Black bird Crackle at Montego Bay Jamaica

The Gates to Goldeneye, Orcabessa, Jamaica

Ian Fleming's home in Orcabessa, Jamaica is set back off the coast road a few miles east of the popular tourist town of Ocho Rios on the North Shore.

As are all of the large Great Houses built by English aristocrats, most of the Jamaican homes have names - and Fleming called his "Goldeneye."

Goldeneye Gate

As can be seen the "Goldeneye" name is inscribed on the gate's pilar.

Goldeneye side yard

At the time I visited the house was owned by Christopher Blackwell, the son of Fleming's mistress Blanch Blackwell, said to have been the person from whom Fleming based his Goldfinger character "Pussy Galore."

Chris founded Island Records, discovered Bob Marley and introduced Jamaican music and reggae to England and the world.

When Fleming died his widow refused to sell the property to Blackwell, so he reportedly had Marley buy it in his stead and later took possession himself.

When I arrived I found the gates to Goldeneye invitingly open, as did James and Mary Bond when they stopped by unexpected in the winter of 1964, shortly before Fleming died.

There were a few servant women around who were washing and drying their clothes on the line, and they permitted me to walk around the grounds and take some photos.

James Bond Meets Ian Fleming

James Bond meets Ian Fleming -
(Photo compliments of Mrs. Bond)

Ian Fleming wrote all of his James Bond books and short stories while in residence at Goldeneye, where he stayed most of January and February of every year.

Of all those individuals who claim that Fleming based his protagonist on other real persons, there is only one person in the world who Fleming himself acknowledged and that is James Bond, the American ornithologist from Philadelphia.

Fleming claimed to have taken the name James Bond from the author of the book "Birds of the West Indies," which he said was his "bible" and kept handy so as to identify the many species of birds that frequented his backyard and private beach.

After Mrs. Bond read some of the books, she wrote to Fleming to say that she noticed some of the places and situations Fleming placed the fictional 007 were familiar to her and her husband, who frequently traveled the Caribbean. Fleming responded that he hoped that Bond would was not upset at the "theft of his identity."

Then in the winter of 1964, while in Jamaica on a bird hunting expedition, Mrs. Bond convinced her husband to take a road trip along the North Shore, and while doing so, they stopped at Goldeneye to pay an unexpected visit.

When Bond knocked at the door, Fleming's cook Violet answered the door and when she asked "Who shall I say is calling?" Bond replyed, "James Bond," Mrs. Bond said Violet looked like she saw a ghost.

To document the moment, Mrs. Bond snapped a photo when Fleming arrived at the door and you can see Violet, in her flower print dress in the door. Since Bond is standing on the ground and Fleming on the steps, it appears that Fleming is taller than Bond, but actually Bond is taller than Fleming.

Fleming invited James and Mary Bond to stay for lunch, and they also met Fleming's friends Mr. and Mrs. Hilary Bray, who were down on the beach with Fleming's copy of Bond's book "Birds of the West Indies."

There was also a Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) film crew there to interview Fleming, and I've often wondered if they included any segments of James Bond in their documentary.

The Playboy Advisor

p. 20 ILLUMINATUS, PART 1

ILLMINATI PROJECT MEMO #4
7/24

J.M. :
Here's a letter that appeared in Playboy a few years ago ("The Playboy Advisor," Playboy, April, 1969, page 62-64):

I recently heard an old man of right-wing views - a friend of my grandparents - assert that the current wave of assassinations in America is the work of a secret society called the Illuminati. He said that the Illuminati have existed throughout history, own the international banking cartels, have all been 32nd-degree Masons and were known to Ian Fleming, who portrayed them as Spectre in his James Bond books - for which the Illuminati did away with Mr. Fleming. At first all this seemed like a paranoid delusion to me. Then I read in The New Yorker that Alan Chapman, one of Jim Garrison's investigators i the New Orleans probe of the John Kennedy assassination, believes that the Illuminati really exist.....

Playboy, of course, puts down the whole idea as ridiculious and give the standard Encyclopedia Britannica story that the Illuminati went out of business in 1785.

