Ian Fleming Even Cooler Than Originally Thought
Filed under: Fandom
My favorite news story of the week comes courtesy of The Times, which reports on an Ian Fleming/James Bond-themed exhibition at the British Imperial War Museum. Apparently, when Fleming was an intelligence officer in the Royal Navy -- in 1940, 13 years before Bond began -- he concocted a harebrained scheme to seize the decryption code used by the German navy to send messages. He proposed to take a captured German plane, fill it with German-speaking Brits, crash it into the English Channel, wait for a German rescue boat to come by, board it, sabotage it, and run off with the loot. (Or, in Fleming's brilliantly terse formulation: "Crash plane in the Channel after making S.O.S. to rescue service. Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.") Even better, he was able to put together a team and await the opportunity to put his plan into action -- but one never came up, and higher-ups started to worry about the crew being killed in the crash or drowning.
The Times speculates that this may have inspired the plot of From Russia With Love, which involved a mission to steal a Russian encryption device. But I'm not sure even Bond would have been up for the mission on which Fleming was about to lead a few real-life British sailors. Hats off to the guy. His fictional creation doesn't have much on him. You can find tales of Fleming's other WWII exploits on his Wikipedia page, but this one seems to be new.
[hat tip: Movie City News]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-08-2008 @ 12:06PM
BondsBabe said...
I hadn't heard that one before. Thanks for the info! :)
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4-08-2008 @ 12:20PM
Richard von Busack said...
The real life Operation Mincemeat--filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was--was an even slicker plan, though Fleming wasn't involved: that's the one where British intelligence took a corpse, dressed it in an British officer's uniform and used it to convince the Germans that an upcoming invasion was heading elsewhere.
Fleming's real-life ideas were, unfortunately, too often crackpot schemes, such as the plan to depillatorize Castro's beard with chemicals (and no, I'm not making it up). There's a good perjorative account of some of Fleming's intelligence scheme in Alexander Cockburn's Corruptions of Empire, and in Simon Winder's excellent The Man Who Saved Britain. Fleming was a bit of a dreamer, which is no surprise to those who love the books.
Let me just add that I'm a huge slavering Bond fan, and I doubt if Fleming would recognize the creature of the movies--a civil servant whose targets are almost always megalomaniac capitalists...such as the kind he'll be going up against in Quantum of Solace.
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