Friday, January 1, 2021

James Bond and Ian Fleming - The Men and the Myth

 JAMES BOND & IAN FLEMING – THE MEN & THE MYTH

James Bond Authenticus

SPRING 1948 – ABOARD THE VIGILANT
SOMEWHERE IN THE CARIBBEAN

James Bond stepped carefully across the deck of the Vigilant, 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The Vigilant 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In November 1947 the Philadelphia Bulletin, 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Catherwood’s yacht, the Vigilant, 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.

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.

A contemporary newspaper article on the expedition dryly notes that James Bond’s "main interest, is birds."

Bond got on well with the scientists, who readily appreciated the fact that after twenty years "in the field," Bond’s book Birds of the West Indies had recently been published.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

The Vigilant 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.

Bond took specimens and notes for updating the next edition of his book, The Birds of the West Indies, 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.

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.

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.

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.

A star field hockey player in school, Mary Wickham, like James Bond, matriculated at Cambridge University in England. After serving as editor of On Leave, a USO publication during World War II, she became publisher of a weekly neighborhood newspaper, the Chestnut Hill Local. 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.

A newspaper review of another of her novels, "Device and Desire," 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."

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.

In Search of James Bond, Philadelphia 1976

 IN SEARCH OF JAMES BOND, PHILADELPHIA – 1976 


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 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin newspaper. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 Philadelphia Bulletin building adjacent to 30th Street train station, and timed myself to go when few people would be around. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

 

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. 

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 “Portrait of a Cold Warrior,” identifies the Catherwood Fund as providing him cover for working on CIA projects in the Philippines. 

According to the Bulletin clips, Catherwood’s fund paid for the construction of the yacht Vigilant, a sailing yacht that Catherwood used for “scientific expeditions.” 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

Then I considered it an ironic coincidence that someone named James Bond went sailing around the Caribbean with the CIA’s bagman Cummins Catherwood. 

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.


Acquiring a copy of John Pearson’s authorized biography, “The Life of Ian Fleming,” 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.” 

“He had already appropriated the name for his hero: James Bond’s handbook, ‘Birds of the West Indies,’ 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.” 

After putting in a request to find me a copy of James Bond’s “Birds of the West Indies” 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 “A Naturalist In Cuba,” by Cambridge professor Thomas Barbour, and discovered James Bond’s name in the index. 

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….”

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.

 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

Written in large print, teletype style, it read: 

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.

 

 

BOND, JAMES – AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGIST  at the Bay of Pigs

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. 

The other envelope contained published references to James Bond, the ornithologist. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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.” 

“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. 

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.” 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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?” 

“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....” 

“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.’” 

“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.’” 

“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.” 

Six months later the CIA backed brigade of anti-Castro Cubans invaded that very beach. 

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. 

Most peculiar indeed.

Goldeneye Jamaica - 1952

  

GOLDENEYE JAMAICA – 1952 
THE THEFT OF JAMES BOND’S IDENTITY 

“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.” 

“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.” 

“’Good Lord,’ said Bond. ‘How,…Where do we come into it?” – Dr. No 

“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. 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

“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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.”. 

“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.” 

“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.” 

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. 

Fleming said the name James Bond sounded appropriately “dull” and unassuming; perfect what was suppose to be his anonymous secret agent. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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.” 

“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. 

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….” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

Philby quotes Wisner as saying, “….it is essential to secure the cooperation of people with conspicuous access to wealth in their own right.” 

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.” 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

Felix Leiter and Henry Pleasants

 FELIX LEITER = HENRY PLEASANTS 


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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

“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.*” 

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.” 

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. 

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.”

“…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.” 

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.” 

“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.” 

“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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Like Catherwood, Krest established the Krest Foundation, which like the Catherwood Foundation, provided tax shelter for his nefarious activities.

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

“Mister Pleasants,” he informed me, “is living in London with his wife Virginia, the harpsichordist.” 

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. 

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. 

“Yes, he’s out of town now. He’s in Vienna at a music festival,” she said. “This is his wife.” 

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. 


