James Bond, Ghost Armies & Ungentlemanly Warfare

The Oxford dictionary defines a con man as a person who cheats or tricks someone by gaining their trust and persuading them to believe something that is not true. You’re probably familiar with the names of the most notorious conmen of the 20th century like Charles Ponzi, Bernie Madoff, the Reverend Jim and Tammy Fay Baker, and of course the Music Man’s Harold Hill.

 But you probably didn’t know four of the most respected people of the 20th century were part of the world’s biggest con.

 The journey of our first hero in today’s story begins in 1854. George Eastman was born in Waterville, New York. George was forced to grow up early as his father and sister passed away before he was 15. To help his mother, George got a camera and started a photography business. But the process of taking and developing a picture was not only messy, but very time consuming.

With the tenacity unlike any other, Eastman set out to make it easier. At the time, photographers used a wet plate process to capture photos, which involved a heavy glass plate that was covered with silver and other chemicals. Beyond messy, it also took a day to develop.

George Eastman’s first success was to create a dry plate, and even better, a machine to apply the chemicals to the plate. And then he created a film that changed the world.

At first, he figured out how to apply the chemicals to a thin gelatin layer on paper, and finally, on celluloid plastic. It was this role of celluloid plastic film that changed cameras forever.

In 1892, Eastman named his business, Kodak, a name he invented to stand out and stand alone. By 1907, Kodak had 5,000 employees worldwide and a virtual monopoly on the film and camera business. He was eventually ordered to divest some of his businesses, so he sold off the paper and dry plate technology, but not the film.

He wanted the Eastman Laboratory in Rochester, New York to be the foremost expert and innovator in everything optics related.

As a person, George Eastman was very giving and philanthropic, interested in the development of his people. His company was a pioneer in offering profit-sharing to employees, and he was perhaps the only company with a woman, Florence McAananey, in an executive position.

While Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were public philanthropists, Eastman gave away half of his wealth to projects in Rochester, black colleges in the U.S., and the Tuskegee Institute. He also created a music school, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and a Dental Institute. Pretty impressive for a man also involved in the world’s biggest con.

Plauged with a spine disorder, however, that left him in great pain, he took his own life in 1932.

The role of film on celluloid plastic changed the world. It actually inspired George’s friend Thomas Edison at the age of 43 to invent the movie camera.

At 43, Edison already had hundreds of inventions, but his participation in the greatest con wouldn’t happen for another 15 years. Born in 1847 to a schoolteacher, he was taught reading, writing and arithmetic at a very early age.

At 12, he contracted scarlet fever that left him almost deaf for the rest of his life. By the time he was 13, his entrepreneurial side had emerged, he was bringing in fifty dollars a week selling newspapers and candy on the trains, and worked himself into the role of telegraph operator for the train.

His genius is never more clear than when he decided how to make more money selling newspapers, he should just sell his own newspaper, and thus he created the Grand Trunk Herald.

At 22 he got his first patent with his invention of an electric vote recorder.
At 27 he invented a better telegraph machine and sold it to his employer for $10,000, around $230,000 in today’s money.

He used that money to create a research and development facility in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His facility would create light bulbs, microphones, electric lights, batteries, and hundreds of other inventions.

In 1880, he was producing 50,000 lamps per year, and his Menlo Park facility had grown to occupy two city blocks.

Edison was always concerned with America’s dependence on other nations, and spent a great deal of time creating alternatives. Phenol, for an example, an ingredient in aspirin and explosives came from Germany.

Edison figured out how to create it here, explosives came from Germany.

And rubber. Rubber was completely imported from abroad, but was very important to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, two of his friends. Together they provided financial assistance, so Edison could try to make rubber here.

And after 17,000 attempts to figure it out, he learned that he could make rubber from the Golden Rod plant.

Edison also spent time lobbying the government to order and use some of his inventions, which were often safer and more efficient. Because it was safer than lead acid batteries, he convinced them to start using his alkaline batteries in ships and submarines. Electronic mail, explosives, and sound detection devices, he also felt could be useful to the government.

Edison passed away in 1931 from complication to diabetes, having 1,093 patents to his name.

 From the invention of his motion picture camera, Edison had also created a motion picture company which made nearly 1,200 films. One of the employees of Edison Films was Alan Crossland. Alan had worked every job at the company as a jack-of-all trades of sorts, including directing short films.

When he left Edison films, Warner Brothers hired him and asked him to direct what would become the first talking picture, Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer. The Jazz Singer debuted on October 6, 1927.

Twenty-five years later, the first James Bond film, Dr. No, would also be released on October 6th, in London. A film by author Ian Fleming shot entirely on Kodak Film, which brings us to our third participant in the world’s biggest con, Ian Fleming.  

Ian was born in 1908, the year Edison patented the movie camera. Ian’s parents were well off his father being a member of Parliament and his grandfather, the founder of an investment house and a bank. Ian wasn’t an academic but rather an athlete. The only part of school he liked was when the headmaster’s wife would read the adventure novels, Bulldog Drummond.

