My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Ben Macintyre On Ian Fleming And James Bond

The Washington Times published my weekly On Crime column on Ben Macintyre’s take on the late, great thriller writer Ian Fleming and his iconic character James Bond.

With the release of latest James Bond film “No Time to Die” postponed from April to November due to the COVID-19 outbreak, millions of Bond fans around the world will have to be content to watch the older Bond films, or perhaps they should go back to the original source — Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

They could also read some of the many books written about the popular character and his creator, such as two fine biographies of the late Ian Fleming, John Pearson’s “The Life of Ian Fleming” and Andrew Lycett’s “Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond.”

Ben Macintyre, a columnist for the London Times and the author of “The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War,” (which I reviewed in these pages) “A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal” and “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal,” also wrote an interesting book called “For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond.”

He wrote the book in 2008 as a companion to the Imperial War Museum exhibition that was held to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. The exhibition examined the late thriller writer and his fictional character in historical context. The exhibition also looked at Ian Fleming’s experiences as a naval intelligence officer in World War II and how they informed his plots and characters.

Ben Macintyre was chosen to write the companion book because of his nonfiction books on espionage and his many columns on Ian Fleming and James Bond, including one column that revealed that there was a Nazi plot to rob the Bank of England, which perhaps inspired Ian Fleming to use a similar plot to rob Fort Knox in his great thriller “Goldfinger.”

Ian Fleming admitted his plots in the novels were fantastic (the films much more so), but he also said they were often based on the real world of intelligence.  

I recall Ben Macintyre telling me that his book on Fleming and Bond was a personal investigation of two lives, one real and one fictional.     

You can read the rest of the column below or via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/18/ben-macintyre-on-ian-fleming-and-james-bond/ 

Note: The below photos are of Ben Macintyre, Ian Fleming. Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No, and Ian Fleming as a WWII naval intelligence officer:

Smersh Spy-Killers Are Back In Business: The Russian Counterintelligence Unit That Inspired Ian Fleming Is Operating In Europe Under A New Name

In Ian Fleming’s 1957 classic spy novel, From Russia With Love, the Soviet agency SMERSH -
Smert Shpionam, or "Death to Spies" - sends a psychopathic killer named Donovan “Red” Grant to murder British intelligence officer James Bond and embarrass the British government. 

The plot is devised by SMERSH’s head of the planning department, chess master Colonel Kronsteen, known as “the Wizard of Ice,” and carried out by the head of SMERSH’s execution department, Colonel Rosa Klebb. (From Russia With Love is my favorite Ian Fleming novel and the best Bond film, although the 1963 film replaced SMERSH with the fictional international crime organization SPECTRE). 

SMERSH was a very real organization that assassinated enemies of the Soviet State.  

Ben Macintyre, seen in the above photo), the author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Operation Mincemeat, and other fine nonfiction books on espionage, offers his take on a SMERSH-like Russian assassination group in his column at the London Times.

The Russian counterintelligence unit that inspired Ian Fleming is operating in Europe under a new name. 

In 1942, the military intelligence section of the Red Army set up a new unit to investigate traitors and deserters, liquidate enemy agents and enforce ideological conformity by destroying “anti-Soviet elements”.

The structure of the wartime espionage unit was deliberately opaque. It is still unclear quite how it was organised and how many officers it deployed. But the purpose was only too apparent in its name, coined by Stalin himself, which merged the Russian words smert meaning death and shpionam meaning spies: hence “Death to Spies”, or Smersh.

Around the same time Stalin changed the name of the military intelligence branch to the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU — the name by which it is still known today. Smersh was the hit squad of the new GRU.

If the idea of a ruthless spy-killing unit sounds like the stuff of fiction, that’s because it became precisely that. In the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming portrayed Smersh (director of operations: Rosa Klebb) as a massive counterintelligence network that more closely resembled the KGB. In the films, Smersh gave way to Spectre, an imaginary global terror organisation.

The real Smersh was remarkably effective, not just at wiping out anti-Soviet traitors (some of whom were undoubtedly innocent) but simultaneously instilling terror among potential enemies and enforcing obedience in the general population. Its mandate was to eliminate subversives and turncoats, initially inside the Soviet military but eventually anywhere in the world, including any of its own agents suspected of disloyalty, sabotage or desertion. 

It specialised in assassinations, known as “wetwork” (mokroye delo). Smersh was disbanded in 1946, by which time it had become semi-mythical: the brutal, inescapable enforcers and spy-hunters of the Red Army.

And now it is back, with a new name and a new remit but essentially the same purpose: to put the fear of God, and assassination, into Russia’s enemies, traitors and deserters.

