Guide to James Bond

Darko Kerim – renamed Kerim Bey in the film – appears in From Russia With Love as the long-time head of Station T in Istanbul. With a Turkish father and English mother, M says, that he is “one of the best men we’ve got anywhere”. He was two inches taller than Bond and broader. Though dissipated and debauched, his face radiated life. As they were both interested in eating, drinking and women, Bond and Kerim became firm friends. Unfortunately, Kerim was killed after one outing on the Orient Express.

In the novel You Only Live Twice, Bond is given a guided tour of the bars and geisha houses of Tokyo by Australian intelligence officer Dikko Henderson, who isn based on Fleming’s friend Dick Hughes, the Asian correspondent for The Times. In the film, there is also a Dikko Henderson, played not noticeably as an Australian by Charles Gray, who went on to play Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever. The movie Dikko is a kimonko-wearing ex-soldier with an artificial leg,s who has settled in Japan. He gets killed, stabbed through the paper wall, when discussing the missing American spacecraft. In the book, Henderson introduces Bond to the head of the Japanese Secret Service, Tiger Tanaka, based on Fleming’s friend Torao “Tiger” Saito. In the movie, Bond is led to Tanaka by his contact Aki. Tanaka studied at Oxford and was naval attaché at the Japanese Eembassy in London. During the war, he became a kamikaze pilot, but was saved by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Interested in drinking and women, Tanaka and Bond soon bond.

Bond’s ally at Scotland Yard is Ronnie Vallance, assistant commissioner in charge of Special Branch Brand and the boss of Bond girl Gala Brand in Moonraker. Vallance reappears in Diamonds Are Forever. It is Vallance who discoversed that the conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone arewere being smuggled through London, but as the diamonds are travelling on to the US he needs the help of the Secret Service and Bond. As the drugs in the short story “Risico” are coming from Italy, Vallance co-opts a reluctant M and Bond again.

In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he becomes, more formally, Sir Ronald Vallance of the CID. M phones him at home on Christmas Dday to discover him reading a report on teenage prostitution. Then in “The Property of a Lady”, Bond uses Vallance’s name to establish his credentials when visiting the Fabergé egg dealer Wartski. Vallance also appears in Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun where he is called in after M has been kidnapped.
Captain Troop and Sir James Molony

In From Russia With Love, Bond is irritated by the Secret Service’s paymaster Captain Troop, head of admin. They sat together on a cCommittee of iInquiry in the aftermath of the defection of Burgess and Maclean and fell out over the recruitment of “intellectuals” to the Service. The eminent neurologist Sir James Molony appears in Dr. No, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice and The Man wWith the Golden Gun, usually expressing concern about the state of Bond’s health.

As head of the KGB, General Gogol should be Bond’s arch- enemy. In his first appearance in the film The Spy Who Loved Me, it is clear that he has sent agents to kill Bond. But soon M and Gogol then form a pact to find out what is happening to their submarines. He makes a brief appearance in Moonraker warning that, if the Americans fail to destroy Hugo Drax’s space station, the Soviet Union willwould take action.

In For Your Eyes Only, he tries to buy the ATAC unit from Kristatos. When Bond throws it over a cliff, Gogol stops his guard shooting Bond. Bond then remarks that the destruction of the ATAC is part of the policy of détente; , Gogol laughs and leaves without saying another word. Then in Octopussy, Gogol opposes General Orlov’s plans to invade Western Europe. Gogol is responsible for Orlov’s death, while the plan is thwarted by Bond, putting them on the same side once again.

Gogol tries to stop renegade KGB agent Max Zorin destroying Silicon Valley. And when Bond succeeds, Gogol awards him the Order of Lenin. By The Living Daylights, Gogol has been transferred to the Foreign Ministry and arranges the visa thatat allows Kara Milovy to play in the West. He is played throughout by Walter Gotell, who made his first appearance in Bond movies in From Russia With Love, where he was a villain. He played Morzeny, head of training on SPECTRE Island.

More recently, Bond has found another reluctant Russian ally, Valentin Dmitrovich Zukovsky, played by Robbie Coltrane. A former KGB officer, Zukovsky has become a Mmafia boss. In a previous encounter, Bond had shot him in the leg, leaving himhis with a permanent limps, and stolen his car and his girl. However, in Goldeneye and The World Is Not Enough, he is willing to help Bond because there is money involved. He has made his last appearance in The World Is Not Enough, as Elektra King killed him.

