"Stranger" & the Missing Code Books on 11/22/63

“Stranger” and the Missing Code Books – Coup or Faux Paux? 

“’We have to know who Stranger is,’” Secretary Rusk said. ‘We don’t know what is happening in Dallas. Who is the government now?’” 

 “The messages kept coming off the wire service machine and finally one started grinding out the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and his previous life in Russia and his membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This went against all the preconceived theories we had established.”

“ 'If this is true,’ Secretary Rusk said, ‘this is going to have repercussions around the world for years to come.’" 

On November 22, 1963, most of President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet were in an airplane over the Pacific on their way to Japan for a regional conference, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall, Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz and Press Secretary Pierre Salinger.

The existing Air Force One tapes begin, not with radio communications with Air Force One, but with riveting conversations between the Cabinet plane and the White House Situation Room.

Air Force One and a similar plane nominally referred to as Air Force Two were both in Texas with the President and the Vice President, while the Cabinet was aboard SAM 86972, all planes operated by the Special Air Mission, a detachment of the 89th Military Air Wing out of Andrews Air Force base, Maryland, near Washington D.C.

SAM 86972 was a VC-137C modified version of the Boeing 707-120 commercial airliner, but with different interior furnishings and electronic equipment. Its primary mission was to provide first class, worldwide transportation for the Vice-President of the United States, Cabinet members and international dignitaries. 

According to official descriptions, “The interior of SAM 86972 was divided into three sections: Forward (crew area), center (stateroom) and aft (passenger). The forward section had a communications center, a galley, lavatory and 13-seat compartment with one table and two overhead bunks. The center section was designed for VIP, with conference tables, swivel chairs, projection screen, two convertible sofa-bunks and a lavatory. The aft section was a combination staff and passenger areas, and contained a Xerox machine, reclining seats, overhead bunks, tables, galley two lavatories. The VC-137B was usually operated by an augmented crew of about twenty, including three pilots (two were qualified aircraft commanders), two navigators, two flight engineers, one crew chief, two communication systems operators, six flight attendants and four security guards.”

Press Secretary Pierre Salinger had just sat down with a book when the wire service machine bell rang five times and then began to clatter text on paper.

Robert Manning, the assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, a former newsman, knew that the bells meant breaking news, so he went over and began reading the jumbled text as it came over the wire, tapped out by an automatic typewriter:

UPI-207 BULLET NSSS PRECEDE KENNEDY X DALLAS, NTEXAS, NOV. 22 (.708LASTTHREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIXENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS  HSQETPEST VVUPLF208 …P KENNEDY WOUNDED PERHAPS FATALLY BY VASSASSINS BULLET HS139PEST’SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Manning immediately took the disjointed report to Dean Rusk, the senior cabinet member on board in the state room, and Rusk read it, and told Manning to get Salinger.

In his book “With Kennedy,” Pierre Salinger wrote: “By 7 A.M., our sleek blue and white presidential Boeing 707 jet was lifting off Hickam Field, headed for Wake Island and Tokyo. I was immersed in my reading sometime later when I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up. It was Robert Manning, ‘The Secretary wants to see you up forward,’ he said. Up forward was the private cabin reserved for the President, but used on this trip by the Secretary of State as the senior officer aboard.”

“I found the Secretary, grave-faced, holding a yellow piece of paper in his hand. I recognized it instantly as coming from the plane’s teletype machine. Because this plane was used a great deal by the President, it carried sophisticated communications equipment not usually carried on commercial airliners. One of these extra communications items was a newspaper teletype. The other members of the Cabinet on the trip were already in the cabin. As we waited for Myer Feldman of the White House staff and Walter Heller, the chairman of the President’s Council on Economic Advisor’s, I looked over Secretary Rusk’s shoulder, the words on the page were badly scrambled – but what I managed to read was unbelievable.”

“I kept reading it over and over again as Feldman and Heller pushed their way into the cabin. The words stayed on the paper. They would not go away. Secretary Rusk read us the last brief bulletin.”

“‘My God!’ gasped Orville Freeman…..Then there was an interminable silence as each man became lost in his private sorrow.”

“‘We’ve got to turn back right now,’” I said to Secretary Rusk.” 

“That’s right, but we have to verify this somehow. Get us in communication with the White House and see if you can get Admiral Felt at CINCPAC…”

“I pushed my way through the forward door of the cabin into the communications section of the plane. ‘Get the White House and Admiral Felt,’ I ordered the communicators, Sergeants Walter C. Baughman and Darrell Skinner. In less than a minute, from almost 6000 miles away, I was talking to the White House Situation Room, the operating nerve center of the nation.”

In the basement of the White House, the Situation Room was set up in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s first crisis, the Bay of Pigs, in early 1961. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his book "A Thousand Day," notes that JFK thought that one reason the Bay of Pigs failed was because he received secondhand updates on the situation.

Michael Bohn, who once worked in the White Situation Room and wrote it’s history in his book “Nerve Center” (2003), reported that, “Kennedy and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wanted a place where they could get the same real-time info the Pentagon and the CIA got, and where the chief executive and his closest advisers could weigh this data in confidence and come to their own conclusions. In retrospect, lack of timely updates may have played a minor role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But in the weeks between the Bay of Pigs and May 15, Kennedy's naval aide Tazewell Shepard enlisted a bunch of Seabees and turned part of the West Wing basement ‘into a facility that some political scientists say changed the fundamental nature of the presidency.’"

As the Air Force One radio transmission reveal, Salinger was put through to “Crown,” the code name for the White House, and when he asked for the latest situation on the President, the operator asked if he wanted the Situation Room.

Note: This patch on the Air Force One tapes can be found at (6:30) on the LBJ Library Tape at [03:57] on the Clifton Tape.

Salinger uses his code name, “Wayside.”

1 - White House, White House, this is Wayside, do you read me?
2 - This is White House. I read you loud and clear Wayside. Over.
3 - Can you give me the latest situation on President? Over.
4 - You want Situation Room? Is that a Roger?

5 - Repeat that transmission please?
6 - This is Crown, This is Crown. Do you want Situation Room? 

7 - I want the Situation Room That’s affirmative.

8 - Roger, Roger getting them now.

9 - Stand by Please.
10- Wayside, Wayside, this is Crown. Situation Room is on. Go ahead.
11- Situation Room. This is Wayside, do you read me? Over.
12- This is the Situation Room. I read you. Go ahead. 

In the Situation Room, Navy aide Oliver Hallett answers the radio call. He is getting his information over the same news wires that put out the first reports on the assassination – Associated Press and UPI, that they call the “tickers.”

13- [Salinger] - Give me all available information on President Over. 

14- [Hallett] - All available information on President follows. Ah, Connally. He and Governor Connally of Texas have been hit in the car in which they were riding. We do not know how serious the situation is, we have no information. Mr. Bromley Smith is back here in the Situation Room now. We are getting our information over the tickers. Over.  

15- [Salinger] - That is affirmative, affirmative. Please be advised that this is the plane on which the cabinet is on the way to Japan. Those heading to (Japan) are turning around and returning to Honolulu and will be there in about two hours. Over

16 [Hallett] - I understand. Those heading to Japan are turning around and heading to Honolulu and will be back there in two hours. Is that correct? Over. 

17- That’s Affirmative. Affirmative. Will need all information to decide whether some of this party should go directly to Dallas. Over.

18- This is Situation Room. Say again your last please?
19- Will need to be advised to determine whether some members of this party should go directly to Dallas? Over.
20- Roger, you wish information as to whether some members of that party should go to Dallas.
21- Affirmative. Affirmative.
22- Do you have anything else, Wayside?
23- Any information you can give me as quickly as possible.
24- The Associated Press is coming out now with a bulletin that the President was hit in the head. That just came in. Over. 

25- Roger. Will get any new information to you. 

26- Where are you Wayside?

27 - Wayside is off the line. This is the radio operator. We are returning to Honolulu and should be back in Honolulu in about two hours. Will be in the air for about two hours and in to Honolulu and you can contact us on the ground there later.  

28- I understand. This is….Hold, hold on the line there Wayside, we have some more information coming up. 

29-…right back.

[0652]

1- Ah, Wayside, Wayside, this is Situation Room. I read from the AP bulletin. Kennedy apparently shot in head, he fell face down on the backseat of his car. Blood was on his head. Mrs. Kennedy cried “Oh no,” and tried to hold up his head. Connally remained half seated slumped to the left. There was blood on his face and forehead. The President and Governor were rushed to Parkland Hospital near the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy was to have made a speech. Over  

2 - I read that, over.
3 - This is Situation Room. I have nothing further for you now. I will contact you if we get more. 

4 - Wayside, Roger and out

5 - Situation Room out.

The Navy aide in the Situation Room, Oliver Hallett, within the hour, would also learn from the wire service reports that the accused assassin was former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who Hallett had known from his stint as a Navy attaché at the US Embassy in Moscow. Hallett was in the room when Oswald turned his passport over to the embassy officer (Snyder).

