Tuesday, January 30, 2024

James Bond, Ian Fleming, Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK

James Bond,  LHO and JFK

Previously posted in part: https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/05/007-lho-jfk.html




In the course of reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s new 800 page biography - Ian Flaming: The Complete Man I noticed or recalled a number of associations with JFK that are relevant to his assassination and are worth mentioning,

Peter Dale Scott first turned me on to Robin Ramsay’s UK based Lobster Journal “that looks at the impact of the intelligence and security services on history and politics, from espionage to dirty tricks.”

Some  years ago Ramsey ran my review of Phil Shenon’s JFK assassination book “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination,” that’s primarily devoted to the Mexico City “Twist Party,” and I tracked down the two American Gringos who were ostensibly with the accused assassin of the President and Cuban embassy officials.

For more on Shenon and the Twist Party::   JFKcountercoup: A Cruel and Shocking Twist

With the impending release of Shakespeare’s new biography “Ian Fleming: The Complete Man,” ( Penguin, 2022) https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/441629/ian-fleming-by-shakespeare-nicholas/9781787302419 ) Robin Ramsey arranged for me to get an advanced copy to read and r

While many back issues are available to read free, I recommend you subscribe to Lobster, ( https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue/88/ ), where you can also read my review in Issue 88, ( https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/article/issue/88/oo7s-real-mission-continues/ ).

As I write at Lobster – There are three things that I thought should be rectified about Fleming that his previous biographies got wrong: why Fleming began the first 007 novel Casino Royale, an accurate portrait of the real James Bond – the Philadelphia ornithologist and author of the book Birds of the West Indies, and the real persons known to Fleming that he used as characters in his stories.

As Shakespeare finally acknowledges Fleming began his first 007 novel Casino Royale because of what they called at the time - The case of the missing diplomats – Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. The revelations about the Cambridge spy ring was what instigated Fleming to write “the spy story to end all spy stories,” which leads me to the associations with JFK and his assassination.

With the disappearance of Burgess and MacLean, Fleming sent Mercury News correspondent Richard Hughes to Moscow where it was arranged for Hughes to meet Burgess and MacLean, confirming their defection. Shakespeare quotes Christopher Moran as saying “Mercury looks like a spy operation. It smells like a spy operation, ergo, I think it is a spy operation.”

Though Shakespeare describes the Mercury news syndicate as a virtual spy network, he doesn’t do the same for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), owned by Fleming’s close friends and wartime associates Ivor Bryce (SIS) and Ernest Cuneo (OSS), whose names are also portrayed as characters in 007 novels. They hired Fleming as a foreign editor, and one of their correspondents Priscilla Johnson (McMillan) interviewed former US Marine defector Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow.

John Judge and I wrote about this in more detail in an essay Bottlefed by Oswald’s NANA – 

https:/archive.politicalassassinations.net/2012/07/was-oswald-bottlefed-by-nana/

Shakespeare mentions Priscilla Johnson as the author of Lee and Marina, a book that portrays accused assassin Lee Oswald as a lone nut, but one who was an avid reader of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, as was President Kennedy.

Shakespeare writes: “It was not merely John F. Kennedy who was overly influenced by Ian Fleming’s novels and engaged in secret plots. Another Bond fan was the emotionally disturbed young man who killed him. At 9 p.m. on Thursday 21 November 1963, a private screening of “From Russia with Love” was held for fifty guests in the White House projection room….”

It was Fleming’s novel “From Russia with Love,” that President Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln added to the list of books the President read because she thought the list was all boring history. When the list was published in Life magazine it boosted the sales of Fleming’s 007 series. It was also one of the books found among Lee Harvey Oswald’s effects in his boarding house room.

