Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
SPECTRE
Summary
SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is a fictional organisation featured in the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, as well as the films and video games based on those novels. Led by criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the international organisation first formally appeared in the novel Thunderball (1961) and in the film Dr. No (1962). SPECTRE is not aligned with any nation or political ideology, enabling the later Bond books and Bond films to be regarded as somewhat apolitical. The presence of former Gestapo members in the organisation though can be considered as a sign of Fleming's warnings about Nazi fugitives after the Second World War, as first detailed in the novel Moonraker (1954). In the novels, SPECTRE begins as a small group of criminals but in the films, it is depicted as a vast international organisation with its own SPECTRE Island training base capable of replacing the Soviet SMERSH.
In the novels, SPECTRE, is a commercial enterprise led by Blofeld. The top level of the organisation is made up of twenty-one individuals, eighteen of whom handle day-to-day affairs. Members are drawn in groups of three from six of the world's most notorious organisations—the Nazi German Gestapo, the Soviet SMERSH, Yugoslav Marshal Josip Broz Tito's OZNA, the Italian Mafia, the French-Corsican Unione Corse, and KRYSTAL, a massive Turkish heroin-smuggling operation. Coincidentally, the three from KRYSTAL are all formerly of RAHIR, an intelligence agency previously run by Blofeld. The remaining three members are Blofeld himself and two scientific/technical experts who make their debut in the ninth Bond novel, Thunderball (1961). When Fleming was writing the novel in 1959, he believed that the Cold War might end during the two years it would take to produce the film, and came to the conclusion that the inclusion of a contemporary political villain would leave the film looking dated. Therefore, he thought it better to create a politically neutral enemy for Bond.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.