tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71549719090412042032024-03-18T20:27:17.581-07:00JamesbondauthenticusWilliam Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-48959292413863526052021-01-01T00:31:00.001-08:002021-01-01T00:31:16.637-08:00James Bond and Ian Fleming - The Men and the Myth <p> JAMES BOND & IAN FLEMING – THE MEN & THE MYTH</p>
<p class="normal">James Bond Authenticus</p>
<p class="normal">SPRING 1948 – ABOARD THE VIGILANT<br />
SOMEWHERE IN THE CARIBBEAN</p>
<p class="normal">James Bond stepped carefully across the deck of the <i>Vigilant,</i> grabbed hold of some rigging
and swung underneath as a wave slapped across the bow, spraying his face. He
felt a bit queasy, the effects of his usual bout with sea sickness that made
the early part of every voyage uncomfortable.</p>
<p class="normal">This was not his first trip to the West Indies, nor would it be
his last, but as always, James Bond was on a journey that had both scholarly
and professional ramifications. Bond had an insatiable interest in the origin,
distribution and lifestyle of birds, particularly the birds of the West Indies,
a subject on which he is recognized, among the international league of
ornithologists, as the foremost authority in the world.</p>
<p class="normal">But this trip would be different from the others because it
would end in death, the death of the captain, and the documentation of the
voyage would later leave Bond open to suspicion that he was an agent or
operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).</p>
<p class="normal">Although unknown to him at the time, such accusations would
only distract from his real mission, and despite his determined ambitions, his
work as a world renowned naturalists would be overshadowed by the publicity
that would make James Bond the world’s most famous spy.</p>
<p class="normal">By the time this particular expedition got underway, in the
spring of 1948, Bond had already spent the better part of twenty years engaged
in his life-long task of surveying the birds of the West Indies. Having been to
the Caribbean on many previous occasions, Bond was leery about this trip for a
number of reasons. Instead of traveling by his usual mode of transport among
the usually inaccessible out-islands, aboard a tramp steamer or native fishing
boat, he was instead with a group of fussy individuals aboard a large, but
confined yacht.</p>
<p class="normal">The <i>Vigilant</i> however,
owned by Philadelphia millionaire and philanthropist Cummins Catherwood, was a
convenient means of getting to the out-islands, and some of the costs were
being funded by Catherwood’s philanthropic foundation that distributed money
from his non-profit Catherwood Fund.</p>
<p class="normal">Encouraged to join this expedition by the Philadelphia Academy
of Natural Sciences, where Bond was the curator of Birds, Bond agreed to go
along when he insisted, and the rest of the party reluctantly agreed, to visit
three small islands that were off the main trade routes – Cayo Largo, St.
Andrews and Old Providence.</p>
<p class="normal">Besides not being easily accessible, these islands had not yet
been adequately or scientifically explored, and there was a high likely hood of
finding rare species of birds, plants and other creatures that the scientific
expedition would be interested in.</p>
<p class="normal">While there were other scientists aboard who shared his
concerns, Bond was especially leery of Catherwood, the owner, who exhibited a
domineering attitude earned only by his position of having bankrolled the trip.</p>
<p class="normal">Taking the ship owner’s routine watch at the helm, Cummins
Catherwood enjoyed sailing, yachting in the old fashioned sense, complete with
sails and a sense of mission. Independently wealthy, Catherwood and his sister,
Mrs. Charles C.G. Chaplin, acquired a considerable inheritance and their
lawyers established the Catherwood Foundation as a philanthropic fund for tax
purposes.</p>
<p class="normal">In November 1947 the <i>Philadelphia
Bulletin,</i> the city’s evening daily newspaper, announced that, "a
petition for a non-profit corporation, to be known as the Catherwood
Foundation, was filed in Common Pleas Court."</p>
<p class="normal">Located with an address in suburban Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania,
the Catherwood Foundation was officially incorporated by Catherwood and his
sister, and listed its directors as Catherwood’s wife, Mrs. Ellen Gown
Catherwood, and their associates Ophelia Aarnoldt, William Hamilton and I.F.
Dixon-Wainwright.</p>
<p class="normal">As a Philadelphia Main Line personality, Catherwood was a blue
blood society figure with a family that had strong Philadelphia roots. One
ancestor, Frederick Catherwood, cut his way through the Central American
jungles in 1839 to discover the ancient lost cities of the Mayan civilization.
An artist, archeologist and explorer, Catherwood drew detailed sketches of the
stone engravings that are now prized by collectors and exhibited by museums.</p>
<p class="normal">When Frederick Catherwood traveled to Central America he
carried with him a letter certifying to his status as a "special
confidential agent of the President of the United States," signed by
Martin Van Buren.</p>
<p class="normal">Thirty years after the 1948 Vigilant expedition that
included James Bond and Cummins Catherwood, it would be revealed that Cummins
Catherwood enjoyed a similar status with the American government – that of a
special bursar for covert operations of the CIA.</p>
<p class="normal">Catherwood’s yacht, the <i>Vigilant,</i> was built in New England to Catherwood’s personal
specifications. 64 feet from bow to stern, paid for with money from his
philanthropic Catherwood Fund, under private foundation laws, such funds could
finance any number of educational, religious and charitable causes, and the
1948 trip to the West Indies was billed as a "scientific expedition."
And that it was.</p>
<p class="normal">Besides his Columbian friend, Barraro, Bond felt most
comfortable with the other scientists aboard – Charles B. Wurtz, who
specialized in mollusks, Leroy H. Saxe, a parasitologist, and George R.
Procter, a botanist.</p>
<p class="normal">A contemporary newspaper article on the expedition dryly notes
that James Bond’s "main interest, is birds."</p>
<p class="normal">Bond got on well with the scientists, who readily appreciated
the fact that after twenty years "in the field," Bond’s book <i>Birds of the West Indies</i> had recently
been published.</p>
<p class="normal">It was Catherwood and the other passengers who made Bond
uneasy. There was Mrs. Catherwood, whose duties included keeping a log as the
expedition’s "official historian."</p>
<p class="normal">Then there was a young college girl on a holiday and an
Austrian baron and artist from Connecticut, a carefree couple who would have
the Captain marry them once they got to sea.</p>
<p class="normal">Although the jet setters on the cruise wanted to put into more
civilized ports-of-call, the avowed purpose of the trip made it necessary to
travel past the Bahamas, Cuba and Jamaica, and get to the small, mainly
deserted out-islands. Once they arrived, Bond used a shotgun to shoot and
gathered specimens of birds not yet in his collection while the other
naturalists studied the various plants, mollusks and parasites native to those
islands.</p>
<p class="normal">On Old Providence, a newspaper article later reported, the
non-scientific members of the crew were instructed to look for "traces of
some unknown types of life, and for signs of the 16th century Puritan
settlement that tried, but failed to colonize the island hundreds of years
ago."</p>
<p class="normal">Legend has it that the Puritan settlers on Old Providence were
driven away by Henry Morgan the pirate, but other reports say the Puritans
eventually became pirates themselves. One reference to the Old Providence
settlers claims that they were unable to farm the crops they brought form
England, lost their religious faith, and began plundering the Spanish treasure
ships. Some say they were eventually sought out and killed by the Spanish, or
Morgan. Other rumors say that a treasure is still buried somewhere on Old
Providence.</p>
<p class="normal">The <i>Vigilant </i>expedition
did not discover any doubloons, but it did take a scientific survey of the
island. Saxe, the parasitologist, "remained behind on Old Providence to
continue his studies," when actually he abandoned ship when given the
opportunity.<br />
<br />
Bond took specimens and notes for updating the next edition of his book, <i>The Birds of the West Indies, </i>which
changed the way scientists understood bird habitats and migration in the Western
Hemisphere. Having recognized many of the birds in the West Indies as species
he knew from the backyard of his suburban Philadelphia home, Bond discovered
that the birds of the West Indies were primarily of North American ancestry,
rather than South American, as previously thought.</p>
<p class="normal">It was a theory he first proposed publicly before the
prestigious Philadelphia Philosophical Society in 1933, and after a century of
misconceptions, Bond’s theory eventually became a generally accepted fact among
the scientific community. The academic classification of bird species in the
West Indies now includes a mythical demarcation line that runs between Grenada
and Tobago and as far south as Old Providence that is known as "Bond’s
Line," which distinguishes birds of the West Indies from their more
prevalent South American counterparts.</p>
<p class="normal">In the course of his studies among the birds of the West Indies
islands Bond also discovered that the songs of birds play a more important role
in their mating than the color of their feathers, destroying another long-held
myth.</p>
<p class="normal">On August 20, 1953, after over a half century as a bachelor,
James Bond himself married Mary Fanning Wickham Lewis, a writer, publisher and
the widow of Philadelphia attorney Shippin Lewis.</p>
<p class="normal">A star field hockey player in school, Mary Wickham, like James
Bond, matriculated at Cambridge University in England. After serving as editor
of <i>On Leave,</i> a USO publication during
World War II, she became publisher of a weekly neighborhood newspaper,
the <i>Chestnut Hill Local.</i> She
also wrote several novels and poems, including a roman a clef and "The
Petrified Gesture," a novel about a birdwatcher, for which James Bond
acted as a consultant for scientific accuracy.</p>
<p class="normal">A newspaper review of another of her novels, <i>"Device and Desire,"</i> notes
that one of her characters is "an artist in a green smock who lives near
18th and Cherry Streets in Philadelphia, where at 1718 Cherry Street there
lives on Agnes Allen, who is a portrait artist who often wears a green
smock."</p>
<p class="normal">Mary Wickham Bond is not the only novelist who has used real
people as a basis for fictional characters. It is a literary device that
British journalist Ian Fleming frequently used in the course of writing his
espionage thrillers. And it was Fleming who appropriated James Bond’s name and
identity and made it an international cliché, much to the chagrin of Bond
himself.</p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-18854366396564748082021-01-01T00:28:00.001-08:002021-01-01T00:28:05.986-08:00In Search of James Bond, Philadelphia 1976 <p> IN SEARCH OF JAMES BOND, PHILADELPHIA – 1976 </p><p class="normal">
<br />
I first came across a reference to the real James Bond while doing research in
the clipping files at the morgue of the now defunct <i>Philadelphia Evening Bulletin</i> newspaper. <br />
<br />
It was during the summer of 1976 when the news was full of post-Watergate
espionage headlines, including the Rockefeller Commission on CIA abuses, the
Congressional investigations of illegal domestic intelligence operations and
the CIA’s own secret report on the illegal activities it admitted to which was
being called “The Family Jewels.” <br />
<br />
The main allegations were that the CIA attempted to assassinate foreign
leaders, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro, that it conducted mind control
experiments with LSD and other drugs on unsuspecting subjects, and had used
journalists as spies. <br />
<br />
Among the news reports that year was the revelation, first published in The
Invisible Government by Thomas Ross and David Wise, that the CIA used private
foundations, including the Catherwood Foundation, as fronts for covert CIA
operations. <br />
<br />
As a history student in college I had focused much of my research on Latin
America, specifically Cuban-American relations, and did a thesis on the Bay of
Pigs. When I learned that the Catherwood Foundation was based in Philadelphia,
near where I lived, I was interested in whether the Catherwood Foundation
sponsored any of the CIA’s Cuban related activities. <br />
<br />
As a research technique I had found the clipping morgues of the daily
newspapers a fantastic source of information on practically any subject. And
while access is usually limited to employees, I found it fairly easy to get to
the rows of filing cabinets. I knew my way around the <i>Philadelphia Bulletin</i> building adjacent to 30th Street train
station, and timed myself to go when few people would be around. <br />
<br />
An afternoon daily that dated back many decades, the Bulletin clipping files
were accumulated by a small group of dedicated ladies who, with quick fingered
sewing scissors, clipped every article published in the Bulletin, and often the
Inquirer, the city’s leading morning paper. <br />
<br />
Every name mentioned in every published article was circled, and a copy of the
clip was dated and placed in a plane white envelop with the person’s name on
it. The envelopes were then filed away in alphabetical order. I never went
there when they were busy, but late at night the security guards would wave me
through and I would make a bee line to the clipping morgue. <br />
<br />
It would be a quick, hit-and-run mission this time, as I was only interested in
Catherwood, and went directly to the cabinets labeled “C” and quickly found one
that had the typewritten name CATHERWOOD, CUMMINS. Thick with dozens of folded
clippings, some yellow with age, there were many stories there – birth announcement,
family in the munitions business, a considerable inheritance, service during
the war and travels around the world, including behind the iron curtain. <br />
<br />
Many of the articles were society columns that mention Catherwood’s attendance
at various Main Line charity balls and blue blood weddings. There was a clip
noting the incorporation of the Catherwood Foundation in 1947, and others that
I was interested in, including Catherwood’s sponsorship of the anti-Castro
Cuban Cuban Aid Relief (CAR), which assisted exile Cuban professionals who fled
the Cuban revolution. </p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal">There was also a reference to Catherwood’s financing of the
International Division of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
and the Columbia-Catherwood Award for journalists. <br />
<br />
Catherwood also financed a University of Pennsylvania study that helped set
government foreign policy in Southeast Asia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Former CIA officer Joseph Smith, in his book <i>“Portrait of a Cold Warrior,”</i> identifies the Catherwood Fund as
providing him cover for working on CIA projects in the Philippines. <br />
<br />
According to the Bulletin clips, Catherwood’s fund paid for the construction of
the yacht <i>Vigilant,</i> a sailing yacht
that Catherwood used for “scientific expeditions.” <br />
<br />
One clip, about a trip Catherwood took to the Caribbean in the spring of 1948,
mentions that one of the four scientists aboard, was “James Bond, whose main
interest is birds.” <br />
<br />
At first I thought that one of Catherwood’s CIA agents had a sense of humor and
used the name James Bond as a cover as a joke. But quickly glancing at the
date, May 1948. <br />
<br />
I realized that the story was published years before Ian Fleming wrote his
first spy novel featuring secret agent James Bond, now a world wide household
name. <br />
<br />
Then I considered it an ironic coincidence that someone named James Bond went
sailing around the Caribbean with the CIA’s bagman Cummins Catherwood. <br />
<br />
I appreciated the irony of the situation, and left the Bulletin into the rainy
streets of Philadelphia. Visiting a friend and fellow journalist, WMMR FM radio
news director Bill Vitka, I related the James Bond and Cummins Catherwood
story. Vitka said that he recalled, from a girlie magazine interview, Ian
Fleming took the name for his fictional 007 hero from an American ornithologist
named James Bond. </p>
<p class="normal"><br />
Acquiring a copy of John Pearson’s authorized biography, <i>“The Life of Ian Fleming,”</i> I read: “James Bond was born at
Goldeneye on the morning of the third Tuesday in January, 1952, when Ian
Fleming had just finished breakfast.” <br />
<br />
“He had already appropriated the name for his hero: James Bond’s handbook, ‘<i>Birds of the West Indies,</i>’ was one of
the books he liked to keep on his breakfast table,” wrote Pearson. He then
quoted Fleming as saying, “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest sounding
name I could find. James Bond seemed perfect.” <br />
<br />
After putting in a request to find me a copy of James Bond’s <i>“Birds of the West Indies”</i> at the
Princeton Antiques Book shop in Atlantic City, I went to New York City to
canvas the used books stores there. At one store on the upper east side, I
found <i>“A Naturalist In Cuba,”</i> by
Cambridge professor Thomas Barbour, and discovered James Bond’s name in the
index. <br />
<br />
Turning to the indicated page I read: “My friend James Bond of the Philadelphia
Academy of Natural Sciences, who had been to Santo Tomas since and has seen it
in life, writes that he found (the Cyanolimnas Cervari) common about three
miles north of the sawgrass stretches in a rather high and dry territory….The
bird at first looks like a stumpy, very short-tailed gallinule. It is
olivaceious blue with feathers of the abdomen, chin and throat white, while the
undertail coverts are also conspicuously white….”<br />
<br />
While uninterested in the “Cyanolimnas Cervari,” I now had a make on Bond. I
knew that he was affiliated with the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences,
back where I started. </p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal">Besides giving me a clue as to Bond’s whereabouts, Barbour
quoted Bond directly, reporting that: “the southern border of the great Zapata
Swamp in Cuba is the home of the rare rail. The Swamp at this point is very
different from the interior of the Cienaga. There are no trees, but dense area
of bush, relieved here and there by open stretches of low swamp grass. To enter
the morass is difficult, except towards the end of the dry season in the
spring, since, though the footing is for the most part firm, there are places
where one may sink up to one’s neck in the soft mud and it is only by holding
onto bushes that progress can safely be made through the swamp.” <br />
<br />
The Zapata Swamp is the Bay of Pigs, and I suddenly realized, by reading this,
how Bond, an ornithologist – bird specialist, could have been of use to the
CIA. His knowledge of the area, the terrain and weather would have been of
great value to those who were planning to invade there. Years later, during the
Faulkland war, the British troops enroute to their invasion to retake that
island were briefed by someone familiar with the terrain – a local
birdwatcher. <br />
<br />
Since I was from Camden, New Jersey, just across the river from downtown
Philadelphia, I was quite familiar with the Philadelphia Academy of Natural
Sciences. I had been there many times as a school boy and recalled the natural
habitat exhibits of stuffed animals in glass cages. <br />
<br />
School children ran about as I approached a secretary, who informed me that,
“Yes, Mister Bond was Curator of Birds here for many years, but he is now
retired.” <br />
<br />
A copy of his book, “Birds of the West Indies,” was removed from a cold storage
vault for me to look at, but I was disappointed that it was a handbook on the
features and habitats of birds of that region, rather than a story book of his
travels. <br />
<br />
Returning to the clipping files at the Philadelphia Bulletin, where I first
began, I realized I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had just
looked up James Bond’s name in the clipping files in the first place. <br />
<br />
I found and pulled out two envelops labeled: BOND, JAMES. One contained reviews
of the books and movies about 007 while the other, thinner envelop contained
references to the renowned American ornithologist and author of the book “Birds
of the West Indies.” <br />
<br />
The envelop with the film reviews contained one peculiar item, a promotional
flyer for the movie “The Spy Who Loved Me,” which included a profile of James
Bond – 007, purported to be stolen from the files of an enemy secret
service. <br />
<br />
Written in large print, teletype style, it read: <br />
<br />
BOND, JAMES. HEIGHT: 163 CENTIMETERS. WEIGHT 76 KILOS. SCAR DOWN RIGHT CHEEK
AND RIGHT SHOULDER; SIGNS OF PLASTIC SURGERY ON THE BACK OF RIGHT HAND; EXPERT
PISTOL SHOT, KNIFE-THROWER, DOES NOT USE DISGUISES. LANGUAGES: FRENCH, GERMAN.
SMOKES HEAVILY (N.B. SPECIAL CIGARETTES WITH THREE GOLD BANDS); VICES: DRINK,
BUT NOT TO EXCESS, VODKA MARTINI, SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED, AND WOMEN. NOT THOUGHT
TO ACCEPT BRIBES. THIS MAN IS A DANGEROUS PROFESSIONAL TERRORIST AND SPY. WITH
THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE SINCE 1938. NOW HOLDS THE SECRET NUBMER 007. IF
ENCOUNTERED IN THE FIELD, FULL DETAILS TO BE REPORTED IMMEDIATELY.</p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal">BOND, JAMES – AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGIST at the Bay of Pigs <br />
<br />
The clipping files at the morgue of the old Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
contained two separate envelops labeled: BOND, JAMES, one thicker one contained
articles and reviews of the popular 007 movies. <br />
<br />
The other envelope contained published references to James Bond, the
ornithologist. <br />
<br />
I first noticed that the clip about the 1948 trip with Catherwood was not among
them. Most of the articles were reviews of his book “Birds of the West Indies,”
or reviews of novels, poems and books by his wife, Mary Wickham Bond, who also
had an envelop of her own. <br />
<br />
Besides her books of fiction and poetry however, Mrs. Bond also wrote, “How 007
Got His Name,” a very compact, little hardbound book that is very rare and hard
to find. In it she explains how Fleming appropriated Bond’s name for his secret
agent, how it affected their lives, and what happened when they went to Jamaica
to visit Fleming. <br />
<br />
Mrs. Bond claims that they were quite unaware of Fleming’s fictional spy until
1962, when a London Times review of a new edition of Bond’s “Birds of the West
Indies” made bizarre and unexplained references to “guns, girls and
gadgets.” <br />
<br />
This review perplexed the Bonds until a friend, Cummins Catherwood’s sister,
Mrs. Charles C. G. Chaplin, provided them with a copy of Fleming’s “Dr. No,”
compliments of their friend, Peter Fleming, Ian’s older brother, the MI6 agent
who just happens to be an amateur ornithologist. <br />
<br />
Nor did Bond, the ornithologist, realize that Fleming borrowed his name for
007, rather than from someone else named Bond, until a local camera shop clerk
point out an interview with Ian Fleming in the risqué men’s Rogue Magazine. In
this interview, Fleming acknowledges that he appropriated the name James Bond
“from the distinguished American ornithologist.” <br />
<br />
“Dr. No,” the book Peter Fleming gave to Mrs. Chaplin, who in turn passed on to
Bond, concerns 007’s investigation of the murder of the British Secret Service
Chief-of-Station K – Kingston, Jamaica. Taking the assignment, which includes a
Spanish dubloon, a clue from Morgan the Pirate’s treasure, Bond goes to Jamaica
posing as an ornithologist by the name of Bryce, as in Ivor Bruce, the American
millionaire who first introduced Fleming to Jamaica during World War II. <br />
<br />
Besides the “How 007 Got His Name,” Mrs. Bond wrote two additional books that
chronicle some of the travels about the West Indies with her husband. “Far
Afield in the Caribbean,” subtitled, “The Migratory Flights of a Naturalist’s
Wife” was followed by “To James Bond, With Love.” <br />
<br />
Famed birdwatcher Roger Tory Peterson helped promote Mrs. Bond’s books with the
blurb, “The saga of the real James Bond is fascinating to those who are bird
oriented. Although his activities might read like fiction;, they are the
true-life adventures of a very remarkable person who had become an authority on
the birds of the West Indies. Exploring little known wildernesses, island by
island, he has found adventure equal to that of 007, but of another
kind.” <br />
<br />
In her most comprehensive book, “To James Bond With Love,” Mrs. Bond reveals
that in 1938 her husband sailed aboard a tramp steamer in the Caribbean with
English writer W. Somerset Maugham. <br />
<br />
Besides being one of the most famous writers of his generation, writing such
classics as “A Razor’s Edge,” Maugham also served as a secret agent for Sir
William Wiseman, the director of British Intelligence in the United States
during World War I. Wiseman was Sir William Stephenson’s predecessor. In 1917
Wiseman sent Maugham to Russia to try to prevent the Communist Revolution and
keep Russia in the war with Germany. Not a simple assignment, but one would
trust to only the best agent. <br />
<br />
Having Bond and Maugham on the same boat together in 1938 presents the
possibility that Bond, like his fictional counterpart, was recruited as a
British, rather than an American secret agent, a full decade before he sailed
with the CIA’s Catherwood. <br />
<br />
Perhaps it was also more than just another ironic coincidence that the
promotional flyer for the movie “The Spy Who Loved Me” has a profile of secret
agent James Bond, purportedly “stolen from the files” of a foreign service. It
reports 007 was recruited into the British Secret Service in 1938, the same
year James Bond sailed on the same tramp steamer as Somerset Maugham. <br />
<br />
Mrs. Bond, in her books, also recounts a visit to the Bahia de Conhinos, Cuba,
the Bay of Pigs. “Shortly before we left Philadelphia,” she writes, “he heard
about a private collection of birds in Havana he hadn’t seen and we decided to
stop off in Cuba first. While there, why not a short trip to the Isle of
Pines?” <br />
<br />
“It’s a dramatic little island,” Bond explained. “This is before the Bay of
Pigs when Castro was trying to lure the tourist trade to Cuba by lowering hotel
rates, mailing letters back to the States for free, and similar
devices....” <br />
<br />
“When the (bus) conductor left, Jim said, ‘That’s a very interesting fellow. I
think he’s a rebel, but of course I didn’t ask. He told me a lot of roads are
being built all over the place…but he spoke of one that surprises me, for it
makes no sense.’” <br />
<br />
“The road the conductor spoke of,” Bond said, “went….to the Bahia de Conhinos –
the Bay of Pigs. I asked him why there? And he replied, ‘for the
tourists.’” <br />
<br />
“But that’s ridiculous. The Bay of Pigs is down in the Zapata Swamp where I’ve
collected, and there’s nothing there for tourists. It’s most peculiar.” <br />
<br />
Six months later the CIA backed brigade of anti-Castro Cubans invaded that very
beach. <br />
<br />
The CIA was negligent if it didn’t know what James Bond knew, that new roads
were constructed that led directly to the swampy beach they were preparing to
invade. <br />
<br />
Most peculiar indeed.</p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-31413757703726213262021-01-01T00:27:00.002-08:002021-01-01T00:27:18.658-08:00Goldeneye Jamaica - 1952 <p> </p>
<p class="normal">GOLDENEYE JAMAICA – 1952 <br />
THE THEFT OF JAMES BOND’S IDENTITY <br />
<br />
“Bloody Morgan the pirate was Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Jamaica
Garrison from 1674 to 1688…This is certainly part of Morgan’s treasure.” <br />
<br />
“M paused to fill his pipe and light it,looking at the ceiling and back at
Bond. ‘I know where the treasure is.It’s in Jamaica, and it’s Bloody Morgan’s.
And I guess it’s one of the most valuable treasure troves in history.” <br />
<br />
“’Good Lord,’ said Bond. ‘How,…Where do we come into it?” – Dr. No <br />
<br />
“Goldeneye” is the name of a small beach house situated on a cliff overlooking
the Caribbean sea along Jamaica’s north shore. The property was bought by Ian
Fleming, sight unseen, and the single story cottage built to his specifications,
a secluded place he could spend two months a year when not working in
London. <br />
<br />
Both Ian Fleming and James Bond were bachelors for most of their lives. The
year before James Bond married Mary Wickham, Ian Fleming was to forego the life
of a bachelor. Both Bond and Fleming married late in life. Bond, born in 1900,
was 53 when he married for the first time, while for Fleming, it was a profound
change for a 43 year old, previously dedicated bachelor. <br />
<br />
To offset the shock, he said, he would write a novel. Fleming found himself at
his Jamaican beach house when the day finally came for him to begin what he had
earlier promised to would be “the spy story to end all spy stories.” <br />
<br />
Beginning a ritual he would continue for the rest of his life, Fleming sat down
to breakfast at Goldeneye, and picked up a copy of James Bond’s book Birds of
the West Indies, which he considered his “bible” and kept next to his breakfast
table. <br />
<br />
Near the sleepy fishing village of Orcabessa, Goldeneye was situated on a cliff
overlooking the sea along Jamaica’s north shore, which was a seasonal resort
for British aristocrats before it became a tourist haven. Most of the rich
Englishmen owned large, family owned plantation homes, called Great Houses.
