Meet The Spy Who Inspired The Creation Of James Bond

One of Britain’s greatest spies of the Second World War, a secret agent who went by the code name White Rabbit, has been identified as the inspiration behind Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

He’s the dashing secret agent who surrounded himself with women, ruthlessly despatched his enemies and had a series of swashbuckling adventures.

It is not James Bond but a real Second World War hero who has now been identified as the inspiration behind Ian Fleming’s fictional creation.

A new biography of Wing Commander Forest “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas, one of Britain’s greatest secret agents of the war, claims the writer based the character of 007 on the spy and recreated many of his real life experiences in his novels.

Yeo-Thomas, who was known by the code name White Rabbit, was parachuted into occupied France three times – after one mission reporting back directly to Winston Churchill – before being captured and tortured by the Gestapo.

He was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp but managed to escape and reach the Allied lines.

His link to Bond is revealed in a document discovered at the National Archives, in west London, by historian Sophie Jackson during her research into a new account of Yeo-Thomas’ exploits, Churchill’s White Rabbit: The True Story of a Real-Life James Bond.

In a dossier of recently declassified documents, she found a memo from May 1945 in which Fleming, who also worked in intelligence during the war, briefs colleagues on the agent and his successful escape from the Nazis.

The two men worked in different units – Yeo-Thomas for the Special Operations Executive and Fleming in the Naval Intelligence Division – and this is the first time a connection has been established between them.

Miss Jackson, a former editor of History Magazine, said that the link – along with remarkable similarities in the characters of Yeo-Thomas and Bond, as well as echoes between the escapades of the real life and fictional spy – supports the idea that Fleming based his character on the agent.

“It shows that Fleming was interested in the case of Yeo-Thomas and had been following it,” she added. “Fleming picked up the story and was interested in it.

"On top of that, there are other significant parallels between Yeo-Thomas and Bond, in their personal life, their relationships with women and attitudes towards women and the way Yeo-Thomas acted as a secret agent. He acts in a way we think of fictional spies acting.

“Some of the sequences that Yeo-Thomas went through are things which are then portrayed in James Bond. And these were experiences that Fleming knew about.”

Yeo-Thomas becomes the latest in a long line of suggested inspirations for the character of Bond, including other intelligence officers of the period: Conrad O’Brien-ffrench, Patrick Dalzel-Job and Bill “Biffy” Dunderdale, Fleming’s brother, Peter, and even the author himself.

In support of her theory, Miss Jackson has detected several parallels between Yeo-Thomas’ war record and sequences in Fleming’s novels.

The most striking is the experience of the agent at the hands of the Gestapo, which was recreated in a scene from the first Bond novel, Casino Royale – as well as the more recent film of the same name – in which the fictional spy is tortured using the same techniques.

On an earlier mission, on a train containing lots of Germans, Yeo-Thomas had found himself having tea with Klaus Barbie, a notorious Nazi known as the “Butcher of Lyon”.

Taking the last seat in the dining car of the Lyon to Paris express, the agent realised he was sitting next to the notorious local chief of the Gestapo.

The Nazis were on the lookout for Yeo-Thomas at the time, but the agent, who was fluent in French, engaged Barbie in conversation and pretended that he was a supporter of the German occupation.

At the end of the meal he was uncertain whether the German had twigged who he was. But he managed to get away safely when the train reached Paris.

The encounter has echoes of a scene from the novel, From Russia, With Love, in which the Bond is on the Orient Express, and has dinner with an enemy agent, who is pretending to be an ally.

On another occasion, Yeo-Thomas adopted the identity of another man to evade detection, a tactic used by Bond in Diamonds Are Forever and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Indeed, several of the techniques used by Yeo-Thomas to repeatedly escape or evade his enemies – at various times, by hiding in a hearse, jumping from a train, strangling a guard or adopting disguises – echo tactics later used by Bond.

And like the licensed to kill 007, Yeo-Thomas always carried a weapon – even though it was contrary to SOE policy. He was also prepared to use it.

On one occasion, he was unable to shake off an enemy agent pursuing him through the streets of Paris. So he lured him to a bridge and hid in the shadows. When his pursuer arrived, Yeo-Thomas pounced on him and shot him at very close range, before tossing his body in the river.

