JAMAICA For Beginners
By Bill Kelly
Atlantic City Monthly Casino Journal
April, 1990
Sitting at the mushroom bar by the pool of the Wyndham Rose Hall Hotel, Montego Bay, Jamaica, I concluded that it doesn’t take long to learn everything you have to know about Jamaica to enjoy it to its fullest.
Even if you’ve never been there before – so you can’t live up to the pitch to ‘come back’ – you have an idea what Jamaica is all about – Sea, sun, beautiful beaches, calypsos – reggae and no problem, mon. As far as I’m concerned, it ranks as the top contender in my own “as close to paradise” ratings war, a contest I’ve just begun.
For starters, it wasn’t my choice destination. I only went because my high school buddy Mark insisted I join him for a four-day weekend, Friday ‘til Monday. He would put the flight and hotel on his credit card, and I could pay him back later when I had the dough. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I had to get out of Dodge.
Round trip on Air Jamaica, at $220, was less than many flights to Florida. No passport, no problem. Just bring a birth certificate and photo ID.
Mark said he chose the Wyndham Hotel adjacent to the historic Rose Hall Great House, because it had a golf course. The plan was for him to play golf on Saturday while I hired a car to visit Goldeneye, the north shore villa where English spy-thriller writer Ian Fleming penned his James Bond – 007 novels.
Bob Marley tunes graced the Air Jamaica cabin as we touched down in Montego Bay, which is the island’s second largest city after the capitol of Kingston. An island dancing and singing troupe greeted us at the gangplank, and a cashier changed our yankee dollars to Jamaican at 7 for 1.
As the taxi took us the ten miles east to our hotel, it was apparent that they were still making repairs after the devastating storm Gilbert hit, on September 12, 1988, leaving fifty people dead and much of the island in ruins. One wing of our hotel was still being renovated, and that which was open was relatively new.
If you visit Jamaica, you have three basic choices of accommodations: You can stay at a hotel like the Wyndham, and pay as you go, or try an all-inclusive resort, which includes everything, including meals and drinks from the bar, and for one set price. In either case, little cash changes hands on the hotel premises or compound, it seems. They either put it on your hotel tab or ring it up on your credit card.
The third choice is renting, through a travel agent, one of the small, beachside villas, like Goldeneye, or something less exclusive, which nonetheless comes with a maid, cook and resident native guide.
Many of the hotels and resorts were at one time winter homes and plantations of aristocratic English families, and each, like Rose Hall, has a unique story. Rose Hall for instance, was once the home of a women who killed each of her three husbands.
The Tryall Club, in Montego Bay, was owned by the late Sir William Stephenson, the paymaster who Churchill dubbed “INTREPID.” Tryall sports a world-class golf course.
Then there’s the Ruins, at Ocho Rios, now a restaurant built around waterfalls.
When we arrived at our hotel, I realized that the two best things about Jamaica for Americans are that it’s in the same time zone and the locals speak English at their native language. The rest of Jamaica still gives you the feeling that you’re visiting an exotic foreign port. And you are.
The bell captain who arranged for a car to drive me to Goldeneye on Saturday flashed an engaging smile as he promised me the best driver on the island. I had to laugh when I focused in on his name tag – Billy Love, a name that Fleming would have certainly appropriated for one of his characters.
It was cloudy and rainy on Friday afternoon when we arrived, but it was a beautiful sunny day when my driver, Douglas Scott, began the 74-mile drive east along the main coast road, which circumnavigates the island.
The first stop was to visit his friend, the Bush Doctor, who sold me herb medicine for sunburn, arthritis and a sex potion, all for $40 Jamaican, or $5.50 American. But he never told me whether the sex potion was ingested or applied locally.
Other tourist attractions along the route included Columbus Park, where Chris put ashore in 1494, nearly 500 years ago. Then there’s the Bauxite plant where James Bond tangled with SMERSH agents in the first 007 flick Dr. No.
We also passed a dozen all-inclusive resorts, like Jamaica Jamaica, Couples, Boscobel Beach and Hedonism. Each has beach view rooms, without TV (which you don’t miss), but plenty of food, sailing, snorkeling, pool and disco. Some have a nude beach, others welcome children.
After a few inquiries, we found Goldeney, a hundred yards off the main road, not far from the sleepy fishing village of Orcabessa. I took some pictures of the house and the beach, both of which have been kept pretty much the same as when Fleming wrote there. It is not however, a public tourist attraction like the nearby villa Firefly, Noel Coward’s home.
Back at the hotel on Sunday, I took a snorkel dive off the nearby reef, only forty yards from the beach and came up with a beautiful red and black conch shell that I thought would look good on my fireplace. I took off my mask, and looked around for a Bond girl in a bikini to show off my prize. But to my surprise, it was still alive, and something was squirming around inside it, so I chucked it back.
We took a taxi to town that night, requesting the island best drive, Mister Scott, and dropped off Billy Love, who finished work for the day and came along for the ride.
Scott and Love suggested that we try a local dish at Pork Pia, where we had the pork jerk and chicken jerk ($24 Jamaican, $3.50 American), with a bottle of Red Stripe beer. Jerk is the description of the way it is cooked, barbecue style, between a flame and burning wood above the meat that gives it a unique smokey flavor.
At the Cave disco, we met up with a contingent of Boston College students on spring break. Having been shunned at Fort Lauderdale and finding Key West too expensive, they found Montego Bay more accommodating. But after a while, dancing to the island’s number-one song “Twice My Age,” sung by an enchanting girl in reggae style with the refrain, “I’m in love with a man twice my age,” we went out to the beachside bar to sip Red Stripe with some Swedish sisters on a holiday, as the half-moon slipped into Montego Bay.
The next day, after a quick snorkel dive to the reef, we asked Mr. Scott to drive us to the airport for our return flight. I told Scott the next time we return, we want to circle the island via the main coast road, from Montego Bay to Kingston, where Morgan the Pirate’s Port Royale is located. Then on to Negril, which Fleming said is the most beautiful beach in the world.
As expected, Scott replied, “No problem, mon.” And he meant it.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
James Bond and Ian Fleming
THE ATLANTIC CITY SUN
Friday, January 16, 1981
OFF BOARDWALK
By William Kelly
Will the real James Bond please stand up?
In the second week of January, 1952, Ian Fleming arrived at his Jamaican estate. After taking a swim in his private lagoon, he closed the jalousies of his workroom and sat down in front of his portable typewriter. Taking a cigarette from his oxidized gold case, he lit it, inhaled deeply and began typing:
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul erosion produced by high tension becomes 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 enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him avoid mistakes and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes…”
Thus began the “spy story to end all spy stories.” The legend of the world’s most famous spy. A story that remains incomplete.
Fleming first hinted that Bond really existed in an interview in Rogue Magazine in 1961. he referred to “the distinguished American ornithologist James Bond.”
Then after Fleming’s death, John Pearson published “The Life of Ian Fleming,” in which he states Fleming took the name for his hero from the author of the book, “The Birds of the West Indies.”
Another reference to Bond mentioned that he served as curator of Birds at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. In center city Philadelphia, the Academy is a child’s playground. School children run about the tiled halls lined with exhibits of stuffed animals in glass cages. An older member of the predominately young staff remembers Bond.
“He is retired. Yes, I think there is a copy of his book in the vault in the library.”
The Princeton Antique Book Store in Atlantic City located a first American edition of “The Birds of the West Indies.” On the back cover is a picture of Bond in the field, dissecting a bird. The first thing that strikes you is the uncanny resemblance to Sean Connery, the Scottish actor who played him in the early films. Tall, thin, weith an angular face, he has a serious look about him.
In 1953, James Bond married Mary Wickham, the publisher of a small Philadelphia weekly newspaper (The Chestnut Hill Local). By 1954 he was still relatively unknown outside the fraternity of ornithologists, when early editions of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale began to get around.
Then came the films and Fleming’s novel-a-year pace, and increasing notoriety.
After John Pearson wrote Fleming’s biography, Mrs. Bond began writing books about her travels with her husband. She wrote “Far Afield in the Caribbean,” subtitled, “The Migratory Flights of a Naturalists’ Wife,” and “How 007 Really Got His Name.” Now there is her recently published “To James Bond, With Love,” (1980 Sutter House Press)
In the last story he wrote, “Octopussy,” Fleming portrays an aging, retired intelligence officer who 007 visits at a beachfront home on the north shore of Jamaica.
On February 5, 1964 James and Mary Bond visited the ailing Fleming at his home in Jamaica. A photo of the two men shows them standing at the doorstep, with Fleming’s Jamaican housekeeper Violet in the background.
The occasion was described as a memorable, dramatic, unrehearsed, spur of the moment affair.” Fleming gave Bond a copy of his latest novel and inscribed it with the note, “To the real Bond, from the thief of his identity, Ian Fleming, Feb. 5, 1964 – A Great Day!”
Five months later Ian Fleming died. Mrs. Bond says that her husband has always resented the invasion of his privacy by the fuss Fleming created, but “I have tried to put a good face on the matter, to have some fun of it when possible.”
Now, the world can rest assured, secure in the knowledge that James Bond has quietly out-lived the image maker as well as his comic book adversaries.
At the age of 81, Bond is living discreetly with his wife at the their penthouse apartment in the suburbs of Philadelphia. A retired gentleman, Bond enjoys golf and his work with birds. He vacations seasonally (at Desert Island) Maine in the summer and the islands in the winter, not unlike his feathered friends.
Occasionally he will receive a visitor who inquires about the habitat of some obscure tropical birds.
Bond should be remembered as Fleming so precisely portrayed him – sitting at the bar of his favorite West Indian haunt, taking a drag from his gold-ringed Morlan special, and self assuredly order a dry-double vodka martini – shaken, not sturred.”
