/ARTS WEEKLY/LITERATURE: Will the Real Bond Please Stand Up?

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Nov 30 2005 (IPS) - Was there ever a real superspy like James Bond, Her Majesty’s secret agent with a licence to kill? A resounding “No” was the answer given by Dusan “Dusko” Popov, himself the real character who inspired writer Ian Fleming to create agent 007.

“I doubt whether a flesh and blood Bond would last 48 hours as a spy,” Popov declared to a group of Italian journalists in 1981, shortly before his death at his residence outside Cannes, on the Mediterranean C- te d’Azur in France.

“Casino Royale,” the book by Fleming that gave birth to the 007 legend, reached its 53rd birthday recently, and “Dr No,” the first film in which Scottish actor Sean Connery portrayed Popov in the shape of Bond, turned 43 this month.

After nearly half a century of amazing exploits on the big screen, the saga continues to captivate a faithful public of all ages. Many languages now accept the terms “James Bonds” or “007s” as synonyms for the secret services, even though they originated in fiction.

Fiction? Yes, but with reality for a backdrop, because the person on whom Fleming based his character was actually a secret agent for British intelligence, although he himself was not British but a wealthy Yugoslav lawyer, born in 1912 in the Serbian town of Titel.

An expert baccarat player with a reputation for seducing beautiful women, he achieved his greatest success as a spy in Portugal.

During World War II (1939-1945), the British secret agent codenamed “Tricycle” was sent to neutral Portugal to carry out a nearly impossible mission: to infiltrate the highly efficient Abwehr, the German military counterespionage unit headed by Admiral Wilhelm Walter Canaris.

Lisbon and its elegant residential suburbs of Estoril and Cascais were at that time crawling with spies from both sides of the conflict.

The Allies were closely watched by the International Police for the Defence of the State (PIDE), the secret police, but they could move about freely, thanks to a pragmatic direct order from Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1932-1968).

Corporatist fascism had taken power in Portugal in 1926, and the regime sympathised openly with the four similar regimes in Europe: Spain under Francisco Franco (1939-1975), Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933-1945), Italy under Benito Mussolini (1922-1943) and Hungary under Miklos Horthy (1920-1944).

However, Salazar had no alternative but to turn a blind eye to the presence of numerous Allied spies, because of the constant threat of a British invasion of the strategic Azores islands, situated in mid- Atlantic between Europe and the Americas, and the additional possibility of occupation of Portugal’s colonies in Africa by Britain.

The Palace Hotel, with its lush gardens, exudes an air of impressive luxury. It faces the Estoril Casino, recalling the golden era when dethroned monarchs, deposed dictators, Allied secret agents, Jewish refugees and Nazi spies rubbed elbows in the corridors while Europe burned up in a ferocious war that cost 50 million lives.

On Aug. 30 this year “the whispering hotel,” as it was called during the war, turned 75 years old.

Its spacious rooms served as home to the Spanish royal family in exile starting in the 1930s, celebrated English economist John Maynard Keynes, French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry, and the Hungarian Jewish sisters Eva and Zsa-Zsa Gabor, who went on to become Hollywood movie stars.

When the war ended, the hotel provided a luxurious refuge to Hitler’s major allies and monarchs expelled from several countries.

Among the best known were Horthy, King Carol II of Rumania, King Umberto II of Italy, Archduke Franz Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen of Austria, Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg and Prince Aleksandar of Yugoslavia.

Famous spies who stayed at the hotel included Spanish double agent Juan Pujol García, who conceived Operation Fortitude to convince the Germans that D-Day (the Allied invasion of occupied Europe that marked the beginning of the end of the war) would take place in Calais, not in Normandy.

Notorious British double agent Kim Philby, who has been described as the spy of the century, was also a guest at the hotel. He deceived the British for four decades, and ended his days in Moscow as a retired agent of the KGB (the intelligence service of the former Soviet Union).

Popov differed from his fellow spies in that he lived a life of luxury, drove fast cars, seduced beautiful women and bankrupted Germans – especially spies, diplomats and PIDE “advisors” – at the Estoril Casino.

It was at the Palace Hotel that Fleming, also an agent of the British Naval Intelligence Service headed by celebrated Admiral John Henry Godfrey, met Popov. A decade later, Fleming launched his famous character.

In Fleming’s first book, “Casino Royale” (1953), Dusko Popov could discern pieces of his own story at the Estoril Casino and the Palace Hotel.

Popov and Fleming even worked together and occupied rooms next door to each other in the Palace Hotel in 1941. This closeness had the effect of magnifying the legend that 007 was based on the Yugoslavian double agent of the Abwehr, codenamed “Ivan”, who was really in the service of His Britannic Majesty and whose mission was to discover the Reich’s plans against the Allies.

Fascinated by Popov and by the temptation of the casino, which, he admitted, was just too strong, Fleming wanted to emulate his new Yugoslavian friend and colleague. He, too, tried to drive Nazi gamblers into bankruptcy in baccarat. He lost his shirt, and Admiral Godfrey himself had to pay his debts. This fact can be found in the records of the Estoril Casino to this day.

During the war, Popov was considered to be one of the most important British agents operating in the nest of spies in Portugal.

In the last half century many people have got to know James Bond, but few have ever heard of Dusko Popov, the agent who, months in advance, managed to discover the Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbour, the United States’ naval base in Hawaii.

Popov travelled in person to the United States with a stack of documents in his briefcase, which he took to the New York office of the then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, J. Edgar Hoover. However, the director not only ignored the whole affair but also forbade Popov to go to Hawaii to carry out a double-cross mission against Germany.

Border police recorded his last exit from Portugal towards the end of the 1940s, but the possibility remains that he may have used his various passports in false names to re-enter the country. The last information about his life places him in peaceful retirement in the swanky French resort of Cannes, where he died at a well-preserved 69 years of age.

In his book “Crime, Espionagem e Poder” (Crime, Espionage and Power), Brazilian journalist and writer Flavio Moreira da Costa recaptures several moments of the spy’s life. Moreira da Costa reveals that the puritanical Hoover, on hearing that Popov’s pseudonym “Tricycle” was derived from his penchant for sleeping with two women at once, dismissed him as “an immoral playboy.”

According to Moreira da Costa, the very real Popov replied, with an honesty that could never have come from the lips of the film character James Bond: “I’m not a spy who turned playboy, but a man who always lived that way and became a spy.”