As you've probably noticed by now, James Bond is in reality a pretty colorless person. He has to be -- he's a spy. The really interesting characters are the villains. They all had rotten childhoods; have hooks for hands; syphillitic noses; they have some real character.

Everybody wonders if Fleming thought of himself as James Bond -- but the truth is he lived through the villains just as much. For instance, Fleming and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, head of SPECTRE, share the same birth date of May 28, 1908. But like Bond, Fleming based most of his villains on real people, too. Casino Royale's Le Chiffre was based on Aleister Crowley. Hugo Drax was based on Nazi Otto Skorzeny. Fleming's other villains are based on less sinister models. For instance, Red Grant was actually a tour guide in Jamaica, and the evil Dr. No, although his physical description is based on Dr. Fu Manchu (written by Fleming's hero Sax Rohmer), his personality was inspired by Fleming's friend Noel Coward (once you know this, it's impossible not to laugh as you read his dialogue in the book).

In the movies, the villains are all basically the same person: They all talk the same, think the same, and want the same thing: to control the world. They demand million dollar ransoms, even though in Films like Diamonds Are Forever they obviously already have billions. The classic Bond villain is Blofeld, who appeared in a number of films (see "SPECTRE," below). Eon can no longer use the character of Blofeld (his film rights are owned by Kevin McClory, along with Thunderball), so they make up new variations -- evil princes, counts, and arms dealers with huge fortresses that seem impossible to pay for. The villain in GoldenEye even has Blofeld's facial scar from You Only Live Twice. Apparently in the case of Blofeld, twice was not nearly enough.

Here is a breakdown:

SMERSH

SMERSH actually existed. An acronym of the Russian phrase Smert Shpionam (Death to Spies), SMERSH was set up by Stalin in the late summer of 1942. It was divided into five administrations:

Number One worked in the armed forces to root out treachery and defeatism.
Number Two collected information and dropped agents behind enemy lines.
Number Three collated and distributed information and orders.
Number Four was the investigation branch, which had powers of arrest.
Number Five was composed of tribunals which tried cases and could sentence death.

SMERSH was incorporated into the KGB ( Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti) after killing thousands of people during World War II. It is rumored that it's last assassination was of Russian defector and author Boris Bakhlanov (not the Bullwinkle bad guy), who published the SMERSH expose Nights Are Longest There under the name Romanov in 1972. He then changed his name to Hatton, but was found floating in a pond on London's Wimbledon Common in 1984.

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SPECTRE

"SMERSH... had been set up by Stalin to do his dirty work. They were OK as villains for a while until Khrushchev closed them down, but always a bit restricting because being the real thing there was always only so far I could go with them in a fictional sense. So I invented SPECTRE to give me the freedom of invention I needed for the more recent books."
- Ian Fleming

When SMERSH was disbanded by the Soviets, Fleming devised the organization SPECTRE while writing screen treatment for his screenplay James Bond of the Secret Service. Fleming based SPECTRE on the Mafia. SPECTRE stands for "Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion." It was originally based in France, at No.136 bis, the Boulevard Haussmann, in the VIIIth and Ixth Arrondissements in Paris. Like the Secret Service, they have a cover name: "Fraternite Internationale de la Resistance Contre l'Oppression (F.I.R.C.O.)." Originally SPECTRE consisted of twenty men and their chief, known only by their numbers (from 1 to 21) as a security precaution. In the novels, the numbers are changed every month as a security precaution, but in the movies they stay consistent. The original members included an escaped East German physicist, a Polish elecronics expert, three Sicilians from the Unione Siciliano (the Mafia), three Frenchmen from the Union Corse, three former members of SMERSH, three surviving members of the former Sondernienst of the Gestapo, three Yugoslavians who had resigned from Marshal Tito's Secret Police, and three highland Turks (in Fleming's words, "the Turks of the plains are no good"). SPECTRE prefered to hire in threes, under the Communist triangle system.

The founder and chairman of SPECTRE is Ernst Stavro Blofeld, known in the films as "Number One" (except Never Say Never Again, where he was called the Supreme Commander).

He was born on May 28th, 1908 to a Polish father and a Greek mother. He became a spy, selling information between governments for large amounts of money -- always American dollars. In World War II he was decorated for his espionage work by the British, Americans, and French.

Blofeld changes drastically from novel to novel (when we first meet him, he is described as sexless, but in a later book he has a syphilitic nose). In the movies his looks not only vary, he even changes accents. Blofeld is not the best of bosses - he has the habit of killing every employee that makes a mistake, or annoys him in any way. In one board meeting, Blofeld shot a member through the heart with a thick needle from a compressed air gun. In another, he garrotted an agent with a wire noose. I'll bet Blofeld doesn't get a lot of presents at the company Christmas party... With Blofeld killing all of the agents that Bond can't assassinate, the employees of SPECTRE don't exactly enjoy great job security. In the films, the SPECTRE hierarchy goes something like this:

Other SPECTRE operatives include Dr. No (drowned in a nuclear reactor pool), escaped murderer Red Grant (garroted by Bond in From Russia With Love), assassins Count Lippe (killed in car explosion by a missile from a motorcycle) and his murderer Fiona Volpe (shot by another SPECTRE agent aiming for Bond). If you see SPECTRE advertising in the "Help Wanted" section of your newspaper, don't answer. Blofeld's later hideouts (in book and in film) include an allergy clinic in the Swiss Alps, a death house where suicidal people come to die on a Japanese island, the inside of a Japanese volcano, a space research lab in Las Vegas (Blofeld lived in a nearbye penthouse), and on Shark Island in the Bahamas.

In the films Blofeld has also developed an affection for white Persian cats. He carries one everywhere and constantly pets it as he speaks. God only knows how many of those he has executed and replaced...