Note 2 : When  Salinger was writing his book, the White House Communications Agency gave him a copy of a transcript of the Air Force One radio communications that included his conversations with the White House Situation Room. Salinger said that he gave his copy of the transcript to the JFK Library in Boston, but when Vincent Salandria requested this document, it could not be located.

As Salinger reported in his book, he said, “Situation Room, this is Wayside [my code name]. Can you give me latest situation on Lancer [the President’s code name]? 

“The answer came right back: ‘He and Governor Connally have been hit in car in which they were riding.’”

“I replied: ‘Please keep us advised. Secretary Rusk is on this plane headed for Japan. We are returning to Honolulu. Will be there in a bout two hours. We will need to be advised to determine whether some members should go direct to Dallas.’”

“I put the microphone down and told Sergeant Baughman to keep the line open and working on our call to Admiral Felt and stepped back into the cabin to report to Secretary Rusk. He promptly ordered the plane to turn around.”

“The radio operator called me forward almost immediately to take a call from the Situation Room: ‘AP bulletin is just coming in. President hit in the head. That just came in.’”

“‘Understand. President hit in the head,’ I replied, heading back to Secretary Rusk’s cabin. We were then 1200 miles from Wake Island and 800 miles from Hawaii. Secretary Rusk had swiftly taken control of the situation. If the President lived, he felt it was essential that certain members of the party on the plane go immediately to Dallas, to his side. Others should get back to Washington as soon as possible. The Secretary decided that he, Bob Manning, and I should go to Dallas, and that the others on the plane should go back to the Capital….Communications were established with Admiral Harry D. Felt.”

Admiral Harry D. Felt, the commander of the Pacific Command – CINPAC, as we later learned, was the only theater commander to raise the military alert status as a result of the assassination, increasing it from Defcon 5 to Defcon 4, a state of increased readiness over an area that included all the US forces in the Pacific, including Vietnam.

Salinger: “The plane roared through the early morning skies. We were informed that a jet had been set up for a trip to Dallas, if necessary. I got two more messages. The first was from ‘Stranger.’ He said our plane was to turn around and go back to Washington.

[14:44]

- Go ahead, please
- Wayside? Wayside? This is Stranger. Do you read me? Over.
- This is Wayside. Go ahead.
- Kilduff asked that all cabinet members return to Washington immediately. Over.
- We are enroute to Honolulu, where we have ah....Washington. Over
- Roger Roger, will they notifiy us of time of arrival and location? Over
- Roger, Roger, we do not have any firm....as to the exact status...go...Dallas...Wayside....go ahead.
- Wayside this is Stranger, I'll get that information...over.

Salinger: “My report of these messages seriously troubled Secretary Rusk. He wanted to know who Stranger was. Aboard every presidential jet there is usually a White House codebook. We searched for it for about five minutes, but there was none aboard this plane.”

“'We have to know who Stranger is,’” Secretary Rusk said. ‘We don’t know what is happening in Dallas. Who is the government now?’” 

“And certainly this was a question running through everybody’s mind. We had no further word on President Kennedy. Was his shooting an isolated event or part of a national or international conspiracy? Certainly, if the latter were true, our own plane was not immune to attack because any foreign power which had planned the shooting of the President would certainly not be unaware of the fact that six of his ten Cabinet members were in an airplane high over the Pacific.”

Salinger says, and as the tapes confirm, “The decision was made that I was to break the code and find out the identity of Stranger.”

[17:20]

- Liberty?
- Go ahead.
- 86972, 86972 Andrews.
- 86972 You are loud and clear.
- Roger. Give me the name, the real name of Stranger please...from the White House
- Roger. Say again the name. What is the name sir? Stranger.
- Stranger – S-T-R-A-N-G-E-R 

“In a minute, I got the answer back.”

[18:20]

- SAM Command Post is on will you give them a call?
- ....Mr. Jackson from the state department.
- We are returning to Hickham field...three zero Zulu...We are standing by for more information.
- Stand by for just a moment sir.
- Roger, Roger Seven two, Let us know when you are going to leave Hickam and what your destination is.
- Okay we will keep you advised, have Wayside give them a call.
- That's a Roger 72.
- 86972 – Andrews.
- Andrews.
- Roger. In reference to request. A Major Harold R. Patterson, Major Harold R. Paterson.

Salinger: “Stranger was Major Harold R. Patterson, a high-ranking officer in the White House Communications Agency. He was, at the time of his transmission to our plane, in Washington D.C. I knew Paterson well. He was one of the most trusted members of the White House staff and he would not have sent us the message without very clear instructions….”

“The messages kept coming off the wire service machine and finally one started grinding out the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and his previous life in Russia and his membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This went against all the preconceived theories we had established.”

“’If this is true,’ Secretary Rusk said, ‘this is going to have repercussions around the world for years to come.’ His words were prophetic because even today, only in the United States is the report of the Warren Commission, fixing the sole responsibility on Oswald, widely believed…”

“It took us only eight hours and thirty-one minutes to make the non-stop flight from Honolulu to Andrews Air Force Base. We arrived there at 12:31 A.M., Washington time, and stepped out of the plane into a barrage of lights from television cameras…”

In an article, “The Tokyo Flight - Coincidence or Conspiracy?” Ronald L. Ecker considers the idea that if the assassination was a high level coup, the presence of the cabinet on the plane over the Pacific was possibly part of the plot. He reviewed these same facts and concluded, “And that was the extent of the missing code book crisis. The code book should not have been missing, but its absence, which proved to be of no real consequence, does not by itself mean something sinister. Still, Rusk's concern over 'Stranger' illustrates the fact that conspirators would certainly have been able to take advantage of there being no code book on board under a worst-case scenario.”

Just as Col. Fletcher Prouty suspected he was sent to Antartica to get him out of the way at the time of the assassination, there is the suggestion that it wasn’t a coincidence that most of the cabinet were on a plane on the other side of the world, and additional evidence of chichainery is the fact that the code book was missing.

While one such incident may be happenstance, and two might be a coincidence, three such incidences stretches credulity, and John Judge presents just such a case.

Judge recalls meeting a SAC pilot who told him that the code books aboard SAC planes were also missing on the day of the assassination.

John Judge, the director of COPA – the Coalition on Political Assassinations, attended the University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio, also the home of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. While there in the 1970s, Judge was a guest at the Wright-Pat Officers Club, where he talked with an officer who said he was a Strategic Air Command pilot of a nuclear armed B-52 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and when President Kennedy was killed. This pilot told Judge that he came to within 30 seconds of reaching the Fail Safe point during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Then on the day JFK was assassinated, they were in the air on their regular shift that maintained a fleet of armed bombers in the air on a 24 hour basis. When they learned that the President had been shot, over civilian commercial radio, they thought they would receive new orders and in preparation for that they opened the plane’s safe to get the code books that are needed to translate and confirm any orders, and it was missing. While they didn’t get any orders while airborne, when they returned to their base, they compared notes with other pilots, and they too said their code books were missing.

Scene From Dr. Strangelove:
"Captain, the Code Book is missing, and Plan R says we should bomb Havana"

Slim Pickins: "Well Golly-Gee, let's go get them commie bastards"

John Judge also recalls reading an early batch of records released under the JFK Act from the Segregated Section, possibly an NSA document which was labeled “Defcon Status.”

Judge requested that file and a box of records were brought out. One of the items in the box included a false press report that Air Force Gen. LeMay was killed in an airplane crash that morning.

Other files in the box included reports for each continental – theater commands, indicating that the Defcon status for all of the commands remained unchanged except for one – Southeast Asia and the Pacific Command – CINPAC, which went from 5 to 4. 

Larry Hancock, in “Someone Would Have Talked” (Lancer 2006, p. 304) wrote: “But Johnson himself shows no indication of seriously fearing Soviet involvement. In the hours following the assassination he ordered absolutely no actions pertaining to military preparedness or national security. Nor did he direct any special intelligence activities against either the Soviets or Cubans. This lack of action on Johnson’s part is confirmed by a White House memorandum written on December 4, 1963, by Bromley Smith in regard to ‘Changes in Defense Readiness Conditions as a Result of the Assassination of President Kennedy.’ This memo summarizes the authority granted to the Joint Chiefs and documents their ‘Defcon’ actions following the assassination. According to the memo, the Joint Chiefs, acting on their own initiative, increased the defense readiness condition from Defcon 5 (the lowest peace time condition) to Defcon 4 at 2:50 EST on November 22 and returned to Defcon 5 at 12:30 on Sunday November 24. The Commander in Chief Pacific (CINPAC) on his own initiative had directed his forces to Defcon 3 at 3:13 PM on November 22, something he was fully authorized to do. This memo provides solid proof that the US military did not move overall to a major elevation of defense readiness, suggesting any fear of foreign involvement or that the assassination was a precursor to an attack.”

Bromley Smith, author of this report, was also present in the White House Situation Room shortly after the assassination and is specifically mentioned on the Air Force One tapes.

Larry Hancock: “Beyond that there is no evidence that the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defense took any other than very limited precautions. When the Chiefs were informed of the assassination, they remained in a meeting together, not even dispensing to their respective operational or command centers. Given that the assassination occurred at the height of the cold war (only a year after the Cuban missile crisis), and that certain defense scenarios anticipated elimination of US leaders as part of any Soviet attack, this apparent lack of a stronger reaction seems rather amazing.”

