Thus, the central paradox of the classic Bond stories is that, although superficially devoted to the Anglo-American war against Communism, they are full of contempt and resentment for America and Americans. And not just political contempt, or the penis envy of a declining power for a burgeoning one, but cultural contempt as well. And not just with cultural contempt in general, but more specifically disgust about America’s plebeian interest in sex and consumerism, the two Bond staples. “Baseball, amusement arcades, hot dogs, hideously large bosoms, neon lighting” is how Tiger Tanaka mouths the anti-American trope in You Only Live Twice. And how does Bond react when praised by the exquisite Tatiana Romanova for his resemblance to an American film star? By barking, “For God’s sake! That’s the worst insult you can pay a man!” This and other revulsions from the Hollywood ethos (a similar distaste is evinced in For Your Eyes Only) are an irony in themselves. And notice, please, that emphasis on “hideously large bosoms.” Some displacement seems to be involved here. For Fleming, it was the southern hemispheres that counted, and size mattered like hell.
I am afraid that the mention of Tatiana Romanova obliges me to record that Fleming described her otherwise peerless behind as “so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man’s.” Not quite like a boy’s, in other words. How is one to deal with the blizzard of information on this point? From Lycett’s biography we learn that the young Fleming had not only a mentor whose pseudonym was Phyllis Bottome but also a lover named Monique Panchaud de Bottomes. This might be coincidence (it could hardly be conspiracy), but in that same premature Times obituary, ostensibly written by “M,” we are expected to believe that the newly orphaned Bond was sent to live with an aunt in the “quaintly named” Kentish hamlet of Pett Bottom. “That was just a love-pat,” says the boorish Australian “Dikko” Henderson in For Your Eyes Only, after he’s floored a Japanese chick. “What’s a girl’s bottom for, anyway?” Fleming himself appeared to have a ready answer to this question. As he wrote to his complaisant future wife, who seems to have shared some of his tastes, “I am the chosen instrument of the Holy Man to whip some of the devil out of you, and I must do my duty however much pain it causes me. So be prepared to drink your cocktails standing for a few days.”
When one really reflects on the memorable scenes in the fiction (shall I say those that stick out?), it becomes obvious that Fleming expended much more careful thought on torture than on sex. It is true that Bond’s bottom is never threatened (Coward would have put a swift stop to any of that), but the other menaces and taunts and practices are distinctly lascivious and lovingly rehearsed. Even Simon Raven, giving Casino Royale an admiring review, protested that the torture scene was essentially unpardonable.
But there is no point in being prissy about this. If Fleming had not been quite a heavy sadist and narcissist and all-around repressed pervert, we might never have got to know Rosa Klebb or Auric Goldfinger or Ernst Stavro Blofeld. And, having said that Bond was originally a figure designed to hold up the British end of the “special relationship,” I ought to add that the cleverness of the series lay partly in how it saw past the confines of the Cold War. The transition probably begins after From Russia with Love. Who would have believed a paranoid tale about the Bulgarians shooting the pope in 1982 if it had not been for the memory of Moscow’s Bulgar robots in that adventure? The stories are a kind of bridge from the period of ideological warfare to our own, where the fear of a frigid colossus or a nuclear “exchange” has been deposed by the fear of an uncorked psychopath and a “dirty bomb.” However anal that last stupid expression may be (a toilet-trained bomb is perhaps more a wish than a possibility), it was Fleming who first conjured it and who reached beyond the KGB into our world of the Colombian cartel, the Russian mafia, and other “non-state actors” like al-Qaeda. “SPECTRE,” I noticed recently, is an anagram of “Respect,” the name of a small British party led by a power-drunk micro-megalomaniac called George Galloway, a man with a friendly connection to Saddam Hussein.