Q Branch again supplies the equipment in From Russia With Love. This time the attaché case conceals two flat throwing knives as well as fifty rounds of .25 ammunition. Inside the lid are fifty gold sovereigns. There are cyanide pills in the handle, which Bond flushes down the lavatory, and a silencer for his Beretta is hidden inside a tube of Palmolive shaving cream in an “otherwise guileless sponge-bag”. However, this time, Q is up against a tricky foe. The KGB hashave supplied assassin Red Grant with a copy of War and Peace that fires bullets from the spine.

In Goldfinger, Bond got Q Branch to send a crate of limpet mines to Station H in Hong Kong. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Q Branch suppliesy a new Rolex because the shops are shut. Q Branch has also given Mary Goodnight a string of pearls, one of which has a suicide pill in it, but she can’t remember which.

Fleming admitted: “It is the gimmicks in my books, rather than the more or less straightforward plots, that stay in people’s minds.”

In fact, the gimmicks in the books are few and far between. But Fleming always insisted that they were based in reality – as were Q and Q Branch. In the book The Man Who Was “Q”, author David Porter, identified the real Q as wartime SOE quartermaster Charles Fraser-Smith. Fleming knew him from his liaison work. Fraser-Smith produced buttons with compasses in them, cigarette lighters that concealed cameras, cigarette holders that doubled as telescopes, flying boots with hidden knives, miniature radios in sandwich boxes and numerous other, what he called, “Q gadgets”, as he called them – taking their name from World War I Q ships, which were warships disguised as unarmed freighters and trawlers. Fraser-Smith’s devices were used to help prisoners of war escape and by SOE agents working behind the lines. Even produced were garlic-flavoured chocolate so agents wouldwith have that an authentic aroma the moment they set foot in France, and containers for hidden documents with a left-handed thread, as Fraser-Smith believeding that the “unswerving logic of the German mind” would mean that no German would ever think of trying to unscrew something the wrong way. Fraser-Smith was particularly amused by Fleming’s use of his hollowed-out golf balls in Diamonds Are Forever. He used hollow golf balls to conceal compasses or messages and they were sent out to prisoners of war. They fooled the Germans because they could actually be used to play golf. Golf -balls filled with diamonds would be too heavy, he pointed out, and would fool no -one.

In the movies, there is some confusion about the origins of Q. Occasionally the technical wizard played in seventeen of the Bond films by Desmond Llewelyn is referred to as Major Boothroyd or “the armourer”. In the novel Dr. No, the armourer Major Boothroyd replaces Bond’s Beretta with a Walther PPK, histhe name being borrowed from Fleming’s arms expert Geoffrey Boothroyd. The Beretta’s silencer got stuck in his clothing and Major Boothroyd, introduced by M as “the greatest small-arms’ expert in the world”, considered it a “ladies’ gun”. The armourer also recommends, for more stopping power, the .38 Smith & Wesson Centennial Airweight. At the end of Dr. No, Bond cables that the Smith & Wesson is no match for a flame-thrower – though, it seems, he has used a Remington carbine to good effect. However, Bond had not been using a Beretta exclusively up until then. In Chapter One of Casino Royale, heBond keeps a .38 Colt Police Positive with a sawn barrel under his pillow, though he carries a flat .25 Beretta with a skeleton grip in his chamois leather shoulder--holster. He also carries a .45 Colt Army Special in a concealed holster under the dashboard of his 4½-litre Bentley with Amherst-Villiers ’ supercharger. Bond is equally adept with the .38 Colt Detective Special he took from off Tee-Hee in Live and Let Die. Moonraker opens with Bond practising with a Colt Detective Special and during his car chase with Drax he finds that .45 Colt Army Special under the dashboard again. In Diamonds Are Forever, M has given him a new Beretta. He has put tape around the skeleton grip, filed the firing pin to a point and sawn the blunt foresight.

