These six words, heard by hundreds of millions of people, are almost invariably spoken during the first five minutes of each movie in one of the biggest media success stories of the twentieth century. Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past forty years, you hear them and you know at once that you’re about to be plunged into a two-hour-long adrenaline¹⁴-saturated extravaganza of snobbish fashionable excess, violence, sex, car chases, more violence, and Blowing Shit Up—followed by a postcoital cigarette and a lighthearted quip as the credits roll.

It wasn’t always so. When Casino Royale was first published in 1953, it got a print run of 4,750 hardcover copies and no advertising budget to speak of; while the initial reviews were favorable, comparing Ian Fleming to Le Queux and Oppenheim (the kings of the prewar British spy-thriller genre), it took a long time for his most famous creation to set the world on fire. Despite his rapidly rising print runs (Casino Royale eventually sold over a million paperbacks in the UK alone), and despite his increasing prominence among the postwar thriller writers, a decade elapsed before any of Fleming’s novels were filmed; indeed, their author barely lived to see the commercial release of Dr. No and the runaway success of the icon he created. (Nor were the films seen as a runaway success before they were made—Dr. No was notoriously made on a tight budget, even though it went on to gross nearly $60 million around the world.)

Literary immortality—or indeed, mere postmortem survival—is dauntingly hard for a novelist to achieve. The limbo of postmortem obscurity awaits 95 percent of all novelists—almost all novels go out of print for good within five years of the death of their author. But in addition to being a million-selling bestseller, Fleming was a ferociously well-connected newspaper executive with a strong sense of the value of his ideas, and he pursued television and film adaptation remorselessly. Cinematic success arrived just in time for his creation, and the synergy between bestselling books and massive movie hype has sufficed to keep them in print ever since.

James Bond is a creature of fantasy, perhaps best described using a literary term looted from that most curious and least respected of fields, fan fiction: the Mary-Sue. A Mary-Sue character is a placeholder in a script, a hollow cardboard cutout into whose outline the author can squeeze their own dreams and fantasies. In the case of Bond, it’s cruelly easy to make a case that the famous spy was his author’s Mary-Sue, for Fleming had a curious and ambiguous relationship with spying.

A dilettante and dabbler for his first three decades, unsuccessful as a stockbroker, foreign correspondent, and banker, Fleming fortuitously landed his dream job on the eve of the Second World War: Secretary to the Director of Naval Intelligence in the Admiralty. The war was good for Ian Fleming, broadening and deepening him and giving him a job that captured his imagination and drew out his not inconsiderable talents. But Fleming was the man who knew too much: privy to too many secrets, he was wrapped in tissue paper and prevented from pursuing his desire to go into the field. He ended the war with a distinguished record—and absolutely no combat experience (if one excludes being bombed by the Luftwaffe or watching the Dieppe raid from a destroyer safely far off the Normandy coastline). Fleming grew up in the shade of a father who died heroically on the Western Front in 1917, and in adult life, he wrote in the shadow of an elder brother whose reputation as a novelist surpassed his own. It’s easy to imagine these unkind familial comparisons provoking the imaginative but flighty playboy who almost found himself during the war, which goaded him into imagining himself in the shoes of a hero who was not merely larger than life, but larger in every way than his own life.

And, as it turns out, James Bond was larger than Ian Fleming. Not only do few novels survive their author’s demise, even fewer acquire sequels written by other hands; yet several other authors (including Kingsley Amis and John Gardner) have toiled in Fleming’s vineyard. Few fictional characters acquire biographies written by third parties—but Bond has not only acquired an autobiography (courtesy of biographer John Pearson) but spawned a small cultural industry, including a study of his semiotics by Umberto Eco. Now, that has got to be a sign of something . . .

