bases beyond the contiguous United States today. For contrast, consider that all other countries in the world hold around thirty foreign bases combined. It has, according to David Vine, some 800 today. In the 1950s, Washington claimed hundreds of overseas bases. Others were walled-off enclaves inside of other countries. Some were, like Doctor No’s base, on remote islands. Starting in the Second World War, the United States had begun seriously acquiring overseas bases around the planet. James Bond was fiction, but not as far from fact as it might seem. Just as he saw, islands and secret bases are instruments of world domination. Yet with the island thing, Fleming was onto something. The exploding pens, shark tanks, and endless procession of round-heeled female helpmeets seem more the fruits of Fleming’s rum-soaked imagination than insights into actual espionage. The world of James Bond contains many absurdities. There is a sequence in the 2006 Casino Royale shot, as was Thunderball, on Wenner-Gren’s island.
AUSTIN POWER SPY WHO SHAGGED ME WHITE GUY ON PIANO ON A BUS MOVIE
The private island looms large in the movie of Doctor No, but similar locales can be found in other Bond films: Thunderball (filmed on Wenner-Gren’s island), You Only Live Twice (rocket base under a Japanese volcanic island), Diamonds Are Forever (offshore oil rig), Live and Let Die (small Caribbean island dictatorship), The Man with the Golden Gun (private Thai island), The Spy Who Loved Me (giant sea base), and Skyfall (abandoned island). The films took that notion and ran with it. Through the fact that I have to account to no one.” “And how do I possess that power, that sovereignty? Through privacy. “Mister Bond, power is sovereignty,” he explains. The secrecy of his location is essential to this. Wenner-Gren.įrom his secluded base, Doctor No tells James Bond in the novel, he can use radio to monitor, jam, and redirect U.S. Its titular villain, a cosmopolitan multimillionaire with a private Caribbean island, bore an undeniable resemblance to Dr. Another, Doctor No, took the idea further. One of them, Live and Let Die, used the bit about a secret island submarine base. He bought an estate in Jamaica (named Goldeneye, after one of the intelligence operations he’d help run) and began writing his Bond novels from there.
But Fleming nevertheless found it all irresistible. The accusations that Wenner-Gren was using his island as a secret Nazi base proved false. Axel Wenner-Gren, a mysterious Swedish multimillionaire with Nazi ties who had established himself on an island in the Bahamas. Rumors floated that the boats were finding safe berth at a secret harbor built by Dr. The Caribbean was then in dire straits, tormented by German submarines that evaded the Allied navies.
In 1943, he traveled to Kingston, Jamaica for a high-level intelligence conference with the United States. During the Second World War, he’d served as the assistant to Britain’s director of naval intelligence. Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, knew something about islands. As far as I can tell, it started with Bond. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the notion of planetary domination from an island started cropping up in literature. Lawless and perhaps even dangerous, but not powerful places. After all, Napoleon’s adversaries sent him to Elba to neutralize him, not to encourage him to have another go.įor the rest of the nineteenth century, that’s how islands were seen. Of all the potentially menacing locales, why do our most ambitious evildoers, the ones bent on world domination, seek out remote specks of land in the middle of seas and oceans? You’d think the qualities of islands that make them desirable vacation spots-their distance from population centers, their relaxed pace of life-would ill suit them as launchpads for global conquest. The deranged supervillain, his island lair, the threat of world domination-it’s so familiar you forget how bizarre it is. Evil, “welcome to my hollowed-out volcano.” The setting, an elaborate underground base on a tropical island from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, is instantly recognizable. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma: An outpost of the United States lodged in the heart of a tightly packed Okinawan city. military bases scattered across the globe might seem like small, unimportant dots on a map, but they are the foundation of the U.S. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.The hundreds of U.S. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below.
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