Also rather contemporary, at least from one end of the special relationship, is the cold dislike of France that keeps recurring. Le Chiffre and Goldfinger both act for the French Communists. Rosa Klebb can operate in Paris with ease, thanks to the climate of treason that pervades the place. Bond finds Paris empty and hypocritical, like a cynical whore. “It was its heart that was gone,” Fleming writes, “pawned to the tourists, pawned to the Russians and Rumanians and Bulgars, pawned to the scum of the world who had gradually taken the town over.” That reflection occurs in “From a View to a Kill,” published in 1960 in the short-story collection For Your Eyes Only, where even Castro’s rebels are granted some grudging sympathy (the Caribbean then being Britain’s backyard, thanks all the same, and not some polluted Yankee pond).
Fleming once confessed that he hoped to “take the story along so fast that nobody would notice the idiosyncrasies.” Fat chance. His “idiosyncrasies” jut out like Tatiana Romanova’s ass. What he ought to have said was that he hoped to pile on the pace and thereby hustle the reader past the point where belief has to be suspended. The smaller details, of products and appurtenances and accessories, fulfill the function of the conjuror’s other hand. They distract attention from the glaring lacunae in the plots, the amazing stupidity of the supposedly mastermind villains, and the reckless disregard for his own safety that this supposedly ice-cold agent displays by falling for every lure. Another critic whose exegesis might have startled Bond’s creator was Umberto Eco, who wrote:
Fleming takes time to convey the familiar with photographic accuracy, because it is upon the familiar that he can solicit our capacity for identification. Our credulity is solicited, blandished, directed to the region of possible and desirable things. Here the narration is realistic, the attention to detail intense; for the rest, so far as the unlikely is concerned, a few pages suffice and an implicit wink of the eye.
The movie industry saw through this trick and learned, with such a big wink, how to replicate it for the masses and to make even Fleming’s pulp fiction look like literature. Fleming was angling for Hollywood, however much he may have despised it.
(The Atlantic, April 2006)
Power Suits
BECAUSE I AM a supporter of the armed struggle against the forces of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein, I quite often get asked if I have become a Republican in my declining years. Never mind for now the many reactionary Republicans, from Brent Scowcroft to Patrick J. Buchanan, who are my enemies in this argument: the fact is that I have been a republican all my life. Not in the sense that I favor the reunification of Ireland—though I certainly do—but in the sense of being opposed to all forms of monarchy and absolutism. I moved to the United States a quarter of a century ago, partly to escape the British royal family (whose publicity alas followed me across the Atlantic) and partly because it was much easier to be an independent writer in a country that had a written constitution and a codified Bill of Rights. After the barbaric assault on American civil society that took place on September 11, 2001, I resolved to stop cheating on my dues and applied to become a citizen, and although my paperwork seems to have vanished into the hideous maelstrom that goes by the name “Homeland Security,” I consider myself to be standing in line to take a formal oath to defend that constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.
In January of this year I found myself involved in two legal actions, one in my country of adoption and another in my country of birth, both directed at arbitrary power. In the first instance, I was contacted by Anthony Romero, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He asked if I would agree to become a plaintiff in a suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and by implication against the Justice Department. It had been disclosed that the NSA was engaging in widespread warrantless surveillance of American citizens. It seemed obvious to me (and the suit alleges) that this violated the First and Fourth Amen
dments to the Constitution, in that it hampered the confidentiality with which reporters and scholars and lawyers must work, in the Middle East and western Asia, and in that it was an unreasonable invasion of privacy rights. The First Amendment is how I make my living. But it is precious to me in other ways, in that it stands against any infringement of free expression. So I said yes.
