For Your Eyes Only Read Free Page B

the finest fillet steak, and then sleeps with the most beautiful women; Fleming, sexually speaking, ‘ate fishcakes’, lots of them. He was not quite a cad, but he was certainly a lothario, a ladies’ man, yet one who preferred the easy, undemanding company of fellow clubmen. He bought a former Baptist chapel in Ebury Street, Belgravia, where the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley had lived, and painted the inside suit-grey. Fleming’s distinctive interior decor no doubt reinforced the seductive, melancholy imagethat many women found irresistible, but it also reflected an innate sense of style and a fascination with colour and composition (perhaps inherited from his fashionable mother) that would find expression in his writing: room interiors are often meticulously described in the books. In upper-class party circles he was known as ‘Glamour Boy’, and there is no evidence he ever objected to the nickname. ‘London has got its claws into me,’ he told Ernan Forbes Dennis. But Fleming also got his claws into London, living a life in the capital’s clubs and fleshpots of unalloyed pleasure that was expensive, pleasant, louche and intellectually unchallenging.
    For millions, the Second World War was a trial or a tragedy. For a certain sort of Englishman, however, it was dangerous and thrilling, an opportunity for excitement and fulfilment in a moral cause. Many looked back on the war years, despite the deprivation, fear and violence, as a formative experience that changed for ever their perception of the world and its possibilities. For Ian Fleming, the outbreak of war was, in retrospect, a godsend. Photographs taken before the war show a young blade with hooded lids and a cruel upper lip, running to seed at speed. From 1939 onwards, he was a man with a mission: specifically, naval intelligence and espionage.
    Quite how Fleming came by this mission is a small mystery. The clubland he inhabited had its share of spies, and he knew many men operating in that shadowland: Forbes Dennishad been a spy. While in Kitzbühel, Fleming had encountered Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench, a semi-independent operative in one of the shadowy spy networks, gathering information on German troop concentrations. His elder brother Peter had already begun to work for British military intelligence before the war. Some thought Ian had done likewise. In 1939, he obtained a leave of absence from his stockbroking firm in order to cover a British trade mission to Moscow as a special freelance correspondent for
The Times
. Sefton Delmer, another journalist reporting on the trade delegation, was convinced that the
Times
job was simply Ian’s cover for more secret activities. Delmer had himself been employed by British intelligence as the
Daily Express
correspondent in Berlin, and would go on to work with Fleming on ‘black propaganda’ during the war. On his return, Fleming wrote a report on Soviet politics, an annotated and revised version of an article
The Times
had declined to publish, which found its way to various Soviet experts at the Foreign Office: ‘Russia would be an exceedingly treacherous ally,’ Fleming warned. And he was almost certainly debriefed by MI6, the external arm of the British secret service, on his return from his earlier Moscow visit in 1933.
    Fleming was clearly attracted to the spy world. For some time before the outbreak of war, he had been providing titbits of intelligence gleaned during his skiing trips and part-time journalism. It is almost equally certain that these offerings were uninvited and, at least in some quarters, unwelcomeand unappreciated. The military attaché in Berlin dismissed Fleming’s early intelligence-gathering efforts as ‘gullible and of poor and imbalanced judgment’. Perhaps he had been actively recruited by British intelligence at some point in the 1930s, but if so, it seems likely that Fleming would have revealed as much in the end: