In the films, the organisation often acts as a third party in the ongoing Cold War. Guntram von Shatterhand and his compound in Japan. By this point, the organisation has largely been shut down, and what remains is focused on maintaining Blofeld's alias as Dr. Blofeld, with a weakened SPECTRE, would appear for the final time in the twelfth novel, You Only Live Twice (1964). The organisation's third appearance is in the eleventh novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) where Blofeld, hired by an unnamed country or party-though the Soviet Union is implied-is executing a plan to ruin British agriculture with biological warfare. The organisation is next mentioned in the tenth novel, The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), when Bond describes investigating their activities in Toronto before the story begins, though they play no part in the story itself. During the events of Thunderball, SPECTRE successfully hijacked two nuclear warheads for ransom. The strict codes of loyalty and silence, and the hard retributions that followed violations, were hallmarks of American gangster rings, the Italian Mafia, the Unione Corse, the Chinese Tongs and Triads, and the Japanese Yakuza and Black Dragon Society. Fleming's SPECTRE has elements inspired by mafia syndicates and organised crime rings that were actively hunted by law enforcement in the 1950s. Therefore, he thought it better to create a politically neutral enemy for Bond. When Fleming was writing the novel in 1959, he believed that the Cold War might end during the two years it would take to produce the film, and came to the conclusion that the inclusion of a contemporary political villain would leave the film looking dated. Their debut is in the ninth Bond novel, Thunderball (1961). The remaining three members are Blofeld himself and two scientific/technical experts. Coincidentally, the three from KRYSTAL are all formerly of RAHIR, an intelligence agency previously run by Blofeld. Members are drawn in groups of three from six of the world's most notorious organisations-the Nazi German Gestapo, the Soviet SMERSH, Yugoslav Marshal Josip Broz Tito's OZNA, the Italian Mafia, the French- Corsican Unione Corse, and KRYSTAL, a massive Turkish heroin-smuggling operation. The top level of the organisation is made up of twenty-one individuals, eighteen of whom handle day-to-day affairs. In Ian Fleming's novels, SPECTRE, is a commercial enterprise led by Blofeld. The world map in the background is common to emphasise the aim of world domination. In the novels, SPECTRE begins as a small group of criminals but in the films, it is later depicted as a vast international organisation with its own SPECTRE Island training base to replace the Soviet SMERSH.īlofeld's SPECTRE volcano base complete with spacecraft-swallowing Bird One spacecraft, helipad and attack helicopter, and command centre in the 1967 film You Only Live Twice. SPECTRE is not aligned to any nation or political ideology, enabling the later Bond books and Bond films to be regarded as somewhat apolitical, though the presence of former Gestapo members in the organisation can be considered as a sign of Fleming's warning of Nazi fugitives after the Second World War, as first detailed in the novel Moonraker (1954). Led by criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the international organisation first formally appeared in the novel Thunderball (1961) and in the film Dr. SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is a fictional organisation featured in the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, as well as the films and video games based on those novels. Different rings are featured in From Russia with Love and Spectre.Ĭounterintelligence, terrorism, revenge, extortion, world domination SPECTRE's logo as featured on its members' rings in Thunderball.

The spectre film