Friday, January 16, 1981
OFF BOARDWALK
By William Kelly
Will the real James Bond please stand up?
In the second week of January, 1952, Ian Fleming arrived at his Jamaican estate. After taking a swim in his private lagoon, he closed the jalousies of his workroom and sat down in front of his portable typewriter. Taking a cigarette from his oxidized gold case, he lit it, inhaled deeply and began typing:
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul erosion produced by high tension becomes 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 enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him avoid mistakes and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes…”
Thus began the “spy story to end all spy stories.” The legend of the world’s most famous spy. A story that remains incomplete.
Fleming first hinted that Bond really existed in an interview in Rogue Magazine in 1961. he referred to “the distinguished American ornithologist James Bond.”
Then after Fleming’s death, John Pearson published “The Life of Ian Fleming,” in which he states Fleming took the name for his hero from the author of the book, “The Birds of the West Indies.”
Another reference to Bond mentioned that he served as curator of Birds at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. In center city Philadelphia, the Academy is a child’s playground. School children run about the tiled halls lined with exhibits of stuffed animals in glass cages. An older member of the predominately young staff remembers Bond.
“He is retired. Yes, I think there is a copy of his book in the vault in the library.”
The Princeton Antique Book Store in Atlantic City located a first American edition of “The Birds of the West Indies.” On the back cover is a picture of Bond in the field, dissecting a bird. The first thing that strikes you is the uncanny resemblance to Sean Connery, the Scottish actor who played him in the early films. Tall, thin, weith an angular face, he has a serious look about him.
In 1953, James Bond married Mary Wickham, the publisher of a small Philadelphia weekly newspaper (The Chestnut Hill Local). By 1954 he was still relatively unknown outside the fraternity of ornithologists, when early editions of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale began to get around.
Then came the films and Fleming’s novel-a-year pace, and increasing notoriety.
After John Pearson wrote Fleming’s biography, Mrs. Bond began writing books about her travels with her husband. She wrote “Far Afield in the Caribbean,” subtitled, “The Migratory Flights of a Naturalists’ Wife,” and “How 007 Really Got His Name.” Now there is her recently published “To James Bond, With Love,” (1980 Sutter House Press)
In the last story he wrote, “Octopussy,” Fleming portrays an aging, retired intelligence officer who 007 visits at a beachfront home on the north shore of Jamaica.
On February 5, 1964 James and Mary Bond visited the ailing Fleming at his home in Jamaica. A photo of the two men shows them standing at the doorstep, with Fleming’s Jamaican housekeeper Violet in the background.
The occasion was described as a memorable, dramatic, unrehearsed, spur of the moment affair.” Fleming gave Bond a copy of his latest novel and inscribed it with the note, “To the real Bond, from the thief of his identity, Ian Fleming, Feb. 5, 1964 – A Great Day!”
Five months later Ian Fleming died. Mrs. Bond says that her husband has always resented the invasion of his privacy by the fuss Fleming created, but “I have tried to put a good face on the matter, to have some fun of it when possible.”
Now, the world can rest assured, secure in the knowledge that James Bond has quietly out-lived the image maker as well as his comic book adversaries.
At the age of 81, Bond is living discreetly with his wife at the their penthouse apartment in the suburbs of Philadelphia. A retired gentleman, Bond enjoys golf and his work with birds. He vacations seasonally (at Desert Island) Maine in the summer and the islands in the winter, not unlike his feathered friends.
Occasionally he will receive a visitor who inquires about the habitat of some obscure tropical birds.
Bond should be remembered as Fleming so precisely portrayed him – sitting at the bar of his favorite West Indian haunt, taking a drag from his gold-ringed Morlan special, and self assuredly order a dry-double vodka martini – shaken, not sturred.”
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Quantum of Solace - The Real Story
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/01/greer-bond-steel
guardian.co.uk
Books Web News
Books The week in books
Series: The week in booksPrevious | Next | Index The week in booksThe male desire for explanation; the real Quantum of Solace; and merchandising fiction
Andrew Lycett writes:
It has been half-term, but I was not expecting the eager hordes when I visited the Imperial War Museum's exhibition on James Bond's creator. Ian Fleming's centenary has put him firmly back on the cultural map. Strange, then, that Quantum of Solace, the Bond film released this week, should bear no relation, bar the title, to Fleming's short story of that name. The title has a Hollywood portentousness, but the story - about a bitter matrimonial struggle in the colonies - is most unBond-like: no action; rather, a tropical mood piece in the style of Somerset Maugham.
By 1959, Fleming had written seven well-received 007 novels. But he was not satisfied with his success. His books might be popular, but not with the people he wanted. The previous year, Paul Johnson in a New Statesman essay had described Dr No as "without a doubt the nastiest book" he had ever read. Closer to home, Ann, Fleming's high-born wife, could not disguise her distaste for Bond - a standing joke with literary friends such as Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly.
Every winter, Fleming would go for three months to Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica, where he knocked out the latest of his Bond stories. But in 1959 his fire had gone. Ann had refused to accompany him and, unable to concentrate on a full-scale novel, he attempted a book of short stories, published the following year as For Your Eyes Only. But even a quota of five mini-007 tales proved beyond him. So he turned to his girlfriend in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell, for the real-life tale that became his story "Quantum of Solace". Blackwell revealed how, in 1938, she had visited her then husband, Joe Blackwell, in Mandeville, where he had been seconded to the local constabulary at the time of a rebellion that threatened to bring the colony to its knees. She had been appalled to witness one of his fellow officers being humiliated by his wife's very public extramarital affair.
She had been reminded of these events when her friend, Sylvia Foot, the wife of a recent governor general, asked her to help an unfortunate woman who had been abandoned by her husband, a former deputy police commissioner on the island. This was Elspeth Smith, the brazen adulteress of Mandeville. According to Foot, the police officer, Clive Smith, had become deputy commissioner in Jamaica. But his wife's infidelities rankled. After a trip abroad, he told her he would no longer communicate, except in writing. When, a year later, she asked for a divorce and alimony, he informed her she would be financially secure since she had the house, the car and all the furnishings. Soon afterwards, he moved to Barbados as commissioner of police. When Elspeth Smith came to sell up, she found nothing paid for. Thus Foot's appeal for charity. But Blackwell, recalling Elspeth's behaviour in 1938, felt no inclination to help.
Fleming changed the Smiths' home to Bermuda and made the policeman a diplomat, but kept the gist of the story, which in his version was told to Bond in an after-dinner conversation in Nassau about the nature of marriage. He had the narrator, the governor of the Bahamas, defining the Quantum of Solace as a precise equation of the amount of comfort necessary between two people if love is to flourish. If this figure is zero, there can be no love. Bond clearly understood, for he added that "when the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you ... you've got to get away to save yourself".
In taking this line, Fleming was commenting on his own parlous marriage. The new film makes some small obeisance to this idea by insisting that Bond is inspired by a residual sense of love to find the killers of Vesper Lynd, his girlfriend in his previous cinematic outing, Casino Royale
Blackwell at least received recompense for her authorial help. Fleming acknowledged her role by giving her what he called "a fat present" - in reality a slim wristwatch from Cartier. At last, a true Bond touch.
guardian.co.uk
Books Web News
Books The week in books
Series: The week in booksPrevious | Next | Index The week in booksThe male desire for explanation; the real Quantum of Solace; and merchandising fiction
Andrew Lycett writes:
It has been half-term, but I was not expecting the eager hordes when I visited the Imperial War Museum's exhibition on James Bond's creator. Ian Fleming's centenary has put him firmly back on the cultural map. Strange, then, that Quantum of Solace, the Bond film released this week, should bear no relation, bar the title, to Fleming's short story of that name. The title has a Hollywood portentousness, but the story - about a bitter matrimonial struggle in the colonies - is most unBond-like: no action; rather, a tropical mood piece in the style of Somerset Maugham.
By 1959, Fleming had written seven well-received 007 novels. But he was not satisfied with his success. His books might be popular, but not with the people he wanted. The previous year, Paul Johnson in a New Statesman essay had described Dr No as "without a doubt the nastiest book" he had ever read. Closer to home, Ann, Fleming's high-born wife, could not disguise her distaste for Bond - a standing joke with literary friends such as Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly.
Every winter, Fleming would go for three months to Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica, where he knocked out the latest of his Bond stories. But in 1959 his fire had gone. Ann had refused to accompany him and, unable to concentrate on a full-scale novel, he attempted a book of short stories, published the following year as For Your Eyes Only. But even a quota of five mini-007 tales proved beyond him. So he turned to his girlfriend in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell, for the real-life tale that became his story "Quantum of Solace". Blackwell revealed how, in 1938, she had visited her then husband, Joe Blackwell, in Mandeville, where he had been seconded to the local constabulary at the time of a rebellion that threatened to bring the colony to its knees. She had been appalled to witness one of his fellow officers being humiliated by his wife's very public extramarital affair.
She had been reminded of these events when her friend, Sylvia Foot, the wife of a recent governor general, asked her to help an unfortunate woman who had been abandoned by her husband, a former deputy police commissioner on the island. This was Elspeth Smith, the brazen adulteress of Mandeville. According to Foot, the police officer, Clive Smith, had become deputy commissioner in Jamaica. But his wife's infidelities rankled. After a trip abroad, he told her he would no longer communicate, except in writing. When, a year later, she asked for a divorce and alimony, he informed her she would be financially secure since she had the house, the car and all the furnishings. Soon afterwards, he moved to Barbados as commissioner of police. When Elspeth Smith came to sell up, she found nothing paid for. Thus Foot's appeal for charity. But Blackwell, recalling Elspeth's behaviour in 1938, felt no inclination to help.