Although Bond’s has been issued with new firearms, the Aston Martin DBIII he picks up from the car pool in Goldfinger still carries a long-barrelled Colt .45 in a concealed compartment under the driver’s seat. Bond could have had the Jaguar 3.4, but he preferred the DBIII because of its up-to-date triptyque and its an inconspicuous colour – battleship grey. It also had extras: switches to alter the type and colour of the lights, reinforced steel bumpers, a radio pick-up tuned to receive signals from a “homer” and “plenty of concealed space that would fox most Customs men”. Bond uses a long-barrelled Colt .45 again in “A View to a Kill”.

In Thunderball, Bond is back in a Bentley again – this time a 1954 Mark II Continental. Some rich idiot had crashed it into a telegraph pole on the Great West Road. Bond bought the wreck for £1,500 and Rolls-Royce straightened the bend in the chassis and fitted a new Mark IV engine with 9.5 compression. For another £1,300, he had the old cramped sports saloon body removed and turned it into a two-seater convertible, painted battleship grey, and with and the upholstery ofwas black morocco. “She went like a bird and a bomb and Bond loved her more than all the women at present in his life rolled, if that were feasible, together.”

Not far into the book the car gets badly damaged in an explosion after an assassination attempt on Bond. Nevertheless, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the old Continental Bentley – with the “R” type chassis, the big six engine and a 13:40 back-axle ratio that he had now been driving for three years – is back on the road again. The Bentley Convertible remains with him through You Only Live Twice and “The Living Daylights”.

In The Spy Who Loved Me, Bond is said to carry a Smith & Wesson Police Positive – a gun that does not exist. However, from Vivienne Michel’s description, it is thought to be an S&W Centennial Airweight, a replacement for the one Bond lost in Drr. No. And as a sniper in The Living Daylights, Bond uses a .308-calibreer International Experimental Target rifle built by Winchester with a curled aluminium handle at the back of the butt that extended under the armpit and held the stock firmly in to the shoulder. An adjustable pinion below the rifle’s centre of gravity to allowed the stock to be nailed into its grooved wooden rest. The armourer had also had the usual single-shot bolt action replaced by a five-shot magazine, in case Bond missed first time.

Boothroyd says that the Walther PPK, which becomes Bond’s trademark, should be carried in a Berns Martin tTriple-draw holster. A sprung holster, it would work well carried under the shoulder, but could cause trouble if worn inside the waistband of this trousers as Boothroyd recommends. Bond solves the problem by wearing it in a stitched pigskin holster inside his waistband in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

In the film of Dr. No, Major Boothroyd is played by Peter Burton. He becomes an increasingly important character as he imparts much of the technical informationnt Fleming litters the books with. Bond drives a Sunbeam Alpine in Jamaica, but it has no special modifications. The only serious gadget in the movie has not been supplied by Q. It is Dr. No’s dragon – a swamp-buggy fitted with a flame- thrower and metal cladding to give it a menacing appearance.

Llewelyn takes over the role of Q in From Russia With Love, supplying Bond with his attaché case full of tricks. As well as the ammunition, the throwing knife and the fifty gold sovereigns taken from the book, the case also contains an AR-7 .22 sniper rifle and a magnetized tin of talcum powder containing a cartridge of tear gas. The case’s catches have to be turned horizontally to prevent the tear-gas cartridge exploding. Kerim Bey – the film’s renamed Darko Kerim I obviously had. -->– has a folding sniper’s rifle provided by Q, which he uses to kill Krilencu. Bond has a box camera that conceals a reel-to-reel tape recorder which he uses when he interrogates Tania. But the enemy hasve the best gadgets. The assassin Red Grant has a retractable piano wire that he uses to garrotte his victims, while Rosa Klebb has spikes in the toes of her shoes that are treated with poison.

In the film, Bond is seen driving a Bentley Mark IV convertible. Its only high-tech gadgetry is a phone – which itself was remarkable in 1963. Bond also has a pager, new then, and an electronic bug detector to ascertain whether his phone has been tapped. The plot revolves around the Lektor – Spektor in the novel – code machine. Based on the German World War II Enigma cipher machine, it is rigged to explode when British technical experts examine it.