MI6 Official HIstory

 

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 56 mins ago

LONDON – It's James Bond, with bureaucracy and cramped office space.

The first-ever official history of MI6 reveals that Britain's foreign spy agency debated assassinating Nazi leaders, landed a spy wearing a wetsuit over his tux at a casino by the sea and experimented with exploding filing cabinets — but also wrangled with other government departments and had to make do on a shoestring budget.

The book, published Tuesday, tells a story of plots, paperwork, duplicity and derring-do that takes in fears of a Nazi anthrax attack, cross-dressing secret agents and worries about the safety of the prime minister's milk supply.

"The real James Bonds are more interesting than the fictional James Bond," said author Keith Jeffery, a historian at Queen's University Belfast, who had access to previously secret files in the MI6 archive. "They are male and female. They are real people. They have real frailties and real courage."

They are, often, larger than life: figures like Wilfred "Biffy" Dunderdale, a Russian-speaking MI6 agent in Paris between the world wars, whom Jeffery said had "a well-known penchant for pretty girls and fast cars, and terrific savoir-faire."

He was a friend of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, and a possible model for the suave secret agent. In old age he became "an incorrigible raconteur" who would claim to recognize his own exploits in the 007 stories.

There is also Dudley Clarke, an agent arrested in Madrid in 1941 "dressed, down to a brassiere, as a woman." The Spanish fascist authorities, confused about whether he was a spy or simply a cross-dresser, eventually released him. Jeffery says he "went on to have a brilliant career in deception."

There is also agent Pieter Tazelaar, put ashore beside a Dutch seafront casino one night during World War II, "in full evening dress and smelling of alcohol, wearing a specially designed rubber oversuit to keep him dry while landing."

On the beach, a colleague "sprinkled a few drops of Hennessy XO brandy on him to strengthen his 'party-goer's' image."

The book tells the story of an agency founded in 1909 with a staff of one, Mansfield Cumming, who recorded his first day in his diary: "Went to the office and remained all day, but saw no one, nor was there anything to do there."

It quickly got more interesting, although Jeffery writes that for decades, MI6 "had to operate on a shoestring" and was perennially short of office space.

The book reveals that its agents included well-loved authors W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and Arthur Ransome, who spied in the Soviet Union and whose mistress was Leon Trotsky's secretary.

It recounts how MI6 spied actively on the U.S. during the 1930s before deciding that "it was more productive to be friends with the United States than continue to treat it as an intelligence target."

Around the same time, MI6 was worried about looming war with Germany, particularly the possibility the Nazis would use biological weapons, possibly exposing anthrax on the London Underground. A memo also asked whether the prime minister's milk supply was secure, as "milk bottles on doorstep can be tampered with."

Some of the revelations are sensitive even now. The book includes an account of Operation Embarrass, in which British agents blew up ships in Italian ports to deter postwar Jewish refugees from sailing to Palestine, then under British control.

The book deflates some cherished myths. MI6 agents do not have a "license to kill," although the agency compiled a list of possible Nazi assassination targets before the D-Day landings. It was judged that the plan was too risky and might spark bloody reprisals.

More happily for spy buffs, Q — the gadget-making super-scientist from the Bond films — is based on reality. After World War II, MI6 researchers worked on silent weapons, knockout tablets, safecracking tools and exploding filing cabinets that could destroy secret documents at short notice.

The book follows the publication last year of an official history of MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service.

Jeffery said he struck a "Faustian pact" when he agreed to write the book. He could look at everything in the archives, but MI6 retained the power to censor what was published.

The book stops abruptly in 1949, but still represents a change of policy for an agency whose existence was only officially acknowledged in the 1990s.

John Scarlett, the former MI6 chief who commissioned the book, said it is intended to "promote well-informed understanding and public debate about MI6," without compromising current operations or living agents.

There is unlikely to be a sequel.

"For MI6 this is an exceptional event," said Scarlett, who stepped down last year as "C," code-name for the agency's head. "There has been nothing like it before and there are no plans for anything similar in the future."

The book is published in Britain by Bloomsbury as "MI6" and in the U.S. by Penguin as "The Secret History of MI6."

___

Online:

MI6: http://www.sis.gov.uk
/>