The Spy With Many Faces
Matthew Dewhurst-Grice for Spybrary
Who was the real James Bond?
Ever since Casino Royale was first published in 1953, the question has never really gone away. It eventually became common knowledge amongst Bond enthusiasts that the character of James Bond was, in many ways, a reflection of Ian Fleming himself — a man who famously loved fast cars, gadgets and women, smoked heavily, and consumed alcohol in heroic quantities. Bond was also, of course, a fantasy. Fleming never carried a licence to kill, never found himself in a genuine gunfight, and almost certainly never dispatched anyone with his bare hands.
Yet Fleming's wartime experience ran deeper than is often acknowledged. During the Second World War, he worked for Naval Intelligence and founded 30 Assault Unit — a group of physically formidable, ruthless men who would do whatever a mission required.
They did carry a licence to kill, and they used it. Some observers have suggested they possessed what we might today recognise as psychopathic tendencies. Fleming also planned and developed numerous wartime operations with varying degrees of success. Operation Goldeneye, developed to monitor Spain in the event of an Axis takeover, was never activated. Operation Mincemeat, by contrast, was a triumph — a plan involving the corpse of a Welsh man who had died of rat poisoning, dressed as a Royal Marines officer and planted with false intelligence to divert the Nazis away from Sicily. That plot alone reads like a Bond novel. There is little doubt that Fleming's wartime world — and the people he encountered in it — fed directly into the creation of James Bond.
Over the years, however, a long queue of candidates has formed, each put forward as the “real” James Bond. Fleming's elder brother Peter is considered one inspiration. Others include Conrad O'Brien-ffrench, Wilfred Dunderdale, and Patrick Dalzel-Job — the latter a member of 30 Assault Unit who, notably, never publicly claimed the title. Before his death, he stated simply that he had never read a Bond novel or watched a Bond film. It wasn't his thing.
Then there are the cases that make me wonder whether they amount to little more than cashing in on the Bond brand.
Duško Popov was a Serbian triple agent whom Fleming was assigned to escort at the Estoril Casino — the same casino later used in On Her Majesty's Secret Service — and watched place a bet of $40,000, an episode widely cited as the inspiration for Casino Royale. Yet in his own interviews, Fleming told the story differently: as a personal experience of playing baccarat against the Nazis in Portugal. The Popov connection, while plausible, is contested by Fleming's own account.
Lionel “Buster” Crabb was a Royal Navy frogman who worked for MI6, knew Fleming personally, and is frequently cited as a Bond inspiration. His career was remarkable — defusing mines, planting them, photographing the hulls of enemy ships — and it's claimed that his underwater exploits inspired scenes in Thunderball. Curiously, however, no one seems to mention the mine-planting scene in Live and Let Die. A further claim holds that Crabb's aunt Kitty, who served as Fleming's personal assistant, was the inspiration for Miss Moneypenny — though she is not the only person to have made that claim.
Crabb's story ends in genuine mystery. In 1956, he was sent to examine the hull of a Soviet warship docked in Portsmouth. He was never seen again. Months later, a severely disfigured corpse washed up that was believed to be his, but was never conclusively identified. Theories persist that he was captured by Soviet intelligence and turned.
I read Ian Fleming's Favourite Spy — “Buster” Crabb: The Inspiration for James Bond back in 2020. What I didn't know at the time was that this was actually the second edition of an earlier book, originally published as The Final Dive: The Life and Death of Buster Crabb. The title change and the heavy invocation of Fleming's name happened to coincide with a new Bond film release that year. Whether that is coincidence or calculated marketing is a question worth asking.
James Charles Bond served under Fleming as a Special Operations Executive officer. His grandson, Stephen Phillips, claims that Fleming chose his grandfather's name for his fictional spy — which rather complicates the well-documented story that Fleming simply wanted “a quiet, dull, boring name” and borrowed it from the ornithologist James Bond, author of Birds of the West Indies. Phillips quotes his grandfather directly: “Believe me when I tell you, I am the real James Bond.” James Charles Bond died in 1995, but years later his connection to Fleming was acknowledged with the addition of “007” to his gravestone.
There is no doubt that this man was a James Bond. Whether he is the one Fleming named his hero after is another matter entirely.
The James Bond that Ian Fleming created in early 1952, in his Caribbean retreat, was a cocktail — of himself, his experiences, his fantasies, and the extraordinary characters he encountered during the Second World War. I am not disputing that certain individuals shaped the character. But I do believe that the extraordinary commercial power of the Bond brand has led authors, publishers and claimants alike to jump aboard what we might call the “Bondwagon” — insisting that any Tom, Dick or Harry was the one true inspiration. The same phenomenon applies to the endless competing claims about the origin of the “007” designation.
Fleming built something singular. The scramble to claim ownership of it says rather more about the brand's value than it does about its origins.
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