Fleming changed the Smiths' home to Bermuda and made the policeman a diplomat, but kept the gist of the story, which in his version was told to Bond in an after-dinner conversation in Nassau about the nature of marriage. He had the narrator, the governor of the Bahamas, defining the Quantum of Solace as a precise equation of the amount of comfort necessary between two people if love is to flourish. If this figure is zero, there can be no love. Bond clearly understood, for he added that "when the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you ... you've got to get away to save yourself".
In taking this line, Fleming was commenting on his own parlous marriage. The new film makes some small obeisance to this idea by insisting that Bond is inspired by a residual sense of love to find the killers of Vesper Lynd, his girlfriend in his previous cinematic outing, Casino Royale
Blackwell at least received recompense for her authorial help. Fleming acknowledged her role by giving her what he called "a fat present" - in reality a slim wristwatch from Cartier. At last, a true Bond touch.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
James Bond with Nazis in Haiti
Jeff Morley, in Our Man in Mexico, (p19), writes:
“With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, America went to war. The FBI, with its network of offices throughout the Caribbean and South America, had the job of keeping track of Germans in Latin America as well. In February 1943 he was loaned out on ‘Special Confidential Assignment’ to the U.S. embassy in Cuba, an unusually rapid promotion. Win loved wartime Havana at first. He served as assistant to the embassy’s legal attaché, an FBI man named Raymond Leddy, and liked him immediately. Leddy was a trim, correct man, a native of New York City and a product of the finest Jesuit schools: Xavier High School, Holly Cross College, and Fordham Law School. Astute about FBI office politics, Leddy spoke fluent Spanish and moved with ease both in the world of the embassy and among the Cubans.”
“He took Win to the jai alai arena and introduced him to the famous writer Ernest Hemingway whose leftist political sympathies made Leddy suspicious. The bearded novelist’s alcohol-fueled reports of German submarines in Havana Bay had become the gag of the office. Win rented a room in Leddy’s tidy seaside house in the Miramar section of Havana, and their friendship grew. ‘He was well-educated, had good, even if accented, Spanish – and he had a car. He had proved to be one of my best friends, and we have kept in contact,’ Win wrote, though there was much, much more to the story than that.”
Indeed there was, as Ian Fleming, an officer in the Royal Navy, was soon to be posted as assistant to the Director of British Naval Intelligence, but was then responsible for the tracking of Nazi submarines in the Caribbean. And Hemingway was an agent of the United States Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) at the time, keeping track of Nazi subs while posing as a fisherman on his yacht the Pilar. Later Hemingway would go to Europe and cover the land war with OSS Col. David Bruce and write reports for Colliers and the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA).
NANA was owned by Ernest Cuneo and Ivor Bryce, two other OSS officers who hired Fleming after the war to run their European correspondents.
Early in the war, while on a conference on Nazi U Boat warfare in the Caribbean, Bryce took Fleming to visit his Jamaican estate, and Fleming decided to return and live there.
While Win Scott may have crossed paths with Ian Fleming when they were both keeping track of Germans in the Caribbean, Scott may have also received reports from James Bond Authenticus, the American ornithologist whose name Fleming acknowledged appropriating for his fictional secret agent 007.
Bond’s book Birds of the West Indies was a reference kept by Fleming’s breakfast table at Goldeneye, his Jamaican home where he wrote all of the Bond novels.
James Bond’s wife, Mary Wickham Bond, a journalist and publisher, wrote a non-fictional book, To James Bond With Love (Sutter House, 1980) in which she details some of her husband’s bird hunting adventures in the West Indies.
On one trip to Jamaica, James and Mary Bond rented a car and took a drive along the scenic North Shore, and stopped in to visit Ian Fleming. Fleming had them for lunch, and they joked about how the fictional 007 likes his meals cooked, and what he real James Bond preferred.
In her book To James Bond With Love (p. 56), Mary Bond reflects on some other experiences of the real James Bond, reports about which may have crossed the desk of Win Scott and Raymond Leddy in Havana, keeping track of Germans in the Caribbean.
“If Ian Fleming had lived longer, it’s a safe guess that he and Jim (Bond) would have met again,” Mrs. Bond wrote. “Fiction writers are scavengers when seeking material for their fabrications, and Fleming might have easily extracted from Jim his enigmatic experience in World War II in Haiti. He arrived in Port-au-Prince in May 1941 for the sole purpose of studying birds on Morne La Selle, a plateau over 6,000 feet high. He put up at the little Hotel de Reix at Kenscoff, a small settlement at about 4,000 feet and tried to obtain two porters to carry his camping material. No one would so. A German, he was told by the habitants, had built an airstrip high on the ridge and would not allow anyone to go up there. Jim asked where the German lived, and the natives pointed to the summit of nearby Morne Tranchant which is covered by low scrubby woods. Jim was doubtful of this, for he was used to near enough gestures from the islanders when asked the location of some rare bird, but decided to go up and see for himself.”
“He climbed to the top of the mountain and found on the edge of a small clearing a very neat cottage well hidden in the foliage. The German who came out was very pleasant, spoke excellent English, and although he did not say, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume,’ to Jim’s astonishment he knew who he was and told him to go ahead wherever he pleased on the La Selle ridge. Jim was so absorbed in his own objectives he forgot all about the alleged airstrip and went on his way without even asking about it.”
“When leaving Haiti for home, he was forced, owing to the war, to travel on a freighter from St. Marc to New York. Back in Philadelphia he told his friend Brandon Barringer about the encounter with the German, and Brandon took it up with the authorities in Washington. Jim was promptly visited at the Academy of Natural Sciences by Army, and then Navy, Intelligence officers. Fleming would have been intrigued with the final twist to the story. The Intelligence people asked a lot of foolish questions and seemed far more suspicious about Jim’s reasons for climbing Morne La Selle, than about the German’s activities.”
“Another episode Fleming might have adapted for his as yet unborn 007 was during Machado’s regime in Cuba.....”
“With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, America went to war. The FBI, with its network of offices throughout the Caribbean and South America, had the job of keeping track of Germans in Latin America as well. In February 1943 he was loaned out on ‘Special Confidential Assignment’ to the U.S. embassy in Cuba, an unusually rapid promotion. Win loved wartime Havana at first. He served as assistant to the embassy’s legal attaché, an FBI man named Raymond Leddy, and liked him immediately. Leddy was a trim, correct man, a native of New York City and a product of the finest Jesuit schools: Xavier High School, Holly Cross College, and Fordham Law School. Astute about FBI office politics, Leddy spoke fluent Spanish and moved with ease both in the world of the embassy and among the Cubans.”
“He took Win to the jai alai arena and introduced him to the famous writer Ernest Hemingway whose leftist political sympathies made Leddy suspicious. The bearded novelist’s alcohol-fueled reports of German submarines in Havana Bay had become the gag of the office. Win rented a room in Leddy’s tidy seaside house in the Miramar section of Havana, and their friendship grew. ‘He was well-educated, had good, even if accented, Spanish – and he had a car. He had proved to be one of my best friends, and we have kept in contact,’ Win wrote, though there was much, much more to the story than that.”
Indeed there was, as Ian Fleming, an officer in the Royal Navy, was soon to be posted as assistant to the Director of British Naval Intelligence, but was then responsible for the tracking of Nazi submarines in the Caribbean. And Hemingway was an agent of the United States Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) at the time, keeping track of Nazi subs while posing as a fisherman on his yacht the Pilar. Later Hemingway would go to Europe and cover the land war with OSS Col. David Bruce and write reports for Colliers and the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA).
NANA was owned by Ernest Cuneo and Ivor Bryce, two other OSS officers who hired Fleming after the war to run their European correspondents.
Early in the war, while on a conference on Nazi U Boat warfare in the Caribbean, Bryce took Fleming to visit his Jamaican estate, and Fleming decided to return and live there.
While Win Scott may have crossed paths with Ian Fleming when they were both keeping track of Germans in the Caribbean, Scott may have also received reports from James Bond Authenticus, the American ornithologist whose name Fleming acknowledged appropriating for his fictional secret agent 007.
Bond’s book Birds of the West Indies was a reference kept by Fleming’s breakfast table at Goldeneye, his Jamaican home where he wrote all of the Bond novels.
James Bond’s wife, Mary Wickham Bond, a journalist and publisher, wrote a non-fictional book, To James Bond With Love (Sutter House, 1980) in which she details some of her husband’s bird hunting adventures in the West Indies.
On one trip to Jamaica, James and Mary Bond rented a car and took a drive along the scenic North Shore, and stopped in to visit Ian Fleming. Fleming had them for lunch, and they joked about how the fictional 007 likes his meals cooked, and what he real James Bond preferred.
In her book To James Bond With Love (p. 56), Mary Bond reflects on some other experiences of the real James Bond, reports about which may have crossed the desk of Win Scott and Raymond Leddy in Havana, keeping track of Germans in the Caribbean.
“If Ian Fleming had lived longer, it’s a safe guess that he and Jim (Bond) would have met again,” Mrs. Bond wrote. “Fiction writers are scavengers when seeking material for their fabrications, and Fleming might have easily extracted from Jim his enigmatic experience in World War II in Haiti. He arrived in Port-au-Prince in May 1941 for the sole purpose of studying birds on Morne La Selle, a plateau over 6,000 feet high. He put up at the little Hotel de Reix at Kenscoff, a small settlement at about 4,000 feet and tried to obtain two porters to carry his camping material. No one would so. A German, he was told by the habitants, had built an airstrip high on the ridge and would not allow anyone to go up there. Jim asked where the German lived, and the natives pointed to the summit of nearby Morne Tranchant which is covered by low scrubby woods. Jim was doubtful of this, for he was used to near enough gestures from the islanders when asked the location of some rare bird, but decided to go up and see for himself.”
