Harry the Spy: The Secret Pre-History of a James Bond Producer



1 / 4 Chevron Chevron Letter from an organization called National Public Relations Advisors to the U.S. Passport Division, June 12, 1945. V-E Day had already been celebrated a month earlier, but Saltzman’s overseas travels continue. An associate named Roy M. Cohen (no, not Roy Cohn of McCarthyite fame) is asking to have his and Saltzman’s visas expedited so that they can travel to France to help “hasten the resumption of normal trade relations between France and the United States.” GIAMMARCO: “National Public Relations Advisors was a proprietary front company for the O.S.S. [the Office of Strategic Services, the early-40s forebear to the Central Intelligence Agency]. It was similar to the Robert Mullen public-relations company in Washington, from which intelligence operatives have been given cover I.D. and credentials, both domestically and abroad, for assignments. This document suggests that Harry’s intelligence activities were still in full swing.”

The title sequence to every James Bond movie from Dr. No to Live and Let Die begins with the credit “Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli present.” Over time, Broccoli, who died in 1996 and was known as Cubby, has come to be the more famous Bond producer. But it was Saltzman who, in 1961, originally secured the Bond-movie option from 007’s creator, the novelist Ian Fleming.

The Canadian-born Saltzman was a curious choice for Fleming to do a deal with—a respected but (prior to Bond) small-time producer best known for low-budget, black-and-white film adaptations of the John Osborne plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. Why, you might wonder, would Fleming have entrusted his life’s work to this guy rather than, say, some deep-pocketed Technicolor specialist? A few years ago, two of Saltzman’s children, Hilary and Steven, gained startling insight into the Saltzman-Fleming relationship when Hilary inadvertently stumbled upon her father’s wartime files, as kept by the U.S. State Department.

Some background: In 2003, Hilary Saltzman was relocating from Los Angeles to Quebec and needed to get her Canadian-citizenship papers in order. In so doing, she hit a snag: the Canadian government required documentation on how and when her father, who died in 1994, had become a U.S. citizen. As I report in my article in the October issue of V.F., “The Birth of Bond,” Hilary’s seemingly benign request to pull her father’s citizenship documents set off alarms at the State Department. The reason? Harry Saltzman, shortly after taking the Oath of Allegiance in 1939, became a high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer, his wartime activities classified. Even when Hilary finally managed to procure the papers she needed—after a protracted bureaucratic process that entailed getting a sign-off from the department’s then top man, Colin Powell—the documents she received remained heavily redacted. “One has to deduce,” says Steven Saltzman, “given the fact that the Secretary of State had to authorize the release of what were 60-year-old records, that Harry’s role, even today, is sensitive.”

For Hilary, the experience of reading all these cables and letters, many of them written by Robert E. Sherwood, the overseas director of the Office of War Information during World War II, cleared up a lot of things about her mysterious, circumspect dad that hadn’t previously made sense. “Finally, I understood what my father had done in the war. Finally, I understood his fascination with the spy genre of films,” she says. Ian Fleming had himself been an intelligence officer on the British side, and, says Hilary, “I really strongly believe that he and my father shared some similar experiences. Even though they couldn’t publicize it, I really think Ian felt that this series was safe in my father’s hands.”

In my article, I say it’s “possible, even probable,” that Saltzman and Fleming, for all their common wartime experience, didn’t actually meet until 1961. However, David Giammarco, a Bond expert and the author of the 2002 book For Your Eyes Only: Behind the Scenes of the James Bond Films, believes that it’s likely that Saltzman and Fleming crossed paths during World War II. While researching his book, Giammarco spoke to retired intelligence officers from both the U.S. and Britain, some of whom, he says, “seemed to feel that Ian and Harry had a prior relationship” well before 1961—though there is no smoking-gun document or photograph that puts the two men together in the same place during the war.

Wherever the truth lies, the documents released to Hilary Saltzman, not to mention the degree to which their contents remain heavily redacted, illustrate, in Giammarco’s words, “the high level of espionage work that Harry carried out.”

This slide show, exclusive to V.F., shows some of the un-redacted Harry Saltzman documents from Hilary’s collection, along with commentary from Giammarco.