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Rory Cormac

1 Oct, 8 tweets, 3 min read

@CIA

With all the talk about #Bond and fact vs fiction, here are a few examples of fiction shaping fact

1. @CIA director Allen Dulles loved Bond's gadgets so much he instructed CIA to replicate - for real - as many as they could...

He claimed CIA successfully managed to make a spring-loaded poison knife (as seen in From Russia with Love)

but failed to make a homing-beacon for a car (as seen in Goldeneye)

source: direct.mit.edu/jcws/article/1…

2. A British foreign secretary once turned down an MI6 operation to engineer regime change in Abu Dhabi on the grounds that it was too much of a "James Bond scheme"

source:
amazon.co.uk/Disrupt-Deny-S…

3. Buckingham Palace once tapped up Fleming to become a speechwriter for the Queen... they wanted him to sprinkle a bit of 007 magic.

but he declined because of a personality clash with another courtier nicknamed the abominable no-man

source: waterstones.com/book/the-secre…

4. Fast forward a few decades and Bond is the reference point for much newspaper coverage of SIS (and indeed any intelligence or special forces)

eg. William Hague on back foot over 'James Bond' Libya mission
theguardian.com/world/2011/mar…

eg this entirely incorrect claim that real life 007s have licence to kill renewed

mirror.co.uk/news/politics/…

eg real life James Bond unit so secret the government won't admit they exist

this matters b/c in the absence of the government admitting existence, the public are left to understand its important work through the prism of James Bond.

END

thesun.co.uk/news/15157602/…

@lucatrenta

@lucatrenta with another example 👇

Which reminds me of the time Kennedy’s brother supposedly asked the CIA:

“Why can’t you gentlemen get things cooking the way 007 does?”

https://twitter.com/lucatrenta/status/1443914214268145665

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Through 3 forgeries, the IRD (of @FCDOGovUK) aimed to:

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“A great insult to the whole Islamic world” 3/5

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1968: mass protests, social unrest, opposition to Vietnam, assassination of Martin Luther King.

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With a fake “ultra-left” student group of course!

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So this week I’m taking flak for being an establishment academic after our recent appointment of Sawers as hon prof

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Just can’t win 🤷‍♂️

I have it on good authority that Prince Charles once called me “that little shit” though, so there’s always that

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#OTD 1953:

The Iranian Shah, days after the successful #MI6 / @CIA sponsored coup, demands British intrigue must now stop. Enough.

The response?

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“Steps that had been taken in this particular case were not in accordance with usual practice, but were due to the special importance of Persia”

(meanwhile the U.K. was stepping up covert ops all over the Middle East!!)

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Oh here’s an interesting coincidence

Also #OTD but 1970

UK wonders what to do about ex Sultan of Oman (whom they’d just deposed in a coup).

They knew he’d feel “sore” about it!

How to keep him quiet? How to stop him writing a tell all book?

The answer…

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Who wants to see a real British forgery from 1963?

This one was designed to “intensify indignation” of African students towards the Soviets

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First, some context:

In early 1963, African students in Bulgaria violently clashed with police after authorities banned their attempts to establish and all-African Students’ Union.

How could 🇬🇧 exploit this??

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