IV. Terryland
This is part of Agent of Influence, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Fleming asked Terry for his advice and expertise on several further occasions, and seems to have consistently received answers that went well beyond the tasks set for him. In February 1954, Terry replied to a request from Fleming for information on escape routes for agents from East to West with several pages of detailed material in English and German. Terry managed to provide this even when reporting from the Four Power Conference in Berlin, which was then taking place in near-Arctic temperatures.
In his accompanying letter, Terry stated that the information provided in the dossier was ‘authentic’, and it certainly reads as such, with details including that Soviet agents were usually appropriately dressed in Western-made clothing but could sometimes be betrayed by their shirts, which tended to be made in East Germany. It could again have been a case of Terry being fed intelligence by a dubious source, but it reads much more like the raw, unvarnished material of real tradecraft.
And yet Fleming didn’t use any of it. It could be that it came too late in the publishing process for him, or was more detailed for what he had in mind. In the end, Moonraker only contained a brief reference to Bond memorizing ‘a long type-written memorandum headed Mainline: A well-established Escape Route from East to West.’
It could also be that the material rang too true. Fleming was not interested in exploring the full dimension of the despair and futility of the espionage business, but was looking for a veneer of authenticity that could dilute some of the more sensational elements of his work. Terry’s pages presented a bleaker vision of the intelligence world than one sees in most of Fleming’s fiction, with desperate refugees making their way by foot across Europe for unseen spymasters.
In June 1956, Ian Fleming and his wife Ann visited Bonn, during which they finally met the Terrys. Fleming was now working on From Russia, With Love, and had created the character of Rosa Klebb, based in part on reports of one of Nicolai Khokhlov’s instructors, a Major Tamara Nicolayeva Ivanova. On hearing this, Rachel Terry entertained Fleming by telling him about Emma Wolff, the hideous Soviet intelligence officer she and Antony had dined with in Vienna on the arrangement of Peter Smolka. Fascinated, Fleming rejigged Klebb, incorporating some of the physical characteristics of Wolff he had been told by Rachel.
On his return home, he wrote to Antony thanking the two of them for their hospitality, and for a copy of Time Right Deadly. This was a thriller written by Rachel under the pseudonym Sarah Gainham, which was due to be published the following month. Fleming promised to try to ‘shovel it into the Kemsley machine’, ie secure a review of the novel in the Sunday Times or another of the group’s newspapers. He added that the first chapter looked ‘very promising’, and in a postscript noted that Rachel had also written him a charming letter.
A few weeks later, he wrote to Terry again, saying he needed ‘a couple of addresses in Berlin’ for his ‘next opus’, i.e. From Russia, With Love. These labours would be in exchange for his ‘I hope successful, efforts to get Sarah Gainham’s excellent work into the Sunday Times and also the Group machinery’.
One would forgive the Terrys if they had been irritated by this approach. Firstly, Fleming had offered to do this in his previous letter without attaching any conditions to it. Now he was positioning help Antony gave him with his new book as payment for aiding his wife’s career—and there was no consideration that she might have deserved such a review in the newspaper without it.
Fleming could also easily have written the review himself. He knew from his own experiences with Raymond Chandler how powerful an endorsement from an established writer could be for a new author on the scene, and he had reviewed books by friends and acquaintances without any apparent fear of a conflict of interest. Just eleven days before writing this letter, in fact, he had reviewed Eric Ambler’s The Night-Comers in the Sunday Times, calling it an ‘excellent thriller’; Ambler’s publisher were using an excerpt from the review, with Fleming’s name attached, in press ads by the end of the month. Even a single word he used in his letter to Terry (‘excellent’), if published with his name attached, could have been a major boon to Gainham’s career at this point, and he surely knew it. Perhaps he didn’t genuinely believe the novel was excellent, or perhaps there was some other reason, a submerged dynamic lost in British obliqueness and politesse.
At any rate, Fleming now had three fresh requests. He wanted the address of British military intelligence headquarters in Berlin’s Western sector about five years earlier, as well as ‘a sensible sounding address’ in the same sector ‘for the head of a German Intelligence Group working for the British and Americans’. The final request was thrown in as though it were a small piece of sub-editing:
‘Please correct and expand with geographical details the following sentence: ‘When he had collected the day’s outgoing mail from the Military Intelligence Headquarters he made straight for the Russian sector, waited with his engine running until the British Control gate was opened to allow a taxi through, and then himself tore through the closing gate at 40 m.p.h. and skidded to a stop beside the concrete pill-box of the Russian frontier post.’’
The first two items were probably fairly easy for someone of Terry’s experience to answer, but the last might have intimidated him a little. This was a much bolder request than previous ones. In effect, Fleming was asking him to fill in a piece of a Bond novel. In addition, he didn’t provide any context for the scene the excerpt would feature in, how much he wanted it expanded, or even who the character involved would be—Terry, not unreasonably, assumed it was James Bond, although in fact it was for a scene featuring Red Grant.
