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like many people involved in espionage, he was not very good at keeping secrets. More probably, his well-connected mother told Montagu Norman, then Governor of the Bank of England, that her son was looking for an interesting war job, and Norman gave a nod to the right channels.
    According to the old saw, anyone who asks to be a spy cannot be a spy. However it came about – whether through formal or informal contact, the old spy network, the old boy network or family clout – Ian Fleming was living proof that if you really wanted to join the espionage and intelligence club, you could. On 24 May 1939, just four months before the declaration of war, Fleming sat down to lunch at the Carlton Grill with Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, the hard-driving Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) and the man responsible for gathering intelligence in all areas of the war related to British naval interests – in other words, just about everywhere. Godfrey, himself barely three months into the job, had put out the word that he needed an assistant. Fleming, he decided, would be the ideal candidate.
    As, indeed, he was. To date, Fleming’s combination of imagination, intelligence and charm had found no moreuseful outlet than half-hearted money-making and full-hearted self-indulgence. He would make a superb aide to the Director of Naval Intelligence: his ability to get on with most people, particularly older, self-important men, made him the perfect liaison between the irascible Godfrey and the other parts of the British intelligence machine; his as yet unrealised literary skills lent him the resourceful thinking and imagination that is essential to effective espionage; his gambler’s instinct, his taste for adventure and his ability to read personality would all be honed and developed as the feckless bon viveur was transformed into Fleming of Naval Intelligence, a pivotal operative in Britain’s secret war at sea. Much of Fleming’s success was a consequence of his relationship with Godfrey: the admiral was M to Fleming’s Bond – an uncompromising, precise, short-tempered and loyal older man, faced with a young, gifted and unorthodox assistant, to whom he granted extraordinary licence. Years later, Godfrey, noting Fleming’s ‘marked flair’ for intelligence planning, would pay extravagant (and perhaps excessive) tribute to his protégé: ‘Ian should have been DNI and I his naval adviser.’ Reflecting years later on the inspiration for Bond, Fleming was precise: ‘My job got me right to the heart of things.’
    The Naval Intelligence Division (NID), operating out of Rooms 38 and 39 of the Admiralty, in Whitehall, was responsible for collecting, analysing and distributing intelligence for the Admiralty, and providing security and counter-intelligenceto the Royal Navy for the war at sea. But its role was far wider than this suggests, just as Fleming was far more than merely an assistant to its boss. With two thousand personnel at its peak, and through a worldwide network of agents and attachés, NID assembled a vast amount of detailed information, but also formulated active deception plans and played an important part in the complex, fast-moving and dangerous game that is wartime espionage. In addition to signals intelligence and tracking U-boats and shipping, NID helped to run agents and double agents, and dealt in stolen documents, aerial photography, coastal surveillance and numerous ‘special operations’ against the Germans.
    In the smoky hive of Room 39, Fleming was Godfrey’s front man, and as such he operated with considerable freedom: he liaised with MI6 and SOE (responsible for sabotage and subversion); he worked with the Political Warfare Executive on propaganda, and handled the press; he fielded demands for information from above, and shielded Godfrey from interference from below. ‘I shared all secrets with him,’ Godfrey later wrote. Fleming