Word: agent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...always teddibly English and utterly U (though Connery was a working- class Scot). To a nation that had seen its empire shrink in rancor, and its secret service embarrassed by the Burgess-Maclean and Profumo scandals, the notion of a British agent saving the free world was a tonic made in Fantasyland. The Beatles might have made Britain swinging for the young, but Bond was a travel-poster boy for the earmuff brigade. The Bond films even put a few theme songs (including Paul McCartney's Live and Let Die) on the pop charts. But their signal influence was closer...
Besides, like any clever agent, Bond could adapt to the Zeitgeist. With an eye toward detente, he found villains in rogue warriors, not cold warriors. Indeed, in A View to a Kill, "Comrade Bond" is awarded the Order of Lenin. One of these days, he might even get a citation from Ms. magazine. The male chauvinist piggy is still susceptible to European beauties of no fixed abode or accent, but now he relies on their intelligence and independence. They can fight manfully; he can fall in love...
...good soldier must kill a pretty young sniper (the unenticing Maryam d'Abo). Then it's off to Vienna, London, Tangier and Afghanistan -- the usual guided tour of In spots and hot spots, with a politically savvy cast of , adversaries. An honorable KGB boss and a duplicitous KGB agent. Afghan freedom fighters who push opium on the side. A renegade arms dealer who may remind you of General Secord's friend Edwin Wilson. And 007 in the middle, juggling global juggernauts like Ollie North, but with less piety and more smarts...
...Mailer? The Pulitzer-prizewinning author (The Executioner's Song) charged last week that two friends convicted on drug- smuggling charges were given heavier sentences to pressure them into implicating him. Mailer was a character witness in the 1983 trial of Writer Richard Stratton and the 1984 trial of Literary Agent Bernard ("Buzz") Farbar, but denies having been an accomplice. "I made no Fifth Amendment claim then, and I didn't need to," he says. Mailer spoke up after nine prominent writers, including William Styron and Nora Ephron, published a letter in the New York Review of Books charging that Farbar...
...then Lonetree, a devotee of spy novels who had already been transferred from Moscow to Vienna, had voluntarily admitted to having had liaisons with a Soviet woman and providing relatively low-level documents from the Vienna embassy -- but not the Moscow embassy -- to a KGB agent nicknamed "Uncle Sasha." Only under persistent and prolonged NIS questioning did Lonetree name Bracy, asserting that when the two of them were in Moscow they had let Soviet agents roam the embassy's secure areas. On the strength of Lonetree's statement, Bracy was arrested...