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Narrator
Wondery subscribers can binge full seasons of the Spy who early and ad free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.
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Charlotte Philby
From Wondery. I'm Charlotte Philby and this is the Spy who In this series the spy who inspired 007 we've been telling the story of the Serbian playboy triple agent Dusko Popov, whose antics at the Casino ESDA Real were an origin the first James Bond novel. And I'm sure many of you have already picked up on the various elements of Dushko Popov's personality and story that have inspired the James Bond character the globe trotting adventures, the womanizing, the Casino Royale. But it turns out Dushko Popov wasn't the only inspiration for 007 and I look forward to talking with our guest today about the other spies whose colorful lives and missions and the best names ever inspired the novelist Ian Fleming when he created the character of James Bond. And we will try and establish which real life spy is the most James Bond of all.
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Charlotte Philby
I've always been interested, both personally and professionally, in what it takes to be a spy. I'm fascinated by the psychology of espionage and how this double life affects people. It's something I explored in my latest novel, Edith and Kim, which is about the Soviet spy Edith Tudorhart and the man she recruited, my grandfather, Kim Philby, a double agent who was working for the Russians in the notorious Cambridge spy ring. But if I'm at a party or the school gate and I happen to mention that I write about spies, 9 times out of 10 the person will say, oh, like James Bond in our culture, he is the quintessential icon for espionage, everyone's first reference point for what life would be like as a spy and as a novelist. Frankly, I find this a bit frustrating. I spend My life researching the lives of spies and imagining what it would be like to walk in their shoes. And the truth is that the daily life of most spies is very different from James Bond. So when someone at a party says, oh, spies like James Bond, I tend to reply, not really, except there is one man who blurs the line between fact and fiction. Right from their first meeting at the casino Ishtar, you can see how Ian Fleming would have been inspired by Popoff to write his novels. However, Popoff might not have been Fleming's only inspiration. There are other spies who might also have informed the iconic character that is 007. So in this episode, I'm going to be chatting with Andrew Lycett, the biographer of Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond. We'll be going through the contenders, including Popoff, to see if we can finally answer the question, who was the real James Bond?
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
Andrew Lysett, thank you so much for.
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Charlotte Philby
Joining me for the Spy who. Can you remember when you first encountered James Bond and why you found this character so fascinating?
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Andrew Lycett
Yes, I was pretty young, maybe 11 or something like that, and I was at school and I was in a dormitory at a boarding school. The book that I had to hand was From Russia with Love in a paperback version. And it was just so exciting. It introduced James Bond, it introduced his adventures, it had the whole sort of scope of travel, intrigue, women and all sorts of things that as an 11 year old schoolboy, I had very little knowledge of, but just seemed so exciting. It just was an amazing bit of writing, really.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
And what is it about Ian Fleming's life that you find so engrossing that it's compelled you to write such a definitive biography about him?
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Andrew Lycett
You know, you have to move on a few years from that schoolboy encounter. I worked as a journalist, I was working in the Middle East, I was interested in aspects of the intelligence arena in the Middle east. And I found Ian Fleming just a very fascinating character because I was actually working at the time for the Sunday Times and he'd worked for the Sunday Times and I was interested in his journalistic exploits. But as I got to know more about him, I was interested in his wartime activities, obviously. And then as I actually began to research him as a subject for biography, I became very interested in this man, the man that was Ian Fleming. The whole James Bond kind of series developed somewhat after the war. It was Ian Fleming feeling that he had this book in him and he was determined to write it and he said he was going to write the spy novel to end all spy novels. And he went off and he joined the Sunday Times and he set up his amazing house in Jamaica, Goldeneye called after one of his operations in Spain while he was working for Naval Intelligence. And it kind of germinated within him, the whole Bond story. And inevitably he drew on lots of his experiences when he was in that very important position as Director of Naval intelligence in the Second World War, starting in 1939, he was at the center of intelligence operations. He was linkman with the other intelligence services, with the, with MI6, SIS, with MI5. So naval intelligence was actually a pretty important aspect of intelligence of the intelligence services in those days because it had agents in all the ports. That was the British. The Royal Navy was then still a very powerful entity and it had people in ports such as Istanbul, Odessa, throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, etc. And it was a sort of central aspect of the intelligence network. And a lot of people who'd been working as agents behind lines, they would pass back, they would call in, they would talk to Godfrey and Fleming would inevitably be there. And he picked up stuff from all these people.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
I love the idea of him borrowing so blatantly from real life.
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Charlotte Philby
What do you think makes the perfect snack?
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am/pm Advertiser
Hmm, it's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.
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Charlotte Philby
Could you be more specific?
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am/pm Advertiser
When it's cravenient. Okay, like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter, available right down the street at am, pm. Or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at am.
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Charlotte Philby
I'm seeing a pattern here.
