Ian Fleming Connections

[Robert Pearson]

I note Ian Fleming doesn't appear in the index. A few months ago I read the excellent biography by Nicholas Shakespeare and far beyond Bond books. there are many intriguing possible connections, of course, firstly Sir William Stephenson, but just for starters, after the war Fleming became foreign manager for Kelmsley Newspapers (Sunday Times) and the bio talks about how his correspondents all over the world (and note, many in the United States and the Caribbean) became a sort of private intelligence service...

It smells strongly of the Caroline Group. This is a very preliminary post while I have a few minutes. But I'd like to see if anyone else has additional insights--I'll add more when I have time to go back and revisit the biography more deeply.

[Robert Pearson]

My apologies for not following up on this yet--I have to get a hold of another copy of the Fleming biography.

[Jan Lundquist]

Robert, sorry for the delayed reply.

The search engine here is not terribly helpful. I know I have touched on Fleming as art of the Boston/Twigsnapper character’s narrative, constructed from his posts in the Before Times.His is the sole account of the pear-shaped post war mission which resulted in the death of a German scientist and a chest wound for Townsend.

The venerable Mr. Twigsnapper seems to have been part of the Royal Marine special Forces known to us as the Auxillary Units 1 and 2 under Fleming’s command at the end of the war, but his first assignment after basic training was as part of a two man crew aboard a mini-sub. The first mini sub off the production line, was placed under Fleming ‘s command, so their shared history may have begun then.

Fleming remained close with Henry Stephenson (1897-1989) after the war and it has long been said?/thought? that Fleming modeled his James Bond character after Stephenson . though Stephenson was most certainly the greatest spymaster of WW II, and a well-connected international businessman, he was small in stature and AFAIK, he never received the type Special Forces Training that a field operative would have been given.

Bond seems to me to be more of composite from those younger men who served in the SAS or AU 1and 2, Some of them returned to mundane lives after the war. Others continued their service in the new Cold War. men We can see one of them in the 1956 Paris photo of a handsome and dapper Twigsnapper, brimming with vitality and in the prime of his life.

[natecull]

It smells strongly of the Caroline Group.

Yes, reading Bill Macdonald's "The True Intrepid" ( https://archive.org/details/trueintrepidsirw0000macd - Internet Archive login required) gives a lot of Ian Fleming connections.

Some hits here on Paul's forum, going back to 2006: search.php?keywords=fleming

What was the Caroline Group in the 1920s-1930s, though, I wonder? Eldridge of course (father and son), and presumably Stephenson, though how and when he crossed paths with the Eldridges remains unclear to me. Electrical and radio tycoons with WWI Signals Intelligence background. Stephenson somehow built up a private intelligence empire during either the 20s or the 30s, such that by 1939 he was already the obvious man for Churchill and FDR to use as their private communications hub. That's an impressive achievement for an Icelandic immigrant orphan from Canada. We don't know much about how that private career unfolded - how he got from a failed can opener business to suddenly getting involved with "telegraphic transmission of photos", a technological subject with military/police implications very close to his old WWI Signals history, but one could imagine that the ex-military and technology-entrepeneur "old boys club" would have helped a lot in that.

I also imagine that if you look at the career of, say, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, that you'd probably see similar patterns to the "Carolines". Ellison's Oracle database was originally a CIA project. One probably doesn't just accidentally stumble into being given such projects, and the opportunity to turn them into a string of massive government/military contracts, even if one is a very bright kid. There have to be connections, as well as luck, bravery and smarts. For Stephenson, it seems like WWI was where he made those connections. For Townsend Brown, his family and then his Navy links. For the Fleming brothers... the British college and newspaper scenes, I guess.

Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Nate,

According to Twigsnapper, via Linda, the Carolines were born/ created in France by a group of women who had seen the horrors of WW I and hoped never to experience another, but vowed to be ready if/when the next one arrived.

The rest of this post will likely be old news for you but will help you readers catch up with the characters in the Brown narrative .

After the Armistice, every informed person knew that the world was in a period of negotiated peace with a limited life span.

If that is the story of the origin of this informal alliance, I wager that silent film star/producer/3 time Oscar winner, Gloria Swanson, was front and center.

The Carolines core members were founders of a communications industry that grew from Gramaphones into Victrolas and beyond to movies, telephones, radio and TV . (Eldridge Johnson’s company would eventually merge with Farnsworth’s nemesis, RCA , to become RCA-Victor.)

The Pathe Brothers of France were the whiz kids of the nascent film industry, technical geniuses whose newsreels played in theaters around the world for decades. One of their most poignant captured Lionel “Buster” Crabb taking his fateful last dive in 1956.

French Marquis Henri “d’longtitle” was an executive for Pathe and a consultant for RKO cinemas in the USA. He and Swanson had been married and divorced, but were still close,?even after she took up with International financier,Joe Kennedy, Sr. Joe’s many business ventures included heavy investments in RKO and a partnership with RCA.

