Ian Fleming (James Bond) Covert Operator

Operation Gladio murdered hundreds of innocent citizens in many bloodbaths, under the false flag of anti-imperialist "red brigades", in order to support right-wing, corrupt, pro-vulgar-capitalist governments and prevent people from electing progressive social leaders. That's a fact. Read Danielle Ganser.

And here comes this well informed apologist and tells us the inventor of James Bond was a member of Gladio and party to heinous crimes...

28/5/2007

James Bond - A Man for our Times

President Kennedy always liked to go to bed with a “Bond” since the British 007’s daring do adventures were his favourite fantasy reading – when of course he was not himself bedding beautiful unattached women, taking amphetamines, organising covert operations in the Caribbean or playing nuclear poker with a Russian Mr Big who was of an iconic grotesqueness that would have stretched even Ian Fleming’s fertile imagination. Indeed Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, had many of the characteristics of the Royal Naval Commander with a “licence to kill”. Some eye-witnesses even claim that Fleming as a war-time Intelligence Chief had personally arranged for Hitler’s Deputy Rudolph Hess to fly to Scotland in May 1941, had liaised with the Admiral the Head of the German Abwehr [Secret Service] and had single-handedly brought Hitler’s new Deputy Martin Boorman to Britain in 1945. Certainly there is a lot of Fleming in Bond, but what gives the novels universal appeal, and not just to priapic Presidents, is not only their cocktail of “sex, snobbery and sadism” but also the addition to the cocktail shaker of both the post-war political order and a twist of lemon of a mythic element – a Manichean conflict between heroes and antiheroes. That is why the re-make of Casino Royale can use the original plot to lay bare the changing threats, iconic beliefs and moral ambiguities of both the worlds of 1953 and 2007. Of the “anti-hero of Casino Royale, Fleming admitted, “Le Chiffre was serving a useful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which and by which alone, the opposite norm of goodness could exist.” Le Chiffre is reincarnated in the likes of Sir Hugo Drax, Dr No and Goldfinger. Ian Fleming’s expertise on correct behaviour and high living were those of one who had been educated as a gentleman but who came from a family that had just reached that status. Ian’s puritanical Scottish grandfather, born in a croft, had made a fortune in American Railways and founded the Fleming Bank in London. His eldest son Val became a Conservative MP and married the outgoing Eve Rose, granddaughter of Disraeli’s lawyer and Queen Victoria’s doctor. She became a vistosa political hostess but when Val was killed in 1917, she moved to Chelsea and became a patron of the arts, forcing the libidinous painter Augustus John to give her a daughter, Amaryllis. Ian was emotionally crippled by his hero father, his powerful mother and brilliant older brother Peter, who excelled at school, while Ian although Victor Ludorum at Eton, had only the option of the Army. This he soon left and was sent to learn German, and undergo Adlerian analysis, in Kitzbuhl and French at Geneva but failed to win a place in the Foreign Office. A spell at Reuters at London, Moscow and Germany followed before becoming first an uninspired banker and then a worse stockbroker, but part-time spy. At 31 in 1939 he found his metier when the Governor of the Bank of England recommended him as Personal Assistant, in effect Deputy, to Admiral Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, on whom he based “M”. Commander Fleming was at the hub of British Intelligence liaising between MI6 – the Secret Intelligence Service - , GCHQ [“special” Signals Intelligence and Bletchley Park where German Enigma code was broken] and the Political Warfare Executive and Special Operations Executive organising respectively Black Propaganda and Insurrection in occupied territory and all coordinated by JIC – the Joint Intelligence Committee. His brother Peter worked at MI [R] – sabotage. Fleming’s talents of sociability, organisation and imagination had at 31 finally found an outlet in this world of violence, duplicity and evil and the playboy was now at his desk at 6am. Bond was a composite of spies and Naval Attaches who worked for, or had been recruited by, Fleming: Merlin Minshall who attempted to block the Danube, Michael Mason, a tough landed gentleman, who had been an international boxer and a Canadian trapper, Commander “Biffy” Dunderdale, MI6 Chief in Paris who drove around in a bullet proof Rolls Royce and financed his espionage from his personal fortune and Commander “Sandy” Glen, an alumnus of “the Scottish Eton” Fettes – like Bond [and Blair] - who as Naval Attache’ in Belgrade seduced secrets and a wife away from a Belgian diplomat. After Pearl Harbour Fleming was sent over to Washington to “give birth to the CIA” or the OSS as it first was, for the US had to start - with a $10m grant! - a co-ordinated Intelligence Service effectively from zero. The US Army in 1938 had been only the 19th largest in the world and had a steep learning curve. Fleming knew too much to be allowed to risk capture on active operations, but the nearest he got was Golden Eye, codename for a stay behind [Gladio] in Spain if the Germans invaded. Here he played against Germans in the Estoril Casino and demanded that the Germans let him travel on a Lufthansa flight from Lisbon to Madrid. Golden Eye was to become the name of his isolated house in Jamaica where he wrote the Bond novels. “Ian’s Red Indians” was the name of the Intelligence Assault Units that he founded for the Dieppe and Normandy Invasions and whom he visited in the front line. Fleming left the Navy in 1945 determined to assuage his remorse for not seeing active service by writing spy stories. Fleming’s attitude towards women, whom he did not disguise that he felt inferior, was tainted by his self-disgust at getting gonorrhoea at the Royal Military College Sandhurst and the powerful love-hate relationship with his mother, who succeeded in forcing Ian with financial and emotional blackmail to break off three engagements. For his platonic friend Lady Mary Pakenham “He looked on girls as a schoolboy does. They were remote mysterious beings who you will never hope to understand, but if you’re clever, you can occasionally shoot one down.” “He liked having a cowering slave” said another. He rarely made the first move and his means of seduction was to invite the victim to a dinner of sausages and champagne at his converted chapel in Chelsea with its Man Ray photographs and then ignore her while leaving her to read his French flagellation pornography. This proved a rigorous self-selecting process. His long term “maitresse en titre” from 1932 was Lady Maud Russell, who was seventeen years his senior and in the 1930s was organising the smuggling of her fellow German Jews out of Germany. For Ian his ideal woman was “thirtyish, Jewish, a companion, who wouldn’t need education in the arts. She would aim to please, have firm flesh and kind eyes.” Ann Chatteris first married Lord O’Neill, who was killed in the war, but already she was in love with both Esmond Harmondsworth, the heir to the Daily Mail’s owner Lord Rothermere and “Glamour Boy” Ian Fleming. She married Esmond in 1946 when Ian refused to propose but then in 1952 left him for Ian. “We are of course totally unsuited – both Gemini. I’m a non-communicator, a symmetrist, of a bilious and melancholic temperament, only interested in tomorrow. Ann is a sanguine anarchist/traditionalist. So china will fly and there will be rages and tears. But I think we will survive as there is no bitterness in either of us and we are both optimists – and I shall never hurt her except with a slipper.” The marriage failed however because Ann found “the deserts of pomposity between the oases of wit were too vast””. There was no divorce but Ann began an affair with Hugh Gaitskill the Leader of the Labour Party. “Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role,” opined US Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Casino Royale, written in 1952 describes that limbo land – physical and moral. Traditional glories are represented by the 1933 3.5 litre Bentley, but in the Casino Bond needs “Marshall Aid” from the CIA’s Felix Leiter to continue his Baccarat game with double dealing Le Chiffre, whom the Russians kill before Bond can. Indeed it is the Russians who save Bond and not the British or the Americans, and Bond does not even get Vesper Lynd, who as a double agent has betrayed not just him but all Western Intelligence’s anti-Soviet operations – just as the Cambridge Spies Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Cairncross and Philby had just done in betraying “the Crown Jewels” of the Atom bomb technology. As much “one of us” and members of the Establishment as Fleming/Bond, these “traitors/patriots” had looked east to the Soviet Empire and not the new American one which had cannibalised the British one. Fleming writing on the British colony of Jamaica looks west, but with the jaundiced eye of an Intelligence chief who can always see both sides’ points of view. “Exotic things would happen to and around him but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government department,” said Fleming of his creation. This is also true of the 2007 Bond although I am afraid “gentlemen do not drive Fords”. International terrorism in a Christian Uganda will cause no offence to either advertisers or jihadisti; ditto Montenegro. Vespa Lynd no longer works for the French Deuxieme Bureau but as an accountant for the British Treasury! Bond is violent but not powerful. We are all terrorised. Yet we are all victims – especially the terrorists. Indeed we are all double agents now. Our loyalties appear torn between those who Quixote-like declare war on terrorism and those who believe in being nice to the crocodile in the hope of being eaten last – or hopefully saved in the nick of time by James Bond licensed to kill by terrestrial rather than celestial fiat.

