Mark Simmons - Ian Fleming and Operation Golden Eye: Keeping Spain Out of World War II

IAN FLEMING AND OPERATION GOLDEN EYE

Spies, Scoundrels, and Envoys keeping Spain out of World War II

MARK SIMMONS

Published in the Great Britain and United States of America in 2018 by

CASEMATE PUBLISHERS

The Old Music Hall, 106108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK

and

1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

Copyright 2018 Mark Simmons

Hardcover Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-685-7

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-686-4

Kindle Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-686-4

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

For a complete list of Casemate titles, please contact:

CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (US)

Telephone (610) 853-9131

Fax (610) 853-9146

Email:

www.casematepublishers.com

CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (UK)

Telephone (01865) 241249

Email:

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemys resistance without fighting. Thus the highest form of generalship is to frustrate the enemys plans and the next best is to prevent the enemys alliances

Sun Tzu, Art of War

If I had a big proposition to handle and could have my pick of helpers Id plump for the Intelligence Department of the British Admiralty.

John Buchan, Greenmantle

To the memory of John Gardner 19262007, former Royal Marine Commando, writer .

This book tells the story of Operation Golden Eye which I have used also to encompass all the operations and schemes to keep Spain and Portugal out of World War II. It is not a biography of Ian Fleming. John Pearson and Andrew Lycett have both already written admirable biographies rather it is the story of a wide range of characters from several countries that played their part on the Iberian Peninsula.

In the official British records Operation Golden Eye is often used in the two-word form, sometimes one. For clarity I have used the two-word form to denote Operation Golden Eye and the single word Goldeneye for Ian Flemings home on Jamaica. The 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye is named after a satellite in the story.

My interest in the role of Spain in World War II was kindled by a visit to Gibraltar in 1975. Then serving in the Royal Marines Commandos I set foot on the Crown Colony, one of the last pink bits, for the first time from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Landing Ship Sir Galahad. Seven years later that ship would be sunk by the Argentine Air Force in San Carlos Waters off the Falkland Islands with great loss of life. In 1975, Sir Galahad was part of a large NATO fleet gathering for the exercise Deep Express , to show the Wests ability to support Turkey against any threat from the Soviet Union.

With several oppos (RM slang for friends) I ventured up to the top of the Rock. Royal Navy ships often run Rock Races, where volunteers run to the summit at 1350ft via the winding roads from the dockyard. On this occasion there was no race so we took the more sedate cable car. The eastern face of the rock at the viewing platform is pretty sheer. Venturing south toward OHaras Battery away to the west across Gibraltar Bay is the sprawl of Algeciras. From here you begin to appreciate just how small Gibraltar is with an area of just 2.6 miles. I wondered why Germany had not taken Gibraltar during World War II, especially considering Spain was a Fascist state.

Had the Axis powers taken the Rock in 1940 it would have made the story of World War II vastly different. Would Britain have been able to hold Malta or even the Suez Canal? Even the ultimate defeat of the Axis must be open to question. Further south from OHaras Battery was Lord Aireys Battery. I was then ignorant of the story of Operation Tracer or that close by, there were six men concealed in the event of invasion. It was all still top secret then.

Around six or seven years before that first visit to Gibraltar I had devoured Ian Flemings James Bond books reading them one after the other and the first film I saw was From Russia with Love. After Sean Connery stopped playing 007 I confess to losing interest.

When I began writing seriously in the 1980s often I would come across Ian Fleming in my research, but this time in his earlier wartime role with naval intelligence. This book covers his involvement with the Iberian Peninsula during World War II. There were two books which inspired me to write about Spains neutrality. Charles B. Burdicks Germanys Military Strategy and Spain in World War II, an old US College library book, opened my eyes to just how committed the Germans had been to planning various invasions of Spain and Portugal. These included Operation Felix in 1940, Isabella-Felix in 1941, Ilona in 1942, and Gisela in 1943. There were also variations within them depending on the level of Spanish cooperation. The second book was Craig Cabells Ian Flemings Secret War where he expressed the opinion that Operation Golden Eye really needed a book in its own right. I thought that was a good idea. However, once I had begun it became apparent that there were many other schemes from the Allies which influenced Franco to keep Spain neutral, which I set out to cover under the umbrella of Operation Golden Eye .

I am most grateful to the staff at Bletchley Park, the Churchill Archives Centre Cambridge, the Imperial War Museum London, the Royal Marines Historical Society, the Public Records Office at Kew and the Royal Navy Museum.

Overseas museums and libraries have been equally helpful: the Central Intelligence Agency Library, Lillian Goldman Law Library, United States Library of Congress, United States National Archives and Records Administration and the Bundesarchiv-German Federal Archives.

For help and ideas with the manuscript I thank Tom Bonnington my editor at Casemate for his excellent suggestions, Michael Leventhal, Group Captain L. E. (Robbie) Robins CBE AE, DL, and John Sherress. Thanks too to my magazine editors who were always helpful and free with their time, Iain Ballantyne, John Mussell, and Flint Whitlock. Thank you to Tristan Hillgarth for permission to use his fathers photograph.

The memories of eyewitnesses to the events have proved a veritable gold mine: Jack Beevor, Ivar Bryce, Winston Churchill, Count Galeazzo Ciano, David & Sybil Eccles, Robert Harling, Sir Samuel Hoare Viscount Templewood, Ewen Montagu, Kim Philby, Franz von Papen, Walter Schellenberg.

Also the works of the following have been invaluable: Christopher Andrew, Andrew Bassett, Patrick Beesley, Michael Bloch, Anthony Cave Brown, Commander Marc Antonio Bragadin, Jimmy Burns, Ian Colvin, Fergus Fleming, Duff Hart-Davis, Anthony Horowitz, Keith Jeffery, David Kahn, Neill Lochery, Andrew Lycett, Ben Macintyre, J. C. Masterman, Donald McLachlan, Russell Miller, David Nutting, Matthew Parker, John Pearson, Paul Preston, Hugh Thomas, Nicholas Rankin, Philip Vickers, John H. Waller, Richard Wigg and Nigel West.

Finally, as always, my wife, Margaret, gave her wholehearted support in the nuts and bolts of building a book, with proof reading, index-compiling, work on the maps, and finding her way through the labyrinth of strange and unfamiliar names, and my creative misspelling of them. Thanks to all. Any mistakes or errors are mine alone.