“Planes with atom bombs don’t just get stolen. Except that they do.”
Thunderball serves as the first book in Ian Fleming’s unofficial “Blofeld Trilogy” (followed by On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice) in which Ernst Stavro Blofeld features prominently in the story. Additionally, in two future novels Blofeld is also referenced, but only peripherally (The Spy Who Loved Me and The Man with the Golden Gun). I should also mention that no review of this novel would complete without acknowledging the lengthy legal dispute that took place over copyright concerns. Back in 1958, Ian Fleming had begun collaborating on a James Bond film script with longtime friends Ivar Bryce and Ernest Cuneo (in fact Thunderball is dedicated to Ernest Cuneo), along with Irish film producer Kevin McClory and English screenwriter Jack Whittingham. However, when several years passed and no studio had acquired the script, Fleming decided to incorporate elements of the unused screenplay into his ninth James Bond novel. However, Thunderball was not exclusively his own work. Once discovered, this led to a conflict with Whittingham and McClory who sought to prevent publication of the novel in 1961, and when that failed, they sued for copyright infringement in 1963, forcing Fleming to settle outside of court in a deal that granted film rights to McClory as well as shared creative acknowledgement for Thunderball given to both Whittingham and McClory.
The extensive legal battle over Thunderball began to take a toll on Fleming’s health. As a lifelong smoker and drinker, Fleming suffered a heart attack during the court case, and soon a second heart attack followed in August 1964 which ultimately ended his life at the age of 56. However, legal battles over Thunderball were far from over. Producers at Eon, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, signed a deal with Kevin McClory wherein he was granted sole onscreen producer credit for the fourth James Bond film Thunderball (1965) in exchange for not spinning off a separate Bond film of his own for a period of ten years (by this point, Eon assumed that the James Bond saga would hardly last another ten years). But when the saga continued to prove financially successful beyond the ten year mark, McClory later produced his own Thunderball-influenced film, the cheekily titled Never Say Never Again (1983) starring Sean Connery, which was released in a direct head-to-head conflict with Eon’s official James Bond film, Octopussy (1983) starring Roger Moore. It was to be a battle of the Bonds –Connery versus Moore—and in the end Moore would eventually prevail at the box office with Octopussy. Over the years, legal battles continued to unfold between Eon and McClory, all of which ultimately prevented Eon from revisiting characters and ideas originally introduced in Thunderball, such as the classic villain Blofield and his mysterious criminal organization called SPECTRE. The whole debacle frustrated executives at Eon, and the dilemma was chucklingly alluded to in the opening scene of the 1981 film For Your Eyes Only in which an unnamed bald man in a wheelchair is cartoonishly tossed into a giant chimney, presumably killing him (almost like a giant middle finger directed at McClory for the stranglehold he continued to keep over the series). The fight over the film rights to Thunderball was not officially settled until after McClory’s death in 2006, which finally ended a four-decade legal dispute. Once acquired by MGM from the McClory estate, the film Spectre (2015) was allowed to be the first James Bond film to incorporate Blofeld and SPECTRE into its plot, the first since Diamonds Are Forever (1971).
Debates within the Bond community persist to this day about what actually happened in this dispute: Did Ian Fleming intentionally plagiarize his fellow authors? To what extent did the legal battle over Thunderball contribute to Fleming’s health problems? Why was Kevin McClory so insistent on retaining the film rights to Thunderball? Should he have been so hostile and litigious? Was there some sort of malicious intent behind all of this? Who really created the idea of SPECTRE? The whole situation is a bit baffling. In reaction to McClory’s generally stubborn, uncompromising demeanor, some biographers have pointed to incidents during the war in which McClory was attacked by German U-Boats while serving in the British Royal Navy –in one case, McClory’s ship sank and he narrowly survived with a small group of seamen aboard a life raft for two weeks, traveling some 600 miles until being rescued along the coast of Ireland. In total, three men died and McClory was left with swollen, frostbitten legs, unable to walk, and he could not speak for upwards of a year afterward (when he finally recovered his voice, he could only speak with a stammer). Perhaps this horrid, grueling encounter informed his generally pugilistic disposition in later years.
