A Spy's Guide to Spy Thrillers: From Russia, with Love
(Note: This is third in a series on how a spy reads spy thrillers. The first two were The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Day of the Jackal. To get the next one by email, sign up at the bottom of this page.)
In September 1940, a British naval intelligence officer named Ian Fleming created a plan to steal the German navy's Enigma code secrets.
Take a captured German bomber. Put a crew in German uniforms. Crash the plane into the English Channel.
When a German boat comes to rescue the "survivors," the English take the boat. And get the Enigma code material on board.
The plan was approved. Fleming went to Dover to wait for the right moment.
But the moment never came. The operation was called off.
Seventeen years later, Fleming published a novel where the other side offers the British a code machine.
The novel was From Russia, with Love.
But it's more than a novel about a code machine.
The first third of the novel, you don't see James Bond.
You see the Soviets. You see how they make decisions. And how they plan.
The plan: the Soviet agency SMERSH will kill James Bond.
But not just kill him. Destroy his reputation, too. And, by extension, the reputation of the British Secret Service.
They reason backward from the end they want. And build the plan.
The plan includes bait: a young cipher clerk posted in Istanbul named Tatiana Romanova.
She tells the British she wants to defect. That she fell in love with Bond from a photograph. And that she has something: a Spektor, a Soviet code machine the British badly want.
One condition.
Bond has to come to Istanbul and get it from her himself.
In London, the offer arrives.
The British know the type of game they're in. It's the Cold War. A Zero-Sum Game. Whatever the British win, the Soviets lose.
And every Zero-Sum Game is fought over people, places or things.
The Spektor is a thing. If the British win it, the Soviets lose it.
So the British weigh the offer as a fight over the Spektor.
And in that fight, the Soviets would count losing a Spektor as a disaster. No Soviet would hand one over.
Unless she was desperate. A young clerk, in love, taking a terrible risk to get out.
M, the head of the British Service, has doubts but believes her story. Bond thinks it's crazy. But the prize is too big to pass up, true story or not.
So Bond goes to Istanbul.
In Istanbul, Bond works with Darko Kerim, the head of the British station in Turkey. Bond meets Tatiana. He and Kerim believe her story.
The clerk is real. The machine is real.
Because SMERSH reasoned backward in building the trap. So they built it out of real things.
The British asked every question about the thing they thought the game was fought over.
But there was one question nobody in London asked:
In this game, what are the Soviets really fighting over?
SMERSH looked forward and reasoned backward. From Bond dead and disgraced, back to the one thing that would bring him to them.
The British reasoned forward.
From the offer to what it would mean to have the machine.
Bond, Tatiana and Kerim leave Istanbul on the Orient Express. With the Spektor.
Kerim spots three Soviet agents on the train. He gets two of them taken off. Later, Kerim is found dead in his compartment, next to the body of the third.
At Trieste, a man introduces himself as Captain Nash. British. From Bond's own service. Bond figures M sent him for protection.
Tatiana is suspicious of Nash. Bond tells her he's one of theirs.
At dinner, Nash drugs her. That night, he wakes Bond with a gun in his hand. Nash is SMERSH's head executioner: Red Grant.
Grant lays out the plan.
He'll shoot them both. He'll throw Tatiana's body out of the train. He'll plant a blackmail letter and film of the two of them in her luggage.
The papers will call it a sordid murder-suicide. Done by the British Secret Service's top man.
An international scandal.
Plus the Spektor is rigged to explode when the British examine it.
It's a good plan.
Except for one thing.
While Grant talks, Bond slides his metal cigarette case between the pages of the book in his hands. And keeps the book over his heart.
Grant fires.
The case stops the bullet.
Bond goes down.
When Grant steps over him, Bond kills him.
The British had the right type of game. A Zero-Sum Game against the Soviets.
But they had the wrong game itself.
In the game the British saw, the Spektor was the prize. In the game SMERSH was playing, the Spektor was bait.
The prize for SMERSH was Bond. His life. His reputation. And the reputation of the British Secret Service.
Which is why SMERSH could put the Spektor on the table. Bond had beaten SMERSH's agents three times. SMERSH needed a win. And it wanted Bond dead in a way the whole world would read about.
And the size of what was at stake is what made the story believable. The bigger the prize, the more it looked like only a desperate clerk would bring it.
In a Zero-Sum Game, when the other side offers a thing, that thing could be bait.
There could be a bigger game they're playing.
If you've only seen the Bond movies and haven't read the novels, you'll find a different Bond in the novels.
The Bond in the novels is more of an observer. More circumspect. More of a man who takes in data and analyzes it before acting.
He's in strange situations. With strange characters. And he's not always the center of attention.
He's more often the one trying to make sense of the world around him.
He's trying to decide with partial information.
So he can act appropriately. And carefully.
The Bond in the novels is more of a spy.
From Russia, with Love is here.
Looking forward and reasoning backward is in A Spy's Guide to Strategy.
-John Braddock
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