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James Bond's Creator, and the Real Spy Gadgets He Inspired
cylonlover writes "It's one of the most memorable moments in perhaps the best James Bond film, From Russia with Love: SPECTRE agent Rosa Klebb, posing as a hotel maid, drops her gun, and appears to be at a disadvantage as she goes toe to toe with Sean Connery's imposing Bond. That is until she deploys her iconic poison-tipped dagger shoes, which have gone on to be copied in other notable action films. But as kitsch as Klebb's cleaver clogs might seem, the CIA attempted to replicate them, and another classic Bond gadget, in real life, according to research by Dr. Christopher Moran of Warwick University. At the heart of the story is the close friendship of Bond author Ian Fleming and former CIA Director Allen Dulles. Gizmag spoke to Moran about 20th century Intelligence, and its peculiar relationship with the fictional British spy."
If you've seen Clooney's movie, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" you know about Project MKUltra -- in which the CIA did things like dose people with LSD without their consent and try to develop psychic powers for remote viewing and other sci-fi stuff.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
dancing around who Flemming patterned Bond after, and not a single solitary mention of William (Bill) "Intrepid" Stevenson. (Here's the clue from Wikipedia): Sir William Samuel Stephenson, CC, MC, DFC (23 January 1897 – 31 January 1989) was a Canadian soldier, airman, businessman, inventor, spymaster, and the senior representative of British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere during World War II. .....Stephenson was soon a close adviser to Roosevelt, and suggested that he put Stephenson's good friend William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan in charge of all U.S. intelligence services.... Not least of Stephenson's contributions to the war effort was the setting up by BSC of Camp X in Whitby, Ontario, the first training school for clandestine operations in Canada and North America. Some 2,000 British, Canadian and American covert operators were trained there from 1941 to 1945, including students from ISO, OSS, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, United States Navy and Military Intelligence, and the United States Office of War Information, among them five future directors of what would become the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.... Did the author just 'miss' all of this? Hello cluestick!
A Man Called Intrepid
Ian Flemming worked for William Stephenson and had this to say, "James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is William Stephenson."
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
TFA mentions two books, The Craft of Intelligence by Allen Dulles, and Spycraft, by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, which talk about the gadgetry in use by the CIA. They're both very good reads, but Spycraft is definitely the fun book of the two. For a more adventurous history that's written by a professional screenwriter, Leo Marks wrote Between Silk and Cyanide, which is a very Bond-like description of work in the SOE during WWII. The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception, also by Melton and Wallace, talks about learning tradecraft from a professional stage magician, where they learned how to perfect the unseen brush pass, dead drops, poison in the champagne glasses, and all of that kind of spy sleight of hand. A fascinating book.
If you want to see what the Soviets were up to during this time, I recommend reading it from their own historical documents in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin. Mitrokhin was the Senior Archivist for the KGB in the 1980s, and copied many of their records against intentional destruction. In it, he documents all kinds of operations, including the secret caches scattered around the United States (booby trapped, of course), radio caches in Berne and Rome, and bugging operations everywhere.
And to cross reference the Soviet files, the book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, has the stories from much of the decoded information the Americans gleaned by cracking the Soviet "one-time-pad" encryption system in use in the late 1940s. This information provided the basis for much of the attention of the FBI as they were hunting for communists through the '50s and beyond; including the Soviet's own documents detailing the Rosenbergs' and Greenglass' involvement in giving the atomic bomb secrets to Russia.
John
They do work and they do have them, albeit, not in James Bond's coolness size. Most work by using a chemical compound like barium hydroxide to remove the CO2. I never really thought the movie one's were "rebreathers" though, since I always saw bubbles. More like a tiny version of the SCUBA SPARE AIR.
On a side note I was thinking of Jane Russell in "Underwater".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq1HZ1wzLQ0
Or as one commenter put it, "beaver tails and camel toes the perfect match".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ni3pqfU0zU