I then had to fill out a questionnaire about my travels to, and contacts in, such countries as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, all of which I have covered for this magazine in the past few years. One of the questions asked if I was in contact with any person or group that the United States government could regard as being associated with terrorists. I would have paused at this anyway. Most of those with whom I exchange e-mail or phone traffic in Iraq and Afghanistan are dedicated to defeating the forces of bin Ladenism. But then there was this other little matter I’d gotten myself involved with. Two men were about to step into a dock in a London court: one of them, named David Keogh, is a former official in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office, and the other, named Leo O’Connor, is an alleged recipient of a document from Keogh. What the document is said to show is this: that on April 16, 2004, President George Bush proposed bombing the Al Jazeera network headquarters, in Qatar, and was talked out of it only by Tony Blair. Now, I have visited those same offices and have friends there, and I sometimes appear on Al Jazeera chat shows. So it seemed that, by one definition at least, I did have contact with suspected-terrorist targets. I had given some help in Washington to a team of British reporters at the London Daily Mirror, which broke the story, and also exchanged information with a celebrated British lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, who had drafted a Freedom of Information request in London, on behalf of Al Jazeera, in order to get a look at the relevant memo.
Both these actions have quite momentous implications. In the case of the first, our lawsuit alleges that President Bush has flat out broken the law: the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which set out “the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted.” (My italics.) These “exclusive means” do not include the words “by secret presidential fiat.” In the second case, if the allegation is true, it means that a very important center of communications, in a neutral country friendly to the United States (and host of the U.S. Central Command), would have been blitzed. I’ve tried to imagine the possible effect of that in the Arab world, but can’t quite manage to do so. Let’s just say that it would have put a large and smoldering hole in Karen Hughes’s “make nice” diplomacy. It would furthermore have raised the suspicion that the American bombing of Al Jazeera’s Baghdad office, in 2003, which killed a reporter, had not been a regrettable accident.
In a way, I am already flirting with lawbreaking by ventilating these questions. Since we filed our suit, the Bush administration has issued a “white paper,” and has agreed to hearings on Capitol Hill about the propriety of using the NSA against Americans. But this was not at all the first response to the revelation of the surveillance program. It was angrily announced by the White House that whoever disclosed it had violated the law and was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. A criminal inquiry has been set in motion to uncover the source of the leak. Meanwhile, in Britain, the Crown Prosecution wants to delay proceedings against Keogh and O’Connor while it seeks endorsement of a secret venue from Blair’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw. (British law features an Official Secrets Act, allowing the government to decide that even public information is secret, which in the US would be a violation of the First Amendment. Another reason, it occurred to me, why I had changed countries to begin with.) In other words, do bear in mind, dear reader, that you were not even supposed to know about these arguments in the first place!
Let us be scrupulous and put the opposite case. Things have changed since 1978, when FISA became law. The distinction between “overseas” and “at home” has been eroded by transnational jihadist groups. The forces of law and order must be able to move very swiftly. The Justice Department white paper argues that Congress did permit the president to order warrantless surveillance when after 9/11 it granted him the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). In ruling on the Yaser Esam Hamdi case, which was that of an “enemy combatant,” the Supreme Court found that the AUMF included detention in “narrow circumstances” as a “fundamental incident of waging war.” The Justice Department now wants to say that electronic surveillance is also a “fundamental incident.” Oh, and Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War.
Well, the fact remains that the AUMF doesn’t say a word about surveillance. And is it not the Republican Party which makes a fetish of “original intent,” and opposes the discovery of hidden or novel interpretations of existing laws? Furthermore, Congress amended FISA after it passed the AUMF. Thus, it can’t be argued that Congress intended that the AUMF supersede or override FISA. It can’t be argued even if, as its critics say when they are finally forced to discuss the matter, FISA is itself unconstitutional. If Bush feels that the act unbalances the separation of powers by granting too much authority to Congress, he must ask for it to be repealed or amended, or request that the Supreme Court strike it down. Meanwhile, it is the law of the land and he is bound by oath to uphold and obey it. And if the Supreme Court is to be cited, then remember what it said in June 2004, when the administration wanted to hold “enemy combatants” without a hearing. It ruled that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President.” In dreams begin responsibilities, and in wars begin the temptation for the rulers to arrogate extraordinary powers to themselves. Bush once appointed an attorney general, John Ashcroft, who knew so little about the United States Constitution that he announced that, in America, “we have no king but Jesus.” That moronic statement was exactly two words too long.
