The Ian Fleming Miscellany Read Online Free PDF Page B

elsewhere, in remote locations working on biological and chemical warfare. In any case the ruling class at the time had been persuaded by their education that scientists had little imagination, rather as women could not drive a tank. It was Montagu’s task to interpret the importance of the information flowing through – what the politicians absolutely must know, what could be passed on to other units for decisions about action and so on. Also, the people in Section 17M had to try to turn agents into double agents and invent imaginary agents to confuse the Germans. The fake map idea surfaced again, as a way of driving German ships into minefields around the British coast.

    Ian Fleming at the Admiralty in 1940, wearing the uniform of a Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve Lieutenant. The National Archive
    Ian worked alongside Ewen and had daily morning briefings with Godfrey in his office next door. ‘Fleming,’ said Ewen shrewdly, ‘is charming to be with, but would sell his own grandmother. I like him a lot.’ He liaised with the other secret services and reported what they were doing to his boss. He was the filter for ‘bright ideas’ that were passed on to Godfrey; if they were obviously hopeless he weeded them out. Many got through. Other wizard wheezes, some of which would prove highly successful, originated with him. ‘Busy, but secretive, he seemed happy and very electrically alive’, wrote Ivar Bryce, who saw him at this time.
    Ian and Anne O’Neill were an item when he started work for Godfrey. (By Christmas 1939 her husband was away commanding a mechanised squadron from a base in Northern Ireland.) On the Monday night following the declaration of war, he found time to attend a dinner at her home. He was never at ease with her cynical arty friends, especially now when they took the opportunity to make fun of his uniform. He didn’t respect these people, but he still minded. Perhaps because his mother’s notoriety shamed him more than he ever admitted, he was sensitive to that kind of passive aggression. He was wary of ‘clever’ people who claimed intellectual superiority. He had a lot more respect for Admiral Godfrey and people like him. Maybe he was, as Andrew Lycett wrote, looking for a father figure: ‘Since his death on the Western Front in May 1917, Val Fleming had been the ghost at Ian’s feast, the blameless paragon of manly virtues whom his son could never hope to match.’ Perhaps, but Ian was also loyal to the ideals that Godfrey represented.
    On 8 September he was made a commander, probably in order to add authority to his briefings at high level. He knew very little about the navy, but he made friends with Captain Drake, a.k.a. Quacker, who was also in Room 39. Quacker now worked with the Joint Intelligence Committee, but he had seen action, and Ian could test his ideas against Quacker’s experience.
    Like Godfrey, Fleming was good at finding people who could supply particular strengths. At White’s, random civilian members were dropping heavy hints about jobs in uniform. Ivar Bryce had come back from South America and asked him the same thing. ‘He advised me to go back to New York and Washington, where I had some influential friends, especially in the newspaper business, ranging from Walter Lippmann to Walter Winchell. “You will be more use there,” he said. “Stick around.”’ Bryce was perfectly happy to do that, so Fleming arranged a flight for him from Prestwick (Glasgow) to Montreal, with stopovers, and from there to New York.
    Fleming wanted only people who would have special skills of value to Naval Intelligence. He was interested, for instance, in black propaganda that would deflect or deter German action. He took Sefton Delmer to meet Godfrey to talk about how to plant disinformation in the newspapers – and how to discover whether or not this ever did put the wind up the Nazis, which seemed unclear.
    At the start of the war he made friends with an exceptional individual: