story does not ring true: whatever brutal qualities he might invest in his fictional agent, Fleming was not the killing kind.
    Fleming never claimed to be James Bond. He did not have to: the critics and media did that for him. But he was careful not to deny it too forcefully either. He was only too happy to be photographed with gun in hand, and to hint at dark doings in his wartime spy days. He had travelled the world helping to spin the wartime spy web, and he had seen fighting at first hand. However, most of his war had taken place behind a London desk, dreaming up plots; his second successful career would involve the same process, but at a different desk. In later years, Fleming would refer to ‘school and war and other uncivilised experiences’; in truth, his war had been a remarkably civilised affair.
    After six and a half years with naval intelligence, Fleming was no longer the callow, spoiled young man he had been in 1939. He had found a world, of secret agents and espionage, of adventure, violence and intrigue, that delighted him, satisfying both his intellect and romanticism. Churchill himself asserted that ‘in the higher ranges of Secret Service work, the actual facts of many cases were in every respectequal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true.’ Fleming would later quote that passage with approval, having converted his own experience of the tangled world into novels. It would be another seven years before he sat down to create Bond, but much of the material was already in place. Fleming had met dangerous adventurers, and known subtle spies; in the midst of war, he had travelled to distant corners of the world; he had witnessed the remarkable power of modern gadgetry in the spy’s armoury; he had seen how secret agents are made; he had watched men die; and he had held the power of life and death in his own hands. Above all, his job with naval intelligence had taken place in a wartime world where anything seemed possible. Winning a war, like writing a novel, required one