The complete list as published in Life Magazine:

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Miscellaneous-Information/Favorite-Books.aspx

Lord Melbourne by David Cecil
Montrose by John Buchan
Marlborough by Sir Winston Churchill
John Quincy Adams by Samuel Flagg Bemis
The Emergence of Lincoln by Allan Nevins
The Price of Union by Herbert Agar
John C. Calhoun by Margaret L. Coit
Talleyrand by Duff Cooper
Byron in Italy by Peter Quennell
The Red and the Black by M. de Stendhal
From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
Pilgrim's Way by John Buchan
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Writing and Speeches of Daniel Webster
Andre Malraux
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Henry Clay by Carl Schurz 

As noted: Dave Powers later added a few titles to the list, and Kennedy’s secretary Mrs. Lincoln later acknowledged she added “From Russia with Love” to the list of otherwise dull and academic books to give it a human touch with a book she knew Kennedy had read that ordinary people could identify with.

The “From Russia with Love” story concerns the theft of a Russian Lector cipher machine from their embassy in Istanbul, which reflects on the theft of the real German Nazi Enigma cipher machine that was successfully broken by the British during WWII, a secret that was kept for thirty years after the war. And Shakespeare tells us that both Ian and his brother Peter Fleming were among the small Bigot List of those who had access to the secrets revealed by the codebreakers.

The story also has Russian assassin Donovan Grant attempting to kill James Bond and retrive the cipher machine. Shakespeare says that Fleming named the SMERSH assassin Donovan Grant after Gen. William Donovan, head of the OSS, and that “Since August, Oswald had used the pseudonym ‘Alik James Hidell.’"

While everyone speculates that "Hidell" was meant to match Fidel, Shakespeare tells us, "The middle name ‘may have been taken from James Bond,’ according to his biographer, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who, who had interviewed Oswald in Moscow after his defection in October 1959,” But Shakespeare fails to note that at the time McMillan interviewed Oswald the defector in Moscow she was working for Bryce, Cuneo and Fleming at NANA.

“It is not unreasonable to suppose,” writes Shakespeare, “that once Oswald returned to America in June 1962, tail between his legs, and learned of the President’s widely publicized reading habits, the fictional career of Donovan as ‘the chief executioner’ of SMERSH offered an alternative vision of how his defection was to have played out. Kennedy saw himself as Bond, and Oswald, in a warped version, as example of Bond’s would-be assassin, Donovan Grant – only successful….” That may be a stretch, but one that is made by Priscilla Johnaon and Shakespiere, not me.

Fleming did meet JFK. As recounted in all three of Fleming biographies, Fleming met and had dinner with Senator John F. Kennedy at his home, when he was visiting his close friend Oatsie Leiter, a Georgetown neighbor of JFK and Jamaican neighbor of Fleming. Over dinner, JFK asked Fleming what James Bond would do about Fidel Castro, to which Fleming replied, “ridicule, chiefly.”

Shakespeare fails to mention that Fleming anoits 007’s CIA sidekick with the name Felix Leiter, and that the family of Oatsie Leiter’s husband John once owned the Virginia land that the CIA headquarters was built on.

Soon after becoming President JFK requested that the CIA send over “America’s James Bond” and the portly, pear shaped William Harvey showed up at the oval office, leaving his pistols with the Secret Service at the door. While Harvey didn’t look like James Bond, he was just as lethal, and is now even considered a suspect in the murder of the President. Harvey also was one of the first to claim, after attending a party at Philby’s apartment, that Philby and Burgess were Soviet spies, and JFK did play an unintentional role in the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring.

President JFK appointed Michael Straight to head a new arts commission, but when Straight found his background was to be closely vetted by the FBI, he confessed that there was an attempt to recruit him into the Cambridge spy ring while he was a student there. Besides Philby, Burgess, McClean, Straight threw another name into the spy ring – Sir Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures. It was Straight's confession that led Philby to flee to Moscow himself. 

While Straight claimed not to have provided them with any useful information, as publisher of his family’s liberal New Republic magazine, he did print some of Philby’s articles and in London Fleming visited the American millionaire Whitney Straight, brother of Michael Straight in order to discuss Burgess and MacLean, who Straight also knew at Cambridge.