By Goldfinger, Llewelyn is solidly established as Q, a hard-working technician who is annoyed by Bond’s flippant attitude and the lack of respect heBond shows for Q'shis gadgets. He is shown in his workshop where assistants are working on gas-spewing parking meters, a Thermos flaskh that contains a bomb, and a bullet-proof coat designed to withstand machine-gun fire. Here, Q introduces Bond to his new fully modified Aston Martin DB5. It has machine guns mounted under the front indicator lights, a bullet-proof shield that emerges to protect the back window and revolving licence plates that are valid in Britain, France and Switzerland. Concealed in the rear light clusters are high-powered oil jets. Other devices produce a rear smoke screen and dispense nails to foil pursuing vehicles. There is a revolving tyre-slasher that emerges from the hubs, a weapons control panel in the centre arm rest and a radar screen that tracks a homing device – another of Q’s devices.

Q warns Bond not to touch a little red button in the top of the gear stick.

“Why not?” asks Bond.

“If you do you’ll release a section of the roof and engage, then fire the ejector seat,” says Q.

“You’re joking,” says Bond.

“I never joke about my work” is Q’s put- down.

On a lighter note, Bond appears in the opening sequence with a snorkel disguised as a seagull. Again the enemy isare not without their gadget’s. Goldfinger has a state-of-the-art industrial laser which he aims to cut Bond in two with, starting at the most delicate parts. Then there’s Oddjob’s lethal bowler.

In Thunderball, Q is flown to the Bahamas to demonstrate the latest underwater equipment to Bond. Thisese includes a mini -breathing unit and an underwater camera, at a time when they were still rare. Though Llewelyn was indeed flown to Nassau, the scene was actually filmed in Pinewood Studios with Q wearing a suitably colourful shirt. Bond is also provided with an underwater propulsion unit that straps to his air tanks, Geiger counters concealed in a watch and a camera, and a tape recorder concealed in a book. When Bond is stuck in a cave, the “radioactive” capsule he has swallowed guides Leiter and a helicopter to the rescue. Bond then fires a mini-flare through a hole in the roof.

The Aston Martin DB5 makes another appearance. At the beginning of the film, Bond makes his escape from Bouvar’s château using a Bell Textron Rocket Belt developed for the US military. At the end, Bond and Domino are rescued by a Skyhook, where a modified plane catches a wire attached to a weather balloon, then hauls the passengers on board.

SPECTRE’s gadgets include a rocket-firing BSA Lightning motorbike, a fully armed hydrofoil with an underwater compartment, “gamma gas” to knock out the crew of the V-bomber and an underwater sled for carrying the atomic bombs on. Blofeld also has the chairs of his staff wired, so he can electrocute any who fails.

Q flies to Japan to deliver the tiny gyrocopter Little Nellie to Bond in You Only Live Twice. This was not just a cinematic prop, but a genuine prototype built and flown by Wing Commander Kenneth Wallis. Just ten -feet long, she had a top speed of 180 miles an hour and, weighing just 250 pounds, she could lift twice that. In the film, she is armed with two front-mounted machine guns, two rocket launchers firing heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, two rear flame- throwers with a range of eighty yards, two smoke ejectors, aerial mines dropped by parachute and a flight helmet carrying a camera.

During the filming of the aerial battle, aerial cameraman John Jordan was leaning out of a helicopter to get a better shot when another helicopter was caught in a gust of wind and was blown closer. The rotor blade severed his leg, which had to be amputated. Nevertheless, he continued working. He developed a special harness hanging eighteen feet below the helicopter for filming aerial shots of the action sequences in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But the following year, he was filming Catch-22 over the Gulf of Mexico when another plane passed close by. He was sucked out of the open doorway and fell two thousand feet to his death.

Tiger Tanaka also had a helicopter in You Only Live Twice. It was fitted with a gigantic electromagnet which picked up the villains’ car and dumped it in the sea. Bond watches the action on a TV screen in Aki’s specially modified Toyota 2000 GT, but who is doing the filming is never explained.

You Only Live Twice is the only Bond movie in whichwhere he does not drive. He is, however, provided with an electronic safe-cracking device and special breathing apparatus when, at the beginning of the film, he is buried at sea in Hong Kong harbour. And along with an array of ninja weapons, Tanaka shows Bond guns that fire jet-propelled ammunition that explodes on impact and gives him a rocket-firing cigarette which he uses to kill the guard and let the ninjas in.