Fleming’s home however, was a smaller, one story cottage, built to his own
specifications. <br />
<br />
Jamaica had maintained a very English flavor since Henry Morgan, the pirate,
used it as a base to plunder Spanish treasure ships. For his efforts Morgan was
knighted Sir Henry Morgan, and appointed the island’s first English
Governor-General. Besides the favorable weather conditions, the fact that the
natives spoke the English language made it a comfortable locale for such
notables as Sir William Stephenson, Ivor Bryce and Noel Coward. <br />
<br />
Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian industrialist who Winston Churchill had
dubbed “INTREPID” on his cables, owned the Tryall Great house, a private club
that was also a world class golf course, country club and resort. Famed British
play write Noel Coward had a home he called “Firefly,” not far from Fleming’s
Goldeneye. Ivor Bryce owned a Great House known as Bellview. <br />
<br />
Stephenson, Coward, Bryce and Fleming were all good friends and World War II
cohorts. Stephenson was the director of British Secret Intelligence Service in
the United States during the war, while Coward served as an entertainer, Bryce
as an officer in the United States Army’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
and Fleming as the assistant to the director of British Naval
Intelligence. <br />
<br />
It was during the war, in 1944, when Fleming first went to Jamaica with Bryce
for a conference on U-Boat warfare in the Caribbean. Bryce and Fleming took
time off from their official duties to visit Bryce’s estate. Despite the dismal
rainy season and dilapidated, unkempt wartime condition of Bellview, Fleming
liked Jamaica. He liked Jamaica a lot, and asked Bryce to arrange for him to
buy some land. <br />
<br />
“I’ll want about fifteen acres,” Fleming requested, “with cliffs of some sort
and a secret bay and no roads between the house and the shore. When you’ve
fixed it for me I’ll build a house there and write and live there.” And that’s
just what he did.<br />
<br />
Site unseen, Fleming purchased the secluded beachfront property and built a
house he christened “Goldeneye.” Some say the name came from a Carson
McCuller’s novel, “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” while others say that it
refers to a Spanish tomb in the nearby garden that has a golden head. Fleming’s
military friends said that “Goldeneye” was the code name for the plan Fleming devised
for the British defense of Gibraltar during the war. <br />
<br />
In any case, Fleming said that he was, “determined that one day Goldeneye would
be better known than any of the Great Houses that had been there for so long
and achieved nothing.” Perhaps he intentionally shrouded the origin of the
home’s name on purpose, much like the mystery of his life and work as a
journalist, naval officer and spy. <br />
<br />
In the 1930’s Fleming went to Moscow to cover an espionage trial as a
journalist for the London Sunday Times. During World War II, after serving as
assistant to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Chief of British Naval
Intelligence, Fleming organized an elite team of British Naval commandos who
participated in behind the lines operations. <br />
<br />
After the war, at the request of Alan Dulles, Fleming helped draft an outline
for the charter, goals, tasks and organizational structure of what would become
the Central Intelligence Agency – CIA. <br />
<br />
During the height of the Cold War Fleming worked as the European editor for
both the Sunday Times and the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). At the
time, NANA was owned by Fleming’s wartime associates Ivor Bryce and Ernest
Cuneo Both had served under William “Wild Bill” Donovan in America’s wartime
spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services – OSS. During the Cold War, Bryce,
Cuneo and Fleming used NANA as a front for joint British-American espionage
operations. <br />
<br />
But despite Fleming’s official resume, he will be best remembered for creating
the legend of 007 – James Bond, the world’s most famous spy. <br />
<br />
The myth of British Secret Agent ‘Double-Oh-Seven” began at Goldeneye, Jamaica
on the second Tuesday of January, 1952. Fleming, then 43 years old, awoke and
went for a nude swim inside the reef of his private lagoon. <br />
<br />
He then sat down at breakfast, prepared by Violet, his faithful housekeeper.
Then he retired to his nearby workroom while his fiancé Anne Rothermere painted
on the veranda. Closing the wood, window jalousies, Fleming sat down at his
desk, took a drag from a cigarette, and began typing what would become the
manuscript of “CASINO ROYALE.”. <br />
<br />
“THE SECRET AGENT” he titled the first chapter. “The scent and smoke and swat
of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul erosion
produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension –
become unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.” <br />
<br />
“James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or
his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him
to avoid the staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes.” <br />
<br />
Fleming later acknowledged that he appropriated the name for his hero from the
author of the book “Birds of the West Indies,” which he kept on his breakfast
table at Goldeneye. <br />
<br />
Fleming said the name James Bond sounded appropriately “dull” and unassuming;
perfect what was suppose to be his anonymous secret agent. <br />
<br />
As the spy novel stories, surreal characters and bizarre plots developed over
the years, with Fleming churning out a book a year, writing them every January
and February while vacationing at Goldeneye in Jamaica, it became apparent that
he took the themes for his plots form his personal experiences, and the names
and identities for his fictional characters from people he knew. <br />
<br />
It later also became apparent that the selection of James Bond as the name for
his secret super hero was yet another mysterious slice out of the lives of
Fleming’s friends and acquaintances. <br />
<br />
When 007’s adventures take him to Las Vegas in “Diamonds Are Forever,” the
fictional Bond is assisted by a cab driver, Ernest Cureo, a pun on his WWII and
NANA associate Ernest Cuneo. <br />
<br />
The name of 007’s London housekeeper is appropriated from the maid Ivor Bryce
employed at his New York City apartment. And Fleming’s arch-villain Ernest
Blowfield shares various character traits with Canadian industrialist L.M.
Bloomfield. <br />
<br />
In many of 007’s fictional exploits, the fictional James Bond is assisted by
his CIA sidekick Felix Leiter, whose name is taken from American millionaire
who would introduce Fleming to President Kennedy, and whose profile closely
parallels that of another Philadelphia, journalist Henry Pleasants. <br />
<br />
When James Bond and Felix Leiter go to a black jazz nightclub in Harlem in
“Live & Let Die,” Leiter is quoted as saying, “I wrote a few pieces on
Dixieland jazz for the Amsterdam News….Did a series for the NANA on the negro
theater about the same time Orson Wells put on his MacBeth with an all-negro
cast at the Lafayette. I knew my way around Harlem pretty well….It’s the Mecca
of jazz and jive.” <br />
<br />
Years later, in their book “The Invisible Government,” David Wise and Thomas
Ross wrote that, “Henry Pleasants, widely known as the CIA mission chief in
Bonn, Germany….was once the chief music critic of the Philadelphia Evening
Bulletin and contributor to the music pages of the New York Times….(He) also
probably had the distinction of being the only top U.S. spy to become the
center of a literary storm. He had continued to write books after joining the CIA
and in 1955 his “Agony of Modern Music” (Simon & Schuster) caused
considerable controversy for its attack on all contemporary music except
jazz.” <br />
<br />
“It could have been a coincidence that Fleming borrowed the name of a prominent
Philadelphia ornithologist for his 007 hero, and used the well-known background
of former Philadelphian Henry Pleasants in developing the character of 007’s
CIA sidekick, as a serious music critic as well as a spy. But Fleming also
created a villain, Milton Krest, who closely resembles yet another
Philadelphian, James Bond’s 1948 yachting companion Cummins Catherwood. <br />
<br />
In the short story, “The Hildebrand Rarity,” the last of Ian Fleming’s five
stories published in the 1959 anthology titled “For Your Eyes Only,” the
featured mastermind is Milton Krest. In the story, Krest sits on the deck of
his yacht explaining to James Bond and others that, “Ya see fellers….in the
states we have this Foundation system for lucky guys that got plenty of dough
and don’t happen to want to pay it to Uncle Sam’s Treasury. You make a
Foundation like this one, the Krest Foundation, for charitable purposes….and
since I happen to like yachting and seeing the world, I built this yacht….and
told the Smithsonian that I would go anywhere in the world to collect specimens
for them. So that makes me a scientific expedition….” <br />
<br />
Catherwood, like Fleming’s fictional Milton Krest, had established the
Catherwood Foundation, ostensibly for tax purposes. But another hidden asset of
the Catherwood Foundation covertly assisted the CIA in its clandestine
operations. Although the Catherwood Foundation’s CIA ties were not revealed
publicly until the 1970s, the Soviet Russians knew of the relationship from the
very beginning, thanks to the treachery of British-Russian double-agent Kim
Philby. <br />
<br />
As a high ranking British intelligence officer, Philby had served as the chief
liaison between the British MI6 and the CIA when the American spy agency was
first established in 1947. Philby was suspected of being the “Third Man” in on
the spy scandal of the century when his two friends and fellow double-agents
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escaped to Moscow shortly before they were to be
arrested. <br />
<br />
Philby was suspected of being a mole by American William Harvey, was publicly
accused of being the double-agent in 1961, and he disappeared from Beirut,
Lebanon in 1963. He eventually surfaced in Moscow, alongside his friends and
former Cambridge University classmates Burgess and Maclean. Although it is
generally acknowledged that Philby had been telling the Russians everything he
knew since the time of his Cambridge student days, the full extent of his
disclosures have never been revealed to this day. <br />
<br />
In his memoirs however, published as “My Silent War” (Grove Press), Philby
elaborated on his means, motives and beliefs, and explains how he worked
closely with CIA director Allen Dulles and his assistant Frank Wisner, chief of
covert operations. <br />
<br />
Philby wrote that at one meeting, “Wisner expounded on one of his favorite
themes: the need to camouflage CIA payments by funneling them through
apparently respectable bodies in which there was a secret interest.” <br />
<br />
Philby quotes Wisner as saying, “….it is essential to secure the cooperation of
people with conspicuous access to wealth in their own right.” <br />
<br />
Cummins Catherwood was one of those people “with conspicuous access to wealth
in their own right,” and the Catherwood Foundation was one of those “apparently
respectable bodies in which there was a secret interest.” <br />
<br />
In 1964, in the wake of the disclosures that the CIA funded the domestically
based National Student Association, President Lyndon Johnson publicly ordered
the CIA to stop using private foundations as cover for covert operations, but
the practice continued. <br />
<br />
Although the Russians, through Philby, knew of the cooperation between the
American philanthropic foundations and the CIA from the beginning, the general
pubic didn’t find out about it until David Wise and Thomas Ross exposed it in
their book, “The Invisible Government.” Among their other disclosures, they
wrote, “Conduites for CIA money included the Catherwood Foundation.” <br />
<br />
So not only did Ian Fleming base three of his characters, James Bond, Felix
Leiter and Milton Krest on three real individuals, who all happen to be from
Philadelphia, two of them – Henry Pleasants and Cummins Catherwood actually
worked for the CIA. And James Bond, it turns out, could have been a real spy as
well. <br />
<br />
After completing the official, authorized biography, “The Life of Ian Fleming,”
John Pearson, a Fleming protégé, also wrote a novel, labeled “fiction,” called
the “Authorized Biography of 007.” In this book, Pearson claims that the real
James Bond had been a spy whose cover was blown. Fleming, Pearson explained,
wrote the fictional 007 spy thrillers about James Bond to throw the opposition
off. Fleming’s idea was to make Bond such a renowned comic book superhero that
the Russians, and everyone else, would believe that he really didn’t
exist. <br />
<br />
The fictional exploits of the British Secret Service agent-hero would also
boost the moral of the once vaulted service that was shattered by the betrayal
of Philby and his friends, and would salvage what they could of the espionage
networks that had been betrayed. One of those networks was funded by Cummins
Catherwood, and included his West Indies shipmate, James Bond. <br />
<br />
While Bond’s mythical line may distinguish the birds of the West Indies and
South America, Ian Fleming, sitting down at his typewriter at Goldeneye, never
drew a discernable line to distinguish what were the facts of life and history
and what he wrote as fiction in his spy novels.</p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-60513431271904867492021-01-01T00:25:00.006-08:002021-01-01T00:25:35.811-08:00Felix Leiter and Henry Pleasants <p> FELIX LEITER = HENRY PLEASANTS </p><p class="normal">
<br />
After discovering James Bond, and the true identify of some of Ian Fleming’s
other fictional characters, I was particularly interested in Henry Pleasants,
whose CIA music critic background bears a striking similarity to the fictional
007’s CIA sidekick Felix Leiter, a recurring character in many of Fleming’s
stories. <br />
<br />
Part of the riddle of Goldeneye is why Fleming based three of his characters on
real people from Philadelphia – James Bond, Cummins Catherwood and Henry
Pleasants. <br />
<br />
It took me quite a while to track down Henry Pleasants, the former Philadelphia
Bulletin reporter and music critic, OSS interrogator of Nazi General Gehlen,
CIA cold warrior in Bonn, Germany, internationally renowned music critic and
model for Fleming’s Felix Leiter, 007’s CIA sidekick. <br />
<br />
Considering I had to criss-cross continents to find him, the idea that he had
eluded my quest for over a decade only made the meeting more satisfying. <br />
<br />
I originally read about Pleasants in 1974 in the paperback edition of “The
Invisible Government,” by David Wise and Thomas Ross, who wrote, “…When the CIA
was casting about for a network in West Germany, it decided to look into the
possibility of using (former Nazi Army General Reinhardt) Gehlen’s talents. And
while they were making up their mind about the ex-General, Henry Pleasants, the
CIA station chief in Bonn for many years, moved in and lived with Gehlen for
several months.” <br />
<br />
“Pleasants, once the chief music critic of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin,
and a contributor to the music pages of the New York Times, was a highly
literate and respected musicologist. His wife Virginia was one of the world’s
leading harpsichordists. He also probably had the distinction of being the only
top U.S. spy to become the center of a literary storm. He had continued to
write books after joining the CIA, and in 1953 his Agony of Modern Music (Simon
& Schuster, N.Y.) caused considerable controversy for its attacks on all
contemporary music except jazz.*” <br />
<br />
The * asterisk referred to a footnote at the bottom of the page that read: “As
recently as April 15, 1962, while he was till the CIA station chief in Bonn,
Pleasants had a by line article in the New York Herald Tribune, filed from
Zurich. It told of the state theater’s production of Meyerbeer’s Le
Prophete.” <br />
<br />
That was enough to peak my interest in Mr. Pleasants to obtain a copy of his
book, “Agony of Modern Music,” and take note of other books he had written.
Besides being historically interested in General Gehlen and his role with the
CIA during the Cold War years, Pleasants and I shared musical tastes,
particularly blues and jazz. <br />
<br />
In “Agony,” Pleasants maintains that, “Serious music is a dead art. The vein
which for three hundred years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of
beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by
deluded spectators picking through the slag pile.”<br />
<br />
“…Thus jazz accomplishment is simply defined,” writes Pleasants, “It has taken
music away from the composers and given it back to the musicians and their
public…This is obviously something the serious composer cannot admit…For deep
down in his heart he knows that jazz is modern music – and nothing else
is.” <br />
<br />
In the back of the book, under the Author’s profile, it says: “Henry Pleasants
began his career as music critic as a specialist in contemporary music.
Following studies in voice, piano and composition at the Philadelphia
Conservatory and the Curtis Institute of Music, he joined the Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin in 1930 as assistant music critic. Arthur Tubbs, the paper’s
veteran theater and music editor, cared little for modern music. The result was
that Mr. Pleasants, as a neophyte second-string critic, got the first string
assignments if modern music were involved. Thus he covered such important
premiers in the early thirties as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s productions of
Wozzeck, Stravinskyu’s Oedipus rex, Prokofiev’s Pas d’Acier, Chavez’s ballet
H.P. Louis Greuenberg’s The Emperor Jones, etc., along with the host of
experimental orchestral compositions with which Leopold Stokowski was making a
name for himself as champion of modern music at that time.” <br />
<br />
“In 1935, at the age of twenty-five, Mr. Pleasants succeeded Tubbs as Music
Editor of the Evening Bulletin, and continued in that post until entering the
Army in 1942. In addition to his work for the Bulletin, he was a regular
contributor to Modern Music and was an occasional music correspondent for both
the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. In 1940 he collaborated
with Tibor Serly on the first definitive article on Bela Bartok to appear in
the United States. It was published in the April issue of Modern Music.” <br />
<br />
“Since the war Mr. Pleasants has remained in Europe, first with the Army and
subsequently with the Foreign Service, continuing his association with music as
correspondent of the New York Times. In this capacity he has covered the
festivals in Vienna, Salzburg,…including such premiers as…Alban Berrg’s Lu
Lu…and Rolf Lieberman’s Penelope.” <br />
<br />
Although Pleasants’ duel role as music critic and spy somehow struck a peculiar
cord that rang kind of spooky, I really didn’t begin looking for him until a
few years later, after I had made some even more peculiar discoveries. <br />
<br />
With a renewed interest in Fleming’s fiction I began to read, or in some cases
re-read his spy thriller novels, discovering two more characters with peculiar
attributes similar to real persons, some of whom happened to be from
Philadelphia. <br />
<br />
Besides Bond, the long-time curator of birds at the Philadelphia Academy of
Natural Sciences, whose name Fleming acknowledge appropriating for his secret
agent 007, there’s Cummins Catherwood. In Fleming’s “Hildebrand Rarity,” one of
the short stories that make up the anthology “For Your Eyes Only,” the villain,
Milton Krest, takes some scientists, including Bond, on an expedition seeking
rare fish specimens for the Smithsonian Institute. <br />
<br />
Like Catherwood, Krest established the Krest Foundation, which like the
Catherwood Foundation, provided tax shelter for his nefarious activities.<br />
<br />
Fleming’s use of Bond’s name and the peculiar developing pattern followed by
Catherwood and Fleming’s fictional Mr. Krest, could have been a coincidence, or
it could be the first insights into a larger network of Fleming’s fictional
characters that are based on real people known to Fleming. <br />
<br />
Then I came up with a third example of Fleming’s duplicity. In “Live and Let
Die,” when 007 and his CIA sidekick Felix Leiter go to a black nightclub in
Harlem, Leiter is quoted as saying, “I wrote a few pieces on Dixieland jazz for
the Amsterdam News…Did a series for the NANA on the negro theater about the
same time Orson Wells put his Macbeth on with an all-negro cast at the
Lafayette. I knew my way around Harlem pretty well…..It’s the Mecca of jazz and
jive.” <br />
<br />
That OO7’s CIA associate wrote music and theater reviews and loved jazz struck
the final off-key note that sent me on the trail of Henry Pleasants. <br />
<br />
I began my quest for Pleasants at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, where as a
music critic for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Pleasants had spent many an
enjoyable evening. There, after a performance of blues acts B.B. King and Bobby
“Blue” Bland, I asked for the oldest usher in the house, and inquired if he
remembered Henry Pleasants. <br />
<br />
“Mister Pleasants,” he informed me, “is living in London with his wife
Virginia, the harpsichordist.” <br />
<br />
In July 1990, returning from Berlin where I covered the fall of the wall as a
journalist, I found myself in London, where the peculiarities of the London
phone system lent itself to my investigation. After making reservations from a
pay phone in a restaurant, I had some change left from the deposit that I could
use, but not receive the change. So I looked up Pleasants in the phone book and
called the one on Palace Lane. <br />
<br />
A women answered the phone, and when I asked for Mr. Pleasants, she said he was
out of town at the moment but would be returning the following week. “I’m
looking for Henry Pleasants from Philadelphia,” I said. <br />
<br />
“Yes, he’s out of town now. He’s in Vienna at a music festival,” she said.
“This is his wife.” <br />
<br />
When I explained I was a journalist from the Philadelphia area seeking an
interview, she said she was sure he would be glad to talk with me, and gave me
an address in Vienna and their address in London, requesting I write. </p>
<p class="normal"><br />
Now armed with his phone number, I called Pleasants again when I got back to
the States and he had returned to London from Austria. Having missed him in
London, he told me he would be in New York that November to address a meeting
of the Record Collectors Society, and asked that I call him at his hotel then
to arrange a meeting. <br />
<br />
“Could I attend the lecture?” I asked.<br />
<br />
“Sure,” he said. “Just tell them you’re my guest and introduce yourself to me
before or after the meeting.” <br />
<br />
On Friday, November 2nd 1990, I drove the two and half hours to New York,
parked across the street from Christ’s Church and descended three flights of
stairs to the Church’s community hall in the basement. <br />
<br />
I was a few minutes late and the lecture had already started. Walking briskly
past the first door, I stood in the back of the room, past a table where old
albums and sheet music were being sold. The room was nearly full, every chair
taken by over a hundred people. I glanced around and noticed they were an odd
assortment of people – the Vocal Record Collector’s Society. Those who weren’t
elderly were of an eccentric sort, highbrows, teachers, students, and one
particularly young and gorgeous blonde who seemed out of place. Many had Tower
Records bags at their side. <br />
<br />
As Pleasants’ voice trailed off and an old scratched recording of an opera
singer was played, I sat on the end of a table and picked up some leaflets that
were lying there. <br />
<br />
One was the Christ Church News, another was an order form for one of Pleasants’
books, “Opera In Crisis,” (Thames and Hudson, N.Y.) and a third gave a
listening for recordings that were to be sold at live auction that night, such
as “Alice Clery (M.S.) Carman: Sabanera/Seguedille AC. ZONOPHONE 83227/8 No
wear, but some scratches, few clicks. She recorded only 3 sides solo. V.G. to
Fine.” <br />
<br />
Then there was a program announcing: “The Vocal Record Collector’s Society
Presents ‘The CANARIES’ by Dr. Henry Pleasants. <br />
<br />
“It will indeed be a pleasure to welcome back to these shores our good friend
and fellow VRCS member, Dr. Henry Pleasants, who, for the fourth year in a row,
conducts our November outing. During the last two years, he had devoted his
programs to the lower region low male voices in 1988 and low female ones in
1989. In a complete turnaround, this year’s program will be devoted to The
CANARIS (and we don’t mean the islands). Despite the title, Dr. Pleasants
assured us that there will be some make voices on the program. Perhaps he will
bring with him the famous five hundred pound canary who sings anywhere he wants
to? Anyhow, that’s all we can tell you about November as, like most of our
members who give programs, the good doctor wishes to keep his program contents
shrouded in secrecy, the better to surprise you with. Do plan to be with us for
what will be an outstanding evening.” </p>
<p class="normal"><br />
The recording of the opera song lasted about five minutes, and when it was over
the audience politely applauded. I had never seen it before – an audience
applauds a very bad recording of a dead opera star. I wondered if, fifty years
from now, some octogenarian hippie would be giving a similar lecture on
psychedelic rock music, playing only a five minute sample of “Inda God Da
Vida.” <br />
<br />
As the evening wore on however, I too found myself applauding as Mr. Pleasants
explained that many of the recordings were originally replayed on now obsolete
and somewhat extinct punctured tubes, like music boxes and player pianos, that
dated to the 1890s. <br />
<br />
Extremely knowledgeable, he also added tidbits of detail, often humorous
insights into the background of the once famous and now obscure singers. <br />
<br />
A few people arrived late, but no one left early, and some two hours later,
when the lecture was over, Pleasants stayed around to mingle with the crowd and
autograph copies of his books. <br />
<br />
As Pleasants signed my copy of his book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” I
introduced myself as the reporter who called him in London requesting an
interview. He smiled assuredly and made a date with me for the following
Thursday afternoon, when he would return to New York following a jaunt to the
Midwest. <br />
<br />
When he inquired about my interest in music I told him I wrote a weekly music
column primarily reviewing live music, and had recently returned from Berlin
where I had seen Roger Water’s rock opera “The Wall” performed before 500,000
people at Potsdam Platz, Berlin while the real wall was being
disassembled. <br />
<br />
The following Wednesday I took a train to New York and stayed with my friend,
the same lawyer who went to Jamaica with me the previous March. The next
morning I walked downtown to the Windsor Hotel, where Pleasants was staying
(one block south of Central Park, near 56th Street). <br />
<br />
Calling him from the lobby, I went up the elevator to his room, where I found
the door ajar, went in and announced myself. After shaking hands he offered me
a drink as he poured one himself. “Whisky and water,” he said. “It’s all I
have.” <br />
<br />
First off I told him how much I appreciated the “CARANIES” lecture. <br />
<br />
“The audience was great!” he said enthusiastically. <br />
<br />
“Yes, no one left early,” I quipped, before he added. <br />
<br />
“And no one coughed.” <br />
<br />
I explained my musical interests leaned more towards blues, jazz and rock and
roll than to classical and opera, but still appreciated the lecture all the
same, particularly because of his interesting background briefings. <br />
<br />
“Tido Puente, Jr. is now playing in a rock band in Italy,” Pleasants noted, an
item I found particularly amusing. <br />
<br />
After we settled in comfortably enough, I came right to the point. <br />
<br />
“Did you ever know or meet Ian Fleming?” <br />
<br />
I was going to add – the British spy fiction writer, but hesitated a moment
because I figured Pleasants knew who I meant. <br />
<br />
“No he said, without too much thought, but obviously puzzled. I didn’t make him
ask me why. <br />
<br />
Pleasants was genuinely surprised when I told him that Fleming had appropriated
some personal traits in creating one of his fictional characters – Felix
Leiter, 007’s CIA associate in a number of stories. <br />
<br />
“Which book?” he asked, and although unfamiliar with the particular passage,
when I told him, “Live and Let Die,” he seemed to recognize it, saying, “Oh,
yes.” <br />
<br />
When I quoted the particular line, “The Mecca of jazz and jive,” and mentioned
the reviews of classical pieces for NANA and Amsterdam News, he smiled and sat
back on the couch, clinking the ice in his glass, he only said, “I haven’t a
clue.” <br />
<br />
As he mixed some more drinks, one for each of us, he seemed to be piecing
something together in his own mind, then threw me a curve that I knew would
have to be figured out later. <br />
<br />
“But I did meet Fleming’s sister, a cellist who performed on occasion with my
wife, in the same chamber orchestra,” Pleasants said, then added, “but that was
in 1968, after Fleming had died.” <br />
<br />
So he knew Fleming’s sister and when Fleming died. He was more familiar with
Fleming then just the titles of his books, but there were a few clues to the
mystery. <br />
<br />
“You were CIA station chief in Bonn, Germany when you wrote, ‘The Agony of
Modern Music,’ I asked. <br />
<br />
“Yes,” he said, “but how did you know?” <br />
<br />
“From Wise and Ross and their book, ‘The Invisible Government,” I said, as he
smiled in recognition once again. <br />
“I haven’t talked about these things in 15 years,” he said. <br />
<br />
He preferred not to talk about Gehlen. <br />
<br />
So I mentioned how I learned he was in London from an usher at the Academy of
Music, who also recalled Mrs. Pleasants, and the days you reviewed shows for
the Bulletin. <br />
<br />
“The Bulletin,” Pleasant mumbled, as we both thought briefly of the old and now
defunct Philadelphia Evening Bulletin newspaper. I told him the Charter
Company, out of Florida, which was mixed up in the Watergate scandal, bought
the paper and then folded it. <br />
<br />
“Yes, I know,” Pleasants said. “I was born in Philadelphia, lived on the Main
Line, took voice and piano lessons at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and
worked at the Bulletin for many years.” <br />
<br />
“I did everything there. I worked as a police reporter in the ‘30s, from the
23rd district, a precinct that stretched from down to Front Street.” <br />
<br />
Although the program listed him as a doctor, “I never really went to college,”
Pleasants said. “But the most valuable course I ever took was in English
composition,” (taught by William Haberman at the University of
Pennsylvania).Besides working as a police beat reporter in center city
Philadelphia, Pleasants also made time to write reviews of the popular music of
the day for the entertainment section. “Often, I didn’t get paid for it, but
that didn’t matter,” he said. “I loved it.” <br />
<br />
“At the Bulletin I also worked in the news center on the radio, doing “the
Voice of the Evening Bulletin,” where I learned to pronounce all of the German
and Russian names. I also took a Berlitz course in Russian and I already knew
some German from the time I spent in Austria.” So when the United States
entered World War II, Henry Pleasants could write well enough and pronounce the
German and Russian names, so served in liaison with the Russians and then made
a translator and interrogator. <br />
<br />
Joining the Army in 1942 Pleasants was stationed in Alaska as a second
lieutenant and assigned to duties as a liaison with the Russians. “We were to
develop a joint US-USSR offense against Japan, but that never materialized,”
Pleasants related. <br />
<br />
“In 1943 I was transferred to the European Theater of Operations after being
trained as an interpreter and interrogator, and assigned to the 5th Army under
General Mark Clark, in Naples, Italy.” <br />
<br />
“I was also a specialist in the German order of battle, that I knew from
memorization, which I’m good at.” <br />
<br />
At the end of the war, Pleasants said, Clark attended the first postwar music
festival in Austria and gave a speech there. <br />
<br />
In the course of his postwar interpretation and interrogation work Pleasants
dealt with former Nazi General Reinhardt Gehlen. <br />
<br />
Although at the time Gehlen’s name was virtually unknown outside of military
and intelligence circles, he probably influenced, more than any one man, the
Cold War strategy that engulfed Europe for the better part of a half-century.
