James Bond remains a powerful recruitment tool for MI6, a secret intelligence expert says – despite claims that he is unrealistically posh and violent.
Dr Rory Cormac, associate professor of international relations with a specialty in secret intelligence at Nottingham university, said MI6 loved the positive brand provided by Ian Fleming’s fictional spy.
“They like the image it creates, as Bond is linked to British omnipotence and omniscience,” he told an audience at the Hay festival. “It is a great recruitment sergeant as well – although a lot of people who want to become James Bond get weeded out very early, as they are psychopaths.”
Cormac said the spy was also a positive for intelligence diplomacy. “When MI6 agents are trying to make contact with people in far-flung countries as part of operations, they have been known to be greeted, ‘Hello, Mr Bond!’ It helps to break the ice.”
In a rare interview in 2016, Alex Younger, the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, said the “fictional stereotypes” in Fleming’s books had created a view of an MI6 officer that bore no resemblance to reality.
“I’m conflicted about Bond,” he said at the time. “He has created a powerful brand for MI6: as C, the real-life version of M, there are few people who will not come to lunch if I invite them. Many of our counterparts envy the sheer global recognition of our acronym … were Bond to apply to join MI6 now, he would have to change his ways.”
Because of Bond, he said, “people have felt that there is a single quality that defines an MI6 officer, be it an Oxbridge education or a proficiency in hand-to-hand combat. This is, of course, patently untrue. There is no standard MI6 officer.”
On Thursday, Cormac said that Allen Dulles, director of the CIA between 1953 and 1961 when Fleming’s first Bond books were arriving on shelves, was a huge fan.
“Interestingly, the impact [of Bond] in America was as big as it was in Britain,” he said. “[Dulles] at the time loved all the James Bond stuff and he saw all the inventions and showed a copy to whoever was in charge of the CIA’s technical desk and said, ‘Get me this, get me this!’”
The pressure inspired the creation of a shoe loaded with a spring-loaded poison knife, as depicted in the first Bond novel that Dulles read, 1957’s From Russia with Love.
The CIA director and the author would go on to become friends, and Fleming would later include a reference to Dulles in The Man With The Golden Gun, ending the book with a scene in which Bond is shown reading Dulles’ 1963 book about his own career, The Craft of Intelligence.
