The businessman who inspired the James Bond character

There is an urban legend that says that the author of spy novels Ian Fleming publicly acknowledged that to create his character he based himself on the life of the Canadian William Stephenson, spy, businessman, military man and inventor. The fact is that if we pull the thread to verify this statement, we inevitably arrive at the prologue of the book Room 3606, written by Fleming himself. A good part of the sources that claim that the writer stated unequivocally that Bond is Stephenson are based on altered versions of the actual text. It is true that Fleming was a friend of the Canadian and that he held him up as an example of a great spy, just as it is also true that he claimed that his character is a mixture of many people, among whom there certainly was Stephenson.

Beyond hypotheses, the truth is that our protagonist was an exceptional character who excelled in everything he set out to do. At only four years old, he lost his father, so his mother had to leave little William in the care of another couple, the Stephensons, from whom he took the surname (he was, in reality, named William Samuel Clouston Stanger). When he finished school, he did not continue studying, but instead went to work at a lumber yard, like his stepfather, and later delivered telegrams for the Great North West Telegraph, a local company. The world of wireless information transmission would, later on, be very important in his life.In 1916 he joined the army as a volunteer, right in the middle of the First World War. Although his physique was not at all powerful (he was 1.57 meters tall), he was sent to the United Kingdom and from there to the French front, where he was wounded by a gas attack. During his recovery, he trained in aeronautics and shortly after he was already flying a biplane and had been promoted to sergeant. After several heroic actions aboard his Sopwith Camel –it is said that he shot down between twelve and eighteen German planes– at the end of July 1918 he was wounded and captured by the enemy, ending up locked in a prisoner-of-war camp. There are different versions of how he got out, whether by escaping or being released. With such a record, it is logical that he finished the war with promotions and decorations.Once the war was over and he was settled back in Canada, he began a new stage, now as an entrepreneur. The first business he set up was the production and distribution of can openers and other hardware items, but things did not go well and he had to travel hastily to England, fleeing from creditors. There, everything changed, because he invented a mechanism to send photographs remotely without wires, inspired by what he had seen while working at the Great North West Telegraph. It was a success and the patent royalties did not stop flowing for a long time. With the money he brought in, he created a company to manufacture radios, the General Radio Company, just at a time (1923) when broadcasting was beginning to become fashionable among the general public. He also invested in an aircraft manufacturer, General Aircraft and, together with other partners, took control of the cement company Alpha Cement, one of the leading English companies in its sector. In the thirties, seeing what the cinema boom in the United States meant, he decided to set foot in the industry, and created the production company Sound City and the Shepperton studios, the largest in the world outside of Hollywood. Also during this period, he joined the board of directors of the Pressed Steel Company, the large English manufacturer of car bodies.Shortly before the start of the Second World War, he began providing confidential information to the British government about the situation in Germany, which was his gateway to the United Kingdom's intelligence services. He even presented a plan to assassinate Hitler a year before the outbreak of the war. During the war, he settled in New York, where he coordinated the British Security Coordination (BSC), in addition to advising President Roosevelt. From the BSC, he directed espionage activities outside the United Kingdom, operations in which he also acted as a spy under the codename Intrepid. After the war, he convinced the American authorities to create the CIA. In the late sixties, he retired, and from then on, he dedicated himself to managing his businesses, first from Jamaica and later from Bermuda, where he died.