As for the Hamdi case, involving an actual combatant and the “fundamental incident of waging war,” if warrantless electronic spying on Americans is now to be defined as such a fundamental incident, then it is difficult if not impossible to say what could not be. Warrantless searches of offices and homes? Prior censorship of the press? This is where the Lincoln analogy becomes more relevant. Honest Abe did try unilaterally to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. But the chief justice ruled that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus, and Lincoln was forced to submit the matter to Capitol Hill. I have never heard it argued that this repressive measure actually shortened the war or hastened the Emancipation Proclamation, but it may have had the psychological effect of showing that the Union would use any weapon at its disposal. The thing to keep your eye on is this: we have already been “at war” with our nonstate enemy for as long as the Civil War went on. We are endlessly told it will be a lengthy struggle. All the more important, then, that we know what our rights and responsibilities are. The administration tries to dissolve this thought by saying, in effect, “It’s an emergency. Be afraid. Trust us.” What sinister poppycock. Our intelligence “community,” with its multibillion-dollar secret budget, left us under open skies on 9/11. The only born-and-raised American who had infiltrated the Taliban was John Walker Lindh of Marin County. George Tenet’s reaction to hearing of the Twin Towers in conflagration was to say that he wondered if it had anything to do with that guy in the flight-training school in Minnesota. For this, Bush gave him a Presidential Medal of Freedom. When the CIA wasn’t generating junk intelligence over Iraq, it was leaking hostile propaganda to discredit the whole idea of “regime change” in that country. These people are not even accountable to Bush: when he “authorized” the warrantless surveillance in late 2001 he found that the NSA had already started doing it without anyone’s permission. The FBI, on which tons of the resulting raw material was dumped, has stated that it was mostly useless and time wasting. It also must say something if an organization whose headquarters building still bears the name of J. Edgar Hoover (who wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and tried
to scare him into committing suicide) has asked the question: Is this even legal? To this and other concerns, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA, has blandly responded, “I can say unequivocally that we have got information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.” Well, presumably. That could also be said if we all had to empty our BlackBerrys into his capacious lap.
If you get yourself involved in a civil liberty lawsuit, you will invariably find that you have teamed up with people you don’t like. I became a supporter of the ACLU three decades ago, when it lost a good chunk of its membership by defending the First Amendment right of the American Nazi Party to hold a parade in the Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois. I told Anthony Romero that he could sign me up for the suit but that I was curious to know who the other plaintiffs might be. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers: fine. Members of this group complain that warrantless eavesdropping destroys attorney-client privilege and makes it almost impossible to represent defendants in far-off locations without flying to see them in person each time. The Council on American-Islamic Relations: yuck. These people produce rationalizations for Muslim fundamentalism and were the advocates for the demented crooner Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), who has incited the murder of Salman Rushdie. Still, how mad and pathetic of Homeland Security to divert a whole transatlantic flight just because the crooner was on board. Professors Larry Diamond and Barnett Rubin, of Stanford and of New York University, respectively: good company to be in. Diamond was a member of the transitional authority in Iraq, before he quit in disillusionment, and Rubin remains an invaluable adviser to the United Nations and the government in Afghanistan. These two men have done more to fight the foe than George Tenet ever did, but they now find that old friends and contacts are reluctant to speak freely on the phone or in e-mail. This is important to me too, and to you, because though my own contribution has been slight, it is reporters like John Burns and Peter Bergen who have come up with far more valuable advance intelligence about al-Qaeda than the CIA or NSA ever has. Put a chilling effect on the investigative work of men like that and you endanger national security. At our press conference, on January 17, the three-hundredth birthday of Benjamin Franklin, I said that this was a sad but appropriate way to commemorate the man who (a) was the presiding spirit at the Constitutional Convention and (b) elucidated the emancipating power of electricity.