As with every true pearl, there was a sand-grain of truth at the heart of Bond. Fleming wrote thrillers informed by his actual experience. Years spent working out of the hothouse environment of Room 39 of the Admiralty building—headquarters of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy—gave him a ringside seat on the operations of a major espionage organization. On various trips to Washington, DC, he worked with diplomats and officers of the OSS (predecessor organization to the CIA). There is also some evidence that, as a foreign news manager at the Sunday Times after the war, Fleming made his agency’s facilities available to officers of MI6. His first Bond novels were submitted to that agency for security clearance before they were published. Bond himself may have been larger than life, but the strictures imposed by the organization he worked for were drawn from reality, albeit the reality of an intelligence agency of the early 1940s.

The world of secret intelligence-gathering during the Second World War was, however, very different from life in the intelligence community today. It was already changing by the late 1950s, as the bleeping, football-shaped Sputniks zipped by overhead and intelligence directors began dreaming of spy satellites. By 2004, when MI5 (the counterintelligence agency) openly placed recruiting advertisements in the press, we can be sure that Bond would have been best advised to seek employment elsewhere. Spies are supposed to be short—less than 180 centimeters (5 feet 11 inches) for men—and nondescript. As a branch of the civil service, MI5’s headquarters are presumably nonsmoking, and drinking on the job is frowned upon. As intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6 staffs aren’t in the business of ruthlessly wiping out enemies of the state: any decision to use lethal force lies with the Foreign Secretary, the COBRA committee, and other elements of the British government’s security oversight bureaucracy. An MI6 agent driving a 1933 Bentley racer with a supercharged engine, frequenting the high-stakes table at a casino as James Bond so memorably did in his first print appearance, is an almost perfect inversion of the real picture.

Nevertheless, the archetype has legs. James Bond continued to grow and evolve, even after his creator put away his cigarette holder for the last time. To some extent, this was the product of storytelling expediency. The film adaptations started in the middle of a continuing story arc—for Fleming wrote his novels with a modicum of continuity—and while Dr. No was the first to make it to celluloid, the novel was in fact a sequel to From Russia with Love (which was filmed second). Thus, various liberties were taken with the plot of the canonical novels right from the start. You can read the novels at length without finding anything of the banter between Bond and M’s secretary Moneypenny that is a recurrent theme of the films, for example, and that’s before we get into the bizarre deviations of the midperiod Roger Moore movies (notably The Spy Who Loved Me and Moon-raker ).

The literary James Bond is a creature of prewar London club-land: upper-crust, snobbish, manipulative and cruel in his relationships with women, with a thinly veiled sadomasochistic streak and a coldly ruthless attitude to his opponents that verges on the psychopathic. Over the years, his cinematic alter ego has acquired the stamina of Superman, learned to defy the laws of physics, ventured into space—both outer and inner—and deflowered more maids than Don Juan. He’s also mutated to fit the prejudices and neuroses of the day, dabbling with (gasp!) monogamy, and hanging out with those heroic Afghan mujahedeen in the late-’80s AIDS-and-Soviets-era The Living Daylights. He’s worked under a ball-breaking postfeminist M in GoldenEye¹⁵, and even confronted a female arch-villain in The World Is Not Enough (an innovation that would surely have Fleming, who formed his views on appropriate behavior for the fairer sex in the 1920s, rolling in his grave). But other aspects of the Bond archetype remain timeless. Fleming was fascinated by fast cars, exotic locations, and intricate gadgetry, and all of these traits of the original novels have been amplified and extrapolated in the age of modern special effects.

Just how does James Bond—a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War,” to use the words the scriptwriters on GoldenEye so tellingly put into M’s mouth—survive in the popular imagination more than fifty years after his literary birth? What does it mean when Mary-Sue stalks the landscape of the imagination, blasting holes in the plot with a Walther PPK (or the P99 Bond upgraded to in Tomorrow Never Dies)? If we’re going to understand this, perhaps we ought to start by looking at Bond’s dark shadow, the Villain.

