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DEADLY_CIPHER

                                             August   24, 2005
                                             September 5, 2005

                                  Reading John Pearson's
                                  "The Life of Ian Fleming" (1966)
                                  In the Bantam paperback edition

Pearson suggests that the
detail in Casino Royale about
a "Japanese cipher expert" was                       GALE_OF_THE_WORLD
based in a very distant way on
an actual event (p. 104):

   The death of the Japanese was a highly
   exaggerated account of the adventure
   in which Fleming took part with Sir
   William Stephenson.  If there was no
   killing there was certainly a Japanese
   cipher expert.  He was on the staff of
   the Japanese Consul General in New
   York, whose office happened to be on
   the floor below Stephenson's.

   Stephenson knew that coded messages
   were being transmitted from this
   office back to Tokyo by short-wave
   radio and he decided that the time had
   come to find out more.

   Fleming was a bystander while the
   Consul's office was cased, duplicate
   keys prepared, the movements of the
   cipher expert studied.  He joined in
   more satisfyingly at three in the
   morning when Stephenson, with two of
   his assistants, let him into the
   office to borrow the Japanese code
   books for an hour or so.  The safe
   presented little difficulty, and it
   took no time at all to get the code
   books microfilmed upstairs and
   returned to their exact place.

Note that this sounds like a *real*
intelligence operation... what point
could there possibly be in assassinating
a cipher expert?

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