CIA men, MI6 colleagues, local contacts: most of the time they’re the support network that makes a one-man mission possible. Every so often, they support Bond the way a wet paper bag supports groceries.
This is a list of bad moments, not bad friends. Several people below do real good elsewhere in their films. House rules: the ally has to be on Bond’s side at the time, as a colleague, a CIA or local contact, or an ally of convenience. Bond girls, villains pretending to be friends and henchmen are not on this list. Being killed is not a failure, and friends who did their job and paid for it belong on a very different list. Each incident is ranked by the direct damage the ally’s own mistake did to Bond’s mission, from minor inconvenience to the one that got him captured.
Minor Inconvenience
5. Lieutenant Hip’s Getaway, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Bond wakes up at a karate school in Bangkok with a room full of students who would like a word. Hip arrives with his two nieces, who flatten the entire dojo. That is a real rescue. Then Hip jumps into the car and drives off without Bond, while his nieces try in vain to tell him he’s missing someone. The man they just rescued is left on foot and has to find his own way out on a long-tail boat. Full marks for the rescue. The headcount needs work.
4 to 3: Surveillance Lost
4. Felix Leiter at Circus Circus, Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Bond sets up a handoff of the real diamonds to Tiffany Case at the Circus Circus casino in Las Vegas, and Felix’s agents have the place covered. Tiffany walks out with the diamonds anyway and passes them down the line to the next smuggler. A casino full of CIA agents lost a diamond smuggler carrying a stuffed animal. It’s a bad night for a Felix who has a good film otherwise: he meets Bond at the Los Angeles airport disguised as a customs inspector, the CIA has already swapped the smuggled diamonds for fakes, and at the finale he leads the helicopter attack on Blofeld’s oil rig.
3. Felix Leiter’s Tracking Job, Goldfinger (1964)
The warning signs start in Miami, where Felix has been watching Goldfinger at cards and rates him “a fabulous card player.” Bond works out that he cheats almost immediately. In Kentucky, Bond is a prisoner at Goldfinger’s stud farm and tries to get a warning out: he slips a homing device and a note about Operation Grand Slam into the pocket of a departing gangster, Mr. Solo. Felix and his partner, waiting at a fried chicken restaurant, pick up the signal and follow it, believing they’re tracking Bond. Oddjob is the one who sends the car into a scrapyard crusher, and Felix can’t rescue a note he doesn’t know exists. Still, the CIA’s whole plan is a dot on a screen, and Bond’s warning gets as far as a cube of scrap metal.
2 to 1: Mission Compromised
2. Carter’s Earpiece, Casino Royale (2006)
Carter is the MI6 agent working the Madagascar stakeout with Bond. The job is to watch a bombmaker named Mollaka at a snake and mongoose fight, blend in and wait. Carter keeps touching his earpiece. Mollaka notices, and the quiet surveillance job turns into a foot chase through a construction site and up a crane. Where it ends, at an embassy with Mollaka dead against orders to take him alive and Bond’s photo in the British papers, is on Bond. The chase is on Carter. The plan was to stand there. Carter could not stand there.
1. Valentin Zukovsky’s Bodyguard, The World Is Not Enough (1999)
Zukovsky is ex-KGB, runs a casino and a caviar business in Baku, and is one of Bond’s key sources in the region. He also employs Bullion as his bodyguard, and Bullion is secretly working for Elektra. Bullion lets her know Bond is still alive, which brings her helicopters down on Zukovsky’s caviar factory. Later, in Istanbul, he plants a bomb in Zukovsky’s safe house, and Bond and Christmas are captured. The submarine has a Zukovsky connection too: the bets Elektra lost at his casino were a payoff for the use of a sub captained by his nephew. Zukovsky insists he didn’t know who she was working with, and he saves Bond’s life in the finale. But one hire put the villain in the room with Bond’s best lead.
The Debrief
Five bad moments, one surviving agent. Bond lived through all of them, which says more about Bond than about the backup.