Another Take On Where James Bond Came From

With this being the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth a lot of attention is being paid to him & the work he did, esp how it relates to his creation of James Bond. The other day I told you of a book that basically claims there were occult undertones as well as sources throughut the entire Bond oeuvre. Now the London Times points out that much of what Ian Fleming wrote may have had more than a little basis in reality.

James Bond Creator's Preposterous Plan to Outwit Nazis Revealed

"The plot cooked up by Ian Fleming in September 1940, more than a decade before he created James Bond, was so brilliantly preposterous that it can now be seen as the prototype 007 mission.

Fleming, in his role as a naval intelligence officer during the Second World War, was the architect of Operation Ruthless, a daring scheme to seize a German codebook that may have inspired the plot to 'From Russia With Love.'

His plan, involving a staged plane crash and disguised commandos, is revealed in full at a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London."

"As Fleming himself put it after the Bond books became global bestsellers: 'True Secret Service history is very fantastic... certainly no more or less fantastic than what happens in James Bond’s adventures.'

He was particularly good at dreaming up imaginative schemes. Among his odder ideas were: scuttling cement barges in the Danube to block the waterway to German shipping, forging Reichsmarks to disrupt the German economy, sinking a lump of concrete with men inside it off Dieppe to observe coastal defenses and offering the French navy the Isle of Wight as French territory until the end of the war."

Gee, these things sound like they could have come from a Bond novel. I suspect that there is a lot of truth to these claims. However, that doesn't preclude any occult influences either.

As it mentions in the article, these revelations are part of a new exhibit about Ian Fleming. "According to James Taylor, the curator of the exhibition, Fleming only discovered a sense of purpose in 1939 after a dissolute career as a hard-living journalist and then 'the world’s worst stockbroker.'"

"(A)s the exhibition shows, he reheated his wartime memories and transposed them to the Cold War.

'Most of the heroes and villains in the novels grew out of his wartime experiences,' Taylor said. 'But by the time he was writing, the real British secret service was in disarray with the defections of [agents] Burgess, MacLean and Philby [to the Soviet Union] the most embarassing examples.

'Bond was a way of projecting Britain as a first rank power despite all this, to suggest that the plucky nation which won the Battle of Britain was still punching above its weight in the new world order.'"

Whatever the truth really is (& I still suspect it is a combination of the 2), the end result was a cultural icon that not only survived well beyond the "Cold War" but looks to continue well into the 21st Century.

For Your Eyes Only, Ian Fleming & James Bond website