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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
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CounterPunch
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Robert
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Arabs
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Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
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Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
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Footprints
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Max
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March 24 - March
30, 2002
50 Years of James Bond
By Alexander Cockburn
The most successful saga in postwar popular culture
got off to a conscientious start after breakfast on a tropical
morning in Jamaica early in 1952. Ian Fleming, forty-three years
old and ten weeks away from his first and last marriage, knocked
out about 2,000 words on his Imperial portable claiming (falsely)
that he was just passing time while his bride elect, Anne Rothermere,
painted landscapes in the garden. In fact Fleming had been planning
to write a spy thriller for years and he kept up the regimen
of2,000 daily words until, two months later, he was done, with
Commander James Bond recovering from a near lethal attack on
his testicles from Le Chiffre's carpet beater, Le Chiffre finished
off by a Russian, Vesper Lynd dead by her own hand, and a major
addition to the world's cultural and political furniture under
way.
On 16 January, 1962, ten years to the
day after Fleming had typed those first words of Casino Royale
('The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at
three in the morning') filming began on Dr No at Palisadoes airport
in Jamaica, with the British Secret Service and the CIA duly
represented by Sean Connery and Jack Lord. Fleming lived long
enough to see only two of the Bond films, Dr No and From Russia
With Love, before dying in August, 1964 of a heart attack helped
along by his seventy or so Morland's Specials
He has much to answer for. Without Fleming
we would have had no OSS, hence no CIA. The cold war would have
ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon,
no Reagan and no Star Wars.
Let those dubious of such assertions
study the evidence. It was Fleming, assistant to the director
of British naval intelligence during the Second World War, who
visited Washington DC in 1941 and wrote a long memo of advice
for General 'Will Bill' Donovan, President Roosevelt's Co-ordinator
of Information, whose duties included the collection of intelligence
and the planning of various covert offensive operations. According
to Ivar Bryce, a lifelong friend of Fleming's who was working
at the time for Sir William Stephenson, the director of Britain's
intelligence operations in the Americas, 'Ian wrote out the charter
for the COI at General Donovan's request ... He wrote it as a
sort of imaginary exercise describing in detail all the arrangements
necessary for financing, paying, organizing, controlling, and
training a secret service in a country which had never had one
before.'
Fleming's memo was dashed down in long-hand
over two days in the British Embassy with the diligence later
exhibited in his imaginative stints after breakfast in Jamaica.
It impressed Donovan who gave him a .38 Police Positive Colt
inscribed with the words 'For Special Services' and went on to
build the COI which later evolved into OSS and later still into
the CIA.
So, you see, it was all Fleming's fault.
He had a riotous imagination utterly unsuited to serious intelligence
collection and analysis. The offices of the British Admiralty
often rang with laughter at his mad schemes. It was Fleming who
suggested that British sailors be entombed in a giant lump of
concrete off Dieppe, from which they could keep watch on Dieppe
through periscopes. It was Fleming who proposed to send a cruiser
into Nazi waters with a transmitter beamed to the German Navy's
wave-length which would, in his words, 'keep up a torrent of
abuse, challenging the German naval commanders by name to come
out and do something about it. No sailor likes to be accused
of cowardice, and Germans are always particularly touchy.'
Fortified by such boyish fantasies, the
officers of OSS never wrought much damage to the foe, but, from
Donovan and his subordinate Allen Dulles downwards, learned to
exploit romantic public fantasies of what a secret service should
be. Thus they ensured their survival, if not in the field then
in the crucial bureaucratic battlegrounds of Washington.
At the end of the war the future of the
OSS hung in the balance. Alert to the importance of publicity
for their supposedly secret organization, Donovan and Dulles
lent every assistance to Hollywood producers racing to be first
in the theaters with an OSS movie. Paramount's man in this race
was Richard Maibaum, who, with Alan Ladd produced "OSS".
Donovan's aid was later responsible for turning the Bond novels
into film scripts. Maibaum recently recalled that 'before we
got done we had literally about ten technical agents all telling
us marvelous stories of what had happened to them all over the
world which we incorporated into the plot. There were foreshadowings
of things in the Bond films, - the pipe that was a gun, and other
gadgets. There were some things we couldn't use, such as foul
smelling stuff like an enormous fart that the OSS agents used
to spray on people they wished to discredit, and thus cause them
to be socially humiliated It was called Who, Me? We could never
get it in, because the Johnson office would never let us use
it.'