From the German order of Battle, Pleasants knew him as the German army’s chief
of intelligence for the Armies East – the Russian front. <br />
<br />
According to Pleasants, “Gehlen was G-2 for the eastern front. He foresaw the
situation at the end of the war when it became Us against Them, the United
States versse the USSR. And he made a very important decision – to turn himself
over to US troops and make himself and his knowledge of the Russians and his
files, available to us. It was good for both. He went on to establish the
German Intelligence organization that we recognized.”<br />
<br />
“An organization that turned out to be penetrated and compromised by the
Russians,” I noted. <br />
<br />
“Yes,” he said, noting that the Russians did the same thing to the British with
Kim Philby and his friends. <br />
<br />
Pleasants said he joined the CIA in 1950 and stayed on with the agency until
1964, working at first in Berne, Switzerland and later in Bonn, the capitol of
West Germany, as chief of station, until he retired. <br />
<br />
“I knew Allen Dulles very well,” he said, and as for Gehlen, “I liked him. We
were good friends.” <br />
<br />
Pleasants pointed out that, “I wasn’t involved in covert operations. I was
strictly liaison was my specialty and I was good at it.” <br />
<br />
Pleasant didn’t mind missing the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban fiasco that ended
Dulles’ career. “Thank God I wasn’t involved with that. That was a real mess. I
only worked in Germany and Europe.” <br />
<br />
When I asked him about the mysterious “Frank Bender,” from the CIA German desk
who helped organize the Bay of Pigs, he looked at me suspiciously and said,
“Let’s talk about music,” and I obliged. <br />
<br />
“I left the foreign service to get back into music,” he said. <br />
<br />
Pleasants passion for music began in Philadelphia where he first went to the
theater and discovered Mario Lanza, Ethel Waters, Eugene Ormandey and many
other entertainers who the regular Bulletin music editor, Ernest Tubbs, failed
to appreciate. <br />
<br />
The thing about Pleasants that struck me the most, compared to other music
critics, is the diversity of his interests. And the one thing that bothered him
the most, he went out of his way to tell me, is the lack of appreciation of the
varied types of music in the world today. <br />
<br />
His tastes ran the gamut from Bach and Beethoven, opera, blues, jazz and rock
& roll. He considers “Serious Music and All That Jazz” his best original
work, but is also proud of “Great American Pop Singers” and “The Agony of
Modern Music,” of which he said, “Stands up very well today.” <br />
<br />
“I found jazz music to be the most amiable people,” said Pleasants. “Their
music often appears easy but is actually very difficult to perform. They just
make the difficult seem easy. And when you ask them about it, they say, “Oh,
you’re interested in the music, not my sex life? The music? Well, I’ll talk
about the music.” <br />
<br />
“I stayed with pop music through Elvis, the 5th Dimension and what’s the group
– CTA – Chicago Transit Authority,” he laughed, “then as my hearing decreased,
I pulled back.” <br />
<br />
I felt that we were on the same cord when we talked about the blues, B.B. King
and jazz, and felt a profound disinterest when we talked about the Cold War
days. Reflecting on the collapse of Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the union of Germany and the end of Cold War, Pleasants merely said, “I have no
opinion on it. I keep up with it, and I am interested, but what can you
say?” <br />
<br />
The main thing in Henry Pleasants’ life was his profound passion for
music. <br />
<br />
As I shook his hand to say goodbye, he reiterated once again his regret over
the lack of appreciation for the wide variety of music in the world today. I
thought then that his work as a police beat reporter in the heart of
Philadelphia somehow gave him his unique perspective that prepared him to be
open minded, and accept a more varied taste in music, and I sensed life.</p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal">[I later discovered that Fleming mentions his sister – the
cellist – in the short story The Living Daylights – one of the last stories he
would write]. </p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal">CHARACTER MEETS AUTHOR <br />
<br />
Calling the Chestnut Hill Local, a weekly neighborhood newspaper once published
by Mrs. Bond, I obtained the address of the Mr. and Mrs. James Bond. They had
lived in a small home in the popular suburban Philadelphia community, but had
moved into a high-rise in the center of town next to the railroad station,
called Hill House. <br />
<br />
I wrote to him directly, asking a number of questions, but Mrs. Bond
intercepted my letter and replied, “No one sympathizes more than I with another
writer’s desire to focus on the subject of his choice, so it is difficult to
write the following.” <br />
<br />
“My husband has always resented the invasion of his private life through the
‘theft’ of his name by Ian Fleming. Had Fleming not identified 007 with the
American ornithologist, my husband would have been teased etc., like many other
men named James Bond, and nothing more would have come of it. But as episodes
kept recurring over the years, my husband put the entire situation into my
hands, and refused to have anything to do with it.” <br />
<br />
In her letter, Mrs. Bond noted that her husband had been fighting cancer since
1975, “and his activities and stamina are greatly curtailed. He wishes he could
be left alone to do his work, which means everything to him, and put 007 behind
him.” <br />
<br />
“Recurring episodes,” stuck out in my mind as I recalled how Mrs. Bond, in her
books, related how she accompanied her husband to Jamaica and to Goldeneye,
where Bond confronted Fleming and got across the point of how much he actually
did resent “the theft of his identity.” <br />
<br />
It was while in Jamaica on an ornithological field trip during the winter of
1964 when Mrs. Bond suggested to her husband that they rent a car and take a
drive along the scenic North Shore coastal highway. Bond said that he
immediately recognized the ploy as an attempt to get him to meet Fleming, but
he acquiesced, and they took the trip. <br />
<br />
Arriving unannounced, they found the front gates invitingly ajar, and drove
past the pink pillars simply inscribed: Goldeneye. Down the vine-covered dirt
drive to the custom built, Spanish revival, one story cottage. <br />
<br />
Stepping over some wires from a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television
crew there to film a documentary interview with Fleming, James Bond knocked on
the side door. The Bonds were met by Fleming’s housekeeper, Violet. <br />
<br />
Flustered when the guests announced themselves, Violet backed off as if she had
seen a ghost. “Mister and Misses James Bond are here, Commander,” she informed
Fleming, and stood in the doorway in her flower print dress as Fleming stepped
outside to meet Bond. <br />
<br />
Mrs. Bond took a photograph of the two men shaking hands on the door step. The
stern, shyly smiling Bond silently got across the feeling that Fleming’s
impulsive use of his name went entirely unappreciated, and in fact was
resented. Fleming got the point. <br />
<br />
After a quick handshake and an awkward smile, Fleming invited the visitors to
lunch. Walking out to the back patio overlooking a private cover and beach,
Fleming yelled down to some friends on the beach. They waved back, holding a
copy of Bond’s book, “Birds of the West Indies.” They were using the guide to
try to identify a swarm of small birds flying about the surf. <br />
<br />
Fleming tested Bond, just as his fictional 007 counterpart has been tested in
his novels and movies, asking what kind of birds they were. “Cave swallows,”
Bond replied, beginning a bantering between the two men that carried through
lunch. <br />
<br />
Fleming elaborately described how his 007 preferred his meals, while Mrs. Bond
recounted some humorous, albeit sometimes obnoxious confrontations that she and
her husband had to endure because of Fleming’s indiscretion in using his name.
There were the strange, lonely girls calling at odd hours of the night, having
found James Bond’s phone number listed in the public directory. And then there
were the times when traveling abroad, Bond was suspiciously detained and kidded
by border guards. <br />
<br />
Before he left Goldeneye, Fleming gave Bond a copy of his latest book and
personally inscribed it: “To James Bond, from the thief of his identity!” <br />
<br />
To Bond, the quick witted humor of the situation somehow made it seem that
Fleming may have missed Bond’s contempt for the notoriety he created. James
Bond really distained the celebrity Fleming gave him. <br />
<br />
Seven months later however, while they were spending the summer at their Mount
Desert Island, Maine cabin, the Bonds were saddened to learn that Fleming had
died. They felt that somehow, he had left them holding the bag.</p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal">[Since I wrote this I have seen the CBC interview with Fleming
at Goldeneye, and have corresponded with the interviewer and producer, so there
is more to add to this episode.] </p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-55699921767261053632021-01-01T00:25:00.002-08:002021-01-01T00:25:09.526-08:00Character Meets Author <p><br /></p>
<p class="normal">CHARACTER MEETS AUTHOR <br />
<br />
Calling the Chestnut Hill Local, a weekly neighborhood newspaper once published
by Mrs. Bond, I obtained the address of the Mr. and Mrs. James Bond. They had
lived in a small home in the popular suburban Philadelphia community, but had
moved into a high-rise in the center of town next to the railroad station,
called Hill House. <br />
<br />
I wrote to him directly, asking a number of questions, but Mrs. Bond
intercepted my letter and replied, “No one sympathizes more than I with another
writer’s desire to focus on the subject of his choice, so it is difficult to
write the following.” <br />
<br />
“My husband has always resented the invasion of his private life through the
‘theft’ of his name by Ian Fleming. Had Fleming not identified 007 with the
American ornithologist, my husband would have been teased etc., like many other
men named James Bond, and nothing more would have come of it. But as episodes
kept recurring over the years, my husband put the entire situation into my
hands, and refused to have anything to do with it.” <br />
<br />
In her letter, Mrs. Bond noted that her husband had been fighting cancer since
1975, “and his activities and stamina are greatly curtailed. He wishes he could
be left alone to do his work, which means everything to him, and put 007 behind
him.” <br />
<br />
“Recurring episodes,” stuck out in my mind as I recalled how Mrs. Bond, in her
books, related how she accompanied her husband to Jamaica and to Goldeneye,
where Bond confronted Fleming and got across the point of how much he actually
did resent “the theft of his identity.” <br />
<br />
It was while in Jamaica on an ornithological field trip during the winter of
1964 when Mrs. Bond suggested to her husband that they rent a car and take a
drive along the scenic North Shore coastal highway. Bond said that he
immediately recognized the ploy as an attempt to get him to meet Fleming, but
he acquiesced, and they took the trip. <br />
<br />
Arriving unannounced, they found the front gates invitingly ajar, and drove
past the pink pillars simply inscribed: Goldeneye. Down the vine-covered dirt
drive to the custom built, Spanish revival, one story cottage. <br />
<br />
Stepping over some wires from a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television
crew there to film a documentary interview with Fleming, James Bond knocked on
the side door. The Bonds were met by Fleming’s housekeeper, Violet. <br />
<br />
Flustered when the guests announced themselves, Violet backed off as if she had
seen a ghost. “Mister and Misses James Bond are here, Commander,” she informed
Fleming, and stood in the doorway in her flower print dress as Fleming stepped
outside to meet Bond. <br />
<br />
Mrs. Bond took a photograph of the two men shaking hands on the door step. The
stern, shyly smiling Bond silently got across the feeling that Fleming’s
impulsive use of his name went entirely unappreciated, and in fact was
resented. Fleming got the point. <br />
<br />
After a quick handshake and an awkward smile, Fleming invited the visitors to
lunch. Walking out to the back patio overlooking a private cover and beach,
Fleming yelled down to some friends on the beach. They waved back, holding a
copy of Bond’s book, “Birds of the West Indies.” They were using the guide to
try to identify a swarm of small birds flying about the surf. <br />
<br />
Fleming tested Bond, just as his fictional 007 counterpart has been tested in
his novels and movies, asking what kind of birds they were. “Cave swallows,”
Bond replied, beginning a bantering between the two men that carried through
lunch. <br />
<br />
Fleming elaborately described how his 007 preferred his meals, while Mrs. Bond
recounted some humorous, albeit sometimes obnoxious confrontations that she and
her husband had to endure because of Fleming’s indiscretion in using his name.
There were the strange, lonely girls calling at odd hours of the night, having
found James Bond’s phone number listed in the public directory. And then there
were the times when traveling abroad, Bond was suspiciously detained and kidded
by border guards. <br />
<br />
Before he left Goldeneye, Fleming gave Bond a copy of his latest book and
personally inscribed it: “To James Bond, from the thief of his identity!” <br />
<br />
To Bond, the quick witted humor of the situation somehow made it seem that
Fleming may have missed Bond’s contempt for the notoriety he created. James
Bond really distained the celebrity Fleming gave him. <br />
<br />
Seven months later however, while they were spending the summer at their Mount
Desert Island, Maine cabin, the Bonds were saddened to learn that Fleming had
died. They felt that somehow, he had left them holding the bag.</p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal">[Since I wrote this I have seen the CBC interview with Fleming
at Goldeneye, and have corresponded with the interviewer and producer, so there
is more to add to this episode.] </p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-77110272611419215672021-01-01T00:21:00.002-08:002021-01-01T00:21:50.059-08:00Goldeneye for Beginners <p> </p>
<p class="normal">GOLDENEYE FOR BEGINNERS – January 1990 <br />
<br />
“I was forcibly struck by a marked similarity of many West Indian bars,
waterfronts, personalities and even incidents described by Ian Fleming, to
those Jim had related to me as his own experiences. I felt that my husband was
being shadowed in a fantastic, surreptitious fashion…” Mary Wickham Bond (How
007 Got His Name, Collins, 1966)<br />
<br />
The opportunity to visit Ian Flemings Jamaican estate Goldeney presented itself
in the spring of 1990 when I joined a friend on a holiday jaunt to Montego Bay.
James Bond had died the previous year, so I couldn’t check in with him as
promised. <br />
<br />
While my friend’s main interest was playing golf, I intended to visit
Goldeneye, some sixty miles east of Montego Bay, on the north coast
highway. <br />
<br />
Fleming seasonally spent two months a year in Jamaica, in January and February,
escaping the cold and damp English winter for the island sun and private beach. <br />
<br />
I first went there in March, 1990, for only a short excursion. I discovered
right away however, that it doesn’t take long to learn everything you have to
know about Jamaica to enjoy it to its fullest. <br />
<br />
Bob Marley tunes played on the Air Jamaica flight out of New York, and native
girls in flower print dresses danced and sang a welcome tune as we disembarked
at Montego Bay airport. A small bus met us at the door and took us to our
hotel, the Wyndam Rose Hall, which was selected mainly because it sports an
in-house golf course with links to the ocean. <br />
<br />
When we arrived a doorman outfitted with a white safari hat opened the door and
a sharp featured, friendly bell hop with an engaging smile grabbed our bags and
put them on a dolly. Then he slapped his feet together, in true Gunga Din
fashion, and introduced himself, “I’m Billy Love. Welcome to Wyndam Rose Hall.
If I can be of any assistance, just let me know. You can contact me at the
desk.” <br />
<br />
“Billy Love,” his engraved nameplate read, as I thought how Fleming would have
certainly loved that name and appropriate it for one of his more engaging
characters. <br />
<br />
“Yes,” I said to Billy Love, once we were settled into our room, “I’ll need a
car and a driver to take me to Orcabessa in the morning. <br />
<br />
“I’ll have the best driver on the island ready for you,” Love promised. “Just
call the desk shortly before you have breakfast and he’ll be waiting for you at
the door when you’re ready.” And Love didn’t let me down. <br />
<br />
My old high school friend Mark, a New York corporate attorney, read the Daily
Gleamer, Jamaica’s daily newspaper, as we enjoyed breakfast on the patio
overlooking the pool and the beach. I had picked up two books at he hotel gift
shop, a rare whitebound hardcover edition of James Bond’s “Birds of the West Indies”
and a copy of Timothy White’s biography of Bob Marley, “Hold A Fire.” <br />
<br />
A friendly blackbird, eating the leftover toast on a tray a few feet away,
seemed to be mocking us with a laugh. I opened up my newly acquired copy of
“Birds of the West Indies” and quickly found Bond’s description of our
tormentor. <br />
<br />
Bond reports that this is a “GREATER ANTILLEAN CRACKLE,” that’s also known in
scientific circles as a “Quiscalus niger,” but had such coloqual local names as
“Tinkling and Cling-cling,” and in Jamaica, “Ting-ting,” based on the mocking
sound it was making at us. It’s also known as a “Ching-ching” in the nearby
Cayman Islands. <br />
<br />
Bond’s fitting description: “1-12 inches. Male: Black with a violet or
steel-blue gloss; iris light yellow, appearing white. Female: Smaller and
duller than the male. Immature individuals have light brown irides. Crackles
have a V-shaped tails, most evident in the male. They are gregarious.” <br />
<br />
Gregarious. Gregarious is a fitting description of all Jamaica. <br />
<br />
While my friend went off to play a round of golf, I went to the front desk,
where Billy Love introduced me to Mr. Douglas Scott, “the best driver on the
island.” <br />
<br />
The doorman in the white safari hat handed Scott a similar white hat and
chastised him for not wearing it, as I got in the front passenger seat of a
quite old but well kept classic station wagon. He took the hat off as soon as
we turned the corner. The first stop was just over a mile away, the roadside
stand of a local “doctor,” manned by his son, a ten year old boy. The good
doctor came out and sold me some natural herb medicine, including some suntan
lotion, vitamins and a sex potion, which I didn’t know if you took internally
or applied locally, but was too embarrassed to ask. Then it was back on the
road, as we had about a sixty mile ride to Orcabessa, just east of Ocho
Rios. <br />
<br />
The stunning beauty of Jamaica jumps out at you from the moment you touch down,
but it doesn’t really come alive until you leave the tourist areas and take a
drive along the coast highway, Jamaica’s main road. <br />
<br />
Although it is only a two-lane blacktop, it hugs the shoreline the entire
circumference of the island of Jamaica. Off to one side there’s birds flying
about colorful tropical trees that bend gently in the breeze, while on the
other, waves break silently along the beach before the bright blue
horizon. <br />
<br />
One of the first visions that struck me was that of two scantly clad teenage
girls wading knee deep in the gentle surf, pulling a net through the shallow
tide, which I thought quite reminiscent of Fleming’s own vision of Honeychile
Rider, played by Rachel Welch, the first Bond Girl in the first 007 movie, “Dr.
No.”<br />
<br />
Between the scenes of tropical beauty however, were stark reminders of the
devastation raked by Hurricane Hugo. Although the storm had struck over a year
earlier, many beachside cottages were left roofless and abandoned. Others
didn’t seem fit for human habitation. Poverty and destitution run hand in hand
along the beach in paradise.<br />
<br />
Not all of the small cottages are derelict or primitive. Some are even rather
stately, with gatehouses, servant’s quarters, and neat, well-trimmed gardens.
Some of these private estates are leased out during the peak tourists season,
which runs from November through March. <br />
<br />
Besides the tourist hotels, small cottages and private villas, there are the
large estates, former Great Houses that have been, for the most part, renovated
and converted into gated resort hotels. <br />
<br />
Wyndham Rose Hall for instance, where we were staying, is adjacent to the recently
restored Rose Hall Great House, now a museum and tourist attraction that gives
keen insight into the history of this part of Jamaica. Rose Hall, they say, is
inhabited by the ghost of former resident, a matron who it is said murdered
each of her three husbands. <br />
<br />
There’s also Bellview Great House, which was owned by Fleming’s friend and
business associate Ivor Bryce, an American. <br />
<br />
There’s Bob Marley’s estate, Island House, at 56 Hope Road in uptown
Jamaica. <br />
<br />
Then there’s one of the most exclusive resorts in all of Jamaica, the Tryall
Club, which sports a world class golf course near Montego Bay, and was once
owned by Sir William Stephenson (aka INTREPID). <br />
<br />
Many new resorts are periodically spaced along the coast road on the North
shore, like Sandals, Couples, Hedonism, Boscobel Beach and Grand Lido. Some are
geared towards singles, others couples and a few cater to families, and all are
either all-inclusive or pay-as-you-go operations. They are surrounded by high,
chain link fences, and are quite self-sufficent, containing everything a
visitor on a holiday could possibly need – beach, pool, bar, disco, restaurant
and room with a view. <br />
<br />
But what they lack is a feeling for the spirit of Jamaica, the gregariousness
expressed by the steel blue Crackle bird and the people on the street, which
you can only experience by getting out and exploring the country. <br />
<br />
Besides the major city of Kingston, the capitol, in the south, also a major
airport, there’s Montego Bay, or “Mo Bay,” as the locals call it, and Ocho
Rios, both along the scenic North Shore, where most of the tourist resorts are
also located. <br />
<br />
Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye is near the small town of Orcabessa, just a few miles
east of Ocho Rios, and some sixty miles east of Montego Bay. My driver and
native guide, Mr. Douglas Scott, slowed down as we approached the town of
Duncan. <br />
<br />
He pulled up in front of a small hotel, the Sober Robin Inn, which any bird
watcher could appreciate, and had a large billboard sized marquee that
advertised it as, “The Childhood Home of the Singer of ‘Island in the
Sun.’” <br />
<br />
“Of course you know who that is,” Scott said, making me wonder, then guess, but
I just didn’t know, and I sensed his disappointment in my ignorance. After a
long pause, “Harry Belafonte,” he says, before unnecessarily adding, “a very
famous singer and actor.” <br />
<br />
“I know who Harry Belefonte is,” I shot back with a hint of sarcasm, before I
explained that, rather than from the song, “Island in the Sun,” a relatively
obscure tune, Belafonte is best known in the United States from “Day-Oh,” or
the “Bannana Boat Song,” and his civil rights and charity work. <br />
<br />
“Day-Oh” is a song that stems from the “field holler” style that the cargo boat
workers sang. It was even popular with the tourists to go down to the docks and
take pictures of the heavily muscled, bare chest black men as they tossed
around bundles of green bananas, and watch the women in their long dresses
carrying bushels of fruit in baskets on their heads. <br />
<br />
“Island in the Sun” on the other hand, is a song, equally melodic, that’s more
of a love ballad. Little did I know at the time, as we passed the Sober Robin
Inn, “Home of the singer of “Island in the Sun,” that the tune, its title, and
the novel based on that name and theme plays a role in the mystery of Goldeneye. <br />
<br />
Besides Belafonte’s song, and the book by the same name, by Alec Waugh, which
was made into a major motion picture in 1957, and starred Harry Belafonte (as
well as James Mason, Joan Fontain, Joan Collins and Michael Rennie), there’s
Island Records, which takes its name from Waugh’s book and Belafonte’s
song. <br />
<br />
Island Records was founded in 1962 by Christopher Blackwell who, besides being
Bob Marley’s manager, now owns Goldeneye. <br />
<br />
The novel and the movie based on the book concern an American journalist who
takes a working vacation to an unnamed tropical Caribbean island, which bears a
striking similarity to Jamaica. It focuses on the disruptions that his stories
make on the daily lives of the people who live in a poor paradise, and the
interrelationships between the natives, aristocratic governors and the
tourists. <br />
<br />
My driver, Mr. Scott, explained at length, the on-going conflicts between these
dynamic forces that are still at work. It being Saturday, market day, the
streets of Duncan were filled with people taking goods to the market. There
were carts filled with fruits and vegetables, men on bicycles and women with
baskets on their heads. But native Jamaicans don’t like being the subject of
tourist camera lenses any more than the men did at the Bannana boat docks, so I
am careful of what I take pictures of. <br />
<br />
Also on the coast road between Montego Bay and Ocho Rios are more popular
tourist and historic sites, like Discovery Bay, where Columbus put ashore on
his second voyage to the New World. There are also bauxite mines of rusty red
girders – the scene of one of James Bond’s movie escapades filed on location in
Jamaica.<br />
<br />
As we pulled into Ocho Rios however, it was apparent that this town is being
developed to cater to tourists. Most of the people on the streets were
Americans and street vendors selling wood carved statutes, shells, wind chimes
and other crafts. <br />
<br />
Once on the other side of Ocho Rios we stopped a Rastafarian, distinctive
because of his long, matted dreadlock hair and red, green and yellow knit hat,
and asked him directions to Orcabessa. He tried to sell us an over-priced bag
of coffee, then directed us down the road. A gardener, trimming the hedges of a
large estate, told us that Goldeneye was just beyond Orcabessa, the next town
down the road. “Make a left turn at the Esso gas station,” he said, “and
Goldeneye is 50 yards down the street on the right.” <br />
<br />
Orcabessa is a very small town, consisting of a post office, police station and
general store, a place where the primary occupation seems to be sitting on the
porch steps and talking with neighbors. It is a sleepy fishing village that is
known primarily, as being the place where Ian Fleming built Goldeneye and wrote
his James Bond novels. <br />
<br />
Just as the old man trimming hedges told us, we made a left at the gas station,
and found the gates to Goldeneye just off the coast road. As James and Mary
Bond had found them twenty-five years before, the wraught iron gates were
“hospitably ajar,” left open between the concrete pillars, one of which simply
read: GOLDENEYE. <br />
<br />
Mr. Scott pulled in and drove down the short, winding, gravel road and stopped
before a clothes line, where multi-colored flower print skirts and dresses were
drying in the sun. Scott got out and leaned against the hood of the car while I
approached a black women sitting in the shade. <br />
<br />
“Is Violet here?” I asked, wondering about Fleming’s long time maid and cook
who I knew lived at Goldeneye. <br />
<br />
“No,” she said. “Violet passed away two years ago.” <br />
<br />
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I replied. “What about the owner, is he here at the
moment?” <br />
<br />
“Mr. Blackwell is in Ocho Rios on business today, but he will be back later
this evening,” she said softly. Nor did she mind if I took some photos of the
house and the grounds, as long as I didn’t disturb anything. <br />
<br />
Although I would have enjoyed meeting Mr. Christopher Blackwell, I was glad I
didn’t since I would have been embarrassed for not knowing then what I know
now. That he was Bob Marley’s manager, founder of Island Records and one of the
most prominent businessmen in all Jamaica. <br />
<br />
The shutters of the glassless windows were open so I could see inside the
living room, where a movie poster of a 007 film hung on one wall. A bar was set
up, and the sparsely furnished house looked much like it was described by Mrs.