According to intelligence sources, Unit 29155 is an elite sub-unit of GRU assassins that operated out of the Haute-Savoie in the French Alps, conducting a variety of wet jobs across Europe: notably the attempted poisoning in Salisbury of GRU officer-turned-MI6 spy Sergei Skripal, and the attempt to kill a Bulgarian arms dealer in 2015. German intelligence officials also believe the Kremlin is implicated in the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, the Georgian-born Chechen fighter shot dead in a Berlin park last August, which has caused a diplomatic face-off between Russia and Germany.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/smersh-spy-killers-are-back-in-business-3m25kwtmn

You can also read my Washington Times piece on Russian assassins via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2018/04/from-russia-with-love-my-washington.html

And you can read Joseph Goulden’s Washington Times review of a book on the history of SMERSH via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/03/smersh-stalins-secret-weapon.html 

And you can read my Q&A with Ben Macintyre about his book on Ian Fleming and James Bond via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/crime-beat-column-q-with-ben-macintye.html

Note: The top photo is of actor Sean Connery as James Bond and Robert Shaw as Red Grant in the best fight scene in cinematic history in the film From Russia With Love. The below photos are from the film From Russia With Love:

Next Up, 007 Sniffs The Undertaker’s Wind

Ben Macintyre, a London Times columnist and author of For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, and A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, offers a clever and amusing column on what title the James Bond film producers will use for the next Bond film.

Daniel  Craig is to be paid $25 million for playing James Bond in the forthcoming film, which raises the 64,000-dollar question: what title to choose for 007’s next outing, his 25th?

The selection of a new Bond film title has become a familiar ritual of world culture that comes around every three or four years, surrounded by artificial mystery, simultaneously silly and commercially significant. It is also very tricky, because the titles are running out.

Ian Fleming wrote 12 Bond novels and nine short stories. There are just four short stories left that have not been made into films, all of which came from arcane corners of the novelist’s brain.

Risico, a story in the 1960 collection For Your Eyes Only, is Italian for risk, or a Dutch word meaning peril as in “Je loopt het risico te vallen”: You run the risk of falling. It doesn’t quite have the ring of Skyfall.

The Hildebrand Rarity was first published in Playboy, and refers to a fictional species of fish hunted by the criminal tax dodger Milton Krest: “A unique member of the squirrelfish family . . . caught by Professor Hildebrand of the University of Witwatersrand off Chagrin Island in the Seychelles, April 1925.” As a film title, The Hildebrand Rarity might cause as much bafflement among Bond fans as Quantum of Solace.

… The film-makers will probably have to fall back on the newer species of fabricated Bond titles (nine of the last 12), which sound pithy, glamorous, dramatic, often contain a reference to death and usually mean nothing at all.

In the Piers Brosnan era, the titles veered close to self-parody, by eliding a death reference with a familiar catchphrase. After Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day, and A View to a Kill, the possibilities seemed endless: Once Bitten Twice Dead? You Only Die Twice, Tomorrow? Shaken, Not Dead?

The title of A View to a Kill was so odd (and grammatically dubious) that scriptwriters felt obliged to make some sense of it during an exchange between the villain Zorin (Christopher Walken) and his henchwoman May Day (Grace Jones). Her: “What a View!” Him: “To a Kill.”

The philosophical-sounding and essentially meaningless Bond film title reached its finest expression with The World is Not Enough (the Bond family motto, apparently derived from Alexander the Great’s epitaph). With Skyfall, the franchise returned to the blunt, compound-word titles of Thunderball and Goldfinger.

Fleming himself struggled with titles. His second novel, Live and Let Die, was originally entitled The Undertaker’s Wind, a reference to the wind that blows across Jamaica (where Fleming wrote). He thought it sounded romantic and eerie. It actually sounds like a mortician with flatulence. If he had stuck to his guns, the book would probably have bombed, and there would be no James Bond as we know him.

Dr No was originally The Wound Man. Goldfinger started out as The Richest Man in the World. From a View to a Kill was first entitled The Rough with the Smooth. The working title of For Your Eyes Only was Man’s Work, which definitely would not go down well in Hollywood today. He also toyed with calling it Death Leaves an Echo, which is rather good.

Fleming found it particularly hard to settle on a title for his third novel, about an evil financier who threatens to destroy London with a £10 million rocket. He rejected Wide of the Mark, Mondays are Hell, Out of the Clear Sky, and The Inhuman Element, before finally settling on Moonraker.