At any rate, Thunderball is the James Bond novel that first introduces the international terrorist organization known as S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) as well as its lead operative Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The novel begins with Bond nursing a hangover. He has been trapped at headquarters for more than a month doing paperwork, and we find him bemoaning his mounting bureaucracy, while also acknowledging an argument he recently had with a section officer –his secretary Loelia Ponsonby has been out sick with the flu so Bond has been given “a silly, and worse, ugly bitch from the pool.” Stay classy, James (this novel marks the final appearance of Loelia “Lil” Ponsonby). Called into M’s office, M reveals that Bond has been given a poor health report for his “mode of life” –smoking sixty cigarettes a day and drinking half a bottle of spirits (between sixty and seventy proof). After admitting to headaches and fibrositis, Bond is sent to a health clinic called Shrublands for two or three weeks –an herb garden health program in Washington Sussex run by Joshua Wain (based on Fleming’s own visit to the Enton Hall Health Resort in 1955). In the meantime, M explains that 009 will take care of Bond’s section. A fussy and incensed Bond, when questioned by Miss Moneypenny, says: “It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst. As for the cigarettes, it’s really only that I don’t know what to do with my hands.”
Whisked off to Shrublands (which Bond later claims is run by a bunch of “grated-carrot merchants”), Bond continues his disgruntled commentary on the world around him, scoffing at a young taxi driver: “he was born into the buyers’ market of the Welfare State and into the age of atomic bombs and space flight. For him life is easy and meaningless” (9). At Shrublands, Bond meets an attractive osteopath named Patricia Fearing (whom he later aggressively kisses in several uncomfortable scenes) as well as a mysterious businessman with investments in Macao named Count Lippe, who has a strange sign tattooed in red on his wrist that looks like “a small zigzag crossed by two vertical strokes.” Bond does a bit of investigating and Secret Service records link this symbol to Asia. As part of his health therapy, Bond is placed on a traction device called the “rack” used to stretch the spine. However, he is sabotaged while on the traction machine and a voice whispers in his ear: “You will not meddle again, my friend.” Bond is then painfully stretched until he blacks out. He awakens in a hospital wondering if he is losing his touch:
“Was his personality changing? Was he losing his edge, his point, his identity? Was he losing the vices that were so much part of his ruthless, cruel fundamentally tough character? Who was he in process of becoming? A soft, dreaming, kindly idealist who would naturally leave the Service and become instead a prison visitor, interest himself in youth clubs, march with the H-bomb marchers, eat nut cutlets, try and change the world for the better?” (34).
Bond strikes back at Count Lippe by scalding him in the health center’s Turkish Bath by enclosing him in a closet and cranking the temperature up to 180 degrees. Once again, Bond displays his trademark brand of prejudice, being quick to judge people based on their bloodline or nationality. For example, Bond claims that names ending in “escu” “ovitch” “ski” “stein” are sometimes not the endings of respectable names. Anyway, little does Bond realize, events concerning Count Lippe are “about to shake the governments of the Western world.”
Next, Fleming uniquely lifts the curtain on the villains in Thunderball and, now that we are no longer focused on the work of SMERSH, he shows us a brief glimpse of the inner-workings of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (or “SPECTRE”), a secretive international group that is situated on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris where respectable offices of prominent industries are located amidst nonprofits like F.I.R.C.O. One of these nonprofits is a front for SPECTRE known as Fraternité Internationale de la Résistance Contre l’Oppression which ostensibly was created to “keep alive the ideals that flourished during the last war among members of all Resistance groups.” However, it is a vague organization with funding from member subscriptions and certain private persons who share the organization’s aims. Inside sits a giant table with 1-21 numbers lining each seat, ready for an urgent meeting of the group’s leaders.
The most important of these leaders is No. 2, an enigmatic but fearsome man, the organization’s chairman whose looks “almost seem to suck the eyes out of your head” and who he is “the supreme commander – almost their god.” This man’s name is Ernst Stavro Blofeld. “He was born in Gdynia of a Polish father and a Greek mother on May 28, 1908 (the same day as Fleming). After matriculating in economics and political history at the University of Warsaw he studied engineering and radionics at the Warsaw Technical Institute and, at the age of twenty-five, obtained a modest post in the central administration of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs” (45). He was characterized as a “highly gifted youth” who discreetly fed secret information to foreign governments in exchange for money until he earned about $200K and then managed to disappear and invent anew identity. Consider the way Fleming describes Blofeld:
“Blofeld’s own eyes were deep black pools surrounded –totally surrounded, as Mussolini’s were—by very clear whites. The doll-like effect of this unusual symmetry was enhanced by long silken black eyelashes that should have belonged to a woman. The gaze of these soft doll’s eyes was totally relaxed and rarely held any expression stronger than mild curiosity in the object of their focus. They conveyed a restful certitude in their owner and in their analysis of what they observed. To the innocent, they exuded confidence, a wonderful cocoon of confidence in which the observed one could rest and relax knowing that he was in comfortable, reliable hands. But they stripped the guilty or the false and made him feel transparent –as transparent as a fishbowl through whose sides Blofeld examined, with only the most casual curiosity, the few solid fish, the grains of truth, suspended in the void of deceit or attempted obscurity. Blofeld’s gaze was a microscope, the window on the world of a superbly clear brain, with a focus that had been sharpened by thirty years of danger and of keeping just one step ahead of it, and of an inner self-assurance built up on a lifetime of success in whatever he had attempted” (49).