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Queen Elizabeth 11 is on her fourth State Visit to the ex-First British Empire. She will visit Jamestown, Virginia, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the New World; indeed she has been Queen so long that she also went to the 350th anniversary on her first State Visit in 1957. This passionate and knowledgeable breeder of racehorses will also attend the Kentucky Derby. She will feel doubly at home because incognito every year she attends the famous horse sales in Kentucky. Then of course there will be dinner at the White House.
Virginia was so named by Sir Walter Raleigh in tribute to Elizabeth 1. If the Virgin Queen had married – and the choice was between a Hapsburg or a Valois - it would have meant that in England Parliament, Common Law, Protestantism and indeed the English Language would have disappeared as these institutions and “local” languages did in the rest of the new “modern” Europe. The same process would have applied of course to North America. Indeed Spanish Jesuits were already colonising north into Virginia from Florida and the French south from Quebec. Jamestown was the seed from which an Anglophone, Constitutional, Common Law and Protestant North America grew. Already by 1619, the year before the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers at Boston, Massachusetts, Virginia had its House of Burgesses or Commons. In that sense the 13 Colonies started out independent of London control.
If the Pilgrim Fathers sought refuge from a tolerant society for the right to persecute each other, Virginia was founded by the venture capitalists of the London Virginia Company to prospect for precious metals and to export raw materials for English manufacture – especially tobacco. Among the first colonists were German, Polish and Italian craftsmen to make use of local materials for export. Jamestown showed that the English no longer just saw the Americas as an obstacle to reaching the riches of the East now blocked by Islam to the East and unjustly – and for Protestants blasphemously – divided by the Pope exclusively between Spain and Portugal.
John Rolfe, who successfully developed Virginia tobacco, famously married a local Indian Princess Pocahontas, who died in London after being presented at Court. It was a shipwreck in Bermuda en route for Virginia that inspired Shakespeare’s’ The Tempest, which raised the question of whether the native American was a bestial subhuman Caliban or the all-seeing enchanter Prospero and whether the typical colonist of this “brave new world” was the self-seeking drunken butler Trincolo or the noble self-sacrificing Prince. The question perhaps remains open.
In the Civil War Massachusetts was the capital of the bourgeois Unionists while Virginia was the capital of the aristocratic Confederates. The visit of the Queen reminds us that Virginia with its fox hunting remains Old England while Massachusetts with its witch burning can be proud to declare itself New England.

