Daniel Craig's first job as James Bond in the film Casino Royale was to fly to Prague to kill a renegade MI6 officer. Having thus earned his 007 designation and the much vaunted licence to kill, he went on to gun down a dozen prison guards in Madagascar while hunting a terrorist bomb-maker.
It must have come as something of a surprise to him last week, then, to learn that MI6 hasn't killed anyone for years. Sir Richard Dearlove, the former MI6 chief, told the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales that, contrary to claims from two separate whistleblowers – David Shayler, who said the service had drawn up a plan to kill Colonel Gadaffi, and Richard Tomlinson, who described a plot to kill Slobodan Milosevic – the service had not carried out any assassinations since he joined it in 1966.
Technically, under the Intelligence Services Act, the real James Bonds could commit any crime outside the UK, be it murder or bigamy, if it were authorised by the foreign secretary. However, while Dearlove conceded that there had once been a plan drawn up to kill a Balkans war criminal, the officer responsible was apparently rapped over the knuckles and told never to think such nasty thoughts again...
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