“Nothing about Blofeld was small.” He weighs about twenty stone (or about 280 pounds), despite being a former weightlifter, and he now sports a belly, though he doesn’t drink or smoke, and has never been known to sleep with a member of the opposite sex. He barely even eats much. Apparently, Fleming based Blofeld on Tom Blofeld, whom Fleming knew while in school at Eton and later through the London gentlemen’s club Boodle’s (which served as an inspiration for M’s club Blades which appears in several 007 novels).
Who are the other members of SPECTRE? There is Kotze (No. 5), an east German physicist; Maslov (No. 18), a polish electronics expert; three Sicilians from top echelon of Unione Siciliano; three Corsican Frenchmen from Union Corse; three former members of SMERSH (the Soviet organization for the execution of traitors and enemies of the state that loomed large over the first five James Bond novels, but has now apparently been disbanded as of 1958 and replaced by the special executive department of the M.W.D.); three of the top surviving members of the former Sonderdienst of the Gestapo; three Yugoslav operatives who resigned from Marshal Tito’s Secret Police; and three highland Turks. They all maintain clean covers while working in high-level international crime.
Presently, SPECTRE has been in operation for about five or six years, and it has accomplished a number of criminal achievements –stealing the Himmler jewels on behalf of the Soviets, lifting a massive heroin shipment from Italy and transporting it to the Firpone crime family in Los Angeles, the robbery of Czech germ warfare phials in Pilsen which were sold to the British Secret Service, a blackmail effort of former SS Gruppenführer Sonntag, who was hiding in Havana, and the assassination of Peringue, a heavy-water specialist who defected to the Communists through Berlin, on behalf of the French Deuxième Bureau (interestingly enough, many Western governments, including the British Secret Service, have used SPECTRE to accomplish top-secret tasks in the past). At their summit, SPECTRE. discusses a recent botched kidnapping plot led by No. 7 (Marius Domingue) and No. 12 (Pierre Borraud). They kidnapped the daughter of Magnus Blomberg, a wealthy Las Vegas hotelier and member of the Detroit Purple Gang (which has been previously mentioned in past Bond novels). Blofeld is furious that the girl was apparently raped while in custody, so he has returned her ransom money and now punishes Borraud, whom he knows to be the culprit, by pressing a button and sending 3,000 volts of electricity shooting through his chair, killing him instantly. This marks the third dtime Blofeld has killed one of his own agents –he once shot a man in the heart with a compressed air pistol and he also garroted another officer with a wire noose.
Now, dissatisfied with the income of SPECTRE, Blofeld has launched “Operation Omega,” a shadowy heist-ransom in the vein of classic Bond villains. He had dispatched Count Lippe (known within SPECTRE as “Sub-Operator G”) to Shrublands where Lippe was to distribute a letter to a rather bumbling pilot named Giuseppe Petacchi stationed at Boscombe, but Lippe got into a squabble and wound up in the hospital with second-degree burns. Nevertheless, Lippe is still tasked with delivering the “letter” to Petacchi which contains a vial of a severe flu virus. Petacchi will then hijack the plane while on a test run, which contains two nuclear bombs, and deliver the plane to SPECTRE agent No. 1 who will be waiting on his yacht in a top-secret location known as “Area Zeta” (where locals believe an annual treasure hunt is underway). In exchange for the stolen weapons, Blofeld plans to extort Western governments for £100 million in gold bullion. Little does Petacchi know, he will be killed after completing the delivery.
Meanwhile, back in London Bond is taking his new health regimen seriously. He chats with his irritated secretary Loelia Ponsonby (whom he describes as “delectable”) and also with a jealous Miss Moneypenny (notably, MoneyPenny calls Bond’s secretary “Lil” which we know she doesn’t like from earlier Bond novels, and we also learn that Moneypenny started her career in the Secret Service as a junior in the Cipher Department). Additionally, “Bond’s elderly Scottish treasure” May is dismayed by his new tobaccoless cigarette from America (nothing good ever seems to come from America in a Fleming novel). However, Bond receives an urgent call from Bill Tanner (the “Chief of Staff”) summoning Bond to an urgent meeting in M’s office –M is fresh out of war cabinet meeting in which a mysterious ransom note was discussed: a British aircraft known as the Villiers Vindicator carrying two atomic weapons was overdue for its arrival home following a NATO training flight south of Ireland in the Atlantic. It disappeared somewhere over the ocean. The ransom note mentions that the location of the plane and its two atomic bombs will only be revealed in exchange for £100 million in gold bullion, otherwise in 7 days a piece of property worth £100 million will be destroyed, and 48 hours after that a major city will be destroyed.
