SPECTRE and the ILLUMINATI

I believe the 'fanciful' elitist band of world dominaters already exists, albeit they have no catchy title and their history is murky at best.  Any corporate officers of sufficient wealth and stature all know each other and where the money involved is enough, nationalities and governments are a non sequitur to the global corporate.

(Ahem), er... does anyone know much about "NANA" (North American Newspaper Alliance), Ian Fleming's American newsagency in the 50s, whose correspondents "repeatedly became entangled in clandestine affairs" and was linked to the CIA?

According to William Kelly in a 1998 COPA address:

"Goldberg, who came into NANA as Fleming was ushered out, concurred that there was a thin line between what was Fleming's responsibilities as an editor and his espionage operatiuons. Fleming, notes Goldberg, had a reputation for hiring beautiful, young women as NANA correspondents. It was his man Richard Hughes however, who got to meet Burgess and Maclean in Moscow."

You made a great post with the exception of mentioning Tom Clancy.  I resent him being placed in a group such as Fleming, etc.  Clancy was a frikkin' real estate salesman in New Hampshire before he hit it big with Hunt For Red October with research he gleaned, albeit painstakingly, from public sources.  Clancy was only introduced to the CIA after the President Reagan read the novel and was impressed with his self taught knowledge.  I quit reading Clancy's novels after the crap hound started believing he was Jack Ryan.  Clancy is a real estate salesman, I've had more intel time in the US Navy than he's had his entire life.

Ok, but let's lighten up on Tom. It's Christmas. Also, he may have started in froggy bottom, but he's certainly a player now! God Bless America!

Once you begin to comprehend anything of Fleming's  true role as a significant post-war spymaster, all bets are off. Kelly indeed suggests that "marital problems" story was a bit of a red herring and the James Bond books were actually part of a secret plan to restore British Intelligence's dented image, harnessing the rumours of their quirky mystique and black ops prowess for propaganda purposes (eventually via Hollywood), while ensuring that no one would ever believe them again!

Fantastic you say - yet it isn't too hard to imagine Ian Fleming selling his superiors on such a project!

Daniel Craig... Illuminati... hmmm... !

Happy Christmas and Good Will to All

Last edited by Bond Agent (4th Jan 2006 11:41)

Speaking of red-herrings, BondAgent, what's your take on the Howard Hughes/Willard Whyte affair in DAF?
There's something particularly strange about the plot of the film and its reflection on reality. A mysterious, reclusive billionaire (living in a Las Vegas penthouse, no less) is kidnapped and replaced by sinister forces.
In November/1970 (just before filming begins) Hughes disappears from Las Vegas in the middle of the night and ends up in the Bahamas. Hughes right-hand man of ten years , ex FBI Robert Maheu, claims that Hughes has been kidnapped.
Although Maheu has never met Hughes face-to-face, he maintains that Hughes is now a  helpless prisoner of the board of  Hughes Tool Co. and the Mormons who take care of the billionaire. Maheu's storied past includes being the connection between the CIA and the Mafia during the early  '60's when both forces joined sides in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. (Operation Mongoose)
Bruce Roberts of The Gemstone Files speculated that Howard Hughes had been kidnapped as far back as 1957 (the last year of Hughes  out in public) and that his kidnapper was none other than...Aristotle Onassis! According to Roberts, Onassis, besides being a giant in shipping, was also the uncrowned head of the world Mafia and , as such, had replaced Hughes with a number of doubles in the subsequent years. (Roberts even points out that DAF is the story of Hughes and not just  007 fiction. He also speculates that Ian Fleming had used Onassis as the model for...Ernst Stavro Blofeld).
A fascinating web of intertwining stories, DAF and the Howard Hughes saga seem to become mirror images of each other . The inspiration for DAF's plot? Well, that was Hughes' buddy Cubby himself who says he saw the whole Hughes/Whyte plot in a dream.

If there is a film in which SPECTRE and the Illuminati blur into each other than that film is DAF. (Blofeld...dies...disappears...?)

"Bert Saxby? Tell him he's fired!"

Two of a Kind - The Ties that Bond - 404?

Hughes was indeed the very model of a modern megalomaniac mogul. Good thing he was on our side! Who could forget, for example, those fabulous RKO propaganda films like "30 Seconds to Zero"?

Sir William Stephenson is comparable in many ways. Now believed to have been an orphan from the boondocks who fabricated his whole priveliged anglo-canadian background, he flew with the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in WWI. Then, an innovative but frustrated electrical engineer, he popularized mass-produced home radio receivers to become a super-rich activist industrialist, soon branching out into electrical plant and aviation. Placing his extensive commercial intelligence network at the service of Churchill in the 30s, he personally toured top-secret factories to obtain the most accurate estimates of German aircraft production then available to Western leaders.

Appointed head of BSC in New York by Churchill, in charge of British covert activities in the US, he was Fleming's immediate superior there in 1941, and remained a close confidante and supporter. He is said to have vetted the unpublished manuscript of Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, with the famous half-wrong quip: "It'll never sell, Ian. The truth is always less believable."

Stephenson remained a major intelligence "player" decades after WWII. Having long since "weeded" his clippings from public archives, British Intelligence allowed two admiring but somewhat unreliable authorized biographies, The Quiet Canadian (aka Room 3603) by H. Montgomery Hyde in 1962, and A Man Called Intrepid, by William Stevenson in 1976. More recently the investigative The True Intrepid apparently reveals startling and important new information. Unconfirmed rumours of overzealous, even "erratic" activities sadly clouded the image somewhat in later years. Stepehenson was eventually sidelined, remaining a revered yet enigmatic figure.

