The Spy Who - The Spy Who Inspired 007 | The other James Bonds | 5

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Charlotte Philby interviews Andrew Lycett, the biographer of Ian Fleming, about the other real life spies that inspired his most famous character: James Bond - including the flamboyant Biffy Dunderdale, the urbane Sir Peter Smithers and even Ian Fleming’s own escapades. But who is the most James Bond of all? Listen to The Spy Who ad-free on Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/the-spy-who now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. 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 Esteril were an origin for the first James Bond novel.

And I'm sure many of you have already picked up on the various elements of Dusko Popov's personality and story that have inspired the James Bond character. The globe-trotting adventures, the womanising, 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 colourful 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. 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 Tudor Hart 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, nine times out of ten, 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 Istoril, 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? Andrew Lycett, thank you so much for joining me for The Spy Who. Can you remember when you first encountered James Bond and why you found this character so fascinating?

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 school boy, I had very little knowledge of, but just seemed so exciting. It just was an amazing bit of writing, really. 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? 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, Golden Eye, 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 link man with the other intelligence services, with MI6, SIS, with MI5. So naval intelligence was actually a pretty important aspect of intelligence and of the intelligence services in those days, because it had agents in all the ports. 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. I loved the idea of him borrowing so blatantly from real life. 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. 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 French intelligence services. And then he was transferred to Washington, and he was instrumental in helping the liaison with the American intelligence services. They were setting up what was to be the forerunner of the CIA. Fleming famously wrote a couple of important memos that were quite significant in 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. And when you met Smithers, did he seem like James Bond incarnate? 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 hard assassin in many ways. And that's why you have to consider the models for James Bond as being an amalgam. Smithers. He actually appeared as a character, didn't he, in Goldfinger?

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, and they pop up in various shapes and forms. So we've heard about two possible contenders for the most Bond-like real-life spy of all. Popoff inspired the casino

royale scene and probably some of James Bond's personality, the charisma womanising. 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. 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 shipowner, 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've 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. Hiding in plain sight, I think that's called. 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 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 goalless 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. And is that where he and Fleming would have crossed paths? I think they might have before that, quite honestly. Yeah. 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. I mean, you couldn't make him up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

He sounds fantastic. And are there any reasons that make you doubt that Biffy Dunderdale would have been an inspiration for Bond? I suppose the only thing that would make one doubt him specifically was that he was a sort of head of intelligence. 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. 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 Ian Fleming himself. 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. 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. 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 a very brilliant chap and he's 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. 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 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. I love that idea of Fleming using Bond to live vicariously through him as a way to go out and do exciting

things. 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 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 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 Bryce's Christian names was Felix. And so that was incorporated into Bond's friend in action, Felix Leiter. It all feels so personal to Ian Fleming. And I love the way that he pays homage.

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. This has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you, and it'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.

Pleasure. Great to talk to you. Thank you very much for joining us, Andrew Lycett, author of Ian Fleming, The Man Who Created James Bond. This brings us to the end of our season on Dushko Popoff. On the next season of The Spy Who, Homeland and Spook star Raza Jafri opens the file on Oleg Lelin, the spy who sabotaged the KGB. Lelin's actions triggered the biggest removal of spies

by any government in history. It's the story of an overstretched security service needing a win, a covert plan to bring catastrophe to Britain's streets, and a love affair that shook the world. Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. 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 Filby. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery. For Vespucci, the producer of this episode is Emma Wetherill.

Our senior producer is Thomas Currie. Consultant is Yellow Ant. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson Sync. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turkin. 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 Living.