The former assistant to the chief of British Naval Intelligence christened his secret agent Double-Oh Seven - 007 - James Bond, who was licensed to kill on behalf of her majesty’s secret service, while having the cover job of an import-export agent for Universal Export. A few years later, Lee Harvey Oswald, just out of the US Marine Corps, boarded a tramp steamer in New Orleans and sailed for Europe on the first leg of a journey that would take him behind the Iron Curtain as a “defector” to the Soviet Union. The passport that Oswald turned over to the US Embassy in Moscow when he announced his defection indicated that his profession was “Import-Export” agent.

In fact, Oswald, before enlisting in the US Marines, did work at an import and export firm in New Orleans. As explained by his brother Robert (Lee – A Portrait of Lee, Coward-McCann, 1967, p. 74), “In November (1955) he (Lee) went to work as a messenger and office boy for a shipping company, Gerald F. Tujague, Inc. He made only $130 a month, but it must have seemed like a lot of money to him, since it was his first full-time job. Mother said he was generous with his money…Feeling prosperous, now that he had a regular income, Lee bought other things, too. Mother said he paid $35 for a coat for her, bought a bow and arrow set – and gun…I remember that gun…Lee really seemed to enjoy his work at Tujague’s for a while. He felt more independent than ever before, and he liked the idea of working for a shipping company. When he first told me about it, he was eager, animated and genuinely enthusiastic. ‘We’re sending an order to Portugal this week,’ he’d tell me. Or, ‘I received a shipment from Hong Kong, just this morning.’ It was a big adventure to him – as if all the company’s ships were his and he could go to any of the places named on the order blanks he carried from one desk to another. It made him feel important, just to be on the fringes of something as exciting as foreign trade.” 

Tujague later came back on the record as a leading member of the Friends of a Democratic Cuba in New Orleans and was said to be on the board of directors of a bank that also included John Mecom, who employed George DeMohrenschildt and sent him to Europe, which led to him being debriefed by the CIA. So both Oswald and DeMohrenschildt, although their lives wouldn’t entwine until years later, were both employed by directors of the same bank, an indication they were both working for the same economic interests years earlier.

Gerald F. Tujague  (10 HSCA, 134, note 64; CE2227, 25 H 128) Owner of a New Orleans shipping company that sixteen year old Oswald worked for from November 10, 1955 to January 14 1956, shortly before he enlisted in the USMC.

Trujague was Vice President of Friends of Democratic Cuba, an anti-Castro Cuban group incorporated in New Orleans on January 6, 1961, which also included Guy Banister on its board of directors. On January 20, 1061, when Oswald was in the USSR, two men visited the Bolton Ford dealership in New Orleans and inquired about the purchase of trucks for their organization, the Friends of Democratic Cuba, using Oswald’s name. 

Was there a reason for Oswald to list his occupation as “import-export agent” on the passport he used to defect to Russia, and was it in any way associated with import-export agency he worked for in New Orleans shortly before enlisting in the Marines? Or was it some kind of inside joke, tongue in cheek reference to James Bond’s occupation as an import-export agent for Universal Export?

In JFK & 007, Less Sanger Golden (alias Author337) perpetuates the myths and takes note of the mutual associations of 007 and Camelot, as well the Oswald connection. Golden wrote: “Meanwhile, the James Bond novels were having a huge impact on another young man, Lee Harvey Oswald. He too was a fan of the novel From Russia with Love, a story of political defection that oddly mirrors Oswald’s own defection to the Soviet Union. In the story, James Bond wisps the young Russian Tatiana Romonvav across the iron curtain with promises of decadent western luxuries. While in Russia, Lee Oswald similarly swept young Marina Prusakova off of her feet and brought her to America with promises of a better life. But when things started going badly, Tatiana and Marina realized that perhaps they were in for more than they had bargained for.” 

