I. The Mind of a Nazi
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
During the Second World War, he worked in the upper echelons of Britain’s intelligence establishment, helping to plan ingenious operations against the Nazis. He was one of the most popular thriller-writers of the 20th century, but his literary reputation has faded in recent years, with critics lambasting his novels as xenophobic, sexist fantasies. And he created a suave but ruthless British secret agent who was orphaned at a young age, expelled from his public school, smoked exotic cigarettes, had a scar on his face, bedded beautiful women and repeatedly saved the world from the threats of megalomaniacal villains.
His name? Dennis Wheatley.
Since the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, Kingsley Amis, O.F. Snelling and many other critics following in their footsteps have claimed that James Bond’s main literary forebears were characters from the early 20th century usually referred to as ‘the clubland heroes’. In 1968, the critic Richard Boston claimed that ‘the short step from Bulldog Drummond to Ian Fleming’s James Bond consisted in giving the hero a sex life’, and this perception has lasted: in the 2006 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Fleming’s novels are described as ‘updated versions of [William] Le Queux and [John] Buchan designed for the Cold War consumer boom and changed sexual mores of the 1950s and 1960s’.[1]
But in fact the clubland heroes had already been updated, and given sex lives, at least two decades before James Bond’s first appearance. There are several characters, incidents and conventions in Fleming’s novels inspired by the above-named writers, but a huge number of thrillers were published between the end of the clubland era in the 1920s and Casino Royale in 1953, and the genre evolved in that time. Among these post-clubland writers, Wheatley’s influence on Fleming has gone almost entirely overlooked, despite it being much more significant than that of the writers usually cited—and playing a crucial role in the development of James Bond.
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Born in 1897, 11 years before Fleming, Dennis Yates Wheatley fought in the trenches in the First World War before taking over his father’s wine business in London. Following the 1929 Stock Market Crash he was bankrupted, and in 1933 embarked on a new career as an author, and soon became a best-seller. Dubbed ‘the prince of thriller writers’ by the Times Literary Supplement, he wrote over 70 books, which have sold over 50 million copies in 28 languages. Today, he is best remembered for his novels dealing with black magic and the occult, but he also wrote straight suspense stories, swashbuckling historical adventures and spy thrillers.
By the time the Second World War began, Wheatley had established himself as one of the country’s best-selling writers, counting King George VI as one of his fans.[2] At 42 he was too old to fight, but he desperately wanted to help his country. Thanks to a chance encounter made by his wife, a chauffeur for M.I.5, in May 1940 he was asked to submit ideas to the War Office on how Britain could resist an invasion. Fourteen hours later, having worked through the night, Wheatley produced a 7,000-word essay stuffed with inventive suggestions. He was immediately asked to write another paper, this time from the perspective of the enemy: if he were in the Nazi High Command, how would he go about trying to conquer Britain? Helped along by two hundred cigarettes and three magnums of Champagne, Wheatley worked at ‘dynamo speed’, and within 48 hours had produced a 15,000-word paper on the topic.[3] Its contents shocked the Chiefs of Staff, as Wheatley recalled with laughter in an interview long after the war:
‘“Wheatley’s got the mind of a Nazi,” they said, “while we’re used to running a war like playing a game of cricket.”’[4]
After completing further papers, he was invited to become a member of the London Controlling Section, a seven-man team within the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet that was responsible for devising deception operations against the Axis powers. He was the only civilian to join it.[5] To celebrate his new position, Wheatley had his tailor create a greatcoat lined with scarlet satin, and persuaded Wilkinson’s to design him a couple of swagger sticks concealing 15-inch blades ‘as a precaution against trouble in the blackout’.[6]
Wheatley was now in his element, given free rein to exercise his thriller-writer’s imagination to help defeat the enemy. He spent his time ‘thinking up rumours that would cause alarm and despondency’[7] among Germans as well as helping to plan several deception operations, notably GRAFFHAM and HARDBOILED.
The L.C.S. also oversaw deception operations proposed by other parts of the British intelligence apparatus. In 1943, it approved Operation MINCEMEAT, whereby a corpse was dressed as a major in the Royal Marines and washed ashore in Spain with forged documents indicating that the Allies would invade Greece and Sardinia instead of their real target, Sicily. Wheatley was also involved with Operation COPPERHEAD in 1944, whereby an Australian named Clifton James impersonated Field Marshal Montgomery.[8]
During the war, Wheatley became both a colleague and friend of another well-known writer, albeit of travel books rather than novels: Peter Fleming, who worked on deception planning in India and the Far East, and often collaborated with the London Controlling Section.