64K Question: Did Hughes and Stephenson ever meet?

Royale Flushed - Hero or Herring?

Conspiracy theories may be a response to the arrogance of our rulers, elected and otherwise, but can also be used to influence opinion and create spurious public enemies. This can result in the "conspiracy within a conspiracy", as in the case of the so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion".  A cursory examination evidences inflammatory language no self-respecting conspirator, however fanatical, would ever write in their "to-do" list, clearly (to anyone but a complete idiot) the work of agents-provocateur. (No correspondence please - oy vey!)

Just as interesting are the conspiracies of silence. They can be society-wide: the general mistreatment of orphans and wards of state would be  an example. I have a particular scenario in mind:

Imagine if you will - some inconvenient fact (or indeed some theory) is annoying some executives whose corporations have recently plunged on a very special franchise, a modern legend with roots deep in the deception of the secret world... let's call it "Bulldog Drummond" aka "X-29". Seems most folks had thought he was  completely made up. Alas, there is a certain amount of evidence that they may be completely wrong.

CEOs get wind of a website and the hotshot lawyers are called in to deal. A take-down notice can't fly in such a case so tame experts are summoned, certain powers-that-be are notified, and arm-twisting pressure is exerted by advertisers upon haplessly complicit infocrats. Our dissident author's work disappears from the search engines, becoming effectively invisible to human knowledge. He is reduced to posting, on sufferance, on "conspiracy" blogs, framed by his tormentors' computer-generated ads, just so long as he doesn't hurt "their" feelings. Some "rigorous debate"...

Meanwhile Bulldog's even-more-dashing son, Bulldog Jr., aged but fiercely loyal, goes begging. His exploits are just too controversial, even now, and British Intelligence can't be associated with any "flamboyant" Bulldog Drummond types. So no medals, no credit, no thanks. Everyone continues to cash in nicely except our (semi-) original hero and his unfunded advocate.

However, "they" just can't resist an information counterstrike. Some former journo VP immediately pumps out a widely-circulated "backgrounder" press release (not uncommon as such) that rubbishes the reality of the Drummond concept with debate-closing language,  pins the whole rap on one of the "usual suspects", then inexplicably wanders off into quite unknown areas of European postwar historic blame-mongering.

Our investigator is discouraged, broke and can't seem to nail the final proof. What's next? Only the silence (amid the usual fanfares) it seems...

But our conspirators may yet learn to their discomfort that fact is stranger (& certainly less predictable) than fiction.

Meanwhile, I do have one handy conspiratorial tip: It is always the cover-up that gets you into the deepest sh*t!

And remember - it's only a (fictional) conspiracy theory, isn't it?

Wow, check out all the echoes in here! As I am only able to "tune in" occasionally, I hope you all are too and will indulge a little "bandwidth" on (and near) these compelling themes!

You would know, Oddjobbie, that "British Intelligence" is a mysterious and heterogenous group of services, sharing, it may be, an intimidating mystique with a somewhat 'masonic' style of management. But it has fallen under the baleful influence of deep-cover ideological cliques and renegade operations on several occasions in the past. This was partly a result of the old "gentleman's club"  approach to recruitment and security re Philby, Maclean et al.  And if you would believe John Le Carre's  The Night Manager (1996), at least one international drug and arms trade "control" operation got way out of hand in the 1990s, becoming both compromised and inordinately important in the greater scheme of things.

Bigzilcho is well aware that discovering and concealing information is only part of the intelligence task. Putting it out there is equally  important and just as "sensitive".  Fact and fiction jostle uneasily in this twilight world: the novels of Ian Fleming furnish a salient example.

"British intelligence" also discreetly helped out the career of disillusioned socialist writer George Orwell, funding numerous foreign translations, including a Thai comic-strip version of Animal Farm. Orwell's 1984 was mandated by Commonwealth school curriculums around the world, ensuring its massive sales and iconic status.

Even so, throughout the postwar era, any notions held by military intelligence of prising unruly European "satellite states" away from the Eastern Bloc with firm support for popular uprisings were sharply rebuked by Western diplomats, intelligentsia and students. In an atmosphere of pacifism, "Bomb"  hysteria and later detente, any such tendencies were increasingly portrayed as extremist, crackpot right-wing conspiracies (culminating laughably in  The Billion Dollar Brain, 1969, in which iconic British spook Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) implicitly helps his KGB opponents to foil such a plot).

Purely defensive Western weapon systems were  (and still are) routinely excoriated in the Western press as provocative threats to the peace. These episodes mark the high water of  Soviet propaganda and the sophisticated covert political warfare apparatus.

The effects of such campaigns often outlive their original purposes, with incalculable consequences.  Nowadays, of course, everyone wants to play at this particular "Great Game", hence the well-funded "think-tanks" , zealous NGOs, politicized blogs and even some big media plays.

You are on the money, Nemesis. The impossible takes a little longer, and resistance is inevitable (if futile). Also, when information is free, only indiscretion is unpardonable. It's when other reference material goes missing that I really start to worry. Search engines are proprietary services, with every right (& responibility) to rate, exploit or delete whatever appears in their directories,  in an (evidently) concerted, cooperative manner if they choose. (Have you compared them lately?) However, the Internet must remain a relatively "open", competitive system, priveliging individuals, dissidence and fact-based debate over commercial pressures, undue censorship and banal dishonest cheats.

Last edited by Bond Agent (9th Mar 2007 18:35)

Interestingly, I came a cross a reference to Fleming on the Chemical Wedding DVD. It's a low budget film about a reincarnation of Aleister Crowley.