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Doctor Shatterhand: Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to speak with you Mr. Dulles. Did you know Ian Fleming very well? Allen Dulles: I knew Ian well and I liked him. If you were an extrovert you could hardly help liking him, and if you didn’t bore him he would probably like you. He was no snob, but he couldn’t stand bores and hypocrites. Everything for him had to be exciting, even his food. Ian was a real gourmet, particularly in exotic dishes from the Orient. He felt society owed him an interesting life and he went about to get it. In many ways it was through creating James Bond that he achieved it. Shatterhand: What was the first Bond novel you read? Dulles: I was introduced to Fleming’s books years ago by Jacqueline Kennedy herself. Shatterhand: Can you tell me about your first meeting with Ian Fleming? Dulles: I was invited to dinner in London with a score of my British colleagues and Ian, and we had quite a night of it. Fleming was a brilliant and witty talker with ideas on everything. We talked about new tools that would have to be invented for the new spy era. The U-2 was already making its top secret flights, but Fleming’s imagination could go even higher. After all, he was trained in the great tradition of British Naval Intelligence. I kept in constant touch with him and he kindly kept sending me his books. Shatterhand: I heard that he inscribe personal messages in his books to you. What did he write? Dulles: In 1962, just as I retired as Director of Central Intelligence, came The Spy Who Love Me; his worse book in my opinion with this inscription: “To Allen, who had been such a strong arm for so long. Ian Fleming.” Then came On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, to which he added a teasing inscription as a reminder of the fact that I was no longer to receive classified information: “To Allen, although he is denied access to similar material, from Ian.”Shatterhand: Fleming frequently had Bond’s buddy Felix Leiter show up in some of his adventures. What was your opinion of this fictional British/American friendship? Dulles: As our acquaintanceship grew, Fleming condescended to include in his books references to the CIA and its people. Occasionally CIA personnel even joined James Bond in his exploits; in a subordinate role, of course, but after all with a great by-line. He liked the Caribbean isles as background scenes for Bond’s adventures and here the helping hand of the CIA and its
Shatterhand: What's would you say is the main reason the Bond novels are so popular? Dulles: The Kennedy interest in James Bond gave Fleming’s books a great lift, and Ian well knew it. But there is something more than that in his success. This generation seems to be attuned to spy stories and I wonder why. It is true that, as never before, great governments have gone into the spy business; among others the United States. Large organizations have been built up and they are engaged in a kind of conflict that seems to intrigue people, as they try to get each other’s secrets first. The Russians really initiated this duel when, though allied with us in World War 2, they used Klaus Fuchs and others to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb. Possibly it was public interest in this kind of struggle that caused Fleming to write about SMERSH, the Kremlin’s “death to spies” organization. This he did in From Russia, with Love. At the time, many of his readers thought that SMERSH was just another bit of James Bond fiction, but it was in fact a very real Soviet terror organization. When he thought his audience had had enough of the Soviet theme, he moved on to international gangsters, called SPECTRE who, among other things, stole a couple of atomic bombs and tried to use them for massive blackmail. After what we have read of the great $7 million British train robbery, this seems not so far removed from reality either. Shatterhand: How does James Bond compare to real secret agents today? Dulles: People always want to know what relation James Bond has to the secret agent of today or, if you prefer, the modern spy. The fact is that there is very little resemblance. The modern spy could not permit himself to become the target of luscious dames who approach him in bars or come out of closets in hotel rooms. In fact, most of the great spies were modest in appearance, careful in their actions and their contacts, and hence not likely to be smoked out on their first mission. Good spies are too valuable, their training is too long and costly, and they are too hard to find to warrant undue exposure. I fear that James Bond in real life would have had a thick dossier in the Kremlin after his first exploit and would not have survived the second. Shatterhand: You once said that you would be glad to hire several James Bonds. How can you say that knowing full well that he wouldn’t survive his second assignment? Dulles: I often said when I was director of Central Intelligence that I would be glad to hire several James Bonds. I did not mean by this that I lacked men and women with Bond’s qualities, because I had many of them. But I was always looking for more to be used, as I say, somewhat differently from Bond. I was also interested in the novel and secret “gadgetry” Fleming described from time to time in the Bond books. I recall, in particular, one device: it was a special kind of homing radio outfit which Bond installed in cars his opponents were using and which permitted him, with an appropriate radar type of gadget, to follow the hostile car and home in on it from his own car even at many miles distance. Bond used this to track Auric Goldfinger across France and into Switzerland. I put my people in the CIA to work on this as a serious project but they came up with the answer that there were too many bugs in it. The device did not work too well when the enemy got into a crowded city. The same may be true of many of Bond’s gadgets, but they did get one to thinking and exploring, and that was worth while because sometimes you came up with other ideas that did work. Shatterhand: You last visited with Fleming in early 1964 prior to his death in August. Did he appear sick to you? Dulles: The last time I saw Ian Fleming, he didn’t look well to me. I knew that he had had a slight heart attack some three years before and had been told to take it easy. But that is something that neither James Bond nor his creator, Fleming, could ever do. Then came Fleming’s last published story, You Only Live Twice. The setting of the book is Japan and the inscription on the flyleaf was in keeping. It read: To Celestial Dulles-san, from Miserable Fleming-san. Shatterhand: Thank you Mr. Dulles.
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