I'm gonna give a go at my own thread to bump it:
Desmond Llewelyn(OTL Q in the James Bond films)
Desmond Llewelyn was born in 1914 in Wales, while the War of 1914 was still raging. He was brought up in Wales, but eventually joined the military in 1933. He wound up in military intelligence, and toured Europe before the outbreak of the Great War in 1937. His intelligence was highly valuable in decoding that the International Pact planned on intervening in the Austrian Civil War on behalf of the Socialist Hungarians.
When the Great War broke out, the Austrian Intervention providing the catalyst, Great Britain joined the German Empire against the forces of the Soviet Union and the Federation of French Communes. Llewelyn once again traveled to mainland Europe, but this time as a member of the newly created Assault Group Six, created by Ian Fleming, a high-ranking intelligence officer at the time. Composed of about 100 men, the “Sixers,” as they became known, traveled in deep into enemy territory in order to disrupt enemy logistics, and gather intelligence.
This took Llewelyn across Europe, through the battlefields in Holland, the Ruhr, Poland, and Hungary. During the end of the war, as German forces, aided by the BEF, approached Paris, he and the Sixers were tasked with stealing high-level documents that outlined French contingency plans if the City of Light fell. They succeeded, even though their cover was blown late in the mission and only got away due to a cinema-like car chase through the streets of Paris. This avoided a potentially game-changing guerilla war that the French had planned to carry out as the Allies instead focused their efforts on capturing or neutralizing the French High Command, something that Llewelyn was highly involved in, including the assassination of Admiral François Darlan in Marseille on April 20th, 1941.
After the war, Assault Group Six was “disbanded,” but its key elements were kept together in an unnamed organization. Although Germany was a close ally during the war, post-war realities led to a very mutual distrust and a rivalry between the two powers. During the late 1940’s and early 50’s, Llewelyn was in charge of the gathering of intelligence on Germany’s rocket and nuclear programs, even going overseas himself and infiltrating the German rocket base in Peenamünde. His team’s intelligence opened Her Majesty’s government’s eyes to the fact that Britain was desperately behind in the technology race. This eventually led to a British-American partnership in the development of these weapons.
Only five years later in 1955 war broke out in the Pacific between the United States and Japan. Although Great Britain did not officially join in, the British gave intelligence support. Llewelyn not only was sent, he volunteered, and took up posts in Indochina, gaining the support of Vietnamese rebels and fighting with them in order to make way for an American invasion at Da Nang. Unfortunately for him, a Japanese bullet did not agree with him, and lodged itself in Llewelyn’s leg. It would have to be amputated. He left Vietnam a month later when extracted by U.S. Marines in 1957.
Llewelyn rose through the ranks back in the UK, eventually becoming the head of Military Intelligence, also known as MI5, from 1964-1982. In one of the most memorable acts of his career, in the service or heading it, Llewelyn headed the defense of the building during the Irish Republican Front attack on the building in 1975 using grenade propellers and automatic weapons. Even partially disabled due to having one leg, Llewelyn, along with other agents of the building, managed to subdue the attackers, and even capture one alive by the time the police arrived. Due to this, the last years of his tenure were obsessed with rooting out Irish terrorist cells in Northern Ireland. He was knighted in 1976.
He retired in 1982, using his retirement to write books based on his experiences in the intelligence service. Llewelyn based his character off both himself and his boss Ian Fleming, going so far as to even name the character Ian Moore. His books were best sellers, and the first movie was released in 1999, titled
The Spy with No Name. Unfortunately, or fortunately perhaps, he did not live to see its release. He died a year earlier in 1998 at the age of 84.
