Bond novels betray Bletchley Park secrets
An author has claimed that Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond novels, was inspired by the intelligence work at Bletchley Park – and even betrayed some of its secrets in the books.
Sinclair McKay told the Henley Literary Festival that Fleming was so enamoured with the secret goings-on at Bletchley Park that he left a number of teasers in his 007 novels, which was a “wild contravention” of the Official Secrets Act.
FOR decades fans have debated which real-life spies may have inspired the character of James Bond – but it seems that Ian Fleming may have borrowed a bit more than just personalities for inspiration.
The author was apparently so enamoured with the secret goings-on at Bletchley Park that he left a number of teasers in his 007 novels in a “wild contravention” of the Official Secrets Act, one expert has claimed.
The hints, which appear not to have been picked up by officials, range from subtle references to the Enigma machine to the inclusion of a game of chess “obviously” based on a real-life competition, which saw a top codebreaker pitted against a Soviet grandmaster.
Sinclair McKay, who has written a number of books on Bletchley Park, told the Henley Literary Festival that the details would have been deliberately included by Fleming because his “ad- miration for the code breakers was enormous”.
After the talk, he told The Daily Telegraph: “Ian Fleming was involved in naval intelligence during the war. He was one of the very, very few outside the Bletchley operation that knew precisely what these women and men achieved. He had to sign the Official Secrets Act because of it.”
The teasers started in Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, which was released eight years after the war ended. It was a simple hint – the inclusion of a character called “Le Chiffre”, translated simply as “The Cipher” or “a code”.
Four years later, Fleming got braver. McKay believes the author was inspired by a chess game from 1954, which saw top codebreaker and chess player Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander take on David Bronstein, a Soviet chess grandmaster.
The game, which saw Alexander “floor” his opponent, was widely covered by national press. It was also watched by a number of Soviet agents, who hid themselves in the audience to make sure none of their team defected.
The chess game used in the 1963 film may also have been inspired by a match between Bronstein and Boris Spassky, a Soviet world champion.
“It is no surprise that just a couple of years after Alexander played chess, the 007 novel From Russia, With Love featured a key chess scene,” McKay said.
“Instead of Bronstein, it was Kronsteen that was at the table – but he was also being watched by Soviet agents and his game ends in disaster, too.”
There was a second teaser in the novel, according to McKay. Bond was on the trail of an encryption machine that was “not a million miles away from the old Enigma”.
Later, in You Only Live Twice, the fictional Japanese coding system is “remarkably close to the real-life one”.
McKay, who latest book The Spies of Winter explores what happened at Bletchley once the war was over, said Fleming easily got away with his neglect of the Official Secrets Act, because the “ordinary person” – and the majority of government officials – would not have thought the details were true.
“He would have known the Bletchley Park hierarchy,” he said. “He got away with it because, of course, only he and the senior directors knew.”