Counterfeit Spies: How World War II Intelligence Operations Shaped Cold War Spy Fiction

In this savvy study, Buckton (The World Is Not Enough), an English professor at Florida Atlantic University, examines how British intelligence operations during WWII influenced postwar spy fiction. For example, Buckton describes how Ian Fleming based his third James Bond novel, Moonraker, around a reimagining of an operation he helped concoct during his tenure with British Naval Intelligence. It involved planting bogus invasion plans on a corpse and dumping it into the Mediterranean, where the phony intel could be picked up by Germans. Former MI6 agent Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, a Bond satire following an incompetent British agent who invents a spy network so he can collect extra pay on behalf of the nonexistent agents, drew inspiration from a British double agent who pulled a similar ruse on the Nazis. Elsewhere, Buckton explores how John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy echoed the case of Russian double agent Kim Philby. The accounts of real-life espionage schemes entertain, and Buckton reveals how Britain’s shifting position in the global power structure shaped each author’s work (“Bond of course was created by Fleming... to fuel the myth that Britain was still a world power”). Readers of Fleming and le Carré will appreciate this perceptive take on their milieu. (Oct.)