Lehrman’s review of the book was dismissive: ‘Dragooned into the Soviet Army, is accidentally drafted as interpreter for-guess what-the secret police. The 1950 English translation of Smersh published by Henry Holt & Company was an edited version of Mondich’s diary that had been put together by two American journalist brothers, Kermit and Milt Hill.

He claimed to have infiltrated Smersh and worked undercover in the organization for seven months before escaping to West Germany where, in 1948, the NTS newspaper Possev published his diary. Sinevirsky was a pseudonym for Mikhail Mondich, a Ruthenian member of an anti-communist group called the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, or NTS. Smersh was the first book to name the organisation. Churchill’s obituary of his father was on display wherever he lived in his later years he had met Popski at the Savoy Hotel in London to discuss his book at the request of Jonathan Cape and Operation Cicero was mentioned in Moonraker, while the attempted assassination of Van Papen in Ankara a year before the affair would inspire the ‘men in straw hats’ incident in Casino Royale. Fleming was fascinated by all three of those subjects. The same issue had Winston Churchill on the cover in connection with the latest installment of his autobiography, and included reviews of Vladimir ‘Popski’ Peniakoff’s memoirs and Ludwig Moyzisch’s Operation Cicero. It was at around this time that Fleming was trying to introduce himself into literary circles more prominently, meeting Jonathan Cape, Edith Sitwell and William Plomer, and keeping up with all the latest literary magazines.2 So one candidate for the book coming to his attention is The Saturday Review of Literature, which ran a review of it by its Eastern European expert Hal Lehrman in its issue of November 25 1950. If so, this would probably have been in connection with Smersh by Nicola Sinevirsky, which was published in English in 1950.

Fleming never revealed precisely where he learned about Smersh, although according to John Pearson’s biography, he first came across it in ‘a magazine article soon after the war, and he embroidered on what little information he had about the organization and introduced it melodramatically into Casino Royale.’1 Many presume that the organisation was invented by Ian Fleming, but Smersh really existed-albeit in a somewhat different form than that described in his novels. It instantly conjures up an image of the Soviet Union, the Cold War and, of course, James Bond.

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