I wrote a guest blog for Artistic Licence Renewed about Ian Fleming’s wartime scheme, Operation Ruthless. It’s an operation Alan Turing was hoping would be carried out as the goal was to capture an Enigma codebook from a German vessel. It’s just a fascinating look at a small piece of history where fiction almost met reality shedding some light into the kinds of Intelligence Operations Fleming designed to help the Allies gain an advatage during the war. Though the Operation was cancelled it’s still very fascinating to imagine how things would have turned out if it had been attempted. http://literary007.com/2015/01/10/operation-ruthless-ian-flemings-plan-to-capture-enigma-codebooks/
Words by Jack Lugo
Commander Fleming
In 1940 Ian Fleming, then a Lt. Commander in British Naval Intelligence, designed a secret operation, which if successful might have helped the Allies crack the German naval enigma codes. Famous cryptanalyst Alan Turing had been among the codebreakers working at Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park.
While there is no evidence that Fleming and Turing ever met there’s no doubt that if Operation Ruthless proved to be successful it would have been of vital importance to breaking Enigma. Fleming, who served as the personal assistant to Naval Intelligence Director Rear Admiral John Godfrey, wrote up a memo detailing an elaborate plot that would have given the Allies a decisive advantage in the war. Many years later while Fleming was in the midst of writing his 9th James Bond book, Thunderball, it is entirely possible that Operation Ruthless
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