Like Wheatley, he was a keen advocate of the use of deception as a weapon, and was sometimes frustrated by the lack of resources assigned to it. ‘This is a one-horse show and I am the horse,’ he complained in a letter to Wheatley from India in mid-1942. Fleming felt that what was needed from the L.C.S. was not merely red herrings to mislead the enemy, but ‘purple whales’—the phrase was later given as a codename to an operation whereby the Chinese were used to sell false documents (written by Fleming) to the Japanese.[9]
Wheatley described Peter Fleming in his memoir of his wartime intelligence activities, The Deception Planners, which was published posthumously:
‘Unlike many authors of travel books, who turn out to be pale, bespectacled little men, his bronzed, tight-skinned face always gave the impression that he had just returned from an arduous journey across the Mongolian desert or up some little-known tributary of the Amazon. His lithe, sinewy figure, dark eyes and black hair reminded one of a jaguar, until his quiet smile rendered the simile inappropriate. Physically, he was as fit as any troop-leader of Commandos and, in fact, he had been Chief Instructor at the London District Unarmed Combat School before being sent out to initiate deception in the Far East. He was always immaculate in the gold-peaked cap and freshly-pressed tunic of his regiment, the Grenadier Guards. There was only one thing I disliked about Peter. He smoked the foulest pipe I ever came within a yard of, and when he used to sit on the edge of my desk puffing at it, I heartily wished him back in the jungle. But we were most fortunate in having such a courageous, intelligent and imaginative man as our colleague for the war against Japan.’[10]
Wheatley also knew Peter’s younger brother Ian, who was thinking up his own outlandish ideas for operations over at Naval Intelligence, where he was the influential personal assistant of the Director, Admiral John Godfrey. According to Dennis Wheatley’s biographer, Phil Baker, Wheatley and Ian Fleming dined together from time to time—like Fleming, Wheatley was very good at what today would be called ‘networking’, and during the war often hosted lunches, inviting interesting and influential figures:
‘Wheatley would lunch them at the Hungaria and he was a good host, with exceptional wine from his own cellars. As well as colleagues and the occasional writer he lunched a host of others including J.C. Masterman (Bill Younger’s old tutor, the MI5 man who later wrote The Double Cross System), Peter Fleming, Brigadier Colin Gubbins, who scotched Germany’s atomic bomb plans with a raid on its deuterium or “heavy water” plant, Ian Fleming, John Slessor, Max Knight and a legion of others, often in groups of four or six; over a hundred and sixty guest lists survive in his papers.’[11]
Wheatley also hosted dinner parties, to which he invited Ian Fleming on at least two occasions: November 10, 1942, and a New Year’s Eve party the same year. Both took place at Wheatley’s home in Earl’s Court. For the November dinner, Fleming was accompanied by Joan Bright, an on-off girlfriend who was also an influential assistant to General Ismay, Churchill’s Chief of Staff in the War Cabinet, and so a colleague of Wheatley. She had typed out one of his earliest papers for the L.C.S.[12] The two other guests were Roland Vintras of the Joint Planning Staff and Colin Gubbins, both also heavily involved in the secret world.[13]
We don’t know what was discussed on this or the other occasions these two men met, but it seems likely that they would have been intrigued by each other: they were engaged in similar secret work, and had a similar approach to it, both being noted for their ability to concoct ingenious if occasionally overly fanciful ideas. On the evening of November 10, Wheatley would have had good reason to have been pleased: Operation TORCH, the Allies’ successful invasion of north Africa two days earlier, had been aided by several deception operations cooked up by the L.C.S. to once again fool the enemy into believing that the real objective had been elsewhere.
Fleming would also have been in a celebratory mood: 30 Assault Unit, the intelligence-gathering commando group under his command (‘my Red Indians’, as he called them), had just captured the Italians’ naval code-books from a villa near Algiers. Wheatley would, one suspects, have been eager to hear the details of that mission, as it was both a success story related to his own work with TORCH and just the kind of daring escapade that featured in his thrillers—despite his day job, he had published seven novels since the start of the war.
