Who was Ian Fleming...and who were the bad guys?

Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was an English author and journalist. Fleming is best remembered for creating the character of James Bond and chronicling his adventures in twelve novels and nine short stories.

Fleming was born into an upper-class land-owning English family. I think the Wikipedia entry on Fleming is as good as any other source for our purposes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming

So… he came from the upper class….his entry position was at the top level (aide to the head of Naval intelligence…and he was a planner for a specialized commando unit……and he was a journalist – covering spy trials and events in Moscow.

Many of the incidents in his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), come from actual events Fleming knew about due to his intelligence work. His second work, Live and Let Die (1954) again has the Soviets up against the Free World, but financing intelligence operations with gold sales and voodoo. The following year he published
Moonraker, about a wealthy industrialist wanting to destroy London.

In his 1956 novel, Diamonds are Forever, Fleming uses the illegal diamond trade in Africa to fund activities. By this time, Fleming has set up a system where despite the Cold War between the Soviets and NATO, the Russian characters are always involved in business means of funding operations.

Unlike other Cold War novelists, Fleming applied other devious means of fundraising in gold, diamonds, oil, etc. (Later in this seminar we will look at coltam in Africa) Perhaps these tales of fundraising schemes might have been interesting enough on their own without the backdrop of the tension between sides in the Cold War.

While other writers just faced off Yank/Brit agents with Soviet agents each funded by their respective governments, Fleming went the extra step of tossing out a semi-plausible possibility that some actions could be self-funded outside of government coffers.

But his big leap came later, when Fleming separated the action agents from the Soviet Union and allowed people to consider rogue agents just working for themselves.

When Thunderball came out in 1961, Fleming took another leap forward with the introduction of SPECTRE – the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – or a non-nation-based terrorist organization. So instead of the Soviet Union being behind all things bad, Fleming opened up the possibility that some non-nation players might enter the game.

But what the hell, this is just fiction……Right?

So, about 50 years ago, Ian Fleming set about exploring wild and sexy dramatic ways
for James Bond to battle in exotic places with industrialists, financiers, scientists and others who were not merely employees of an opposing government, but individuals in a way like Osama bin Laden who backed an idea and found the means to fund their terrorist movement.

In general, greed was the motivator for the enemies of James Bond, but in the real world other ideas, like fundamentalist religion, are powerful motivators for people to revolt against governments.

I like to mention Ian Fleming because of Chapter 11 in the 9/11 Commission Report about the lack of imagination shown by the U.S. in assessing the post-Cold War threat from rogue insurgent groups like Al Qaeda.

Back in 2001, the idea that Muslim rebels could find the funding and work together to train dedicated volunteers to hijack aircraft to fly into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and possibly the Capitol or White House, did seem to be the work of a novelist like Ian Fleming. That men could come into the U.S., attend flight training schools (no take-offs or landings, please), research aircraft schedules and airports, and then commandeer four aircraft nearly simultaneously and fly to population centers of business and government -- while the U.S. military sought guidance on defensive measures and the top leadership was in disarray and powerless to stop them – does seem like something out of a James Bond novel.

And the introduction of the suicide bomber as the poor man’s nuclear weapon….or that bypassing stockpiles of enemy munitions could mean most U.S. casualties in Iraq are from IEDs…..and the list goes on of very different people in a very different challenge to the U.S. and Europe and China.

Another journalist to consider is former newspaper and Associated Press reporter Thomas Harris. In 1975, he wrote his first novel, Black Sunday, about a diabolical plot to kill thousands with a blimp during the Superbowl.

Perhaps ahead of his time, the terrorism of 11 September, 2001, led to many stadiums being turned into no-fly zones due to fears of a similar attack. The novel was turned into a film – “Black Sunday” (1977) -- a very short two years after being published. Following its success, Harris devoted his career entirely to fiction and in 1981, wrote his first book in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy.

Journalists seem to be especially clever at adapting real life situations to international incidents. The daily interaction of reporters with criminals, cops, soldiers, politicians, and publicans seems to often give journalists a more realistic look at the ways that some dedicated individuals could challenge national governments. People with a military or intelligence background often lack this base-level tutoring from constant journalistic encounters with people at the top and bottom of society.

Governments often lack imagination -- especially when looking at potential enemies and the actions of people who do not have large forces or a tremendous treasury but do possess dedication.