The character of James Bond was a mixture of the various adventurers Fleming had encountered while working in naval intelligence: “a compound of the secret agents and commando types I met during the war”. In the same way, his titles were gathered, magpie-like, from whatever came to hand. Diamonds are Forever was a direct lift from the De Beers advertising campaign slogan dreamed up by copywriter Frances Gerety in 1947. “You only live twice” was a phrase coined by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/next-up-007-sniffs-the-undertaker-s-wind-q9zvj3rg8 

You can also read my Crime Beat interview with Ben Macintyre via the below link::

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/crime-beat-column-q-with-ben-macintye.html 

My Crime Beat Column: My Q & A With Ben Macintyre, Author of "For Your Eyes Only, Ian Fleming & James Bond"

This is truly Ian Fleming’s year. Fleming, who was born 100 years ago on May 28, 1908, is being given the royal treatment in the United Kingdom, the U.S., and around the world. For some months I’ve been reading a good number of newspaper, magazine and Internet articles on Fleming and his iconic character, James Bond.

As regular readers of this column know, I’m a true Fleming aficionado, so I’m pleased that Fleming is getting the attention and respect I believe he truly deserves.

To celebrate the Fleming centenary Penguin is releasing a new collection of his short stories as well as his novels. His children’s story, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is also being released in a new hardback edition. Ian Fleming Publications, which is run by the Fleming family, has authorized two series of peripheral Bond stories. Charlie Higson has written a series of Young Bond novels, and Samantha Weinberg has written The Moneypenny Diaries. The family has also hired a "literary" author, Sebastian Faulks, to write a Bond continuation novel called Devil May Care. I’m set to review the continuation novel for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

I’ve always been interested in Fleming’s wartime experience, so I’m looking forward to the publication Ian Fleming’s Secret War in August. According to the publisher, Pen & Sword Military, little is known about Fleming’s contribution during WWII. Fleming joined the Royal Navy at the outbreak of WWII and he served as "the right hand man" to the Director of Naval Intelligence for six years. From the outset, the publisher notes, Fleming was at the center of events, meeting key political and military figures as well as those of exceptional intelligence, experience and courage. This experience gave him invaluable background when he came to write the Bond novels.

According to the publisher, the book’s author, Craig Caber, has uncovered through official documentation, private papers and contacts the depth of Fleming’s work in wartime naval intelligence.

There is also talk of a film based on Fleming’s life. Leonardo Dicaprio’s film production company has the rights, but I can only hope that he doesn’t choose to portray Fleming.

This October we’ll see the 22^nd film in the Bond series, Quantum of Solace. Although Daniel Craig does not fit Fleming’s physical description of Bond (I believe that Clive Owen would have been a better choice), his first outing as Bond in Casino Royale was well received by both critics and the public.

The film producers wisely returned to Fleming’s original material and made a thriller rather than a cartoon, which many of the later films were in my view. The producers claim the next film will also be an exciting thriller.

The new editions of Fleming’s work, the continuation novel, and the film Quantum of Solace will no doubt create new James Bond fans and remind his many older fans that Fleming was a first rate thriller writer.

The British are honoring Fleming with Royal Mail stamps and the Imperial War Museum in London is marking the Fleming centenary with a major exhibition that explores his life and influences that guided him in his creation of his famous character James Bond. Fleming’s father died in combat in WWI and his younger brother died in combat in WWII. Considering his family’s sacrifices and his own military experience, Fleming, I think, would be proud of the exhibition honoring him at the Imperial War Museum.

Ben Macintyre (seen in the below photo), a writer at large for The Times of London, and author of Agent Zigzag and The Napoleon of Crime (two outstanding books in my view) has written a companion book to the Imperial War Museum exhibition called For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming & James Bond (Bloomsbury, USA).

As Macintyre wrote in his introduction, the book was published to coincide with the exhibition. The book is homage to Ian Fleming on the centenary of the author’s birth, and a celebration of James Bond, his greatest creation.

"It is not a biography –others, notably John Pearson and Andrew Lycett, have already performed that task admirably – nor is it a biography of James Bond, for that, too, has been written," Macintyre states in the introduction.

"It does not purport to be a comprehensive guide to the James Bond phenomenon (for this, I recommend Henry Chancellor’s official companion). Rather, it is a personal investigation into the intersection of two lives, one real and one fictional."

Macintyre went on to state that as a journalist and writer of non-fiction, he had always been intrigued by the factual origins of fiction. His previous books were in search of the nineteenth-century criminal Adam Worth, the model for Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes tales, and Josiah Harlan, an adventurer who would win literary immortality in Rudyard Kipling’s short story The Man Who Would Be King.

