Ian Fleming describes Le Chiffre in Casino Royale

Aleister Crowley

The nail-biting poker game between 007 and the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale is one of the best in the history of movies.

Daniel Craig’s Bond eventually won the $120 million match but was later tortured by Mads Mikkelsen’s sadistic baddie in a blood-curdling scene.

The hit film grossed more than £470m worldwide but few would have guessed Bond’s nemesis was based on a notorious occultist who worshipped the devil on the shores of Loch Ness and whose drug-fuelled satanic rituals left a legacy of death and destruction.

Aleister Crowley – one-time master of Boleskine House near Inverness – met James Bond creator Ian Fleming during the Second World War and was not only the inspiration for the writer’s first great villain but also the grotesque template for most of those who followed. And the reason behind their unlikely, and only, meeting is stranger than the fiction itself. It sprang out of the historic arrival in Scotland in 1941 of Hitler’s number two, Nazi chief Rudolf Hess.

The revelation comes in a new book by former Royal Marine commando-turned-author Mark Simmons. For the first time it directly links Fleming’s wartime service in Naval Intelligence – the people he met and the adventures he had – with scenes from the 007 tales.

Author Simmons, whose non-fiction explores the links with, among others, Dr No, Thunderball and from Russia With Love, said: “I took on this book because when you read biographies on Fleming they suggest he was mostly desk-driven. But he did have adventures. There were quite a few events in the war where he was at the sharp end. The books and the films were heavily influenced by his time in Naval Intelligence. He met Crowley, just the once, in Torquay.”

But it was enough to make its mark. The Cornwall-based writer, 66, who spent part of his childhood in Helensburgh where he grew up on a diet of The Broons, but became fascinated with Fleming, who had Scots blood in his veins, told The Sunday Post: “After his death in 1947, Crowley became the inspiration for Bond’s first villain Le Chiffre.

“And Le Chiffre becomes a blueprint for most of the Bond villains. Almost all are grotesque in one way or another. Several have huge bodies, be they over 6ft like Le Chiffre or short and squat like Auric Goldfinger, who is 5ft tall; most weigh in at 18-20 stone. They are pretty much all megalomaniacs obsessed with power and world domination.”

The dad of two, who has two grandchildren, said Crowley and Fleming – who had been a reserve officer in the Black Watch before joining Naval Intelligence – met after Hess’s arrival in Britain in 1941. The Nazi parachuted into a farm in Eaglesham, East Renfrewshire, on a peace mission but Simmons said the occult may at one point have been considered as a potential lure for the deputy fuhrer, who was fascinated with the paranormal and astrology.

Head of wartime MI6 Maxwell Knight, a colleague

A black fleeced Minotaur rising out of a green grass field –