Bond and it seems that it has been maintained very similar to the way Fleming
kept it. <br />
<br />
Outside there seemed to be little evidence of the destruction left in the wake
of Hurricane Hugo. Some of the roof had been repaired and the canopy that
covered the patio walk was gone, but otherwise, Goldeneye seemed much the same
as when Fleming lived and worked there. <br />
<br />
The patio walk leads to an iron railing, where you can stand and view the steps
that descend to the private beach cove, and overlooks the scenic small boat
harbor and horizon. Just beyond the beach is the reef, which keeps the sharks
out and provided an abundance of sea life for Fleming to probe when he snorkel
dived in the cove. <br />
<br />
Leaving Goldeneye, we drove down the coast road away from Orcabessa and Ocho
Rios and towards Noel Coward’s home Firefly, not far from Goldeneye. Firefly, I
had learned, was now a museum and tourist attraction where Coward’s butler
still resided. We never made it to Firefly however, because we stopped at a small
café to have a cold drink. <br />
<br />
As I had a Red Stripe beer Douglas Scott drank a soft drink as we talked with
the barmaid. She had known Violet, in fact was her niece, and she talked about
the native dishes Violet prepared for Fleming and his guests, like conch gumbo
and fried octopus tentacles with tarter sauce. <br />
<br />
I asked the barmaid about Aubyn Cousins, the local fisherman, son of a native
Jamaican and a Belfast schooner boat captain who often took Fleming shark
fishing out beyond the reef. Cousins, who Fleming’s first biographer John
Pearson called, “…the nearest to the original for James Bond’s faithful Cayman
islander Quarrel….” Unfortunately, he too had died a few years earlier. <br />
<br />
But his brother was still alive and living nearby, and the barmaid sent a
little boy off to get him while she entertained us with some local gossip.
Christopher Blackwell, she said, was well known as Bob Marley’s manager. Less
known was that Marley himself had purchased Goldeneye from Ian Fleming’s widow.
After Fleming died, his wife wanted to sell Goldeneye. She never really liked
Jamaica, and only went there with Fleming. She wanted to sell Goldeneye, but
not to Blackwell, whose mother Blanch Blackwell was an acquaintance of Fleming.
In fact, Blanch Blackwell was the real life counterpart to Pussy Galore, and
too close of an acquaintance to Fleming for his wife to appreciate. So her son
Christopher Blackwell used Bob Marley as a straw buyer to purchase Goldeneye,
and then resell it to him. <br />
<br />
When the young boy returned with old Mr. Cousins, I bought him a beer and asked
him about Fleming, who he referred to as, the “Commander.” Cousins had nothing
bad to say about the Commander, and “very fine man,” still revered in the
community. <br />
<br />
His brother Aubyn, he said, would take the Commander shark fishing, with a
lasso. They would attract the sharks with fresh meat, then lasso one with a
rope from the end of a bamboo pole. Tying the rope to the front of the small
boat, they would then let the shark take the boat on a “Nantuckett Sleigh
Ride,” as the old whalers called it. <br />
<br />
But Fleming would never let Cousins kill the shark. After their fun they would
let the big fish go on its way. <br />
<br />
Mrs. Blackwell they said, lived at Bolt House, not far down the coast road
towards Port Maria. Leaving the café, we passed Coward’s Flyfly, intending to
stop back there some other day, and drove up to the sprawling green grass hill
to Bolt House, Pussy Galore’s residence. <br />
<br />
Although described as a mansion, it is actually not unlike Goldeneye – a small,
one story, Spanish style home with a panorama view of the ocean on three sides.
Mrs. Blackwell, however, was visiting the Cayman Islands at the time we
visited. <br />
<br />
So we headed back to Montego Bay, along the same north shore coast road that
provides so much beautiful scenery, my eyes washed by the setting sun, and my
mind reconsidering the mysteries of Goldeneye and the role Christopher
Blackwell plays in the whole affair.</p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-28219465019067115112021-01-01T00:20:00.008-08:002021-01-01T00:20:54.196-08:00007 and Lee Harvey Oswald <p> </p>
<p class="normal">007, LHO and JFK </p>
<p class="normal">According to the myth, in early 1954, in order to take his mind
off impending marriage, Ian Fleming sat down at his typewriter in his Jamaican
beach house and began “Casino Royale,” a paperback spy thriller novel,
that he called “the spy story to end all spy stories.”</p>
<p class="normal">The chief of British Naval Intelligence
christened his secret agent Double-Oh Seven - 007 - James Bond, who was
licensed to kill on behalf of her majesty’s secret service, while having the
cover job of an import-export agent for Universal Export. </p>
<p class="normal">Writing a book a year, by 1957 he had a few novels under his
belt when he wrote what some considered his finest, “From Russia with
Love,” about the theft of a Soviet cipher and the defection of a young and
beautiful Russian embassy clerk.</p>
<p class="normal">A few years later, Lee Harvey Oswald, just out of the US Marine
Corps, boarded a tramp steamer in New Orleans and sailed
for Europe on the first leg of a journey that would take him behind
the Iron Curtain as a “defector” to the Soviet Union. The passport that
Oswald turned over to the US Embassy in Moscow when he announced his
defection indicated that his profession was “Import-Export” agent.</p>
<p class="normal">In fact, Oswald, before enlisting in the US Marines, did work
at an import and export firm in New Orleans. As explained by his brother
Robert (Lee – A Portrait of Lee, Coward-McCann, 1967, p. 74), “In November
(1955) he (Lee) went to work as a messenger and office boy for a shipping
company, Gerald F. Tujague, Inc. He made only $130 a month, but it must have seemed
like a lot of money to him, since it was his first full-time job. Mother said
he was generous with his money…Feeling prosperous, now that he had a regular
income, Lee bought other things, too. Mother said he paid $35 for a coat for
her, bought a bow and arrow set – and guy…I remember that gun…Lee really seemed
to enjoy his work at Tujague’s for a while. He felt more independent than ever
before, and he liked the idea of working for a shipping company. When he first
told me about it, he was eager, animated and genuinely enthusiastic. ‘We’re
sending an order to Portugal this week,’ he’d tell me. Or, ‘I
received a shipment from Hong Kong, just this morning.’ It was a big
adventure to him – as if all the company’s ships were his and he could go to
any of the places named on the order blanks he carried from one desk to
another. It made him feel important, just to be on the fringes of something as
exciting as foreign trade.” </p>
<p class="normal">Tujague later came back on the record as a leading member of
one of the Free Cuba Committees in New Oreleans and was said to be on the board
of directors of a bank that also included John Mecom, who employed George
DeMohrenschildt and sent him to Europe, which led to him being debriefed
by the CIA. So both Oswald and DeMohrenschildt, although their lives
wouldn’t entwine until years later, were both employed by directors of the same
bank, an indication they were both working for the same economic interests
years earlier.</p>
<p class="normal">Was there a reason for Oswald to list his occupation as
“import-export agent” on the passport he used to defect to Russia, and was
it in any way associated with import-export agency he worked for in New
Orleans shortly before enlisting in the Marines?</p>
<p class="normal">Or was it some kind of inside joke, tongue in cheek reference
to James Bond’s occupation as an import-export agent for Universal Export?</p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-62772916186077720672021-01-01T00:19:00.004-08:002021-01-01T00:19:27.347-08:00JFK and 007 <p>]JFK and 007</p>
<p class="normal">In <i>JFK and 007</i> Less Sanger Golden wrote: “Meanwhile, the James Bond novels were having a
huge impact on another young man, Lee Harvey Oswald. He too was a fan of the
novel From Russia with Love, a story of political defection that
oddly mirrors Oswald’s own defection to the Soviet Union. In the story,
James Bond wisps the young Russian Tatiana Romonvav across the iron curtain
with promises of decadent western luxuries. While in Russia, Lee Oswald
similarly swept young Marina Prusakova off of her feet and brought her
to America with promises of a better life. But when things started
going badly, Tatiana and Marina realized that perhaps they were in for more
than they had bargained for.” </p>
<p class="normal">All of Fleming’s novels include fictional characters who have
real life counterparts, and story lines that are based on real, sometimes
historic events, especially <i>“From Russia with Love.” </i> It has
been noted that in 1950, a US naval attaché was assassinated and
thrown from the Orient Express train by a Communist agent, a story that
inspired Fleming to write <i>"From Russia With Love."</i></p>
<p class="normal">The storyline deals with the theft of a Lektor Decoding
Machine, which Fleming based on his knowledge of the Enigma Decoding Machine
from World War II. Fleming was involved with the Ultra Network that cracked the
Enigma Code in 1939, and Fleming fictionalized the story a decade before the
Ultra Network's historical activities were declassified and released 1975.</p>
<p class="normal">As Golden also noted other similarities when he wrote: “If JFK
represents all the most charming aspects of James Bond, then perhaps Lee Oswald
is a reflection of his dark side. His rages, his wrath. The irony inherent in
any substantive comparison of JFK and 007 is inescapable. For while James Bond
is a timeless figure, JFK was a figure taken before his time. And while James
Bond is unkillable, we all that the same cannot be said of Jack Kennedy.</p>
<p class="normal">“And yet, the tragic assassination of President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy on in Dallas Texas on November 22nd 1963, is oddly
paralleled in the life and times of James Bond 007. In the novel and
film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James Bond’s marriage to Contessa
Teresa Vicenzo ended in the same way as Jacqueline Kennedy’s marriage to Jack.
Just as Jack Kennedy was gunned down by a hail of assassins bullets in his car,
so too was Teresa Bond. Just as Jack Kennedy’s lifeless body fell into Jackie’s
lap, so too did Teresa. They say that once the Presidential limousine reached
the hospital, Jackie Kennedy refused to let go of her husband’s body, even as
others entreated her to do so. And when all hope was lost for Contessa Teresa
Bond, James Bond too refused to let go. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was
published in April of 1963, mere months before the assassination.”</p>
<p class="normal">Oswald would probably be amused by these associations,
especially if he knew that, at the time of his defection to the Soviet
Union, Ian Fleming had been the European editor of the North American Newspaper
Alliance (NANA), whose correspondent reported on his defection to
the Soviet Union.</p>
<p class="normal">As a correspondent for NANA, Priscialla Johnson, was one of the
first reporters to interview Oswald and she wrote a newspaper article about him
and his defection. The report she filed on Oswald’s defection was long, but
only a part of it was circulated among NANA subscribers and published. The rest
was filed away by NANA editors, Ian Fleming among them. Oswald mentions this
news article and the others like it in a letter he wrote to then Secretary of
the Navy John Connally, a man he is later accused of shooting.</p>
<p class="normal">Of course Oswald should not have, could not have known that
Fleming, the author of the 007 novels he enjoyed, was also one of the editors
of one of the newspaper articles he complained about as misrepresenting
his true position and situation. </p>
<p class="normal">Golden: "Meanwhile, the James Bond novels were having a
huge impact on another young man, Lee Harvey Oswald. He too was a fan of the
novel From Russia with Love, a story of political defection that
oddly mirrors Oswald’s own defection to the Soviet Union. In the story,
James Bond wisps the young Russian Tatiana Romonvav across the iron curtain
with promises of decadent western luxuries."</p>
<p class="normal"> "While in Russia, Lee Oswald similarly swept
young Marina Prusakova off of her feet and brought her
to America with promises of a better life. But when things started
going badly, Tatiana and Marina realized that perhaps they were in for more
than they had bargained for. If JFK represents all the most charming
aspects of James Bond, then perhaps Lee Oswald is a reflection of his dark
side. His rages, his wrath. The irony inherent in any substantive comparison of
JFK and 007 is inescapable. For while James Bond is a timeless figure, JFK was
a figure taken before his time. And while James Bond is unkillable, we all that
the same cannot be said of Jack Kennedy."</p>
<p class="normal">"And yet, the tragic assassination of President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy on in Dallas Texas on November 22nd 1963, is
oddly paralleled in the life and times of James Bond 007. In the novel and film
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James Bond’s marriage to Contessa Teresa
Vicenzo ended in the same way as Jacqueline Kennedy’s marriage to Jack. Just as
Jack Kennedy was gunned down by a hail of assassins bullets in his car, so too
was Teresa Bond. Just as Jack Kennedy’s lifeless body fell into Jackie’s lap,
so too did Teresa. They say that once the Presidential limousine reached the
hospital, Jackie Kennedy refused to let go of her husband’s body, even as
others entreated her to do so. And when all hope was lost for Contessa Teresa Bond,
James Bond too refused to let go. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was
published in April of 1963, mere months before the assassination."</p>
<p class="normal">After Oswald returned home with his Russian bride and was
living in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, he took a number of
books out of the local New Orleans library. A Warren Commission
memorandum included the list of the books that Oswald checked out of the New
Orleans Library. First on the list is “Goldfinger,’ and it officially
notes that the author is IAN FLEMING, the book was checked out
– 9/19/63 (Sept. 19) and the return date is indicated
as 10/3/63 (October 3).<br />
<br />
“Goldfinger” wasn’t the first 007 novel that Oswald checked out, as the
records show that he had previously taken out “Thunderball” and
“From Russia With Love.” Another 007 book “Moonraker” was
also checked out on the same date as “Goldfinger,” both of which were
returned on October 3</p><p class="normal">
For assassination investigators the problem with Oswald’s “Goldfinger” is
that, according to the records of the New Orleans Library, the book was
returned on October 3, 1963, a full week after Oswald, the friendless
loner had left New Orleans.</p>
<p class="normal">Oswald left New Orleans on September 24, went
to Mexico, and was back in Dallas, Texas on October 3rd, at least
he was according to the official story, which has yet to explained how Oswald’s
“Goldfinger” was returned to the New Orleans library while he was
in Dallas</p><p class="normal">
Besides the Fleming novels, the other books on Oswald’s list – two dozen in
all, are mainly non-fiction history, science fiction and biography, and deserve
closer attention</p><p class="normal">
If Oswald was the assassin of the President, despite the fact that no motive
can be or has been attributed to him, then an assessment of his reading habits
would be in order since they would naturally help indicate what he was thinking
and what motivated him.</p><p class="normal">
Of course if Lee Harvey Oswald was the real assassin of the President of the
United States, these books would have been given a through going over and
psychoanalysts would have given their interpretation of the assassin’s state of
mind at the time, but since Oswald was a patsy, and framed for the crimes, just
as he claimed, there has been no real attempt to even try to understand the
psychological makeup of the patsy. If he had been the actual triggerman and
assassin, then it would be a different story. In any case, Oswald is one of the
most thoroughly analyzed patsies in history, so we know a lot about him, much
more than we know about the actual assassins. One of the things we know is that
he read a lot, and we know what he read from the library records</p><p class="normal">
Any cursory review of the books we know Oswald read should begin with
“Goldfinger,” which opens with a quote above the table of contents that
reads: </p>
<p class="normal">“Goldfinger said, ‘Mr. Bond, they have a saying
in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time
it’s enemy action.’” </p>
<p class="normal">Indeed, and if the happenstances and coincidences are added up,
one must come to the conclusion that it is neither happenstance nor coincidence
but intentional covert action.</p>
<p class="normal">And so Lee Harvey Oswald read through
“Goldfinger,” probably very quickly as he was a voracious reader and Ian
Fleming’s novels would be very light reading compared to the more heavy science
fiction, biographies and world affairs that he was also reading at the time.
The other books on the list – two dozen in all, are mostly non-fiction history,
science fiction and biography. </p>
<p class="normal">The Warren Commission memo with the list of Oswald’s library
books also reported: “Marina Oswald in discussing Oswald’s reading habits, said
that he read generally histories or biographies and she recalled specifically
that he read biographies of Hitler, Kennedy and Khrushchev. She is not clear,
however, whether he read those books in New Orleans or Dallas.
She did recall that he read a book by Eric Maria Remarque, ‘Time to Live
and Time to Die,’ and that he read a book about Powers, the U-2 Pilot. Other
than that, she cannot specifically recall what books he checked out of
the Dallas library.Marina in her testimony has mentioned that
Oswald read books of the ‘Historical Nature,’ and that he read books by Marx
and a two-volume history of the United States. Some of Oswald’s associates
in Texas mentioned that he read books by Marx and Lenin, etc. Katherine
Ford also mentioned that Oswald read some books about how to be a spy.”</p>
<p class="normal">Oswald did take an literary interest in the subject of
espionage, as another book he checked out was, “Five Spy Novels.” </p>
<p class="normal">US Army Reserve Col. Jose Rivera, who was affiliated with a top
secret MK/ULTRA program at Fort Detrich, had foreknowledge of the
assassination, the death of JFK’s son Patrick that summer, and knew
Oswald’s New Orleans phone number before Oswald himself knew where he
was going to live. Rivera was quoted as saying, “We will have him read about
the assassins of history, and indeed, Oswald did read, Hermann B. Deutsch’s
“The Huey Long Murder Case.”</p>
<p class="normal">Oswald also read “Portrait of a President,” about the man
he is accused of killing, as well as Kennedy’s own “Profiles in Courage,” which
earned the Pulitzer Prize.</p>
<p class="normal">Among the other books on Oswald’s list
include: The Berlin Wall, One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, Soviet Potentials, What We Must Know About Communism,
Russia Under Khrushchev, Portrait of A Revolutionary:, Mae Tse-Tung, This
is My Philosophy, Conflict, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Hornblower and The
Hotspur, The Hittites, The Blue Nile and Ben-Hur</p>
<p class="normal">JFK & 007 </p>
<p class="normal">Kennedy was also well read, and tried to popularize reading
like he promoted physical fitness. In 1954-1955 he attended meetings at the
Foundation for Better Reading in Baltimore where his reading speed was
reported to be 1200 words a minute with a high level of comprehension.</p>
<p class="normal">Although “From Russia with Love” is the only book that is cross
referenced among the books ready by both Kennedy and Oswald, their interests
are very similar, reading primarily history and biography, while Kennedy leaned
more towards the classics and Oswald drifted into Science Fiction.</p>
<p class="normal">Kennedy is personally credited with popularizing the Fleming
novels in America, and it has been alleged that both President Kennedy and
Oswald, his alleged assassin, read 007 novels on the night before the
assassination. According to Robert A. Caplen in “Shaken & Stirred - The
Feminism of James Bond” (Xlibris 2010), “Kennedy was reportedly reading a
Bond novel the night before he was assassinated. In fact, reports surfaced that
Lee Harvey Oswald was also reading a Fleming novel the night before Kennedy’s
assassination.”</p>
<p class="normal">Although I find this hard to substantiate, Kennedy is certainly
credited with helping to popularize Fleming’s books and the 007 myth, and did
view the film “From Russia with Love” the night before he left for Texas, so
both Kennedy and his alleged assassin were were acquainted with Secret Agent
007 – James Bond.</p>
<p class="normal">Actually Kennedy had been familiar with James Bond and Ian
Fleming since he had asked his friend and Georgetown neighbor Oatsie
Leiter to recommend some books to read while he was laid up in bed, ill with
some malady or other. She suggested, some say she gave Kennedy a copy of a
light-hearted 007 spy thriller written by her friend Ian Fleming.</p>
<p class="normal">Just as Fleming had taken the name James Bond from the American
ornithologist and author of the book Birds of the West Indies, he had also
appropriated the surname for 007’s CIA sidekick Felix Leiter from
John and Oatsie Leiter, Kennedy and Fleming’s mutual friend and
Kennedy’s Georgetown neighbor.</p>
<p class="normal">Kennedy most certainly immediately caught the “inside joke” of
007’s CIA associate being named Felix Leiter, obviously a not-so
hidden reference to their mutual friend Oatsie Leiter. As the grand daughter of
a civil war general and governor of Alabama, Oatsie had served in
the OSS during the war and married Chicago millionaire John
Leiter, whose family owned the Virginia land where the
new CIA headquarters was built. As mutual neighbors in
both Newport and Georgetown, the Kennedys and Leiters were old
blue blood money that mirrored Fleming’s and is reflected in the power circles
that agent 007 infested.<br />
<br />
The President’s wife Jackie was as well-read as her husband, and later became a
book editor and publisher. She also took notice of Ian Fleming’s novels, though
she may not have gotten the joke, but she is credited with recommending
Fleming’s books to CIA director Alan Dulles. Dulles also enjoyed
Fleming’s stories and tried to cultivate a similar genre
of CIA themed literature that would do for the agency what Fleming’s
books did for the British spy agencies. Both E. Howard Hunt and David Attle
Phillips wrote a number of officially approved fictional pulp paperback novels
that were similar to Fleming’s 007 stories in style and content.</p>
<p class="normal">But before Kennedy endorsed and popularized the books and the
before the films came along, Fleming’s novels were something of a literary
oddity. When the head of British MI5 visited Washington and was being
escorted about town by Dick Helms of the CIA, Helms asked him about this
British writer Ian Fleming. The MI5 director said he didn’t know, but the very
next day the newspapers revealed that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had
spent a week at Fleming’s Jamaican home “Goldeneye,” which led Helms to
conclude that he had been lied to since the head of British
counter-intelligence had to know and approve where the Prime Minster was
living.</p>
<p class="normal">Bill Koenig visited the Lilly Library
at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where the
Fleming papers are kept. He reported: “The Fleming-related material is hardly
the oldest or rarest of what's here. But for a fan of 007, it is a treasure
trove. Not only are most of Fleming's original Bond manuscripts here but a huge
collection of people writing to Fleming and receiving correspondence from him.
The letters are, indeed, of a different time, when people took the time to type
out a letter and drop it in the mail, not just bang out a few lines of e-mail
and forget it. The library has two collections of note. The first is comprised
of fifteen Fleming manuscripts, purchased from Fleming's widow in 1970. (The
library also acquired rare books collected by Fleming in his lifetime.) The other
is a collection of letters gathered by Leonard Russell, the late literary
editor of The Sunday Times of London and by John Pearson,
Fleming's biographer. Other letters show Fleming's relationship with more
casual acquaintances - except his casual friendships were
with CIA directors or U.S. attorneys general.”</p>
<p class="normal">In a 1962 letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Fleming
wrote that “I am delighted to take this opportunity to thank Kennedys
everywhere for the electric effect their commendation has had on my sales
in America.”</p>
<p class="normal">Golden: "These days, everyone in America knows
who James Bond is. The character and his franchise are pervasive and vastly
influential in all spheres of popular culture, from movies, to video games,
comics, novels, toys, and TV. At first, James Bond wasn’t particularly popular
in the United States. That was until President Kennedy listed From Russia
with Love as one of his favorite books. After that ringing endorsement, Ian
Fleming’s James Bond books started flying off of the shelves. Though JFK and
007 shared a similar style, wit, charm, and taste for the good life, the
connection between the two icons goes far deeper than cosmetic comparisons. We
often think of James Bond stories as being influenced by world events, but what
is startling to realize is that in many ways, the opposite is true, and that
the James Bond novels changed the course of history. After finishing the novel
From Russian With Love, JFK passed it on to Allen Dulles, head of the Central
Intelligence Agency, America’s M." </p><p class="normal">
CIA Director Allen Dulles, like 007's Spy chief M and the real James Bond - smoked a pipe<br />
<!--[endif]--></p>
<p class="normal">Allen Dulles, the former CIA chief wrote to Fleming
on April 24, 1963, saying, "I have received and finished reading
your latest ‘On Her Majesty's Secret Service.’ I hope you have not really
destroyed my old friend and colleague James Bond, but I fear his bride has
gone." More than a year later, in June 1964, Dulles wrote again. "I
see that ‘From Russia With Love’ is now a movie and although I rarely see them
I plan to take this one in."</p><p class="normal">
Fleming was thanking Kennedy because Fleming’s book got the unexpected plug
when one of them was included among the books the President enjoyed. Hugh
Sidney, in (March 17, 1961) Life Magazine wrote an article titled The
President’s Voracious Reading Habits which listed From Russia with
Love as one of his 10 favorite books. A list of the President’s favorite
books was also sent out to various libraries during National Library Week.</p>
<p class="normal"><span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Miscellaneous-Information/Favorite-Books.aspx">http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Miscellaneous-Information/Favorite-Books.aspx</a></span></p><p class="normal">
Among the particular favorites of President Kennedy was Fleming’s “From Russia
with Love” which was also among Oswald’s books.<br />
<br />
Lord Melbourne by David Cecil<br />
Montrose by John Buchan<br />
Marlborough by Sir Winston Churchill<br />
John Quincy Adams by Samuel Flagg Bemis<br />
The Emergence of Lincoln by Allan Nevins<br />
The Price of Union by Herbert Agar<br />
John C. Calhoun by Margaret L. Coit<br />
Talleyrand by Duff Cooper<br />
Byron in Italy by Peter Quennell<br />
The Red and the Black by M. de Stendhal<br />
From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming<br />
Pilgrim's Way by John Buchan<br />
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon<br />
Writing and Speeches of Daniel Webster<br />
Andre Malraux<br />
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman<br />
Henry Clay by Carl Schurz </p>
<p class="normal">Dave Powers later added a few titles to the list, and Kennedy’s
secretary Mrs. Lincoln later acknowledged she added “From Russia with
Love” to the list of otherwise dull and academic books to give it a human
touch with a book she knew Kennedy had read that ordinary people could identify
with.</p>
<p class="normal">While “Casino Royale” was the first 007 novel, the story had
been adapted to an American television show, so the first 007 major motion
picture was “Dr. No,” which Oswald could have and probably did see.
<br />
<br />
In 1961, Kennedy watched the first James Bond film, Dr. No, in a
private White House screening, and in part to Kennedy’s influence, the next
movie was based on “From Russia, With Love,” and according to William
Manchester, it would be the last movie that the president saw,
on November 20, 1963, the evening before he left for Texas. </p>
<p class="normal">Vincent Canby made the observation: “Whether accurately or not,
the first films made from the Bond novels came to characterize a number of
aspects of the Kennedy Administration with its reputation for glamour, wit and
sophistication, and its real-life dram and melodrama. Indeed, the President
himself could be seen as a kind of Bond figure, and the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis as a real-life Bond situation.”</p>
<p class="normal">Golden stretches the similarities to the max: “The early.1960s.
The pinnacle of male style, when men treated each activity, accouterment and
debutant with sophistication and taste. But the two ambassadors of swinging
sixties charm were also two of the Cold War’s coldest warriors. Both were
boarding school boys turned navy officers, men who rose in rank to the heights
of government service. They were the sort of men all others envied, and all
women pined for. They were men of legendary libidos, womanizers worthy of
even Don Juan’s envy. Both traveled the world, wooing and winning the world’s
most gorgeous women in the lap of luxury, while also facing down some of the
most nefarious villains of our times. Their way with women was matched only by
their way with words, wit, and whimsy. With a wink and smile these two men
pulled the world from the brink of Nuclear Annihilation time and time again.
These two men, are of course Secret Agent James Bond, and President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy. Two men who need only be known by three characters, JFK
& 007.</p>
<p class="normal">In addition to “From Russia with Love” being on their mutual
reading lists, and both reported to have read Fleming novels on their last
Thursday night on earth, Fidel Castro was another mutual obsession of both
Kennedy and Oswald. </p>
<p class="normal">In his more detailed analysis of Oswald and Fleming’s novels,
Golden wrote: “Just like 007, there was always someone trying to take out
JFK. His most dangerous enemy might have been Russian Premiere Nikita Kruschev,
but his closest foe, and most personal nemesis was communist super villian
Fidel Castro, AKA “The Beard”. The plan was to whack the Beard before he
could get to Kennedy. When asked what kind of man should spearhead the
operation to whack Castro, JFK said ‘We need James Bond.’”</p>
<p class="normal">Most significant is the time when Kennedy met Fleming and
invited him to dinner, about which there has been many misrepresentations, as
that recounted here:</p>
<p class="normal">“The summer before his election, Jack Kennedy invited Ian
Fleming over to his estate and asked the novelist how M and 007 would take out
Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro. Fleming suggested three plans. When JFK became
president, the CIA acted on all three of these proposals. So the
leader of the free world and the head of its largest intelligence agency were
conducting foreign policy based on James Bond novels. Ian Fleming was not only
writing the greatest literary character in history. He was literally writing
history.”</p>
<p class="normal">In an interview with his friend William Polmer, Ian Fleming
recounted:</p>
<p class="normal">“Well, it was rather interesting. About a year before Mr.
