When I read that Alexei Navalny, who died in a prison in Siberia two years ago, had been killed by a poison derived from an Ecuadorean dart frog, I could not help but think immediately of Ian Fleming, and James Bond, and, specifically, From Russia with Love. On the last page, Rosa Klebb, of SMERSH, Death to Spies, kicks Bond in the calf. Her shoe has at its point a poisoned dart. Bond crashes to the floor. The film has an alternative happy ending when the Bond girl (but perhaps that expression is no longer PC), Tatiana Romanova, shoots Klebb, so chillingly played by the great Lotte Lenya. In the book, Bond receives the fatal kick, and that might have been the end of a five book thriller series. Perhaps Fleming decided to kill off his hero before Bond, with his profoundly unhealthy lifestyle, reciprocated. But as it turned out Bond was resurrected and would appear in nine more books.
We have to wait until chapter two of Dr No before the world famous neurologist Sir James Maloney tells M what nearly killed Bond. It was fugu poison, from the sex organs of Japanese globe fish. It’s a neuromuscular blocker, tetrodotoxin, with the same effect as curare. As Sir James said, “Trust the Russians to use something no one’s ever heard of.”
Navalny was not killed by fugu poison, but by epibatidine, naturally found in dart frogs in South America. Fugu poison makes another appearance in You Only Live Twice, when Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, explains how Japanese restaurateurs must have a special licence to prepare and serve globe fish. But strangely, there is also an amphibian connection. The dust jacket of the hard-back first edition of You Only Live Twice, so brilliantly designed by Richard Chopping, depicts a toad. We only meet the toad in the last chapter, and the pharmacological agent derived from its integument is not a neurotoxin, but an aphrodisiac. Bond, having killed off Guntrum Shatterhand aka Ernst Stavro Blofeld (at least, we assume he is dead, but we can’t be sure) is left profoundly brain damaged. In addition to losing his memory, he has lost his libido. Bond girl Kissy Suzuki visits a sex merchant in The Happy Shop in Fukuoka, and buys half a teaspoonful of toad sweat obtained by placing the toad on a hot plate. No animals were injured in the creation of this product.
At any rate it works, and Bond recovers his libido (and even, unbeknownst to him, fathers a child), but not his memory. So when he’s eventually washed up on the shores of Vladivostok, he is really a lame duck for the KGB further to brain-wash and send on a mission… fast forward to The Man with the Golden Gun… to attempt to assassinate M. It’s all utterly bizarre and fantastical and yet, reading about Alexei Navalny, it seems that the world depicted is completely real. In 1978 a Bulgarian dissident was killed on the streets of London apparently by a ricin pellet fired from an umbrella tip. In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko died a lingering death after drinking a cup of tea laced with polonium-210. In 2020, Navalny was poisoned with novichok. He survived, and after a period of treatment and convalescence in Germany he voluntarily, and with great courage, returned to Moscow, where he was promptly arrested. Novichok was used in Salisbury in an attempt to kill Sergei Skripal. In the event, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died because she happened to pick up a phial of perfume, which in fact contained novichok. I recall Salisbury was essentially in lockdown for weeks. Prime Minister May was terribly exercised, but unable to do very much about it. Mr Putin paraded the two suspect killers on television, who denied any involvement, and said they were visiting Salisbury as tourists and for cultural reasons. Apparently they greatly admired the cathedral.
Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer, was a double agent. What Fleming said all these years ago in Casino Royale about SMERSH could easily have applied to events in Salisbury. “Be faithful, spy well, or you die. Inevitably and without any question, you will be hunted down and killed.”
Bruised by the discovery that Vesper Lynd was a double agent working for “Redland”, who, in an impossible bind, takes her own life, Bond resolves to devote his professional life to pursuing the agents of SMERSH, the terror organisation behind the Soviet spy network. Clearly, Fleming is setting up a scenario for Bond’s future assignments. But oddly enough, he never really followed it up. Granted SMERSH is lurking somewhere behind the activities of a lot of these spectacular gargoyles, like Mr Big, Dr No, and Scaramanga; but really most of them run a criminal private enterprise purely for personal gain, like Goldfinger, the Spangs, and most spectacularly Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE. After Casino Royale, the only true Cold War Bond thriller is From Russia with Love.
Yet the Cold War is always lurking in the background, and the last sight we have of James Bond is in a stinking smashed up Berlin flat at the corner of Kochstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse, overlooking the site that was later to become Checkpoint Charlie.
The Russian Embassy in London has described the dart frog thesis as “feeble-mindedness of Western fabulists”. They might as easily have said that it read like a James Bond book. But the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands have reported the Kremlin to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Perhaps Mr Putin will echo the words of one of his predecessors, Joseph Stalin, and ask, “How many divisions does the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have?” In the new world order of Might is Right, our international institutions are becoming increasingly fragile. The US has diminished the influence of the United Nations, and dismissed the climate crisis as a hoax, fake news. Once you elect to disregard the truth, anarchy reigns.
Alexei Navalny was a great champion of the truth. In his remarkable memoir, Patriot, he encouraged us all to tell the truth, and spread the truth. I wonder if Mr Putin has read Patriot? In the long run, the truth is the most powerful weapon of all. Amidst all the darkness that enshrouds the Russian Federation, Navalny’s memoir offers a ray of hope, and spreads a little of the Living Daylights.
jamescalumcampbell 