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. 

“Could I attend the lecture?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Just tell them you’re my guest and introduce yourself to me before or after the meeting.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

Then there was a program announcing: “The Vocal Record Collector’s Society Presents ‘The CANARIES’ by Dr. Henry Pleasants. 

“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.” 


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.” 

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. 

Extremely knowledgeable, he also added tidbits of detail, often humorous insights into the background of the once famous and now obscure singers. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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). 

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.” 

First off I told him how much I appreciated the “CARANIES” lecture. 

“The audience was great!” he said enthusiastically. 

“Yes, no one left early,” I quipped, before he added. 

“And no one coughed.” 

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. 

“Tido Puente, Jr. is now playing in a rock band in Italy,” Pleasants noted, an item I found particularly amusing. 

After we settled in comfortably enough, I came right to the point. 

“Did you ever know or meet Ian Fleming?” 

I was going to add – the British spy fiction writer, but hesitated a moment because I figured Pleasants knew who I meant. 

“No he said, without too much thought, but obviously puzzled. I didn’t make him ask me why. 

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. 

“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.” 

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.” 

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. 

“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.” 

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. 

“You were CIA station chief in Bonn, Germany when you wrote, ‘The Agony of Modern Music,’ I asked. 

“Yes,” he said, “but how did you know?” 

“From Wise and Ross and their book, ‘The Invisible Government,” I said, as he smiled in recognition once again. 
“I haven’t talked about these things in 15 years,” he said. 

He preferred not to talk about Gehlen. 

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. 

“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. 

“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.” 

“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.” 

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.” 

“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. 

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. 

“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.” 

“I was also a specialist in the German order of battle, that I knew from memorization, which I’m good at.” 

At the end of the war, Pleasants said, Clark attended the first postwar music festival in Austria and gave a speech there. 

In the course of his postwar interpretation and interrogation work Pleasants dealt with former Nazi General Reinhardt Gehlen. 

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. 

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.”

“An organization that turned out to be penetrated and compromised by the Russians,” I noted. 

“Yes,” he said, noting that the Russians did the same thing to the British with Kim Philby and his friends. 

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. 

“I knew Allen Dulles very well,” he said, and as for Gehlen, “I liked him. We were good friends.” 

Pleasants pointed out that, “I wasn’t involved in covert operations. I was strictly liaison was my specialty and I was good at it.” 

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.” 

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. 

“I left the foreign service to get back into music,” he said. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

“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.” 

“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.” 

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?” 

The main thing in Henry Pleasants’ life was his profound passion for music. 

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.

 

[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].

 

CHARACTER MEETS AUTHOR 

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. 

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.” 

“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.” 

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.” 

“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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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!” 

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. 

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.

 

[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.] 

Character Meets Author


CHARACTER MEETS AUTHOR 

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. 

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.” 

“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.” 

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.” 

“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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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!” 

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. 

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.

 

[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.] 

Goldeneye for Beginners

  

GOLDENEYE FOR BEGINNERS – January 1990 

“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)

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

“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. 

“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. 

“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. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

Gregarious. Gregarious is a fitting description of all Jamaica. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.”

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

There’s also Bellview Great House, which was owned by Fleming’s friend and business associate Ivor Bryce, an American. 

There’s Bob Marley’s estate, Island House, at 56 Hope Road in uptown Jamaica. 

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). 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.’” 

“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.” 

“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. 

“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. 

“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. 

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. 

Island Records was founded in 1962 by Christopher Blackwell who, besides being Bob Marley’s manager, now owns Goldeneye. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

“Is Violet here?” I asked, wondering about Fleming’s long time maid and cook who I knew lived at Goldeneye. 

“No,” she said. “Violet passed away two years ago.” 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I replied. “What about the owner, is he here at the moment?” 

“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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

But Fleming would never let Cousins kill the shark. After their fun they would let the big fish go on its way. 

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. 

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. 

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.

007 and Lee Harvey Oswald

  

007, LHO and JFK 

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.”

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. 

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.

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.

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.” 

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.

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?

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?