“He climbed to the top of the mountain and found on the edge of a small clearing a very neat cottage well hidden in the foliage. The German who came out was very pleasant, spoke excellent English, and although he did not say, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume,’ to Jim’s astonishment he knew who he was and told him to go ahead wherever he pleased on the La Selle ridge. Jim was so absorbed in his own objectives he forgot all about the alleged airstrip and went on his way without even asking about it.”
“When leaving Haiti for home, he was forced, owing to the war, to travel on a freighter from St. Marc to New York. Back in Philadelphia he told his friend Brandon Barringer about the encounter with the German, and Brandon took it up with the authorities in Washington. Jim was promptly visited at the Academy of Natural Sciences by Army, and then Navy, Intelligence officers. Fleming would have been intrigued with the final twist to the story. The Intelligence people asked a lot of foolish questions and seemed far more suspicious about Jim’s reasons for climbing Morne La Selle, than about the German’s activities.”
“Another episode Fleming might have adapted for his as yet unborn 007 was during Machado’s regime in Cuba.....”
James Bond & the Cambridge Spy Ring
JAMES BOND & THE CAMBRIDGE SPY RING
More secrets emerged after the death of James Bond in 1989, and a few were publicized when new academic biographies of both Bond and Ian Fleming were published - The Private Life of James Bond, a profile of James Bond the ornithologist, by history professor David R. Contosta (Sutter House, 1993), and The Man Behind James Bond (Turner Books, 1995) by Andrew Lycett.
With the official approval and cooperation of Fleming’s estate, family and friends, Andrew Lycett continued to promote the false myth that Fleming began his spy novels on a lark, to take his mind of marriage, and despairingly refers to James Bond as an “unknown academic.”
Yet Lycett teases with the truth by brining the Cambridge spy ring to the table. During World War II Fleming had said he wanted to write “the spy story to end all spy stories,” and when he sat down to is desk at his Jamaican beach house in January, 1952, the biggest spy story of the century was slowly unfolding in back alleys, capitol offices and headlines around the world.
It was unthinkable that the best and brightest of England’s native sons could betray their nation’s most precious secrets to the Soviet Union, yet that was what was just beginning to be understood. One year earlier, on May 28, 1951, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess disappeared shortly before McLean was to be arrested for espionage, setting off a search for a “Third Man,” suspected of tipping them off as to MacLean’s impending doom.
Since both Burgess and Mclean attended Cambridge University, suspicion immediately fell on their former schoolmate and friend Kim Philby, the MI6 British Secret Service liaison to the United State’s CIA, former head of the MI6 bureau responsible for Soviet counter-intelligence, and one of the few primary candidates to head the British Secret Service. While the suspicions put a strain in U.S. – British relations, it also strongly affected Ian Fleming, a Philby colleague whose generation of friends and associates were caught exposed and vulnerable by the betrayal their own friends, associates and countrymen.
Four months after Burgess and Maclean escaped to Russia, Ian and his wife Ann visited their friends Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife Clarissa. According to Lycett, “The Prime Minister was unwell, largely as a result of the anguish he was experiencing about the enduring subject of the ‘Missing Diplomats’. A White Paper on Burgess and Maclean’s defection to Moscow had just been published and the government was being forced to lie about the case, falsely denying that the two traitors’ colleague Kim Philby was the ‘Third Man’. Clarissa Eden begged her guests not to mention any of these names in front of her husband. When they were alone, Ian and Ann asked her for more details.”
The subject was also taboo when Fleming sat down with his old friend and mentor, Sir William Stephenson [The man called INTREPID], reports Lycett, as “Curiously, Ian did not mention…the intelligence-related matter which obsessed the chattering classes of the time – the disappearance in May of two senior Foreign Office officials, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who were suspected of being communist spys. When Ian and Ann had entertained Cyril Connolly and Noel Coward in September, they had spoken of little else. How could such pillars of the Establishment nurtured an ideological commitment for Marxism?”
Connolly was actually with Maclean on the day before he fled, and [in Douglas Southerland’s The Fourth Man – The Story of Blunt, Philby, Burgess and MacLean, Arrow Books, 1980], Connolly is quoted as saying, “…I knew them both and actually
Lunched with Maclean the day before he disappeared. The point I wanted to mention to you was that on that day I am sure he had no intention of leaving the way he did. He spoke to me so normally as to his private affairs…this makes me feel that, subsequent to meeting me on May 24th, he received some warning that he was under suspicion, and immediately left the country with Burgess. It may be, therefore, that someone in the Foreign Office told him….” Now we know that person was Kim Philby.
The Sunday Times had commissioned Cyril Connolly to write a story on the missing diplomats, and Fleming wanted to expand the article into a book for his publishing house, Queen Ann Press, whose offices share the same Queen Anne’s Gate underground stop with those who work at the offices of the British Secret Service.
While mocking Fleming’s actual intentions and motives, Lycett acknowledged that Fleming’s first novel was inspired by the betrayals of the Cambridge syps when he wrote, “What raised Casino Royale out of the usual run of thrillers was Ian’s attempt to reflect the disturbing moral ambiguity of a post-war world that could produce traitors like Burgess and Maclean. Although Bond is presented like Bulldog Drummond with all the trappings of a traditional fictional secret agent (such as his Bentley), in fact he needs ‘Marshall Aid’ from Leiter to enable him to continue his baccarat game with Le Chiffre. Bond is rescued from his kidnappers not by the British or the Americans but by the Russians, who complete the job he should of done of eliminating Le Chiffre. Bond does not even get the girl: [ Vesper ] she has been duplicitous throughout, betraying not only him personally but all Western Intelligence’s anti-Soviet operations. No wonder, feeling let down and abandoned, he fails to conceal his bitterness at the end and spits out, ‘The bitch is dead now.’”
Casino Royale was Ian Fleming’s response to the betrayal of the Cambridge spy ring, portraying the women who loved James Bond as the sexy snake who actually worked for the opposition, much like the sexual ambiguity and background of the Cambridge spies. After writing Casino Royale in Jamaica in January, Fleming and his wife returned to England for the birth of their son Casper.
After dropping her off a the hospital, Fleming visited an old friend from school days, the American born Whitney Straight, chairman of the BOAC airlines. Both Whitney Straight, described as a playboy race driver, and his younger brother were personal friends of Guy Burgess and according to Lycett the case of the Missing Diplomats is what they discussed.
Ian Fleming’s father had established the family banking interests in America with J. P. Morgan, a firm that included Whitney and Michael Straight’s father, and with whom Fleming himself was affiliated with for a while. Both Whitney and Michael Straight attended Cambridge, where they knew Guy Burgess from the hunting and drinking social set at the Pitt Club. Straight considered Burgess an “alcoholic adventurer, a name dropper and a gypsy.” At Cambridge Michael Straight, was recruited into the Cambridge spy cell by art historian Anthony Blunt, the Fourth Man.
Although a reluctant Soviet spy, Michael Straight retained his friendship with Blunt, Philby, Burgess and Maclean. As editor and publisher of the New Republic Michael Striaght published some of Philby’s commentaries from Lebanon, where he was exiled to in 1956.
Ian Fleming even went so far as to reach out to Burgess and Maclean, after they defected, asking his friend and associate Dick Hughes, the Far East correspondent, to try to contact them. Hughes, also a character in Fleming’s novels, introduced both Fleming and Somerset Maugham to the intricacies and lifestyle of Tokyo, as reflected in their novels. Hughes, one of Fleming’s Mercury team, obtained the first ever interview with Burgess and Maclean in exile, by urging the Russians to produce the two defectors before a planned summit conference. In February, 1956, Burgess and Maclean met Hughes in the lobby of a Moscow hotel and handed him a statement, the first acknowledgement that Burgess and Maclean were spys, had defected and were living comfortably behind the Iron Curtain.
The summit itself was interrupted in true Flemingesque fashion, when a frogman, “Buster” Crabb, was sent into the Thames to inspect the hull and propellers of the Russian cruiser that brought diplomats to London. When Crabb failed to surface, and his headless body later washed ashore, exposing supposedly secret operations, heads rolled at St. James Gate. The subsequent public scandal became almost as significant as the U2 incident that later cancelled the Eisenhower-Kruschev summit. Nicholas Elliot was second in the chain of command on the operation, and had personally selected Crabb as the frogman. So that stain on Elliot’s career, and his steadfast faith in Philby, would set him up to put an end to the Philby problem. It was Elliot, Fleming’s primary contact with MI6, who was selected to confront Philby when evidence of his duplicity would be undeniable.
Although you wouldn’t know it from reading his official biographies, which promote the real James Bond as an “unknown academic” and the 007 novels as being written, in ornithological terms, “on a lark,” Ian Fleming was actually in the thick of the double-agent duplicity.
In November, 1956, Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 visited Washington D.C. to brief the Americans about the missing diplomats and Third Man affair. Driving Hollis around Washington, Richard Helms of the CIA asked Hollis, “Who’s this writer Ian Fleming?” Helms mentioned the recently published book Live and Let Die, but Hollis simply replied, “Don’t know.”
A few days later it was revealed that Prime Minister Anthony Eton had flown to Jamaica to spend some time at Fleming’s Goldeneye beach house, sparking Helms to assume “The man lied. Hollis must have cleared the prime minister to stay with Fleming,” writes Tom Bower [in The Perfect English Spy – The Unknown Man In Charge During The Most Tumultuous, Scandal-Ridden Era In Espionage History], a biography of Sir Dick White.
