London, Sept. 22: There was a real James Bond who was an incorrigible storyteller with a penchant for pretty women and fast cars, says a new history of Britain’s intelligence service MI6.
Daily Telegraph on Wednesday reported that Commander Wilfred Dunderdale was known for his prowess as a boxer in the Royal Navy at the end of the First World War.
The first official history of the intelligence service says that Dunderdale became close friends with Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, and he claimed to have recognised some of his own stories in the books.
A man of great charm and savoir-faire, in old age he became an incorrigible storyteller, Mr Keith Jeffery of Queen’s University, Belfast, who was given access to all MI6 files from when it was founded in 1909 until 1949, was quoted as saying.
He liked to tell the story of how, while still in his teens, as an interpreter for a (Tsarist) White Russian general, he found himself translating outside a railway sleeping compartment where the General and his British mistress were seducing each other.
When he was the head of the secret intelligence service, Paris station, in the 1930s, he had a penchant for pretty women and fast cars, he said.
The book MI6, the History of the Secret Intelligence Service, says Dunderdale was the son of a British naval engineer. He spoke fluent Russian and began working on special intelligence duties in Sevastopol port in 1919.