It is interesting to note that Blofeld assumed his primacy as Bond’s number-one enemy only in the movie canon; Fleming originally invented him while working on the screenplay and novel of Thunderball, and used him subsequently in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. (Prior to these later books, Bond typically tussled with less corporate enemies—Soviet stooges, unregenerate Nazis, and psychotic gangsters.) Blofeld was born out of mere corporate expediency. Rather than demonize the Soviets and reduce their potential audience, the producers of the film From Russia with Love appropriated SPECTRE as the adversarial organization. With the success of Thunderball, the fourth of the films, Blofeld moved front and center, and acquired a life of his own that far exceeded his prominence in the novels. Arguably, Fleming’s death in 1964 freed up the movie series to diverge from their original author’s plans; and so Blofeld may be seen as a demon of necessity, conjured up from the vasty deep in order to provide Bond with a worthy adversary.

’Twas not always so. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, around the time that the British spy thriller was gradually cohering out of the mists of the penny dreadful and the literature of suspense (via the works of John Buchan and Erskine Childers—not to mention the tangential contributions of Arthur Conan Doyle, by way of Sherlock Holmes), there was no dualistic vision of the great champion confronting the villainous heart of evil. There was no mighty champion: we were on our own against the masters of night and mist, the great and terrible supercriminals. Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s nemesis—the Napoleon of Crime—was but one of these: Fantômas, the 1911 creation of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, is another. The emperor of crime, Fantômas was a master of disguise and an agent of chaos (not to mention standing astride Paris in black mask, top hat and tails in the posters for the 1913 movie of the same name: an icon of decadent wealth and criminal chaos). Nor was he alone. Guy Boothby’s 1890s supervillain Dr. Nikola fits the bill, too, right down to the fluffy lap-cat and the fiendish plans. But perhaps the root of Bond’s nemesis can be found in his full-fledged form somewhat later, and somewhat further to the east—in the guise of Dr. Mabuse.

Dr. Mabuse is an archetype and a runaway media success in his own right, famous from five novels and twelve movies. The Doctor was created by author Norbert Jacques, and was developed into one of the most chilling creations of the silent era in 1922 by no less a director than Fritz Lang. Mabuse is a name, but one that nobody in their right mind speaks aloud. He’s a master of disguise, naturally, and a rich, well-connected socialite and gambler. (Some social context: gambling at the high-stakes table is not so much an innocuous recreation as an obscenity, in a decade of hyper-inflation and starvation, with crippled war veterans dying of cold on the street corners, as was the case in Weimar Germany.) Mabuse has his fingers in every pie, by way of a syndicate so shadowy and criminal that nobody knows its extent; he’s a spider, but the web he weaves is so broad that it looks like the whole of reality to the flies trapped within. He is (in some of the stories) a psychiatrist, skilled in manipulation, and those who hunt him are doomed to become his victims. If Mabuse has a weakness it is that his schemes are overelaborate and tend to implode messily, usually when his most senior minions rebel, hopelessly late; nevertheless, he is a master of the escape plan, and with his ability to brainwash minions into playing his role, he’s a remarkably hard phantom to slay.

It is all too easy to make fun of the likes of Fantômas and Dr. Nikola, and even their modern-day cognates such as Dr. Mabuse and Ernst Stavro Blofeld—for do they not represent such an obsessively concentrated pinnacle of entrepreneurial criminality that, if they really existed, they would instantly be hunted down and arrested by INTERPOL?

Careful consideration will lead one to reconsider this hasty judgment. Criminology, the study of crime and its causes, has a fundamental weak spot: it studies that proportion of the criminal population who are stupid or unlucky enough to get caught. The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended—indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized as not crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal a paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.

