The Enemies of Ian Fleming's 007 and the Modern Villain

Englishman Ian Fleming wrote a set of secret agent thrillers during the 1950's and 1960's that defined a literary genre and created one of the most memorable fictional characters of literature and film, agent 007, James Bond, the British Secret Service agent who fought some of the most evil and bizarre criminals ever introduced to the fantasy world of the fictional secret agent. Fleming's villains are egocentric, cruel, and enemies of Western Civilization. Their names have become synonymous with Bond thrillers and heinous crooks: Dr. No, Goldfinger, Blofeld, La Chiffre, and Hugo Drax, and though they are fictional characters they are similar to many post-Fleming villains, real criminals that have haunted the Western world for decades.

The Fleming Villain

After Fleming became tired of using the real Stalinist counter-intelligence group SMERSH as a foil, he adopted the fictional SPECTRE headed by his most famous villain: Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Blofeld appeared in numerous Bond books and films with his first introduction within Thunderball as SPECTRE's security chief and supervisor of criminal projects. He is described as a man with a colorful past of work within World War II Allied intelligence agencies, and eventually he created his own intelligence service within Turkey to sell information. His underhanded ways lead to his life of crime. His first major project, detailed in Thunderball involved the theft of two nuclear bombs that were held for 100,000,000 pounds ransom.

Blofeld is described as a huge man of mixed ethnic makeup: Greek and Polish. Many of Fleming's villains are described as mixtures of race and ethnic origin: Dr. No (Chinese-German), Le Chiffre (Mediterranean, Russian, Polish, Jewish), Goldfinger (Baltic, Jewish), as if this was a factor in understanding their insidious behavior, though Bond himself is a mixed European product of a Scottish father and Swiss mother. However, for other Fleming villains ethnicity is of little importance, but their evil is steeped in treason, cruelty, greed, and cheating all wrapped up into a mélange of sociopaths: Red Grant (English traitor, SMERSH assassin), Rosa Klebb (ruthless supervisor of SMERSH's operations and executions); Mr. Big (African American allied with SMERSH); and Hugo Drax (the card-cheating, secret Nazi commando hailed as a British hero who plots to destroy London with the atomic Moonraker missile). This set of killers represents pawns and unconscionable henchmen of either SMERSH or SPECTRE's malicious agenda.

Before Blofeld meets his end by Bond, he is a significant part of three novels that helps define the most persistent of Fleming's villains: Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice. Beyond his Thunderball operation of ransoming nuclear bombs, he plots to enhance SPECTRE's reputation as the ultimate world terror organization and his own wealth by launching a bacterial warfare attack on England (On Her Majesty's Secret Service). Blofeld's final outrage is the building and operation of the most bizarre inventions of Fleming's imagination: a huge, poisonous garden constructed within a Japanese coastal castle designed to aid in suicide and facilitate murder (You Only Live Twice).

When Blofeld orders the murder of Bond's wife, he becomes an enemy of not only civilized Western society but of Bond himself, the most deadly extension of MI6. The domination of women and the bizarre nature of the plots involving the Fleming villains is enough for the novels to provide titillation and wonder. Within the films, the villains take on increasingly unusual idiosyncrasies usually in the form of ghastly physical deformities (Le Chiffre's bleeding eye, Scaramanga's third nipple, and Blofeld's scarred face and lobeless ears).

The Fleming villain often portrays the following characteristics: bizarre name, ethnic mixture, ruthless and cruel demeanor, egocentric dominator of women, odd and unpleasant physical characteristics, traitor, criminal behavior, extraordinary intelligence or talent, and murderer. When we are introduced to bad guy Mr. Big by M., and he provides file details to Bond concerning his next nemesis, we are introduced to the archetypical Fleming villain. Mr. Big of Live and Let Die is the nickname for the half-Haitian black and half-French Buonoparte Ignace Gallia, a huge man who took his name from his size and the acronym of his name. Due to chronic heart disease, he has a grayish tinge to his skin, which adds to his sinister appearance. He emigrated to the U.S. and became part of a high jacking team with the Legs Diamond gang, where he invested his criminal assets into Harlem nightclubs and prostitution. In 1943, he is drafted into the Office of Strategic Services due to his ability to speak French and is decorated by the U.S. and French authorities for his service. He becomes a Soviet agent with SMERSH and becomes a ruthless businessman in Harlem. Those who cross him find themselves dead. Due to his initiation into Voodoo in Haiti at a young age, he establishes a Voodoo temple in Harlem where he fosters the rumor that he is a zombie, in fact the living corpse of the Prince of Darkness, Baron Samedi. Samedi is one of the Voodoo spirits, a perfect persona for Mr. Big. Samedi's spirit represents chaos, obscenity, decadence and has an unflagging affinity, naturally, to tobacco and rum. Mr. Big dominates the virginal and clairvoyant Solitaire, and he has become a key figure in a plot to fund SMERSH by laundering a pirates' hoard of 17^th century Jamaican gold coins through the American economy.