Bower also notes, “Michael Straight, an accomplished American whose family boasted East Coast wealth and influence, had known Anthony Blunt in 1934 while studying at Trinity [College, Cambridge]. Already inclined towards socialism, Straight had become immersed in Cambridge’s communist movement. Before returning to America in 1937, he had been invited to join Blunt and Burgess’ conspiracy but had refused. Even thirteen years later when he met Burgess again in Washington, he volunteered that he had never betrayed his friends. But in 1963 Straight was offered a government post and, apparently fearful of exposure, he had spent June closeted with FBI officers….By any measure, the confession was a major breakthrough. Not surprisingly, the MI5 officer returned to Britain excited about the disclosure. The molehunt had been legitimized.”
Michael Straight kept his secret knowledge of the Cambridge spy ring until John F. Kennedy, President of the United States, wanted to appoint Michael Straight director of the National Endowment for the Arts, which he first accepted and then turned down when confronted with an FBI background check.
According to John Costello (Mask of Trechery – Spys, Lies and Betrayal, Warner Books, 1988), Straight confessed to the FBI and told them about his attempted recruitment while a student at Cambridge. Costello, who died suspiciously while writing about these things, Straight “…was given a list of eighty-five Americans who attended Cambridge University between the years 1930 and 1934, from which he picked out one American, who he knew casually at the Department of State. He then named two more Americans with whom he had studied at Cambridge between 1936 and 1937 and whom he knew to have been Trinity cell members or Communist sympathizers…The FBI representatives in the U.S. embassy in London recommended a full review of all Americans who studied at either Oxford or Cambridge before the war.”
As head of the FBI, responsible for counter-intelligence in the United States, J. Edgar Hover inexplicitly, according to Costello, balked at “the political repercussions of an investigation of over 500 American citizens with no basis for such an inquiry in fact…”.
The CIA however, had no such qualms, and says Costello, “as a result, the records of nearly six hundred American who had attended either Oxford or Cambridge before World War II were carefully compiled, examined and scrutinized,” among them James Bond, who not only attended Cambridge, but was a member of the exclusive Pitt Club.
Born in Philadelphia on January 4, 1900, Bond attended the exclusive St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, but because Bond’s father had business in England and eventually married an Englishwomen, James Bond attended Harrow and Cambridge, before returning to America and embarking on his ornithological pursuit and survey of birds that led to the publication of his book Birds of the West Indies.
It was not the first time the American intelligence agencies had taken an interest in James Bond. During World War II Bond went to Haiti on an ornithological expedition to a remote area of the island country, where he encountered a German on Morne La Selle mountain, a recluse who maintained an airstrip. Bond told his friend Brandon Barringer about the German, and Bond was subsequently interviewed by Army and Navy Intelligence investigators at his office at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. According to Mrs. Bond, “The intelligence people asked a lot of foolish questions and seemed far more suspicious about Jim’s reason for climbing Morne La Selle than about the German’s activities.”
As one of the American students at Cambridge before World War II, James Bond was one of the over 500 such students who fit the profile of those being investigated, although Bond was there a decade before the Cambridge spy cell was first organized. If recruited by a professor however, others students could have been to Cambridge, been recruited and left without being uncovered, and remain as sleeper agents in high government offices.
With Michael Straight’s confession to the FBI and then to the British MI5, Philby could no longer bluff his way out of being exposed at the Third Man after all. Chosen to go to Beruit to confront Philby and get his confession, Nicholas Elliot was Ian Fleming’s contact at MI6, where Fleming’s older brother Peter also worked as a special agent.
Nicholas Elliot’s father, Charles Elliot, was the headmaster at Eton, where the old school ties began with the original “C,” Sir Stewart Menzies, and continued with other Etonians, including Ian Fleming and Guy Burgess. As Maclean lunched with Cryil Connolly on the day before he fled, Burgess returned to his old school and visited with a former history professor, ostensibly to discuss the biography Burgess was writing about the Earl of Sandwich.
Their defection would spark Philby’s relocation to Lebanon, where Philby would remain in Beruit until confronted by Elliot, and finally acknowledge his betrayal. But before Philby was allowed to flee on the heels of Burgess and Maclean, Fleming himself visited Beruit.
Before the civil war, Beruit was the jewel of the Mediterranean, with hotels, casinos and a bustling nightlife. When Fleming arrived he immediately checked in with Elliot. According to Lycett, “Their conversation ranged over a variety of intelligence-related topics, including Kim Philby, a key participant in the Missing Diplomats affair, who had been working in Beirut as a newspaperman since 1956. Ian told Elliot that he had his own minor freelance intelligence assignment to perform: the then NID chief Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denniung had asked him for information about the Iraqi port of Basra…Ian did not delay…. he asked to leave, saying he had a rendezvous with an Armenian in the Place de Canons in the center of town.”
“Perhaps,” speculates Lycett, “Ian was meeting Philby,” But again belittling the situation, he writes that, “Elliot had the distinct impression his dinner guest had arranged to see a pornographic film in full color and sound.” Shortly thereafter, Philby, like Burgess and Maclean before him, disappeared, only to surface a few months later in Moscow, sending back postcards, from Russia, with love.
Whether Fleming went to Beruit to see a porno film or meet with Philby, the betrayal of the Cambridge spy cell weighted heavy on Fleming, and undisputedly affected his work, both professionally and his literature, and by extension, the mass market movies based on his stories.
In Die Another Day, the last James Bond film starring Pierce Brosnan, 007 stops at a cabana beach bar in Cuba where he orders a drink while perusing a book, which if you look closely, is clearly Birds of the West Indies by James Bond.
“I’m here for the birds,” 007 announces, as Halle Berry walks out of the water in a scene from the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, in which 007 masquerades as an ornithologist, and Ursula Andress emerged from the surf as the first “Bond Girl.”
The next movie, a throwback to the original Casino Royale, Daniel Craig will portray the new 007 in the 21st Bond film, which reportedly will return to Fleming’s original portrayal of James Bond, without all the “guns, girls and gadgets,” that came to dominate the later movies.
In a fictional “biography of James Bond,” Fleming’s original, official biographer, John Pierson, claims that in the course of his researching the life of Fleming, he discovered the existence of the real James Bond, who he met in the lobby of an island hotel. Pierson wrote that Fleming’s real purpose in writing the James Bond stories was to make James Bond such a comic book super hero that the Russians would fail to take the real James Bond seriously, allowing him to continue his secret work anonymously.
Such a secret, literary psychological warfare operation was not unique, as Jim Hougan demonstrates [in Secret Agenda – Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (Random House, 1984) ], where he mentions that Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt is also, “The author of more than four dozen pulp thrillers and novels of the occult.”
According to Hougan, “Hunt left the agency in furtherance of a counterintelligence scheme that revolved around his literary efforts. The purpose of the scheme, according to government sources familiar with Hunt’s curriculum vitae at the agency, was to draw the KGB’s attention to books that Hunt was writing under the pseudonym David St. john. These spy novels alluded to actual CIA operations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and contained barely disguised portraits of political figures as diverse as Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It was the CIA’s intention that the KGB be led to believe that the books contained security breeches, and towards that end the agency created a phony ‘flap’ that was capped by Hunt’s supposedly ‘forced retirement.’…”
Hunt’s literary scheme, that “contained barely disguised portraits of political figures” was unoriginally based on Fleming’s success with James Bond, and a web of fictional characters based on real people whose stories wove a web of intrigue that is more incredible than the novelized account.
In retrospect, unlike other mythical super heroes like Sherlock Holmes and Superman, whether purposely contrived or by coincidence, its kind of reassuring that there was a real James Bond. A James Bond who really was an anonymous hero, who did go far into the field and discover something new, reported what he learned, and as a proficient naturalist, made the world a better place to live.
And that’s more important that the idea he may also have been a secret agent who played a major role in cold war double-agent duplicity, the Bay of Pigs, Cuba and Grenada. Now, in days of equally impearling crisis, where is James Bond, now that we really need him?
xxxxx
More secrets emerged after the death of James Bond in 1989, and a few were publicized when new academic biographies of both Bond and Ian Fleming were published - The Private Life of James Bond, a profile of James Bond the ornithologist, by history professor David R. Contosta (Sutter House, 1993), and The Man Behind James Bond (Turner Books, 1995) by Andrew Lycett.
With the official approval and cooperation of Fleming’s estate, family and friends, Andrew Lycett continued to promote the false myth that Fleming began his spy novels on a lark, to take his mind of marriage, and despairingly refers to James Bond as an “unknown academic.”
Yet Lycett teases with the truth by brining the Cambridge spy ring to the table. During World War II Fleming had said he wanted to write “the spy story to end all spy stories,” and when he sat down to is desk at his Jamaican beach house in January, 1952, the biggest spy story of the century was slowly unfolding in back alleys, capitol offices and headlines around the world.
It was unthinkable that the best and brightest of England’s native sons could betray their nation’s most precious secrets to the Soviet Union, yet that was what was just beginning to be understood. One year earlier, on May 28, 1951, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess disappeared shortly before McLean was to be arrested for espionage, setting off a search for a “Third Man,” suspected of tipping them off as to MacLean’s impending doom.
Since both Burgess and Mclean attended Cambridge University, suspicion immediately fell on their former schoolmate and friend Kim Philby, the MI6 British Secret Service liaison to the United State’s CIA, former head of the MI6 bureau responsible for Soviet counter-intelligence, and one of the few primary candidates to head the British Secret Service. While the suspicions put a strain in U.S. – British relations, it also strongly affected Ian Fleming, a Philby colleague whose generation of friends and associates were caught exposed and vulnerable by the betrayal their own friends, associates and countrymen.
Four months after Burgess and Maclean escaped to Russia, Ian and his wife Ann visited their friends Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife Clarissa. According to Lycett, “The Prime Minister was unwell, largely as a result of the anguish he was experiencing about the enduring subject of the ‘Missing Diplomats’. A White Paper on Burgess and Maclean’s defection to Moscow had just been published and the government was being forced to lie about the case, falsely denying that the two traitors’ colleague Kim Philby was the ‘Third Man’. Clarissa Eden begged her guests not to mention any of these names in front of her husband. When they were alone, Ian and Ann asked her for more details.”
