Bond Before Being Licensed as an 00 Agent?
Dovy
Posts: 206MI6 Agent
According to the Craig incarnation M promoted him to an 00 agent, licensed to kill, which suggests that she was his boss BEFORE that? It seems that an agent is promoted after two successful previous assassinations. But how could an agent assassinate if he/she wasn't already licensed? Anyway, in this incarnation Bond was not previously a Navy commander, so where did he come from, and what kind of agent was he before M licensed him?
Comments
You can still kill people in the line of duty without being a OO. And Craig’s Bond is still a Commander in the RNR, they just changed his background slightly by having him serve in the SBS also.
Then what changes with being licensed??
I think the idea of a licence to kill in the fiction of Bond is that Double-0s are sanctioned to kill in the line of duty and M entrusts them with the responsibility of deciding that themselves when on a mission. Lesser agents are only allowed to kill specifically when ordered by M to do so: so I guess Bond earns the double 0 by killing two people who he has been specifically told to assassinate.
From then on, although it's obviously not legal in the countries he visits, he is trusted to kill people he needs to kill without having to request permission from HQ.
That sounds very realistic. Thanks. So in the pre-movie life of Bond he is merely an agent who was given a specific assignment to kill someone and nothing more. And he wasn't known yet with the title 007. What a great idea for a couple of prequels! The life of James Bond BEFORE HE became 007. But what happened if he still had to kill in the line of duty before the license?
No, Bond wasn’t an agent in ‘pre-movie’ life…he was (in the DC universe) with the SBS, who have to occasionally kill people in their line of work…he would then have been recruited by MI6 and given desk work until a suitable target came up…
Not quite: according to the CR 'dossier' on Bond's history from the official website at the time, prior to being a double 0 his record was:
British Embassy staff, Kingston, Jamaica:
Duties included: translations of Haitian, French and Dutch West Indies communiqués, interdiction efforts with gun and drug smuggling between Kingston and London (resulting in a letter of commendation from his superior, Charles DaSilva), and four days Black Ops recce into Cuba, penetrating military compounds.
MI6 HQ, London
Bond continued to work as a Mission Specialist (re: Black Ops) in such locations as Cuba, the United States, Austria, Spain, Russia, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, the Sudan, and the UAE.
So a bit more than a desk job!
Prior to SIS he served with Naval Intelligence, 030 Special Forces Unit and then Defence Intelligence Group RNR. Although he volunteered for SBS and took the training, he didn't serve with the standard SBS units.
Cmd. Bond' s work with the Defence Intelligence Group at Defence Intelligence and Security Centre, Chicksands, proved highly satisfactory, although his fellow officers noted Bond' s rather casual attitude toward command structure and protocol. Cmd. Bond' s work provided vital intelligence during key moments with Libya, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Indonesia, China (during the Hong Kong handover) and North Korea. In Libya, Bond was able to secure detailed assessments of the status of the Libyan government' s reputed financial ties to numerous terrorist organizations, as well as crucial information related to the settlement of issues related to the Pan Am 103 case. In Iraq, Cmd. Bond was able to monitor Iraqi counter-moves to the UNSCOM (now UNMOVIC) inspections process during one key period. Cmd. Bond undertook a particularly hazardous mission into Afghanistan to rescue a researcher deemed important to Her Majesty' s government who was being imprisoned by the Taliban government. During the S-300 missile crisis in Cyprus, Cmd. Bond helped undermine the Republic of Cyprus government' s confidence, and, it is felt, helped bring a peaceful resolution to the matter. During his tenure at the DI Group RNR, Bond attended specialized courses at Cambridge (where he achieved a first in Oriental Languages), Oxford and other institutions. Bond left the DI Group RNR after recruitment by the MI6.
Now we know there is little "continuity" among all the Bond actors, so each Bond might have a different history. It seems that Roger Moore's Bond displayed the most information. He was highly educated at major universities, became a naval commander and was familiar with many languages. But Craig's Bond doesn't strike me having that kind of background. I may be wrong.
And Moore’s Bond served on the Ark Royal of course, which Craig’s didn’t 😄
As you see from the bio above, CraigBond did take ‘specialised courses’ at various universities.
this is awesome @emtiem never saw that before. Theres at least a dozen separate countries listed there, so he's already been on lots of missions, must have kept him busy for many years.
I like this detail, because its from Fleming!
