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hands because he was privy to everything.’ To Fleming’s chagrin, ‘Operation Ruthless’ was first postponed and then abandoned.
    Despite such setbacks, Commander Fleming was not content to spend the war pushing paper from behind a desk, no matter how interesting the paper or how imposing the desk. In June 1940, Fleming apparently flew to Paris as France was collapsing under the German onslaught. There he is said to have extracted a large sum of money from the safe at the Rolls-Royce headquarters in Paris where MI6 kept its funds, before heading south to make contact with Admiral Jean-François Darlan, head of the French navy. Britain needed to know whether Darlan would come over to the British side, or whether his fleet might fall into German hands. Godfrey wanted Fleming to find out.
    When Fleming arrived, Bordeaux was in chaos, teeming with refugees. The newly arrived naval lieutenant commander helped with evacuation, burned most of the papers at the British Consulate, and using a simple line of argument persuaded a number of French merchant vessels to help with the evacuation: ‘If you don’t take these people on board and transport them to England, I can promise you that if the Germans don’t sink you, the Royal Air Force will.’ Fleming made his way home via Madrid and Portugal, but before leaving France he came up with a typically imaginative suggestion for dealing with Darlan and the French fleet: ‘Why doesn’t His Majesty’s government offer Admiral Darlan the Isle of Wight for the duration of the war, and make it French territory under the French flag for the entire period?’ The suggestion, needless to say, was not taken up; instead, the British, unwilling to take any further chances with Darlan’s promises, shelled and torpedoed the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir to prevent the Germans from getting their hands on it. Fleming reflected ruefully that perhaps he should ‘leave the conduct of the war to older and conceivably wiser heads’. Conceivably, but then again, Fleming’s idea might have saved 1,250 French lives, removed a source of French animosity that lingers to this day, and changed the course of the war. How the residents of the Isle of Wight would have felt to discover that they had suddenly become French can only be imagined.
    One of Fleming’s most notable contributions to wartimeintelligence was the creation of 30 Assault Unit (30 AU), a commando group dedicated to gathering intelligence in advance of the main British fighting force. Fleming and Bond expert Henry Chancellor has described 30 AU as ‘in effect, the private army of the Naval Intelligence Department’; if so, then Fleming was its general, though never in the field. He referred to them as his ‘Red Indians’ – somewhat to their annoyance, since a number of these warriors had little time for their self-styled chief. Recruited from other commando units, the men of 30 AU, which was initially only thirty strong but eventually more than five times that size, were trained in unarmed combat, safe-cracking, code-breaking and other nefarious arts. A similar force had been deployed by the Germans to capture Allied documents, codes and equipment; Fleming considered it ‘one of the most outstanding innovations in German intelligence’ and worked hard to copy it. Inevitably, 30 AU attracted men of a particular stamp: daring, independent-minded buccaneers, stylish in a brutal way and supremely tough. One member of the unit described them as ‘fairly piratical, especially with the women’. These ‘tough commando types’, as Fleming remembered them, would form the bedrock of James Bond’s character.
    Some men of what would become 30 AU got their first taste of action during the disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942, the major assault launched by six thousand British and Canadian troops to test the German defences on the northern coast