Even the "sidekicks" of the villains are imbued with fascinating idiosyncrasies and questionable character that makes them evil extensions of their masters. Author Simon Winder assembled their name, nationality, and characteristic in a table for easy understanding and comparison. Some of the more memorable are Goldfinger's Oddjob, the Korean strongman who hurls deadly hats and is known to eat cats; Irma Bunt the hideously ugly lesbian who becomes Blofeld's wife; Red Grant the huge Irishman turned SMERSH assassin; and Mr. Big's sadistic Robber whose ". . . complexion was the colour of tobacco dust, a sort of yellow-beige . . ." - a fitting associate for the gray-black Mr. Big.

After the detailed description of Mr. Big by M., we, like Bond, anticipate learning more about this fascinating monster, and we await the inevitable supreme duel between the two, in fact, as Bond promises himself, a Homeric slaying with the giant. Within just a few pages we are drawn into the fantastic and wonder how Bond will slay the cruel murderer, foil the Soviet killing machine SMERSH, revenge his CIA friend's maiming, and free the captured and abused beauty Solitaire while saving Western democracy to fight another day.

Mr. Big boasts that he separates himself from the achievements of other Black men by being the first great Black criminal, or as he puts it in the vernacular of the time, a great Negro criminal. His crime will be executed as an art; his method of murder serves a purpose in its use when he threatens to tow Bond and Solitaire behind his speedy yacht into shark and barracuda waters. "I am not going mad, Mister Bond," Big contradicts Bond's accusation while Big plots to rid the world of a British secret agent and his unfaithful woman he rescued from the gutters of the Caribbean. " . . . I wish also to continue my experiments with carnivorous fish. I believe they only attack when there is blood in the water . . . you will not be harmed inside the reef . . . when your bodies have been dragged over the reef, then I'm afraid you will bleed . . . and then we will see if my theories are correct." This murder will leave no evidence, Mr. Big boasts, the superstition of Voodooism is used to appease his followers, and the "bodies are used for scientific research." This, Mr. Big tells Bond, is what he means by "an infinite capacity for taking artistic pains," in his work.

"Who in the world has the power of life or death over his people?" Dr. No asks Bond. As all questions that come from the Fleming villains, they are simply rhetorical, a conversational device to rationalize their megalomania. "Now that Stalin is dead, can you name any man except myself?" Dr. No's character repeats the egotistic villain with traits of emotional indifference, cruelty, and physical deformity (missing hands). Dr. No, like Blofeld and Mr. Big, shows occasional politeness to his captives Bond and Rider as he displays great pride in describing his checkered past, and his plans to be a very private man with designs to make himself wealthy. He is the product of a German Methodist minister and a "good Chinese girl." Born in China he has an aunt paid to raise him and eventually finds his way out of Shanghai poverty by joining the vicious Tong gang where he "enjoyed conspiracies, the murders, the burglaries, the arson of insured properties." His crime was a revolt against a father that had abandoned him. He finds his way to New York where he has his hands cuts off by the Tongs when they have found he has stolen the treasury, but this trauma only inspires Julius No (his surname standing for "no to authority") to become a medical doctor and work his way to the epitome of the crime world where he eventually buys a Jamaican island and makes a fortune by developing guano from rare sea birds into fertilizer. However, his designs are greater for he is working with the Russians and has developed a foolproof method of destroying American rockets from his secret island, and this is where he will make his untold millions by collecting from the communists of Russia and China. Like the great Fleming villains he is a sadist but unlike Mr. Big, he is not an artist but a scientist who longs for privacy and money. Only meddlers that interfere with his work are in his way, but their deaths will not be in vain. Because Bond and Rider has put No to a "great deal of trouble" as trespassers into his privacy, he intends to put them through "a great deal of pain." Alluding to the German experiments during World War II as a "great benefit to science," he intends to ". . . record the length of your endurance. The facts will be noted. One day my findings will be given to the world. Your deaths will have served the purposes of science. I never waste human material." Like Blofeld and Mr. Big he is a huge man with giant ambitions, hard past, and, as M's Chief of Staff says, a "daft name."

