More information on Fleming the spy

This is interesting stuff. I haven’t previously followed it closely, but more and more information is emerging about Ian Fleming’s role as a real life spy during World War II. It explains the credible feel of the novels even when plot elements are absolutely ridiculous.

The current news is about a woman who, after her step-father’s death, found papers indicating he was a spy working under Fleming.

Her painstaking inquiries led to her writing a book, now published, called Berlin to Bond and Beyond – The Story of a Fleming Man.
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It tells how Terry had been recruited by Fleming as an intelligence officer and posted to various European countries under the guise of a foreign correspondent with the Sunday Times.
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Fleming ran an intelligence agency called Mercury which used foreign correspondents working for the Sunday Times’ parent company Kemsley Newspapers, for which he was foreign manager, as spies.
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The former SIS and MI6 agent Anthony Cavendish described the relationship in his book Inside Intelligence. He wrote: “At the end of the war a number of MI6 agents were sent abroad under the cover of newspapermen. Indeed the Kemsley Press allowed many of their foreign correspondents to cooperate with MI6 and even took on MI6 operatives as foreign correspondents.”
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Fleming lived for a period in St Margaret’s Bay in a house he bought from his friend Noel Coward, who, it was revealed recently, also acted as a spy for the British in Europe and America.