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am/pm Advertiser
Well, yeah, we're talking about what I.
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Charlotte Philby
Crave, which is anything from am, pm.
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am/pm Advertiser
What more could you want?
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Andrew Lycett
Drinks are perfectly craveable and convenient. That's cravenience am, pm Too much good stuff.
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Charlotte Philby
So we have now established that Ian Fleming got his inspiration for James Bond from his time working for the British Naval Intelligence. But who really inspired the most famous fictional spy of all? Our listeners know about one real life inspiration, Serbian playboy triple agent Dusko Popov, and how, for instance, he inspired the Casino Royale scene. So let's move on to contender number two, Ian Fleming's friend and colleague, the charming diplomat and spy, Sir Peter Smithers.
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Andrew Lycett
Indeed. Smithers was a naval officer, a very brilliant man. He'd got a first at Oxford and he was trained as a barrister and he joined the Navy. He was in the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve, but he had the misfortune to be struck down with measles and he was in a naval hospital in Portsmouth and he was told that he couldn't go out to sea anymore. So Fleming for some reason, alighted on Smithers and dragged him up to London to work with him in Naval Intelligence. And he arranged for Smithers to be seconded to MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, and be sent to Paris, where Smithers acted as liaison with the the French intelligence services. And then he was transferred to Washington and he was instrumental in helping the sort of liaison with the American intelligence services. And they were setting up what was to be the sort of forerunner of the CIA. And Fleming famously wrote a couple of important memos that were quite significant in the sort of the ideas behind the CIA. Then Smithers came back and he became head of the Council of Europe. He lived in Switzerland, which is where actually I met him. He became a great expert in flowers and he had a beautiful garden in his house in Switzerland.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
And when you met Smithers, did he seem like James Bond incarnate?
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Andrew Lycett
He was a very urbane chap. He was absolutely charming. He didn't have that hard edge of Bond. Fleming had a phrase for it. Bond was the blunt instrument of the state and he was basically a hired assassin in many ways. And that's why you have to consider the models for James Bond as being an amalgam.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
Smithers, he actually appeared as a character, didn't he, in Goldfinger?
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Andrew Lycett
That is correct, yes. He was a sort of bank of England official. Yeah. Fleming used the names of friends of his in the sort of James Bond oeuvre. They pop up in various shapes and forms.
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Charlotte Philby
So we've heard about two possible contenders for the most Bond, like real life spy of all, pop off inspired the Casino Royale scene and probably some of James Bond's personality, the charisma, womanizing in Fleming's good friend Sir Peter Smithers may have inspired Bond's charm and jet setting lifestyle. But who else might have been an inspiration? I'm thinking here of the person with possibly the best name I've ever heard, Biffy Dunderdale.
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Andrew Lycett
Indeed. It was a name that grabbed me as the first time that I heard about Biffy Dunderdale. He was head of MI6 in Paris before the Second World War and he was an amazing character. Basically. He had been born, I think, in Odessa and his father was a ship owner and he spent some time in Istanbul as a child and he came to the knowledge of British intelligence at the early years of the Russian Revolution. He translated to Paris and became head of British Intelligence in Paris. And he sort of had a lot of the Characteristics of James Bond. He smoked incessantly, he drove around, and I always thought this is not the best thing for a head of intelligence to do, but apparently he did. He drove around Paris in a Rolls Royce and it's rather drawing attention to yourself.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
Hiding in plain sight, I think that's called.
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Andrew Lycett
Yeah, good point, yeah. But he developed very good understanding with members of the French intelligence services and he also, because he had good contacts, he developed good relations with members of Polish intelligence who were there based in Paris, and such good relations that they were able to share with him their early researches into the Enigma decryption machine that the Germans were using both commercially and in intelligence activities. And they were able to. To spirit one out through Paris to London, which was very important in allowing the people at Bletchley park to look at this machine and understand how it worked and understand how its various sort of encryption facilities operated. And that was very important, obviously, in the prosecution of the war. Dunderdale then came back to London and slightly faded from view because his contacts with the French intelligence were with the sort of old regime and the new French intelligence were very much a sort of Go list crowd that he wasn't very well acquainted with. But nevertheless, he was a very significant character in the whole sort of intelligence story in the run up to the war and the early years of the Second World War.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
And is that where he and Fleming would have crossed paths?
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Andrew Lycett
I think they might have before that, quite honestly, yeah. But. And then when Dunderdale came back to London and again he was one of these kind of almost mythical figures, you know, Biffy Dunderdale going around Paris.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
I mean, you couldn't make him up.
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Andrew Lycett
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
He sounds fantastic. And are there any reasons that make you doubt that Biffy Dunderdale would have been an inspiration for Bond?
