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Prologue: Fleming How the creator of James Bond intrigued to help America form a proper spy service.
A green Plymouth taxi took him from La Guardia Field to Rockefeller Center, in midtown Manhattan, where he got out with his boss, Rear Admiral John H. Godfrey, the British Director of Naval Intelligence. Flags of a hundred nations fringed the plaza's International Building, as if to advertise the many spy services within: America's Federal Bureau of Investigation on the 44th floor, the Japanese consulate on 35, and on 36, behind a door marked "Rough Diamonds, Ltd.," the British Secret Service. When Fleming later began writing novels, he would have his fictional James Bond shoot a Japanese cipher clerk in Rockefeller Center -- hinting that this was based on the author's own killing of a Japanese agent, by "accidentally" crashing a construction sandbag through a window. As far as history can establish, however, Fleming's real purpose in America was at once more prosaic and more profound. In the words of a Most Secret British document, Fleming was to help Godfrey "report on United States intelligence organizations," and "to coordinate them with those at the disposal of the United Kingdom." In practice, that would mean pushing for an American central intelligence agency, and helping choose its chief. The task fell mostly to Fleming. The Admiral, after all, had to follow such matters as the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck. Besides, it was an attache's job to read files and command facts. Fleming began working closely on the project with station chief William Stephenson, a Canadian millionaire-inventor and former world lightweight boxing champion, cable-address Intrepid, who would later be the model for "M" in the Bond books. Stephenson's secret duties, performed under a cover as Passport Control Officer, included recruiting agents like Greta Garbo, Noel Coward and David Niven to infiltrate American isolationist groups, and hiring Italian crime families to sweep the New York docks for Nazi spies. Another of Intrepid's tasks was to liaison with the Americans, and he had been urging them to create their own spy service while there still was time. The problem assumed a new urgency on the day after Fleming arrived, when, worried by Japanese aggressiveness in the Far East, President Franklin Roosevelt declared a full "state of emergency." On the eve of her inevitable entry into the worst war in world history, it was pathetic and dangerous that the United States had no brain trust to analyze foreign affairs, no espionage service to practice the darker arts of clandestine collection, no counterspy component to keep her secrets safe. America was not exactly a secret intelligence virgin -- General Washington had been helped by Nathan Hale and hurt by Benedict Arnold, and Pinkerton's detectives had caught Confederate spies for Abraham Lincoln -- but the country still had no central intelligence. Instead, Stephenson told Fleming, feuding U.S. intelligence chiefs had a "twilight-zone" problem. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had decreed that the FBI would handle spy work in the Western hemisphere, while military and naval intelligence would cover the rest of the world. Although those "Big Three" were ordered to pool their efforts, that was easier demanded than done. If, for instance, the Navy were running a double-agent in Hawaii, and he came to the continental U.S., must he then be handed over to the FBI? The Bureau thought so, but naturally the Navy did not. When Roosevelt convened a cabinet meeting on such matters in April 1941, all parties admitted that a certain amount of "twilight zone" was inevitable, but the President himself did not see why it couldn't be overcome. In Britain, he observed, such matters were handled by "a gentleman known as Mr. X, whose identity was kept a complete secret." Why shouldn't America have its own Mr. X? The Big Three agreed it would help to have a single coordinator. But just who that man would be, they would leave to the President. The President himself had then turned to Winston Churchill. FDR did not especially like the prime minister or his alcoholically bombastic "curtain raising of history." But he did want British experience and advice -- and so had arisen the Godfrey-Fleming mission. Second, to get those bits, the Bureau had planted secret agents of its own. For the past few months Foxworth had been sending operatives into Latin America under covers as soap salesmen, stockbrokers, and journalists. The game could get dangerous, but his agents had been tutored in jujitsu, and were drilled in hip shooting and night firing with the pistol, shotgun, machine gun, .30'06, .351, and Remington 81 rifles. Perhaps more importantly, for purposes of secret intelligence, they were as a "secure" a unit as any in the world, being well disciplined, highly motivated, and "clean" to a fault; none was likely to have the kind of character weakness that could lead to entrapment or blackmail by foreign powers. They were learning on the job and making some mistakes, but could be expected to improve, Fleming noted -- provided they got proper tutoring from British experts. That was the third and perhaps most important requirement, a willingness to work with London. For the past year, Intrepid had been trying to effect what his files termed "the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence." Serious courtship had occurred in Bermuda, where mail sacks from the Pan Am Clipper were secretly taken to the basement of a pink hotel, there to be "chamferred" for secret writing by Nazi agents. Some take from that operation had been provided to Foxworth, who was now tangling covertly with at least four spy rings in the New York area. A member of one ring, William Sebold, had even been turned into a double agent; the FBI had installed him in an office with a hidden camera and microphone, yielding legal evidence against the Nazi entire