However, SPECTRE hasave a rocket named Bird 1 that captures US and Soviet spacecraft. Helga Brandt has a stun grenade concealed in her lipstick when she escapes the Cessna, leaving Bond to his fate. And Blofeld has a retractable bridge in his office that dumps those who have failed him into a pool of pirhanpiranhaa.

Q appears briefly at the beginning of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, showing Bond radio-active fluff that can be used as a tracking device. At the end, he turns up at Bond’s wedding to offer: “If you need anything …”

Bond replies with a smile: “Thanks Q, but I’ve got all the equipment – and I know how to use it.”

During the scene where Bond breaks into the office of Blofeld’s lawyer in Bern, he has delivered another electronic safe-cracking machine which doubles as a photocopier. Bond also had a Minolta Minox B spy camera – standard issue for spies at that time – which he uses to photograph a map in Blofeld’s lair. The DB5 returns, this time with a sniper rifle in the glove compartment. Tracy drives a Ford Cougar, though in the books it’s a Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder.

Q appears in Las Vegas in Diamonds Are Forever, but again shows a mastery of the gadgetry by winning jackpots on a line of one-armed bandits. Earlier Q has provided Bond with false fingerprints so that he can pass as smuggler Peter Franks. He also matches the voice simulator Blofeld uses to imitate Willard Whyte. Bond uses a standard mountaineer’s piton gun to break into Whyte’s penthouse apartment and carries a razor-sharp finger trap in his pocket which foils one of Blofeld’s body guards when he tries to disarm him.

Blofeld, on his side, has the whole building rigged with CCTV, a mMoon buggy which Bond borrows to make his escape, Honda three-wheeled dirt bikes for the chase, a diamond- encrusted satellite and a Bbathosub in which he tries to escape from his oil-rig headquarters in. The assassins Wint and Kidd provide a bomb hidden inside a “bombe surprise”.

As the film is set largely in America, Bond gets to drive Tiffany’s Mustang Mach 1 in a car chase around Las Vegas.

By then, Q had become such an important part of the Bond formula that Llewelyn made a publicity tour of the US, showing off the gadgets. However, he was dropped from Live and Let Die.

But that does not mean Bond was short of gadgets. He has a Rolex watch that can, magnetically, deflect a bullet at long range. It is also used to unzip the dress of Italian agent Miss Caruso. And it has a built-in buzz saw that Bond uses to free himself when he is tied up in Kananga’s lair. He uses a hang- glider to infiltrate Kananga’s island headquarters at night and a radio transmitter concealed in the cigarette lighter of CIA agent Strutter’s car to contact Felix Leiter, leading Bond to quip: “A genuine Felix lighter.”

He communicates with Quarrel Jr in Morse code via a radio transmitter concealed in a hairbrush. It also contains a bug detector which Bond uses to sweep his room.

The enemy hasve fewer gadgets. Whisper fires a poison dart from his right wing mirror, killing the agent driving Bond into Manhattan. Tee Hee has a prosthetic steel arm whose pincers bend the barrel of Bond’s pistol at right angles. On San Monique, Kananga protects his poppy fields with scarecrows that have CCTV cameras in their eyes and guns in their mouths.

As well as trying to drive from the back of athe car speeding down the Franklin D. Roosevelt River Drive, Bond gets to drive an old London double-decker bus, making it a single-decker when he goes under a low bridge during a car chase. But the most famous chase involves four Glastron speedboats powered by Evinrude jet propulsion motors.

In The Man wWith the Golden Gun, the slightly flustered Q provides Bond with a prosthetic third nipple so he can impersonate Scaramanga. The only other gadgets do not come from Q Branch. There is the solar agitator which promises to provide limitless energy from the sSun, Scaramanga’s golden gun, his high-tech junk and his AMC Matador which, with wings attached, becomes a light aircraft. Bond himself drives an AMC Hornet hatchback with Sheriff Pepper in the car chase through Bangkok.

After the film, Llewelyn was asked by the president of the Ian Fleming Foundation to donateprovide one of Q’s suits to a private Bond Museum in the US. However, he had none to offer. The crumpled tweeds Llewelyn wore were his own.