The Soviet agent who defected to the West
I an Fleming’s 1953 novel Casino Royale introduced the world to suave super-spy James Bond. As has been noted by academics in the decades following the book’s publication and even by Fleming himself, he drew much from his own wartime experiences as a naval intelligence officer. Yet despite this, Fleming was keen to keep his books as up-to-date and contemporary as possible. The result was that the Soviet Union, whose uneasy alliance with Britain and America had collapsed in the years following the end of the war, was selected as James Bond’s primary antagonist for Fleming’s novels, in particular the shadowy intelligence organisation SMERSH. However, while James Bond may be fictional, SMERSH were terrifyingly real.