The Real Spycraft That Inspired James Bond

James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, always denied that he modeled his famous protagonist, Agent 007, on himself or anyone else he’d known during his secretive wartime service in British naval intelligence.

“Though he is a meld of various qualities I noted among Secret Service men and commandos in the last war, he remains, of course, a highly romanticized version of the true spy,” Fleming wrote in his foreward to another espionage book. “The real thing, who may be sitting next to you as you read this, is another kind of beast altogether.”

That hasn’t stopped legions of Bond buffs from combing Fleming’s 14 original books and what’s publicly available of his service record with the Royal Navy’s Naval Intelligence Division, looking for parallels—and finding some intriguing ones.

Fleming tended to minimize the sensitive role he played in the war and often dismissed his Bond novels as mere “fantasies.” He told one interviewer that the stories were “what you would expect of an adolescent mind—which I happen to possess.”

But Fleming may have had other reasons for his seeming modesty, says Nicholas Shakespeare, author of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (2023). Britain’s Official Secrets Act, for example, apparently prohibited him from revealing anything he’d learned through his work for naval intelligence, even in fictional form. “It may be as simple as that … a question of security,” Shakespeare says.

Ultimately, Shakespeare concludes, Fleming’s novels “were grounded in reality and a truth that Ian could not reveal but had intensely experienced. He wrote what he knew.”

Jennet Conant, author of The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, agrees: “Everything was grist for the mill… Everything that interested Fleming eventually ended up in his books.” That included his passion for gambling, properly mixed cocktails, fine automobiles, attractive (and dangerous) women—and clever spy gadgets. Fleming “carried a small commando knife with him on most foreign assignments,” wrote Conant, “along with a trick fountain pen that ejected a cloud of tear gas when the clip was pressed.”

Over the more than 60 years of Bond films, each new actor, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig, has been armed with fresh gadgets for plying his deadly trade. But the DNA of it all was already present in Fleming’s originals: the 12 novels and two short-story collections he published between 1953 and 1966.

Much of Fleming’s wartime record apparently remains classified, so it’s often difficult to know the precise role he played in many top-secret operations. The 30 Assault Unit (AU), a fabled British commando team formed in 1942 to collect intelligence on the enemy, was his brainchild, according to the official website of his estate. Among the unit’s greatest triumphs: the successful capture of one of the Nazis’ fabled “Enigma” coding devices and the seizure of a trove of historical German naval records.

Fleming’s AU commandos trained in many of the same skills that would be crucial to Bond’s success and survival. According to Craig Cabell, author of Ian Fleming’s Secret War (2008), those included the handling of small arms, mortars, hand grenades and explosives, parachute jumping, safecracking and lock picking, among other specialties.

“It is clear that Fleming used his wartime experiences in certain Bond novels, but he didn’t overdo it,” Cabell wrote. That’s likely due to Great Britain’s Official Secrets Act, as well as an agreement between the British government and the press, called a D-Notice, designed to keep the latter from publishing information that might endanger national security.

When Fleming did allude to actual incidents, Cabell adds, “the details were slightly altered in some cases to shroud covert operations, [while] other times they were vastly exaggerated for artistic license to thrill.”

The author also helped organize several espionage missions, including the top-secret Operation Mincemeat in 1943. The scheme involved an elaborate hoax in which agents planted fake documents on a corpse dressed as a British officer, then arranged for it to wash ashore in Nazi-friendly Spain. Incredibly, the Nazis took the documents to be genuine and moved their troops to protect Greece from an Allied invasion that they were now convinced was imminent. That allowed Allied troops to take the Italian island of Sicily, their real target, with far less opposition and fewer casualties.

Biographer Shakespeare credits Fleming with suggesting the idea for Operation Mincemeat in a memo to his higher-ups. In the memo, Fleming cites a 1930s mystery novel by another writer as his inspiration. “I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital,” he added, “but of course it would have to be a fresh one.”

Many Bond characters drew on Fleming’s wartime colleagues—one of whom he’d make famous with a fictional, one-letter code name: M. Starting with the first Bond book, Casino Royale (1953), M serves as the chief of the British intelligence service and 007’s no-nonsense boss. While there are several contenders for the title of M’s real-life model, he’s thought to be largely based on John Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence during the war who hired Fleming as his assistant.

Bond’s gadget master first surfaces in Dr. No (1958) as Major Boothroyd, head of Q Branch, a crackerjack tech team. On screen, he’d be forever known as Q, the wizard behind 007’s lethal toys. His real-life inspiration appears to have been a man named Charles Fraser-Smith, whom Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett describes as “nominally an obscure official in the Ministry of Supply but in reality the man who kitted up British agents with all sorts of gadgets from shaving brushes with secret cavities to shoelaces that acted as saws.” Among Fraser-Smith’s innovations were hollowed-out golf balls that could carry secret messages. Fleming appropriated the idea for hiding uncut gems in his novel Diamonds Are Forever.

In the 1959 novel Goldfinger, Fleming rolls out what is perhaps Bond’s sexiest and most iconic piece of hardware, an Aston Martin sports car, equipped with what the author coyly refers to as “certain extras which might or might not come in handy.” Those included reinforced steel bumpers “in case he needed to ram,” a Colt .45 pistol “in a trick compartment under the driver’s seat” and “plenty of concealed space” for sneaking contraband through customs. The book’s Aston Martin proved to be a relatively tame affair compared with the 1964 movie version, which added such amenities as machine guns, tire slashers and an ejection seat for undesirable passengers.

Fleming even provided Bond’s foes with some special equipment, such as the poison-tipped knitting needles and retractable shoe knives in From Russia With Love and the razor-brimmed bowler hat worn (and occasionally tossed) by the henchman Oddjob in Goldfinger.

Bond arrived just as the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union darkened. With atomic brinkmanship threatening civilization, Fleming’s hero offered readers the fantasy of control: fearless, witty and endlessly resourceful—especially with all those ingenious gadgets.

The novels found fans in high places, including two men who bore much of the real-life responsibility for guiding the U.S. through the Cold War: President John F. Kennedy and his first C.I.A. director and spy chief, Allen Dulles.

Fleming attempted to return the favor in his final novel, The Man With the Golden Gun, showing Bond reading Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage in one scene and Dulles’ The Craft of Intelligence in another. Unfortunately, by the time the book came out in 1965, Kennedy had been assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald (himself reportedly a Bond reader) and Fleming had died after a heart attack.

But Agent 007 and the empire Fleming built would carry on.