Talk:The Link (UK organization)

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See Talk:Rudolf_Hess; There's no other source for the claims about Rudolf Hess than The Man Who Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight by Anthony Masters, ISBN 0-631-13392-5
 * I would to concur with the above. It is well known that Rudolf Hess who was a muddled thinker to put it charitably went on his celebrated flight to Scotland in May 1941 with the aim of effecting an Anglo-German peace by contracting the Duke of Hamilton. Hess's message was that the two "Aryan" peoples should not be fighting and killing each other, and that Germany would be launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, in the very near-future, so now was the ideal time for Britain and Germany to join forces. The British politely ignored his message and interned him. This chapter has an ocean of conspiracy theories about what prompted this bizarre gesture on the part of Hess that are too numberless to list him. But the claim that this was a "sting" operation by British intelligence to lure Hess into making his flight is not generally accepted. All of the evidence suggests that British officials were surprised and confused by Hess's outlandish peace mission which is hard to square with the claim that this was all planned out in advance. A telling point is the claim that this was planned by Ian Fleming, who was the executive assistant to the director of naval intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey. If Fleming had never written his James Bond novels, none of these claims about his wartime achievements would be made today. To be fair, Fleming seems to have done a good job as the executive assistant to Admiral Godfrey, but he is credited with all sorts of fantastic feats during the war that he never did. It is safe, but true that most people's ideas about intelligence work is based upon the James Bond films, which are completely unrealistic to say the least. A detailed critique of the Bond films is not germane here, but sufficient to say that the character of Bond-though he is described as a spy-is more alike to an assassin than a spy. The purpose of a spy is gather intelligence, not going around and killing people. Because Fleming wrote the novels upon the Bond films are based, there are a number of unreliable stories making all sorts of claims about Fleming's supposed wartime career that have no basis in fact. Fleming's job in naval intelligence was to find the location of German warships and submarines. Tricking Hess into making his flight to Scotland would have been well outside of his line of work. --A.S. Brown (talk) 02:04, 14 January 2024 (UTC)