New Material On Ian Fleming Published

Two new books will be a must for fans of Bond author Ian Fleming. The first publication, the 'Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming's World of Intelligence', by Nigel West (Scarecrow Press, 2009), appeared late last year, while 'Operation Mincemeat', by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), is due to hit UK bookshops after being serialised in 'The Times' newspaper.

Both works push forward the available historical and literary knowledge on Fleming's secret intelligence-related career and explore the part the 007 author played in both the Second World War and in the post-1945 Cold War.

Cold War Fleming

Nigel West (which is a pen name for Rupert Allason) sets out in his Historical Dictionary to make connections between Fleming's role in the real world of espionage and how this contributed to his creation of the fictional adventures of James Bond. The Dictionary has numerous entries on real-life examples of espionage and spies, together with descriptions of the leading spy agencies of the world, and interesting material on the short stories and novels written by Ian Fleming in the 1950s and early 1960s. As the publishers put it in their marketing material, the James Bond author drew upon friends and places he knew well to provide the backdrop for his fictional drama, 'but what proportion of his output is authentic, and what comes directly from the author's imagination?' These are the questions West tries to address.

West, a former Member of Parliament in the 1990s, is currently the European editor of the academic journal the 'International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence', and his most recent book was 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain's Intelligence Agency, MI6' (2006), which gave biographical portraits of the various men who have overseen Britain's secret service since its formal foundation in the early 20th century.

War Time Fleming

'Operation Mincemeat', while not a study that deals directly with Ian Fleming, nevertheless contains some major new insights on the role the Bond author played in a key operation against the Nazis in World War Two.

The secret operation was the deception mounted by the British to fool the Germans into believing that the Allies would invade Greece, Sardinia and the South of France in 1943, instead of Sicily, their real intended target. The highly secret operation is calculated by historians to have saved thousands of Allied lives.

British intelligence officers found a dead man (a homeless Welshman), gave him a new identity, with forged papers and clues about the 'invasion' planted on him, and dropped the body off in the sea, near the coast of Spain. They knew that, once the body was found by the authorities in Franco's Spain, the information would inevitably be passed on to the Nazi intelligence services. Although Spain was neutral in the conflict, there were key fascists in Franco's regime who sympathised with the Nazi war effort and wished to see the Allies lose the war.

The deception worked perfectly, and encouraged the Germans to divert military forces away from the Allies' real invasion target. The story became immortalised in the 1956 British film 'The Man Who Never Was', based upon a carefully vetted memoir written by one of the participants. For many years, possibly because of the ethical sensitivity of 'borrowing' a dead body, the British government refused to release details on the secret operation. However, in 1996, files on 'Operation Mincemeat' were declassified, and Macintyre has made extensive use of the material for his new book, together with his own detailed research on the intriguing episode.

Moreover, Ian Fleming has been pointed to as the likely inspiration behind the controversial but ingenious operation. One key document was a memorandum issued by the Naval Intelligence Department (NID) in the early months of World War Two, which proposed using a dead body to feed false information to the Germans. The memo was signed by Admiral John Godfrey. Fleming worked as personal assistant under Admiral Godfrey in Naval Intelligence, and was often the main source for the 'unusual' and imaginative intelligence operations mounted by NID, something Godfrey himself later acknowledged.

Ben Macintyre is very familiar to Bond fans, as he was the author of 'For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond', written to tie in with the recent Fleming centenary exhibition mounted in 2008-2009 at the Imperial War Museum in central London.

Macintyre will publicly discuss his new book at the Cabinet War Rooms, London, on February 23, 2010, at 7.00pm. Tickets can be booked through 'The Times' newspaper.