Fleming treated it like just another Atticus request, as he had done for his earlier question on the Werewolves, but Terry was not a novelist. It took him three days to reply. Accompanying the 3,000-word response was a casual-sounding note that surely belied the effort that had been put into compiling it; in it, Terry said the document had been a combined effort with his wife, who would gladly provide more details if required.
The document is fascinating in several ways. As with the material on escape routes, this was a dispatch from the world of real espionage. A journalist and M.I.6 operative gathered intelligence on the Berlin sectors and spy groups in the city, and his wife, who would become one of the Cold War’s finest spy novelists, refashioned the raw material. Instead of simply presenting Fleming with one possibility, they provided him with three alternatives, one of which read:
‘…from the office he made straight for the Soviet Sector, down the Charlottenburger-chausse [note: it is now renamed Strasse des 17 Juni after the ’53 riots] and turned half-left at the gilded Victory Column looming over the deserted wastes of the Tiergarten. Just like Hitler to have thought that thing beautiful and to have moved it where it could be staring in its pinchbeck grandeur up the wide boulevard he had just come down…. As he waited for the lounging blackclad People’s policeman to come up to him he saw the white caps and fluttering aprons of a group of nurses from the Charite Hospital across the road…’
This gives us an intriguing glimpse into what someone other than Fleming writing Bond at this point might have looked like. While such a thought would have been anathema while Fleming was alive, it doesn’t read as strangely as one might think. It’s not a pastiche, and it’s in keeping with the mood of the opening Fleming had provided. It’s a long way from the more fantastical side to his writing, but many of his novels and stories contain scene-setting descriptions that use precisely this kind of detailed but briskly inserted local knowledge and inside expertise. (Indeed, Fleming had contacted Terry to obtain that.) It’s easy enough to imagine such a passage in From Russia, With Love, one of the most down-to-earth of the Bond novels.
Fleming replied two days later thanking Terry for the ‘vast and splendid memorandum’, adding:
‘You really shouldn’t have taken so much trouble. You have practically written a thriller and I was fascinated by all the gen.’
However, other than adding in a reference to the Reichskanzlerplatz he didn’t use any of the material, as he hadn’t with his earlier request on East-West escape routes. The fulsome thanks reads like a very British sort of polite exaggeration employed when something isn’t quite right. The information might have been too detailed or unadaptable for what he had in mind for the scene, or possibly intimidating: the level of expertise employed in the passages is somewhat overwhelming. To modern eyes (at least these ones), much of the material wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the novel, and could even have enhanced it, but it might have struck Fleming very differently. He was insecure about his writing ability at the best of times, particularly as his wife and many of her literary friends were very snooty about it. But Fleming was also in the midst of writing a novel, and writers are often even more insecure then. He’d asked for a sentence to be corrected and had received excerpts from several brilliant alternate thrillers in return. He might well have been worried that some of the passages appeared better crafted than his own efforts.
In August 1959, Fleming turned once again to Terry, this time for personal advice. He wanted to buy a new car: was a convertible model of the Mercedes 220 SE available? Terry sent him the catalogue, and Fleming then flew to Germany to visit him, with Terry showing him around Hamburg and crossing the border into East Berlin. The next May, Fleming was back in the city and was met by Rachel and Antony, who now gave him one of his ‘spook’s tours’ of the city, introducing him to a German agent working for the British in East Berlin. Terry was no longer providing text about escape routes and checkpoint controls, but an experience of the espionage world up-close.
Fleming wrote about his travels in Germany for the Sunday Times, who were keen to capitalize on the growing fame of their writer. One article turned into several, and before long Fleming was on an all-expenses-paid round-the-world trip. In September 1960, Fleming asked Terry for help with Thrilling Cities, a book that compiled these travel articles. Like other Mercury correspondents who had hosted him on his travels, Terry provided a mass of detailed information about restaurants, hotels and night clubs to visit in Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna, virtually all of which made it into the book unchanged.
Shortly after, Fleming was succeeded as Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times by Frank Giles. By now Mercury, judged too costly for its contributions, had been wound down. Terry continued as a senior correspondent for the Sunday Times in Paris and reported from Budapest, Biafra and finally New Zealand.
Terry’s influence on Fleming went much deeper than providing him with occasional background information. Dozens of letters between the two men survive, but they also talked regularly on the telephone, and met. Over the years, they became friends. Terry was Fleming’s chief link with the realities of Cold War espionage in the field and those insights, along with his investigations into war criminals propped up by Soviet intelligence and Nazi treasure hidden in lakes or beer cellars, all gradually seeped into the bloodstream of Fleming’s fictional universe.
