Roald Dahl, author of James and the Giant Peach and Willy Wonka, was a twice-shot-down fighter pilot that spent WWII attached to the diplomatic corps in Washington where he vacationed with Eleanor Roosevelt, encouraged LBJ into politics, set up a feature film on Gremlins with Disney and served as the inspiration for James Bond to his coworker and drinking buddy, Ian Fleming. He later wrote a Bond script, as well as the screenplay to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. From memory. Not positive about chitty chitty bang bang.
Chitty Chitty was an Ian Fleming book for which Dahl did co-write the screenplay. I love that movie. Ian Fleming attended Camp X, a spy training ground in Canada and stayed at an apartment in Toronto which was across the street from St. James - Bond United Church.
A lot of WWII spies ended up either in entertainment or just being famously weird. I'm sure there were more that were typical bureaucrats, but just looking at people with "worked in intelligence during WWII" in their biography somewhere, it starts to look like the job they gave you if you were smart but too much of an oddball to be useful anywhere else.
