Now pay attention, 007. ‘M’ has a question for you: What is the relationship between the realm of spy fiction and the real world of spies? Quite often it is difficult to know what is fiction and what is fact. Bond author Ian Fleming certainly made good use of the realities of past espionage in his 007 novels, and often drew upon his real-life knowledge of spying to provide his Bond stories with a grounding in historical fact, much of it picked up when he served as a Naval Intelligence officer in World War Two.
This has led to regular speculation about which spies may have influenced Fleming’s creation of James Bond. Fleming himself said there was no single individual who served as a role-model, but that Bond was an amalgam of the various types of servicemen he encountered during the war.
However, this has not stopped commentators from speculating about this over the years, and one real-life spy was often pointed to in the 1970s as a possible candidate, mainly because he penned his autobiography, and much of it read like an escapist 007 novel. The man was Dusko Popov.
This perception was reinforced some years later by a TV documentary. Bond fans in the UK were able to see the first transmission on British TV of True Bond on 2 January, 2009, a drama-documentary about Dusko Popov, who, it was claimed, was possibly a direct role-model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Shown on the National Geographic cable channel, the one-hour programme was a biographical investigation of Dusko Popov’s dramatic career as a real-life spy in World War Two, and it tried to explore the extent to which Fleming (who worked for British Naval Intelligence in Whitehall in London) may have used episodes from Popov’s career as the basis for some of his fictional 007 plots. There was a big emphasis on may, of course. So what was the evidence?
The Spy Who Knew Him
Fleming, who knew Popov well and was involved in setting up some of the espionage operations Popov carried out, seems to have admired Popov’s playboy lifestyle and his attempts to ‘clean out’ Nazi agents at the gambling tables in Casinos in neutral Portugal. The programme speculated about whether Fleming had possibly witnessed one such high-stakes gambling episode when he visited Portugal and saw Popov at work, and may have used it as the basis of Casino Royale, his debut James Bond novel However, there have been a number of theories about this from Fleming’s biographers and nobody can be certain.
The programme inter-mixed frequent clips from the EON Bond movies with an account of Popov’s adventures as one of the most daring secret agents of World War Two, and included contributions from Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, author of Ian Fleming (1995).
Although there has been much speculation in the past about Popov’s precise influence on Ian Fleming, Popov himself always remained modest about this and often reminded interviewers that James Bond was based on a combination of different people admired by Fleming during the War. The programme included clips from a rarely-seen American TV interview with Popov, conducted around the time Popov published his best-selling memoirs, Spy, Counterspy (1974).
Dusko Popov (pictured) was born in 1912 in Serbia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He became famous for his extravagant spending and his love of cars and women. He spoke fluent German, French, English and Italian, and had many contacts in the German establishment, but came to secretly hate the Nazis for their invasion of his country.
He decided to play a double-game. Taking huge risks, he signed up to the Abwehr (German secret intelligence), persuading them that nobody would suspect he was a spy because of his extrovert and high-living life-style! He then immediately offered his services to British intelligence as a double-spy. MI5 (the British domestic security service) gave him the code-name ‘Tricycle’ and used him to feed false information to the Nazis.
The Nazis were very pleased with the quality of Popov’s intelligence work. When he was in London, Popov would often rent a room at the Savoy Hotel and frequent nightclubs, buying expensive champagne and apparently cultivating key British people. In the meantime, Fleming and other officers in the British intelligence community put together intelligence material that would be plausible and persuasive (but ultimately useless) so that Popov could feed this back to Germany via secret radio contact. In 1941 Popov’s German handlers even despatched him to the USA to set up a new Nazi spy network in the country. He was instructed to find information about the US Naval base at Pearl Harbour, and realised the Germans wanted this information to pass on to their Japanese allies in the Axis alliance. In August 1941 Popov decided to tip off the FBI about this but, as True Bond pointed out, J. Edgar Hoover’s men were highly suspicious of Popov because of his international playboy lifestyle and frequent liaisons with Hollywood actresses. Tragically, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover failed to pass on this vital information about Axis interest in Pearl Harbour to his bosses at the top of the American government. Pearl Harbour was attacked by Japan in December, 1941.
For Their Eyes Only
Although at one point both Popov and his British intelligence employers feared his cover had been blown to the Germans (and he took to carrying a Luger pistol in his waistband just in case), ‘Tricycle’ was able to successfully continue feeding false information to the Nazis. In fact, as True Bond reminded its audience, it is no exaggeration to say that Popov was able to influence the course of World War Two. He was heavily involved in the British operation to fool the Germans into thinking that the 1944 ‘D-Day’ Normandy landings were not the main landings in France, and that the real invasion of France would still be through Calais. This tied up thousands German soldiers in the Calais area, allowing the Allies to gain a clear foothold in Normandy and avoid even greater loss of life.
Popov died in 1981, aged 69. His MI5 handlers in the War described him as an ‘intelligent, cultured man’ and he charmed most people who came into contact with him. It remains open to debate how far Popov was really the main inspiration for 007, as the programme contended (there are other important candidates), but True Bond remained an entertaining account of Popov’s career as a double-agent who clearly thrived on great risk. Although many of the EON film clips in the programme were of poor quality, it is still worth catching it if you have the opportunity.
There is one aspect to Popov that the programme avoided, though. When MI5 files on ‘Tricycle’ were finally released to the British National Archives at Kew, south-west London, in 2002, while there was much information about Popov’s extensive use of microdots, invisible ink and secret contacts, there was also the strong hint that Popov had been given the codename ‘Tricycle’ by his British MI5 handlers because of Popov’s strong sexual appetites and his love of the ménage a trois. One suspects Fleming would have been very amused.
Did You Know?
Another man who worked directly for Ian Fleming during the war was Naval officer Merlin Minshall (1906-1987), an amateur racing-car driver and skilled yachtsman, who carried out some daring missions for Britain. He later nominated himself as a role model for Fleming’s Bond, and published his claims in his autobiography, Guilt-Edged, published in 1977, with a foreword by spy writer Len Deighton.
