Skip to main content

The CIA’s online FOIA library or ‘electronic reading room’ contains some files linking former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen W Dulles to notorious spy author Ian Fleming.   Dulles and Fleming were old friends – they exchanged letters regularly, including discussions of the James Bond novels.  The documents in the CREST database have not been digitised by the Agency and so can’t be downloaded from their site, so I requested copies and made digital copies myself.

One of the files is a CIA document detailing mentions of the DCI in the latest James Bond novel You Only Live Twice (a book fellow spy and author Roald Dahl said was Ian Fleming’s worst).  The other is a copy of a dialogue published in Redbook magazine where Dulles and Fleming interviewed each other, talking about everything from the use of female spies to JFK to the Official Secrets Act.  It also contains one golden story about Nikita Kruschev:

Dulles-Kruschev story

You can download the memo on mentions of the DCI in You Only Live Twice here, and the dialogue between Dulles and Fleming here.