Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel Read online

  About Kate Westbrook

  Kate Westbrook was born in 1970 and educated at Cambridge and Harvard. She has a doctorate in history, specialising in the emergence of post-colonial political structures. She has worked in Africa and Latin America and is the author of numerous articles, as well as two novels, as yet unpublished. She is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  Also by Kate Westbrook

  The Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant

  The Moneypenny Diaries: Final Fling

  The Moneypenny Diaries

  Guardian Angel

  Edited by Kate Westbrook

  Ian Fleming Publications

  IAN FLEMING PUBLICATIONS

  E-book published by Ian Fleming Publications

  Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, Registered Offices: 10-11 Lower John Street London

  www.ianfleming.com

  First published by John Murray 2005

  John Murray, 338 Euston Road, London, NW1 3BH

  Copyright © Ian Fleming Publications, 2005

  All rights reserved

  Moneypenny is a registered trademark of Danjaq, LLC, used under licence by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd

  The moral right of the copyright holder has been asserted

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-1-906772-57-4

  To G.A. with thanks

  K.W

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The first entry I read was dated 6 July 1962, and began, ‘007 leaves for the Caribbean today. M returned from lunch on Monday at the American Ambassador’s residence, called for Bill and issued a flurry of commands. “Send up the recent signals file from Station A, please, Miss Moneypenny … Get Head of Section C up here … Arrange a meeting with the armourer first thing tomorrow … and summon 007 immediately.”’

  The three packages from my aunt had arrived on 10 October 2000, exactly ten years after she died. They were delivered to my office in Trinity College, Cambridge. I had just returned from giving my first lecture of the term, and was settling down to a mug of tea and a small gas fire as the porter came in with the boxes. When I examined them – one large, two small, wrapped in brown paper and string and sealed with irresistible red sealing wax – I saw that each had a different postmark.

  I opened the large one first. It was the size of a small school trunk, and heavy. The letter accompanying it was from a firm of solicitors on Queensgate, Inverness, and simply said that the box had been sent as per the instructions of their client, Miss Jane Vivien Moneypenny. I broke the seal and peeled back the paper to reveal a gunmetal-grey chest, securely fastened with a Chubb padlock. After a few fruitless minutes searching for a way in, I turned to one of the smaller parcels. It was a cash box, sent by another firm of solicitors, this time in Edinburgh. Again it was locked, but when I shook it I could hear the soft thud of some padded article inside. The third and last box had been sent by the engagingly named ‘McTavish, McTwee & McTavish’ of Portree, Isle of Skye. This one, thankfully, was only taped shut. I tore off the tape and opened the box, to find a small brass key. This fitted the lock of the second box, inside which I discovered, wrapped in layers of scarlet paper, the key to the large chest.

  I unlocked it and peeled away more layers of the same brilliant tissue paper (so like my aunt – a dash of flamboyance in a discreet shell), to find neat stacks of identical red lambskin diaries, some forty of them, each carefully secured with a red leather tab. There was also a letter addressed to me in my aunt’s familiar hand:

  North Uist, 15th September 1990

  My dear Kate,

  First, please forgive the cloak and dagger arrangements I felt bound to make for the delivery of these books to you. Secrecy and subterfuge have become as natural an impulse to me as checking the rear-view mirror in a car, or watching for the heather to tremble before a storm. As you will soon understand, assuming you have the time or the heart to read this burden that I have laid at your door, I had additional reasons for care.

  I hope you will not be upset when you learn how little I could ever tell you about my life. It was just not possible. Shortly after your mother and I came to England, I obtained a position as a junior cipher clerk in the Secret Intelligence Service, and it was that organisation I served in some capacity for the next thirty years. As far as the world knew – and that included family, friends and lovers – I was a civil servant. I was taught to brush off any questions about my work with ‘Oh, something in the Foreign Office, quite boring really.’ That was as far as it went. I was happy with this. It was the nature of the pact to which I had signed my name, under a litany of official type, and to which I stayed true over the succeeding three decades. I am not a natural confider, and in any case I had few friends at that time in England. Those I made subsequently came from the same world and we were bound together by our secret lives. It only pained me that I could not share this with you then.

  It is also the reason I never married. There were men I loved, but mostly they were not one of ‘Us’, not a fellow initiate to our secret world. There was one person for whom I could have forsaken everything, but it never came to that.