His academic failures, outside listening to that story, landed him at the Royal Military College. And in 1927, his mother actually sent him to a private school in Austria, where he took a special interest in Germany and politics.

In 1939, family friend, Rear Admiral John Gottfried, recruited Ian Fleming to become his personal assistant. As his assistant, Fleming was active throughout World II, and was lauded for his ideas.

Being in Jamaica for a summit in 1942, he had decided to make Jamaica this permanent home. And after the war, he moved there and he built a house that he named Golden Eye, after a Carson McCullers book. Working at the Sunday Times in London only allowed him to spend three months there at Goldeneye.

But three months here was plenty, because in 1952 he would produce his first book there, Casino Royal, about a charismatic spy named James Bond. He modeled the character after his memories of Bulldog Drummond and people he’d met in the war.

Biff Dunderdale was one of them. He’d been a spy for MI6. He wore cufflinks and was regularly chauffeured in a Rolls-Royce.

And Sir William Samuel Stevenson, a spy for the British, who was also a flying ace in the top with camel, scoring 12 aerial victories before being shut down.

Independent publisher Jonathan Cape took an interest in Fleming’s novel. Though small, he was the publisher of D.H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, H. L. Menken, Robert Frost, Margaret Mead, James Joyce, and Roald Dahl. He would also be the publisher of James Bond. B

etween 1953 and 1961, Ian would publish ten bond novels to mixed reviews and sales, but all that would change in 1961. When an article was published about John F. Kennedy’s ten favorite books, which included Ian Fleming’s “For Your Eyes Only.”

Sales of Ian Fleming’s books took off and never stopped. In April of that year, 1961, Fleming had a heart attack and was bedridden. A friend suggested he try something new, something light- hearted. Maybe he would write the stories he’d been telling his son at bedtime about a flying car. Ian was ecstatic at this idea.

He would actually finish that book that year and it would be published in 1964. His only children’s book became a hit and kids everywhere knew the story of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

In July of 1961, he also signed a film rights deal with Harold Sultman and Albert Broccoli. They had a six movie deal with the United Artists and decided to start by turning Dr. No into a movie. Ian Fleming celebrated the movie rights deal by buying a car James Bond would never drive. Bond was European through and through, driving Aston Martens and Benleys. For Ian, he found joy in the Ford Thunderbird. He’d only have that car three years before his second heart attack, which would prove fatal.

He’d never delivered to see how successful the Bond franchise would become.

Overall there would be 28 Bond films by 2022. All shot with Kodak film. Ian’s first book Casino Royale wouldn’t become a movie until 2006, where it grossed $622 million. He would never see stars like Eva Green, where in a Bill Blast gown on the red carpet. Which brings us to our final hero and participant in the world’s greatest con, Fashion designer Bill Blass.

The youngest of the four, Bill Blass was born in 1922 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, home to movie star Carol Lombard. Like Ian, Bill wasn’t much of a student, but like Eastman and Edison, he just wanted to create. In his autobiography, he wrote that the margins of his schoolbooks were filled with sketches of Hollywood fashion.

He spent his free time at the movie house, the cheapest form of entertainment during the Depression. But also, where he could see Carol Lombard, a local girl who made it big. In high school, he entered designs into a fashion contest put on by a Chicago Tribune and came in second place.

That led to him selling designs to New York manufacturers which led him to relocating to New York City after graduation. In 1942, however, he had to put his fashion on hold for a bit, as he was recruited for the war. But he stated in his autobiography that his time in the war was transformational. Not only was it the first time he was totally on his own, but also forced him to think differently.

After the war, Bill found a mentor in the Vogue editor, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, and found work at the Manhattan firm of Maurice Rettner, where he worked for years before buying it and renaming it Bill Blast Ltd.

He was one of the first American fashion designers to attach his name to his business, alongside Oscar de Laurentis. He would become a pioneer in licensing, profiting from landing his name, to glasses, chocolate, perfume, automobiles, and dozens of other things. Bill would actually find himself in the offices of Ford one day, designing the continental Mark V car.

Forever expanding his brand outside the fashion world. By the 1970s Bill Blast Ltd was worth $700 million and his fashion was worn by everyone from the likes of Barbara Walters, Gloria Vanderbilt, Barbara Streisand, Nancy Kissinger and even the Rockefellers.

Bill logged 30,000 miles a year attending trunk shows in every quarter of the country paying close attention to the fashion needs of the women in Omaha versus Boise versus places like Miami.

His work garnered the highest awards in the industry and in 1999 he sold Bill Blass for $50 million and retired to Connecticut. The next year he passed away due to third cancer.

Even today, however, his designs show up on the red carpet, as could be seen on Molly Sims at the Quantum of Solace, James Bond movie premiere.

But it isn’t Kodak film or Red Carpet dresses that unite these four. It isn’t Ford or New York City. It’s their participation in the world’s biggest act of deception.