"All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than any writer I know, anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew," Macintyre wrote.

Espionage is itself a shadow trade between truth and untruth and is a complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality, Macintyre noted.

"As a former officer in naval intelligence, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote like one. This book is an attempt to explore a remarkable double life and to establish, as nearly as possible, where the real world of Ian Fleming ended and the fictional world of James Bond begins."

I contacted Ben Macintyre and arranged an interview. Below is my Q &A with him:

DAVIS: To begin with, why did the Imperial War Museum offer a tribute to Ian Fleming?

MACINTYRE: The IWM exhibition is to mark the 100^th anniversary of Fleming’s birth; more broadly I think the Fleming family and the museum felt there was mileage in drawing more attention to Fleming’s wartime past and its role in the development of the Bond books.

DAVIS: What drew you to write the companion book? Where you a fan of the novels and/or the films?

MACINTYRE: I have always been a fan, but was asked by the family, partly because of Agent Zigzag and partly because of articles I have written in the past about Bond and Fleming.

DAVIS: Did you find Fleming to be as interesting a subject as Adam Worth or Eddie Chapman?

MACINTYRE: In truth, though Fleming is a complex and interesting character, I got great pleasure in exploring characters who are less well known, and finding out about them or the first time, as it were.

DAVIS: Can you describe how Fleming was inspired by his late father who died in WWI and his own military service in WWII?

MACINTYRE: Val Fleming is a large part of the Bond myth. His early tragic death and gallantry provide, I think, the template for the Bond character. Fleming’s wartime service is critical: plots, characters, events, gadgets, places and politics all flow directly from that war. Bond is very much a World War II personality, fighting a Cold War.

DAVIS: How did his work in journalism play a role in his novels?

MACINTYRE: His ability to write to deadline, to get the facts right, and ensure a pacey narrative can all be traced directly to his early journalistic training.

DAVIS: I've read critics who state that Bond is a cardboard character with no motivation, but I see Ian Fleming as a patriot and believe Bond's main motivation is patriotism (as well as a love of adventure). Do you agree?

MACINTYRE: I do agree, although the somewhat veiled motives of Bond are part of appeal in the books: he is supposed to be a blunt instrument, and we are not really intended to be privy to his personal feelings about anything.

DAVIS: Many people find his novels and the films to be utterly fantastic, but you've noted that his plots, as well as his characters, were in fact based on reality. Can you explain this?

MACINTYRE: Fleming always based his books firmly in reality. "Everything I write has a basis in truth". True, Bond is able to carry out exploits that would be hard to believe in fact, yet the world of spying quite often beggars belief: Agent Zigzag being a good example.

DAVIS: What do you think of Fleming's attitude towards women?

MACINTYRE: Fleming’s attitude to women was odd: he never really understood them, and was, I think, very slightly afraid of them; he was a fantastic womaniser, but the women he really loved were not in the cocktail party poppet mould, but grown up, bossy, independent, often older (and married).

DAVIS: What do you think of "Bond Girls?"

MACINTYRE: I think the Bond girls in the books can be traced pretty directly to his wartime girlfriend, Muriel Wright, who was killed: Bond Girls tend to be beautiful, flawed, a little vulnerable, athletic, independent, biddable… and doomed.

DAVIS: Do you see a difference between the movie Bond and the novel Bond?

MACINTYRE: The film Bond is more violent, sexually promiscuous, and far wittier than the Bond of the books.

DAVIS: I was glad to see The Times rate Fleming as Number 14 in their list of the 50 greatest post-war writers. Why do you think he was rated so highly?

MACINTYRE: Because the books really do warrant re-reading.

DAVIS: Raymond Chandler was a friend and a fan of Fleming's novels. Can you describe their friendship and mutual admiration?

MACINTYRE: They had a huge amount in common, and Chandler felt that Fleming had broken out of a particularly hidebound tradition of English thriller writing.

DAVIS: Why do you think Fleming's James Bond character has endured and probably will endure for some time?

MACINTYRE: I think it will last forever, because the Bond character is endlessly malleable.

DAVIS: Lastly, has the Imperial War Museum's Fleming exhibition been successful?

MACINTYRE: Yes, very, so far, but it has another year to run.

DAVIS: Thanks for taking the time to speak to us.

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming & James Bond is a well-written, well-researched and smart-looking book. The book also offers great photos.

I truly liked the book and I highly recommend it to Fleming aficionados who wish to celebrate the Ian Fleming centenary.

Note: The above column originally appeared in the Orchard Press Online Mystery Magazine in 2008.