Soon the postwar audiences were enjoying
Maibaum's OSS along with Cloak and Dagger from Warner's and 13,
Rue Madeleine from Twentieth-Century Fox. This spy hype helped
the OSS resist bureaucratic extinction and instead metastasize
into the CIA.
Having engendered the OSS, Fleming now
began to lure Anthony Eden down the path of fantasy. Like many
in the small but enthusiastic fan club for Fleming's early thrillers,
Sir Anthony Eden rejoiced that in Fleming's pages, if not in
the real world, a Briton was capable of decisive, ruthless action.
Eden, as prime minister, resolved that the fortunes of 007 would
be reflected in bold deeds, undertaken by himself. In concert
with France and Israel he invaded Egypt in 1956. He had not studied
the works of his friend with sufficient care. Bond and his master,
M, placed the highest priority upon acting at all times with
the approval of the United States. In the case of Suez, President
Eisenhower said the invasion had to stop and it did. Twelve days
later Eden had an attack of what his spokesman called 'severe
overstrain' and his doctors urged him to spend a few weeks in
absolute seclusion and repose.
Once again Eden was overwhelmed by the
fantasies of his friend. After the war Fleming had bought a plot
of land on Jamaica's North Shore and built a small house on it.
To acquaintances trembling with cold in English winters Fleming
would body forth 'Goldeneye', his Caribbean paradise. In the
crisis, seeking rest, Eden and his wife decided to go to Goldeneye.
Fleming was delighted, since it raised the rental value of the
place and he was badly in need of cash. But for the Edens the
trip was unfortunate. The quarters were unalluring. Gazing into
the rafters of Goldeneye, the prime minister, already suffering
bouts of paranoia, fancied he saw rats. He was right. He consumed
days chasing them in the company of his two body-guards. Finally,
harrowed by lack of sleep, broken in health, he returned to London,
announced he was 'fit to resume my duties' and resigned three
weeks later.
In 1958, Fleming wrote Dr No, which advanced
the novel notion that Cuba, as the local representative of the
international Communist conspiracy, had perfected a reactor-based
instrument capable of sabotaging US missile tests, thus explaining
the Soviets' apparent advantage in space technology, as evidenced
by the launching of the Sputnik. Having proposed a fictional
Caribbean missile crisis, Fleming followed up in person. In the
spring of 1960 he was taken to dinner at the Washington home
of Senator and Democratic presidential candidate-elect Jack Kennedy.
The conversation turned to the problem of Castro. How should
he be dealt with? Fleming's imagination sprang into action. As
Fleming's biographer, John Pierson, reported the conversation,
he told the assembled company, which included a CIA man called
John Bross, that the United States should send planes over Cuba
dropping pamphlets, with the compliments of the Soviet Union,
to the effect that owing to American atom bomb tests the atmosphere
over the island had become radioactive; that radioactivity is
held longest in beards; and that radioactivity makes men impotent.
As a consequence the Cubans would shave off their beards, and
without bearded Cubans there would be no revolution.
Everyone, including Senator Kennedy,
laughed at the scheme. The next day Allen Dulles, director of
the CIA, telephoned a friend of Fleming to express regrets that
he had not been able to listen to Fleming's plans in person.
Within two years the Kennedy brothers along with Alien Dulles,
director of the CIA, were hiring gangsters to help in either
the murder or humiliation of Castro, with the latter being attempted
by a dust which would cause his beard to fall out. The subculture
of sabotage andassination coaxed into being by the Kennedys finally,
on November 22, 1963, turned back on the President.
Just as Eden helped raise the real estate
value of Goldeneye, so did President Kennedy augment the fortunes
of the fantasist. On 17 March, an article by Hugh Sidey in Life
announced that President Kennedy could read at a rate of 1,200
words a minute and had ten favorite books. From Russia With Love
was ninth, just ahead of Stendhal's The Red and the Black.
Bond became the embodiment of western
discourse on the Cold War. The men who would later construct
the Reaganite view of the universe turned time and again to their
Bond for edification. From him they learned that the Russians
use Bulgarians as "proxies" and thus the legend of
the KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope was born. They watched
Thunderball and conceived that terrorists, probably Libyans,
would steal atomic bombs and attack American cities. They worried
about germ warfare when they saw On Her Majesty's Secret Service
and about weather modificationwhen they saw The Man With the
Golden Gun. But it was the lasers in Diamonds Are Forever, along
with the space station in Moonraker that made the deepest impact.