Both Hallet, author of this report, and Bromley Smith were present in the White House Situation Room shortly after the assassination and is mentioned on the Air Force One tapes. 

I think this is that report:

Home/Archive/Documents/JFK Assassination Documents/Department of Defense/Joint Chiefs of Staff/JCS Files, JFK Library/
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/....do?docId=78887

202-10002-10180
MEMORANDUM FOR: BROMLEY SMITH
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
4 DECEMBER 1963
Subj. CHANGES IN DEFENSE READINESS CONDITIONS AS A RESULT OF ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY
MEMORANDUM FOR:
Bromley Smith

1. By the authority granted under Joint Chiefs of Staff Emergency Action Procedures (SM-600-63) dated 12 June 1963, the JCS [redacted] or higher authority are authorized to declare Defense Readiness Conditions [DEFCONS] 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. A copy of Chapter Four of this publication is appended under Tab A.
2. Acting on this authority, the JCS after news of the Dallas shooting was received issued their message 3675 at 2:15 p.m. November 22.
3. Acting on this message [redacted] Copies of the three messages are appended under Tab C
4. [redacted] A copy of this directive is appended under Tab D (U.S. forces in Vietnam are in DEFCON 3 on a continuing basis)
5. [redacted] The NMCC received no other notifcations other than those specified above and appended. If a commander took precautions within his command [redacted] he need not necessarily inform the JCOS of them. NMCC received no other message.
notifications.

If this report is correct, and U.S. forces in Vietnam are on a constant DEFCON 3 basis, then their status went to DEFCON 2, one step away from war. 

The commander of CINPAC, the only command to change its alert status, was Admiral Felt, the person Secretary Rusk tried to contact as soon as he learned that President Kennedy had been shot.

"Stranger," - Major Harold Patterson, recalls the incident and says that when Salinger requested to know his identity, Salinger was told to check the code book on the plane, but this part of the conversation is not on the existing Air Force One radio transmission tapes, further proof that many of the relevant recorded conversations have been eliminated from the edited tapes that exist today.

SAC RADIO SILENCE ORDER

Besides the Joint Chiefs issuing the still classified Message 3675 at 2:15 PM on 11/22/63, they apparently also ordered all Air Force planes honor radio silence, as Gerald Blaine reports: 

“Art Godfrey’s midnight shift agents in Austin were headed back to Washington D.C. on a Strategic Air Command (SAC) KC135 that had departed Bergstrom Air Force Base at 3:00 PM. They’d rushed from their hotel to the base, and by the time they had boarded the plane, they still didn’t know whether President Kennedy was alive or dead. The military had all their units on radio silence because of a Strategic Air Command order, and except for the droning of the engines and occasional bits of information gleaned from commercial radio reports heard by those in the cockpit and passed back to them, there was complete silence during the long flight to Washington.”

The Three Martini Lunch Crew

The Three Martini Lunch Crew

Even before Ian Fleming’s 007 James Bond made it famous, the martini was the drink of spies, as a select group of espionage agents and operatives were flagrantly drinking martinis, including Ernest Hemingway, James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby, William Harvey, Harvey’s secretary Maggie and JMWAVE maritime boss Gordon Campbell and his wife – all, as historically recorded, martini drinkers in the midst of the Cold War tempests.

Lee Harvey Oswald mentions in his letter to Navy Secretary John Connally, who he is later accused of shooting, that he was in Russia like Hemingway went to Paris, a simple analogy that the NANA correspondent who interviewed him, Priscilla Johnson, to relate to Hemingway’s “Moveable Feast” time in Paris in the 1920s, but Oswald didn’t say the 20s, and Hemingway also made another memorable visit to Paris in 1944, during World War II when he was serving as a war correspondent. 

After D-Day Hemingway went into France attached to an advanced American unit and a tight band of French resistance fighters. Hemingway’s son was an OSS Jedbergh, one of those special agents trained as a commando and parachuted behind the lines to organize resistance forces. While his son was captured and in a prisoner of war camp, Hemingway was affiliated with Colonel David Bruce, who was the senior OSS officer in that theater of the war.

Bruce would later be Hemingway’s best man at his wedding and serve as President Kennedy’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, but in late June 1944 he was with Hemingway and a band of French resistance fighters on the outskirts of Paris, as it was being liberated.

While French General LeClerc accepted the surrender of the German general at the train depot, Hemingway, Bruce and their band of resistance fighters rode a jeep and a truck full of partisans into Paris and liberated the bar at the Ritz Hotel, shortly after the German general staff had left the premises. 

Hemingway reportedly put his machine gun on the bar, looked around and counted heads and ordered 60 double vodka martinis.

Of course Ian Fleming’s James Bond would make famous the vodka martini, shaken, not stirred, but as with all of his characters and story lines, there is some semblance of truth to his stories, and real life counterparts to his fiction, but when it comes to martinis, it could be just the preferred drink of spies.

Among those secret agents who are known to have enjoyed martinis on a regular basis, James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby and William Harvey quickly come to mind, as Angleton’s three martini lunches were possibly written off as a government business expense if the chief of CIA’s counterintelligence was trying to get his lunch mate loosened up and spill the beans of whatever it is Angleton was after at the time. Unfortunately, Kim Philby was one of his more frequent lunch partners, and Philby probably got more out of Angleton and his other lunch mates than Angleton got out of Philby, who Angleton thought was a friendly British MI6 officer when in fact he was a KGB double agent.

While Angleton may have not been able to see through the three martinis, William Harvey apparently could, although Philby later complained that Harvey once drank too many after dinner martinis and passed out for awhile before his wife took him home.

Certainly martinis and alcohol had something to do with the dinner party fiasco that Philby hosted one evening that included Angleton, Harvey, Harvey’s wife, Philby’s co-conspirator Guy Burgess and a dozen other top US spies, including Ted Shackley and Our Man in Mexico Win Scott.

When a drunk and obnoxious Burgess drew an unflattering sketch of Harvey’s wife, “America’s James Bond” took a swing at Burgess and Angleton and others had to pull him off of the offending Burgess in a scene more like Oliver & Hardy than 007.

“Then came an incident which practically everyone who has written about the CIA’s early days mentions: a dinner party in January 1951 at Kim Philby’s house on Nebraska Avenue that went disastrously wrong and had consequences that shook both the British and the American governments. The story made its public debut in David Martin’s ‘Wilderness of Mirrors,’ but all versions are substantially the same, even to the one in Norman Mailer’s ‘Harlot’s Ghost.’ Kim had invited ‘twenty-five to thirty’ of his closest American associates, including Bob Lamphere and his wife, and ‘Mickey and Catherine Ladd, Emory and Molly Gregg,’ all of the FBI. The CIA contingent included the top brass from Clandestine Services; Jim Angleton and his wife, Cicely; and the Harveys. The party was a disaster, far worse than any host’s worst nightmare. First, there was the obvious social split between the Bureau and the Agency people. Harvey was somewhere in the middle: not, socially, CIA, but no longer FBI. Then, into this tense-but-bibulous group of guests waltzed Guy Burgess, a second secretary at the British embassy, who was bunking with Philby. Burgess had already come to the attention of the American civil authorities because of a flagrant traffic incident in Virginia. He had been spared a driving under the influence citation only because of his diplomatic immunity.”

Bob Lamphere: “Libby Harvey joined us [at the party]. She’s already had a lot to drink and wanted to share her disgust at the entire array of dinner guests and the party itself with anyone who’d listen. Somehow she became my dinner partner, and I spent most of the meal attempting to quiet her. She hated the typically British cold roast beef and loudly said, ‘Isn’t this God-awful!’ about every detail of food and service. The end of the dinner came none too quickly for me, and as soon thereafter as we could politely manage, the Greggs and my wife and I left the party. We should have stayed….Burgess got into an insulting debate with Mickey Ladd, which Ladd probably enjoyed…But then Burgess turned to Libby Harvey. He said to her, ‘how extraordinary to see the face I’ve been doodling all my life!’ She invited him to sketch her portrait. Burgess executed a caricature so lewd and savage that Libby demanded to be taken home immediately.”

As Stockton relates, “Burgess’ sketch was a vividly obscene cartoon of Libby, dress hiked above her waist, crotch bared. Burgess, very drunk, showed the sketch around. Enraged, Harvey swung at Burgess and missed. The party lurched close to mayhem. Winston MacKinlay Scott, former FBI station chief in Mexico City, now CIA, described the dinner to John Barron, the well-known chronicler of the secret world. ‘Harvey jumped on Burgess and was choking him with both hands. It took Scott and Philby and one other guest to pull him off.’ Angleton quickly steered Harvey out the door and walked him around the block. Others took care of the now-hysterical Libby.”

Burgess shortly thereafter returned to England to warn Donald MacLean of his impending arrest for espionage and the two of them disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, leaving Philby to fend for himself.

