THE inspiration for Goldfinger, the arch villain created by Ian Fleming to rival James Bond, could have been a German spymaster who plotted to blow up gold reserves at the Bank of England.

Andrew Cook, a historian who specialises in intelligence affairs, has found new evidence that suggests Auric Goldfinger’s fictional plans to destroy all the gold in Fort Knox may have been based on a conspiracy to bankrupt Britain on the eve of the first world war.

Cook believes Fleming based his villain on Gustav Steinhauer, “the Kaiser’s master spy” who was running a network of German agents in the UK before hostilities broke out in 1914.

Fleming is known to have drawn much of the inspiration for his Bond novels from his work with British naval intelligence.

He published Goldfinger in 1959 and five years later it was adapted as a blockbuster film starring Sean Connery as Bond and Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore, the villain’s personal pilot. Fleming visited the movie set, but died a month before its premiere.

In the film plot, which slightly differs from the novel, Goldfinger, an evil gold smuggler, plans to use a nuclear device supplied by China to increase the value of his own bullion tenfold by detonating it inside Fort Knox, thereby making the US gold supply radioactive for decades.

“The Bank of England plot has been a secret for nearly 100 years and it is only now that we are beginning to uncover the truth,” said Cook.

“If Britain’s Secret Service Bureau had not uncovered the plot and the Germans had succeeded, Britain would almost certainly have lost the first world war.”

Cook’s theory is based on a previously undisclosed three-page memorandum written by an assistant to William Melville, head of the Secret Service Bureau – the forerunner to MI5 and MI6 – known as “M”.

Apparently written as part of a memoir by Arthur Hailstone, it describes how “M” discovered the bank plot through monitoring letters sent to a spy ring in England run by Steinhauer in Berlin.

“For some time we had been attending to tasks concerning possible targets for German sabotage,” says the memo. “A network of German agents was known to exist in England and their activities and communications were closely monitored thanks to our intercepting of their post.

“From one such letter, Mr Morgan [Melville’s alias] had gained a suspicion that German agents had bold designs on no less than the Bank of England.”

On discovering the plot, Melville paid a visit to Baron Walter Cunliffe, the bank’s governor, and inspected the building’s formidable security, including its subterranean strong rooms where gold bars were stored.

“Even if it were possible to effect entry to vaults, his reasoning power told him that removing anything of value would prove a gargantuan task, necessitating a considerable number of perpetrators [and] an incalculable amount of time,” wrote Hailstone.

Melville soon worked out what Steinhauer may have intended. The memo says: “It occurred to him that the answer might lie in the realms of economic warfare. Explosives, apart from their use in securing entry to premises, might also be employed for destructive objectives.

“The consequences of such an attack on the Bank were without doubt incalculable and potentially as deadly as any major defeat on the battlefield.”

After examining the vaults, Melville organised a search of the tunnels under the Bank, to “nip in the bud any possibility of German sabotage”. However, no explosives were found.

“We will never know for certain, but I believe that is where Fleming got the inspiration for Goldfinger,” said Cook.

“Fleming no doubt found out about the real-life plot against the Bank of England in 1914 and simply transposed it to America where the equivalent target would be Fort Knox.”

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