That job was deceiving the Germans in the Great World Wars, the most involved con job ever executed, and it all started with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.

In May of 1915, after Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat, the New York Times asked Thomas Edison for comment, and then they published three long pages of his remarks. It was this article that brought our four heroes together.

Not yet in the war, Edison wanted the US to focus on preparedness. He felt technology was changing the face of war. Men with swords would be replaced by someone killing dozens at the press of a button. Ultimately, he called on the US military to create a great resource laboratory to which America’s scientists and inventors would collaborate on new weapons and defenses.

The Secretary of the Navy read the article and shot off a letter to Edison, applauding the idea and asked him him to head this new Navy Bureau of Invention and Development, later renamed the Navy Consulting Board. Edison agreed and gathered the nation’s brightest scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and inventors.

Together, they and the Navy published a list of the issues the Navy could use help solving. And they got over a hundred and ten thousand responses from Americans. Edison himself chose to focus on German U-boats, offense and defense.

One of his suggestions was to better camouflage our ships. His suggestions included shipping at night, eliminating smoke stacks, and even painting the ships differently. For the optics, he contacted George Eastman.

George volunteered use of his primary optics engineer Lloyd Jones and use of his Kodak Eastman research laboratory. At the Eastman Lab, they built an experimental ocean with an observation tank, artificial sun, movable sky, scale model ships, and even submarine periscopes for viewing.

They built an outdoor testing center as well on Lake Ontario, experimenting with colors and created in flammable paints. Using a Navy submarine patrol boat, Edison himself tested new anchors and rudders to help ship surveyed torpedoes.

He worked on quick fix patches that could be deployed to cover blast holes, listening devices, and better binoculars. Both Eastman and Edison gave their full attention to the US military and their efforts to deceive the German offenses during World War War I.

When World War II came around, the con was in scientists and artists coming up with ideas. It was a full-fledged part of the Allied plan. The US military actually created the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops on January 20, 1944. It had 1,100 men, one of them was Bill Blass, traditionally called the Ghost Army.

The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, were effectively a traveling roadshow who put on 23 performances during the course of the war. The operations of the 23rd would lead Germany to moving men, assets and operations all over Europe, ready to fight. No one, ready to fight in actual ghost army.

Bill Blass was part of that unit that designed and created inflatable tanks, guns, and planes. The 23rd would create complete ghost armies for the German pilots to see from above and report back to German officers. But the con didn’t stop at inflatables.

In fact, the level of detail and coordination that went into the charade is almost hard to fathom. The inflatable tank army was given the name to 79th Armored Division, and real soldiers outfitted with fake patches were asked to visit nearby towns for snitches and german spies to see in report.

Telegraphers of the 23rd Division created full-scale fake conversations and transmissions about the movements of the tanks and soldiers. Even mimicking the Morse Code style of regular transmission operators.

A team of Sonic engineers set up large speakers and broadcast the sounds of tank movements, construction, light battle, and soldiers moving about. They even employed General Patton and Omar Bradley, who were sent to camps for German prisoners to see before being released. I

n other instances, they used look-like actors to show the presence of high-profile generals. A parachute troop of 500 scarecrows were dropped in France, along with the real soldiers with speakers who played the sounds of their soldiers coming under fire after landing.

Another political team made official visits with other countries and municipalities, as they would normally do when working with and crossing other nations.

All radio and paper chatter about the visits would mention the movements of the 75th Armored Division, the Ghost Army. Bill Blass’s army of inflatable tanks made appearances at the Ryan River, Battle of the Bulge, and the Normandy Battles, amongst 21 others.

Operation Fortitude was a giant joint deception effort of the UK and the United States. An entire battalion was simulated in Edinburgh, Scotland, with all signs pointing to a large scale invasion of Germany at the Straits of Dover. The calm was so effective that it not only left very few enemy troops at the official Normandy invasion, but also convinced Hitler that Normandy was just a small scale distraction attempt, the larger invasion of the north just waiting to happen.

And so thinking that way, Hitler left entire divisions in the north, ready for the invasion, which never came.

Operation Mincemeat was a deception attempt of another sort in Southern Europe.

While the Allies wanted to come up through Italy, they needed to convince the Germans they were going to land in Greece. A plan was hatched to find a corpse that looked about the age of a soldier, to clothe the body in a royal army uniform and float him ashore in Spain.

On him was an official envelope, including war orders, to move troops across northern Africa and come in via Greece. The plan was supported by the building of large water pipes across the north African desert. The body was found and the message transmitted to German officers, where troops were immediately sent to Greece, leaving Sicily open for the Allied invasion, and it worked brilliantly.

The entire operation was based on a memorandum called the “Trout Memo” that was distributed to Allied military leaders in 1939. It came from the office of rear admiral John Godfrey, but it was written and conceived by his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming.

Edison, Eastman, Blast Fleming, were all part of the greatest con ever conceived.