network, and had also set up for Sebold a radio transmitter on Long Island, for the relay of misleading material to Berlin. Yet Stephenson had been getting cold feet about the bride he had been wooing, and after talking to other SIS agents and reading their reports, Fleming came to see why. "The truth [is] that internal security and foreign intelligence do not mix well," he wrote for Godfrey on June 1. The problems were built into the strengths. SIS agents compiled a mound of data, for instance, but FBI policy forbade them to analyze it. A law enforcement officer's main duty was accurate collection of information -- "just the facts" -- and every memo disseminated outside the Bureau carried the caveat: "this document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI." Putting the Bureau in charge of American spying might lead to a lot of prosecutor's briefs but very little strategic intelligence, since there would be no way to filter signals from noise. Even if analysis were to become FBI policy, moreover, Fleming recommended that the Bureau's criminal investigators be "flanked with teams of experts from different backgrounds." FBI agents were good sniffer-dogs but they were not especially promising material for a brain-trust. Most struck Fleming as Irish-Catholic Texans from second-rate law schools, which not only invited British snobbery, but made it made it difficult to find plausible covers in places like Peru, where some SIS agents went around pronouncing gracias as "grassy-ass." Some re-education had been attempted with Foxworth, who had gone to London in February for a crash-tutorial in spying, but his 10-week report card showed little progress. Fleming found SIS a "small and uncoordinated force," mostly "amateurs without special training," who "have no special means of communication," and seldom any clearer brief than "to go and have a look." FBI agents had not been taught to look, but not to see; they thought only about arresting spies, and Stephenson struggled to keep them watching the Sebold ring instead of busting it up. Nor, alas, was much energy was devoted to divining enemy plans. "'Intelligence' in the United States generally means 'Security and Counter-espionage," Fleming wrote. "The concept of 'Offensive Intelligence' is not well understood." What Fleming meant by "offensive" had to include Stephenson's mischief on the docks. Britain was fighting for its very existence, and His Majesty's Secret Service was not going to let a few Yankee laws sink vital convoys in the North Atlantic. But neither was the FBI going to stand by idly while American laws were disobeyed, and Foxworth warned Fleming that a "flap" was brewing over the recent murder of a suspected Nazi spy. That episode raised the most intractable problem of all, the key to all the others, and in early June the British team boarded a train to Washington to confront him. [Home] |
On
May 25, 1941, Commander Ian Fleming entered the United States on a secret
mission. 
Sitting
with Intrepid now in the British station at Rockefeller Center, smoking
Turkish cigarettes and reviewing the relevant files -- it became pretty
clear to Fleming that were really only two options before him. To explore
the first one, Fleming took an elevator to the 44th floor of the International
Building and entered the secret headquarters of the FBI's Special Intelligence
Service. For "cover" purposes, the wood-paneled front rooms actually functioned
as a law firm, and pin-striped SIS chief Percy "Bud" Foxworth seemed more
a busy, gray-templed senior partner than a chief of spies. But the business
of the day was espionage, and Foxworth got down to it with Fleming right
away. He seemed well-organized and highly intelligent, and a tour of SIS
operations, both in-station and in the field, revealed some key advantages
for the spy service Fleming foresaw. First, the FBI was a virtual trap
for facts. From almost two hundred field offices, more than two thousand
special agents teletyped all new data daily to Headquarters in Washington,
where an army of clerks indexed it for easy retrieval. In the terminology
of a later era, the FBI might be viewed as a giant computer made of human
beings. That suited strategic intelligence, the construction of a big
picture from an updatable universe of bits, as well as counterintelligence
(CI), the thwarting of enemy spies. Both depended on accurate records,
for one never knew, in advance, which bits of data might burn the enemy's
agents or plans. 
Furthermore,
Fleming felt the FBI stifled creativity and risk-taking -- qualities essential
for secret work. Realizing that "impressions made by Special Agents on
the public have a great deal to do with developing cooperation on the
part of the public," the FBI had imposed a strict administrative code
that extended even to a man's appearance and personal life. Agents had
to wear dark suits, white shirts, and snap-brim hats; cut their hair two
inches above the collar in back, and comb it just so on top so that there
would be "no pointy heads"; they must keep a handkerchief in the right
front pocket so no heroically firm handshake would be marred by "wet palms."
Coffee was not allowed at desks, unmarried agents were not allowed to
spend the night at girlfriends' apartments, and no FBI man must ever be
drunk. The resulting white-knight mystique did ensure public cooperation,
to the point where an agent's gold badge was often enough to make an arrest,
and a gun was almost superfluous; most agents therefore tolerated such
petty tyrannies, just as similar rules were endured by college football
players or Marines, which many FBI men had once been, or by Catholics,
which most FBI men still were. Still, strict enforcement of such regulations
did create a certain climate of fear, and some of the brighter agents
had quit because, as one would put it, "I always had the feeling that
someone was looking over my shoulder, checking up on what I was doing
and how I was doing it. In fact, some of the FBI discipline verged on
thought control."