Fleming and Wheatley had a lot else in common. Both appreciated the finer things in life: Wheatley liked to savour elaborate meals, and often followed them with his favourite cigarettes, a Turkish mixture made by Sullivans in the Burlington Arcade. Fleming preferred a Turkish and Balkan mixture by a rival tobacconist, Morlands, who were based in Grosvenor Street—in 1944, one of his girlfriends was killed in a German bombing raid a few hours after collecting two hundred cigarettes for him from the shop.[14]
Wheatley and Fleming also shared a boyish delight in gadgets and weaponry: Wheatley had his special swagger sticks from Wilkinson’s, Fleming a small commando dagger made by the same company that he carried with him on foreign assignments. Both men were keen book collectors, and relied on a mutual friend, the antiquarian dealer Percy Muir, to suggest suitable investments.
Wheatley was also friends with Maxwell Knight, who headed M.I.5’s countersubversion section and had some eccentric tendencies: he kept a host of animals in his home, and would sometimes be seen taking his pet bear Bessie for a stroll around the streets of Chelsea.[15] However, there’s no credible evidence that Fleming knew Knight, and the oft-repeated idea that the two of them, along with Wheatley and the occultist Aleister Crowley, were involved in luring Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941 stems from a fabrication by serial hoaxer Donald McCormick. Fleming did approach Crowley about trying to influence Hess after his arrival in Scotland, but nothing came of that.[16]
Wheatley did know Crowley, having been introduced to him in 1934 by his friend and neighbour Tom Driberg, a journalist who became one of Knight’s agents, codenamed M/8; he later became a Labour MP, was compromised by the K.G.B., and became a Soviet asset.[17] Wheatley became fascinated by Crowley, and used him as the basis for two of his villains: Mocata, the black magician in 1935’s The Devil Rides Out (later played in the film adaptation by Charles Gray opposite Fleming’s cousin, Christopher Lee); and Sean O’Kieff, an occultist with ‘a hard rat-trap of a mouth’ in the 1939 novel The Quest of Julian Day. We don’t know if Fleming read this novel, but one can’t help feeling it would have been up his street: Day, a half-Austrian half-British old Etonian with a double-first from Oxford in Oriental Languages, is up against not just O’Kieff but the rest of ‘The Big Seven’, the men behind a massive criminal organization involved in espionage, blackmail, dope-running, diamond-smuggling and white-slave trafficking.
At any rate, one suspects thrillers would have been uppermost in Ian Fleming’s mind while dining with Dennis Wheatley, for he was a long-standing aficionado of the genre, and harboured the ambition of writing ‘the spy story to end all spy stories’ himself after the war.[18]
Somewhat ironically, his brother Peter beat him to it—in a manner, anyway. The Sixth Column, published in 1951, was a light send-up of the books he and Ian had enjoyed since their schooldays at Eton, when they had devoured the works of Sapper and Sax Rohmer. It also seems to have been something of a send-up of Dennis Wheatley. One of the novel’s main characters is a former commando, Archie Strume, who has had unexpected success with a thriller based on his war-time experiences, which he has written as ‘an antidote against boredom’. Strume is visited by British intelligence, who ask him to use his thriller-writer’s brain to think of ways the enemy might try to harm Britain, so that they can take precautions against them. This, of course, is precisely what Wheatley had been asked to do in 1940, and as he was the only thriller-writer to have been asked to carry out such a job, it seems certain that Peter Fleming got the idea from his friend and former deception-planner.
Strume’s melodramatic best-seller featured a dashing commando called Colonel Hackforth, who is fond of saying things like: ‘Tell the Minister of Defence to have a midget submarine alongside the Harwich customs jetty not later than last light on Tuesday. It’s important.’ This, too, appears to be a reference to Wheatley, whose secret agent Gregory Sallust behaves in a similar manner. In The Black Baroness, published in 1940, Sallust calls his superior from the Netherlands to ask if permission can be obtained for him ‘to be taken on board any naval vessel which might be leaving Harwich for Belgian waters’. His boss says he will ‘get in touch with the Admiralty at once’.
Peter dedicated his novel to Ian, and it might have been both a nod to their shared love of such thrillers and a spur for the younger brother: a few months after the publication of The Sixth Column, he started writing Casino Royale. Strangely enough, its protagonist would also resemble Gregory Sallust.