Kennedy became President, I was staying in Washington with a friend of mine and
she was driving me through, it was a Sunday morning, and she was driving me
through Washington down to Georgetown and there were two people walking along
the street and she said, ‘Oh, there are my friends Jack and Jackie,’ and they
were indeed very close friends of hers, and she stopped and they talked. And
she said, ‘Do you know Ian Fleming?’ And Jack Kennedy said,
‘Not the Ian Fleming?’ Of course that was a very exciting thing for
him to say and it turned out that they were both great fans of my books, as
indeed is Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, and they invited me to dinner
that night with my friend, and we had great fun discussing the books and from
then on I’ve always sent copies of them direct and personally to him before
they’re published over here.”</p>
<p class="normal">“I think that was an historic encounter,” Plomer noted.</p>
<p class="normal">Although Fleming discretely avoided her name, the mutual friend
was Marion ‘Oatsie’ Leiter Charles who lived at Dougal House 3259 R
Street NW, Georgetown, not far from Kennedy’s home.</p><p class="normal">
Oatsie Leiter, JFK's Georgetown and Newport neighbor, introduced him to 007 and
Ian Fleming.</p><p class="normal">
Her husband owned the land the CIA Headquarters was built on.<br />
<br />
Apparently Oatsie Leiter had been invited to the Kennedys for dinner that
night, and they drove over to Kennedy’s Georgetown home to inquire
whether Fleming could accompany her to dinner, but Kennedy and his wife had
stepped out for a stroll. So when they came upon the couple walking down the street
they stopped and Mrs. Leiter introduced Fleming, who Kennedy recognized by
saying, “James Bond?”</p>
<p class="normal">As for joining them for dinner, “By all means,” Kennedy
said. </p>
<p class="normal">While James Bond would be a popular subject at the dinner table
that night, what to do with Fide Castro was the main topic, especially as to
what Fleming had to say about giving Castro the James Bond treatment. </p>
<p class="normal">Other guests reported to be there include painter and longtime
Kennedy friend William Walton, as well as journalist and CIA asset
Joseph Alsop. The CIA itself was represented by John Bross, who had
served with distinction in Cold War Germany.</p>
<p class="normal">In recounting the dinner that night Fleming’s official
biographer John Pearson wrote:</p>
<p class="normal">“During the dinner the talk largely concerned itself with the
more arcane aspects of American politics and Fleming was attentive but subdued.
But with coffee and the entrance of Castro into the conversation he intervened
in his most engaging style. Cuba was already high on the headache
list of Washington politicians, and another of those what’s
to-be-done conversations got underway. Fleming laughed ironically and began to
develop the theme that the United States was making altogether too
much fuss about Castro – they were building him into a world figure, inflating
him instead of deflating him. It would be perfectly simple to apply one or two
ideas which would take all the steam out of the Cuban.”</p>
<p class="normal">“Kennedy studied the handsome Englishman, rather as puzzled
admirals used to study him in the days of Room 39. Was he an oddball or
something more? What ideas had mister Fleming in mind?”</p>
<p class="normal">What would James Bond do about Castro? Fleming sarcastically
replied, “Ridicule, chiefly,” and as Pearson related, “…with immense
seriousness and confidence he developed a spoof proposal for giving Castro the
James Bond treatment…” </p>
<p class="normal">According to another account, “Fleming … in their conversation
... told Kennedy that he had a way to get rid of Fidel Castro, the Communist
leader of Cuba. This piqued Kennedy's interest, since Castro had been a
thorn in the side of Kennedy. Fleming said that Castro's beard was the key.
Without the beard, Castro would look like anyone else. It was his trademark.
So, Fleming said that the US should announce that they found that
beards attract radioactivity. Any person wearing a beard could become
radioactive himself as well as sterile! Castro would immediately shave off his
beard and would soon fall from power, when the people saw him as an ordinary
person. Kennedy had a good laugh about this bizarre suggestion.”</p>
<p class="normal">The next morning, CIA director Allen Dulles received
a full briefing of the previous night's dinner conversation, ostensibly from
Bross, the CIA man. </p>
<p class="normal">And as Golden notes, “The man selected to wack the beard was
William Harvey,” otherwise known as America’s James Bond.</p>
<p class="normal">When President Kennedy asked to meet “America’s James Bond,” he
was presented with William Harvey – a heavy drinking, womanizing former FBI
agent and CIA intelligence officer who helped run the Cuban
operations and an assassination project called ZRRIFLE.</p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-23319749958316804982021-01-01T00:10:00.009-08:002021-01-01T00:10:39.688-08:00JFK and The Cambridge Spy Ring <p> </p>
<p class="normal">JFK & THE CAMBRIDGE SOVIET SPY RING</p>
<p class="normal">The CIA might oppose the release of 50 year old operational
records related to the assassination of President Kennedy on grounds of
national security, since Castro is still alive and the records are still
relevant today, but the American people are the only ones being kept in the
dark about what’s so secret since both Castro’s G2 infiltrated JMWAVE as sea
level while Kim Philby penetrated the CIA at the highest levels in
Washington. </p>
<p class="normal">Things might have continued on unabated had not President
Kennedy appointed Michael Straight to a prominent post in the government, which
set a series of events in motion that are still being felt to this day, and is
at the heart of the government’s continued resistance to the opening of their
records, not an attempt to keep the enemy from learning the most important
secrets, because they already know, but to keep the American people from
knowing the embarrassing truths.</p>
<p class="normal">JFK, MICHAEL STRAIGHT, IAN FLEMING AND KIM PHILBY</p>
<p class="normal">All of the official biographies of Ian Fleming acknowledge that
he took the name for his fictional 007 hero from James Bond, the author of the
book Birds of the West Indies, but they also all falsely claim that Bond
enjoyed the celebrity status Fleming gave him and took it as a joke, when in
fact Bond was quite annoyed and deeply resented the “theft of his identity.”</p>
<p class="normal">So I also began to question the validity of the frequently
repeated statement that Fleming began to write the 007 novels on a lark, to
take his mind off his impending marriage, and considered the possibility that
there was a more significant “operational” motive behind the literature. They
could have been written either to boost the morale of the British Secret
Service which was severely damaged by the betrayal of Kim Philby and the
Cambridge spy ring or to salvage some of the operations they may have exposed.</p>
<p class="normal">This thought occurred to me when I read Jim Houghan (in <i>Secret
Agenda – Watergate, Deep Throat & the CIA</i>, Random House, 1984, p. 5-6) where
he notes that:</p>
<p class="normal">“When (E. Howard) Hunt first approached Colson for work in the
White House, he was still a part of the CIA. His retirement from the agency
would not occur until April 30, 1970, and, considering his record, the
possibility of his retirement was bogus is quite real. Indeed, this was the
third time that Hunt had left the Central Intelligence Agency. The first
occasion was in 1960, when he was issued fraudulent retirement papers to
facilitate his liaison with anti-Castro exiles. When that invasion was
launched, only to founder, Hunt returned to the agency’s staff – having never
actually left its payroll. Five years later, in 1965, Hunt quit for a second
time. The author of more than four dozen pulp thrillers and novels of the
occult, Hunt left the agency in furtherance of a counterintelligence scheme
that revolved around his literary efforts. The purpose of the scheme, according
to government sources familiar with Hunt’s curriculum vitae at the agency, was
to draw the KGB’s attention to books that Hunt was writing under the pseudonym
David St. John. These spy novels alluded to actual CIA operations in Southeast
Asia and elsewhere, and contained barely disguised portraits of political
figures as diverse as Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the late Senator Robert F.
Kennedy. It was the CIA’s intention that the KGB be led to believe that the
books contained security breaches, and toward that end the agency created a
phony ‘flap’ that was capped by Hunt’s supposedly ‘forced retirement.’ In his
memoir of his years as a spy, Hunt does not mention the counterintelligence
aspects of the David St. John novels, but writes, ‘I resigned from the CIA
[this second time], and was at once rehired as a contract agent, responsible
only to [the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, Thomas Karamessines.’”</p>
<p class="normal">Since it has also been acknowledged that E. Howard Hunt, in
light of the success of Ian Fleming’s 007 books, had obtained official
permission to write his spy-fiction novels as an intelligence operation,
perhaps there is something to the idea that Fleming also began to write his
novels as a counter-intelligence project as well.</p>
<p class="normal">Fleming began to write his first 007 novel within a year of the
defection of Burgess and Maclean.</p>
<p class="normal">In January 1952, when Fleming sat down at his typewriter to
begin his first 007 novel, “Casino Royale,” it was no longer a matter of
speculation as to whether the British Secret Service had been betrayed by its
own long standing members, it was only a matter of determining the severity of
the damage and what could be done to rectify it.</p>
<p class="normal">When Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean disappeared the previous
May, 1951, shortly before MacLean was to be confronted with the evidence he was
a Soviet spy and interrogated, the speculation centered on the identity of the
“third man” who had tipped them off and allowed them to flee. Since these
secrets were tightly held by only a few men in the counter-intelligence field,
the “third man” was certainly positioned in a high place within the Secret
Service, and a major effort was made to identify him. </p>
<p class="normal">The investigation quickly focused on Kim Philby, a former
Cambridge classmate of Burgess and Mclean, who at the time was serving in
Washington D.C. as liaison to the CIA and FBI.</p>
<p class="normal">Both Burgess and Maclean had been posted to America and
associated with Philby, and Burgess drew suspicion on himself and Philby by his
outrageous behavior, sparking William Harvey “America’s James Bond,” to
question whether Philby and Burgess were Soviet agents. But James Angleton,
chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence branch, discounted any such notions,
especially after many three-martini lunches with Philby. </p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p>In November 1956 Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 visited Washington
D.C. to brief the Americans about the missing diplomats and the Third Man
affair. Driving Hollis around town, Richard Helms of the CIA asked Hollis,
“Who’s this writer Ian Fleming?” Helms mentioned the recently published book
Live and Let Die, but Hollis replied, “I don’t know.” </p>
<p class="normal">A few days later it was revealed that Prime Minister Anthony
Eton had flown to Jamaica to spend some time at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye beach
house, sparking Helms to assume, “The man lied. Hollis must have cleared the
prime minister to stay with Fleming,” wrote Tim Bower [in The Perfect English
Spy].</p>
<p class="normal">When President Kennedy, already familiar with the 007 novels,
and having entertained Fleming at dinner at his home, requested to meet the
“American James Bond,” he was presented with William Harvey, who insisted that
Philby and Burgess were Soviet spies. </p>
<p class="normal">While Burgess’ treachery was confirmed by his disappearance,
Philby weathered the storm and though relieved from his position as liaison to
the American services, was eventually rehired by MI6 – the British foreign
intelligence service.</p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p>President Kennedy then nominated Michael Straight to be the
director of the National Endowment for the Arts, a move that unraveled a whole
new line of inquiry that revitalized the spy hunt for the elusive “third man.”</p>
<p class="normal">At first Straight accepted the prestigious position, but when
he realized that he would have to undergo a vigorous background check, he
declined because he too was one of those recruited by the Soviets while a
student at Cambridge. When he explained his dilemma to a friend he was advised
to go to the FBI and tell them everything, which he did.</p>
<p class="normal">After writing the first 007 novel <i>Casino Royale, </i>Fleming and
his wife returned to England for the birth of their son Casper. After dropping
her off at the hospital, Fleming visited an old friend from their school days,
the American born Whitney Straight, then chairman of BOAC airlines. Both
Whitney Straight and his younger brother Michael had attended Cambridge and
were personal friends with Guy Burgess, and according to Fleming biographer
Andrew Lycett, the case of the Missing Diplomats is what they discussed.</p>
<p class="normal">Michael Straight was preceded at Cambridge by his older brother
Whitney, a playboy race car driver who introduced Michael to the Pitt Club,
which has been described as a “hunting and drinking” club, where he first met
Guy Burgess, who Straight dismissed as “an alcoholic adventurer, a name dropper
and gypsy.” </p>
<p class="normal">While most of the Cambridge spy ring were members of the
Apostles, Michael Straight, Guy Burgess and James Bond himself, from some years
earlier, were members of the Pitt Club, and continued their affiliation with
the club years after they left Cambridge.</p>
<p class="normal">Among those who attended Cambridge, James Bond and Michael
Straight, while years apart, stood out conspicuously as American “Yanks,”
though they too were products of the British prep school system, Bond having
attended St. Paul’s school in New Hampshire and then Harrow in England, while
Michael and his older brother Whitney attended Darlington Hall in South Devon.</p>
<p class="normal">A month after his arrival at Cambridge Michael Straight was
reluctantly recruited into the Cambridge Communist cell by Anthony Blunt, who
would go on to become a member of the Secret Service as well as the surveyor of
the Queen’s extensive art collection. Although he declined Blunt’s invitation
to join them, Straight never betrayed his friends and assisted them in other
ways.</p>
<p class="normal">Straight’s reluctance to willingly serve the Soviets did not
prevent them from obtaining valuable use of him, especially when he returned to
America and became editor and publisher of the New Republic, which published
some of Philby’s commentaries.</p>
<p class="normal">J. E. Hover had ordered a complete investigation of all the
American students who attended Cambridge in the 1930s to see if there were any
more similar communist moles who had burrowed into the heart of the American
government bureaucracy, the Straight brothers among them, but James Bond himself
apparently avoided that dragnet since he had attended in the 1920s, even though
the communist recruiters were busy at work there at that time too.</p>
<p class="normal">According to John Costello [<i>Mask
of Treachery – Spies, Lies and Betrayal</i>, Warner Books, 1988], Straight “…was
given a list of eighty-five Americans who attended Cambridge University between
the years 1930 and 1934, from which he picked out one American who he knew
casually at he Department of State. He then named two more Americans with whom
he had studied at Cambridge between 1936 and 1937 and whom he knew to have been
Trinity cell members and/or Communist sympathizers…The FBI representative in
the U.S. Embassy in London recommended a full review of all Americans who had
studied at either Oxford or Cambridge before the war.” [Costello would die
suspiciously while engaged in his investigation of the Cambridge spy ring.]</p>
<p class="normal">Although J. E. Hover allegedly balked at “the political
repercussions of an investigation of over 500 American citizens with no basis
for such inquiry in fact,” the CIA reportedly changed his mind and “as a
result, the records of nearly six hundred Americans who had attended Oxford or
Cambridge before World War II were carefully compiled, examined and
scrutinized.”</p>
<p class="normal">If James Bond was among those scrutinized, it wasn’t the first
time he came to the attention of the counter-intelligence, counter-spies, as Bond
had called attention to himself by providing information to the FBI about some
German activity in the Caribbean during World War II.</p>
<p class="normal">According to Mrs. Mary W. Bond, in her book <i>To James Bond With
Love</i> [Sutter House, 1980], while on a bird hunting expedition in Haiti, Bond
had a run in with a reclusive and suspicious German on Morne La Selle mountain.
When he returned home Bond “told his friend Brandon Barringer about the
encounter with the German, and Brandon took it up with the authorities in
Washington. Jim (Bond) was promptly visited at the Academy of Natural Sciences
by Army, and then Navy intelligence officers.”</p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="normal">As Mrs. Bond related, “Fleming would have been intrigued with
the final twist to the story. The intelligence people asked a lot of foolish
questions and seemed far more suspicious about Jim’s reason for climbing Morne
La Selle than about the German’s activities.”</p>
<p class="normal">Whether by intent or coincidence, James Bond’s Cambridge ties
add credence to the theory that Ian Fleming wrote the 007 novels as part of a
concerted psychological warfare operation rather than on a ‘lark,’ and the
James Bond stories have more to do with actual covert operations than has been
acknowledged.</p>
<p class="normal">One biographer, Andrew Lycett, [in <i>The Man Behind James Bond,</i>
Turner, 1995] while mocking Fleming’s actual intentions and motives,
acknowledged how Fleming’s first novel was inspired by the betrayals of the
Cambridge spies when he wrote: “What raised Casino Royale out of the usual run
of thrillers was Ian’s attempt to reflect the disturbing moral ambiguity of a
post-war world that could produce such traitors like Burgess and Maclean.
Although Bond is presented like Bulldog Drummond with all the trappings of a
traditional fictional secret agent,…in fact he needs ‘Marshall Aid’ from Leiter
(CIA) to enable him to continue his baccarat game with Le Chiffre. Bond is
rescued from his kidnappers not by the British or the Americans but by the
Russians, who complete the job he should of done by eliminating Le Chiffre.
Bond does not even get the girl: [Vesper] she has been duplicitous throughout,
betraying not only him personally but all Western Intelligence’s anti-Soviet
operations. No wonder, feeling let down and abandoned, he fails to conceal his
bitterness at the end and spits out, ‘The bitch is dead now.’” </p><p class="normal">
If <i>Casino Royale </i>was Ian Fleming’s response to the betrayal of the Cambridge
spy ring, then portraying the women who loved James Bond as the snake who
actually worked for the opposition, was much like the sexual ambiguity and background
of the Cambridge spies.</p>
<p class="normal">Although his official biographies hardly mention their names,
Ian Fleming had many close associations with all three traitors – Philby,
Burgess and Maclean.</p>
<p class="normal">The career paths of Ian Fleming and Kim Philby crossed more
than once, but most certainly during World War II when Philby was responsible
for MI-6 counter-intelligence for the Iberian peninsula – Spain and Portugal,
which includes Gibralta, for which Fleming was given the responsibility of
planning the defense of for the Admirality, a plan he codenamed “Goldeneye,”
also the name of his Jamaican estate.</p>
<p class="normal">In his fictional obituary of 007, Fleming notes that his James
Bond attended Eton, as did many of those involved in these intrigues beginning
with “C,” Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of the British Secret Service and on
whose watch the Cambridge moles were recruited into it. Other former Eton
students include Ian Fleming and Guy Burgess, and Eton headmaster Charles
Elliot was the father of Fleming’s chief MI6 contact Nicholas Elliot. The old
Eton ties facilitated recruitment into the British Secret Service when Menzies
served as its head.</p>
<p class="normal">The day before Burgess embarked on his sudden journey to Moscow
with Maclean, he returned to Cambridge where he visited a former history
professor to explain a moral dilemma concerning his authorship of a biography
of the Earl of Sandwich authorized by the family.</p>
<p class="normal">At the same time Maclean was in London where he met and had
lunch with Fleming’s close associate Cyril Connolly, who after the defection,
was assigned to write about the missing diplomats by Fleming’s Sunday Times.</p>
<p class="normal">According to Douglas Sutherland [in<i> The Fourth Man – The Story
of Blunt, Philby, Burgess and McLean, </i>Arrow Books, 1980], “The late Cyril
Connolly, the well-known Sunday Times book critic, was a close friend of
Maclean’s and lunched with him the day before he left on 25 May, 1951.”</p>
<p class="normal">Sutherland quoted Connolly as saying: “I was very interested to
read your remarks about Mclean and Burgess…because I knew them both and
actually lunched with Maclean the day before he disappeared. The point I want
to mention to you was that on that day I am sure he had no intention of leaving
the way he did. He spoke to me so normally as to his private affairs…this makes
me feel that, subsequent to meeting me on May 24th, he received some warning
that he was under suspicion, and immediately left the country with Burgess. It
may be, therefore, that someone in the Foreign Office told him on May 25th that
you had authorized him to be questioned. Of course it was not until the Foreign
Office knew that the security office knew as well.” Now we know that person was
Kim Philby.</p>
<p class="normal">Cyril Connolly’s book on the affair was to have been published
by Queen Anne’s Press, on his board of directors Ian Fleming served. The
publishing company’s name did not disguise the nature of their interests, as
Queen Anne’s Gate was where the offices of the British Secret Service were
located. </p>
<p class="normal">Most intriguing among the connections between Fleming and the
Cambridge moles is the sequence of events that resulted in Burgess and Maclean
publicly surfacing in Moscow. While most people suspected they were in the
Soviet Union, it wasn’t known for sure until Fleming’s chief foreign
correspondent Richard Hughes urged the Russians to produce the two defectors
before a major British-Soviet summit conference. At Fleming’s suggestion Hughes
made an effort to contact the “missing diplomats,” succeeded in meeting the two
in a Moscow hotel and obtained a formal statement from them. Hughes did so by
making an official inquiry, suggesting that the scheduled summit conference
would not be successful unless the matter of the missing diplomats was first
explained.</p>
<p class="normal">Then after Burgess and Maclean publicly surfaced, the
British-Soviet summit conference was disrupted by a botched covert operation,
much like the Gary Powers-U2 incident wrecked the USA-Soviet summit in 1959.
British frogman Buster Crabb disappeared while investigating the hull of
Khrushchev’s ship in Portsmouth harbor, his body discovered a few days later.
Fleming even wrote about the incident, which was a joint venture between MI6
and British Naval Intelligence, and reportedly directed by Fleming’s chief contact
in MI6, Nicholas Elliot, and eventually led to the resignation of the director
of MI6.</p>
<p class="normal">The resurfacing of Burgess and Maclean also called unwanted
attention to Kim Philby, who somehow had reclaimed his job with MI6 and was
working in Beruit, Lebanon with the cover job as a correspondent for two
British publications.</p>
<p class="normal">When Philby arrived in Beruit the MI6 station chief there was
his long time friend and faithful supporter, Nicholas Elliot, Fleming’s contact
who was reportedly responsible for the botched Buster Crabb operation that led
not only to the resignation of the head of MI6 but also brought about a change
in the political party in power. That November, shortly before relinquishing
power, outgoing Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife took a vacation to
Jamaica, where they stayed at Fleming’s Goldeneye. </p>
<p class="normal">With the change in government, the Buster Crabb incident also
forced a change in the leadership of both MI6, responsible for foreign
intelligence, and MI5, counter-intelligence, with the director of MI5 Dick
White assuming the position of director of MI6, the first time anyone had
served both positions. White was astonished when he learned that Philby, after
all the fuss over the “Third Man,” was still working for MI6 in Beruit.</p>
<p class="normal">Tom Bower [in <i>The Perfect
English Spy</i> – a biography of Sir Dick White] wrote, “Even thirteen years
later when he met Burgess in Washington, he (Michael Straight) volunteered that
he had never betrayed his friends. But in 1963 Straight was offered a
government post and, apparently fearful of exposure, he had spent June closeted
with FBI officers, including Bill Sullivan, detailing Blunt’s futile attempt at
recruitment. In January, 1964, Straight repeated the story to Arthur Martin. By
any measure, the confession was a major breakthrough. Not surprisingly, the MI5
officer returned to Britain excited about the disclosure. The mole hunt had been
legitimized.”</p>
<p class="normal">While the earlier evidence was inconclusive, with the addition
of Michael Straight’s confession and a number of Soviet defectors who had
identified Philby as a Russian spy, the evidence was overwhelming, his longtime
friend Nicholas Elliot was ordered to confront him. Elliot did extract a
confession of sorts from Philby, but he did not get him to return to England, and
instead Philby disappeared, resurfacing in Moscow with his Cambridge mates,
Burgess and Maclean.</p>
<p class="normal">How he got there, while a mystery for some time, had something
to do with his Armenian friends, a connection he shared with Fleming.</p>
<p class="normal">Of their life in Beirut, Philby’s wife Eleanor wrote: “People
are constantly asking me how it was possible that I, who shared his daily life,
could have remained so unaware of his secret work for Russia. Perhaps the
answer is that I just was not looking for clues. Looking back over our life
together in Beirut, I can see some significance in one or two odd incidents
which I thought nothing of at the time. There was, for example, the occasion
when Kim, after a few drinks too many, decided late in the evening to take me
and a friend out to dinner. We took a taxi and Kim directed the driver outside
the city to an Armenian shanty town which sprawls across the malodorous Beirut
river. In one of the mean streets, we stopped outside a first-floor restaurant
full of shabby people. The food was good, but Kim, fuddled with alcohol, seemed
hardly aware of his surroundings. Some weeks later I suggested we return to the
Armenian restaurant. ‘What Armenian restaurant?’ Kim asked, giving a sharp
look. He strongly denied that we had ever been to any such place.” [p. 48 Kim
Philby-The Spy I Married, Eleanor Philby, Ballentine, 1968]</p>
<p class="normal">In <i>The Third Man – The
Full Story of Kim Philby</i> [by E. H. Cookridge, Berkley Medllion, 1968] the
mystery deepens further into the Armenian mist. Cookridge wrote: “On one
occasion, however, Philby was almost caught red-handed. He was observed on
night on the terrace of his apartment waving a dark object to and fro in the
air. The observer was a security agent of the Lebanese secret police, the head
of which was Colonel Tewfik Jalbout, a trusted ally of the American CIA, whom
he had rendered many services in the past…To find out who was at the receiving
end, Colonel Jalbout sent out a posse of agents, but Philby’s house stood on a
hill overlooking a fairly large part of the city. The receiver of the signals
could be one of several hundred people, looking from any window. However, the
search was narrowed down to two or three suspects, one of them an Armenian,
believed to be a Soviet agent….On another occasion one of Jalbout’s detectives
reported that he had seen Philby twice changing taxicabs and eventually
arriving at a small sweetshop belonging to an Armenian in the old city. Soon
after, the Soviet assistant military attaché entered the shop. The detective
did not dare stop the two men, as he was afraid to cause a diplomatic incident.