The subject was also taboo when Fleming sat down with his old friend and mentor, Sir William Stephenson [The man called INTREPID], reports Lycett, as “Curiously, Ian did not mention…the intelligence-related matter which obsessed the chattering classes of the time – the disappearance in May of two senior Foreign Office officials, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who were suspected of being communist spys. When Ian and Ann had entertained Cyril Connolly and Noel Coward in September, they had spoken of little else. How could such pillars of the Establishment nurtured an ideological commitment for Marxism?”
Connolly was actually with Maclean on the day before he fled, and [in Douglas Southerland’s The Fourth Man – The Story of Blunt, Philby, Burgess and MacLean, Arrow Books, 1980], Connolly is quoted as saying, “…I knew them both and actually
Lunched with Maclean the day before he disappeared. The point I wanted to mention to you was that on that day I am sure he had no intention of leaving the way he did. He spoke to me so normally as to his private affairs…this makes me feel that, subsequent to meeting me on May 24th, he received some warning that he was under suspicion, and immediately left the country with Burgess. It may be, therefore, that someone in the Foreign Office told him….” Now we know that person was Kim Philby.
The Sunday Times had commissioned Cyril Connolly to write a story on the missing diplomats, and Fleming wanted to expand the article into a book for his publishing house, Queen Ann Press, whose offices share the same Queen Anne’s Gate underground stop with those who work at the offices of the British Secret Service.
While mocking Fleming’s actual intentions and motives, Lycett acknowledged that Fleming’s first novel was inspired by the betrayals of the Cambridge syps when he wrote, “What raised Casino Royale out of the usual run of thrillers was Ian’s attempt to reflect the disturbing moral ambiguity of a post-war world that could produce traitors like Burgess and Maclean. Although Bond is presented like Bulldog Drummond with all the trappings of a traditional fictional secret agent (such as his Bentley), in fact he needs ‘Marshall Aid’ from Leiter to enable him to continue his baccarat game with Le Chiffre. Bond is rescued from his kidnappers not by the British or the Americans but by the Russians, who complete the job he should of done of eliminating Le Chiffre. Bond does not even get the girl: [ Vesper ] she has been duplicitous throughout, betraying not only him personally but all Western Intelligence’s anti-Soviet operations. No wonder, feeling let down and abandoned, he fails to conceal his bitterness at the end and spits out, ‘The bitch is dead now.’”
Casino Royale was Ian Fleming’s response to the betrayal of the Cambridge spy ring, portraying the women who loved James Bond as the sexy snake who actually worked for the opposition, much like the sexual ambiguity and background of the Cambridge spies. After writing Casino Royale in Jamaica in January, Fleming and his wife returned to England for the birth of their son Casper.
After dropping her off a the hospital, Fleming visited an old friend from school days, the American born Whitney Straight, chairman of the BOAC airlines. Both Whitney Straight, described as a playboy race driver, and his younger brother were personal friends of Guy Burgess and according to Lycett the case of the Missing Diplomats is what they discussed.
Ian Fleming’s father had established the family banking interests in America with J. P. Morgan, a firm that included Whitney and Michael Straight’s father, and with whom Fleming himself was affiliated with for a while. Both Whitney and Michael Straight attended Cambridge, where they knew Guy Burgess from the hunting and drinking social set at the Pitt Club. Straight considered Burgess an “alcoholic adventurer, a name dropper and a gypsy.” At Cambridge Michael Straight, was recruited into the Cambridge spy cell by art historian Anthony Blunt, the Fourth Man.
Although a reluctant Soviet spy, Michael Straight retained his friendship with Blunt, Philby, Burgess and Maclean. As editor and publisher of the New Republic Michael Striaght published some of Philby’s commentaries from Lebanon, where he was exiled to in 1956.
Ian Fleming even went so far as to reach out to Burgess and Maclean, after they defected, asking his friend and associate Dick Hughes, the Far East correspondent, to try to contact them. Hughes, also a character in Fleming’s novels, introduced both Fleming and Somerset Maugham to the intricacies and lifestyle of Tokyo, as reflected in their novels. Hughes, one of Fleming’s Mercury team, obtained the first ever interview with Burgess and Maclean in exile, by urging the Russians to produce the two defectors before a planned summit conference. In February, 1956, Burgess and Maclean met Hughes in the lobby of a Moscow hotel and handed him a statement, the first acknowledgement that Burgess and Maclean were spys, had defected and were living comfortably behind the Iron Curtain.
The summit itself was interrupted in true Flemingesque fashion, when a frogman, “Buster” Crabb, was sent into the Thames to inspect the hull and propellers of the Russian cruiser that brought diplomats to London. When Crabb failed to surface, and his headless body later washed ashore, exposing supposedly secret operations, heads rolled at St. James Gate. The subsequent public scandal became almost as significant as the U2 incident that later cancelled the Eisenhower-Kruschev summit. Nicholas Elliot was second in the chain of command on the operation, and had personally selected Crabb as the frogman. So that stain on Elliot’s career, and his steadfast faith in Philby, would set him up to put an end to the Philby problem. It was Elliot, Fleming’s primary contact with MI6, who was selected to confront Philby when evidence of his duplicity would be undeniable.
Although you wouldn’t know it from reading his official biographies, which promote the real James Bond as an “unknown academic” and the 007 novels as being written, in ornithological terms, “on a lark,” Ian Fleming was actually in the thick of the double-agent duplicity.
In November, 1956, Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 visited Washington D.C. to brief the Americans about the missing diplomats and Third Man affair. Driving Hollis around Washington, Richard Helms of the CIA asked Hollis, “Who’s this writer Ian Fleming?” Helms mentioned the recently published book Live and Let Die, but Hollis simply replied, “Don’t know.”
A few days later it was revealed that Prime Minister Anthony Eton had flown to Jamaica to spend some time at Fleming’s Goldeneye beach house, sparking Helms to assume “The man lied. Hollis must have cleared the prime minister to stay with Fleming,” writes Tom Bower [in The Perfect English Spy – The Unknown Man In Charge During The Most Tumultuous, Scandal-Ridden Era In Espionage History], a biography of Sir Dick White.
Bower also notes, “Michael Straight, an accomplished American whose family boasted East Coast wealth and influence, had known Anthony Blunt in 1934 while studying at Trinity [College, Cambridge]. Already inclined towards socialism, Straight had become immersed in Cambridge’s communist movement. Before returning to America in 1937, he had been invited to join Blunt and Burgess’ conspiracy but had refused. Even thirteen years later when he met Burgess again in Washington, he volunteered that he had never betrayed his friends. But in 1963 Straight was offered a government post and, apparently fearful of exposure, he had spent June closeted with FBI officers….By any measure, the confession was a major breakthrough. Not surprisingly, the MI5 officer returned to Britain excited about the disclosure. The molehunt had been legitimized.”
Michael Straight kept his secret knowledge of the Cambridge spy ring until John F. Kennedy, President of the United States, wanted to appoint Michael Straight director of the National Endowment for the Arts, which he first accepted and then turned down when confronted with an FBI background check.
According to John Costello (Mask of Trechery – Spys, Lies and Betrayal, Warner Books, 1988), Straight confessed to the FBI and told them about his attempted recruitment while a student at Cambridge. Costello, who died suspiciously while writing about these things, Straight “…was given a list of eighty-five Americans who attended Cambridge University between the years 1930 and 1934, from which he picked out one American, who he knew casually at the Department of State. He then named two more Americans with whom he had studied at Cambridge between 1936 and 1937 and whom he knew to have been Trinity cell members or Communist sympathizers…The FBI representatives in the U.S. embassy in London recommended a full review of all Americans who studied at either Oxford or Cambridge before the war.”
As head of the FBI, responsible for counter-intelligence in the United States, J. Edgar Hover inexplicitly, according to Costello, balked at “the political repercussions of an investigation of over 500 American citizens with no basis for such an inquiry in fact…”.
The CIA however, had no such qualms, and says Costello, “as a result, the records of nearly six hundred American who had attended either Oxford or Cambridge before World War II were carefully compiled, examined and scrutinized,” among them James Bond, who not only attended Cambridge, but was a member of the exclusive Pitt Club.
Born in Philadelphia on January 4, 1900, Bond attended the exclusive St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, but because Bond’s father had business in England and eventually married an Englishwomen, James Bond attended Harrow and Cambridge, before returning to America and embarking on his ornithological pursuit and survey of birds that led to the publication of his book Birds of the West Indies.
It was not the first time the American intelligence agencies had taken an interest in James Bond. During World War II Bond went to Haiti on an ornithological expedition to a remote area of the island country, where he encountered a German on Morne La Selle mountain, a recluse who maintained an airstrip. Bond told his friend Brandon Barringer about the German, and Bond was subsequently interviewed by Army and Navy Intelligence investigators at his office at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. According to Mrs. Bond, “The intelligence people asked a lot of foolish questions and seemed far more suspicious about Jim’s reason for climbing Morne La Selle than about the German’s activities.”
As one of the American students at Cambridge before World War II, James Bond was one of the over 500 such students who fit the profile of those being investigated, although Bond was there a decade before the Cambridge spy cell was first organized. If recruited by a professor however, others students could have been to Cambridge, been recruited and left without being uncovered, and remain as sleeper agents in high government offices.
With Michael Straight’s confession to the FBI and then to the British MI5, Philby could no longer bluff his way out of being exposed at the Third Man after all. Chosen to go to Beruit to confront Philby and get his confession, Nicholas Elliot was Ian Fleming’s contact at MI6, where Fleming’s older brother Peter also worked as a special agent.