Could missiles be destroyed in space? Could there be such a thing
as a space shield? To hand was a Bond sequel by John Gardner
called For Special Services in which the villain announces on
page 222 that -The Particle Beam once operational - will
prevent any country from launching a conventional [sic] nuclear
attack. Particle Beam means absolute neutralisation.- On March
23, 1983 President Reagan proposed a space-based defense system,
known as SDI, which would use lasers and particle beams. Star
Wars was born.
Bond was in poor ideological shape at
the beginning, running badly to seed in a way that would have
aroused the contempt of his fictional antecedent, the fascist
Captain Bulldog Drummond. In an exchange in Casino Royale with
the French agent Mathis, Bond unburdens himself of the following:
"The villains and heroes all get mixed up. Of course ...
patriotism comes along and makes it seem fairly all right, but
this country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out
of date. Today we are fighting communism. Okay. If I'd been alive
fifty years ago, the brand of conservatism we have today would
have been damn near called communism, and we should have been
told to go and fight that.'
It didn't take too long for Bond to straighten
himself out and declare unending war on evil in the manner prescribed
by Mathis. As Maibaum puts it, 'the basic success of Bond is
lan Fleming's James Bond syndrome: a ruthless killer who is also
St George of England, a modern day combination of morality and
immorality. In the age of the sick joke it clicked.'
Of course the Bond of the books was a
bit of a sicko, held together mostly by his sanction from the
state: licensed to kill. He could never keep any relationship
together, and if Vesper Lynd hadn't done herself in with a handful
of Nembutals before they got married she probably would have
got around to it in the end. What a prissy old autocrat of the
breakfast table he would have been, howling for his perfectly
brown egg, boiled for three and a third minutes and then put
in its Minton cup, next to the Queen Anne coffee pot and the
Cooper's Vintage Oxford marmalade!
There was something a bit common too
in all this insistence on the very best, as though Bond knew
that in the end he was, as the elegant Dr No put it in Maibaum's
line in the movie, 'nothing but a stupid policeman,' on hire
to the ruling class. Hence the great scene in From Russia With
Love, when the class impostor Bond, played by a working-class
boy from Edinburgh with a Scots burr in his voice, comes up against
the other class impostor and psychopath Red Grant, played by
Robert Shaw. 'Red wine with fish,' says Connery, 'I should have
known.' 'I may take red wine with fish,' Shaw gg hisses viciously,
'but you're the one on your knees now.'
Bond was in urgent need of a shrink.
Fleming himself had the good fortune to be cared for in his troubled
teens at Kitzbuhel in Switzerland by a couple called Forbes-Dennis,
who were much influenced by Alfred Adler. Mrs Forbes Dennis,
who wrote under the name Phyllis Bottome, thought the young Fleming
proof of Adler's theories, his impressive elder |g brother Peter
being the Adlerian Gegenspieler. 'The Gegenspieler; wrote Bottome
in her book on Adler, 'is a contemporary brother or sister by
whom the child felt dethroned ... in almost any intimate relationship
that follows, the child as he develops into the man will build
up the same perpetual antagonism between himself and any beloved
person.' The ^ subject, said Adler, pushes aside the world by
a mechanism consisting of 'hypersensitiveness and intolerance
... the neurotic man employs a number of devices for enabling
him to side-step the demands of reality.'
If Adler had lived long enough to visit
Pinewood in 1982 when they were making Octopussy and Superman
III he would have surely felt vindicated. Somewhere along the
line, in their post-imperial fantasy life, the British got muddled
about secrets and spying and sex and identity and the confusion
has been causing them endless trouble ever since. On a one-week
visit years ago to England I found the newspaper headlines were
replete with spy and sex scandals. The Thatcher government was
claiming that national security had been 'compromised,' by an
article about a British spy satel¬ lite.
Another story concerned Mrs Payne, a
woman on trial for running prostitutes, about whom Terry Jones,
of the Monty Python crew, has produced a film. According to the
account in The Independent, a tall man who dressed as a French
maid at Cynthia Payne's parties told yesterday how he was 'touched
up' by a man he later learned was a 'boisterous, tall and very
fat' undercover policeman. Keith Savage, with short cropped hair
and a Geordie accent, told a jury that the bearded officer put
his hand up his skirt and fondled his bottom. 'I was a bit upset
about the police bursting in and I thought this man was trying
to console me. But he got a bit overfriendly ... I think he had
a motive of a sexual nature.' Another policeman, he claimed,
was dressed effeminately wearing eye make-up and a monocle.
Click here to
conclude 50 Years of James Bond
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