The fact that both Philby and a Soviet officer had gone to a dirty little sweet
shop, whose regular customers were Arab children, was significant, particularly
if considered in conjunction with the other incidents observed.” </p>
<p class="normal">Then in the <i>Philby Conspiracy</i> [by Bruce Page, Daid Leitch and
Philip Knightley (Times Newspaper-Signet, 1968)] it is revealed: “How did
Philby get to Moscow? We are able to reveal for the first time, that Philby
arrived on Russian soil four days after he left Beirut, i.e. on January 27,
1963…He made his way across Syria into Turkey. From there on,m using his
knowledge of the country gained during his earlier periods there and his
contacts with Armenians which he had built up in Cyprus, he walked into Soviet
Armenia. Then, feeling safe for the first time in thirty years, he ‘went home’
to Moscow.”</p>
<p class="normal">Before Philby fled however, Ian Fleming himself visited Beirut,
arriving in November 1960 on his way to Kuwait, where he had been commissioned
to write the official history of the Gulf emirate by the Kuwait Oil Company. In
Beirut he met up with his friend and MI6 contact Nicholas Elliot. According to
Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, “…Elliot was delighted to see him. Their
conversation ranged over a variety of intelligence-related topics, including
Kim Philby, a key participant in the Missing Diplomats affair, who had been
working in Beirut as a newspaperman since 1956. Ian told Elliot that he had his
own minor freelance intelligence assignment to perform: the then NID chief Vice
Admiral Sir Norman Denning had asked him for information about the Iraq port of
Basra…Ian did not delay…at 10:30 sharp he asked to leave, saying he had a
rendezvous with an Armenian in the Place de Canons in the center of town.”</p>
<p class="normal">“Perhaps,” speculated Lycett, “Ian was meeting Philby, whom he
had certainly met during the war. But Elliot had the distinct impression his
dinner guest had arranged to see a pornographic film in full color and sound.”</p>
<p class="normal">As we see, even though Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald
Maclean are hardly mentioned in the first two official biographies of Fleming
and dismissed by Lycett, they played a major role in his life and work, as well
as his fiction.</p>
<p class="normal"><i>“Casino Royale,”</i> Fleming’s first 007 book, concerns the
betrayal of a fellow agent named Vesper, the snake, and John Pearson, who wrote
The Life of Ian Fleming, the first official biography, also wrote a companion
book, A Biography of James Bond, an ostensibly fictional work in which he
acknowledges discovering the real James Bond while researching and writing
Fleming’s biography.</p>
<p class="normal">According to this account, Fleming wrote the 007 books in order
to salvage some important on-going operations and to make James Bond such a
famous and outrageous super hero, the Soviets would not believe that he really
existed. And it worked. </p>
<p class="normal"><br /></p>
<p class="normal"><o:p> </o:p></p>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-34835537031581231942012-12-14T09:54:00.002-08:002012-12-14T09:54:33.072-08:00Ivor Bryce on the Men and the Myth <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Ivar Bryce, You Only Live Once (1975)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pages 27-28<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the meantime Ian became a stockbroker. He joined the old
and distinguished firm of Rowe and Pitman. The senior Pitman, already a friend,
and his wife became two of his nearest and dearest throughout adult life.
Whether he learnt much of value in the management of money is another question.
In my opinion he never would have made his mark as a businessman. But then I
myself am so lacking in the necessary qualities for achieving the peaks of the
business world that my opinion is of little or no value.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It was in the spring of 1939 that Ian's journalistic
experience in Russia and his linguistic attainments first put the idea in some
sage and influential heads - among "establishment" circles,
Whitehall, the City - that here was a young man who should be made use of in
the troubled times which they could so clearly see ahead. No doubt his name was
mentioned in quiet conversations in hallowed clubs, and jotted down in little
notebooks by small gold pencils belonging to people who count. The Governor of
the Bank of England was consulted - Robert Fleming and Co. is after all a most
reputable merchant bank - and Ian was invited to lunch at the Carlton Hotel.
Admiral John Godfrey was the new Director of Naval Intelligence, and Ian liked
him enormously from this first meeting, a liking which, perhaps fortunately for
the British Navy, was immediately returned. Ian knew he had fallen on his feet
when he was invited to become the Admiral's personal assistant. He breathed in
great lung-fulls of the precise, professional atmosphere of his new
surroundings, like some powerful ozone. All through the summer months he was
meeting new people and absorbing new skills. Secret persons approached him, and
helped him acquire these secret skills necessary to establish him in the key
situation that awaited him. If those who foresaw as inevitable a death struggle
between the ideologies that split the western world in two proved to be right,
he could become of value to his country. For Ian the die was cast. His feet
were firmly planted on the path for which his natural talents equipped him
perfectly.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pages 49-53<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ian Fleming, of course, I saw in <st1:city><st1:place>London</st1:place></st1:city>
. He was in the blue serge uniform of the wavy navy. Busy, but secretive, he
seemed happy and very electrically alive. We had wartime lunches together in
haunts of his that were handy to the Admiralty, and he asked a million
questions about my recent life, activities and friends.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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He advised me to go back to <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state>
and <st1:state><st1:place>Washington</st1:place></st1:state> , where I had some
influential friends, especially in the newspaper business, ranging from Walter
Lippman to Walter Winchell. "You will be more use there," he said.
"Stick around."He also intimated that his Admiral might be visiting <st1:country-region><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region>
quite soon, and that he, Ian, would no doubt accompany the party.<o:p></o:p></div>
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He got me on a flight back. It was the first of many wartime
transatlantic air crossings, with their noisy, freezing, crowded bucket seats,
oxygen at all altitudes above 10,000 feet, and roaring take-offs from <st1:place>Prestwick</st1:place>,
<st1:city><st1:place>Reykjavik</st1:place></st1:city> , <st1:place><st1:placename>Goose</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>Bay</st1:placetype></st1:place> , Stephensville, to Dorval
Field, the airport at <st1:city><st1:place>Montreal</st1:place></st1:city> .<o:p></o:p></div>
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Reading the papers, listening to the radio and digesting the
gloomy news reports occupied my time, until one day the telephone rang and I
was requested to call on the British Passport Control Officer, <st1:street><st1:address>630
Fifth Avenue</st1:address></st1:street> , at my convenience. I was taken to a
back office where, at the desk, sat an acquaintance of mine. We exchanged some
platitudes and Pat, evidently a busy man, stood up and thanked me for my prompt
visit. "Go to the Westbury Hotel", he added, "room 320, at <st1:time hour="15" minute="0">three o'clock</st1:time> this afternoon. Someone there
would like to see you."<o:p></o:p></div>
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On time I rang the bell of room 320, and the door
immediately opened on a pink-faced, bright-blue-eyed old gentleman, who waved
me in, sat me down, and told me all about myself. "With your languages and
your experience of <st1:place>South America</st1:place> you could be of use to <st1:stockticker>HMG</st1:stockticker>,"
he said. "If you are willing to follow any orders, and accept whatever
happens to you, and on no account ever to reveal the smallest detail concerning
your work, just sign this document here at the bottom, and I will explain to
you." The Official Secrets Act - a terrifying document if you read it
through. I did not.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I did not want to give this cherubic sixty-year-old, with
his fiery complexion and bald pate encircled by white hair, one second in which
to change his mind. I had read a thousand thrillers (what are now described as
"suspense stories") and could recognize a spy-master when I saw one.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I swore total and blind and everlasting obedience, and was
ushered out of room 320 with instructions to report at <st1:time hour="9" minute="0">9.00 am</st1:time> the following day at an office on the
thirty-sixth floor of the Rockefeller Center, New York.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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For some months, my office job of nine to six, or any other
hours that were requested, was just an office job. Dickie Colt, the irrascible,
impatient, unpredictable, intelligent and, above all, loyal gentleman who had
just recruited me, turned out to be my immediate superior in what, for all I
could tell, was a particularly boring sub-department of the Consular Service,
dealing in commercial and cultural matters in Latin American and other
countries.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Mr Colt, known as Coitus interruptus by his staff, was a man
who expected every question answered before it was asked. He was both amazed
and displeased if I did not know the name of the secretary of the Venezuelan
manager of Eno's Fruit Salts. The staff of our office, far more numerous than I
had expected, comprised a fascinating mixture of backgrounds and achievements.
There were playwrights, engineers, university professors, military men, tycoons
and just plain boffins among us, and they all knew a great deal more than I did
about everything. Also, though ready at any time for a visit to a bar or
nightclub, they seemed unable to discuss our business, or to clarify any of the
numerous enigmas that puzzled me. There were also great travellers: here today
and gone, sometimes for ever, tomorrow. There were many sections and, though
mine was concerned with Latin America, I did discover that several new friends
of mine, who worked for an elderly white Russian, Mr Halpern, once a member of
the Duma, the czarist parliament before 1917, seemed closely enmeshed with
minority groups and refugees from many lands, not only in South America but in
the great USA as well.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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My first specific assignment was explained to me eventually.
Much of <st1:place>Western Europe</st1:place> was now Nazi-occupied and two
necessities for the survival, let alone the eventual emancipation, of our
friends were to secure intelligence (news) from the conquered territories, and
also to provide intelligence, propaganda, materials for sabotage, and, in the
ultimate, weapons for our friends to create an underground network and help to
win the war. People, `bodies', must be found who could undertake the terrible
risks of infiltrating the occupied lands. They must, of course, speak the
language not only perfectly but with up-to-date slang, if their mission
involved contact with anyone at all. They must also be trained in a number of the
black arts to have any hope of being successful `agents'. To find and train
such men was the work of my service, <st1:stockticker>SOE</st1:stockticker>,
for Special Operations Executive. And to find them in <st1:place>Latin America</st1:place>
was to be my special responsibility. I had to find daring, patriotic,
intelligent and reliable men as candidates for these jobs; and I had to be
certain that they were trustworthy - heart and soul against the enemy. One
wrong decision, one traitor among our faithful could cause disaster to many
brave men. When the Gestapo were acting on `information received', the victim
did not just get away with death. He was tortured, and any friend who could be
identified by any scrap of knowledge in his brain was run down and tortured
too.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The dreadful responsibility of selecting a secret agent was,
naturally, not all mine. Many experts, many cross-references, and long, long
training were the order of the day. I recruited twenty such volunteers. About
half never made it and for one reason or another were rejected, or even
imprisoned to prevent any possible dangerous contact. Several succeeded and
returned safely after completing their hair-raising missions. One, Jan van
Schrelle, a young Dutch friend of mine from <st1:country-region><st1:place>Brazil</st1:place></st1:country-region>
, was parachuted into <st1:city><st1:place>Holland</st1:place></st1:city> after
his underground group was blown. He landed among a reception committee composed
of Gestapo, and was never seen again. His life in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Brazil</st1:place></st1:country-region>
had been useful and happy, and it was I who suggested to him what he might
exchange it for.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sometime before <st1:place>Pearl Harbor</st1:place> , it
occurred to Franklin Roosevelt that the proud American boast that they had no
need for a secret service was no longer true. The <st1:country-region><st1:place>United
States</st1:place></st1:country-region> could not afford to lag behind its
potential enemies, nor even its allies, in the intelligence available to the
government and the armed forces, nor in secret methods to protect its citizens.
General (from the First World War) "Wild Bill" Donovan, a holder of
the Congressional Medal of Honour, and now the senior partner in a
distinguished law firm, was most wisely chosen by the President to initiate and
create a secret service worthy of a super-power. Donovan was a personal friend
of the far-seeing Canadian pilot, William Stephenson, who by now was in charge
of all British para-military organizations in the Western hemisphere. Before accepting
this new American responsibility, Big Bill consulted his friend Little Bill (as
they came to be called) in search of methods and constructions for the
formation of such an organization.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Little Bill gave wise advice and the offer of an expert, to
be selected by the British, to formulate the table of organization required to
set up an American service. The expert, immediately flown to <st1:state><st1:place>Washington</st1:place></st1:state>
from <st1:city><st1:place>Whitehall</st1:place></st1:city> , was the personal
aide of Admiral Sir John Godfrey, the Director of British Naval Intelligence.
He was a comparatively young but exceptionally able officer,
Lieutenant-Commander Ian Lancaster Fleming R N V R.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Page 64-67<o:p></o:p></div>
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An infinitelv more important event was on the cards this
fateful autumn of 1941. While it became obvious to increasing millions of
Americans that their President was right in his belief that the United States
must eventually enter the war, a powerful propaganda was hammering the pacifist
doctrines of `America first' into the minds of timid and wishful-thinking
citizens. Numerous influential papers, radio stations and opinion-swaying
groups were fighting against entry. The <st1:place>Middle West</st1:place> ,
despite its largely Germanic background and German and Italian organizations,
open and secret, contributed little to these causes. The British were forced to
advocate the opposite view, and our representatives were prepared to go to
greater lengths than they would have been willing to admit to their American
colleagues. The battle was between life and death, after all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The enemy's strength in <st1:place>South America</st1:place>
and the Nazi intentions for that continent had Hitler decided to attack to the
west rather than to the east were wetl known. But they were difficult to prove
to those who did not wish to believe. I knew that whole populations would have
been eradicated, national borders changed, and Nazi-oriented governments
supported if Hitler had eventually got his way. The whole continent would have
been forced to bow to Nazification, and freedom, enjoyed by Latin Americans for
more than a century, would have been forever banished from their homelands.
Sketching out trial maps of the possible changes on my blotter, I came up with
one showing the probable reallocation of territories that would appeal to <st1:state><st1:place>Berlin</st1:place></st1:state>
. It was very convincing: the more I studied it the more sense it made. The
obvious aggrandizement of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Paraguay</st1:place></st1:country-region>
, the land-locked and poverty-stricken but immensely militaristic kingdom of
the German dictator Stroessner, would of course be enlarged: a great corridor
to the Pacific, at the expense of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Chile</st1:place></st1:country-region>
, <st1:country-region><st1:place>Paraguay</st1:place></st1:country-region> 's
old enemy. The abolition of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Uruguay</st1:place></st1:country-region>
, the Switzerland of South America, then a happy, peaceful, law-abiding and
democratic little country, was obvious. And so on. It made me feel the heady
power of king-makers, and I drew most carefully a detailed extension of the
idea, as it would appeal to Hitler, for submission to the powers that be, to
wit Bill Stephenson.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Were a genuine German map of this kind to be discovered or
captured from enemy hands and publicized among the good neighbours themselves,
and above all among the `America firsters' with their belief that America could
get along with Hitler, what a commotion would be caused. The idea appealed to
the Chief, and a method immediately occurred to him.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Intelligence had just reached him that a certain house on <st1:country-region><st1:place>Cuba</st1:place></st1:country-region>
's southern coast was in use by German agents for radio communication with the
U-boats in their area. This intelligence had deadly results for the helpless
shipping supplying West Indian islands with food: news of sailings and itineraries
was radioed to the nearest submarine, and so the death sentence was carried
out. Stephenson was about to inform the FBI, whose territory of action included
<st1:country-region><st1:place>Cuba</st1:place></st1:country-region> . An
unpublicized raid would be made at night, the transceiver apparatus removed and
the operators captured, and the ships would be saved. Among the finds that the
FBI would make in this enemy outpost, when the raid was carried out, would be
papers, orders, records or the like emanating originally from the German High
Command. It was always so. On this occasion Stephenson decided the FBI were
going to fall upon a monster prize, something of transcendental importance that
the Nazi agents would have no time to destroy. My map was quickly turned over
to the expert forgers - a department of scientists whose knowledge of papers,
inks, types, colours, watermarks and similar minutiae was total. In forty-eight
hours they produced a map, slightly travel-stained with use, but one which the
Reich's chief mapmakers for the German High Command would be prepared to swear
was made by them. An authentic German map from the highest, most top secret
archives....<o:p></o:p></div>
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After <st1:place>Pearl Harbor</st1:place>, and with <st1:country-region><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region>
's entry into the war, the British and American counterparts, those men in <st1:stockticker>BSC</st1:stockticker>
(British Security Co-ordination) and the members of <st1:city><st1:place>OSS</st1:place></st1:city>
(Office of Strategic Sciences), were, so to speak, officially introduced to
each other. As `each other' were in many cases colleagues and friends who had
been cooperating in secret for months, and who had grown into a mutual respect
and friendship, this was a relief to all. Henceforth it was not finally the
British or American Chiefs of Staff who were our ultimate masters, but the
Combined Chiefs of Staff, sitting in Washington and responsible only to their
Chiefs of State.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pages 91-94<o:p></o:p></div>
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As for my American life, <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state>
is a city impossible for a man to inhabit in idleness. <st1:state><st1:place>New
York</st1:place></st1:state> life does not particularly appeal to me, either
for play or work; but that is only one person's taste and I am at heart always
a countrv boy, with no wish to live permanently in <st1:city><st1:place>London</st1:place></st1:city>
, <st1:city><st1:place>Paris</st1:place></st1:city> or any other city. If
obliged to abide in <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state> , it
is better to work, and if obliged to work, it is better to be occupied with
matters that are by nature of interest.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Late in the war, a most interesting figure had entered my
life, and now he came to the fore once again. Ernest Cuneo is my contemporary,
give or take a few months, and I should become intolerably conceited if I had a
fraction of his attainments. The Cuneos (whose name means "wedge" in
Italian) come from Chiavari and one Michael Cuneo of <st1:city><st1:place>Savona</st1:place></st1:city>
in fact sailed with <st1:city><st1:place>Columbus</st1:place></st1:city> .
Following the Risorgimento, in which the Cuneos backed Garibaldi, there was a
grand exodus of the clan: one branch (Ernie's) went to New York, where they
founded a ship repair/marine hardware business and eventually invested in real
estate; another branch to Chicago, where they started the now substantial Cuneo
Press; and yet another branch went to San Francisco, where they became
co-founders of the Bank of America. Ernie's parents, however, arrived in the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United
States</st1:place></st1:country-region> as infants and, because he only heard
English at home, Ernie does not speak a word of Italian and is an American par
excellence. He grew up in schools typical of the comfortable Wall Street
commuter belt, a strong and brilliant boy who could, when he wanted, acquire
knowledge at high speed and recall it instantly years later. He is what is
known in American athletics jargon as a "suare-rigger" - 5'9"
and 195 lbs. As a young man, he excelled at football, playing for <st1:place><st1:placename>Columbia</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>University</st1:placetype></st1:place> , of which he is a proud
alumnus, and, finally, he achieved the tremendous distinction of becoming an
All-American footballer.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In his early twenties, like Ian and me, he `found out about
girls' and later advised us of the <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state>
rule of thumb: "to play the field of the international demi-mondaines, the
cost is simple to calculate - 50% more than your income".<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He took up the law "to raise hell" and over the
years his career flourished. His encyclopaedic wisdom, his fine sense of humour
and his kindness to all around him contributed to making him a special <st1:state><st1:place>New
York</st1:place></st1:state> personality of titanic proportions. While his
specialities were nominally international and constitutional law, he acted as
counsel to many famous and prestigious American and foreign corporations and
businessmen. On the rare occasions when he did not immediately know the answer,
he would bury himself in his large library, churn around the shelves and emerge
at last with the solution to some knotty problem.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Over the years, as a lawyer, Ernie raised hell against
Mussolini, Franco, Hitler and Stalin, with a group putting into effect the
policies of the President, by acting as counsel to the Republic of Poland on
the brink of war, and by running with the famous columnist Walter Winchell the
propaganda campaign against Hitler, before the United States entered the Second
World War. It is now also part of the public record that a line of intelligence
information between Churchill and Roosevelt was established during the war
using the <st1:city><st1:place>OSS</st1:place></st1:city> and <st1:stockticker>BSC</st1:stockticker>,
outside official communications channels. This consisted of a chain of five
men, of whom the third was Ernie.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He is the repository of innumerable secrets; is on intimate
terms with the denizens of the corridors of power; and his advice, as can
easily be imagined, is widely sought by the famous. So is his company. It is
not surprising that this eminence grise of <st1:state><st1:place>Washington</st1:place></st1:state>
and <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state> became a most useful
as well as a most dear friend to Sir William Stephenson. Ernie was of great
help to us in the war and when I met him and became a friend of his I
considered myself lucky indeed. He is a wonderful companion, to whom I am
indebted for countless happy and laughter-filled hours, and the enormous bulk
of wisdom I have not learnt from him is due entirely to my limited ability to
learn enough of that which he has the unlimited ability to teach.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With <st1:city><st1:place>Cuneo</st1:place></st1:city> , the
erudite attorney, it became possible to control and direct a business concerned
with news - always fascinating to me. NANA, standing for North American
Newspaper Alliance, was a reputable (if modest compared with the giants of AP,
UP, Reuters) wire service and syndicator of features. It had been formed
originally to enable a group of important regional American newspapers to club
together and thus afford to secure the occasional and expensive journalistic
treasure. Churchill's memoirs are a prime example. No one paper could afford,
alone, to buy the world rights of such a work. NANA could bring them together.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
NANA also provided a wire service to hundreds of subscribers
from the <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state> 'limes to
unknown local journals in the back-of-beyond, generally of lesser news stories
for the inside pages. It fed the American press with the syndicated columns of
pundits revered by the public, comic strips with their vast multitude of
addicts, cartoons, horoscopes and crossword puzzles. There was always something
going on and interesting people to be met: lovable old newsmen living on a
shoestring, their reward and all they asked the by-line (their names printed at
the foot of any contribution of theirs which received publication) ;
celebrities of stage and screen who needed the friendship of the press; callers
with original ideas; eccentrics. All kinds of people. It was an interesting
life, although nearly impossible to make a profit in such a violently
competitive field; but it supplied us with an exaggerated feeling of importance
- a feeling shared by no one but ourselves.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pages 97-98<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Look at the top," he said, pointing at a small
handbook entitled Birds of the <st1:place>West Indies</st1:place> which we
often needed to consult. "Look - the name." Birds of the <st1:place>West
Indies</st1:place> by James Bond.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was James Bond, the ornithologist, whose homely English
name was destined to be known to a hundred million human beings. A letter from
Ian at Goldeneye, dated simply "Wednesday", I think, in 1964, says,
"James Bond appeared here the other day in person with Mrs B. and we duly
stuffed him into the middle of a forty-minute television interview by Canadian
Broadcasting ($1000!). A charming couple who are amused by the whole joke. He
duly identified our swallows as cave swallows, had lunch and departed. Some
scoop for <st1:stockticker>CBC</st1:stockticker>!"<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Yes, that would make a pretty good name," I
agreed. From that year on "the books" were annually brought to birth.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Over the years Ian evolved a formula for writing which
enabled him to produce his intended novel a year. His "commonplace
book", in which he recorded detail and incidents which might someday prove
useful, was never far from him. Like all writers, I suppose, he viewed every
incident of life with an appraising eye, judging what would be of use in the
next book, or the next but one. He took immense trouble with names and plots,
although the names sometimes came before the plots. He enjoyed using the names of
his friends, or even those whom he knew only slightly. It certainly amused me
to discover that Mr and Mrs Bryce signed the visitors' book in Dr No, as well
as travelling incognito by train together in Live and Let Die. But it was the
names alone which he used, for in most cases the characters bore no resemblance
to their real-life originals. Honeychile, the beach girl in Dr No, comes from
Honeychile Wilder, Princess Hohenlohe, American-born in <st1:state><st1:place>Kentucky</st1:place></st1:state>
and a celebrated wit and beauty. Leiter - Tommy rather than Felix - was the
scion of the Chicago Leiters, a gentle, friendly millionaire. Fox-Strangways,
Bond's station commander in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Jamaica</st1:place></st1:country-region>
, was the Hon. John Fox-Strangways, a great friend of ours at <st1:place>Eton</st1:place>
. Ernie Cuneo surfaces as a <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state>
taxi driver. For some of his characters he took both name and background. May
Maxwell, our indispensable housekeeper at <st1:street><st1:address>74th Street</st1:address></st1:street>
, appears in the same role for James Bond, while Albert Whiting, the golf
professional at the Royal Sandwich course, whom Ian knew well, becomes the
quick-thinking Albert Blacking in Goldfinger.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the storehouse of Ian's mind nothing was ever forgotten.
One dav while we were all staving at the Farm in <st1:state><st1:place>Vermont</st1:place></st1:state>
, Ian and Ernie Cuneo decided to visit the famous mud baths at <st1:city><st1:place>Saratoga
Springs</st1:place></st1:city> . Some miles out of <st1:city><st1:place>Saratoga</st1:place></st1:city>
they saw a battered sign to the mud baths down a side road. They arrived at
ramshackle huts deep in the woods, which proclaimed themselves the mud baths.
Hesitating only for a moment they went in and received the full treatment. Only
when it was too late did they discover that the vastly luxurious mud baths for
which they had set out were in Saratoga itself; they had blundered into what
was very much a back-street establishment, filled with all the low life which
is attracted to a great gambling centre. That was how the famous mud-bath
incident in Diamonds are Forever was born.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-75260747603155078912012-04-28T17:19:00.002-07:002012-04-28T17:19:40.085-07:00JFK & Ian Fleming<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
JFK & IAN FLEMING </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While John F. Kennedy was still a senator, shortly after
being nominated as the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, he entertained
Ian Fleming at his <st1:city><st1:place>Georgetown</st1:place></st1:city> home
as a dinner guest with a number of other people. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While Fleming was in Washington, visiting his friends John
and “Oatsie” Leiter, Fleming was driving around <st1:state><st1:place>Washington</st1:place></st1:state>
with Mrs. Leiter when they came across Kennedy and his wife walking down <st1:street><st1:address>P
Street</st1:address></st1:street> not far from their home. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In an interview with his friend William Polmer Ian Fleming
recounted: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Well, it was rather interesting. About a year before Mr.
Kennedy became President, I was staying in Washington with a friend of mine and
she was driving me through, it was a Sunday morning, and she was driving me
through Washington down to Georgetown and there were two people walking along
the street and she said, ‘Oh, there are my friends Jack and Jackie,’ and they
were indeed very close friends of hers, and she stopped and they talked. And
she said, ‘Do you know Ian Fleming?’ And Jack Kennedy said,
‘Not the Ian Fleming?’ Of course that was a very exciting thing for
him to say and it turned out that they were both great fans of my books, as
indeed is Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, and they invited me to dinner
that night with my friend, and we had great fun discussing the books and from
then on I’ve always sent copies of them direct and personally to him before
they’re published over here.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I think that was an historic encounter,” Plomer noted. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Although Fleming discretely avoided her name, the friend was
<st1:city><st1:place>Marion</st1:place></st1:city> ‘Oatsie’ Leiter. Apparently Mrs.
Leiter had been invited to the Kennedy home for dinner that night, and they
drove over to Kennedy’s <st1:city><st1:place>Georgetown</st1:place></st1:city> to
inquire whether Fleming could accompany her to dinner, but Kennedy and his wife
had stepped out for a stroll. So when they came upon the couple walking down
the street they stopped and Mrs. Leiter introduced Fleming, who Kennedy
recognized by saying, “James Bond?” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As for joining them for dinner, “By all means,” Kennedy
said. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just as Fleming had taken the name James Bond from the
American ornithologist and author of the book Birds of the <st1:place>West
Indies</st1:place>, he had also appropriated the surname for 007’s <st1:stockticker>CIA</st1:stockticker>
sidekick Felix Leiter from John Leiter, Kennedy and Fleming’s mutual friend and
Kennedy’s <st1:city><st1:place>Georgetown</st1:place></st1:city> neighbor. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Other guests reported to be at dinner that night included
William Walton, a painter and longtime friend of Kennedy, journalist and <st1:stockticker>CIA</st1:stockticker>
asset Joseph Alsop and John Bross, who was said to be “from the <st1:stockticker>CIA</st1:stockticker>,”
and indeed had served with distinction in Cold War <st1:country-region><st1:place>Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In recounting the dinner that night Fleming’s official
biographer John Pearson wrote: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“During the dinner the talk largely concerned itself with
the more arcane aspects of American politics and Fleming was attentive but
subdued. But with coffee and the entrance of Castro into the conversation he
intervened in his most engaging style. <st1:country-region><st1:place>Cuba</st1:place></st1:country-region>
was already high on the headache list of <st1:state><st1:place>Washington</st1:place></st1:state>
politicians, and another of those what’s to-be-done conversations got underway.
