#espoinage

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.

- Ian Fleming, Goldfinger    

[juicetrump2]

A deliciously gloat-worthy litany of trump’s self-induced misery over the impending release of the redacted DOJ affidavit authorizing the FBI search of Mar-a-Lego.

Drink a shot every time O’Donnell says “MISERABLE” and be plastered in under 10 minutes 🤪

Highly satisfying

[northbrookpl]

Movie:

Atomic Blonde -  An undercover MI6 agent is sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a missing list of double agents.

Books:

The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal by Howard Blum - As close to the true story of the Atomic Blonde as you can get, this follows the story of Betty Pack, an American debutante turned Allied spy during WWII. Betty Pack was charming, beautiful, and intelligent--and she knew it. She also worked for the MI6 and was sometimes referred to as the blonde Bond. 

Masquerade by Gayle Lynds -  Confused, dazed, and unable to remember her own name, Liz Sansborough embarks on a terrifying journey in search of the truth that takes her into the perilous world of international terrorism, mind-altering drugs, and high-level post-Cold War espionage.

Mockingbird Vol. 1: I Can Explain by Chelsea Cain &  Kate Niemczyk -  When someone close to her is murdered, Bobbi sets out on her own, discovering some strange goings-on at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s medical-and-recovery network.

Lady Killer by Joelle Jones & Jamie S. Rich - When the balance between her life as doting mother and wife and life as a ruthless killer begins to falter Josie Schuller sets out to stop her American-dream life from being destroyed.

Desert Dark by Sonja Stone -  At Desert Mountain Academy, sixteen-year-old Nadia Riley begins a punishing routine to become an undercover CIA agent, but when a double-agent is reported on campus, she is the top suspect.

Jackdaws by Ken Follett -  On the eve of World War II, Special Operations agent, Felicity 'Flick' Clairet is sent undercover to destroy the German lines of communication. An all woman team dubbed the Jackdaws is hastily trained to aid her in this very difficult mission.

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott -  The never-before-told story of four real-life women who risked everything to take on a life of espionage during the Civil War - just in case you want to read about more real life female spies. 

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.

Ian Fleming, Goldfinger    

[blackswaneuroparedux]

So they’ve decided on you to fuck up my work.

- Ian Fleming to Sean Connery on being cast as James Bond

By the time auditions for the role of James Bond in the first 007 movie, Dr No, were held in 1961, Connery was a well-established and highly regarded serious actor, but Fleming reportedly didn’t think he was right for the part of 007.

Connery said that Patrick McGoohan, James Mason, Rex Harrison, Stewart Granger and Richard Burton (all approved by Fleming as being suitable for the role) were ruled out, for various reasons. The casting wasn’t going well and had even been advertised in stage magazines.

Eventually, Connery was taken in to see the casting directors and he got the part. However, Fleming wasn’t happy with their choice, reportedly saying privately he was nothing but an “over-developed stunt man”, describing him as “unrefined”. Connery reciprocated the feelings, calling Fleming “a real snob”, but admitting he was “interesting”.

Connery was surprised to get the part, because he had heard how Fleming felt about him. Apparently, Dana Broccoli, wife of producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, was instrumental in getting Connery the part, as she was convinced he was the right man. Fleming’s girlfriend, Blanche Blackwell, also said he had the right “charisma” for the role.

Fleming’s frustration over the direction his series was being taken was revealed when he confronted first time director Terence Young at a United Artists function in London.

Fleming squared up to the realities of an untested director guiding a half-known ex-labourer star into James Bond’s elegant world.

Mr Fleming vented: “So they’ve decided on you to fuck up my work.”

But Mr Young “was not shaken” and told him: “Let me put it this way, Ian. I don’t think anything you’ve written is immortal as yet.

Ian Fleming wrote relatively little about Bond’s style, sketching in only the briefest of descriptions while devoting pages to the overblown outfits of Bond’s foes. A little goes a long way. Terence Young took Connery to Anthony Sinclair, a tailor on London’s Conduit Street at the northern end of Savile Row. Sinclair was Young’s tailor. He specialised in what he called the “Conduit Cut,” a fitted hourglass shape to the jacket that suited fit, military men. It was deliberately at odds with the boxy fashion suits worn by most young men at the dawn of the swinging sixties. Cutting like that stood out as slightly behind the times but reassuringly expensive.

Next Young took him to Turnbull and Asser, his shirtmaker on Jermyn Street several blocks away south of Piccadilly. There, Connery was fitted with the same pale blue cotton poplin shirts and knitted navy silk ties that Young wore day in day out himself. It was Young who gave Bond his turned back “cocktail” cuffs, a sartorial detail that at the time defined a man as both well-to-do yet rather rakish.

Bond’s style was extremely precise, the spare but expensive, handmade wardrobe of a military man, not overtly fashionable but not fuddy-duddy, either. It met and exceeded accepted standards of dress while remaining deliberately unsensational. Fashion in all its preening frivolity was always reserved for Bond’s vain, egotistical nemeses like Goldfinger, Blofeld, or Largo. As a recipe for worry-free style, Connery’s Bond defined and still defines the clean-cut ideal of a wardrobe that transcends fashion and becomes eternal.

If Bond was the establishment man in town, the exotic and tropical locations around the globe were the backdrop for him to get a bit more experimental with his off-duty wardrobe. It didn’t always work. That said, Connery fares better than all succeeding Bonds as his wardrobe for the beach is still as spare and restrained as his working day clothes. Later Bonds fall prey to the gravitational pull of fashion and pay the price. Roger Moore suffers from this and unfairly, I think. It’s not his fault he got the gig in the hedonistic 1970s. But just about the only thing Connery’s Bond gets wrong is in Goldfinger, where he appears in Miami in a sky-blue terry-cloth onesie. Somehow, he gets away with it.

