Was a Japanese agent/code expert killed in New York in around 1945?

[Number24]

If this question seems strange to you, it's only because it is ...
I am a James Bond fan. In the novel "Casino Royal" James Bond gets his 00-status after two assassinations. The first target is a Japanese code expert in New York. The second is a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm. Casino Royale is of course fiction, but I ask for two reasons: The author Ian Fleming was the personal Assistant to the Commander of British Navy Inteligence Division in WWII and was better informed than most about espionage and covert operations at that time. The second reason is that only one or two agents were murdered in Stockholm during the war, Claes Bertil Warholm and Kai Holst (murder of suicide?). Warholm was Swedish, but operated as a double agent in Norway and was killed by two Norwegian Special Operation Executive agents. Kai Holst was a Norwegian resistance leader who worked in the espionage community in the Swedish capital. He was found shot with his gun next to him right after the war. This is the sort of thing Fleming was likely to know about and it does remind me about what he wrote in the novel.
Was there a murder in New York around that time that could be the inspiration behind e the first assassination done by James Bond in the novel Casino Royale?

 

[aggienation]

Why would a British agent be assassinating someone in New York? If there was one, the OSS would likely have been the ones who killed them. But most times they don't, its more effective by far to flip them, force them to work as double agents.

Besides that, there was not much in the way of a Japanese population on the US East Coast in the 1940s, I'm not aware of any non-ethnic Japanese that were traitors, there would have been little reason to be in New York versus a West Coast port city, where troop movements, supplies, etc. would be moved from that actually affected the PTO.

 

[Number24]

It doesn't have to be a British agent. Warholm was killed by Norwegians. We don't know who killed Kai Holst, but some suspect the OSS because Holst was looking for war criminals among German POW in Norway (this was after the war ended) while Swedish secret service and the OSS were looking to recruit agents among the German prisoners.
You are right when you say the west coast was more interesting than the east coast for the Japanese. Perhaps they were spying on government offices in NY or shipping businesses with headquarters on the east coast? It's also possible Ian Fleming heard of an assassination in the US and chose to place it in NY.

 

[aggienation]

It doesn't have to be a British agent. Warholm was killed by Norwegians. We don't know who killed Kai Holst, but some suspect the OSS because Holst was looking for war criminals among German POW in Norway (this was after the war ended) while Swedish secret service and the OSS were looking to recruit agents among the German prisoners.
You are right when you say the west coast was more interesting than the east coast for the Japanese. Perhaps they were spying on government offices in NY or shipping businesses with headquarters on the east coast? It's also possible Ian Fleming heard of an assassination in the US and chose to place it in NY.

More possible Fleming just made it up. Like the idea of a "license to kill," the 007 code, all completely fictitious.

 

[Number24]

That's of course very possible. That's what I thought before I read about the murders of Holst and Warholm. That the two murders in the espionage community in Stocholm during the war were both reminiscent of one of the murders Fleming mentions seemes more than a coincident.
Some SOE agents or resistance in occupied countries had a license to kill, meaning they were tasked with killing selected nazi targets such as double agents. The SOE agent Gunnar Sønsteby and leader of the military resistance Jens Christian Hauge had meatings were they sanctioned assassinations and picked agents to do the job.
No nation in peacetime will admit to having a license to kill program, and most don't. There has been speculations about a British program with a licence to kill, maybe called "The Initiative", but that's far from proved. Fleming's experience was from WWII and then "licence to kill" really did exist. He probably thought "What if that sort of thing still exist?"