While Philby’s days were numbered from that party on, it seems like Harvey made martinis a popular drink at the JMWAVE station, where

After leaving Berlin, Harvey moved over to the Cuban desk, where he was a senior officer at JMWAVE, and where his faithful secretary followed. and where U.S. Army Ranger Capt. Bradley Ayers met her. Maggie was said to drink martinis while sitting on floor, so as not to fall off the carpet. 

Harvey’s first secretary was like “M” Miss Moneypenny, as described by Stockton, “Middle-aged, plain looking, hard as nails, precise, but a good worker….If Bill told her to file something securely, she might have used her own body cavities…That’s how loyal, and how secure, she was.” 

“She was the latest in a select line of secretaries who served Bill with ferocious fealty. In Berlin, it had been Maggie Crane…, who sat on the floor when she drank martinis ‘so she wouldn’t fall off the carpet.’ Rita Chappiwicki succeeded Maggie. And then, in the Langley basement, it was Skip. The three knew all the secrets, but they never, ever betrayed Bill’s trust.”

Ayers also recalled visiting JMWAVE’s head of maritime operations, Gordon Campbell on his Dinner Key yacht, where he found Campbell and his wife drinking martinis, in a scene that 007 could easily fit into.

“I stole a few hours’ extra sleep the next morning,” Ayers recalled, “then went out to Coconut Grove, where I was to meet Gordon Campbell. He and his wife lived on a yacht moored at the Dinner Key marina. I walked down a long concrete pier, past sleek, expensive cruisers, and finally found Gordon’s boat. Both he and his wife – an attractive bikini-clad silver-haired women – were well into their Sunday afternoon martinis. As he mixed me a drink, he asked, “What do you think of the men? How do they look – moral, interest – you know, guts for the job?”…Our discussion terminated when Mrs. Campbell came down to the gallery carrying drinks for all of us. She chided us fro spending the “glorious Sunday afternoon” talking business, and threw her heavily oiled, deeply tanned body into her husband’s lap.”

Campbell died, in 1962, the year before Ayers met him, which remains one of the major mysteries of the case.

But just as everything Adele Edisen said checked out, except the fact that she was given Oswald’s New Orleans phone number two weeks before Oswald himself knew what it was, then perhaps the incongruity is reason for further inquiry.

While Campbell is certifiably dead, Maggie however, may still know all the secrets.

Writing in a style that resonates like Ian Fleming, Ayers wrote: “The affair with Maggy had gotten out of hand. I felt great sympathy for her. Abstractly, I saw us as two lonely, desperate souls, each with self-made problems, struggling to retain some sense of honor or dignity while confronted by almost overwhelming decisions. In view of this, I was not surprised when she hinted about working out some kind of ‘arrangement’ and, together, remaining with the CIA after my resignation. One night, as we talked, I experienced an almost overwhelming sense of entrapment. I had placed unquestioning trust in Maggie. Now it occurred to me that there could be another motive behind her efforts to persuade me to stay with the CIA. Maybe it wasn’t love. Maybe it was just a clumsy CIA recruitment plot. Perhaps Maggy, in her dedication to the agency, was using my deep feelings for her and my sense of commitment to ensnare me for the agency. Maybe that’s what our friendship had been about from the beginning. I thought. Nausea washed over me. Why would any other CIA venture be any different than this: the bodies in the barn, abandoned and expendable. That was the end of our affair. The next morning I moved out of her apartment and went back to the emptiness of the Homestead safe house. I never confronted her with my suspicions, but she must have known why I left. She telephoned a few times and told me how lonely she was and how she missed me. But the seeds of doubt about her true intentions had been planted, and I gave her no encouragement. My experience with Maggy intensified my paranoia. Assuming that my suspicions about the underhanded recruitment effort were correct, and considering the doubts I had always harbored about the agency’s sincerity in handling the Cuban freedom fighters, I began to wonder about the ends to which they might go to maintain control over a disenchanted employee. Assuming I rejected them after having the door opened so widely, would they take reprisals? What if they wouldn’t let me resign? They had no rules except expediency. Suddenly, the idea of being framed for some criminal act or publicly dishonored and confined became a real fear. My suspicions eroded whatever loyalty I felt toward the agency…But I was never very far from the reality of my involvement with the agency and JM/WAVE…”

JFK, Michael Straight, Ian Fleming & Kim Philby

"In Washington (on September 10, 1963), Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn E. Thompson prepared a memo of his conversation with the Russians and JFK’s response. As described by Mark White, the editor The Kennedys and Cuba, 'In a secret message to JFK, Khrushchev makes clear that he is aware of the recent resumption of sabotage by the United States against Cuba. He also warns Kennedy that the Soviet Union will respond if Cuba is attacked.'” 

Despite the official State Dept. declaration of March 1963 that no attacks would be made against Cuba from US Shores, the Special Group and JFK approved five such attacks that were proposed in April, approved in June and conducted in the fall of 1963. Most of the commandos infiltrated were immediately arrested by Cubans, much like the Frank Wisner's Albanians were rounded up when infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s. Kim Philby was identified as the security breach in the Albanian operation, and should be a suspect in the betrayal of the JMWAVE Cubans. 

One of the reasons the government and CIA continue to resist the release of the records related to the assassination of President Kennedy is because of national security. 

The CIA might oppose the release of 50 year old operational records related to the assassination of President Kennedy on grounds of national security, since Castro is still alive and the records are still relevant today, but the American people are the only ones being kept in the dark about what’s so secret since both Castro’s G2 infiltrated JMWAVE at sea level while Kim Philby penetrated the CIA at the highest levels in Washington. 

Things might have continued on unabated had not President Kennedy appointed Michael Straight to a prominent post in the government, which set a series of events in motion that are still being felt to this day, and is at the heart of the government’s continued resistance to the opening of their records, not an attempt to keep the enemy from learning the most important secrets, because they already know, but to keep the American people from knowing the embarrassing truths.

JFK, MICHAEL STRAIGHT, IAN FLEMING AND KIM PHILBY

All of the official biographies of Ian Fleming acknowledge that he took the name for his fictional 007 hero from James Bond, the American author of the book Birds of the West Indies, but they also all falsely claim that Bond enjoyed the celebrity status Fleming gave him and took it as a joke, when in fact Bond was quite annoyed and deeply resented the “theft of his identity.”

So I also began to question the validity of the frequently repeated statement that Fleming began to write the 007 novels on a lark, to take his mind off his impending marriage, and considered the possibility that there was a more significant “operational” motive behind the literature. They could have been written either to boost the morale of the British Secret Service which was severely damaged by the betrayal of Kim Philby and the Cambridge spy ring or to salvage some of the operations they may have exposed.

This thought occurred to me when I read Jim Houghan (in Secret Agenda – Watergate, Deep Throat & the CIA, Random House, 1984, p. 5-6) where he notes that:

“When (E. Howard) Hunt first approached Colson for work in the White House, he was still a part of the CIA. His retirement from the agency would not occur until April 30, 1970, and, considering his record, the possibility of his retirement was bogus is quite real. Indeed, this was the third time that Hunt had left the Central Intelligence Agency. The first occasion was in 1960, when he was issued fraudulent retirement papers to facilitate his liaison with anti-Castro exiles. When that invasion was launched, only to founder, Hunt returned to the agency’s staff – having never actually left its payroll. Five years later, in 1965, Hunt quit for a second time. The author of more than four dozen pulp thrillers and novels of the occult, Hunt left the agency in furtherance of a counterintelligence scheme that revolved around his literary efforts. The purpose of the scheme, according to government sources familiar with Hunt’s curriculum vitae at the agency, was to draw the KGB’s attention to books that Hunt was writing under the pseudonym David St. John. These spy novels alluded to actual CIA operations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and contained barely disguised portraits of political figures as diverse as Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It was the CIA’s intention that the KGB be led to believe that the books contained security breaches, and toward that end the agency created a phony ‘flap’ that was capped by Hunt’s supposedly ‘forced retirement.’ In his memoir of his years as a spy, Hunt does not mention the counterintelligence aspects of the David St. John novels, but writes, ‘I resigned from the CIA [this second time], and was at once rehired as a contract agent, responsible only to [the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, Thomas Karamessines.’”

Since it has also been acknowledged that E. Howard Hunt, in light of the success of Ian Fleming’s 007 books, had obtained official permission to write his spy-fiction novels as an intelligence operation, perhaps there is something to the idea that Fleming also began to write his novels as a counter-intelligence project as well.

Fleming began to write his first 007 novel within a year of the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to the Soviet Union.

In January 1952, when Fleming sat down at his typewriter to begin his first 007 novel, “Casino Royale,” it was no longer a matter of speculation as to whether the British Secret Service had been betrayed by its own long standing members, it was only a matter of determining the severity of the damage and what could be done to rectify it.

When Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean disappeared the previous May, 1951, shortly before MacLean was to be confronted with the evidence he was a Soviet spy and interrogated, the speculation centered on the identity of the “third man” who had tipped them off and allowed them to flee. Since these secrets were tightly held by only a few men in the counter-intelligence field, the “third man” was certainly positioned in a high place within the Secret Service, and a major effort was made to identify him. 