When the real Napoleons of Crime walk among us today, they do so in the outwardly respectable guise of executives in business suits and thousand-dollar haircuts. The executives of WorldCom and Enron were denizens of a corporate culture so rapacious that any activity, however dubious, could be justified in the name of enhancing the bottom line. They have rightfully been charged, tried, and in some cases jailed for fraud, on a scale that would have been the envy of Mabuse, Blofeld, or their modern successor, Dr. Evil. When you need extra digits on your pocket calculator to compute the sums you are stealing, you’re in the big league. Again, when you’re able to evade prosecution by the simple expedient of appointing the state prosecutor and the judges—because you’re the president of a country (and not just any country, but a member of the rich and powerful G8)—you’re certainly not amenable to diagnosis and detection in the same sense as your run-of-the-mill shoplifter or petty delinquent. I’m naming no names (They have intelligence services! Cruise missiles!), but this isn’t a hypothetical scenario.

“It took me a long time to understand the agenda that the British government was pursuing through the covert activities of MI6,” he told me over a glass of sweet tea. “Call me naïve, but I really believed—at least at first—that they were honest capitalists, the scoundrels.”

Over the course of an hour, Ernst explained to me how he first became aware that the UK was attempting to sabotage his business interests. “It was back in 1960 or thereabouts that they first tried to destroy one of my subsidiaries. Until then I hadn’t really had anything to do with them, but I believe one of my rivals in the phosphate mining business at the time put it about that my man on site was some sort of spy, and they sent this Bond fellow—not just to arrest my man or charge him with some trumped-up nonsense, but to kill him.” His lips paled with indignation as he contemplated the iniquity of the situation: that agents of the British government might go after an honest businessman for no better reason than an unsubstantiated allegation that he was spying on American missile tests. “I warned Julius to be careful and advised him to put a good lawyer on retainer, but what good are lawyers when the people you’re up against send hired killers? Julius brought in security contractors, but this Bond fellow still murdered him in the end. And the British government denies everything, to this day!”

Ernst obviously believes in his own moral rectitude, but I had to ask the obvious questions, just for the record.

“Yes, I was chief executive of SPECTRE for twelve years. But you know, SPECTRE was entirely honest about its activities! We had nothing to hide because what we were doing was actually legal. We’ve been mercilessly slandered by those rogues from MI6 and their friends in the newspapers, but the fact is, we’re no more guilty of criminal activity than any other multinational today: we simply had the misfortune to be foreign and entrepreneurial at a point in time when Whitehall was in the grasp of the communist conspirators Wilson and Callaghan, and their running-dog, so-called ‘Conservative’ fellow Heath. And we were pilloried because what we were doing was in direct competition with the inefficient state-run enterprises that my good friend Lady Thatcher recognized as mosquitoes battening on the life-blood of capitalism. That cad Fleming put it about that SPECTRE stands for ‘Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion’—absolute tosh and nonsense! Would a group of criminals really call themselves something that blatant? I’ll remind you that SPECTRE is actually a French acronym, as befits a nonprofit charity incorporated in Paris. The name stands for ‘Société professionelle et éthique du capital technologique réinvesti par les experts.¹⁶ Venture capitalists specializing in disruptive new technologies, in other words—commercial space travel, nuclear power, antibiotics. Not some kind of half-baked terrorist organization! But you can imagine the threat we posed to the inefficient state monopolies like the British Aircraft Corporation, the coal mining industry, and Imperial Chemical Industries.”

Blofeld paused to sip his tea thoughtfully.

“We were ahead of our time in many ways. We pioneered business methods that later became mainstream—Sir James Goldsmith, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, they all watched us and learned—but by then, the commies were out of power in the West thanks to our friends in the establishment, so they had an easier time of it. No need to hire lots of expensive security and build concrete bunkers on desert islands! And yes, that made us look bad, don’t think I’m unaware of it—but you know, you want bunkers and isolated jungle rocket-launch bases? All you have to do is look at Arianespace! It’s fine when the government bureaucracies do it, but if an honest businessman tries to build a space launch site, and hires security to keep the press and saboteurs from foreign governments out, it’s suddenly a threat to world security!”

