A S.P.E.C.T.R.E. is haunting Europe

And globally.  But not the spectre of communism.  The organisation that owns the James Bond rights have resolved the legal dispute with Kevin McClory’s estate and now Ernst Stavro Blofeld can return, along with the SPecial Executive for Crime, Terror, Revenge and Extortion.  This is a moment I have waited for a long, long time.  The relaunch of Bond in 2006 had the omnipresent group Quantum standing in for S.P.EC.T.R.E. but it could now be written that Quantum is just a front for the original criminal empire.  Though legally, S.P.E.C.TR.E. and large parts of Thunderball was the intellectual property of McClory, Blofeld was not, named as he was after the cricket commentator and Ian Fleming friend, Henry Blofeld.  But after an initial proposal to have a group of nihilists to depose Blofeld as head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.  in The Spy Who Loved Me was shelved because the ongoing court battle might have delayed the release date past the 15^th anniversary, all references were cut, to the extent that there is a an oblique reference in the pre-titles sequence in For Your Eyes Only, where, after Bond lays flowers on his wife’s grave, there is just a bald guy in a wheelchair and neck brace, with white cat, who is dropped down a chimney in pre-development London Docklands (sans cat).

As with part of the plot of Diamonds Are Forever, there was always the prospect that even this person was just another Blofeld double.  Now that Never Say Never Again is being talked of being made ‘official’, that intriguing prospect makes the Blofeld double argument plausible as he pops up again two years later, played by Max von Sydow (in yet another change of appearance, in accordance with the novels).  Whether this addition to the canon would be after or before Octopussy is largely immaterial but Bond does have to retire and then come back.

S.P.E.C.T.R.E. was the replacement for Smersh (an abbreviation of Smiert Spionem – death to [foreign] spies), the Soviet spycatchers, as peaceful co-existence between the West and the Soviet bloc seemed ever more likely in the wake of de-Stalinisation in the USSR.  A mafia of mafias with its tentacles stretched around the world was seen as a neutral replacement (though with obvious subtext).  I still believe it was a play on Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto tract by dedicated anti-communist Fleming, so S.P.E.C.T.R.E. became a convenient stand-in for Smersh as Quantum did for the former.  Now it can flourish again in all of its malignancy with the Bond villain sans pareil heading it up once more.