Fleming's unique and carefully designed narrative device of Bond-Villain/Villain-Woman/Bond-Woman relationship is carefully analyzed by novelist Umberto Eco in his essay "Narrative Structures of Fleming."[1] Affix detailed descriptions of cars and cocktails along with Fleming's fantastic plots, add some amazing gadgets, and then shake it together with this intricate set of relationships and you have the main ingredients of the Bond phenomenon. Fleming's books have spawned over twenty major motion pictures and a lucrative industry of Bond-related writings that have included a Bond biography, diaries of Miss Moneypenny, the exploits of the young Bond, and numerous novels starring 007, the first major work of these post-Fleming novels written by British writer Kingsley Amis (Colonel Sun, 1968).

Modern Villain

A rifle-toting, religious fanatic and heir to hundreds of millions of dollars is kept alive by a machine while he plots to kill thousands of people from a remote mountain hideaway through devoted henchmen. In an effort to topple Western civilization, he is assisted by his number two man, a medical doctor equally devoted to the religious cause, who has already planned and executed the assassination of a head of state.

Are these two human monsters part of Fleming's villains of SPECTRE? No, they are the infamous Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, devotees of the jihadist terror group Al Qaeda and self-proclaimed designers of numerous terror attacks including the destruction of the Twin Towers of New York in 2001.

Or what of the head of state who hatched kidnapping plots of OPEC ministers in Vienna, Austria during December of 1975 with the help of a Venezuelan Marxist-terrorist, while murdering thousands of men, women, and children in his own country with mustard gas and nerve agents because they were political enemies? Known for murdering and torturing unknown numbers of Iraqis, Saddam Hussein's heinous acts were fit for Fleming's darkest imaginings. The Venezuelan terrorist who planned and executed the Vienna kidnappings was the inimitable terrorist of the 1970's, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal.[2] Hussein was provided licenses to obtain pathogens as war weapons by the United States through President Reagan's special envoy Donald Rumsfeld in 1988. During the early stages of the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. hoped Hussein would use the germ and gas warfare as a deterrent against Iranian or Soviet aggression, but Hussein chose to use the pathogens against the Kurds on the Iran-Iraq border thinking he was eliminating his country of Iranian sympathizers. No need for a secret laboratory headed by a "Dr. No" -- the pathogens were supplied by the American Type Culture Collection in Virginia, the largest repository for germ warfare pathogens in the world at the time.[3]

And what of the multi-millionaire, South American drug lord who started his criminal career by selling stolen tombstones? While being known to build churches for impoverished Columbian villages and ball fields for children, Pablo Escobar became the most powerful man in Columbia and possibly South America by ruthlessly murdering hundreds of people in an effort to control the lucrative cocaine cartel. Imprisoned within a self-designed and appointed luxury suite in a Columbian prison, Escobar eventually escaped incarceration and was tracked down by electronic surveillance equipment in 1993. He was trapped in a Medellin, Columbia slum house where he died in a shootout.

[1] Lindner, Chris. The James Bond Phenomenon - A Critical Reader, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2003, pp. 34-55.

[2] The Venezuelan-born terrorist, whose real life was suitable for a Fleming villain, was the son of a middle-class real estate agent with communist sympathies. Sanchez' father sent Ilyich (named after Lenin) to Moscow for an education at Lamumba University, also known as the "University of Terrorism" since its staff consisted of 90% KGB agents. Captured in the Sudan in August 1995, sentenced to life in prison in France for kidnapping and murder, a mixture of Sanchez' life and legend became part of Robert Ludlum's "Bourne" novels.

[3] Thomas, Gordon. Secret Wars - One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6, St Martins, New York, 2009, p. 236.