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BILL FAIRCLOUGH & JAMES BOND, FLEMING’S PERFECT SPY


All the James Bond actors playing cards together.


Bill Fairclough pictured over five decades playing cards.



Let me introduce myself. I am Charles Fairclough, the son of Bill Fairclough who was a secret agent working for British Intelligence and other state agencies for about five decades. I was the Operations Director of FaireSansDire which was a global niche intelligence agency that my father established in 1978 with the backing of Colonel Alan Pemberton CVO MBE and Barrie Parkes BEM: both worked extensively in British Intelligence for many decades.

On 7 August 2023 I published an article about my father in which were listed circa 60 life threatening or near death incidents he endured. Roughly half of those events were assassination attempts, all of which he somehow survived, often thanks to Barrie Parkes and others associated with British Intelligence. Since then tens of thousands of people have read that article and we at TheBurlingtonFiles have been inundated with requests for us to compare him with fictional spies, especially James Bond, as characterized by Ian Fleming.

Accordingly, I have published this article but limited James Bond’s characteristics and adventures to those set out in Ian Fleming’s novels. Carrying out a comparison of a real spy (Bill Fairclough) and Fleming’s fictional James Bond was not without difficulty. Why? For starters, my father was real as were his activities whereas Bond never existed and all of Bond’s larger than life thrills and spills were merely figments of Fleming’s imagination. Nevertheless, given Ian Fleming was a skilful writer he managed to create a multidimensional identity for Bond as if he were a real person and that is what I have compared with my father. I have used what Ian Fleming, not John le Carré, concocted to be his version of a “perfect spy”, namely James Bond.

Fleming loosely based James Bond on some people he knew in real life. Indeed, Fleming described Bond as "a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war". However, Fleming, being an egotist, instilled another important ingredient into the mix of James Bond’s character. Bond became not just the amalgam already described but a combo of that and of Ian Fleming himself and his own tastes, preferences and traits many of which Fleming consciously or otherwise added to the pot pourri we now recognise as James Bond. I’ll refer later to that pot pourri making up Ian Fleming’s “perfect spy” as “Fleming’s Bond concoction”.

The 12 novels and two short story collections featuring James Bond which Ian Fleming wrote that I have analysed (using inter alia Artificial Intelligence) were:

Casino Royale – April 13, 1953; Live and Let Die – April 5, 1954; Moonraker – April 7, 1955; Diamonds Are Forever – March 26, 1956; From Russia, with Love – April 8, 1957; Dr No – March 31, 1958; Goldfinger – March 23, 1959; For Your Eyes Only (Short Stories) – April 11, 1960 including "From a View to a Kill", "For Your Eyes Only", "Quantum of Solace" and "Risico". As said, I have based James Bond’s background and lifestyle on the contents of these books only and ignored all the 25 official James Bond films produced by Eon Productions. Other non-Eon Bond-related films (like Never Say Never Again in 1983, starring Sean Connery, and the 1967 version of Casino Royale) are not part of this official series and have also been ignored.

 

COMPARISON OF JAMES BOND’S AND BILL FAIRCLOUGH’S

BACKGROUNDS AND LIFESTYLES

 

 

Issues

 

 

The Fictional James Bond

 

The Real Bill Fairclough

Ancestry

British – Scottish

British – English

 

 

 

Religion at birth

Christian, Scottish Presbyterian

Christian, Church of England

 

 

 

Countries lived in

The UK, France and Jamaica

The UK, USA and Bahamas

 

 

 

Schooling

Eton/Fettes

Red House/St Peter’s York

 

 

 

Universities

Geneva

Oxford/UEA/Northumbria

 

 

 

Scholarships

None

Two

 

 

 

Languages spoken

French/German

French

 

 

 

Age on losing virginity

16

13

 

 

 

Siblings

None

Brother and sister

 

 

 

Married

Once but widowed that day

Married twice, divorced once

 

 

 

Children

None

Two known

 

 

 

Height when circa 40 years’ old

6' 0'' or 183 cm

5' 11'' or 180 cm

 

 

 

Weight when circa 40 years’ old

168 lbs or 76 kg

168 lbs or 76 kg

 

 

 

Illnesses suffered

Poisonings + a few others

Poisonings + many others

 

 

 

Favourite sports

Skiing, golf and swimming

Football and tennis

 

 

 

Favourite films

Not known

Get Carter (1971)

 

 

 

Favourite books

The Bible

The Godfather (1972)

 

 

 

Favourite music

Jazz, Bach

Sixties/seventies hits

 

 

 

Favourite alcoholic drinks

Martini or whiskey

Newcastle Brown or lager top

 

 

 

Favourite non-alcoholic drinks

Strong coffee

Ribena

 

 

 

Favourite meals

Scrambled eggs, roast beef

Filet mignon, pork/lamb chops

 

 

 

Favourite restaurant

Scott’s (Sea Food), London

Mandarin Grill, Hong Kong

 

 

 

Favourite casino

Casino Royale Royat, France

Les Ambassadeurs, London

 

 

 

Favourite casino game

Chemin de fer

European single zero roulette

 

 

 

Alcohol consumption aged 40

Excessive

Excessive

 

 

 

Cigarette consumption aged 40

60 a day on average

40 a day on average

 

 

 

Cigar consumption aged 40

None

On occasion

 

 

 

Recreational drug intake aged 40

Amphetamine Benzedrine

Marijuana

 

 

 

Preferred cars

Aston Martins and Bentleys

Jaguars

 

 

 

MI6 codename

007

JJ

 

 

 

MI6 standing

MI6 officer and field agent

MI6 secret agent

 