He could also kill with his bare hands. In 1920, after volunteering to serve with the Polish army against the Soviets, he escaped from a Russian prison by strangling a guard.

Miss Jackson also believes the actual character of Bond was based on traits Fleming must have observed in Yeo-Thomas. The real spy was, like the his fictional counterpart, charming and attractive to women and was also surrounded by them – the main members of his personal cell were all female.

He was dashing, having worked at a French fashion house before the war, and had a tangled love life. He never officially married his partner, Barbara, who he met during the war – although she changed her name to his – because he was unable to obtain a divorce from his estranged wife, Lillian, who was living in occupied France.

After the war, Yeo-Thomas succumbed to recurring nightmares and illness, attributed to his wartime experiences. In this, he appears closer to the “darker” and more “psychologically troubled” Bond of the Fleming novels than the more light hearted depictions of the later films. He died in 1964, at the age of 62.

People wanted me very badly to run for president at this year's elections. I was the leader in the polls, but I'm friendly with Romney and I have businesses to take care of. The Apprentice enters its 13th season this year. I will continue to provide a great many jobs, which is one thing my country needs. The other is a leader who knows business, and that is Romney.

I have an ongoing spat with Obama – obviously. I don't think he's doing a good job with the economy. There's nothing personal. We have our little ins and outs and of course there was his recent speech about me [Obama was very funny about Trump at the Washington State Dinner]. That was nice. I mean, it was good. I laughed.

I like to think big and that results in large, loud, spectacular things: casinos, hotels, golf resorts. I've loved sky scrapers since I built them with blocks as a kid. But there is a common denominator: elegance. A highly respected critic for the New York Times said I was "the only beauty freak at large in NYC real estate development". He called the Trump World Tower "a handsome hunk", which it is.

There's a tremendous pressure in business and few people can handle it. I've seen a lot of people fail and I can only think that [the ability to cope] is something you have within, a natural ingredient you're born with.

My father had a four-step formula for success, which accounts for my reputation for getting things done: "Get in, get it done, get it done right, get out."

I think I like Prince Harry. He's young and rebellious and I don't think people should hold that against him. I think the security didn't do a good job, frankly.

I never went bankrupt. I fought my way through a bad situation [Trump was $900m in the red in the early 90s] and now my company is worth more than $8bn, bigger and stronger than it's ever been. There's good debt and bad debt; it can be a form of leverage if you know how to work it.

To me, religion is comprehensive. It makes you think about the wider picture. My faith [Trump is Presbyterian] keeps me humble, while striving for great things.

My parents had a good model for marriage. They were together 61 years. My mother was from Stornoway but they met on holiday in New York and it was very romantic.

I support the person in politics, not the party. You've got to go for the champion, not the team..

The problem with Alex Salmond is that he wants to destroy Scotland with his ridiculous windmills that's he's littering the countryside with. I've just opened a golf resort in Aberdeen so I let him know. But everybody knows he's a disaster.

Donald Trump is speaking at the National Achievers Congress, 5-7 October, London ExCel

Germany's Wind Power Chaos Should Be A Warning To Everyone

Germany has gone further down the 'renewables' path than any country in the world, and now it's paying the price,

On Friday, September 14, just before 10am, Britain’s 3,500 wind turbines broke all records by briefly supplying just over four gigawatts (GW) of electricity to the national grid. Three hours later, in Germany, that country’s 23,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels similarly achieved an unprecedented output of 31GW. But the responses to these events in the two countries could not have been in starker contrast.

In Britain, the wind industry proclaimed a triumph. Maria McCaffery, the CEO of RenewableUK, crowed that “this record high shows that wind energy is providing a reliable, secure supply of electricity to an ever-growing number of British homes and businesses” and that “this bountiful free resource will help drive down energy bills”. But in Germany, the news was greeted with dismay, for reasons which merit serious attention here in Britain.