Nicholas Elliot’s father, Charles Elliot, was the headmaster at Eton, where the old school ties began with the original “C,” Sir Stewart Menzies, and continued with other Etonians, including Ian Fleming and Guy Burgess. As Maclean lunched with Cryil Connolly on the day before he fled, Burgess returned to his old school and visited with a former history professor, ostensibly to discuss the biography Burgess was writing about the Earl of Sandwich.
Their defection would spark Philby’s relocation to Lebanon, where Philby would remain in Beruit until confronted by Elliot, and finally acknowledge his betrayal. But before Philby was allowed to flee on the heels of Burgess and Maclean, Fleming himself visited Beruit.
Before the civil war, Beruit was the jewel of the Mediterranean, with hotels, casinos and a bustling nightlife. When Fleming arrived he immediately checked in with Elliot. According to Lycett, “Their conversation ranged over a variety of intelligence-related topics, including Kim Philby, a key participant in the Missing Diplomats affair, who had been working in Beirut as a newspaperman since 1956. Ian told Elliot that he had his own minor freelance intelligence assignment to perform: the then NID chief Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denniung had asked him for information about the Iraqi port of Basra…Ian did not delay…. he asked to leave, saying he had a rendezvous with an Armenian in the Place de Canons in the center of town.”
“Perhaps,” speculates Lycett, “Ian was meeting Philby,” But again belittling the situation, he writes that, “Elliot had the distinct impression his dinner guest had arranged to see a pornographic film in full color and sound.” Shortly thereafter, Philby, like Burgess and Maclean before him, disappeared, only to surface a few months later in Moscow, sending back postcards, from Russia, with love.
Whether Fleming went to Beruit to see a porno film or meet with Philby, the betrayal of the Cambridge spy cell weighted heavy on Fleming, and undisputedly affected his work, both professionally and his literature, and by extension, the mass market movies based on his stories.
In Die Another Day, the last James Bond film starring Pierce Brosnan, 007 stops at a cabana beach bar in Cuba where he orders a drink while perusing a book, which if you look closely, is clearly Birds of the West Indies by James Bond.
“I’m here for the birds,” 007 announces, as Halle Berry walks out of the water in a scene from the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, in which 007 masquerades as an ornithologist, and Ursula Andress emerged from the surf as the first “Bond Girl.”
The next movie, a throwback to the original Casino Royale, Daniel Craig will portray the new 007 in the 21st Bond film, which reportedly will return to Fleming’s original portrayal of James Bond, without all the “guns, girls and gadgets,” that came to dominate the later movies.
In a fictional “biography of James Bond,” Fleming’s original, official biographer, John Pierson, claims that in the course of his researching the life of Fleming, he discovered the existence of the real James Bond, who he met in the lobby of an island hotel. Pierson wrote that Fleming’s real purpose in writing the James Bond stories was to make James Bond such a comic book super hero that the Russians would fail to take the real James Bond seriously, allowing him to continue his secret work anonymously.
Such a secret, literary psychological warfare operation was not unique, as Jim Hougan demonstrates [in Secret Agenda – Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (Random House, 1984) ], where he mentions that Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt is also, “The author of more than four dozen pulp thrillers and novels of the occult.”
According to Hougan, “Hunt left the agency in furtherance of a counterintelligence scheme that revolved around his literary efforts. The purpose of the scheme, according to government sources familiar with Hunt’s curriculum vitae at the agency, was to draw the KGB’s attention to books that Hunt was writing under the pseudonym David St. john. These spy novels alluded to actual CIA operations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and contained barely disguised portraits of political figures as diverse as Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It was the CIA’s intention that the KGB be led to believe that the books contained security breeches, and towards that end the agency created a phony ‘flap’ that was capped by Hunt’s supposedly ‘forced retirement.’…”
Hunt’s literary scheme, that “contained barely disguised portraits of political figures” was unoriginally based on Fleming’s success with James Bond, and a web of fictional characters based on real people whose stories wove a web of intrigue that is more incredible than the novelized account.
In retrospect, unlike other mythical super heroes like Sherlock Holmes and Superman, whether purposely contrived or by coincidence, its kind of reassuring that there was a real James Bond. A James Bond who really was an anonymous hero, who did go far into the field and discover something new, reported what he learned, and as a proficient naturalist, made the world a better place to live.
And that’s more important that the idea he may also have been a secret agent who played a major role in cold war double-agent duplicity, the Bay of Pigs, Cuba and Grenada. Now, in days of equally impearling crisis, where is James Bond, now that we really need him?
xxxxx
Felix Leiter = 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.
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.
Meeting James Bond
MEETING JAMES BOND
I decided to confront James Bond the same way he met Ian Fleming, walk up to his front door unannounced.
Having obtained a copy of his book “Birds of the West Indies,” from the Princeton Antique Book Shop in Atlantic City, I used it as an excuse to get Bond to sign it.
I drove to Chestnut Hill, parked on the street, and went to Hill House, the only high rise apartment building next to the railroad station. The Bonds lived on an upper floor, so I took the elevator up and paused in front of the door with the simple nameplate that read: BOND.
I knocked lightly, and a few moments later Mrs. Bond opened the door hesitantly, opening a crack as I held up the book and asked her if Mr. Bond could sign it. She smiled, opened the door, and invited me in as she called out to her husband in the back room.
“Jimmy! There’s a young man here to see you.”
The Jimmy threw me off for a moment, making me think that perhaps I had the wrong man, before I realized that Bond is very American, and not the prim and proper Englishman we’ve come to know as “James.”
It being the summer of 1976, I was rather young, at 25, while Bond was 76.
Just insides the apartment, to the left of the foyers, among a wall of old, hardcover books, W. Somerset Maugham’s name jumped out at me. There on the shelf was “Of Human Bondage,” “The Razor’s Edge,” “Ashenden – The Secret Agent” and other hardcover books by Maugham.
I quickly scanned the rest of the roomy, modern apartment, peculiar for its lack of any ornithological art, as Bond himself walked briskly out of the back room where he had been watching a golf match on television.
A broad smile on his face, a cigarette in one hand and the other outreached to sake my own, Bond, tall and lanky, is unlike Fleming’s 007 in that he wears shores with laces and smokes a typically American brand of cigarettes.
“He wants you to sign his book, dear,” Mrs. Bond said as she stood off as I handed the book to him. “Let’s see what you have here,” said Bond, opening the book’s cover flap. “1961, a first American edition.”
Placing the book down on a small table, which also contained a row of each of the books that Bond and his wife had written, he quickly scribbled his signature while asking me if I had ever been to the West Indies.
“No,” I hadn’t, I said, “but I plan on going there someday, Jamaica and Cuba, and this book will come in handy.”
“There’s still a lot of work to be done down there,” Bond said, asking that I get back in touch with him so he could brief me as to where to go.
Mrs. Bond reminded him that the golf match he had been watching on television was still in progress, but he waved her away, saying he was no longer interested. It seemed that he really wanted to talk with this young stranger.
I told Mrs. Bond that I had also acquired copies of and read some of her books, and found them fascinating, particularly “How 007 Got His Name.”
Her eyes lit up as she said, “That book is very hard to get now Someone recently told me that it’s worth $75 a copy to collectors.”
I mentioned that I had paid $50 to Princeton Antique Books to find that copy of “Birds of the West Indies,” but kept silent about finding the same book at the used book store on South Street for under $10, already signed.
Bond seemed enthusiastic when he said he recently finished updating his book, and that a new edition of “Birds of the West Indies” would be published soon. Bond then walked me into another room in the apartment and pulled out an advanced proof copy of the latest edition, pointing out some additional illustrations and some places on the map in Cuba where some rare birds had been recently sighted.
When I told him I was a student of Cuban history, and planned on going there some day, he said, “Well, there’s a lot of fine work being done there, particularly by Czech naturalists.”
“When I was there, in the early ‘60s, everybody was suspicious. But I stayed out of politics,” Bond said.
Waylaying his own suspicions that I perhaps I was not interested in birds altogether, I told Bond that I had an apartment in Cape May Point, New Jersey, which is on the East Coast migratory flyway and is considered the birdwatcher’s Mecca.
The latest report from the Audubon Society outpost in Cape May was that a band from a Marlin hawk, tagged at Cape May Point, was found and removed from the bird in Cuba, and returned by a Freedom Flotilla refugee, as if it were some extremely important message.
Bond smiled at that and swamped me his own Cuban bird story. He said that he recently heard from some friends in Cuba with whom he corresponds with on occasion. They were perplexed by the behavior of a hawk they were watching that landed on the shoulder of one of the startled birdwatchers. “I knew right away,” Bond said, “that it must have escaped from a falconer and migrated with the wild hawks.”
Sitting there on the couch across from him in his living room, I told Bond that before I went to the West Indies I would be sure to stop by and get some advice from him. “You have to know where to go, and when” Bond said, “and I will gladly try to help you.”
After a short pause, Bond said something about even helping to finance a serious expedition, if it went to the right places.
I used that as an excuse to ask him about the Catherwood expedition in 1948.
He looked at me awkwardly for a moment and smiled, saying, “You know those millionaires and how they like to do things.”
Knowing how Bond seemed to enjoy sleeping in a hammock on a deserted island beach, rather than the millionaire’s preference for hotel rooms and tablecloths, I knew what he meant. When I mentioned Catherwood’s CIA ties, he shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Without any alarm concerning Catherwood’s CIA connections Bond mentioned some details of the trip that hadn’t been published in the news clippings, including the fact that the captain had died during the trip, making the rest of the voyage difficult. Catherwood’s CIA ties seemed to be of no interest to him.