 

 

Age when operational

Circa 18 to 42

Circa 19 to 70

 

 

 

Unarmed combat training

MI6

Glaswegian/other bouncers et al

 

 

 

Skiing skills

Excellent on land only

Reasonable on water only

 

 

 

Armed combat training

MI6

Ex SAS/MI6 experts

 

 

 

Shooting skills

First class marksman

First class marksman

 

 

 

Professional qualifications

None

FCA MSI MCT

 

 

 

Highest rank in UK armed forces

Naval Commander

None

 

 

 

Spy agencies worked for/with

MI6 and the CIA

MI5, MI6, CIA + Others

 

 

 

Countries operated in

Circa 12

At least 120

 

 

 

Countries visited on operations

Circa 20

More than 50

 

 

 

Intelligence agencies owned

None

FaireSansDire

 

 

 

Number of directorships

None

More than 50

 

 

 

Number of subordinates

Acted as a lone field agent

Sometimes tens of thousands

 

 

 

Number of near death incidents

Circa 40-50 in 24 years

Circa 60 in 50+ years

 

 

 

Number of kills

36 direct hits

Classified

 

 

 

Honours awarded by HMG

Order St Michael/St George

None

 

 

 

 

What struck me during the course of this analysis was that ignoring the looks of all the Bond actors when compared to my father, “Fleming’s Bond concoction” was superficially not that dissimilar to my father. That is hardly surprising given my father was a real secret agent and James Bond was “Fleming’s Bond concoction”, ie what Ian Fleming thought a secret agent should be like. Even so, while these two profiles might help you spot a spy the key ingredients of what make a good spy are missing. Those ingredients include a psychological cocktail of his/her temperament, psychological disposition, integrity and the extent of his/her suspicious nature.




A montage of photos of James Bond actors.



A montage of photos of Bill Fairclough.


If you set aside Bond’s naval background and my father’s commercial background, they had a lot in common except that your average MI6 recruit (ie “Fleming’s Bond concoction”) was less scholarly than and lacked the intellect of my father. According to Barrie Parkes, it was that intellectual difference twixt your average MI6 recruit and my father combined with the aforementioned psychological cocktail that had led Colonel Alan Pemberton to recruit and invest so much in my father. In Pemberton’s eyes my father had far more to offer than “Fleming’s Bond concoction”, which was after all only an amalgam of traditional “secret agents and commando types” with a shedload of Fleming’s character stirred not shaken into the mix! Mind you, that was Pemberton’s speciality: recruiting agents intellectually smarter than he was and officers who seriously outranked him militarily. Little wonder he was a legend in British Intelligence.

As Colonel Pemberton said, the best spies don’t know they are spies. That seemed to have been Ian Fleming’s problem. He knew he was not a real spy and that Bond was fiction. Put another way, behind closed doors Ian Fleming may have privately longed to have been a real secret agent just like the Bill Fairclough he never knew or met. Was that the motivation behind creating Bond? Fleming may have had an exciting life in the Second World War but it lacked the stuff secret agents lived with 24/7 and which only real adrenalin junkies could sustain and thrive on. Begrudgingly Fleming probably realised that no matter how good a writer he was, his fictional agent James Bond would never be a real secret agent “running in the field”.

Ignoring all the psychological nuances, the main difference between James Bond and Bill Fairclough will always be that Bill Fairclough lived in the real world and didn’t save the world every time a book or film was published about him. Nonetheless, my father’s exploits would have pleased Vesper Lynd. In real life, it has been estimated that the funds my father recovered for HM Treasury et al from fraudsters, mobsters and enemies of the state over five decades were ample to fund the whole of British Intelligence for a few years in the seventies.

As for James Bond in real life, the only adage I have heard relating to my father was that in 1991 in Hong Kong when he was staying as usual in The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a package addressed to James Bond was delivered to him. It had been couriered from Tokyo by a British soft commission broker/dealer working in Japan who had dined with him at the Mandarin Grill the night before. The package was delivered by the hotel’s business support team who had close ties with FaireSansDire and predictably suspected the package might be for FaireSansDire’s boss, namely my father. The hotel’s business unit allegedly had close ties with FaireSansDire and no doubt may have had even closer clandestine ties with others in Hong Kong at the time.

Anyway, the package contained a list of businessmen allegedly connected to various Yakuza and Triad gangs involved in money laundering in the Far East. The same villains had apparently tried but failed to murder my father after the dinner the night before. Paradoxically, that dinner must have been hilarious because Barrie Parkes had somehow infiltrated the hotel’s Tannoy and speaker phone systems. Once ensconced therein he had begun to audibly demean those in the Mandarin Grill who were maintaining purportedly covert surveillance over my father. He taunted one of them for wearing a grimy Special Forces tie when in fact he’d never served in The Regiment and mocked another because her soiled wig was a futile disguise bearing in mind she wore it so often. They left before finishing their main courses.

The reason my father’s guest was fearfully impressed was that he discovered that Barrie Parkes was in Brussels in Belgium that night! Having witnessed the commotion in the restaurant, the broker agreed to immediately report what he knew to the appropriate authorities as long as he could say in any court of law that he had not sent the data to Bill Fairclough or FaireSansDire as an intermediary for HMG. That was why the package was addressed to James Bond c/o The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Hong Kong from Dr Yes … yes you may have guessed it! Needless to say, my father’s activities in Hong Kong would almost certainly have been monitored by the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

I hope you have found this article fascinating. If you have any comments please email me via https://theburlingtonfiles.org/index.html#/contact-us.

This article was first published on 13 September 2024.


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