00 agent replacement waiting period

TheNextLeiter

I had this thought the other day about the waiting period of replacing a 00 agent after one retires, gets killed in battle, or has been missing for a long period of time.

In 'Skyfall', Bond is missing for a few months and is presumed dead. M even writes a eulogy for him. But there is no mention of a replacement agent to take the 007 number. This also happens in the novel 'The Man With the Golden Gun', with Bond being missing/presumed dead for a year. Again, no mention of someone else given the 007 handle.

So what do think the waiting period could be? I would imagine when an agent retires or a confirmed kill they would look for replacements soon after. For the case of missing/presumed dead, I would think 6 months would be an appropriate waiting period.

Gassy Man

I think there's s a difference between replacing a missing OO and, for lack of a better term, retiring his or her number. Bond got to 00 status pretty quickly -- too quickly, M says in Casino Royale. At the same time, for the purposes of avoiding confusion, I suspect a 00 number could be vacated a year or two before another person assumes it in order to avoid confusion.

Thunderpussy

Good observation TheNextLeiter, I'd never thought about it
before. Although I would agree with Gassy man. -{

CmdrAtticus

Mallory tells M it had been three months since she lost the hard drive (and Bond). I believe that during that time she probably had chosen a new recruit for the 00 section and they were probably being trained -there was no need to mention this in the film. In fact, the impression I got was that the failure of human intel with this operation was one of the points in the plot - that 00's were out of date with modern intel using high tech applications (which is what Silva and Q were all about). As far as being given his number - I always got from Fleming that these numbers were not handed it out in a strict numerical order but in a more random fashion in order to confuse the enemy. If I remember right there were only three 00's in the department.