MI6's WWII mission inspired opening sequence of ‘Goldfinger’

London: Millions of James Bond fans around the world will be surprised to learn that a scene in 007 flick ‘Goldfinger’ was inspired by a real mission executed by MI6 during World War II and was scripted by a secret wartime operations expert. The scene is one of Bond's most famous.

The spy emerges from the water in a wetsuit, knocks out a sentry and sets up explosives before unzipping his suit to reveal an immaculate dinner jacket beneath. Thereafter, he steps into the nearest bar, throws a glance at his watch and casually lights a smoke just as the storage tanks bursts into flames behind him. Who could imagine the scene to have been enacted in real life? But now Jeremy Duns, a Brit writer researching his new book, has found that a Dutch spy used a strikingly similar technique to sneak into Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The exiled Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, had ordered Peter Tazelaar to slip into the country to extract two fellow countrymen to join the government-in-exile in Britain. Tazelaar and his fellow secret agents Eric Hazelhoff Roelfzema and Bob Van der Stok had often been at the seaside resort of Scheveningen, near The Hague, and knew quite well that the Palace hotel there had been occupied by the Germans, who used it as a headquarters, and that every Friday night they partied there. The made a plan - approach Scheveningen by boat under the cover of darkness, and take Tazelaar into the surf by dinghy, from where he could get ashore. Once there, he would do away with his wetsuit only to reveal his evening clothes underneath, and join the bash as any other partygoer. The ‘Goldfinger’ scene that this plot inspired was not in Ian Fleming’s book, on which the 1964 flick is based, and the original draft screenplay began with Bond (Sean Connery), already in a bar. According to Duns, Paul Dehn, a British scriptwriter and former senior intelligence officer during World War II, who was asked to polish the screenplay, knew about the Dutch operation and included it in the script to give the movie a more powerful and dramatic opening. "Dehn was steeped in the world of intelligence and special operations and his senior position meant he would certainly have been aware of the amazing Dutch operation, and he decided to use in the screenplay," the Telegraph quoted Duns, as saying. He added: "It’s just too much of a coincidence because it was such an extraordinary operation. Dehn used his knowledge and experience in the intelligence world to embellish Fleming’s work to great artistic effect." The real operation, however, was pulled off with much more difficulty than is portrayed in the movie. Duns came across the story when he was researching a trilogy of spy novels, the first of which, Free Agent, hits bookstores in May. ANI