He paused for a while. “They put the worst complexion on everything we did. The plastic surgery? Well, we had the clinic, why not let our staff use it, so the surgeons could sharpen their skills between paying customers? It was a perk, nothing more. We did—I admit it—acquire a few companies trading in exotic weapons, nonlethal technologies mostly. And that business with Emilio and the yacht, I admit that looked bad. But did you know, it originally belonged to Adnan Khashoggi or Fahd ibn Saud or someone? Emilio was acting entirely on his own initiative—a loose cannon—and as soon as I heard about the affair I terminated his employment.”

I asked Ernst to tell me about Bond.

“Listen, this Bond chap, I want you to understand this: however he’s painted in the mass media, the reality is that he’s a communist stooge, an assassin. Look at the evidence. He works for the state—a socialist state at that. He went to university and worked with those traitors Philby and Burgess, that MacLean fellow—communist spies to a man. He didn’t resign his commission when the British government went socialist, like a decent fellow; instead he took assignments to go after entrepreneurs who were a threat to the interests of this socialist government, and he rubbed them out like a Mafia button man. There was no due process of law there, no respect for property rights, no courts, no lawyers—just a ‘License to Kill’ enemies of the state, loosely defined, who mostly happened to be businessmen working on start-up projects that coincidentally threatened state monopolies. He’s a damned commissar. Do you know why Moscow hated him? It’s because he’d beaten them at their own racket.”

Blofeld was clearly depressed by this recollection, so I tried to change the subject by asking him about his personal management philosophy.

“Well, you know, I tend to use whatever works in day-today situations. I’m a pragmatist, really. But I’ve got a soft spot for modern philosophers, Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand: the rights of the individual. And I’ve always wanted to remake the world as a better place, which is probably why the establishment dislikes me: I’m a threat to vested interests. Well, they’re all descended from men who were threats to vested interests, too, back in the day, only I threaten them with new technologies, while their ancestors mostly did their threatening with a bloody sword and the gallows. I don’t believe in initiating force.” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “I suppose you could call me naïve.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Bond milieu is the prevalence of technologies that are strangely out of place. Belt-buckle grappling hooks with wire spools that can support a man’s weight? Laser rifles? These aren’t simple extrapolations of existing technology—they go far beyond anything that’s achievable with today’s engineering tools or materials science. But forget Bond’s toys, the products of Q division. From Blofeld’s solar-powered orbital laser in Diamonds Are Forever to Carver’s stealth cruiser in Tomorrow Never Dies, we are surrounded by signs that the adversary has got tricks up his sleeve that far outweigh anything Bond’s backers can provide. These menacing intrusions of alien superscience—where could they possibly have gotten them from?

The answer can be discerned with little difficulty if one cares to scrutinize the writings of the sage of Providence, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This scholar—whose path, regrettably, never crossed that of the young Ian Fleming—asserted that our tenancy of this planet is but a recent aberration. Earth has in the past been home for a number of alien species of vast antiquity and incomprehensibly advanced knowledge, and indeed some of them may still linger alongside us—on the high Antarctic plateau, in the frigid oceanic depths, even in strange half-breed colonies off the New England coastline.

If this strikes you as nonsensical, first contemplate your nearest city: How recognizable would it be in a hundred years’ time if our entire species silently vanished tomorrow? How recognizable would it be in a thousand years? Would any relics still bear witness to the once-proud towers of New York or Tokyo, a million years hence? Our future—and the future of any once-proud races that bestrode our planet—is that of an oily stain in the shale deposits of deep history. Earth’s biosphere and the active tectonic system it dances upon cleans house remorselessly, erasing any structure that is not alive or maintained by the living.

