The Ian Fleming Miscellany (5 page)

Ian Fleming at the Admiralty in 1940, wearing the uniform of a Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve Lieutenant.
The National Archive

Ian worked alongside Ewen and had daily morning briefings with Godfrey in his office next door. ‘Fleming,' said Ewen shrewdly, ‘is charming to be with, but would sell his own grandmother. I like him a lot.' He liaised with the other secret services and reported what they were doing to his boss. He was the filter for ‘bright ideas' that were passed on to Godfrey; if they were obviously hopeless he weeded them out. Many got through. Other wizard wheezes, some of which would prove highly successful, originated with him. ‘Busy, but secretive, he seemed happy and very electrically alive', wrote Ivar Bryce, who saw him at this time.

Ian and Anne O'Neill were an item when he started work for Godfrey. (By Christmas 1939 her husband was away commanding a mechanised squadron from a base in Northern Ireland.) On the Monday night following the declaration of war, he found time to attend a dinner at her home. He was never at ease with her cynical arty friends, especially now when they took the opportunity to make fun of his uniform. He didn't respect these people, but he still minded. Perhaps because his mother's notoriety shamed him more than he ever admitted, he was sensitive to that kind of passive aggression. He was wary of ‘clever' people who claimed intellectual superiority. He had a lot more respect for Admiral Godfrey and people like him. Maybe he was, as Andrew Lycett wrote, looking for a father figure: ‘Since his death on the Western Front in May 1917, Val Fleming had been the ghost at Ian's feast, the blameless paragon of manly virtues whom his son could never hope to match.' Perhaps, but Ian was also loyal to the ideals that Godfrey represented.

On 8 September he was made a commander, probably in order to add authority to his briefings at high level. He knew very little about the navy, but he made friends with Captain Drake, a.k.a. Quacker, who was also in Room 39. Quacker now worked with the Joint Intelligence Committee, but he had seen action, and Ian could test his ideas against Quacker's experience.

Like Godfrey, Fleming was good at finding people who could supply particular strengths. At White's, random civilian members were dropping heavy hints about jobs in uniform. Ivar Bryce had come back from South America and asked him the same thing. ‘He advised me to go back to New York and Washington, where I had some influential friends, especially in the newspaper business, ranging from Walter Lippmann to Walter Winchell. “You will be more use there,” he said. “Stick around.”' Bryce was perfectly happy to do that, so Fleming arranged a flight for him from Prestwick (Glasgow) to Montreal, with stopovers, and from there to New York.

Fleming wanted only people who would have special skills of value to Naval Intelligence. He was interested, for instance, in black propaganda that would deflect or deter German action. He took Sefton Delmer to meet Godfrey to talk about how to plant disinformation in the newspapers – and how to discover whether or not this ever did put the wind up the Nazis, which seemed unclear.

At the start of the war he made friends with an exceptional individual: Sidney Cotton. Handsome, in his mid-forties, Cotton was absolutely Ian's kind of man. He'd been everywhere, made money, lost it, been married, been divorced ... with Sidney Cotton, the thought was father to the deed. Like Fleming, he headed for excitement wherever he could find it. Cotton was an Australian businessman and pilot, who, in the First War, had invented draught-proof pilot suits that the RAF still wore. More recently, he had produced clear pictures of the German navy lined up in harbour and of German military airfields, having overflown these sites prepared with a cover story and piloting a civilian aircraft from which his secretary, Patricia Martin, took pictures on demand. Such photography was no easy feat, since a plane at great height is cold, and lenses mist. He had devised a practical way to keep his camera, a Leica, warm enough not to cloud up.

Ian liked Cotton a lot and was impressed. He co-opted him to do some snooping for Naval Intelligence. Ireland was a shaky neighbour. The British were dubious about the Irish Republic. It was not uncommon to hear of known German agents propping up the bar in Jury's Hotel. Fleming knew that there were deserted, sheltered harbours along the beautiful west coast between Galway and Mayo, which U-boats might find useful. It was just a hunch, but he asked Cotton to test it, photographing the entire coastline from 2,000ft. The weekend after the outbreak of war, he paid a visit to Cotton in his flat. Cotton and a co-pilot promptly took off on 12 September and took a few pictures from 10,000ft. Ian went down to Plymouth to show his boss the prints on the 14 September and was asked for the same pictures from 2,000ft. Cotton later said the following:

It happened that A.J. Miranda had recently sold the Irish a single American anti-aircraft gun. So far as we knew, this was the only modern anti-aircraft gun they had. Miranda conducted all his European business through my office in St James's Square, so I knew all about this gun, its performance and where it was likely to be sited. My friends told me that after my flight of 12th September the Irish had mounted the gun on a railway carriage and were running it up and down the West coast in readiness for me, but I suspect they were pulling my leg.

He and his co-pilot ended up photographing the entire Atlantic coast in the next couple of weeks, and the results showed there was no need for concern.

Cotton could coolly identify a problem and find a simple solution. Uproar. The Air Ministry huffed and puffed; the RAF was responsible for reconnaissance, not the Admiralty. Cotton was dismissive. This was not the first time he had fallen out with people in authority. Quite apart from the pettiness of this squabble – after all, there was a war on – he told Fleming that the Air Ministry bigwigs should encourage the use of radar, but were blockheads who refused to be convinced. But the RAF wanted his skills on side, so he made a deal; he would be expected to go overseas at short notice, so he had to be able to get in and out of airfields easily. They gave him a special code, ‘White Flight', and within three weeks of the declaration of war, he had a commission and a uniform and instructions to set up a Photographic Development Unit at Heston. Zipping over German territory in Spitfires and Mosquitos, and returning with invaluable shots of the enemy's strengths and weaknesses, his pilots became known as Cotton's Club. He told them to fly high and fast, and he had the engines souped up.