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British Embassy staff, Kingston, Jamaica:
Duties included: translations of Haitian, French and Dutch West Indies communiqués, interdiction efforts with gun and drug smuggling between Kingston and London (resulting in a letter of commendation from his superior, Charles DaSilva), and four days Black Ops recce into Cuba, penetrating military compounds.
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see this bit from Casino Royale
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Bond knew Jamaica well, so he asked to be controlled from there and to pass as a Jamaican plantocrat whose father had made his pile in tobacco and sugar and whose son chose to play it away on the stock markets and in casinos. If inquiries were made, he would quote Charles DaSilva of Chaftery's, Kingston, as his attorney. Charles would make the story stick. (Chapter 4: L'Ennemi Écoute, PAN edition pg 27)
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and again from Live and Let Die
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Bond knew Jamaica well. He had been there on a long assignment just after the war when the Communist headquarters in Cuba was trying to infiltrate the Jamaican labour unions. It had been an untidy and inconclusive job but he had grown to love the great green island and its staunch, humorous people. Now he was glad to be back and to have a whole week of respite before the grim work began again. (Chapter 13: The Undertaker’s Wind, PAN edition pg 180)
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this is awesome @emtiem never saw that before.
My pleasure. Yes it was all on the official Casino Royale website at the time, long gone now of course. It listed a birth date for Bond too, which slipped forward in time as the films went along (just like Fleming!). A bit of documentation seen in Spectre had him younger than he was in CR.
Here's the rest of the dossier, saved for posterity. It's a really fun read:
https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/bond_21_007_dossier1
I came across some interesting points about "Bond's" background online back to Dr. No, which I didn't even pay attention to!
In the briefing meeting with M the First M talks about what Bond was doing before. We find out that in the previous operation Bond ended up spending 6 months in the hospital and sort of given up for dead, and that M was successful somehow in preventing the deaths of one 00 after the other to the tune of 40%. Apparently Bond's earlier accident had to do with the kind of gun he was using, i.e. a Beretta instead of a Walther during the previous 10 years. Most interesting is that it hadn't been too long before than Bond was only involved in "standard intelligence duties", whatever that was, and was not yet licensed to killed as a 00 operative. Standard duties could involve desk work, research and the like, and as proposed by another poster, specific targeted killing assignments or intelligence gathering. This indicates that in the not too distant past before Dr. No James Bond was armed with a self-defense Beretta (or targeted assassination assignments) for a TEN YEAR period, i.e. from around 1952 to 1961 before his last assignment when he was badly injured. It's curious as to what M actually did to reduce killing of his (pre-Bond) 00 operatives to the tune of 40%.......
speaking of which agent @Dovy ...
I don't believe you filed reports on the first two films?
dovu said:
We find out that in the previous operation Bond ended up spending 6 months in the hospital and sort of given up for dead
...
Apparently Bond's earlier accident had to do with the kind of gun he was using, i.e. a Beretta instead of a Walther during the previous 10 years.
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theres a bit of a paradox here, as this dialog was straight from Fleming's novel, and the previous mission that landed Bond in the hospital was ... From Russia With Love!! but since in the film adaptations, FRWL is explicitly a sequel to Dr No (and Bond doesn't end up n the hospital) he must be referring to some other Unseen Mission, left to our imaginations.
an interesting thing I just noticed about those "ten years" is that would take us back to when Fleming was writing Casino Royale (jan/feb 1952). I wonder if that was intended, or if 10 years was just a good round number? a couple of later volumes imply Bond was assigned the double oh number sometime in 1950.
It sounded to me as if it was referring to a previous operation before Dr. No, perhaps when Bond first became an 00
I think my first posting was about Goldfinger. I guess I could do the first two at some point
In the novels, Bond is said to have earned his 00-prefix thanks to 2 assassinations during the war.
CR novel was published 1953, so he has been a 00 for abut 8 years, if the licencing was immediate. If he was assigned his 00-prefix in -51, then earlier missions would have been taken into account when these assignments were considered.
Also, the beretta could easily be a carryover from the war (in the novels) since Bond was employed in intelligence duties already in that time.
-Mr Arlington Beech
@0073 said:
In the novels, Bond is said to have earned his 00-prefix thanks to 2 assassinations during the war.
CR novel was published 1953, so he has been a 00 for abut 8 years, if the licencing was immediate.
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absolutely right, the first kill in particular must have happened before Pearl Harbour as it took place in the Japanese Consulate in New York. and the second kill is a traitor who'd been collaborating with Germany.