The investigation quickly focused on Kim Philby, a former Cambridge classmate of Burgess and Mclean, who at the time was serving in Washington D.C. as liaison to the CIA and FBI.

Both Burgess and Maclean had been posted to America and associated with Philby, and Burgess drew suspicion on himself and Philby by his outrageous behavior, sparking William Harvey “America’s James Bond,” to question whether Philby and Burgess were Soviet agents. But James Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence branch, discounted any such notions, especially after many three-martini lunches with Philby.

In November 1956 Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 visited Washington D.C. to brief the Americans about the missing diplomats and the Third Man affair. Driving Hollis around town, Richard Helms of the CIA asked Hollis, “Who’s this writer Ian Fleming?” Helms mentioned the recently published book Live and Let Die, but Hollis replied, “I don’t know.”  

A few days later it was revealed that Prime Minister Anthony Eton had flown to Jamaica to spend some time at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye beach house, sparking Helms to assume, “The man lied. Hollis must have cleared the prime minister to stay with Fleming,” wrote Tim Bower [in The Perfect English Spy].

When President Kennedy, already familiar with the 007 novels, and having entertained Fleming at dinner at his home, requested to meet the “American James Bond,” he was presented with William Harvey, who insisted that Philby and Burgess were Soviet spies.

While Burgess’ treachery was confirmed by his disappearance, Philby weathered the storm and though relieved from his position as liaison to the American services, he was eventually rehired by MI6 – the British foreign intelligence service.

President Kennedy then nominated Michael Straight to be the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, a move that unraveled a whole new line of inquiry that revitalized the spy hunt for the elusive “third man.”

Michael Straight, nominated by JFK to be the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, at first accepted and then turned it down after he feared a background investigation would uncover his association with the Cambridge University communist spy cell that also included Kim Philby, Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess.

At first Straight accepted the prestigious position, but when he realized that he would have to undergo a vigorous background check, he declined because he too was one of those recruited by the Soviets while a student at Cambridge. When he explained his dilemma to a friend he was advised to go to the FBI and tell them everything, which he did.

After writing the first 007 novel Casino Royale, Fleming and his wife returned to England for the birth of their son Casper. After dropping her off at the hospital, Fleming visited an old friend from their school days, the American born Whitney Straight, then chairman of BOAC airlines. Both Whitney Straight and his younger brother Michael had attended Cambridge and were personal friends with Guy Burgess, and according to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, the case of the Missing Diplomats is what they discussed.

Michael Straight was preceded at Cambridge by his older brother Whitney, a playboy race car driver who introduced Michael to the Pitt Club, which has been described as a “hunting and drinking” club, where he first met Guy Burgess, who Straight dismissed as “an alcoholic adventurer, a name dropper and gypsy.” 

While most of the Cambridge spy ring were members of the Apostles, Michael Straight, Guy Burgess and James Bond himself, from some years earlier, were members of the Pitt Club, and continued their affiliation with the club years after they left Cambridge.

Among those who attended Cambridge, James Bond and Michael Straight, while years apart, stood out conspicuously as American “Yanks,” though they too were products of the British prep school system, Bond having attended St. Paul’s school in New Hampshire and then Harrow in England, while Michael and his older brother Whitney attended Dartington Hall in South Devon.

A month after his arrival at Cambridge Michael Straight was reluctantly recruited into the Cambridge Communist cell by Anthony Blunt, who would go on to become a member of the Secret Service as well as the surveyor of the Queen’s extensive art collection. Although he declined Blunt’s invitation to join them, Straight never betrayed his friends and assisted them in other ways.

Straight’s reluctance to willingly serve the Soviets did not prevent them from obtaining valuable use of him, especially when he returned to America and became editor and publisher of the New Republic, which published some of Philby’s commentaries.

J. E. Hover had ordered a complete investigation of all the American students who attended Cambridge in the 1930s to see if there were any more similar communist moles who had burrowed into the heart of the American government bureaucracy, the Straight brothers among them, but James Bond himself apparently avoided that dragnet since he had attended in the 1920s, even though the communist recruiters were busy at work there at that time too.

According to John Costello [Mask of Treachery – Spies, Lies and Betrayal, Warner Books, 1988], Straight “…was given a list of eighty-five Americans who attended Cambridge University between the years 1930 and 1934, from which he picked out one American who he knew casually at he Department of State. He then named two more Americans with whom he had studied at Cambridge between 1936 and 1937 and whom he knew to have been Trinity cell members and/or Communist sympathizers…The FBI representative in the U.S. Embassy in London recommended a full review of all Americans who had studied at either Oxford or Cambridge before the war.” [Costello would die suspiciously while engaged in his investigation of the Cambridge spy ring.]

Although J. E. Hover allegedly balked at “the political repercussions of an investigation of over 500 American citizens with no basis for such inquiry in fact,” the CIA reportedly changed his mind and “as a result, the records of nearly six hundred Americans who had attended Oxford or Cambridge before World War II were carefully compiled, examined and scrutinized.”

If James Bond was among those scrutinized, it wasn’t the first time he came to the attention of the counter-intelligence, counter-spies, as Bond had called attention to himself by providing information to the FBI about some German activity in the Caribbean during World War II.

According to Mrs. Mary W. Bond, in her book To James Bond With Love [Sutter House, 1980], while on a bird hunting expedition in Haiti, Bond had a run in with a reclusive and suspicious German on Morne La Selle mountain. When he returned home Bond “told his friend Brandon Barringer about the encounter with the German, and Brandon took it up with the authorities in Washington. Jim (Bond) was promptly visited at the Academy of Natural Sciences by Army, and then Navy intelligence officers.”

As Mrs. Bond related, “Fleming would have been intrigued with the final twist to the story. The intelligence people asked a lot of foolish questions and seemed far more suspicious about Jim’s reason for climbing Morne La Selle than about the German’s activities.”

Whether by intent or coincidence, James Bond’s Cambridge ties add credence to the theory that Ian Fleming wrote the 007 novels as part of a concerted psychological warfare operation rather than on a ‘lark,’ and the James Bond stories have more to do with actual covert operations than has been acknowledged.

One biographer, Andrew Lycett, [in The Man Behind James Bond, Turner, 1995] while mocking Fleming’s actual intentions and motives, acknowledged how Fleming’s first novel was inspired by the betrayals of the Cambridge spies when he wrote: “What raised Casino Royale out of the usual run of thrillers was Ian’s attempt to reflect the disturbing moral ambiguity of a post-war world that could produce such traitors like Burgess and Maclean. Although Bond is presented like Bulldog Drummond with all the trappings of a traditional fictional secret agent,…in fact he needs ‘Marshall Aid’ from Leiter (CIA) to enable him to continue his baccarat game with Le Chiffre. Bond is rescued from his kidnappers not by the British or the Americans but by the Russians, who complete the job he should of done by eliminating Le Chiffre. Bond does not even get the girl: [Vesper] she has been duplicitous throughout, betraying not only him personally but all Western Intelligence’s anti-Soviet operations. No wonder, feeling let down and abandoned, he fails to conceal his bitterness at the end and spits out, ‘The bitch is dead now.’” 

.
If Casino Royale was Ian Fleming’s response to the betrayal of the Cambridge spy ring, then portraying the women who loved James Bond as the snake who actually worked for the opposition, was much like the sexual ambiguity and background of the Cambridge spies.

Although his official biographies hardly mention their names, Ian Fleming had many close associations with all three traitors – Philby, Burgess and Maclean.

The career paths of Ian Fleming and Kim Philby crossed more than once, but most certainly during World War II when Philby was responsible for MI-6 counter-intelligence for the Iberian peninsula – Spain and Portugal, which includes Gibralta, for which Fleming was given the responsibility of planning the defense of for the Admirality, a plan he codenamed “Goldeneye,” also the name of his Jamaican estate.

In his fictional obituary of 007, Fleming notes that his James Bond attended Eton, as did many of those involved in these intrigues beginning with “C,” Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of the British Secret Service and on whose watch the Cambridge moles were recruited into it. Other former Eton students include Ian Fleming and Guy Burgess, and Eton headmaster Charles Elliot was the father of Fleming’s chief MI6 contact Nicholas Elliot. The old Eton ties facilitated recruitment into the British Secret Service when Menzies served as its head.

The day before Burgess embarked on his sudden journey to Moscow with Maclean, he returned to Cambridge where he visited a former history professor to explain a moral dilemma concerning his authorship of a biography of the Earl of Sandwich authorized by the family.

At the same time Maclean was in London where he met and had lunch with Fleming’s close associate Cyril Connolly, who after the defection, was assigned to write about the missing diplomats by Fleming’s Sunday Times.

According to Douglas Sutherland [in The Fourth Man – The Story of Blunt, Philby, Burgess and McLean, Arrow Books, 1980], “The late Cyril Connolly, the well-known Sunday Times book critic, was a close friend of Maclean’s and lunched with him the day before he left on 25 May, 1951.”