Their affair lasted three years, during which time he served as her financial advisor. Though Kennedy was most definitely an antisemite, Swanson clearly was not. By the late 1930s,she and Henri d’ were working to exfiltrate Jewish sound and photography engineers from countries under Nazi control. The company was able to supply expertly forged passports and identity papers.

Swanson headed the U S end of the operations from her headquarters in the Rockefeller Plaza building (“The Rock”) , which she occupied for months before Stephenson’s British Supply company arrived. She was called The Big Chief by the rescued.

All of the above is documented history. So is the fact that Major Robert Staver of the U.S . Army Propulsion command, serving in an ALSOS mission, jumped the chain of command to recommend swift implementation of the expanded exfiltration that became Operation Paperclip.

The expertise of the ex filtrated talent was widely distributed and it is possible to find a record of where each of the 200 or some were sent. A few arrived at the remote China Lake weapons research base in the Mojave Desert, staffed by Caltech rocket scientists doing the sensitive work of developing and testing proximity switches for explosive warheads.

Until shown otherwise I will continue to believe that the mysterious Staver was Robert Sarbacher. I have found no enlistment records nor history of Robert Staverof and no record of Satbacher participating in an ALSOS mission, but Twigsnapper has placed him there.

[Robert Pearson]

Thanks everyone for the always intriguing additional information--I recently devoured The Irregulars by Jennet Conant, an excellent book about British intelligence operations in the US told through the experiences of Roald Dahl. It seems almost certain that Fleming never met Stephenson in person until March 1941 when he arrived in the US with a British Naval Intelligence delegation. He soon became friendly with Stephenson (and later, their estates in Jamaica were quite close to each other) but I'm finding there's no real evidence that Fleming was part of the Caroline Group. I highly recommend The Irregulars though!

[Jan Lundquist]

This was a duplicate post.

[Jan Lundquist]

Thank you, Robert. I will add The Iirregulars to my reading list.

I have just finished a memoir called Crossing, a journal of survival and resistance in World War II, by Jan Yoors, who was 18 when France was invaded. From the age of 12 onward, Yoors had spent long periods of time with a band of traveling Romany, and was adopted as one of their own.

He described a meeting with a mysterious stranger, meek, and mild in appearance whom he believed to be a member of British intelligence. The meeting seemed very Caroline like. The stranger, who was waiting for Jan in his temporary lodging in a Parisian convent, knew all about the Romany connections and asked Jan to feel out the Rom elders to see if they would join the Resistance.

For as long as they were able to travel freely, before they were rounded up and sent to the death camps, Romany men provided heroic assistance in various ways. This freedom enabled them to smuggle many people to safety across French borders.

Through this service, Pulika, Jan’s adoptive father ,became friendly with a Gajin or non-Rom.?This was an unusual occurrence in and of itself, made more unlikely by the fact that the man was an aristocrat.

He headed a small, but well equipped partisan army that operated from a decrepit hunting lodge deep in a forest. The aristocrat said that their families received compensation for their services from private funding. His nom de Guerre , was Capitaine Lothar, but his command subordinates called him Le Chef , The Chief.

There are points in his story which mirror what is known about French Marquis, Henri de la Fallaise.

The Big Chief, herself, Gloria Swanson, would later say thatchedHenri was her favorite ex husband. A handsome, well built, decorated hero from WW I, the man possessed enough charm to woo and wed (sequentially) two of the most glamorous movie stars of the day.

Though divorced, he and Swanson would work as partners in a coordinated effort to rescue men in danger of being killed or captured by the Germans. While Lothar’s adjutants, who seemed to come and go, were more cosmopolitan and urbane than the men in his command, he was perfectly comfortable squatting by a fire and exchanging brandy and stories with his Romany companion. He talked freely (perhaps too freely for his own safety, Jan feared) and had no hesitation in sharing his history. He had been a lawyer like Fallaise, and like Fallaise , he had worked for an international news agency before the war.

Noted for the record,
jan

[Jan Lundquist]

Jan Yoors says the man who recruited him into the Frenc Resistancerece had a strabismus in one eye. He spoke French with a slight accent which could have been a regional one.

Yoors heard him called Msr. Henri, but this May boy have been his actual name. Ohysicalky he was less prepossessing than Henri d’Fallaise.

The man taught him the “politics of resistance”. He arranged for Yoors to receive the training he needed, including lessons in “open hand” combat from an Asian master. Jan greatly admired “Msr. Henri’s” clarity of thought and his precise communications and strove to impress him, but received little feedback. As the war wore on, Jan came to realize that he had not been ignored, only unheard. The man had grown exceedingly hard of hearing.

If no one recognizes him now , perhaps a future historian will find him in another tale of the times.

Jan