Its in From Russia with Love, where SMERSH says they first documented Bond's double oh status in October(?) 1950. They could just have been late in learning that. but in Goldfinger (written jan/feb 1958) it is also stated Bond has been a double oh for about six years.
So if we accept those clues from later books, why would MI6 wait eight years to give him his promotion?
John Pearson deals with this in his Bond Biography by having Bond quit the service at the end of WWII, then rehired just as the double oh program is introduced. Casino Royale is his second mission as double oh according to Pearson, the unseen Jamaican mission is his first.
Anthony Horowitz has a very elegant solution in Forever and a Day: it took until 1950 to gather the evidence needed to justify Bond's second kill. Both Pearson and Horowitz have Bond promoted to double oh in 1950, as does John Griswold in his Bond Chronology and Annotations.
but why would Fleming confuse the question by making those first two kills explicitly wartime events?
I have a theory; first of all remember Fleming was making it up as he went along and Casino Royale was his first book, he had no idea it'd be a series when he wrote it, and did not know he'd be planting those later clues.
But the other thing is, he has said many times he had the idea for his first novel when he himself was in the Secret Service during the war (he actually did try to out-gamble a Gestapo agent in a Portuguese casino and lost badly). He still had that raw idea in mind when he finally got time to write his "spy story to end all spy stories" and may not been clear in his mind that this story he was writing was "happening" in more current times, he may have been thinking it was happening in ~1946 or so as he wrote (though he does give the date 1950 a couple of times when giving backstories to le Chiffre and Royale les Eaux)
What happened to the 00 department whenever Bond leaves the service? Are there ongoing cases going on in the world requiring services of other 00 operatives? I wondered about it at the end of Spectre when Bond went to see Q to get his Astin Martin back.
Well 009 is a character in Spectre: Bond even steals his car.
I think I remember Sam Mendes saying that in his head, 009 was played by Damian Lewis.
In other words is there a "Bond" saga with M and Q working on heavy issues with other successful operatives without Bond in the picture? I suppose that would be a subject for a "Bond-type" story in fanfiction!
My idea about this is, that the two killings that earned Bond his 00-prefix were killings of legitimate enemies in "hot war". Fleming writes quite often in the novels how Bond resents this part of his work, calling it murder. Maybe it is just that the killings alone do not warrant promotion to the 00 -section, and Bond had to get further experience in intelligence operations before being considered for 00. We know that in Flemings 00 -section, there are 3 operatives, who are senior members of the service. This is why M as the head of the service sends Bond out on his missions, instead of CoS or somebody else. So the question is: are they senior because of the 00 -status or do they need to be senior to get the 00 -status?
Interesting twist in this "licensed to kill" thing is, that in the short story "The Living Daylights" there is a part where it is discussed other options for the shooter, so in Flemings Bond universe assassinations are not just for the 00 -section.
-Mr Arlington Beech
there actually is a brand new novel with this very premise:
Double or Nothing by Kim Sherwood, first of a trilogy, following the adventures of three other double oh's after Bond has gone missing
Is there ever any explanation about Bond (starting with Roger Moore) being called COMMANDER? If he was a naval commander, he would have been at a higher level in MI6 than merely regular investigative duties before being 007 as was his role mentioned by M in Dr. No. A naval commander would presumably never have simply been an MI6 operative without a license as an 00 operative on ordinary missions. Any thoughts about this?
I think the Commander thing is a bit of a hangover from Bond’s origins as a character who would have fought in WW2, when folks rose through the ranks quickly. Commanders today take a bit longer to reach that rank and are generally a bit older than Bond (there’s a stat around about average ages), as it is a pretty high rank. Captains of large Naval ships are at the Commander rank quite often. Bond isn’t a usual sort of guy of course, but I’m not sure the Commander thing does make a huge amount of sense today, or at least not as much as it did in the books.
If you have a read of the dossier on CraigBond I posted above they do a decent enough job of making it seem plausible; and he wasn’t just engaging in investigative desk jobs; he was on black ops missions and the like.
You mean according to the Craig universe? Because it seems that in Dr. No at least Bond had previously had a lower level intelligence position in MI6 that would have seemed unsuitable for a "commander". I realize there are inconsistencies in terms of continuity between one Bond and another, which can never be reconciled except with a very healthy dosage of real science fiction!
I just found a Youtube interview with the author of Double or Nothing. Looks to be interesting.