I also brought up the subject of W. Somerset Maugham, mentioning the voyage they took together in 1938. “I didn’t meet him,” Bond said, “although we were on the same boat together. He kept pretty much to himself.”
Then as a tease, without elaboration, Bond said, “He was on his way to Devil’s Island, the French penal colony,” while raising his eyebrows in a dramatic fashion.
But Bond’s lack of interest in Catherwood and the CIA and politics in general, along with his passion for the birds, convinced me as I was sitting there with him that he had no connection with clandestine espionage operations, and I left him that night with that conviction.
Before leaving Philadelphia however, I drove through center city to South Street and stopped by the used bookstore where I had found a signed copy of “Birds of the West Indies,” thinking I might get lucky again. I did find another copy of “Birds,” as well as an interesting biography of Somerset Maugham.
Opening Maugham’s biography to the chapter where he was sent to Russia in 1917 by William Wiseman, I read how he accidently encountered some exiled partisan agents aboard the trans-Siberian express. Although they could have shared some valuable information, Maugham purposely ignored them to avoid blowing his cover.
I realized that even if James Bond were in fact a real spy, or had been one, he certainly would never readily admit it anyway, especially to a stranger who had sought him out.
I had no real proof, one way or another, that Bond was a spy. He did attend Cambridge University, where many British, as well as Russian spies were recruited, including Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess and Sir Anthony Blunt.
Bond had sailed the Caribbean with British writer-spy W. Somerset Maugham, as well as CIA bagman Cummins Catherwood.
James Bond was at the Bay of Pigs shortly before the CIA invasion, and he knew Grenada well, so I would think that our intelligence agencies were probably negligent if they didn’t consult Bond before invading those places.
The facts at that point, were inconclusive as to whether James Bond was a spy, and we may never know for sure.
James Bond has contributed much to the body of knowledge about life on earth. He was a professional naturalist who sought no acclaim, and tried to complete his work of surveying the birds of the West Indies as much as possible before he died in 1989.
The consolation in not knowing the whole truth behind the mystery is the quiet contentment that comes with the knowing that there really was a James Bond. A real anonymous hero who merely went about his job as quietly and thoroughly as possible.
Perhaps it is best to leave James Bond where most of us first met him and memember him best, and as Ian Fleming so vividly portrayed him – sitting down at the bar of his favorite Caribbean haunt, lighting up a cigarette and ordering a double-dry vodka martini, shaken, not stirred.
I decided to confront James Bond the same way he met Ian Fleming, walk up to his front door unannounced.
Having obtained a copy of his book “Birds of the West Indies,” from the Princeton Antique Book Shop in Atlantic City, I used it as an excuse to get Bond to sign it.
I drove to Chestnut Hill, parked on the street, and went to Hill House, the only high rise apartment building next to the railroad station. The Bonds lived on an upper floor, so I took the elevator up and paused in front of the door with the simple nameplate that read: BOND.
I knocked lightly, and a few moments later Mrs. Bond opened the door hesitantly, opening a crack as I held up the book and asked her if Mr. Bond could sign it. She smiled, opened the door, and invited me in as she called out to her husband in the back room.
“Jimmy! There’s a young man here to see you.”
The Jimmy threw me off for a moment, making me think that perhaps I had the wrong man, before I realized that Bond is very American, and not the prim and proper Englishman we’ve come to know as “James.”
It being the summer of 1976, I was rather young, at 25, while Bond was 76.
Just insides the apartment, to the left of the foyers, among a wall of old, hardcover books, W. Somerset Maugham’s name jumped out at me. There on the shelf was “Of Human Bondage,” “The Razor’s Edge,” “Ashenden – The Secret Agent” and other hardcover books by Maugham.
I quickly scanned the rest of the roomy, modern apartment, peculiar for its lack of any ornithological art, as Bond himself walked briskly out of the back room where he had been watching a golf match on television.
A broad smile on his face, a cigarette in one hand and the other outreached to sake my own, Bond, tall and lanky, is unlike Fleming’s 007 in that he wears shores with laces and smokes a typically American brand of cigarettes.
“He wants you to sign his book, dear,” Mrs. Bond said as she stood off as I handed the book to him. “Let’s see what you have here,” said Bond, opening the book’s cover flap. “1961, a first American edition.”
Placing the book down on a small table, which also contained a row of each of the books that Bond and his wife had written, he quickly scribbled his signature while asking me if I had ever been to the West Indies.
“No,” I hadn’t, I said, “but I plan on going there someday, Jamaica and Cuba, and this book will come in handy.”
“There’s still a lot of work to be done down there,” Bond said, asking that I get back in touch with him so he could brief me as to where to go.
Mrs. Bond reminded him that the golf match he had been watching on television was still in progress, but he waved her away, saying he was no longer interested. It seemed that he really wanted to talk with this young stranger.
I told Mrs. Bond that I had also acquired copies of and read some of her books, and found them fascinating, particularly “How 007 Got His Name.”
Her eyes lit up as she said, “That book is very hard to get now Someone recently told me that it’s worth $75 a copy to collectors.”
I mentioned that I had paid $50 to Princeton Antique Books to find that copy of “Birds of the West Indies,” but kept silent about finding the same book at the used book store on South Street for under $10, already signed.
Bond seemed enthusiastic when he said he recently finished updating his book, and that a new edition of “Birds of the West Indies” would be published soon. Bond then walked me into another room in the apartment and pulled out an advanced proof copy of the latest edition, pointing out some additional illustrations and some places on the map in Cuba where some rare birds had been recently sighted.
When I told him I was a student of Cuban history, and planned on going there some day, he said, “Well, there’s a lot of fine work being done there, particularly by Czech naturalists.”
“When I was there, in the early ‘60s, everybody was suspicious. But I stayed out of politics,” Bond said.
Waylaying his own suspicions that I perhaps I was not interested in birds altogether, I told Bond that I had an apartment in Cape May Point, New Jersey, which is on the East Coast migratory flyway and is considered the birdwatcher’s Mecca.
The latest report from the Audubon Society outpost in Cape May was that a band from a Marlin hawk, tagged at Cape May Point, was found and removed from the bird in Cuba, and returned by a Freedom Flotilla refugee, as if it were some extremely important message.
Bond smiled at that and swamped me his own Cuban bird story. He said that he recently heard from some friends in Cuba with whom he corresponds with on occasion. They were perplexed by the behavior of a hawk they were watching that landed on the shoulder of one of the startled birdwatchers. “I knew right away,” Bond said, “that it must have escaped from a falconer and migrated with the wild hawks.”
Sitting there on the couch across from him in his living room, I told Bond that before I went to the West Indies I would be sure to stop by and get some advice from him. “You have to know where to go, and when” Bond said, “and I will gladly try to help you.”
After a short pause, Bond said something about even helping to finance a serious expedition, if it went to the right places.
I used that as an excuse to ask him about the Catherwood expedition in 1948.
He looked at me awkwardly for a moment and smiled, saying, “You know those millionaires and how they like to do things.”
Knowing how Bond seemed to enjoy sleeping in a hammock on a deserted island beach, rather than the millionaire’s preference for hotel rooms and tablecloths, I knew what he meant. When I mentioned Catherwood’s CIA ties, he shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Without any alarm concerning Catherwood’s CIA connections Bond mentioned some details of the trip that hadn’t been published in the news clippings, including the fact that the captain had died during the trip, making the rest of the voyage difficult. Catherwood’s CIA ties seemed to be of no interest to him.
I also brought up the subject of W. Somerset Maugham, mentioning the voyage they took together in 1938. “I didn’t meet him,” Bond said, “although we were on the same boat together. He kept pretty much to himself.”
Then as a tease, without elaboration, Bond said, “He was on his way to Devil’s Island, the French penal colony,” while raising his eyebrows in a dramatic fashion.
But Bond’s lack of interest in Catherwood and the CIA and politics in general, along with his passion for the birds, convinced me as I was sitting there with him that he had no connection with clandestine espionage operations, and I left him that night with that conviction.
Before leaving Philadelphia however, I drove through center city to South Street and stopped by the used bookstore where I had found a signed copy of “Birds of the West Indies,” thinking I might get lucky again. I did find another copy of “Birds,” as well as an interesting biography of Somerset Maugham.
Opening Maugham’s biography to the chapter where he was sent to Russia in 1917 by William Wiseman, I read how he accidently encountered some exiled partisan agents aboard the trans-Siberian express. Although they could have shared some valuable information, Maugham purposely ignored them to avoid blowing his cover.
I realized that even if James Bond were in fact a real spy, or had been one, he certainly would never readily admit it anyway, especially to a stranger who had sought him out.
I had no real proof, one way or another, that Bond was a spy. He did attend Cambridge University, where many British, as well as Russian spies were recruited, including Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess and Sir Anthony Blunt.
Bond had sailed the Caribbean with British writer-spy W. Somerset Maugham, as well as CIA bagman Cummins Catherwood.
James Bond was at the Bay of Pigs shortly before the CIA invasion, and he knew Grenada well, so I would think that our intelligence agencies were probably negligent if they didn’t consult Bond before invading those places.
The facts at that point, were inconclusive as to whether James Bond was a spy, and we may never know for sure.
James Bond has contributed much to the body of knowledge about life on earth. He was a professional naturalist who sought no acclaim, and tried to complete his work of surveying the birds of the West Indies as much as possible before he died in 1989.
The consolation in not knowing the whole truth behind the mystery is the quiet contentment that comes with the knowing that there really was a James Bond. A real anonymous hero who merely went about his job as quietly and thoroughly as possible.
Perhaps it is best to leave James Bond where most of us first met him and memember him best, and as Ian Fleming so vividly portrayed him – sitting down at the bar of his favorite Caribbean haunt, lighting up a cigarette and ordering a double-dry vodka martini, shaken, not stirred.
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