Ian Fleming's War by Mark Simmons

Author:Mark Simmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2020-12-19T00:50:21+00:00

10

Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

In the wake of Operation Catastrophe, as Fleming called his drunken night out in Tangier with Henry Greenleaves, he was back in London in August 1941. Looking for a new challenge, he applied to join the British Military Mission to Moscow as naval representative. The leader of the mission was Major General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, known as “Mac.” He had known Ian from Berlin in the late 1930s and their paths had crossed again when he had been second-in-command of the Gibraltar garrison up to March 1941. At the time, Mac was also head of the Joint Intelligence Center on the Rock and the combined forces group ready to activate Operation Golden Eye. He was not impressed by Fleming, thinking he was “gullible and of poor unbalanced judgment.” He told Major General Francis Davidson, the Director of Military Intelligence, that he did not want Fleming “foisted” upon them. He felt that he was likely to harm the “so far very cooperative and matey family” he had assembled.1

Mac need not have been concerned for the question never came up as Godfrey would not release his key assistant. Fleming was disappointed, telling Peter Smithers that he “hoped to lose myself there for protracted winter sports, but I dare say skiing with a Panzer Division behind is less fun than the old-fashioned kind.”2

It was only a matter of days after his return that Ian got involved with the new Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and their remit to take over propaganda and deception, which he found fascinating and had ended up on his desk at 17F.3 One of Ian’s great skills was to delegate and for the day-to-day running of propaganda he set up a new section in Room 39, 17Z, to be run by Donald McLachlan in close cooperation with Sefton Delmer, who had set up PWE’s “black” propaganda machine, designed to confound and confuse the enemy, at Woburn Abbey. White propaganda was put out by the BBC. Ian’s friend, Robert Harling, would also be roped into “black radio” the “subversive broadcasts to the German Navy.”4

Harling had first met Ian in the late summer of 1939 when he was an established typographic businessman publishing innovative magazines. Theirs was an unlikely friendship, given Ian came from Eton and the City, while Harling came from a working-class background and was a self-made man. However, Fiona MacCarthy wrote in the foreword to Harling’s Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir of their “burgeoning friendship” and that they had much in common: “The two men shared a certain inner loneliness, war suited both of them. They both had a taste for action, an almost boyish longing for adventure and escapade.”5

Harling was a keen sailor and at the outbreak of war he volunteered for the Navy. In the evacuation from Dunkirk he commanded a whaler shuttling men from the beaches to larger ships. After that he was a navigator on a corvette on convoy duties in the Atlantic. A bad bout of gastric flu left him ashore

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