Ian Fleming and John le Carré
One chief of British Intelligence described James Bond as “the best recruiting sergeant in the world.” Another former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, agrees that the fictional spy’s impact has been huge. “Definitely, it’s had a positive effect. It’s made the Service the most famous Intelligence organisation. There is no linking or reality at all, but that’s not really the point. It’s reputational, it’s myth-building, it’s contributed to the brand. In the most distant part of the world, everyone has heard of MI6. There are big espionage cases, not just walk-ins like Oleg Gordievsky and Vasily Mitrochin, where people have gone to the British when it would be more logical to approach the Americans, and who particularly like the British because of the Bond culture.”
This is more than borne out by my interview with former KGB Colonel, Alexander Lebedev. We meet in the Edition Hotel off Oxford Street. Fifteen minutes late, in he strides: a man in black, blond hair cropped short, early sixties, round glasses. He guides me into a back room, curtained off, where a table is reserved. Part philanthropist, part fantasist, part tabloid gangster, Lebedev is surrounded by staff who come up or contact him on the i-phone he monitors on the stool beside him.
“In 1982, I first worked for KGB. I went to Libya to tell stories about Lenin in Tajoura. I had studied English. To be or not to be. I read that again the other day.”
“How does it go on?”
“I still need to refresh my memory, but my mother was a teacher of literature and history. When first I became aware of Fleming? Not before 1988, when I arrived in UK. I still watch the movies. I’ve seen all of them. I look at my wife, Elena. I really think she would do a good movie. I show you. This is the trailer. We’ve finished seven seconds. I’m going to show to John Malkovich and Kevin Spacey.”
He plays me the brief sequence on his phone. In a tight red onesie, gripping two long-barrelled pistols, his wife shoots at various white busts on pedestals which crash to the ground. It appears to copy a Bond movie in every frame.
“It’s called ‘Banksters’. Set in Russia, Ukraine, the US. It’s about bankers, corruption, about global financial fraudulence, apartheid – dramatic, full-scale fiction.”
He puts the phone down. “I started reading Ian Fleming when I came here. Smiley, yes.”
“Smiley is le Carré.”
He thinks about this. “Le Carré is more closer to reality. Bond, it’s an adventure.” Soon after, he stands up. He has to go. He is joining his son Yevgeny for a party they are throwing for the UK’s new Prime Minister of a few hours, Boris Johnson.
At John le Carré’s last public appearance, I put it to Fleming’s most obvious successor, whom I had known for more than thirty years as David Cornwell, that he had created George Smiley as a rebuke to James Bond and an embodiment of everything Bond was not – cuckolded, ugly, old, unsporty, cerebral, morally torn. Yet didn’t the two authors have elements in common – even though le Carré seemed to want to place as much distance as he could between Fleming and himself? Both had left their British private schools early and gone to live in Switzerland and Germany, where they learned to ski well; both had joined the British Intelligence Service, with Cornwell nearly coming to work for Fleming on the Sunday Times as part of the Mercury team (which recruited a number of Intelligence officers); both had married an Englishwoman called Ann; both wrote their break-out novels in a matter of weeks; both received brickbats when they tried to escape their genre; and how le Carré, having set up real battles within the soul when his books begin, often ended them with Ian Fleming climaxes. The parallels did not end there. Le Carré had used Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan as lead actors, and Paul Dehn (“Goldfinger”) as a screenwriter (“The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”), and for his next project, le Carré had told me, he wanted none other than Daniel Craig to play Alec Leamas in his new six-part adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Even if it were merely to recoil from him, le Carré’s denial of any indebtedness to Fleming (“I have never had much interest in him or his books”) was as impossible to swallow as his shifting stories about how he had come up with his pseudonym – on a shopfront seen from the top of a double-decker bus, being the most common. But as his biographer Adam Sisman says: “He provided several different explanations of why he chose the name John le Carré, and afterwards admitted that none of these was true.” Ian Fleming told Georges Simenon how he followed Balzac’s method of borrowing his characters’ names from “a good name outside a shop”. Then I read Fleming’s description in Thrilling Cities of the Casino in Monte Carlo where Ronnie Cornwell had taken the young David to gamble for perilous amounts. What pulled me up was Fleming’s reference to the call of “Carré” uttered by the croupier amid “all the noisy abracadabra of one roulette table”. At once, I thought of the first Bond villain, Le Chiffre, who meets Bond at the baccarat table a decade before Cornwell chose his pseudonym. I thought of Le Cercle, Fleming’s group who frequented casinos in pre-war France. And I made this extravagant leap: could Cornwell have come up with “le Carré” in subconscious homage to Le Chiffre and Le Cercle and the croupier’s “Carré” calls – to Ian Fleming, in other words. I emailed him. No answer. He had died.
Bond, as ex-Colonel Lebedev astutely observes, is “adventure”. But what I discovered after four years in Ian Fleming’s company, uncovering material that because of his secret status has taken its time to be released, is how much Fleming’s life was “closer to reality” and more harrowing than Bond or le Carré put together. Fleming actually lived the seriousness which le Carré’s novel sought to convey. Le Carré, like Bond and Graham Greene, was only a minor player in British Intelligence. “The trouble with David,” said one MI6 colleague, “is that he was never involved in a successful operation.” Fleming, by contrast, was in the inner sanctum of the “central inaccessible citadel”, as his Naval Intelligence chief, Admiral Godfrey, called it – and a more significant figure in the history of covert operations than Bond, le Carré or Greene ever were. Ian and his brother Peter formed part of an unbelievably select group who were cleared to know the war’s top secrets, the decrypts from the code-cracking centre in Bletchley Park: in April 1940, the list of those with access to this information, known as ULTRA, was restricted to less than 30. Fleming was also one of a trusted few who were charged with trying to bring the United States into the fight, and worked to set up and then coordinate with the foreign Intelligence department that developed into the CIA. Following the Allied victory of 1945, he continued to play an undercover role in the Cold War from behind his Sunday Times desk.
When all this is said, Fleming emerges as significant despite Bond and not wholly because of Bond. He was an influential figure in his own right, someone even world leaders wished to consult, who had a fascinating story to tell, but one that security concerns and a strong stripe of diffidence prevented him from writing. To simplify horribly, there would be no James Bond had Fleming not led the life he did, but if Bond had not existed, Fleming is someone we should still want to know about.
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man is published by Harvill, £30