“Tomorrow, or the day after, the bows and arrows would be atomic bombs. And this was the first blackmail case. Unless SPECTRE was stopped, the world would get round and soon every criminal scientist with a chemical set and some scrap iron would be doing it’ (77).
A frantic M mentions that he has teamed up with Allen Dulles of the CIA in order to search for the plane –M believes it is located somewhere in the Bahamas so Bond is sent to the islands posing as a wealthy real estate investor with a cipher machine which reports directly to M. The CIA will also be sending one of their best agents (can you guess who it might be?) “Every intelligence man all over the world who’s on our side is being put on this operation –Operation Thunderball they’re calling it” (78). Thus “Operation Thunderball” is underway –the biggest job the Secret Service has ever encountered, however Bond laments that he is being given a background job: to fly down to the Bahamas and poke around while more serious search efforts are unfolding across the world. After leaving headquarters, Bond is suddenly attacked by an assassin in the streets –it is Count Lippe, however Lippe is also being followed in his car by an agent of SPECTRE who slaughters Lippe with a grenade, rendering his charred remains unrecognizable. Regardless, Bond quietly breezes past this strange near-death encounter and simply moves forward with his assignment.
When he arrives in Nassau, Bond speaks with the local government officials who lead him to a mystery-man named Emilio Largo (No. 1 of SPECTRE) –a giant hulking figure with huge hands who has suddenly arrived in the Bahamas for the annual treasure-hunting activities aboard his enormous hydrofoil yacht called the “Disco Volante” (or “flying saucer” in Italian). He is described as “a big, conspicuously handsome man of about forty. He was a Roman and he looked like a Roman, not like from the eRome of today, but from the Rome of the ancient coins…” He is like a “centurion” and had fought for Italy in the Olympic foils, “an adventurer, a predator on the herd” who “was the epitome of the gentleman crook – a man of the world, a great womanizer, a high liver, with the entrée to café society in four continents, and the last survivor, conveniently enough, of a once famous roman family whose fortune, so he said, he had inherited. He also benefitted from having no wife, a spotless police record, nerves of steel, a heart of ice, and the ruthlessness of a Himmler. He was the perfect man for SPECTRE, and the perfect man, rich Nassau playboy and all, to be Supreme Commander of Plan Omega” (101).
The trail to Emilio Largo leads Bond to Largo’s mistress named Dominetta “Domino” Vitali, a strong and confident 29-year-old about whom Bond speculates: “In bed she would fight and bite and then suddenly melt into hot surrender” (117). Will she be a femme fatale? Both of her parents were killed in a train crash, she was educated in England, and her brother is currently a high-ranking pilot in Paris. She has a slight limp with one leg an inch shorter than the other. She is a “kept woman” or “a bird in a gilded cage” who longs for a fantasy Hero. Later, Bond meets his newly arrived CIA contact known as “F. Larkin” who turns out to be none other than Felix Leiter (were you expecting someone else?). “Bond hoped he wouldn’t be a muscle-bound ex-college man with a crew cut and a desire to show-up the incompetence of the British, the backwardness of their little colony, and the clumsy ineptitude of Bond, in order to gain credit with his chief in Washington” (124). In keeping the continuity from previous books, Felix still sports his hook for a hand he was given as a result of his injuries at the end of Live and Let Die and he has now returned to the CIA after working for Pinkerton’s which was previously mentioned in Diamonds Are Forever (Bond also alludes to his past mission in Moonraker in this book). Felix brings with him some CIA gadgets, including a Rolleiflex camera and a Geiger counter. Together, they investigate Largo aboard his yacht and at the casino (which used to be the only legal casino throughout the Commonwealth and which was leased to a Canadian gambling syndicate). During a tense but outwardly friendly game of chermin de fer filled with subtle jabs, Bond starts beating Largo and he coyly remarks: “When I came to the table I saw a SPECTRE… the SPECTRE of defeat.” The mere mention of SPECTRE wipes the smile off Largo’s face. Was it merely his “Italian superstition” or was Largo involved with this shadowy group of international terrorists? Bond takes all his money and goes out with Domino.
