The real story behind Bond's dinner jacket: MI6 secrets revealed in new book

Published on Tuesday 21 September 2010 15:25

IT is a scene that perfectly captures the intrigue and elegance of the life of a secret agent.

• Sir Sean Connery as James Bond, who wore his tuxedo under a wetsuit for one secret mission

In Goldfinger, Sir Sean Connery's James Bond swims ashore on a clandestine mission only to strip off his wetsuit and reveal a perfectly pressed tuxedo beneath.

Now a new history of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), reveals the fact behind the fiction.

During the Second World War, MI6 put a secret agent ashore on a Dutch beach near a seaside casino.

He was dressed in a specially designed rubber outer suit, which he then stripped off to reveal a full evening dinner jacket and tie.

Pieter Tazelaar, the Dutch agent whose mission was to glean intelligence on German-occupied Holland, was even sprinkled with a few drops of Hennessy XO brandy by a colleague so as to strengthen his cover as a party-goer.

The mission, which took place in November, 1941 is revealed in MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service by Professor Keith Jeffrey.

The author has been given unrestricted access to the files of MI6 which, unlike all other government departments, have never been released to the Public Records Office at Kew.

• A Scots spy with a talent for poetry

The book, which tells the story of the secret service up until 1949, gives an insight into inspirations for the character of Britain's best-loved secret agent, James Bond, created by Ian Fleming, who worked in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War.

Among the myths inspired by the James Bond books which are scotched in the history is that secret agents have a "licence to kill".

As Prof Jeffrey explained: "No such thing existed. In wartime, some officers and agents were given weapons training for defence. Espionage was dangerous work and many paid with their lives." Yet the book does feature a couple of agents from whom Fleming is thought to have drawn inspiration for his celebrated character.

Wilfred "Biffy" Dunderdale, born in Odessa, the son of a British naval engineer, spoke Russian fluently and combined his secret intelligence work with a keen eye for women and taste for fine wines and food which he indulged while working in Paris during the 1930s.

Prof Jeffrey's book states: "He was a great friend of Ian Fleming, and claimed that he found parts of his own stories in the James Bond novels."When head of SIS Paris station in the 1930s, he had a penchant for pretty women and fast cars, and has been proposed as one of the possible models for Bond."

A second candidate as inspiration for Bond was Air Commodore Lionel "Lousy" Payne, who was a legendary seducer on whose SIS report it was written that although he had "some strange friends" he was "often well informed, probably due to the fact that information is more readily obtained in bed".

While there was no "double-O licence to kill" there was a Q tasked with the development of gadgets and technical devices.

The man responsible for the department was an experienced army quartermaster colonel and was, indeed, given the designation Q.

The training and development directorate, as it was officially known, wrote in its first newsletter that its task was to "evolve items of equipment for specialised work. We need, for example, a special type of silent weapon".

Among their other inventions was an exploding filing cabinet.

The plan was to develop a means of incinerating a cabinet full of secret files rapidly in case of an enemy raid.

Not everything, however, went to plan as one memo made clear: "We hope the paper will disappear in the short time it takes a man to run up a flight of stairs … the way things are going it will have to be a short, fat, man with gout and broken wind."