Fleming laughed ironically and began to develop the theme that the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United
States</st1:place></st1:country-region> was making altogether too much fuss
about Castro – they were building him into a world figure, inflating him
instead of deflating him. It would be perfectly simple to apply one or two
ideas which would take all the steam out of the Cuban.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Kennedy studied the handsome Englishman, rather as puzzled
admirals used to study him in the days of Room 39. Was he an oddball or
something more? What ideas had mister Fleming in mind?” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What would James Bond do about Castro? In the best form of
British sarcasm, Fleming replied, “Ridicule, chiefly,” and as Pearson related,
“…with immense seriousness and confidence he developed a spoof proposal for
giving Castro the James Bond treatment…”
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
According to one account, “Fleming … in their conversation,
…. told Kennedy that he had a way to get rid of Fidel Castro, the Communist
leader of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Cuba</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
This piqued Kennedy's interest, since Castro had been a thorn in the side of
Kennedy. Fleming said that Castro's beard was the key. Without the beard,
Castro would look like anyone else. It was his trademark. So, Fleming said that
the <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> should
announce that they found that beards attract radioactivity. Any person wearing
a beard could become radioactive himself as well as sterile! Castro would
immediately shave off his beard and would soon fall from power, when the people
saw him as an ordinary person. Kennedy had a good laugh about this bizarre
suggestion.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bill Koenig visited the Lilly Library at <st1:place><st1:placename>Indiana</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>University</st1:placetype></st1:place> in <st1:place><st1:city>Bloomington</st1:city>,
<st1:state>Indiana</st1:state></st1:place>, where the Fleming papers are kept.
He reported: “The Fleming-related material is hardly the oldest or rarest of
what's here. But for a fan of 007, it is a treasure trove. Not only are most of
Fleming's original Bond manuscripts here but a huge collection of people
writing to Fleming and receiving correspondence from him. The letters are,
indeed, of a different time, when people took the time to type out a letter and
drop it in the mail, not just bang out a few lines of e-mail and forget it. The
library has two collections of note. The first is comprised of fifteen Fleming
manuscripts, purchased from Fleming's widow in 1970. (The library also acquired
rare books collected by Fleming in his lifetime.) The other is a collection of
letters gathered by Leonard Russell, the late literary editor of The Sunday
Times of London and by John Pearson, Fleming's biographer.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Other letters show Fleming's relationship with more casual
acquaintances -- except his casual friendships were with <st1:stockticker>CIA</st1:stockticker>
directors or <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region>
attorneys general. Allen Dulles, the one-time <st1:stockticker>CIA</st1:stockticker>
chief, didn't know Fleming's address when he wrote a letter on <st1:date day="24" month="4" year="1963">April 24, 1963</st1:date>. "I have received
and finished reading your latest ‘<i>On Her
Majesty's Secret Service.</i>’ I hope you have not really destroyed my old
friend and colleague James Bond, but I fear his bride has gone." More than
a year later, in June 1964, Dulles writes again. "I see that ‘<i>From Russia With Love</i>’ is now a movie
and although I rarely see them I plan to take this one in."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“By the time of the Dulles correspondence, James Bond was
becoming big in the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>
-- mainly thanks to President John F. Kennedy including <i>From Russia With Love</i> on the list of his 10 favorite books. Fleming
acknowledges that fact in a 1962 letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
‘I am delighted to take this opportunity to thank Kennedys everywhere for the
electric effect their commendation has had on my sales in <st1:country-region><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region>.’”<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-36228042275787719892012-04-28T17:17:00.001-07:002012-04-28T17:18:05.970-07:00Portraits of James Bond<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHZTBb2CXJpiT_c-Z-uWZDxk135Yeg55rh5OSOQXughYedA8vpUZ5ZhYD57fpD-PetVYQMfmUHuJRpp4yzSCPmJt_bDscIrxbIjTGaLiHrB_6Kzw0OrvlJiD8x7l34I5RnIadxGe_s4Fn4/s1600/James+Bond+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHZTBb2CXJpiT_c-Z-uWZDxk135Yeg55rh5OSOQXughYedA8vpUZ5ZhYD57fpD-PetVYQMfmUHuJRpp4yzSCPmJt_bDscIrxbIjTGaLiHrB_6Kzw0OrvlJiD8x7l34I5RnIadxGe_s4Fn4/s320/James+Bond+1.jpg" width="288" /></a></div>
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Portrait of James Bond as a boy </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisWBdb3Qpn8jdDMb4kJh8fxlwRXvQFeMYystxlPPAu-tZFM1LNqO672Hz3BbSpXietYBBQV4eBhTgd2gQPd2gp8efpi0Paeu1v_C5EGGGUeV2KavaEmg2ea0njRA1SwMu3_yHuvAztfSP3/s1600/James+Bond+1_0004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisWBdb3Qpn8jdDMb4kJh8fxlwRXvQFeMYystxlPPAu-tZFM1LNqO672Hz3BbSpXietYBBQV4eBhTgd2gQPd2gp8efpi0Paeu1v_C5EGGGUeV2KavaEmg2ea0njRA1SwMu3_yHuvAztfSP3/s320/James+Bond+1_0004.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
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James Bond (right) and his brother as young boys</div>
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James Bond and his brother and mother</div>
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James Bond in Philadelphia while a student at Cambridge in the 1920s</div>
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J<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn2Xpu9NAa1Xf3upbmPWfyio8AyxMhiX4ffVLDJPwBSCJY73Db3IyWWyDrJgirvoXfM9MxT2R5qy_4gF2JbzMeoCIXYf5gPSREhlkyaWs4Q2K9qvhHiMYITRppi2iThRhkXtmuy9f8Ve2K/s1600/James+Bond+1_0022.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn2Xpu9NAa1Xf3upbmPWfyio8AyxMhiX4ffVLDJPwBSCJY73Db3IyWWyDrJgirvoXfM9MxT2R5qy_4gF2JbzMeoCIXYf5gPSREhlkyaWs4Q2K9qvhHiMYITRppi2iThRhkXtmuy9f8Ve2K/s320/James+Bond+1_0022.jpg" width="243" /></a></div>
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James preparing a bird specimen </div>
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James and Mary Wickham Bond "in the field"</div>
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James Bond with specimen trays at Philadephia Academy of Natural Sciences</div>
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Ian Fleming signed a copy of his latest book to Bond on the day they met - Feb. 5, 1964 </div>
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"A great day!" </div>
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<br /></div>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-36645157647308268842012-04-19T18:25:00.000-07:002012-04-19T18:25:11.163-07:00Ian Fleming and Kim PhilbyIan Fleming and Kim Philby <br />
<br />
All of the official biographies of Ian Fleming acknowledge that he took the name for his fictional 007 hero from James Bond, the author of the book Birds of the West Indies, but they also all falsely claim that Bond enjoyed the celebrity status Fleming gave him and took it as a joke, when in fact Bond was quite annoyed and deeply resented the “theft of his identity.” <br />
<br />
So I also began to question the validity of the frequently repeated statement that Fleming began to write the 007 novels on a lark, to take his mind off his impending marriage, and considered the possibility that there was a more significant “operational” motive behind the literature. They could have been written either to boost the morale of the British Secret Service which was severely damaged by the betrayal of Kim Philby and the Cambridge spy ring or to salvage some of the operations they may have exposed. <br />
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This thought occurred to me when I read Jim Houghan (in Secret Agenda – Watergate, Deep Throat & the CIA, Random House, 1984, p. 5-6) where he notes that: <br />
<br />
“When (E. Howard) Hunt first approached Colson for work in the White House, he was still a part of the CIA. His retirement from the agency would not occur until April 30, 1970, and, considering his record, the possibility of his retirement was bogus is quite real. Indeed, this was the third time that Hunt had left the Central Intelligence Agency. The first occasion was in 1960, when he was issued fraudulent retirement papers to facilitate his liaison with anti-Castro exiles. When that invasion was launched, only to founder, Hunt returned to the agency’s staff – having never actually left its payroll. Five years later, in 1965, Hunt quit for a second time. The author of more than four dozen pulp thrillers and novels of the occult, Hunt left the agency in furtherance of a counterintelligence scheme that revolved around his literary efforts. The purpose of the scheme, according to government sources familiar with Hunt’s curriculum vitae at the agency, was to draw the KGB’s attention to books that Hunt was writing under the pseudonym David St. John. These spy novels alluded to actual CIA operations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and contained barely disguised portraits of political figures as diverse as Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. <b>It was the CIA’s intention that the KGB be led to believe that the books contained security breaches, </b>and toward that end the agency created a phony ‘flap’ that was capped by Hunt’s supposedly ‘forced retirement.’ In his memoir of his years as a spy, Hunt does not mention the counterintelligence aspects of the David St. John novels, but writes, ‘I resigned from the CIA [this second time], and was at once rehired as a contract agent, responsible only to [the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, Thomas Karamessines.’” <br />
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Since it has also been acknowledged that E. Howard Hunt obtained official permission to write his spy-fiction novels in light of the success of Ian Fleming’s 007 books, perhaps there is something to the idea that Fleming began to write his novels as a counter-intelligence project as well. <br />
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Fleming began to write his first 007 novel within a year of the defection of Burgess and Maclean. <br />
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In January 1952, when Fleming sat down at his typewriter to begin his first 007 novel, “Casino Royale,” it was no longer a matter of speculation as to whether the British Secret Service had been betrayed by its own long standing members, it was only a matter of determining the severity of the damage and what could be done to rectify it. <br />
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When Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean disappeared the previous May, 1951, shortly before MacLean was to be confronted with the evidence he was a Soviet spy and interrogated, the speculation centered on the identity of the “third man” who had tipped them off and allowed them to flee. Since these secrets were tightly held by only a few men in the counter-intelligence field, the “third man” was certainly positioned in a high place within the Secret Service, and a major effort was made to identify him. <br />
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The investigation quickly focused on Kim Philby, a former Cambridge classmate of Burgess and Mclean, who at the time was serving in Washington D.C. as liaison to the CIA and FBI. <br />
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Both Burgess and Maclean had been posted to America and associated with Philby, and Burgess drew suspicion on himself and Philby by his outrageous behavior, having William Harvey being one of the first to question whether Philby and Burgess were Soviet agents. But James Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence branch, discounted any such notions, especially after many three-martini lunches with Philby. <br />
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When President Kennedy, already familiar with the 007 novels, and having entertained Fleming at dinner at his home, requested to meet the “American James Bond,” he was presented with William Harvey, who insisted that Philby and Burgess were Soviet spies. <br />
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While Burgess’ treachery was confirmed by his disappearance, Philby weathered the storm and though relieved from his position as liaison to the American services, was eventually rehired by MI6 – the British foreign intelligence service. <br />
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President Kennedy then nominated Michael Straight to be the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, a move that unraveled a whole new line of inquiry that revitalized the spy hunt for the elusive “third man.” <br />
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At first Straight accepted the prestigious position, but when he realized that he would have to undergo a vigorous background check, he declined because he too was one of those recruited by the Soviets while a student at Cambridge. When he explained his dilemma to a friend he was advised to go to the FBI and tell them everything, which he did. <br />
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After writing the first 007 novel Casino Royale, Fleming and his wife returned to England for the birth of their son Casper. After dropping her off at the hospital, Fleming visited an old friend from their school days, the American born Whitney Straight, then chairman of BOAC airlines. Both Whitney Straight and his younger brother Michael had attended Cambridge and were personal friends with Guy Burgess, and according to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, the case of the Missing Diplomats is what they discussed. <br />
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Michael Straight was preceded at Cambridge by his older brother Whitney, a playboy race car driver who introduced Michael to the Pitt Club, which has been described as a “hunting and drinking” club, where he first met Guy Burgess, who Straight dismissed as “an alcoholic adventurer, a name dropper and gypsy.” <br />
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While most of the Cambridge spy ring were members of the Apostles, Michael Straight, Guy Burgess and James Bond himself, from some years earlier, were members of the Pitt Club, and continued their affiliation with the club years after they left Cambridge. <br />
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Among those who attended Cambridge, James Bond and Michael Straight, while years apart, stood out conspicuously as American “Yanks,” though they too were products of the British prep school system, Bond having attended St. Paul’s school in New Hampshire and then Harrow in England, while Michael and his older brother Whitney attended Dartington Hall in South Devon. <br />
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A month after his arrival at Cambridge Michael Straight was reluctantly recruited into the Cambridge Communist cell by Anthony Blunt, who would go on to become a member of the Secret Service as well as the surveyor of the Queen’s extensive art collection. Although he declined Blunt’s invitation to join them, Straight never betrayed his friends and assisted them in other ways. <br />
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Straight’s reluctance to willingly serve the Soviets did not prevent them from obtaining valuable use of him, especially when he returned to America and became editor and publisher of the New Republic, which published some of Philby’s commentaries. <br />
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J. E. Hover had ordered a complete investigation of all the American students who attended Cambridge in the 1930s to see if there were any more similar communist moles who had burrowed into the heart of the American government bureaucracy, the Straight brothers among them, but James Bond himself apparently avoided that dragnet since he had attended in the 1920s, even though the communist recruiters were busy at work there at that time too. <br />
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According to John Costello [Mask of Treachery – Spies, Lies and Betrayal, Warner Books, 1988], Straight “…was given a list of eighty-five Americans who attended Cambridge University between the years 1930 and 1934, from which he picked out one American who he knew casually at he Department of State. He then named two more Americans with whom he had studied at Cambridge between 1936 and 1937 and whom he knew to have been Trinity cell members and/or Communist sympathizers…The FBI representative in the U.S. Embassy in London recommended a full review of all Americans who had studied at either Oxford or Cambridge before the war.” [Costello would die suspiciously while engaged in his investigation of the Cambridge spy ring.] <br />
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Although J. E. Hover allegedly balked at “the political repercussions of an investigation of over 500 American citizens with no basis for such inquiry in fact,” the CIA reportedly changed his mind and “as a result, the records of nearly six hundred Americans who had attended Oxford or Cambridge before World War II were carefully compiled, examined and scrutinized.” <br />
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If James Bond was among those scrutinized, it wasn’t the first time he came to the attention of the counter-intelligence, counter-spies, as Bond had called attention to himself by providing information to the FBI about some German activity in the Caribbean during World War II. <br />
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According to Mrs. Mary W. Bond, in her book To James Bond With Love [Sutter House, 1980], while on a bird hunting expedition in Haiti, Bond met a reclusive and suspicious German on Morne La Selle mountain. When he returned home Bond “told his friend Brandon Barringer about the encounter with the German, and Brandon took it up with the authorities in Washington. Jim (Bond) was promptly visited at the Academy of Natural Sciences by Army, and then Navy intelligence officers.”<br />
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As Mrs. Bond related, “Fleming would have been intrigued with the final twist to the story. The intelligence people asked a lot of foolish questions and seemed far more suspicious about Jim’s reason for climbing Morne La Selle than about the German’s activities.” <br />
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Whether by intent or coincidence, James Bond’s Cambridge ties add credence to the theory that Ian Fleming wrote the 007 novels as part of a concerted psychological warfare operation rather than on a ‘lark,’ and the James Bond stories have more to do with actual covert operations than has been acknowledged. <br />
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One biographer, Andrew Lycett, [in The Man Behind James Bond, Turner, 1995] while mocking Fleming’s actual intentions and motives, acknowledges how Fleming’s first novel was at least inspired by the betrayals of the Cambridge spies when he wrote: “What raised Casino Royale out of the usual run of thrillers was Ian’s attempt to reflect the disturbing moral ambiguity of a post-war world that could produce such traitors like Burgess and Maclean. Although Bond is presented like Bulldog Drummond with all the trappings of a traditional fictional secret agent,…in fact he needs ‘Marshall Aid’ from Leiter (CIA) to enable him to continue his baccarat game with Le Chiffre. Bond is rescued from his kidnappers not by the British or the Americans but by the Russians, who complete the job he should of done by eliminating Le Chiffre. Bond does not even get the girl: [ Vesper ] she has been duplicitous throughout, betraying not only him personally but all Western Intelligence’s anti-Soviet operations. No wonder, feeling let down and abandoned, he fails to conceal his bitterness at the end and spits out, ‘The bitch is dead now.’” <br />
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Casino Royale was Ian Fleming’s response to the betrayal of the Cambridge spy ring, portraying the women who loved James Bond as the sexy snake who actually worked for the opposition, much like the sexual ambiguity and background of the Cambridge spies. <br />
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Although his official biographies hardly mention their names, Ian Fleming had many close associations with all three traitors – Philby, Burgess and Maclean. <br />
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The career paths of Ian Fleming and Kim Philby crossed more than once, but most certainly during World War II when Philby was responsible for MI-6 counter-intelligence for the Iberian peninsula – Spain and Portugal, which includes Gibralta, for which Fleming was given the responsibility of planning the defense of for the Admirality, a plan he codenamed “Goldeneye,” also the name of his Jamaican estate. <br />
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In his fictional obituary of 007, Fleming notes that his James Bond attended Eton, as did many of those involved in these intrigues beginning with “C,” Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of the British Secret Service and on whose watch the Cambridge moles were recruited into it. Other former Eton students include Ian Fleming and Guy Burgess, and Eton headmaster Charles Elliot was the father of Fleming’s chief MI6 contact Nicholas Elliot. The old Eton ties facilitated recruitment into the British Secret Service when Menzies served as its head. <br />
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The day before Burgess embarked on his sudden journey to Moscow with Maclean, he returned to Cambridge where he visited a former history professor to explain a moral dilemma concerning his authorship of a biography of the Earl of Sandwich authorized by the family. <br />
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At the same time Maclean was in London where he met and had lunch with Fleming’s close associate Cyril Connolly, who after the defection, was assigned to write about the missing diplomats by Fleming’s Sunday Times. <br />
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According to Douglas Sutherland [in The Fourth Man – The Story of Blunt, Philby, Burgess and McLean, Arrow Books, 1980], “The late Cyril Connolly, the well-known Sunday Times book critic, was a close friend of Maclean’s and lunched with him the day before he left on 25 May, 1951.” <br />
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Sutherland quoted Connolly as saying: “I was very interested to read your remarks about Mclean and Burgess…because I knew them both and actually lunched with Maclean the day before he disappeared. The point I want to mention to you was that on that day I am sure he had no intention of leaving the way he did. He spoke to me so normally as to his private affairs…this makes me feel that, subsequent to meeting me on May 24th, he received some warning that he was under suspicion, and immediately left the country with Burgess. It may be, therefore, that someone in the Foreign Office told him on May 25th that you had authorized him to be questioned. Of course it was not until the Foreign Office knew that the security office knew as well.” Now we know that person was Kim Philby. <br />
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Cyril Connolly’s book on the affair was to have been published by Queen Anne’s Press, on his board of directors Ian Fleming served. The publishing company’s name did not disguise the nature of their interests, as Queen Anne’s Gate was where the offices of the British Secret Service were located. <br />
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Most intriguing among the connections between Fleming and the Cambridge moles is the sequence of events that resulted in Burgess and Maclean publicly surfacing in Moscow. While most people suspected they were in the Soviet Union, it wasn’t known for sure until Fleming’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Hughes urged the Russians to produce the two defectors before a major British-Soviet summit conference. At Fleming’s suggestion Hughes made an effort to contact the “missing diplomats,” succeeded in meeting the two in a Moscow hotel and obtained a formal statement from them. Hughes did so by making an official inquiry, suggesting that the scheduled summit conference would not be successful unless the matter of the missing diplomats was first explained. <br />
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Then after Burgess and Maclean publicly surfaced, the British-Soviet summit conference was disrupted by a botched covert operation, much like the Gary Powers-U2 incident wrecked the USA-Soviet summit in 1959. British frogman Buster Crabb disappeared while investigating the hull of Kruschev’s ship in Portsmouth harbour, his body discovered a few days later. Fleming even wrote about the incident, which was a joint venture between MI6 and British Naval Intelligence, and reportedly directed by Fleming’s chief contact in MI6, Nicholas Elliot, and eventually led to the resignation of the director of MI6. <br />
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The resurfacing of Burgess and Maclean also called unwanted attention to Kim Philby, who somehow had reclaimed his job with MI6 and was working in Beruit, Lebanon with the cover job as a correspondent for two British publications. <br />
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When Philby arrived in Beruit the MI6 station chief there was his long time friend and faithful supporter, Nicholas Elliot, Fleming’s contact who was reportedly responsible for the botched Buster Crabb operation that led not only to the resignation of the head of MI6 but also brought about a change in the political party in power. That November, shortly before relinquishing power, outgoing Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife took a vacation to Jamaica, where they stayed at Fleming’s Goldeneye. <br />
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With the change in government, the Buster Crabb incident also forced a change in the leadership of both MI6, responsible for foreign intelligence, and MI5, counter-intelligence, with the director of MI5 Dick White assuming the position of director of MI6, the first time anyone had served both positions. White was astonished when he learned that Philby, after all the fuss over the “Third Man,” was still working for MI6 in Beruit. <br />
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Tom Bower [in The Perfect English Spy – a biography of Sir Dick White] wrote, “Even thirteen years later when he met Burgess in Washington, he (Michael Straight) volunteered that he had never betrayed his friends. But in 1963 Straight was offered a government post and, apparently fearful of exposure, he had spent June closeted with FBI officers, including Bill Sullivan, detailing Blunt’s futile attempt at recruitment. In January, 1964, Straight repeated the story to Arthur Martin. By any measure, the confession was a major breakthrough. Not surprisingly, the MI5 officer returned to Britain excited about the disclosure. The molehunt had been legitimized.” <br />
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While the earlier evidence was inconclusive, with the addition of Michael Straight’s confession and a number of Soviet defectors who had identified Philby as a Russian spy, the evidence was overwhelming, his longtime friend Nicholas Elliot was ordered to confront him. Elliot did extract a confession of sorts from Philby, he did not get him to return to England, and instead Philby disappeared, resurfacing in Moscow with his Cambridge mates, Burgess and Maclean. <br />
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How he got there, while a mystery for some time, had something to do with his Armenian friends, a connection he shared with Fleming. <br />
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Of their life in Beirut, Philby’s wife Eleanor wrote: “People are constantly asking me how it was possible that I, who shared his daily life, could have remained so unaware of his secret work for Russia. Perhaps the answer is that I just was not looking for clues. Looking back over our life together in Beirut, I can see some significance in one or two odd incidents which I thought nothing of at the time. There was, for example, the occasion when Kim, after a few drinks too many, decided late in the evening to take me and a friend out to dinner. We took a taxi and Kim directed the driver outside the city to an Armenian shanty town which sprawls across the malodorous Beirut river. In one of the mean streets, we stopped outside a first-floor restaurant full of shabby people. The food was good, but Kim, fuddled with alcohol, seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. Some weeks later I suggested we return to the Armenian restaurant. ‘What Armenian restaurant?’ Kim asked, giving a sharp look. He strongly denied that we had ever been to any such place.” [p. 48 Kim Philby-The Spy I Married, Eleanor Philby, Ballentine, 1968] <br />
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In “The Third Man – The Full Story of Kim Philby [by E. H. Cookridge, Berkley Medllion, 1968] the mystery deepens further into the Armenian mist. Cookridge wrote: “On one occasion, however, Philby was almost caught red-handed. He was observed on night on the terrace of his apartment waving a dark object to and fro in the air. The observer was a security agent of the Lebanese secret police, the head of which was Colonel Tewfik Jalbout, a trusted ally of the American CIA, whom he had rendered many services in the past…To find out who was at the receiving end, Colonel Jalbout sent out a posse of agents, but Philby’s house stood on a hill overlooking a fairly large part of the city. The receiver of the signals could be one of several hundred people, looking from any window. However, the search was narrowed down to two or three suspects, one of them an Armenian, believed to be a Soviet agent….On another occasion one of Jalbout’s detectives reported that he had seen Philby twice changing taxicabs and eventually arriving at a small sweetshop belonging to an Armenian in the old city. Soon after, the Soviet assistant military attaché entered the shop. The detective did not dare stop the two men, as he was afraid to cause a diplomatic incident. The fact that both Philby and a Soviet officer had gone to a dirty little sweet shop, whose regular customers were Arab children, was significant, particularly if considered in conjunction with the other incidents observed.” <br />
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Then in the Philby Conspiracy [by Bruce Page, Daid Leitch and Philip Knightley (Times Newspaper-Signet, 1968)] it is revealed: “How did Philby get to Moscow? We are able to reveal for the first time, that Philby arrived on Russian soil four days after he left Beirut, i.e. on January 27, 1963…He made his way across Syria into Turkey. From there on,m using his knowledge of the country gained during his earlier periods there and his contacts with Armenians which he had built up in Cyprus, he walked into Soviet Armenia. Then, feeling safe for the first time in thirty years, he ‘went home’ to Moscow.” <br />
