For Your Eyes Only by Ben Macintyre

intelligence) to influence American opinion, channel top-secret information, and train secret agents at Camp X in Ontario. Some two thousand agents would pass through this camp during the course of the war, five of whom would go on to direct the CIA. Stephenson’s plan (which never materialised) to obtain nearly three million dollars in gold belonging to the Vichy government from the Caribbean island of Martinique, may have inspired the plot of
Goldfinger
, in which the arch-villain seeks to empty Fort Knox. Stephenson’s plot involved overthrowing the Vichy authorities on the island, getting the colony to declare for General de Gaulle, and then handing the gold reserves over to the Free French. Stephenson undoubtedly played a vital role inBritain’s wartime espionage and taught Fleming much of the craft he knew so well, but in many ways he is closer to M, the veteran spymaster, than to Bond himself.
    There is no definitive answer to the question, who was ‘the real Bond’, since, as he is a fictional creation, there was no such thing. Teasing apart the claims and counterclaims is made harder by the fact that spies lie so easily, particularly when remembering their own lives. The entertaining memoirs of Popov, Minshall and Stephenson should all be taken with large quantities of salt. Bond is all of the above, and none of them: he possesses the cunning of William Stephenson, the sheer toughness of Michael Mason, the insouciant style of Popov, the disobedience of Dalzel-Job, the elegant cufflinks of Biffy Dunderdale, the courage of Merlin Minshall, and Fitzroy Maclean’s intelligent heroism. Bond is all of these, but flavoured throughout with a healthy dollop of Fleming himself and his remarkable family. These intoxicating elements were then shaken up together, and stirred.
Who was M?
    At first this seems a far easier question to answer, but, as with all Fleming stories, the plot is thicker than it seems. The fictional Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG (finally identified by name in
The Man with the Golden Gun
) is based, in large part, on John Godfrey, Fleming’s boss at the NavalIntelligence Department. M is grumpy, dedicated, rude and every inch the naval martinet, with ‘damnably clear’ bright blue eyes; his underlings are terrified and loyal in equal parts. He ‘thinks in the language of battleships’, and his voice is straight off the Quarterdeck (the name of his house). Kingsley Amis assiduously totted up the various ways M’s voice is described by Fleming: angry (3); brutal, cold (7); curt, dry (5); gruff (7); stern, testy (5); and so on. Yet this is the voice Bond ‘loved and obeyed’. All these traits were apparent in Godfrey, who nonetheless ran a tight ship and proved a most effective spymaster. Fleming described him as a ‘real war-winner’ with ‘the mind and character of a Bohemian mathematician’. Some found Godfrey impossible to deal with, and his abrupt sacking in 1942 (and lack of wartime decoration) has never been fully explained. But, like Bond, Fleming knew how to play his short-tempered boss, and was treated with similar indulgence: M lets Bond get away with, and periodically commissions him for, murder. In
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
, Fleming makes the M–Godfrey link most explicit, describing the door-knocker on M’s house as the ship’s bell clapper from ‘HMS
Repulse’
, which ‘had been M’s final sea-going appointment’. Godfrey’s last command, before taking over at NID, had been the
Repulse
.
    In a strange case of truth following fiction, Godfrey would eventually ask Fleming to write his biography (Fleming declined), yet it seems the inspiration for M was not entirely pleased to be immortalised as the boss of a cold-bloodedkiller, who was prepared to employ Bond to kill the crooks who had murdered his friends (in ‘For Your Eyes Only’). ‘He turned me into that unsavoury