Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, liked to claim – only half in jest – that he had helped to create the CIA.

During the Second World War Fleming worked as personal assistant to John Godfrey, the hard-driving head of Naval Intelligence, who was Fleming’s model for M in the Bond series.

Part of Fleming’s job was to liaise with General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s newly minted wartime answer to MI6. The two men got on extremely well, and when Donovan was preparing plans for a new American intelligence service in 1941, he asked Fleming to write him a blueprint.

Fleming’s 72-page memo on how a US service might look contains a description of the ideal secret agent, which has strong echoes of James Bond (although Fleming would not sit down to write the Bond books for another decade).

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The perfect secret agent, wrote Fleming, “must have trained powers of observation, analysis and evaluation; absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty; language and wide experience, and be aged about 40 to 50”.

The memo that Fleming wrote to Donovan is on display at the Imperial War Museum, in London, as part of the exhibition For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond.

Fleming apparently attended Camp X, the top-secret compound near the Canadian city of Toronto, where OSS agents were trained in unarmed combat, firearms and espionage tradecraft. According to William Stephenson, the Canadian spymaster who went under the codename Intrepid, Fleming excelled at the OSS training course. This may have been artistic licence, for there is no record to show that Fleming attended a complete course at the camp.

Fleming would later suggest that his advice to Donovan on founding the OSS had been instrumental in forming the CIA charter. Even if this was not strictly true, Donovan was grateful enough to present Fleming with a .38 Colt revolver inscribed, somewhat cryptically, “For Special Services”.

Fleming would never say precisely what those services had been, but he liked to imply, with a wink, that they had been very special indeed.

His gift to Donovan was, if anything, longer lasting – the character of Felix Leiter, the American CIA agent and staunch ally of 007 in the Bond stories, is based partly on “Wild Bill”.

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