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Before Philby fled however, Ian Fleming himself visited Beirut, arriving in November 1960 on his way to Kuwait, where he had been commissioned to write the official history of the Gulf emirate by the Kuwait Oil Company. In Beirut he me up with his friend and MI6 contact Nichoals Elliot. According to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, “…Elliot was delighted to see him. Their conversation ranged over a variety of intelligence-related topics, including Kim Philby, a key participant in the Missing Diplomats affair, who had been working in Beirut as a newspaperman since 1956. Ian told Elliot that he had his own minor freelance intelligence assignment to perform: the then NID chief Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denning had asked him for information about the Iraq port of Basra…Ian did not delay…at 10:30 sharp he asked to leave, saying he had a rendezvous with an Armenian in the Place de Canons in the center of town.” <br />
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“Perhaps,” speculated Lycett, “Ian was meeting Philby, whom he had certainly met during the war. But Elliot had the distinct impression his dinner guest had arranged to see a pornographic film in full color and sound.” <br />
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As we see, even though Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean are not mentioned in the first two official biographies of Fleming and dismissed by Lycett, they played a major role in his life and work, as well as his fiction. <br />
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“Casino Royale,” Fleming’s first 007 book, concerns the betrayal of a fellow agent named Vesper, the snake, and John Pearson, who wrote The Life of Ian Fleming, the first official biography, also wrote a companion book, A Biography of James Bond, an ostensibly fictional work in which he acknowledges discovering the real James Bond while researching and writing Fleming’s biography. <br />
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According to this account, Fleming wrote the 007 books in order to make James Bond such a famous and outrageous super hero, the Soviets would not believe that he really existed. And it worked.William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-7001849942433550102011-09-02T05:29:00.001-07:002011-09-02T05:29:39.648-07:00Bond's Line outlining the area of the bird species of the West Indies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdcRLv4dODrVG35i_oUtLkq_BUwDubnuWErbGHFJRrJK1kevFdtQI2qOCUjcRA4Ax9AO0X17IULwxvNCtgIxIBPJuLoPjmhn4bVx6jixfNhN1zPWWat5PAkqZ8qXSA_1SFgVCgQujaf1et/s1600/IMG+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="389" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdcRLv4dODrVG35i_oUtLkq_BUwDubnuWErbGHFJRrJK1kevFdtQI2qOCUjcRA4Ax9AO0X17IULwxvNCtgIxIBPJuLoPjmhn4bVx6jixfNhN1zPWWat5PAkqZ8qXSA_1SFgVCgQujaf1et/s400/IMG+%25282%2529.jpg" /></a></div><br />
William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-13044703793544540902011-09-01T09:33:00.001-07:002011-09-01T09:33:38.212-07:00James Bond RIPDeaths – Philadelphia Daily News <br />
February 16, 1989 <br />
<br />
BOND<br />
James, Feb. 14, 1989, of Chestnut Hill, Pa., husband of Mary F. W. (Nee Porcher) Bond. Relatives and friends are invited to the Memorial Service, 11 A.M. at ST. Martin in the Fields <br />
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James Bond, 89, Spied on Birds <br />
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By Jim Nicholson <br />
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James Bond, world famous ornithologist, author and a former curator of the ornithology department of the Academy of Natural Sciences, died Tuesday. He was 89 and lived in Chestnut Hill. <br />
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A widely published and respected authority on birds of the Caribbean, Bond had devoted his life to the study of birds since 1926. <br />
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He was also known beyond ornithological circles as the man after whom Ian Fleming named his 007 spy, James Bond.<br />
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In the past six decades, Bond visited more than 100 islands. In the early days he could live there on as little as 25 cents a day, living with the islanders, eating their food and, to the despair of his friends in the medical profession, drinking unboiled water. <br />
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“He got along with the native people so remarkably well,” said his wife, Mary Fanning Wickham Bond, “This was the strength of his research work down there, because the island people are very close to the earth, theyknow their medicines and voodoo and everything about their birds and animals around them. He got close to that.” <br />
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For nearly a century the scientific community accepted the belief that birds of the Caribbean were of South American origin. Then, in 1934, Bond shook the foundation of biogeography when he presented the theory that the birds of the region actually originated in North America. He supported his theory over the years in more than 100 scientific papers. <br />
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As a measure of the acceptance of his theory, his peers now call “Bond’s Line,” that line dividing the Caribbean birds of North American ancestry from those of South American. The line lies between Grenada and Tobago.<br />
<br />
Born in Philadelphia, Bond attended St. Paul’s in New Hampshire and then went to Cambridge to obtain a bachelor of arts degree in 1922. He began a career in banking but quickly changed to natural history. <br />
<br />
In 1974, in a biographical sheet written for the Academy, Bond noted, “All of my life I have been interested in natural history. And as a young boy, I collected butterflies. Following graduation from college I worked for nearly three years in the Foreign Exchange department of the old Pennsylvania Company, resigning in 1925 to accompany Rudolphe de Schauensee on an expedition to the Lower Amazon in search of mammals and birds. On my return I decided on my life work – a survey of the avifauna of the Antillean subregion, and subsequently of extralimital island of the Caribbean.” <br />
<br />
He said part of his choice was the realization that “probably more Antillean birds were in danger of extinction than in all the rest of the world.” Some of the field data he gathered can never be duplicated. <br />
<br />
In 1936 he authored the book, “Birds of the West Indies.” It was this book, now in its sixth edition, that spy-thriller author Ian Fleming was reading in the early 1950s when he began writing his 007 stories. In the early 1960s, Fleming corresponded with Bond’s wife and explained how he appropriated her husband’s name. <br />
<br />
Fleming wrote that he was at his house in Orcabessa, Jamaica, and about to be married. He said to take his mind off the apprehensions of matrimony he decided to write a thriller. <br />
<br />
“I was determined that my secret agent should be as anonymous as possible,” wrote Fleming. “Even his name should be the reverse of the kind of ‘Peregrine Carruthers’ whom one meets in this type of fiction. At that time, one of my bibles was and still is ‘Birds of the West Indies’ by James Bond, and it struck me that this name, brief, unromantic and yet very masculine, was just what I needed and so James II was born.” <br />
<br />
In relaying his regards, Fleming added in his letter, “I can only offer your James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purpose he may see fit! Perhaps one day he will discover some particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion.” <br />
<br />
In 1952 Bond received the Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica. In 1954 he was awarded the Brewster Medal, the American Ornithologist Union’s highest honor. And in 1975 he received the Leidy Medal of the Academy of Natural Sciences, only the second academy scientist in the 52-year history of the award to receive it at that time. <br />
<br />
Mary Bond, his wife of 36 years, is also an author of poetry, short stories and numerous magazine articles, and two novels, “Device and Desire” and “The Petrified Gesture.” Last spring her “autohistory” was published by Dorance and Co., entitled, “Ninety Years At Home In Philadelphia.”<br />
<br />
Of her marriage to Bond, she said, “It was a wonderful life for me to go around to these places. He was a relaxed and charming person.” <br />
<br />
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a step-daughter, Mary E. Eiseman, a nephew, and six step-grandchildren. <br />
<br />
A memorial service will be at 11 a.m. Saturday at St. Martin in the Fields, Chestnut Hill. <br />
<br />
Contributions may be made to the Academy of Natural Sciences, 19th Street and the Parkway, Philadelphia., 19103. <br />
William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-81658859093321729012011-09-01T08:43:00.000-07:002011-09-01T08:43:06.616-07:00Mary Fanning Wickham BondObituary <br />
Philadelphia Inquirer <br />
Wednesday December 17, 1997 <br />
<br />
BOND <br />
On Dec. 13, 1997, MARY FANNING WICKHAM age 99 of Chestnut Hill, wife of the late James Bond and Shippen Lewis; step-mother of Polly Eiseman. Memorial Service, Fri. Dec. 19, 3 P.M. at St. Martin in the Fields Church, St. Martin’s Lane and W. Willow Grove Ave. Chestnut Ave., In lieu of Flowers, memorials may be made to The All Saints Fund, St. Martin in the Fields Church, Chestnut Hill. Community Association or the charity of your choice. JACOB F. RUTH <br />
<br />
Mary Fanning Bond, 99; <br />
Writer, artist and socialite <br />
<br />
By Andy Wallace <br />
<br />
Mary Fanning Wickham Bond, 99, best-selling author, artist and a socialite who learned to play craps on the marble steps of the Bellevue Stratford and became the wife of the legendary James Bond’s namesake, died of congestive hear failure Saturday at her home in Chestnut Hill. <br />
<br />
Mrs. Bond was indeed the wife of James Bond whose name Ian Fleming made famous as Agent 007, but her James Bond was not the international spy. He was an ornithologist , and author of the book Birds of the West Indies. <br />
<br />
It was that book that later caused problems for Bond and his wife, because Fleming considered the author’s name “the dullest name in the world,” and appropriated it for his secret agent, who was supposed to be “an uninteresting man to whom things happened.” <br />
<br />
While the name was just right for the spy, it was not just right for Mrs. Bond, to whom the wrong things happened. She didn’t mind when people pestered her husband during the day, she once wrote, but she did object when “soft female voices called up at 2 or 3 in the morning, asking, “Is James there?....I finally put an end to such conversations by answering sharply: ‘Yes, James is here, but this is Pussy Galore, and he’s busy now.’” <br />
<br />
Mrs. Bond learned how Fleming stole her husband’s name in a magazine article in 1964, and she wrote him a sarcastic letter to which he sent an equally sarcastic reply, offering to let Bond us his name, “for any purpose he might think fit.” <br />
<br />
She later arranged a meeting between her husband and Fleming, and they became friendly, meeting from time to time in the Caribbean. She then wrote a book about the whole affair, “How 007 Got His Name. <br />
<br />
In her own way, Mary Wickham Bond was as formidable a character as Fleminjg’s agent. “She was just not a maternal kind of person,” said her step granddaughter, Cary Page. “She was extraordinarily smart and talented.” <br />
<br />
She did needlepoint, painted and was interested in politics and, until two weeks ago, played the piano. At one time, she could play for four hours by memory, Page said. <br />
<br />
“Her first job was selling at Wanamakers – to her father’s horror,” Page said. “She was like that. She did what she wanted to do. She was outrageous and a lot of fun. Until I sw her about five minutes after her death, I never saw her still.” <br />
<br />
A trim, athletic women with red gold hair and bright blue eyes, she was born in to a privileged world of private schools (Miss Landstreet’s in Chestnut Hill), horseback riding, and debutante balls. She was accepted into Bryn Mawr College, but decided not to attend because she wanted to explore “what lay outside in the real world.” <br />
<br />
At the time, the real world was at war, and for a time she was an emergency aid, one of the women who volunteered as nurses, truck drivers, air raid wardens, bandage makers and the like. <br />
<br />
It was during that time, she related in an article about the Bellevue Stratford published in 1977, that some of her old friends, returning from training camp, taught her to shoot craps on the same circular staircase at the Bellevue where she and other debutantes made their entrances not long before. <br />
<br />
As a girl, she studied piano was looking forward to a musical career, but after having a sonnet published in a newspaper and selling a poem to a magazine for $7, she changed her mind. She became a writer. <br />
<br />
In the 1920s, she began writing novels – seven in all with such titles as The Titled Cup, Cerique, and Gloom Creek. They were never published. <br />
<br />
“They were just awful,” she told reporter Barbara Barnes of the Bulletin in 1950. “They’re stones under the building now.” <br />
<br />
But Mrs. Bond, who had won the Philadelphia Browning Society’s gold medal for a sonnet in 1926, continued writing poetry, short stories, girls’ out-West adventure stories, and magazine articles on sports and nature. <br />
<br />
When she got back to wring novels in the late 1940s, she wanted to write books people would read, so she made a mental list of things people were interested in: “violence, and power, babies, dogs and nature.” <br />
<br />
She then went to the library where, in a book, Unusual and Eccentric Wills, she found a potential plot, a story about a rich Viennese gentleman who left each of his nine relatives $25,000 – only if they would stay away from his funeral – but with the stipulation that anyone who did show up would get his entire estate. <br />
<br />
In Devise & Desire, A Novel of Bad Manners, she transferred the story to contemporary Philadelphia and the result was a local best-seller that a reviewer called “a good humored satire on social pretensions.” <br />
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She had one other popular book, To James Bond With Love, published in 1980 when she was 82. It was about life with the real James Bond, the ornithologist whom she married in 1954 and whom she accompanied on birding expeditions unti they were in their 60s. He died nine years ago. <br />
<br />
It was her second marriage. Her first, in 1930, was to Shippen Lewis, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer who was a widowed with three children. He died in 1952. <br />
<br />
Her last book, Ninety Years at Home in Philadelphia, a reflection on Philadelphia society from the early years of the century up to the present, was published just before her 90th birthday, June 8, 1988. <br />
<br />
She is survived by a stepdaughter, Mary “Polly” Eiseman: six step children; and 14 great-stepgrandchildren. <br />
<br />
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Friday at the Church of St. Marin-in-the-Fileds, St. Martin’s Lane and Willow Grove Avenue. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-74645343513375840402011-09-01T03:48:00.001-07:002011-09-01T03:48:52.610-07:00The Gates to Goldeneye, Orcabessa, Jamaica<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWcQTkSnqqZSKb5UBpcBNB6aK9Bpc0mxiKlRKuI_qid07NpRxL9xmtL5k0N58WQuHChY4ZOZX6pfB16xS4ZJQqAqyWCF_WzL8hXIrEZQKnMy5T1rldWlLKQjov9bUuj3sobSVRUQUiJn-f/s1600/IMG_0003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWcQTkSnqqZSKb5UBpcBNB6aK9Bpc0mxiKlRKuI_qid07NpRxL9xmtL5k0N58WQuHChY4ZOZX6pfB16xS4ZJQqAqyWCF_WzL8hXIrEZQKnMy5T1rldWlLKQjov9bUuj3sobSVRUQUiJn-f/s400/IMG_0003.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Goldeneye, the Jamaican home of Ian Fleming, is where he wrote all of his 007 novels. <br />
<br />
William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-33211772846402420182011-08-23T05:25:00.000-07:002011-08-23T05:27:00.144-07:00Black bird Crackle at Montego Bay Jamaica<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1gLUSpzTwgRz64nkf2c7oWXWAF5EY5thW6Ab6joH0pQCf5aOdP10gQlQHi9979RanODAVJqZrjAaaQ-2nBI3ge570AkwCF-AwX2uM40Z3rtbOtrx9G85GTJtkUiB_LUe1uAxmn9iqNZs4/s1600/IMG_0012.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 269px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1gLUSpzTwgRz64nkf2c7oWXWAF5EY5thW6Ab6joH0pQCf5aOdP10gQlQHi9979RanODAVJqZrjAaaQ-2nBI3ge570AkwCF-AwX2uM40Z3rtbOtrx9G85GTJtkUiB_LUe1uAxmn9iqNZs4/s400/IMG_0012.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5644026724632799330" /></a>
<br />William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-16976317624349322092011-07-27T12:21:00.000-07:002011-07-29T09:39:05.450-07:00The Gates to Goldeneye, Orcabessa, Jamaica<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnBcobLW3W4CcoqlUKmVTHmrOeQLRwiZ-sfgQxgd8wTqZ7aKzSXEdJbEJ9-i62AICl9iDc7vnAPFaMw2X-ZJjkOQEYP8LeK5eVJuiPqMWCnl5-V23xWjmHgsk-HWVQuMAlUX435QcYDSTj/s1600/IMG_0032.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 372px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnBcobLW3W4CcoqlUKmVTHmrOeQLRwiZ-sfgQxgd8wTqZ7aKzSXEdJbEJ9-i62AICl9iDc7vnAPFaMw2X-ZJjkOQEYP8LeK5eVJuiPqMWCnl5-V23xWjmHgsk-HWVQuMAlUX435QcYDSTj/s400/IMG_0032.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634115096075487730" /></a><br /><br />Ian Fleming's home in Orcabessa, Jamaica is set back off the coast road a few miles east of the popular tourist town of Ocho Rios on the North Shore. <br /><br />As are all of the large Great Houses built by English aristocrats, most of the Jamaican homes have names - and Fleming called his "Goldeneye."William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-61981066026713883542011-07-27T12:20:00.002-07:002011-07-30T13:27:42.929-07:00Goldeneye Gate<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNYcW4K-InoQA1ms83Dz87QheZeClm40PYJL7HqsYG_xVRzyaX4Ugy_EMp2Z_8L017TL5df4pf6De_K9dguPQs_DGaxMZkk_P3MmSsZwPn_VZmAjUScchJb_s_nHowCYorH0qvXxKwsphQ/s1600/IMG_0034.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 286px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNYcW4K-InoQA1ms83Dz87QheZeClm40PYJL7HqsYG_xVRzyaX4Ugy_EMp2Z_8L017TL5df4pf6De_K9dguPQs_DGaxMZkk_P3MmSsZwPn_VZmAjUScchJb_s_nHowCYorH0qvXxKwsphQ/s400/IMG_0034.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635244711052498674" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOn17nauOLd10pr8sX9fZDyYBLeZPOBLvwpIvrPXiT4CU7ulAKyeWfjj5pkUVMRuReYVljbGvPf_stIUK6Z-7vNPWIAHJ4YLFJb2SQbym-NmcjTq7gVzrxGTyLINuLF8UMK46yEbCje5Cx/s1600/IMG_0029.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 283px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOn17nauOLd10pr8sX9fZDyYBLeZPOBLvwpIvrPXiT4CU7ulAKyeWfjj5pkUVMRuReYVljbGvPf_stIUK6Z-7vNPWIAHJ4YLFJb2SQbym-NmcjTq7gVzrxGTyLINuLF8UMK46yEbCje5Cx/s400/IMG_0029.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634114334367787746" /></a><br /><br />As can be seen the "Goldeneye" name is inscribed on the gate's pilar.William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-19454425198992821132011-07-27T12:20:00.001-07:002011-07-29T10:04:32.788-07:00Goldeneye side yard<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxiv2OaE11bxdCfc4IfLCpKHHJtyY4ntXHdwayauCiQVeS4mQK1qlbeoj-rCJuWSMT-ZNMjAsgHFtUnjNyPBgfBl7yqge6_2EwhLE-K-QTRVgZ_HWkfBxNWgwX-5qe-x3vwNkj8fo5bJ8r/s1600/IMG_0031.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 287px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxiv2OaE11bxdCfc4IfLCpKHHJtyY4ntXHdwayauCiQVeS4mQK1qlbeoj-rCJuWSMT-ZNMjAsgHFtUnjNyPBgfBl7yqge6_2EwhLE-K-QTRVgZ_HWkfBxNWgwX-5qe-x3vwNkj8fo5bJ8r/s400/IMG_0031.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634114184924827586" /></a><br /><br />At the time I visited the house was owned by Christopher Blackwell, the son of Fleming's mistress Blanch Blackwell, said to have been the person from whom Fleming based his Goldfinger character "Pussy Galore." <br /><br />Chris founded Island Records, discovered Bob Marley and introduced Jamaican music and reggae to England and the world. <br /><br />When Fleming died his widow refused to sell the property to Blackwell, so he reportedly had Marley buy it in his stead and later took possession himself. <br /><br />When I arrived I found the gates to Goldeneye invitingly open, as did James and Mary Bond when they stopped by unexpected in the winter of 1964, shortly before Fleming died. <br /><br />There were a few servant women around who were washing and drying their clothes on the line, and they permitted me to walk around the grounds and take some photos.William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-74433836949085042442011-07-27T12:16:00.000-07:002011-07-29T10:09:59.256-07:00James Bond Meets Ian Fleming<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEayqpSOi-t-htVuHhSb3tP9Vv6Qo5LcDGvKEnI-9bR4v99GhPlRa3oReJX4eQxtrVSoONPq-84AMdL8sN7lgjp8R24clJB5wuLQ_4g7N3VhHcKVT1-j2Wk6-VFMggB1r84gfSKJhBJ-uU/s1600/IMG_0028.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 358px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEayqpSOi-t-htVuHhSb3tP9Vv6Qo5LcDGvKEnI-9bR4v99GhPlRa3oReJX4eQxtrVSoONPq-84AMdL8sN7lgjp8R24clJB5wuLQ_4g7N3VhHcKVT1-j2Wk6-VFMggB1r84gfSKJhBJ-uU/s400/IMG_0028.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634113494204460098" /></a><br /><br />James Bond meets Ian Fleming - <br />(Photo compliments of Mrs. Bond)<br /><br />Ian Fleming wrote all of his James Bond books and short stories while in residence at Goldeneye, where he stayed most of January and February of every year. <br /><br />Of all those individuals who claim that Fleming based his protagonist on other real persons, there is only one person in the world who Fleming himself acknowledged and that is James Bond, the American ornithologist from Philadelphia. <br /><br />Fleming claimed to have taken the name James Bond from the author of the book "Birds of the West Indies," which he said was his "bible" and kept handy so as to identify the many species of birds that frequented his backyard and private beach. <br /><br />After Mrs. Bond read some of the books, she wrote to Fleming to say that she noticed some of the places and situations Fleming placed the fictional 007 were familiar to her and her husband, who frequently traveled the Caribbean. Fleming responded that he hoped that Bond would was not upset at the "theft of his identity." <br /><br />Then in the winter of 1964, while in Jamaica on a bird hunting expedition, Mrs. Bond convinced her husband to take a road trip along the North Shore, and while doing so, they stopped at Goldeneye to pay an unexpected visit. <br /><br />When Bond knocked at the door, Fleming's cook Violet answered the door and when she asked "Who shall I say is calling?" Bond replyed, "James Bond," Mrs. Bond said Violet looked like she saw a ghost. <br /><br />To document the moment, Mrs. Bond snapped a photo when Fleming arrived at the door and you can see Violet, in her flower print dress in the door. Since Bond is standing on the ground and Fleming on the steps, it appears that Fleming is taller than Bond, but actually Bond is taller than Fleming. <br /><br />Fleming invited James and Mary Bond to stay for lunch, and they also met Fleming's friends Mr. and Mrs. Hilary Bray, who were down on the beach with Fleming's copy of Bond's book "Birds of the West Indies." <br /><br />There was also a Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) film crew there to interview Fleming, and I've often wondered if they included any segments of James Bond in their documentary.William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-20704373133084820702010-11-12T03:27:00.000-08:002010-11-12T03:35:04.982-08:00The Playboy Advisorp. 20 ILLUMINATUS, PART 1 <br /><br />ILLMINATI PROJECT MEMO #4 <br />7/24 <br /><br />J.M. : <br />Here's a letter that appeared in Playboy a few years ago ("The Playboy Advisor," Playboy, April, 1969, page 62-64): <br /><br />I recently heard an old man of right-wing views - a friend of my grandparents - assert that the current wave of assassinations in America is the work of a secret society called the Illuminati. He said that the Illuminati have existed throughout history, own the international banking cartels, have all been 32nd-degree Masons and were known to Ian Fleming, who portrayed them as Spectre in his James Bond books - for which the Illuminati did away with Mr. Fleming. At first all this seemed like a paranoid delusion to me. Then I read in The New Yorker that Alan Chapman, one of Jim Garrison's investigators i the New Orleans probe of the John Kennedy assassination, believes that the Illuminati really exist..... <br /><br />Playboy, of course, puts down the whole idea as ridiculious and give the standard Encyclopedia Britannica story that the Illuminati went out of business in 1785.William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-78475112482809914302010-09-21T20:51:00.000-07:002010-09-21T20:53:40.508-07:00MI6 Official HIstory<div style='text-align:center;margin:0px auto 10px;'><a href='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV31ym-yqLtGVMKRrWpx2PB6eIEHqyk8xjWMQkk0pxkqfIJ1MMVFiijgBDy-wRBq8J2vebQ5KCe9pzsRx5FYeTopMCsGMbhghT1xtCxMhfT59tZQUJpScj-lR9FIsXjPd4jM998lXFQhzQ/s1600/Professor+Keith+Jeffery+poses+for+photographers+...jpg'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV31ym-yqLtGVMKRrWpx2PB6eIEHqyk8xjWMQkk0pxkqfIJ1MMVFiijgBDy-wRBq8J2vebQ5KCe9pzsRx5FYeTopMCsGMbhghT1xtCxMhfT59tZQUJpScj-lR9FIsXjPd4jM998lXFQhzQ/s400/Professor+Keith+Jeffery+poses+for+photographers+...jpg' border='0' alt='' /></a> </div><div style='clear:both; text-align:CENTER'><a href='http://picasa.google.com/blogger/' target='ext'><img src='http://photos1.blogger.com/pbp.gif' alt='Posted by Picasa' style='border: 0px none ; padding: 0px; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial;' align='middle' border='0' <br /><br /><br />By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 56 mins ago<br /><br />LONDON – It's James Bond, with bureaucracy and cramped office space.<br /><br />The first-ever official history of MI6 reveals that Britain's foreign spy agency debated assassinating Nazi leaders, landed a spy wearing a wetsuit over his tux at a casino by the sea and experimented with exploding filing cabinets — but also wrangled with other government departments and had to make do on a shoestring budget.<br /><br />The book, published Tuesday, tells a story of plots, paperwork, duplicity and derring-do that takes in fears of a Nazi anthrax attack, cross-dressing secret agents and worries about the safety of the prime minister's milk supply.<br /><br />"The real James Bonds are more interesting than the fictional James Bond," said author Keith Jeffery, a historian at Queen's University Belfast, who had access to previously secret files in the MI6 archive. "They are male and female. They are real people. They have real frailties and real courage."<br /><br />They are, often, larger than life: figures like Wilfred "Biffy" Dunderdale, a Russian-speaking MI6 agent in Paris between the world wars, whom Jeffery said had "a well-known penchant for pretty girls and fast cars, and terrific savoir-faire."<br /><br />He was a friend of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, and a possible model for the suave secret agent. In old age he became "an incorrigible raconteur" who would claim to recognize his own exploits in the 007 stories.<br /><br />There is also Dudley Clarke, an agent arrested in Madrid in 1941 "dressed, down to a brassiere, as a woman." The Spanish fascist authorities, confused about whether he was a spy or simply a cross-dresser, eventually released him. Jeffery says he "went on to have a brilliant career in deception."<br /><br />There is also agent Pieter Tazelaar, put ashore beside a Dutch seafront casino one night during World War II, "in full evening dress and smelling of alcohol, wearing a specially designed rubber oversuit to keep him dry while landing."<br /><br />On the beach, a colleague "sprinkled a few drops of Hennessy XO brandy on him to strengthen his 'party-goer's' image."<br /><br />The book tells the story of an agency founded in 1909 with a staff of one, Mansfield Cumming, who recorded his first day in his diary: "Went to the office and remained all day, but saw no one, nor was there anything to do there."<br /><br />It quickly got more interesting, although Jeffery writes that for decades, MI6 "had to operate on a shoestring" and was perennially short of office space.<br /><br />The book reveals that its agents included well-loved authors W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and Arthur Ransome, who spied in the Soviet Union and whose mistress was Leon Trotsky's secretary.<br /><br />It recounts how MI6 spied actively on the U.S. during the 1930s before deciding that "it was more productive to be friends with the United States than continue to treat it as an intelligence target."<br /><br />Around the same time, MI6 was worried about looming war with Germany, particularly the possibility the Nazis would use biological weapons, possibly exposing anthrax on the London Underground. A memo also asked whether the prime minister's milk supply was secure, as "milk bottles on doorstep can be tampered with."<br /><br />Some of the revelations are sensitive even now. The book includes an account of Operation Embarrass, in which British agents blew up ships in Italian ports to deter postwar Jewish refugees from sailing to Palestine, then under British control.<br /><br />The book deflates some cherished myths. MI6 agents do not have a "license to kill," although the agency compiled a list of possible Nazi assassination targets before the D-Day landings. It was judged that the plan was too risky and might spark bloody reprisals.<br /><br />More happily for spy buffs, Q — the gadget-making super-scientist from the Bond films — is based on reality. After World War II, MI6 researchers worked on silent weapons, knockout tablets, safecracking tools and exploding filing cabinets that could destroy secret documents at short notice.<br /><br />The book follows the publication last year of an official history of MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service. <br /><br />Jeffery said he struck a "Faustian pact" when he agreed to write the book. He could look at everything in the archives, but MI6 retained the power to censor what was published. <br /><br />The book stops abruptly in 1949, but still represents a change of policy for an agency whose existence was only officially acknowledged in the 1990s. <br /><br />John Scarlett, the former MI6 chief who commissioned the book, said it is intended to "promote well-informed understanding and public debate about MI6," without compromising current operations or living agents. <br /><br />There is unlikely to be a sequel. <br /><br />"For MI6 this is an exceptional event," said Scarlett, who stepped down last year as "C," code-name for the agency's head. "There has been nothing like it before and there are no plans for anything similar in the future." <br /><br />The book is published in Britain by Bloomsbury as "MI6" and in the U.S. by Penguin as "The Secret History of MI6." <br /><br />___ <br /><br />Online: <br /><br />MI6: http://www.sis.gov.uk<br />/></a></div>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154971909041204203.post-35045247228700789642009-10-19T17:29:00.000-07:002011-07-27T13:17:01.617-07:00The Mystery of Goldeneye<div style='text-align:center;margin:0px auto 10px;'><a href='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihGa-tTmU40zTG1kidyNQygBQ85NkNCUV594-pBExwmS6CQocU6zRgk1vPKep-HNvG_koWMuPl7J0Fs6kbisYZo095sbTAkbVXpqCb19opveyUZ9t3PQNgaAFzN9s3eonQ0tBcAFl5oMwl/s1600-h/Image+(3).jpg'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihGa-tTmU40zTG1kidyNQygBQ85NkNCUV594-pBExwmS6CQocU6zRgk1vPKep-HNvG_koWMuPl7J0Fs6kbisYZo095sbTAkbVXpqCb19opveyUZ9t3PQNgaAFzN9s3eonQ0tBcAFl5oMwl/s400/Image+(3).jpg' border='0' alt='' /></a> </div><br /><br /><br />The Mystery of Goldeneye <br /><br />Art by Barbecue Jim Cambell<div style='clear:both; text-align:CENTER'><a href='http://picasa.google.com/blogger/' target='ext'><img src='http://photos1.blogger.com/pbp.gif' alt='Posted by Picasa' style='border: 0px none ; padding: 0px; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial;' align='middle' border='0' /></a></div>William Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06891936236810260349noreply@blogger.com0