[quote]50 Years of James Bond
By Alexander Cockburn
The most successful saga in postwar popular culture got off to a conscientious start after breakfast on a tropical morning in Jamaica early in 1952. Ian Fleming, forty-three years old and ten weeks away from his first and last marriage, knocked out about 2,000 words on his Imperial portable claiming (falsely) that he was just passing time while his bride elect, Anne Rothermere, painted landscapes in the garden. In fact Fleming had been planning to write a spy thriller for years and he kept up the regimen of2,000 daily words until, two months later, he was done, with Commander James Bond recovering from a near lethal attack on his testicles from Le Chiffre's carpet beater, Le Chiffre finished off by a Russian, Vesper Lynd dead by her own hand, and a major addition to the world's cultural and political furniture under way.
On 16 January, 1962, ten years to the day after Fleming had typed those first words of Casino Royale ('The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning') filming began on Dr No at Palisadoes airport in Jamaica, with the British Secret Service and the CIA duly represented by Sean Connery and Jack Lord. Fleming lived long enough to see only two of the Bond films, Dr No and From Russia With Love, before dying in August, 1964 of a heart attack helped along by his seventy or so Morland's Specials
He has much to answer for. Without Fleming we would have had no OSS, hence no CIA. The cold war would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.
Let those dubious of such assertions study the evidence. It was Fleming, assistant to the director of British naval intelligence during the Second World War, who visited Washington DC in 1941 and wrote a long memo of advice for General 'Will Bill' Donovan, President Roosevelt's Co-ordinator of Information, whose duties included the collection of intelligence and the planning of various covert offensive operations. According to Ivar Bryce, a lifelong friend of Fleming's who was working at the time for Sir William Stephenson, the director of Britain's intelligence operations in the Americas, 'Ian wrote out the charter for the COI at General Donovan's request ... He wrote it as a sort of imaginary exercise describing in detail all the arrangements necessary for financing, paying, organizing, controlling, and training a secret service in a country which had never had one before.'
Fleming's memo was dashed down in long-hand over two days in the British Embassy with the diligence later exhibited in his imaginative stints after breakfast in Jamaica. It impressed Donovan who gave him a .38 Police Positive Colt inscribed with the words 'For Special Services' and went on to build the COI which later evolved into OSS and later still into the CIA.
So, you see, it was all Fleming's fault. He had a riotous imagination utterly unsuited to serious intelligence collection and analysis. The offices of the British Admiralty often rang with laughter at his mad schemes. It was Fleming who suggested that British sailors be entombed in a giant lump of concrete off Dieppe, from which they could keep watch on Dieppe through periscopes. It was Fleming who proposed to send a cruiser into Nazi waters with a transmitter beamed to the German Navy's wave-length which would, in his words, 'keep up a torrent of abuse, challenging the German naval commanders by name to come out and do something about it. No sailor likes to be accused of cowardice, and Germans are always particularly touchy.'
Fortified by such boyish fantasies, the officers of OSS never wrought much damage to the foe, but, from Donovan and his subordinate Allen Dulles downwards, learned to exploit romantic public fantasies of what a secret service should be. Thus they ensured their survival, if not in the field then in the crucial bureaucratic battlegrounds of Washington.
At the end of the war the future of the OSS hung in the balance. Alert to the importance of publicity for their supposedly secret organization, Donovan and Dulles lent every assistance to Hollywood producers racing to be first in the theaters with an OSS movie. Paramount's man in this race was Richard Maibaum, who, with Alan Ladd produced "OSS". Donovan's aid was later responsible for turning the Bond novels into film scripts. Maibaum recently recalled that 'before we got done we had literally about ten technical agents all telling us marvelous stories of what had happened to them all over the world which we incorporated into the plot. There were foreshadowings of things in the Bond films, - the pipe that was a gun, and other gadgets. There were some things we couldn't use, such as foul smelling stuff like an enormous
that the OSS agents used to spray on people they wished to discredit, and thus cause them to be socially humiliated It was called Who, Me? We could never get it in, because the Johnson office would never let us use it.'Soon the postwar audiences were enjoying Maibaum's OSS along with Cloak and Dagger from Warner's and 13, Rue Madeleine from Twentieth-Century Fox. This spy hype helped the OSS resist bureaucratic extinction and instead metastasize into the CIA.