  I wrote about my experiences. That was my sin, possibly my greatest one. From early childhood, I wrote my journals. Whenever I could, I would take a pen and one of these leather books – the first of which was my father’s last gift to me, sent by ship from a stationer’s in Scotland, who have supplied me with them ever since – up to an old acacia tree on the bank of our small lake, sit in the shade and write about the birds and beasts I had seen, about my dreams and feelings. At night, I would hide the book under my mattress. I wanted one day to be a writer, to travel the world in search of its wilder shores. This ambition, sadly, I had to relinquish after my parents died, for the rather prosaic need for financial security. But I could not break the habit of recording on paper the minutiae of my daily existence. It was strictly forbidden by the Office, of course. We were inculcated from the beginning with the impulse to destroy, to shred, to burn, to leave no trace of anything that could be of conceivable use to the enemy. For that reason, I could never take my diaries in to work; when I went away, I left them behind, hidden as always in the safe I had built into the false wall between my bedroom and bathroom. Had my secret been discovered, even by our side, I would have lost my position, probably been prosecuted for contravening the Act that governed our daily existence. If They had found them, the consequences would have been considerably more serious.

  Do you remember, many years ago, we laughed about a character in a book who was named Miss Moneypenny? You said something along the lines of ‘Gosh, is that you, Aunt Jane? Tell me that you’ve been consorting with handsome secret agents and spies all along. Did you really love James Bond?’ And we laughed some more, at the total preposterousness of it all, and never spoke of it again.

  Well, my dear, yes, that was me. For nearly forty years now we have all kept quiet about a wonderful piece of literary piracy. But then we
were good at secrets. Yes, I was personal assistant to the Chief, the man we called M. Yes, I knew James, as well as the other oo agents, and yes, they had a ‘licence to kill’ for their country. I had intimate knowledge of almost every detail of the day-to-day running of that extraordinary organisation. I was a party to events that will never be written about in even the most searching accounts of the time. But they happened, and in some cases they changed the course of history, as only a few know it.

  So now, you see, I am faced with the dilemma of what to do with these diaries that I have hidden and protected for so long. I no longer need them; I have finally cured myself of the habit of writing; I feel I have little left to say. My first instinct was to destroy them, to build a grand old pyre and watch them burn to soft ash and fly into the deep blue Scottish sky. I even went so far as to collect the driftwood. I don’t know what stopped me; maybe some lamentable sense of vanity, an idea that you might be interested in what I was before I became an old island maid? Perhaps you would like to know about your grandfather and the true circumstances of his death, which I managed to uncover, but never to share with anyone, even my dear sister? Or was it merely to make you chuckle at the cloak and dagger world which is fast becoming a relic from the past?

  So I have saved them. I am sure they can be of no interest now to either side; what I wrote of is already far in the past, and today is a different place. To make extra sure, I have instructed my solicitors to hold them back for ten years from the day of my death before sending them to you. By then, anyway, the official papers will have passed into the public domain, even if my experiences will still officially be bound by secrecy.

  Whatever the motive, here it is, dearest Kate: my life, for what it is worth.

  Enjoy yours, and please remember, the wind is never so strong that you cannot sail a little closer to it.

  Your ever loving aunt,

  Jane

  How I wish I had known. When I first read the letter, I was filled with intense, conflicting emotions – excited, intrigued and upset almost in equal part. The excitement was easy to explain, but the sense of betrayal I found more surprising and harder to rationalise. It was almost as if a large part of my childhood – some of my happiest memories – had just been revealed to me as a chimera. I felt that I had been denied a role in my aunt’s great adventure. In time, as I came to accept her parallel existence, I replaced this emptiness with a determination to get to know this parallel Miss Moneypenny – through her diaries – as well as I had known my Aunt Jane.

  She had never talked to me about her work. It was not until her memorial service, in January 1991, that I had the first inkling that perhaps her working life was not as straightforward as I had supposed. My mother was already ill, so I had taken responsibility for organising the service. I realised that, close as I had been to my aunt, with a very few exceptions – her neighbours in Scotland, a handful of childhood friends from Kenya who had moved to England around the same time as she and my mother, Cambridge people she’d met on her frequent weekend visits to my parents – I knew none of her friends. And so, just as if you don’t read newspapers when you’re abroad you think the world has stopped, I had assumed she lived a quiet life. She loved travelling, and there had been occasional, oblique hints of men, but I had never met them and had no idea how to find them.

  In terms of assembling the memorial service, my only point of reference – and a hazy one at that – was her work. I put a notice in The Times and the Daily Telegraph, and wrote to the Foreign Office. I didn’t even know whose name to put on the front of the envelope. And so it came as a surprise when, on the day, St Martin-in-the-Fields was thronged with people: smart old gentlemen with watch chains and impressively crafted moustaches; ladies wearing gloves and hats. Elderly men chainsmoked on the steps outside. Some had lost an arm or a leg; others wore a patch over one eye. Many had faint Scottish accents and cold grey eyes. As a group, they seemed to have descended from a different world – from the palm court of a Cairo hotel in the 1950s, perhaps, or cocktails at the Café Royal. They all came up to offer their condolences, but whether as a result of my state of sorrow, or because they mumbled, I caught few names. It was fortunate that Mark, my ally and sometime partner in crime, insisted on taking photographs, though at the time I thought it tasteless.

