Once Improbable James Bond Villains Now Close To Real Thing, Spy Researcher Says

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2008) — Professor Richard J. Aldrich, Professor of International Security at University of Warwick, who has just been awarded a £447,000 grant from UK's Art and Humanities Research Council to examine 'Landscapes of Secrecy' says that the once improbable seeming villains in the Bond movies have become close to the real threats face faced by modern security services.

He says: "Throughout the Cold War, Bond's villains looked improbable, but now life imitates art. Indeed, in the early 1990s as the Cold War came to a sudden end, real MI6 officers worried about redundancy. Their boss, the real "M", Sir Colin McColl reassured them that the end of the Cold War would be followed by a Hot Peace. He was quite right. Within a few years they had joined with special forces to battle drug barons in South America and to track down war criminals in the former Yugoslavia."

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