Germany is way ahead of us on the very path our politicians want us to follow – and the problems it has encountered as a result are big news there. In fact, Germany is being horribly caught out by precisely the same delusion about renewable energy that our own politicians have fallen for. Like all enthusiasts for “free, clean, renewable electricity”, they overlook the fatal implications of the fact that wind speeds and sunlight constantly vary. They are taken in by the wind industry’s trick of vastly exaggerating the usefulness of wind farms by talking in terms of their “capacity”, hiding the fact that their actual output will waver between 100 per cent of capacity and zero. In Britain it averages around 25 per cent; in Germany it is lower, just 17 per cent.

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).

Both these problems have come home to roost in Germany in a big way, because it has gone more aggressively down the renewables route than any other country in the world. Having poured hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies into wind and solar power, making its electricity bills almost the highest in Europe, the picture that Germany presents is, on paper, almost everything the most rabid greenie could want. Last year, its wind turbines already had 29GW of capacity, equivalent to a quarter of Germany’s average electricity demand. But because these turbines are even less efficient than our own, their actual output averaged only 5GW, and most of the rest had to come from grown-up power stations, ready to supply up to 29GW at any time and then switch off as the wind picked up again.

Now the problem for the German grid has become even worse. Thanks to a flood of subsidies unleashed by Angela Merkel’s government, renewable capacity has risen still further (solar, for instance, by 43 per cent). This makes it so difficult to keep the grid balanced that it is permanently at risk of power failures. (When the power to one Hamburg aluminium factory failed recently, for only a fraction of a second, it shut down the plant, causing serious damage.) Energy-intensive industries are having to install their own generators, or are looking to leave Germany altogether.

In fact, a mighty battle is now developing in Germany between green fantasists and practical realists. Because renewable energy must by law have priority in supplying the grid, the owners of conventional power stations, finding they have to run plants unprofitably, are so angry that they are threatening to close many of them down. The government response, astonishingly, has been to propose a new law forcing them to continue running their plants at a loss.

Meanwhile, firms such as RWE and E.on are going flat out to build 16 new coal-fired and 15 new gas-fired power stations by 2020, with a combined output equivalent to some 38 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs. None of these will be required to have “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), which is just an empty pipedream. This makes nonsense of any pretence that Germany will meet its EU target for reducing CO2 emissions (and Mrs Merkel’s equally fanciful goal of producing 35 per cent of electricity from renewables).

In brief, Germany’s renewables drive is turning out to be a disaster. This should particularly concern us because our Government, with its plan to build 30,000 turbines, to meet our EU target of sourcing 32 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020, is hell-bent on the same path. But our own “big six” electricity companies, including RWE and E.on, are told that they cannot build any replacements for our coal-fired stations (many soon to be closed under EU rules) which last week were supplying more than 40 per cent of our power – unless they are fitted with that make-believe CCS. A similar threat hangs over plans to build new gas-fired plants of the type that will be essential to provide up to 100 per cent back-up for those useless windmills.

Everything about the battle now raging in Germany applies equally to us here in Britain – except that we have only fantasists such as Ed Davey in charge of our energy policy. Unless the realists stage a counter-coup very fast, we are in deep trouble.

Only warmists could pass this A-level

While Michael Gove tries valiantly to remedy our dysfunctional exam system he might take a look at some recent papers, such as that set last June for A-level General Studies students by our leading exam body, AQA. Candidates were asked to discuss 11 pages of “source material” on the subject of climate change. Sources ranged from a report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to The Guardian, all shamelessly promoting global warming alarmism. One document from the Met Office solemnly predicted that “even if global temperatures only rise by 2 degrees C, 30-40 per cent of species could face extinction”. A graph from the US Environmental Protection Agency showed temperatures having soared in the past 100 years by 1.4 degrees – exactly twice the generally accepted figure.

The only hint that anyone might question such beliefs was an article by Louise Gray from The Daily Telegraph, which quoted that tireless campaigner for the warmist cause, Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute, dismissing all sceptics as “a remnant group of dinosaurs” who “misunderstood the point of science”.

If it were still a purpose of education to teach people to examine evidence and think rationally, any bright A-level candidate might have had a field day, showing how all this “source material” was no more than vacuous, one-sided propaganda. But today one fears they would have been marked down so severely for not coming up with the desired answers that they would have been among the tiny handful of candidates given an unequivocal “fail”.