Sutherland quoted Connolly as saying: “I was very interested to read your remarks about Mclean and Burgess…because I knew them both and actually lunched with Maclean the day before he disappeared. The point I want to mention to you was that on that day I am sure he had no intention of leaving the way he did. He spoke to me so normally as to his private affairs…this makes me feel that, subsequent to meeting me on May 24th, he received some warning that he was under suspicion, and immediately left the country with Burgess. It may be, therefore, that someone in the Foreign Office told him on May 25th that you had authorized him to be questioned. Of course it was not until the Foreign Office knew that the security office knew as well.” Now we know that person was Kim Philby.

Cyril Connolly’s book on the affair was to have been published by Queen Anne’s Press, on his board of directors Ian Fleming served. The publishing company’s name did not disguise the nature of their interests, as Queen Anne’s Gate was where the offices of the British Secret Service were located. 

Most intriguing among the connections between Fleming and the Cambridge moles is the sequence of events that resulted in Burgess and Maclean publicly surfacing in Moscow. While most people suspected they were in the Soviet Union, it wasn’t known for sure until Fleming’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Hughes urged the Russians to produce the two defectors before a major British-Soviet summit conference. At Fleming’s suggestion Hughes made an effort to contact the “missing diplomats,” succeeded in meeting the two in a Moscow hotel and obtained a formal statement from them. Hughes did so by making an official inquiry, suggesting that the scheduled summit conference would not be successful unless the matter of the missing diplomats was first explained.

Then after Burgess and Maclean publicly surfaced, the British-Soviet summit conference was disrupted by a botched covert operation, much like the Gary Powers-U2 incident wrecked the USA-Soviet summit in 1959. British frogman Buster Crabb disappeared while investigating the hull of Khrushchev’s ship in Portsmouth harbor, his body discovered a few days later. Fleming even wrote about the incident, which was a joint venture between MI6 and British Naval Intelligence, and reportedly directed by Fleming’s chief contact in MI6, Nicholas Elliot, and eventually led to the resignation of the director of MI6.

The resurfacing of Burgess and Maclean also called unwanted attention to Kim Philby, who somehow had reclaimed his job with MI6 and was working in Beruit, Lebanon with the cover job as a correspondent for two British publications.

When Philby arrived in Beruit the MI6 station chief there was his long time friend and faithful supporter, Nicholas Elliot, Fleming’s contact who was reportedly responsible for the botched Buster Crabb operation that led not only to the resignation of the head of MI6 but also brought about a change in the political party in power. That November, shortly before relinquishing power, outgoing Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife took a vacation to Jamaica, where they stayed at Fleming’s Goldeneye. 

With the change in government, the Buster Crabb incident also forced a change in the leadership of both MI6, responsible for foreign intelligence, and MI5, counter-intelligence, with the director of MI5 Dick White assuming the position of director of MI6, the first time anyone had served both positions. White was astonished when he learned that Philby, after all the fuss over the “Third Man,” was still working for MI6 in Beruit.

Tom Bower [in The Perfect English Spy – a biography of Sir Dick White] wrote, “Even thirteen years later when he met Burgess in Washington, he (Michael Straight) volunteered that he had never betrayed his friends. But in 1963 Straight was offered a government post and, apparently fearful of exposure, he had spent June closeted with FBI officers, including Bill Sullivan, detailing Blunt’s futile attempt at recruitment. In January, 1964, Straight repeated the story to Arthur Martin. By any measure, the confession was a major breakthrough. Not surprisingly, the MI5 officer returned to Britain excited about the disclosure. The molehunt had been legitimized.”

While the earlier evidence was inconclusive, with the addition of Michael Straight’s confession and a number of Soviet defectors who had identified Philby as a Russian spy, the evidence was overwhelming, his longtime friend Nicholas Elliot was ordered to confront him. Elliot did extract a confession of sorts from Philby, but he did not get him to return to England, and instead Philby disappeared, resurfacing in Moscow with his Cambridge mates, Burgess and Maclean.

How he got there, while a mystery for some time, had something to do with his Armenian friends, a connection he shared with Fleming.

Of their life in Beirut, Philby’s wife Eleanor wrote: “People are constantly asking me how it was possible that I, who shared his daily life, could have remained so unaware of his secret work for Russia. Perhaps the answer is that I just was not looking for clues. Looking back over our life together in Beirut, I can see some significance in one or two odd incidents which I thought nothing of at the time. There was, for example, the occasion when Kim, after a few drinks too many, decided late in the evening to take me and a friend out to dinner. We took a taxi and Kim directed the driver outside the city to an Armenian shanty town which sprawls across the malodorous Beirut river. In one of the mean streets, we stopped outside a first-floor restaurant full of shabby people. The food was good, but Kim, fuddled with alcohol, seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. Some weeks later I suggested we return to the Armenian restaurant. ‘What Armenian restaurant?’ Kim asked, giving a sharp look. He strongly denied that we had ever been to any such place.” [p. 48 Kim Philby-The Spy I Married, Eleanor Philby, Ballentine, 1968]

In  The Third Man – The Full Story of Kim Philby [by E. H. Cookridge, Berkley Medllion, 1968] the mystery deepens further into the Armenian mist. Cookridge wrote: “On one occasion, however, Philby was almost caught red-handed. He was observed on night on the terrace of his apartment waving a dark object to and fro in the air. The observer was a security agent of the Lebanese secret police, the head of which was Colonel Tewfik Jalbout, a trusted ally of the American CIA, whom he had rendered many services in the past…To find out who was at the receiving end, Colonel Jalbout sent out a posse of agents, but Philby’s house stood on a hill overlooking a fairly large part of the city. The receiver of the signals could be one of several hundred people, looking from any window. However, the search was narrowed down to two or three suspects, one of them an Armenian, believed to be a Soviet agent….On another occasion one of Jalbout’s detectives reported that he had seen Philby twice changing taxicabs and eventually arriving at a small sweetshop belonging to an Armenian in the old city. Soon after, the Soviet assistant military attaché entered the shop. The detective did not dare stop the two men, as he was afraid to cause a diplomatic incident. The fact that both Philby and a Soviet officer had gone to a dirty little sweet shop, whose regular customers were Arab children, was significant, particularly if considered in conjunction with the other incidents observed.”  

Then in the Philby Conspiracy [by Bruce Page, Daid Leitch and Philip Knightley (Times Newspaper-Signet, 1968)] it is revealed: “How did Philby get to Moscow? We are able to reveal for the first time, that Philby arrived on Russian soil four days after he left Beirut, i.e. on January 27, 1963…He made his way across Syria into Turkey. From there on,m using his knowledge of the country gained during his earlier periods there and his contacts with Armenians which he had built up in Cyprus, he walked into Soviet Armenia. Then, feeling safe for the first time in thirty years, he ‘went home’ to Moscow.”

Before Philby fled however, Ian Fleming himself visited Beirut, arriving in November 1960 on his way to Kuwait, where he had been commissioned to write the official history of the Gulf emirate by the Kuwait Oil Company. In Beirut he met up with his friend and MI6 contact Nichoals Elliot. According to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, “…Elliot was delighted to see him. Their conversation ranged over a variety of intelligence-related topics, including Kim Philby, a key participant in the Missing Diplomats affair, who had been working in Beirut as a newspaperman since 1956. Ian told Elliot that he had his own minor freelance intelligence assignment to perform: the then NID chief Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denning had asked him for information about the Iraq port of Basra…Ian did not delay…at 10:30 sharp he asked to leave, saying he had a rendezvous with an Armenian in the Place de Canons in the center of town.”

“Perhaps,” speculated Lycett, “Ian was meeting Philby, whom he had certainly met during the war. But Elliot had the distinct impression his dinner guest had arranged to see a pornographic film in full color and sound.”

As we see, even though Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean are hardly mentioned in the first two official biographies of Fleming and dismissed by Lycett, they played a major role in his life and work, as well as his fiction.

“Casino Royale,” Fleming’s first 007 book, concerns the betrayal of a fellow agent named Vesper, the snake, and John Pearson, who wrote The Life of Ian Fleming, the first official biography, also wrote a companion book, A Biography of James Bond, an ostensibly fictional work in which he acknowledges discovering the real James Bond while researching and writing Fleming’s biography.

According to this account, Fleming wrote the 007 books in order to salvage some important on-going operations and to make James Bond such a famous and outrageous super hero, the Soviets would not believe that he really existed. And it worked. 

007, LHO & JFK

007, LHO and JFK - By WEK 

007 & LHO

According to the myth, in early 1954, in order to take his mind off impending marriage, Ian Fleming sat down at his typewriter in his Jamaican beach house and began “Casino Royale,” a paperback spy thriller novel, that he called “the spy story to end all spy stories.”

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. 

Writing a book a year, by 1957 he had a few novels under his belt when he wrote what some considered his finest, “From Russia with Love,” about the theft of a Soviet cipher and the defection of a young and beautiful Russian embassy clerk.

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 guy…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.

JFK & 007 - The Assassination Agnostic 

JFK007 « ASSASSINATION AGNOSTIC

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.” 

All of Fleming’s novels include fictional characters who have real life counterparts, and story lines that are based on real, sometimes historic events, especially “From Russia with Love.”  It has been noted that in 1950, a US naval attaché was assassinated and thrown from the Orient Express train by a Communist agent, a story that inspired Fleming to write "From Russia With Love."