One example of Terry’s incremental influence is Octopussy, a short story published after Fleming’s death. It’s perhaps his most intimate piece of published writing, with the character of Major Dexter Smythe a savagely warped self-portrait of an ageing spook living on unearned wealth in the tropics. The story harked back once more to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and to several topics Terry had been involved in and written about: war crimes, hidden Nazi gold and dark secrets emerging from the past. In a 1966 review in The Spectator, Philip Larkin noted that it was easy to see Smythe’s career as ‘an allegory of the life of Fleming himself! The two Reichsbank gold bars that the major smuggles out of the army on his discharge from the Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau are Fleming’s wartime knowledge and expertise; he emigrates to Jamaica and lives on them—selling a slice every so often through the brothers Foo (presumably his publishers), and securing everything his heart desires: Bentleys, caviare, Henry Cotton golf clubs.’
Some aspects of Smythe’s career also closely echoed Antony Terry’s: we learn that he volunteered for the Commandos in the war, and his fluent German had ‘earned him the unenviable job of being advanced interrogator on Commando operations across the Channel’, precisely the role Terry had volunteered for in the St Nazaire raid. Smythe was decorated for his role in the war—an O.B.E. (Military) rather than Terry’s Military Cross—and then roamed Germany with a British unit tracking down fugitive Nazis, again very much as Terry had done. Although not a central focus, once again the intriguing details of Terry’s life and expertise had crept into Fleming’s work.
Perhaps the best example of this is The Living Daylights. In October 1961, Fleming once again wrote to Terry asking for help on geographical matters in Berlin: he wanted to check which sector the building he had set a short story was in. He added that he hoped the story would ‘arouse memories of our stay in Berlin and of the ‘friend’ we met when there’. This was a reference to Fleming’s visit to Terry the previous year, and the British agent he had introduced him to.
Four days later, Terry replied that the address Fleming had given was in the U.S. sector, and informed him that it was currently closed to civilian traffic because the road led to Checkpoint Charlie ‘and the West Berlin authorities try to discourage West Berliners from going there in case there is trouble at the border like last weekend when they tried to beat up some Russians’. He added some further incidental information Fleming might find useful.
On the surface, Terry’s input here might seem insignificant, but the resulting story was a kind of culmination of his influence on Fleming. In the years since Fleming had posted him to Germany, many of his articles about the strange and sinister ‘spy jungle’ of Berlin had crossed his boss’s desk and, as Fleming had mentioned, his recent visit to Terry had also left an impression. Now he had decided to take James Bond there.
This was far from an obvious step to take, as he usually sent Bond to much more exotic locales—007 rarely approaches the Iron Curtain. But while Fleming hadn’t made direct use of Terry’s dossier about escape routes for Moonraker, or his detailed material on movements in Berlin for From Russia, With Love, the atmosphere of them all dominated The Living Daylights.
The story concerns an agent working for the British, codenamed 272, who has been ‘holed up in Novaya Zemlya since the war’, as M tells Bond in his clipped briefing for his mission:
‘Now he’s trying to get out—loaded with stuff. Atomic and rockets. And their plan for a whole new series of tests. For nineteen sixty-one. To put the heat on the West. Something to do with Berlin. Don't quite get the picture, but the FO says if it’s true it's terrific. Makes nonsense of the Geneva Conference and all this blather about nuclear disarmament the Communist bloc is putting out. He’s got as far as East Berlin. But he’s got practically the whole of the KGB on his tail—and the East German security forces, of course. He’s holed up somewhere in East Berlin, and he got one message over to us. That he’d be coming across between six and seven p.m. on one of the next three nights—tomorrow, next day, or next day. He gave the crossing point.’
Due to a double agent, the KGB knows when and where 272 will make a run for it back into West Berlin, and have put their best sniper on the job to shoot him as he crosses. Bond has to kill the sniper before he (or, as it turns out, she) kills 272.
The story is much more downbeat and sophisticated than most of Bond’s other adventures, an examination of the low-key spy war taking place across the no man’s land between East and West. When Bond arrives at the address in Berlin, he observes the ‘waist-high weeds and half-tidied rubble walls stretching away to a big deserted crossroads lit by a central cluster of yellowish arc lamp’. Rather than being tortured by Smersh operatives or put through obstacle courses by Fu Manchu-style masterminds, Bond now has to do battle with the K.G.B. Bond the famous man of action is forced to sit in the dark like a real spy… and wait.
The plot, too, bears Terry’s imprint. Fleming’s letter makes clear that 272 is at least in part inspired by the ‘friend’ Terry introduced him to, a man who was either one of his journalistic sources or agents, or quite plausibly both: the roles had, from the start and with Fleming’s aid, intertwined. 272’s intelligence—‘atomic and rockets’, ‘a whole new series of tests’—also recall Terry’s succession of stories from the previous decade. James Bond is no longer in his usual world of casinos and yachts. He is in Terryland.