Consider also the extent to which we really occupy the planet we live on. We think of ourselves as the dominant species on Earth—but 75 percent of the Earth’s entire biomass consists of bacteria and algae that we can’t even see with the naked eye. (Bacteria from whose ranks fearsome pathogens periodically emerge, burning like wildfire through our ranks.) Nor do we, in any real sense of the word, occupy the oceans. Certainly our trawlers hunt the bounty of the upper waters. But submarines (of which there are only a few hundred on the entire planet) fumble like blind men through the uppermost half-kilometer of a world-ocean that averages three kilometers in depth, unable to dive beneath their pressure limits to explore the abyssal plains that cover nearly two-thirds of the planetary surface. Finally, the surface (both the suboceanic abyss and the thin skin of dry land we cling tenuously to) is but a thousandth of the depth of the planet itself; we can’t even drill through the crust, much less contemplate with any certainty the nature of events unfolding within the hot, dense mantle beneath.

We could be sharing the planet with numerous powerful alien civilizations, denizens of the high-energy condensed-matter realm beneath our feet, and we’d never know it—unless they chose to send emissaries into our biosphere, sprinkling death rays and other trade goods like glass beads before the aboriginal inhabitants, extracting a ghastly price in return for their largesse . . .

It’s no coincidence that the Cold War was the golden age of spying—the peak of the second-oldest profession, the diggers in the dark, the seekers after unclean knowledge and secret wisdom. Prior to 1939, spying of the international kind rather than the sordid domestic variety (let us pass swiftly over the tawdry Stasi archives of sealed glass jars full of worn underwear, kept as scent cues for the police dogs) was a small scale, largely amateurish concern. With the outbreak of the Second World War, it mushroomed. Faced with employment vacancies, the first response of a growing organization is to recruit close to home. Just like any 1990s dot-com start-up, growing as the founders haul in all their friends and anyone they know who has the right skill set, the 1940s espionage agencies were a boom town into which a well-connected clubbable London playboy would inevitably be sucked—and, moreover, one where he might try his hand and succeed, to everyone’s surprise. (In the 1990s he’d end up in marketing, with stock options up to here. Sic transit gloria techie.)

When the Second World War gave way to the Doomwatch days and Strangelove nights of the Cold War, it entered a period in which the same clubbable fellow might find himself working in a mature organization, vastly larger and more professional than the half-assed amateurism of the early days. The CIA was born in the shadow of the wartime OSS, and grew into the emblematic Company (traders in secrets, overthrowers of governments), locked in titanic struggle with that other superpowered rival, the KGB (and their less well-known fellows in the GRU).

The age of the traditional sneak-spies with their Minox cameras gave way to the era of the bugging device. With the 1960s came a new emphasis on supplementing human intelligence (HUMINT) with intelligence from electronic sources (ELINT). New agencies—the NSA in the United States, GCHQ in the UK—expanded as the field of “spyless spying” went mainstream, aided by the explosion in computing power made possible by integrated circuits and, later, the microprocessor. As telephony, television, telex, and other technologies began to come online, a torrent of data poured through the wires, a deluge that threatened to drown the agencies in useless noise. Or was it the whispering on the deep-ocean cables? Maybe the chatter served to conceal and disguise the quiet whispering of the hidden oracles, dribbling out strange new concepts that warped the vulnerable primate minds to serve their inscrutable goals. The source of the incredible new technologies that drove the advances of the mid-twentieth century was, perhaps, the whispering of an alien farmer in the ears of his herd . . .

Times change, and the golden age of spying is over. We’ve delivered the harvest of fear that the Secret Masters desired; or maybe they’ve simply lost interest in us for the time being. Time will tell. For now, be content that it’s all over: the Cold War was a time of strangely rapid technological progress, but also of claustrophobic fear of destruction at three minutes’ notice, of the thermonuclear stars coming and bringing madness and death in their wake. Retreat into your soap-bubble universe, little primate, and give thanks.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Bond was a poor archetype for a hero; certainly he couldn’t save us from the gibbering horrors of the Cold War, but only cast a shadow beneath their unblinking ground-zero glare. But we found salvation in the end, in the most unlikely place of all: if you turn on the TV you’re likely to see one of old Ernst’s protégés being held up for praise as an object of emulation. President of Italy, captain of industry, or chief executive of Enron—SPECTRE won and it’s their world that we live in, the world of the lesser evil.