The storyline deals with the theft of a Lektor Decoding Machine, which Fleming based on his knowledge of the Enigma Decoding Machine from World War II. Fleming was involved with the Ultra Network that cracked the Enigma Code in 1939, and Fleming fictionalized the story a decade before the Ultra Network's historical activities were declassified and released 1975.

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.”

Oswald would probably be amused by these associations, especially if he knew that, at the time of his defection to the Soviet Union, Ian Fleming had been the European editor of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), whose correspondent reported on his defection to the Soviet Union.

As a correspondent for NANA, Priscialla Johnson, was one of the first reporters to interview Oswald and she wrote a newspaper article about him and his defection. The report she filed on Oswald’s defection was long, but only a part of it was circulated among NANA subscribers and published. The rest was filed away by NANA editors, Ian Fleming among them. Oswald mentions this news article and the others like it in a letter he wrote to then Secretary of the Navy John Connally, a man he is later accused of shooting.

Of course Oswald should not have, could not have known that Fleming, the author of the 007 novels he enjoyed, was also one of the editors of one of the newspaper articles he complained about as misrepresenting his true position and situation. 

Tatiana 

Golden: "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."

Marina

 "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."

"And yet, the tragic assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on in Dallas Texas on November 22nd 1963, is oddly paralleled in the life and times of James Bond 007. In the novel and film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James Bond’s marriage to Contessa Teresa Vicenzo ended in the same way as Jacqueline Kennedy’s marriage to Jack. Just as Jack Kennedy was gunned down by a hail of assassins bullets in his car, so too was Teresa Bond. Just as Jack Kennedy’s lifeless body fell into Jackie’s lap, so too did Teresa. They say that once the Presidential limousine reached the hospital, Jackie Kennedy refused to let go of her husband’s body, even as others entreated her to do so. And when all hope was lost for Contessa Teresa Bond, James Bond too refused to let go. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was published in April of 1963, mere months before the assassination."

After Oswald returned home with his Russian bride and was living in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, he 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.

Oswald left New Orleans on September 24, went to Mexico, and was back in Dallas, Texas on October 3rd, at least he was according to the official story, which has yet to explained how Oswald’s “Goldfinger” was returned to the New Orleans library while he was in Dallas.

Besides the Fleming novels, the other books on Oswald’s list – two dozen in all, are mainly non-fiction history, science fiction and biography, and deserve closer attention.

If Oswald was the assassin of the President, despite the fact that no motive can be or has been attributed to him, then an assessment of his reading habits would be in order since they would naturally help indicate what he was thinking and what motivated him. 

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.

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.’” 

Indeed, and 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.

And so Lee Harvey Oswald read through “Goldfinger,” probably very quickly as he was a voracious reader and Ian Fleming’s novels would be very light reading compared to the more heavy science fiction, biographies and world affairs that he was also reading at the time. The other books on the list – two dozen in all, are mostly non-fiction history, science fiction and biography. 

The Warren Commission memo with the list of Oswald’s library books also reported: “Marina Oswald in discussing Oswald’s reading habits, said that he read generally histories or biographies and she recalled specifically that he read biographies of Hitler, Kennedy and Khrushchev. She is not clear, however, whether he read those books in New Orleans or Dallas. She did recall that he read a book by Eric Maria Remarque, ‘Time to Live and Time to Die,’ and that he read a book about Powers, the U-2 Pilot. Other than that, she cannot specifically recall what books he checked out of the Dallas library. Marina in her testimony has mentioned that Oswald read books of the ‘Historical Nature,’ and that he read books by Marx and a two-volume history of the United States. Some of Oswald’s associates in Texas mentioned that he read books by Marx and Lenin, etc. Katherine Ford also mentioned that Oswald read some books about how to be a spy.”

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

US Army Reserve Col. Jose Rivera, who was affiliated with a top secret MK/ULTRA program at Fort Detrich, had foreknowledge of the assassination, the death of JFK’s son Patrick that summer, and knew Oswald’s New Orleans phone number before Oswald himself knew where he was going to live. Rivera was quoted as saying, “We will have him read about the assasssins of history, and indeed, Oswald did read, Hermann B. Deutsch’s “The Huey Long Murder Case.”

Oswald also read “Portrait of a President,” about the man he is accused of killing, as well as Kennedy’s own “Profiles in Courage,”which earned the Pulitzer Prize.

Among the other books on Oswald’s list include: The Berlin Wall, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Soviet Potentials, What We Must Know About Communism, Russia Under Khrushchev, Portrait of A Revolutionary:, Mae Tse-Tung, This is My Philosophy, Conflict, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Hornblower and The Hotspur, The Hittites, The Blue Nile and Ben-Hu


007 & JFK 

Kennedy was also well read, and tried to popularize reading like he promoted physical fitness. In 1954-1955 he attended meetings at the Foundation for Better Reading in Baltimore where his reading speed was reported to be 1200 words a minute with a high level of comprehension.

Although “From Russia with Love” is the only book that is cross referenced among the books ready by both Kennedy and Oswald, their interests are very similar, reading primarily history and biography, while Kennedy leaned more towards the classics and Oswald drifted into Science Fiction.

Kennedy is personally credited with popularizing the Fleming novels in America, and it has been alleged that both President Kennedy and Oswald, his alleged assassin, read 007 novels on the night before the assassination. According to Robert A. Caplen in “Shaken & Stirred - The Feminism of James Bond” (Xlibris 2010), “Kennedy was reportedly reading a Bond novel the night before he was assassinated. In fact, reports surfaced that Lee Harvey Oswald was also reading a Fleming novel the night before Kennedy’s assassination.”

Although I find this hard to substantiate, Kennedy is certainly credited with helping to popularize Fleming’s books and the 007 myth, and did view the film “From Russia with Love” the night before he left for Texas, so both Kennedy and his alleged assassin were were acquainted with Secret Agent 007 – James Bond.

Actually Kennedy had been familiar with James Bond and Ian Fleming since he had asked his friend and Georgetown neighbor Oatsie Leiter to recommend some books to read while he was laid up in bed, ill with some malady or other. She suggested, some say she gave Kennedy a copy of a light-hearted 007 spy thriller written by her friend Ian Fleming.

Just as Fleming had taken the name James Bond from the American ornithologist and author of the book Birds of the West Indies, he had also appropriated the surname for 007’s CIA sidekick Felix Leiter from John and Oatsie Leiter, Kennedy and Fleming’s mutual friend and Kennedy’s Georgetown neighbor.

Kennedy most certainly immediately caught the “inside joke” of 007’s CIA associate being named Felix Leiter, obviously a not-so hidden reference to their mutual friend Oatsie Leiter. As the grand daughter of a civil war general and governor of Alabama, Oatsie had served in the OSS during the war and married Chicago millionaire John Leiter, whose family owned the Virginia land where the new CIA headquarters was built. As mutual neighbors in both Newport and Georgetown, the Kennedys and Leiters were old blue blood money that mirrored Fleming’s and is reflected in the power circles that agent 007 infested.

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.

                                                     Sean Connery and Ian Fleming

But before Kennedy endorsed and popularized the books and the before the films came along, Fleming’s novels were something of a literary oddity. When the head of British MI5 visited Washington and was being escorted about town by Dick Helms of the CIA, Helms asked him about this British writer Ian Fleming. The MI5 director said he didn’t know, but the very next day the newspapers revealed that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had spent a week at Fleming’s Jamaican home “Goldeneye,” which led Helms to conclude that he had been lied to since the head of British counter-intelligence had to know and approve where the Prime Minster was living.

Bill Koenig visited the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where the Fleming papers are kept. He reported: “The Fleming-related material is hardly the oldest or rarest of what's here. But for a fan of 007, it is a treasure trove. Not only are most of Fleming's original Bond manuscripts here but a huge collection of people writing to Fleming and receiving correspondence from him. The letters are, indeed, of a different time, when people took the time to type out a letter and drop it in the mail, not just bang out a few lines of e-mail and forget it. The library has two collections of note. The first is comprised of fifteen Fleming manuscripts, purchased from Fleming's widow in 1970. (The library also acquired rare books collected by Fleming in his lifetime.) The other is a collection of letters gathered by Leonard Russell, the late literary editor of The Sunday Times of London and by John Pearson, Fleming's biographer. Other letters show Fleming's relationship with more casual acquaintances - except his casual friendships were with CIA directors or U.S. attorneys general.”

In a 1962 letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Fleming wrote that “I am delighted to take this opportunity to thank Kennedys everywhere for the electric effect their commendation has had on my sales in America.”

Golden: "These days, everyone in America knows who James Bond is. The character and his franchise are pervasive and vastly influential in all spheres of popular culture, from movies, to video games, comics, novels, toys, and TV. At first, James Bond wasn’t particularly popular in the United States. That was until President Kennedy listed From Russia with Love as one of his favorite books. After that ringing endorsement, Ian Fleming’s James Bond books started flying off of the shelves. Though JFK and 007 shared a similar style, wit, charm, and taste for the good life, the connection between the two icons goes far deeper than cosmetic comparisons. We often think of James Bond stories as being influenced by world events, but what is startling to realize is that in many ways, the opposite is true, and that the James Bond novels changed the course of history. After finishing the novel From Russian With Love, JFK passed it on to Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, America’s M." 

