Fat Bond

“Hello, my name’s Thomas. Thomas the Tank Engine…”

December 2008

The world of international espionage was shocked to the core to learn that James Bond has quit his derring-do activities and retired to the island of Sodor, home of children’s favourite Thomas the Tank Engine.

Pierce Brosnan, the last but one Bond, has agreed to become the voice of the Fat Controller, who is the narrator and Thomas’s boss in the latest TV series.

Instead of leaping off mountains and planes, chasing speedboats through hoops of fire, sipping Champagne over the roulette tables at Monte Carlo, and getting up to hanky-panky with lots of lovely ladies, he will be confined to more mundane tasks.

These include making sure the line is kept working between Tidmouth and Ffarquhar, and ensuring that Thomas’s friends - Gordon the Big Express Engine, James the Red Engine, Terence the Tractor Engine, Mavis, Henry, Percy and all – don’t get into too much trouble.

The timeless Thomas books, films and TV series are now enjoying a huge popularity among their third generation of kids.

It’s a big come down for the man who saved the world on countless occasions. And that’s all the thanks he gets.

There is, however, no truth in the rumour that the current Bond, Daniel Craig, is to take a starring role in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s all very worrying the way the secret services are being emasculated. The rot set in when the Bond people replaced solid old reliable pipe-smoking “M” with a woman in the shape of Dame Judy Dench.

But the biggest travesty of all was when they came to replace Desmond Llewellyn as the irascible genius “Q”, mastermind behind all Bond’s lethal gadgets. Who did they let take over? Why, that loony John Cleese, that’s who.

Can we all safely sleep in our beds after this?
We might as well just sit back and hand the world over to SMERSH without a whimper. Hey there, Mr. Goldfinger – here’s the keys to Fort Knox, take all the gold you want!..Hi, Mr. Blofeld – here’s your licence for world domination, and we’ve even thrown in a chocolate mouse for your cat!

Truly, the shadowy world of spies just isn’t what it used to be. Now, thanks to the concept of open government, it’s all above board. Soon, they’ll be playing by Marquis of Queensbury Rules.

Take Britain’s MI5, for instance. A time was when you’d be hard pressed to get the government to admit it even existed, let alone talk about it. It was the stuff of fiction, spoken of in hushed tones with a nod and a wink. Now, everybody knows where they live (it’s at Thames House, 11 Milbank, London, but they draw the line at conducted tours.)

Not only that, but they are even advertising for spies. Seriously.

I’ve been dipping into their careers prospectus, and it makes interesting reading.

So you want to be a spy? How about an Intelligence officer’s job, starting at £23,500 a year plus benefits?

“Making decisions will be part of your daily life,” proclaims the prospectus. “An incisive intellect and finely balanced judgment are essential…flexible, analytical and highly organized, you will have a superb eye for detail, and the perfect balance of sensitivity and confidence…discretion and absolute integrity are also crucial qualities.”

There’s also a Mobile Surveillance Officer’s job on offer at up to £28,602 a year. This involves shadowing suspects on foot and in vehicles, recording their movements, secretly photographing them and those they meet and listening to their conversations. I guess there will probably be a lot of hiding behind hedgerows and down manholes involved.

An unspecified position at GCHQ, the secret electronic surveillance centre in Cheltenham, describes itself simply: “This is not your average desk job.” You can bet your bottom dollar it isn’t. Staff at the Thames House HQ are offered a susbsidised restaurant, coffee bar, squash courts and multi-gym.
MI5 has even sponsored a children’s reading promotion called the Summer Reading Challenge. Needless to say, spy books were a big favourite. MI5 even brought the kids some goodies from their archives to show them, including secret message pens, invisible inks, a camera concealed in a fake tin of apricots, and, bizarrely, an attaché case that belonged to the 1960’s British spy Guy Burgess, who was exposed as a Russian agent.

The spooks have really come out of the closet. The first hint I got of this trend was many years ago while covering US President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Ireland. Tucked among the trees surrounding the place he was staying were burly men and women wearing jackets with day glow signs on the back proclaiming: SECRET SERVICE. It sure does pay to advertise, I guess.

Personally, I much preferred it the old fashioned way. Give me Sean Connery beating the living daylights out of a posse of Kung Fu attackers any day. Somehow there was a comfort zone there, knowing there was this shadowy corps secretly beavering away at keeping us safe from dastardly predators.

Mind you, with the competence of some of our own governments, one may well wonder just who we need protection from.

It has been revealed that from the 1960’s right up to the early years of Tony Blair’s government, the security of Britain’s nuclear bombs was controlled by…a bicycle lock.

To launch Armageddon all a mad military man had to do was undo the flap on the side of the bomb, like opening the battery compartment of a radio – your thumbnail or a coin would do the job - and inside were instructions how to drive the thing. For a low yield explosion, using a simple Allen key, you turn the switch to the left; for a really big bang turn it to the right. For detonation in the air, turn another switch to the left; for a bang on the ground turn it to the right. Now comes the hard bit. To arm the bomb you insert the bicycle key, turn it, and…Bingo!

This apparently caused much alarm among the Americans and the Russians, especially during the Cold War. They had each put in place fail-safe systems to prevent the so-called “Dr. Strangelove” scenario. Everybody remembers the Peter Sellers movie in which a paranoid general orders a nuclear attack on Russia.

Each superpower introduced PALS – Permissive Action Links – on their nuclear weapons to keep them safe. It ensured that no one person could launch a nuclear weapon and relied on at least two people with matching launch codes.

This is familiar from many Hollywood movies, such as Crimson Tide with Gene Hackman as the paranoid submarine commander, Broken Arrow with John Travolta, The Peacemaker with Nicole Kidman – and of course, a whole raft of Bond movies.

But Britain still clung to a system in which any nutty submarine commander or V- bomber captain could launch Armageddon. The worried Americans constantly urged Britain to introduce similar safeguards, but it was always strongly resisted. Even the British government’s own Chief Scientific Adviser formally advised the then Defence Secretary, Denis Healy, to install PALS on the weapons, but the Cabinet again turned down the plan.

The Royal Navy argued that, being the Senior Service, its officers could be trusted… “It would be invidious to suggest…that Senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders…”

So hip, hip hooray for the stiff upper lip of the Senior Service. Had they forgotten about the Mutiny on the Bounty?

All things considered, I think that in retrospect I would prefer that my security was left in the safe and competent hands of the Fat Controller.