There are several scenes of Bond using an aqualung to dive down to the ocean floor, including a night dive wherein he spots all manner of octopi and barracuda, as well as an underwater assassin. I really quite enjoyed these scenes. Consider the following passage:
“Far below, where the dancing moon shadows could not penetrate, the bottom was even white sand with an occasional dark patch that would be seagrass. All around there was nothing but the great pale luminous hall of the sea at night, a vast lonely mist through which, against his will and his intelligence, Bond expected at any moment the dark torpedo of a great fish to materialize, its eyes and senses questing towards the rippling shape of the black intruder. But there was nothing, nothing came, and gradually the patches of seagrass became more distinct and ripples showed on the sandy bottom as it shelved slowly up from fifty to forty and then to thirty feet” (247).
A struggle ensues between Bond and Largo’s underwater sentry, but the assassin is suddenly eaten alive by a barracuda while Bond escapes, confirming that something suspicious is indeed happening beneath Largo’s yacht. Meanwhile, Felix spots Kotze in the casino, the German physicist under an alias and he calls for backup American submarine support from the Manta. Then, Felix and Bond fly around the island in search of the spot where the hijacked airplane might have been stashed, ultimately finding it in the clear ocean water surrounded by sharks feasting on decaying corpses inside, hidden beneath a tarpaulin camouflaged covering –but they find no sign of the bombs.
Awaiting next steps from headquarters, Bond finds Domino swimming but she has stepped on some sea-egg spines which Bond awkwardly removes with his mouth (cue the double entendres). They duck into a nearby changing room to sleep together before Bond abruptly reveals some knowledge he recently learned –that her brother, Giuseppe Petacchi, was killed by an elaborate conspiracy involving Largo (as it turns out, Domino’s real name is Petacchi). With little time to grieve, Domino agrees to help Bond by taking the Geiger counter back aboard the Disco Volante to see if the bombs are present on Largo’s yacht.
With time running out, Bond and Felix board the newly arrived Manta submarine helmed by Commander Peter Pedersen, while Domino is discovered by Largo and tied up in her cabin where Largo proceeds to torture her by “scientifically” applying ice cubes and a cigar her body in order to extract the name of the person who gave her the Geiger counter. Bond and Felix then lead a vast underwater ambush of Largo and his SPECTRE agents. Bond saves Felix’s life and violently faces off with Largo who is then shot in the neck by Domino brandishing a CO2 gun (as was the case in Fleming’s short story “From A View To A Kill,” Bond is rescued by his paramour). The bombs are recovered, and Bond and Domino both awaken in hospital beds. Kotze has agreed to expose the inner workings of SPECTRE to the Western intelligence agencies. In total, six Americans were killed in the underwater battle along with ten SPECTRE agents (including Largo).
All things considered, for the first SPECTRE/Blofeld novel, I had a lot of fun with this Bond novel. It’s mercifully not as bad as Diamonds Are Forever, but it cannot possibly rise to the heights of From Russia, with Love. The best parts of the novel in my view include the early scenes of Bond chasing Count Lippe in Shrublands, as well as the latter sections of the novel in which Bond is ocean-diving all over the Bahamas and following a trail of clues with Felix Leiter. A particularly climactic moment occurs when Bond revisits his suave card-playing roots a la Casino Royale wherein he beats Emilio Largo at a game of chermin de fer in the Nassau casino. However, Thunderball also feels like a very long novel with plenty of listless meandering at points, perhaps the result of several different writers, and I’m not particularly impressed by the portrayal of a punctilious Bond who carps about the dangers of women drivers, while also aggressively kissing young women whenever and wherever he pleases. Still, Thunderball contains some enthralling James Bond tropes the likes of which are rife throughout the movies –a larger-than-life villain, a shadowy criminal world populated by Blofeld and SPECTRE, and high-stakes ransoms, hijackings, a pair of seductive Bond girls, as well as a world-saving event in which Bond prevents two nuclear weapons from being detonated in a major world city (Miami was the city that would have been leveled). Plus, it’s always a joy to see James Bond and Felix Leiter joining forces again. Interestingly enough, M’s presence looms large over Thunderball. It is M, after all, who pushes Bond to focus on his health, and it is also M who follows a hunch that leads Bond to investigate Emilio Largo in the Bahamas (in some ways, this concept is reminiscent of M’s personal mission featured in “For Your Eyes Only”).
Fleming, Ian. Thunderball. Thomas & Mercer in Las Vegas, NV c/o Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. 1961 (republished in 2012). Paperback edition.
Click here to return to my survey of the James Bond saga.
Click here to read my review of the film Thunderball (1965).
Click here to read my review of the film Never Say Never Again (1983).