The new James Bond 007 thriller SPECTRE hit theatres in the U.S. after having been released a week earlier in Europe and looks to be another big international hit. But where did S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (yes, it’s actually an acronym, at least in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels) first appear?
In 1958, Bond creator Ian Fleming worked with film producers Kevin McClory and Ivar Bryce, along with writer Ernest Cuneo and screenplay scribe Jack Whittingham, to launch a Bond film with a new story devised by the five of them. Delays ensued and Fleming adapted the completed screenplay for his 1961 007 novel Thunderball. (McClory & Whittingham, who had also worked on the screenplay with Fleming, were not happy about their work being novelized without their permission and sued him.)
After rejecting the Russians and the Mafia (!) as potential villains in the original screenplay and subsequent novel, it was decided that Bond would battle a new, wholly fictional criminal organization consisting of ex-intelligence agents, Nazi war criminals, and gangsters from various countries. Said organization would be called S.P.E.C.T.R.E., (hereafter, just plain SPECTRE), which stood for “the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion.”
SPECTRE would only appear in three of Fleming’s Bond novels (plus getting a shout-out in 1962’s The Spy Who Loved Me) but they would play a major part in both the books and films. But their setup and origin are first revealed in Thunderball.
Led by their founder and Chairman Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who, strangely enough, shares the same birthdate as Ian Fleming…), the SPECTRE organization steals two nuclear bombs from a hijacked RAF bomber. SPECTRE threatens to destroy two major cities unless their ransom (about 100,000,00 British Pounds) is delivered. The American and British intelligence forces combine to find the bombs in a joint campaign codenamed Operation Thunderball.
With help from his boss M, Bond deduces that the bombs are somewhere in the Bahamas and, after arriving there, meets up with the sister of one of the hijacked plane’s pilots, (who had been working for SPECTRE), Domino Vitali. Domino is there as the mistress of playboy treasure hunter Emilio Largo…who just happens to be SPECTRE’s top agent and the brains behind the extortion plot.
To say more would spoil the fun. Fleming’s usual compelling writing style is at its best here, from detailed descriptions of the hijacking and the military efforts to find the bombs, to even humorous offhand observations by the author. The characters are depicted well; there are genuine emotional feelings between Bond and Domino. Plus there are also some great underwater action sequences (the one where Bond finds the hijacked plane underwater, with its dead crew, will give you nightmares), culminating in an unexpected climax. And the SPECTRE Board Room scenes are both chilling and darkly funny at the same time.
SPECTRE, and Blofeld, would reappear in 1963’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and 1964’s You Only Live Twice.
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