CIA Director Allen Dulles, like 007's Spychief M - smoked a pipe

Allen Dulles, the former CIA chief wrote to Fleming on April 24, 1963, saying, "I have received and finished reading your latest ‘On Her Majesty's Secret Service.’ I hope you have not really destroyed my old friend and colleague James Bond, but I fear his bride has gone." More than a year later, in June 1964, Dulles wrote again. "I see that ‘From Russia With Love’ is now a movie and although I rarely see them I plan to take this one in."

Fleming was thanking Kennedy because Fleming’s book got the unexpected plug when one of them was included among the books the President enjoyed. Hugh Sidey, in (March 17, 1961) Life Magazine wrote an article titled The President’s Voracious Reading Habits which listed From Russia with Love as one of his 10 favorite books. A list of the President’s favorite books was also sent out to various libraries during National Library Week.

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

Among the particular favorites of President Kennedy was Fleming’s “From Russia with Love” which was also among Oswald’s books.

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 

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.

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.”

Golden stretches the similarities to the max: “The early.1960s. The pinnacle of male style, when men treated each activity, accouterment and debutant with sophistication and taste. But the two ambassadors of swinging sixties charm were also two of the Cold War’s coldest warriors. Both were boarding school boys turned navy officers, men who rose in rank to the heights of government service. They were the sort of men all others envied, and all women pined for. They were men of legendary libidos, womanizers  worthy of even Don Juan’s envy. Both traveled the world, wooing and winning the world’s most gorgeous women in the lap of luxury, while also facing down some of the most nefarious villains of our times. Their way with women was matched only by their way with words, wit, and whimsy. With a wink and smile these two men pulled the world from the brink of Nuclear Annihilation time and time again. These two men, are of course Secret Agent James Bond, and President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Two men who need only be known by three characters, JFK & 007.”

In addition to “From Russia with Love” being on their mutual reading lists, and both reported to have read Fleming novels on their last Thursday night on earth, Fidel Castro was another mutual obsession of both Kennedy and Oswald. 

In his more detailed analysis of Oswald and Fleming’s novels, Golden wrote: “Just like 007, there was always someone trying to take out JFK. His most dangerous enemy might have been Russian Premiere Nikita Kruschev, but his closest foe, and most personal nemesis was communist super villian Fidel Castro, AKA “The Beard”. The plan was to whack the Beard before he could get to Kennedy. When asked what kind of man should spearhead the operation to whack Castro, JFK said ‘We need James Bond.’”

Most significant is the time when Kennedy met Fleming and invited him to dinner, about which there has been many misrepresentations, as that recounted here:

“The summer before his election, Jack Kennedy invited Ian Fleming over to his estate and asked the novelist how M and 007 would take out Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro. Fleming suggested three plans. When JFK became president, the CIA acted on all three of these proposals. So the leader of the free world and the head of its largest intelligence agency were conducting foreign policy based on James Bond novels. Ian Fleming was not only writing the greatest literary character in history. He was literally writing history.”

In an interview with his friend William Polmer, Ian Fleming recounted:

“Well, it was rather interesting. About a year before Mr. Kennedy became President, I was staying in Washington with a friend of mine and she was driving me through, it was a Sunday morning, and she was driving me through Washington down to Georgetown and there were two people walking along the street and she said, ‘Oh, there are my friends Jack and Jackie,’ and they were indeed very close friends of hers, and she stopped and they talked. And she said, ‘Do you know Ian Fleming?’ And Jack Kennedy said, ‘Not the Ian Fleming?’ Of course that was a very exciting thing for him to say and it turned out that they were both great fans of my books, as indeed is Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, and they invited me to dinner that night with my friend, and we had great fun discussing the books and from then on I’ve always sent copies of them direct and personally to him before they’re published over here.”

“I think that was an historic encounter,” Plomer noted.

Although Fleming discretely avoided her name, the mutual friend was Marion ‘Oatsie’ Leiter Charles who lived at Dougal House 3259 R Street NW, Georgetown, not far from Kennedy’s home.

Oatsie Leiter, JFK's Georgetown and Newport neighbor, introduced him to 007 and Ian Fleming.
Her husband owned the land the CIA Headquarters was built on.

Apparently Oatsie Leiter had been invited to the Kennedys for dinner that night, and they drove over to Kennedy’s Georgetown home to inquire whether Fleming could accompany her to dinner, but Kennedy and his wife had stepped out for a stroll. So when they came upon the couple walking down the street they stopped and Mrs. Leiter introduced Fleming, who Kennedy recognized by saying, “James Bond?”

As for joining them for dinner, “By all means,” Kennedy said. 

While James Bond would be a popular subject at the dinner table that night, what to do with Fide Castro was the main topic, especially as to what Fleming had to say about giving Castro the James Bond treatment.  

Other guests reported to be there include painter and longtime Kennedy friend William Walton, as well as journalist and CIA asset Joseph Alsop. The CIA itself was represented by John Bross, who had served with distinction in Cold War Germany.

In recounting the dinner that night Fleming’s official biographer John Pearson wrote:

“During the dinner the talk largely concerned itself with the more arcane aspects of American politics and Fleming was attentive but subdued. But with coffee and the entrance of Castro into the conversation he intervened in his most engaging style. Cuba was already high on the headache list of Washington politicians, and another of those what’s to-be-done conversations got underway. Fleming laughed ironically and began to develop the theme that the United States was making altogether too much fuss about Castro – they were building him into a world figure, inflating him instead of deflating him. It would be perfectly simple to apply one or two ideas which would take all the steam out of the Cuban.”

“Kennedy studied the handsome Englishman, rather as puzzled admirals used to study him in the days of Room 39. Was he an oddball or something more? What ideas had mister Fleming in mind?”

What would James Bond do about Castro? Fleming sarcastically replied, “Ridicule, chiefly,” and as Pearson related, “…with immense seriousness and confidence he developed a spoof proposal for giving Castro the James Bond treatment…” 

According to another account, “Fleming … in their conversation ... told Kennedy that he had a way to get rid of Fidel Castro, the Communist leader of Cuba. This piqued Kennedy's interest, since Castro had been a thorn in the side of Kennedy. Fleming said that Castro's beard was the key. Without the beard, Castro would look like anyone else. It was his trademark. So, Fleming said that the US should announce that they found that beards attract radioactivity. Any person wearing a beard could become radioactive himself as well as sterile! Castro would immediately shave off his beard and would soon fall from power, when the people saw him as an ordinary person. Kennedy had a good laugh about this bizarre suggestion.”

The next morning, CIA director Allen Dulles received a full briefing of the previous night's dinner conversation, ostensibly from Bross, the CIA man. 

And as Golden notes, “The man selected to wack the beard was William Harvey,” otherwise known as America’s James Bond.

When President Kennedy asked to meet “America’s James Bond,” he was presented with William Harvey – a heavy drinking, womanizing former FBI agent and CIA intelligence officer who helped run the Cuban operations and an assassination project called ZRRIFLE.

 Ernest L. Cuneo, the OSS agent Fleming met during World War II at the New York city apartment of Sir William Stephenson (INTREPID), got to know Fleming very well, and Fleming dedicated two of his books to him and used his name as a character in "Diamonds Are Forever." 

Cuneo, with another Fleming OSS associate, who introduced Fleming to Jamaica, were co-owners of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) when they hired Fleming to be their European Editor. 

In the introduction to a book on Ian Fleming and 007, Cuneo also caught the 007, Ian Fleming-JFK- Fidel Castro connection. 

“The Flemings, particularly Anne, were very close to Prime Minister Eden, much as the American jet set was close to President Kennedy. It was a fast, slippery track. It is worth mentioning that both Prime Minister Eden and President Kennedy came a cropper on it, as did Fleming, his son Casper, and eventually Anne. However, it would be fatuous to suggest there was any casual relationship. All one can do is note that whatever his literary existence, James Bond appears as an evil talisman in the very real lives of people in his periphery. Eden’s illness and his fleeing to Fleming’s place, Goldeneye, has an overtone of Appointment in Samara. Jack Kennedy, professing his preference for James Bond, certainly imitated him to a degree no President had even remotely approached before. President Kennedy’s death duel with Cuba’s Castro has James Bond overtones.”

(Oxford dictionary: Cropper: To have a heavy fall or bad failure.)

Cuneo, in his introduction to Raymond Benson’s “The James Bond Bedside Companion” (1984), noted that Fleming never graduated from Eton or Sandhurst. “He had mastered the course but refused to cross the finish line. Having demonstrated he could win, he threw in his hand. That’s probably what he did with his life: at the end, in pain, tired and disillusioned, he said, ‘the hell with it, it’s a bore. I’ve proven I could play the hand, I’ve won the pot – and now you can keep it.’”

“James Bond, who, in the novels, is often stricken with the malady of ennui, would probably have done the same thing had he been a real person. After all, what could be more ridiculous than a seventy-five-year old James Bond?”