As Golden also noted other similarities when he wrote: “If JFK represents all the most charming aspects of James Bond, then perhaps Lee Oswald is a reflection of his dark side. His rages, his wrath. The irony inherent in any substantive comparison of JFK and 007 is inescapable. For while James Bond is a timeless figure, JFK was a figure taken before his time. And while James Bond is unkillable, we all that the same cannot be said of Jack Kennedy.”

After Oswald  living in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, Oswald took a number of books out of the local New Orleans library. A Warren Commission memorandum included the list of the books that Oswald checked out of the New Orleans Library. First on the list is “Goldfinger,’ and it officially notes that the author is IAN FLEMING, the book was checked out – 9/19/63 (Sept. 19) and the return date is indicated as 10/3/63 (October 3). “Goldfinger” wasn’t the first 007 novel that Oswald checked out, as the records show that he had previously taken out “Thunderball” and “From Russia With Love.” Another 007 book “Moonraker” was also checked out on the same date as “Goldfinger,” both of which were returned on October 3. For assassination investigators the problem with Oswald’s “Goldfinger” is that, according to the records of the New Orleans Library, the book was returned on October 3, 1963, a full week after Oswald, the friendless loner had left New Orleans. If Oswald was on a bus from Mexico to Texas on that day, who returned the book to the New Orleans library?

Of course if Lee Harvey Oswald was the real assassin of the President of the United States, these books would have been given a through going over and psychoanalysts would have given their interpretation of the assassin’s state of mind at the time, but since Oswald was a patsy, and framed for the crimes, just as he claimed, there has been no real attempt to even try to understand the psychological makeup of the patsy. If he had been the actual triggerman and assassin, then it would be a different story. In any case, Oswald is one of the most thoroughly analyzed patsies in history, so we know a lot about him, much more than we know about the actual assassins. One of the things we know is that he read a lot, and we know what he read from the library records.

Oswald did take an literary interest in the subject of espionage, as another book he checked out was, “Five Spy Novels.” 

The President’s wife Jackie was as well-read as her husband, and later became a book editor and publisher. She also took notice of Ian Fleming’s novels, though she may not have gotten the joke, but she is credited with recommending Fleming’s books to CIA director Alan Dulles. Dulles also enjoyed Fleming’s stories and tried to cultivate a similar genre of CIA themed literature that would do for the agency what Fleming’s books did for the British spy agencies. Both E. Howard Hunt and David Attle Phillips wrote a number of officially approved fictional pulp paperback novels that were similar to Fleming’s 007 stories in style and content.                   

While “Casino Royale” was the first 007 novel, the story had been adapted to an American television show, so the first 007 major motion picture was “Dr. No,” which Oswald could have and probably did see.  

In 1961, Kennedy watched the first James Bond film, Dr. No, in a private White House screening, and in part to Kennedy’s influence, the next movie was based on “From Russia, With Love,” and according to William Manchester, it would be the last movie that the president saw, on November 20, 1963, the evening before he left for Texas. 

Vincent Canby made the observation: “Whether accurately or not, the first films made from the Bond novels came to characterize a number of aspects of the Kennedy Administration with its reputation for glamour, wit and sophistication, and its real-life dram and melodrama. Indeed, the President himself could be seen as a kind of Bond figure, and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis as a real-life Bond situation.”

Any cursory review of the books we know Oswald read should begin with “Goldfinger,” which opens with a quote above the table of contents that reads: “Goldfinger said, ‘Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.’” 

While some of these incidents are speculative, some are coincidences and other perhaps hapenstance, if the happenstances and coincidences are added up, one must come to the conclusion that it is neither happenstance nor coincidence but intentional covert action.

As David Atlee Phillips said, “The intelligence profession does not encourge one to believe in coincidence as an explanation for events.”

Billkelly3@gmail.com






















































































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