  Those faces floated back into my mind as I picked up that first soft leather journal and started flicking through its pages. These were pale blue and gilt-edged, feint ruled, and crammed with words written in deep-violet ink. It was not a conventional calendar-type diary – there were no printed days of the week – and, as I soon saw, my aunt did not write with regularity. Nor did every volume begin in January and end in December. Some entries were many pages long; others no more than a few lines. Some were intensely personal; others related to the world of her work.

  My dead aunt had led me to a hidden peephole through which I could spy on the most secret corners of power. As far as I knew, nothing of this sort had come into the public domain before; possibly nothing else like it exists – over the last few years I have searched hard. I once read about a young man’s interview with MI6 at the beginning of the Second World War. He was given an address in Paris and told to report there for immediate duty. He carefully wrote it down in his diary, and as he made to put this away in his pocket his interviewer instructed him to hand it over. He opened it to the relevant page and tore out everything the young man had written, before handing it back. The young man never kept a diary again.

  The journals awoke in me a curiosity to learn everything I could about this hidden world. Of the two British secret services – the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) and the Security Service (MI5) – the former has always worn an extra cloak of secrecy. There have been histories written of MI5, former officers such as Peter Wright have published their own experiences (albeit against every effort of government), and a significant proportion of its archives has been declassified and filed in the National Archives. The same is not true of the Secret Intelligence Service – except, of course, in fiction.

  The urge to find out the truth, to verify my aunt’s diaries, hit me even as I was reading that first entry. It was the close link to a fictional world – or one that I, along with most people, assumed to be fictional – that had introduced a doubt. In other circumstances I would not have questioned my aunt; she was one of the sanest, on the surface most straightforward people I have ever met (five years ago I would not even have thought to qualify that description). Yet her diaries interleaved closely with the James Bond series of books by Ian Fleming, which I reread in tandem with the diaries. If what she wrote was true, then the Bond series was, at the very least, based firmly on truth. And if that was the case, then how did Fleming – never a member of the SIS – get his information?

  I have spent the last five years – every spare minute I could squeeze between my academic duties – working on The Moneypenny Diaries: searching and researching, checking, rechecking and authenticating. I have travelled halfway around the world and delved deep into libraries and archives, submersing myself in a world of covers and code names, of shadows and mirrors, where much was not as it first appeared to be. In every place I have learned something. When I could not find the files I wanted in the National Archives in London, I found their counterpart in the National Security Archives in Washington, DC; where Wright left gaps, Gordievsky and Mitrokhin filled them in. The more I discovered, the more it became apparent that Fleming had reported the events of the time with an alarming degree of accuracy. There was a real person called Goldfinger, and an organisation called SMERSH (or Death to Spies) – I visited its former headquarters in Moscow. There is an island off the north coast of Jamaica called Crab Key, and SPECTRE existed, as did Ernst Stavro Blofeld. I read the report on his death written by the representative of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in Tokyo and sent to SIS headquarters in London. Which was not, however, in Regent’s Park, as Fleming wrote, but in Westminster, nearer to the s
eat of power.

  There were times when I felt I was swimming through a warm sea of truth, occasionally hitting cold spots of fiction. I didn’t know where they were and when I might hit the next one. I was stunned to learn that Fleming had worked beside my grandfather – Jane Moneypenny’s father – in Naval Intelligence during the war; how did that fit in? I would begin to doubt what I knew to be fact: I had little doubt that had I told anyone what I was doing, they would have laughed. For the first time I could almost imagine what it must have been like for my aunt to live in a world within a world. I started to seek out her former colleagues, and it was with one of them, after years of searching, that I finally experienced the flash of clarity. It was our second meeting; this person was close to my aunt, and our conversations had been full of emotion. After several hours, I asked about the Fleming books; how much was true? ‘As much of it as he knew,’ was the reply. I knew then that I was face to face with Fleming’s source. We smiled at each other, and I made a promise not to reveal his identity while he was still alive. Now I am the safe guardian of another secret.

  I returned to the diaries with a fresh eye and a clear mind. The line between truth and fiction appeared to draw itself as I followed it. Through his source Fleming had been given access to the inner sanctums of the Secret Intelligence Services, allowing him to report many of the great missions, successes and rare failures of the organisation, and in return he was careful not to reveal anything that would place the service in jeopardy. Some names and locations were changed, some dates were altered and emphases shifted, but essentially his stories are a near-accurate record of some of the intelligence service’s more outlandish adventures.

  At first, thoughts of publication were not at the forefront of my mind. Throughout a lifetime of writing these diaries, my aunt never considered that they might one day be read – certainly not by a wider audience. Had there been even the slightest risk of that, I think she would have burned them immediately. Yet instead she entrusted them to me, and as her trustee I had no desire to betray her confidence.