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Winston Churchill, the Minister responsible at the time of the Partition of Ireland in 1922 wrote resignedly in his inimitable style about the seemingly eradicable ethnic confessional conflict in Northern Ireland:

“Then came the Great War [1914-18]. Every institution, almost, in the world was strained. Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the groupings of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world. But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone – [Counties of N Ireland] emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm that has swept the world.






Suddenly this one certainty is no more. Alongside the Prime Minister Tony Blair,
the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the Northern Ireland Minister Peter Hain we see the new Northern Ireland First Minister Rev Ian Paisley, for whom the Pope is Anti-Christ - something most Protestants are too polite to mention - taking tea!, smiling! and chatting! with his Deputy “Butcher Boy” Martin McGuiness, IRA Commander in Londonderry [Protestant] Derry [Catholic] and sometime IRA Army Council Commander. The Northern Ireland Assembly election system gives no majority rule by the Protestant majority but “power sharing” with two Ministers each for the Democratic Unionists, Sein Fein [Republicans], the United Unionists and the Social Democratic Party [Nationalists]. The leader of the United Unionists David Trimble and the leader of the Social Democratic Party John Hume justly won the Nobel Prize for their part in bringing the two communities to the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998, but the successful foot dragging over verifiable decommissioning of the Sein Fein/IRA explosives and arms has meant that the extremes have won the recent elections for the Assembly, suspended in 2002 when Sein Fein was raided by the Police for spying in the Assembly Offices for assassination targets. Both communities only trusted the two extreme parties to make sure firstly that Sein Fein had really ended its policy of the ballot paper and the Armalite rifle in each hand and that secondly the Unionists were really going to accept power sharing, including for example a Sein Fein Minister running education.


After 9 years of “peace process” and centuries of conflict each side has obtained its essential demands. Ireland has renounced the claim in Articles 2 and 3 of its Constitution to the “6 Counties” while the UK has said self-determination will be by a referendum, which reassures the Unionist majority, while Sein Fein got its prisoners on both sides of the border released, British Security presence reduced, control of the Police and to be a part of government. The fact that the previously socially and economically backward Republic has become a Celtic Tiger economy with a GDP per head greater than the UK and that 9/11 ended the Irish American financing of the IRA, have had an effect. Most important has been the use of both English and Irish fantasy with “polite fictions” and “creative ambiguity”.

The British Government began secret talks with the IRA, and especially Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, in 1972. As these two self-educated but highly skilled guerrilla leaders began the slow process of realising that there was no military victory and moved via the front of Sein Fein to an increasingly political struggle the “polite fiction” was maintained by all that Sein Fein had nothing to do with the IRA. However there would have been no point in cultivating them if they could not deliver the end to the armed struggle as the members of the 6 man IRA Army Council. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was a masterpiece of “creative ambiguity”. English and especially Irish literature is full of delightful ambiguity of multiple meaning. Blair’s mother is an Irish Protestant from Donegal, in the North, but part of the Republic. He persuaded both parties to risk moving, but at least forward, to deliberately ill-defined objectives. This got the Catholic SDLP and Sein Fein on board, but allowed Sein Fein to overtake the SDLP as being those who gave away least and over the longest possible time.


However the Protestant Unionists are people of The Word – The Bible – and this confirmed their distrust of the Jesuitical Sein Fieners - in government but with a gun still under the desk. Sein Fein’s foot dragging now forced the leader of the moderate Unionists David Trimble to resign and for Paisley’s uncompromising Democratic Unionists to become the largest Unionist Party as the only one trusted to face down Sein Fein’s bluffing. Ironically – or Jesuitically - a Paisley/ McGuinness Government in Northern Ireland comes from a process from the Armalite to the ballot box. Hopefully the two minorities – the Catholics in Northern Ireland and the Protestants in a United Ireland – can now live in a wary peace.

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