The Vexed Relationship Between James Bond and Real-World Intelligence Work

This also reflects Bond’s origins in Fleming’s actual experience with the Naval Intelligence Division. “Casino Royale” was inspired by Fleming’s visit to a spy-infested casino in neutral Portugal, where he lost his travel allowance playing baccarat. The designation ‘007’ comes from the double-zero code applied to top-secret signals during World War II (itself derived from the 0075 ID number of the intercepted 1917 Zimmermann telegram). The characters of Bond, ‘M’ and Moneypenny were modelled on British intelligence figures. And the account in “Casino Royale” of Bond’s qualifying ‘double-O’ kills—a Norwegian working for the Germans in Sweden and a Japanese spy targeting the British in New York—mirrors much more prosaic case histories to which Fleming was privy.

It’s not just public perceptions that were shaped. John F. Kennedy was known to be Bond fan. Meeting Fleming at a 1960 dinner party, Kennedy, then a presidential candidate, sought his views on how to depose Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Bizarrely, Fleming’s tongue-in-cheek suggestions found their way into serious-minded reporting back to CIA headquarters (from a CIA officer, not Kennedy). Once in office, Kennedy’s predilection for Bond helped shape his (pre–Bay of Pigs) impressions of the CIA and its director, Allan Dulles.

This extends to intelligence professionals. In his book The real special relationship, Michael Smith cites one former MI6 officer recalling that Egyptian intelligence ‘held MI6 in such high regard that its training school used James Bond books as textbooks in tradecraft’. KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky claims that the Soviet Central Committee watched Bond films and that the KGB was instructed to source Bond gadgets, as if they were real.

A public understanding of espionage as modelled by Bond is one characterized by violence: he is more assassin and saboteur than spy. He’s also an incorrigible individualist, leaning occasionally on colleagues like ‘Q’ or the CIA’s Felix Leiter—when intelligence is fundamentally a team sport.

Part of Bond’s legacy is therefore that ‘many intelligent and otherwise well-informed people assume that intelligence consists in bumping people off rather than the more prosaic reality of talking to them in order to learn what they know; spies, after all, want living sources not dead ones,’ wrote Alan Judd in the introduction to the 2012 edition of “Casino Royale.”

This reveals a darker side to the distortional effects of the Bond franchise. What Amy Zegart calls ‘spytainment’ fills a vacuum in the public’s and policymakers’ understandings left by reticent US agencies and governments and exacerbated by the ‘culture of secrecy’ separating intelligence professionals from the community. (A point echoed by Dan Lomas about the UK.) At its most pernicious, this extends to those making policy about intelligence, and sometimes even to intelligence professionals themselves.

This blurring of myth and reality has led to a tendency to overstate intelligence capabilities, which can result in misperceived, simultaneous omnipotence and incompetence. Two examples are the disappointment engendered by the CIA’s inability to track down Osama bin Laden after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks and the conspiracy theories that arose in their wake. It has also led to the invocation of fake spies in efforts to make real policy, such as the citations of the ticking time bomb fallacy in US Supreme Court deliberations.

The answer, though, is not to completely eschew spy fiction. Rather, it needs to be balanced with an informed, necessarily prudent public understanding of those who act in the public’s name.

As Zegart concludes: ‘Using intelligence better starts with understanding intelligence better. Without developing a fundamental understanding of how intelligence agencies work and the trade-off involved in controversial intelligence policies, intelligence policy will suffer and the public will not know enough to demand better.’

Chris Taylor is the head of ASPI’s statecraft and intelligence program. He believes Timothy Dalton to be the best Bond and that “The Living Daylights” is a masterpiece—so perhaps you should factor that into your assessment of his judgements. The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and do not represent those of the Australian government or any agency of the Australian government. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).