12/18/2023 0 Comments Real life secret agents![]() ![]() Simply put, tradecraft is the methods developed by intelligence operatives to conduct their operations. While Bond may not have cut the mustard with Le Carre as a traditional spy, there is still ample evidence of tradecraft at work. Deighton saw no reason to denigrate Fleming’s creation as he knew the debt that his generation of thriller writers owed him. Len Deighton, on the other hand, saw Fleming as a mentor and although commercial rivals for a time, their creations could not be more different. It starts a story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion.’ He knew all the types but decided he wanted his ‘spy’ a little different as he remarked.Īs Somerset Maugham, wrote in the “Preface” to his 1926 classic of spy fiction, Ashenden: ‘Fact is a poor story-teller. Fleming understood that James Bond works because he’s what we want spies to be like. Perhaps only Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene and Eric Ambler have caught the squalor and greyness of the Secret Service.” – Ian Fleming, The Diamond Smugglersįor real spying, is waiting and watching, nothing much happens and there’s no real action. “There is something in the subject that leads to exaggeration, and the literary framework of ‘a beginning and a middle and an end’ doesn’t belong to good spy writing, which should be full of loose ends and drabness and ultimate despair. Fleming battled his own demons, especially drink, so it’s hardly surprising he would want to escape the real world in his fiction.įor Fleming, the grey moral ambiguities of Graham Greene’s spies or Eric Ambler’s protagonists, whom he much admired, were less appealing than a more black and white hero who could provide a window of escape for readers, and very possibly himself. To write James Bond as close to a real spy as he would have produced a very different character and seen very little action. John Le Carre’s Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is the antithesis of Bond who brutally characterises them in the novel as ‘a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.’ Strong stuff.įleming and Le Carre approach their writing very differently and while money is no doubt a motivating factor, Fleming was far more overt about it. (Bond is the ideal defector because) ‘if the money was better, the booze freer and women easier over there in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot’. It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a licence to kill.’ ‘I’m not sure that Bond is a spy… I think it’s a great mistake if one’s talking about espionage literature to include Bond in this category at all. John Le Carre has always taken a more pejorative opinion of Fleming’s creation, as quoted in The Daily Telegraph, reflecting perhaps more of a difference in world view, than an objective take on Bond’s espionage abilities. Some ‘spy’ writers with Intelligence backgrounds had mixed opinions on Fleming’s Bond. I’ve known a few like that, and none of them ever went very far.’ There are those who try to ape Ian Fleming’s fictional spy, bristling with gadgets, sexually voracious, intrepid and constantly involved with battles of one kind or another. Yuri Modin the KGB controller for the “Cambridge Five” certainly did his best to shoot down Bond’s credentials as a spy, when he said ‘…the agent who thinks he’s James Bond has no place at all in a real intelligence service. He would go after the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy.’ ![]() ‘The business of espionage could be left to the white-collar boys. In truth, Fleming was unambiguous about Bond’s role from the outset in Casino Royale. ![]() His job was to gather intelligence, report to his bosses and at times, send real secret agents out into the field. This is not to say that Bond does not do any intelligence gathering or was not skilled in counter-intelligence.īut Ian Fleming, of course, was an expert in spying techniques having worked at close hand with real spies in Naval Intelligence, working cross-functionally with other intelligence agencies. He was a secret agent with a license to kill, should he need to use it. James Bond will never have a reputation in the intelligence or spy writer community as being a great spy. ![]()
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