In the end it was a cocktail: Connery’s suave style with his own rough edges poking through that gave Bond his bite. It resonated with the socially and geographically expanding world of the 1960s; Connery was a forerunner of a whole generation of working-class British actors made good - like Michael Caine and Terence Stamp - who personified a rougher and racier sexuality on screen. In clothing terms, Connery’s Bond gave all young man an easily referenced visual encyclopedia of how to dress well without ever overdoing it.

The two didn’t meet until filming was underway. Connery’s performance won the writer over immediately. In fact, Fleming liked Connery so much that he later gave the spy a Scots heritage to mirror the actor’s own. In his novel, You Only Live Twice, published in March 1964, Fleming wrote that Bond’s father was from Glencoe.

Photo: Legendary actor Sean Connery photographed laying on a sofa while smoking a cigarette in London, United Kingdom on the 8 October 1963

[blackswaneuroparedux]

You only live twice: Once when you are born And once when you look death in the face.

- Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice (1964)

James Bond has a tête-à-tête with Helga Brandt.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I don't believe Bond is superman, a cardboard cut out or two-dimensional. He's got to be a human being. He’s got to be identifiable, and that's what I'm trying to be. It's not a spoof, it's not light, it's not jokey. I mean, James Bond lives in a world that is violent and dangerous.

- Timothy Dalton on playing James Bond

The best literary representation of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Sean Connery was the best cinematic representation of Bond.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Mata Hari: The Myth of a Femme Fatale as a Spy

I had long since lost any illusion of being loved for who I was and now accepted, with clean conscience, flowers, flattery, and money that fed my ego and my false identity. Death is nothing, nor life either, for that matter. To die, to sleep, to pass into nothingness, what does it matter? Everything is an illusion.

- Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod (née Zelle) aka Mata Hari (1876-1917)

She refused a blindfold and by some accounts even smiled at her executioners. Margaretha Zelle, a.k.a. “Mata Hari,” an exotic dancer and convicted spy, met her end at age 41 at the hands of a firing squad outside Paris 100 years ago on Oct. 15, 1917.

She’s been portrayed as a femme fatale archetype and one of history’s greatest spies, and her life has inspired films, musicals, a ballet and books. However, some contend that - regarding military matters - she was little more than a gossip with a thing for officers on both sides of the WWI battlefront.

Born in 1876 in the Netherlands, she was the daughter of a once-prosperous hat merchant who went bankrupt. At age 18, she married an officer in the Dutch colonial army. Together they lived at his military post in Indonesia (then called the Dutch East Indies), where they had two children — one of whom died soon after birth — during their unhappy, mutually unfaithful, and at times physically abusive marriage.

Upon heading back to Europe in 1902, the couple separated and ultimately divorced. Migrating to Paris, the divorcee reinvented herself as a striptease dancer who claimed to be of Far Eastern descent. She called herself Mata Hari (“eye of the dawn” in the Malay language).

Starting in 1905, she captivated crowds in Europe’s cultural capitals. Her career lasted about a decade until she lost ground to younger and more athletic imitators. But she still possessed abundant charm and was fluent in several languages, and was able to find success as a courtesan, seducing the wealthy and powerful from multiple nations, including high-ranking government officials.

Because her home country remained neutral during World War I, she was allowed to cross borders with comparatively little hassle. However, her travels and lifestyle would attract attention: Before the War, her behavior might’ve met with mere moral disapproval. But during the War, it also elicited suspicion of espionage.

Among her lovers was Major Arnold Kalle, a German military attaché. Whether he began to regard her as a nuisance or a liability, he sought to dispose of her. So, using a code that he knew the French had already cracked, he transmitted a message easily identifying her as a spy.

Mata Hari was arrested in a luxury Paris hotel in February 1917, and her closed-door trial took place five months later. Though the prosecution blamed her for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers, no specific evidence or explanation was provided as to how she caused these fatalities.

In fact, no one ever identified any specific defeat or leak of information that could be blamed on her, and yet the myth persists.

Although her amorous life wasn’t loyal to any particular side, no evidence existed that she provided militarily useful information to anyone.

But by 1917, the French military was war-weary; morale was low and some military divisions had even begun to mutiny. It seemed the Allied side, and the French especially, needed someone to blame, to punish - to defeat. So they found a perfect scapegoat in this so-called, as one historian put it, “immoral foreigner with a sensuous walk who had shamelessly seduced men from all armies.”

On July 25, 1917, the French military government found her guilty of espionage. The Dutch government did not intervene to any significant degree on behalf of its citizen, who was executed after having spent months enduring malnourishment and incarceration in vermin-infested conditions.

The mythmaking began immediately after her date with the firing squad.

Rumours circulated that the French executioners had fired blanks, enabling her to escape. The truth was far less romantic: After she was shot dead, her remains were donated for dissection to the University of Paris medical school. For all the demand her body had previously inspired, nobody wanted it once she had died.

In the view of Julie Wheelwright, author of The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage, Mata Hari “symbolised women’s danger, their treacherous desires hidden beneath their rallying cry as mothers of the nation or self-sacrificing nurses.”

And so, however dubious her real-life espionage career was, her legacy became that of the quintessential female spy, and her name evoked mystery, seduction and duplicity. Movie portrayals involving such stars as Greta Garbo only added to the Mata Hari legend.

However the public chose to remember her, the German government exculpated Mata Hari in 1930. But the nation that executed her has shown more reluctance to revisit her story: Though some French papers pertaining to her case have been declassified, it remains to be seen whether the future will further her notoriety as a spy or solidify her tragedy as a scapegoat.