Old War Office — Ian Fleming's Corridors

The Old War Office in London is a landmark completed in 1906 where MI5 and MI6 were founded in 1909 and James Bond creator Ian Fleming worked as an intelligence officer. Built with 25 million bricks and 26,000 tonnes of Portland stone, the structure housed Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia. Featured in five James Bond films, it opened as Raffles London in 2023.

London · from the walk “Secrets of Westminster & MI6” · audio ~3 min · Generated

Old War Office, Whitehall, London SW1A 2EU

How is London's Old War Office connected to Ian Fleming and James Bond?

Take a good look at that grand Baroque facade in front of you. Over one Thousand rooms... two and a half Miles of corridors. Designed in a neo-Baroque style by architect William Young, this building was completed in nineteen oh six. It took twenty five million bricks and twenty six thousand tonnes of Portland stone to build it. But what makes this place truly extraordinary isn't the architecture. It's the Secrets that lived inside these walls.......... This was the headquarters of the British Army, a command center during both World Wars — and this is the room where, in nineteen oh nine, they founded MI five and MI six. Churchill occupied a grand suite of offices here as Secretary of State for War from nineteen nineteen to nineteen twenty one. Lawrence of Arabia once worked here. The corridors were so vast that messengers actually Cycled along them to deliver their messages.......... But here's the story that changed popular culture forever. In May nineteen thirty nine, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, recruited a young man named Ian Fleming to be his personal assistant. Fleming's code name was "seventeen F." He had no real naval experience or intelligence training, but his travels and experience as a journalist proved useful. And perhaps Most useful was Fleming's great personal charm.......... Now, Fleming didn't just push papers. He dreamed up operations that read like thriller novels... because they later Became thriller novels. In September nineteen forty, Fleming wrote a memo proposing Operation Ruthless — a plan to capture a German bomber, man it with a German-speaking crew dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms, crash it into the English Channel, then Attack their German rescuers and steal their boat along with its Enigma machine. The mission was never carried out. Alan Turing himself was reportedly among those disappointed. His colleague Frank Birch wrote that "Turing and Twinn came to me like undertakers cheated of a nice corpse."

...... And the characters? Fleming based much of M's character on Admiral Godfrey himself. After Fleming's death, Godfrey complained — "He turned me into that unsavoury character, M." Fleming reached the rank of Commander... a rank he subsequently gave to his fictional creation. Even the number double oh seven may have deep roots — it has been noted that one of the agents of Elizabeth the First, John Dee, would sign his letters to the queen with "double oh seven," and Dee often worked with spymaster Francis Walsingham, going undercover.......... This building has been featured in a grand total of Five James Bond films — more than any other venue — as the headquarters of MI six. In twenty sixteen, the government sold it for three hundred and fifty million pounds, and it opened in September twenty twenty three as Raffles London. Deep in its basement, you'll find the Spy Bar, in rooms once used by MI five and as interrogation rooms. Fiction and reality... in this building, they were always the same thing.

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