Six months into the Phoney War, the Germans had made no direct move against France or England. It was going to happen, because Germany's eastern borders were now secure because of the pact with Stalin. Sure enough, in the second week of May, Nazi units began to push back the French army. Their advance was relentless. They were soon fighting the hopelessly ill-equipped British Expeditionary Force in Belgium.

One scare had it that Germans planned to land on the beach at Southend in the weekend of 27–8 May. The Joint Intelligence Committee took this seriously. Ian and Peter Fleming (who was now PA to the Director of Military Intelligence) were unconvinced, but in case it did happen, they thought the nation deserved to get an unbiased British view of events, rather than being brainwashed by German triumphalism. So they motored down to Southend in a staff car on the Saturday afternoon, presumably with a pair of binoculars and a service revolver between them. At Southend, this being Whit weekend, they were overwhelmed by an onslaught of kiss-me-quick hats, beery East Enders and fish and chips. Having peered out to sea from a naval reconnaissance post on a hotel roof and detected nothing, they prised their driver out of the bar and returned to the comforts of home.

At the beginning of June, the Germans seemed unstoppable and the fall of France inevitable. The French navy might fall into German hands, which would be disastrous. He must have Admiral Darlan,
Amiral de la Flotte
, order it into British ports. But with the full-scale evacuation from Dunkirk in progress already, Ian was first despatched to move SIS staff out of Paris.

Among the first people he met was Biffy Dunderdale, the larger than life Head of SIS Station in Paris. Biffy had been born to wealthy merchants in Odessa. He was filthy rich, flamboyant and clever. In July of 1939 he had been one of the French and British intelligence chiefs secretly invited by three Polish cryptologists to Warsaw. There the Poles proved that they had worked out how to break the Wehrmacht Enigma code. It had been Dunderdale who conveyed this top secret information to Bletchley Park, although Fleming probably didn't know that at the time. Very few people were allowed to know that the Enigma code had been penetrated. All he probably knew was that Biffy Dunderdale, who drove his own armoured Rolls Royce, intended to evacuate key embassy staff to Jersey immediately. Ian had to deal with the rest of the SIS contingent.

As soon as he arrived, he commandeered the SIS emergency cache of money from the safe at the Rolls Royce office, and sent the staff and their families to join the growing stream of Parisians clogging the roads out of Paris. Shepherded by a Naval Intelligence officer called Smithers, the SIS contingent took refuge in a Château on the Loire.

Since Admiral Darlan and the British naval attaché were not on speaking terms, it fell to Fleming to persuade Darlan to order the French fleet to safety in English ports. On 10 June the French government fled to Tours, so he raced there hoping to see Darlan or at least an aide at Ministry of Marine. He was in contact whenever possible with Admiral Godfrey thanks to a private tele-printer line, and he told Smithers to move the SIS refugees towards Bordeaux where a British ship would pick them up.

There was no positive response in Tours. Darlan was unreachable. The government itself was about to leave for Bordeaux. Chaos reigned. Paris was in German hands by 14 June. Sidney Cotton was in Bordeaux already, moonlighting for SIS, making one of many ‘special survey flights' to rescue British agents. He received urgent instructions to rescue Biffy Dunderdale and his party, presumably including the Polish cryptologists and their families, from Jersey, where they were being strafed by German planes. This would mean getting two Hudsons over there – big Lockheed bombers, which required a crew of six each, including gunners. Cotton said later:

There were reports of German planes all over the Channel, so I filled up with ten hours' fuel, flew due west at low level into the Atlantic, finally coming in via Bristol and thence to Heston. I sent my two Hudsons to pick up Bill Dunderdale and his party, then rang the Admiralty and told them of the crowds of people still stranded at Bordeaux, adding that I had seen a large number of ships at the mouth of the Gironde and suggesting that these could be used to assist the evacuation.

On the ground, Fleming was already onto it. He arrived in Bordeaux, got into the British Consulate and destroyed all paperwork that implicated French or British nationals. He then turned his attention to the refugees. He bribed a ferryboat captain, and with the help of Smithers, who'd just arrived, managed to get boatloads of people, not just SIS but also stray Jewish and other families from France, Belgium and Poland, to England. He found that seven merchant ships were moored at the mouth of the Gironde. He threatened them with being sunk by the RAF unless they helped, so they did.

Back in London, Cotton was summarily sacked. He had already clashed with Air Ministry people because of the special survey flights for SIS, and they now found an excuse to get rid of him: he'd given a lift in his RAF plane to Marcel Boussac, the head of Christian Dior. On 16 June, the day after his return from Bordeaux, he was politely informed, by letter, that Geoffrey Tuttle would be taking over as commander of the photographic unit. The Air Ministry's loss was the navy's gain, and Naval Intelligence exploited Cotton's talents for the rest of the war.

On the same day, 16 June, Darlan firmly refused British asylum for the French navy. He was already working for Pétain's puppet regime, which would ultimately move to Vichy. The French fleet was bombed in harbour at Mers El Kebir three weeks later, with the loss of 1,300 lives.

Ian Fleming's youngest brother, Michael, had been with the British expeditionary force. After Dunkirk, he was pronounced missing. In September his wife learned that he had been wounded and taken prisoner. In November, she was told that he had died at the beginning of October.