Having engendered the OSS, Fleming now began to lure Anthony Eden down the path of fantasy. Like many in the small but enthusiastic fan club for Fleming's early thrillers, Sir Anthony Eden rejoiced that in Fleming's pages, if not in the real world, a Briton was capable of decisive, ruthless action. Eden, as prime minister, resolved that the fortunes of 007 would be reflected in bold deeds, undertaken by himself. In concert with France and Israel he invaded Egypt in 1956. He had not studied the works of his friend with sufficient care. Bond and his master, M, placed the highest priority upon acting at all times with the approval of the United States. In the case of Suez, President Eisenhower said the invasion had to stop and it did. Twelve days later Eden had an attack of what his spokesman called 'severe overstrain' and his doctors urged him to spend a few weeks in absolute seclusion and repose.
Once again Eden was overwhelmed by the fantasies of his friend. After the war Fleming had bought a plot of land on Jamaica's North Shore and built a small house on it. To acquaintances trembling with cold in English winters Fleming would body forth 'Goldeneye', his Caribbean paradise. In the crisis, seeking rest, Eden and his wife decided to go to Goldeneye. Fleming was delighted, since it raised the rental value of the place and he was badly in need of cash. But for the Edens the trip was unfortunate. The quarters were unalluring. Gazing into the rafters of Goldeneye, the prime minister, already suffering bouts of paranoia, fancied he saw rats. He was right. He consumed days chasing them in the company of his two body-guards. Finally, harrowed by lack of sleep, broken in health, he returned to London, announced he was 'fit to resume my duties' and resigned three weeks later.
In 1958, Fleming wrote Dr No, which advanced the novel notion that Cuba, as the local representative of the international Communist conspiracy, had perfected a reactor-based instrument capable of sabotaging US missile tests, thus explaining the Soviets' apparent advantage in space technology, as evidenced by the launching of the Sputnik. Having proposed a fictional Caribbean missile crisis, Fleming followed up in person. In the spring of 1960 he was taken to dinner at the Washington home of Senator and Democratic presidential candidate-elect Jack Kennedy. The conversation turned to the problem of Castro. How should he be dealt with? Fleming's imagination sprang into action. As Fleming's biographer, John Pierson, reported the conversation, he told the assembled company, which included a CIA man called John Bross, that the United States should send planes over Cuba dropping pamphlets, with the compliments of the Soviet Union, to the effect that owing to American atom bomb tests the atmosphere over the island had become radioactive; that radioactivity is held longest in beards; and that radioactivity makes men impotent. As a consequence the Cubans would shave off their beards, and without bearded Cubans there would be no revolution.
Everyone, including Senator Kennedy, laughed at the scheme. The next day Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, telephoned a friend of Fleming to express regrets that he had not been able to listen to Fleming's plans in person. Within two years the Kennedy brothers along with Alien Dulles, director of the CIA, were hiring gangsters to help in either the murder or humiliation of Castro, with the latter being attempted by a dust which would cause his beard to fall out. The subculture of sabotage andassination coaxed into being by the Kennedys finally, on November 22, 1963, turned back on the President.
Just as Eden helped raise the real estate value of Goldeneye, so did President Kennedy augment the fortunes of the fantasist. On 17 March, an article by Hugh Sidey in Life announced that President Kennedy could read at a rate of 1,200 words a minute and had ten favorite books. From Russia With Love was ninth, just ahead of Stendhal's The Red and the Black.
Bond became the embodiment of western discourse on the Cold War. The men who would later construct the Reaganite view of the universe turned time and again to their Bond for edification. From him they learned that the Russians use Bulgarians as "proxies" and thus the legend of the KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope was born. They watched Thunderball and conceived that terrorists, probably Libyans, would steal atomic bombs and attack American cities. They worried about germ warfare when they saw On Her Majesty's Secret Service and about weather modificationwhen they saw The Man With the Golden Gun. But it was the lasers in Diamonds Are Forever, along with the space station in Moonraker that made the deepest impact. Could missiles be destroyed in space? Could there be such a thing as a space shield? To hand was a Bond sequel by John Gardner called For Special Services in which the villain announces on page 222 that -The Particle Beam