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Andrew Lycett
I suppose the only thing that would make one doubt that him specifically was that he was a sort of head of intelligence, I. E. You know, he wasn't. Bond was very much an active man doing operations in the field. And Biffy, although as I say, he managed to get hold of the Enigma machine from the Poles, he was a bit more of what you might call an office man. The thing about Bond was that he was out there in the field and doing what it took to conclude his operations, including killing people if necessary.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
If it wasn't Biffy Dunderdale, who else could it have been? I'm wondering from hearing all this whether there might have been another inspiration for Bond, who is of course, in Fleming himself.
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Andrew Lycett
Yeah, inevitably Fleming himself is a major player in this story because the people who come into the picture regarding the models for James Bond were often largely based on the people that Ian Fleming came in contact with during the Second World War. The Second World War and his time in Naval Intelligence was pivotal in giving him a view of how intelligence worked. You know, this was when he conceived of an idea to write the spy novel to end all spy novels. But having said that, although Ian Fleming had some interesting escapades during the Second World War, his actual activity at the place where he spent most time was behind a desk in the Admiralty. And he was clearly fantasizing about these guys coming through the door. They'd been blowing up things in Bucharest and that kind of thing. And that was not his modus operandi at all. You know, he was an ideas man. He came up with some extraordinary, inventive ideas during the war, but he was inspired by these action men. So I've always taken the line that James Bond was, in a sense, Ian Fleming's alter ego. He's kind of the person that he would have liked to have been during the Second World War. Liked to have been, period, you know. But that is a way of looking at the character James Bond. He's a sort of alter ego of Ian Fleming. Now the Fleming brothers, to get to Ian Fleming's brother Peter. Peter had a very interesting war alongside his brother and in slightly different areas. Peter Fleming was Ian Fleming's elder brother. He'd made his name as an explorer and writing books. He was very brilliant chap and, you know, he fated as a writer well before Ian Fleming, in fact. And he got into the intelligence world in around 1937 in military intelligence, and actually, in a way, facilitated his brother Ian's entry into Naval intelligence. But Peter had been involved in the invasion of Norway and he played an important role in that. And it was a bit of a disaster in some ways. And at one stage it was felt that it was actually reported that Peter Fleming had been killed, but he hadn't. That caused some consternation in the Fleming family at the time, but he remained a sort of very significant figure in another part of the intelligence world, the military intelligence world, and he was sent to Delhi. And Fleming, actually, in the last part of the war, he. He made a trip around the world because he was getting a bit bored by that stage. And Peter Fleming was a very cool, brave, intelligent man.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
I love that idea of Fleming using Bond to live vicariously through him as a way to go out and do exciting things.
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Andrew Lycett
Another character that I might just refer to is Ian Fleming's childhood friend, school friend, Ivor Bryce. He was the nearest of Ian Fleming's to being a playboy. He was enormously wealthy and he married a succession of even wealthier women. And one of his wives had a house in Jamaica, sort of old plantation house. And when Fleming went over to America, he went with Bryce to Jamaica to attend a naval conference there. And they spent time in Bryce's wife's wonderful house overlooking Kingston. And that was the event which caused Fleming to first take notice of Jamaica. But he was, he was the kind of the racy sort of side of James Bond. He lived incredibly well and he was actually, as I say, a sort of childhood friend of Ian Fleming. And Fleming incorporated his name into at least a couple of his characters, including one of the Bryce's Christian names was Felix. And so that was incorporated into Bond's friend in action, Felix Leiter.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
It all feels so personal to Ian Fleming and I love the way that he pays homage.
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Andrew Lycett
It's inevitable, isn't it, that you know, if you've had this experience and if you are a sort of. If you are in a sort of imaginative character, imaginative chap with aspirations to write fiction, it's inevitable that you're going to call on these characters that you've had dealings with and incorporate aspects of their activities and their exploits and their bravery, etc.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
This has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you. Annette's given me reason to go and look up some more interesting characters from Fleming's history. I think it's safe to say that rather than there being one or two sources for Bond, that Bond is an amalgamation of all sorts of people, including Fleming himself and the alter ego that he would have loved to have. Thank you so much for your time.
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Andrew Lycett
Pleasure. Great to talk to you.
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
Thank you very much for joining us. Andrew Lycett, author of Ian Fleming, the Man who Created James Bond Wondery plus.
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Narrator
Subscribers can binge full seasons of the Spy who early and ad free on.
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Andrew Lycett
Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.
- [21:14]
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Interviewer (Charlotte Philby)
This is the final episode in our series, the spy who inspired 007. This bonus episode of the Spy who is hosted by me, Charlotte Philby. Our show is produced by Vespucci Verwandery for Vespucci. The producer of this episode is Emma Wetherill. Our senior producer is Thomas Curry. Consultant is Yellow Ant. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson Sync. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turk. Executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Jessica Radburn and Marshall Louise.