William Stephenson - Wikipedia
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William Stephenson contributed in many ways to the war against Hitler. Not the least of his achievements was running an espionage camp in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, where he trained American, Canadian, and British operatives. Retiring in Bermuda, he was visited by Ian Fleming who listened to his stories with great interest. Ian admitted to using some of William’s characteristics in the building of James Bond.

  • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    18 days ago

    James Bond was explicitly an amalgamation of different spies that Ian Fleming knew, however, given what he wrote about William Stephenson, if anything, mixing in characteristics of other people like Gus March-Phillips is what made James Bond flawed in comparison:

    People often ask me how closely the hero of my thrillers, James Bond, resembles a true, live secret agent. To begin with, James Bond is not in fact a hero, but an efficient and not very attractive blunt instrument in the hands of government, and though he is a meld of various qualities I noted among Secret Service men and commandos in the last war, he remains, of course, a highly romanticised version of the true spy. The real thing, who may be sitting next to you as you read this, is another kind of beast altogether.

    We know for instance, that Mr. Somerset Maugham and Sir Compton Mackenzie were spies in the First World War, and we now know, from Mr. Montgomery Hyde’s book, that Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., D.S.O., M.C., a member of White’s and the St. James’s, formerly of Eton and the Life Guards, was head of the Secret Service in the last war news which will no doubt cause a delighted shiver to run down the spines of many fellow members of his clubs and of his local hunt.

    But the man sitting alone now in his study in New York is so much closer to the spy of fiction, and yet so far removed from James Bond or 'Our Man in Havana/ that only the removal of the cloak of anonymity he has worn since 1940 allows us to realise to our astonishment that men of superqualities can exist, and that such men can be super-spies and, by any standard, heroes.

    Such a man is the Quiet Canadian,’ otherwise Sir William Stephenson, M.C., D.F.C., known throughout the war to his subordinates and friends, and to the enemy, as ‘Little Bill.’

    He is the man who became one of the great secret agents of the last war, and it would be a foolish person who would argue his credentials; to which I would add, from my own experience, that he is a man of few words and has a magnetic personality and the quality of making anyone ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. (He also used to make the most powerful martinis in America and serve them in quart glasses.)