The Prime Minister receives a communiqué from SPECTRE ( SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion ) explaining that the organisation has hijacked a Villiers Vindicator and seized its two nuclear bombs, which it will use to destroy two major cities unless a £ 100, 000, 000 ransom is paid.

SPECTRE is introduced in the first film, Dr. No ( 1962 ), in which the doctor explains to Bond that it is the acronym for the SPecial Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion, the four great cornerstones of power.

Blofeld, with a weakened SPECTRE would appear for the final time in You Only Live Twice.

The goal of world domination was only ever stated in You Only Live Twice, and SPECTRE was working not for itself but for an unnamed Asian government whose two representatives Blofeld speaks to during the movie ; perhaps Red China, who earlier backed Goldfinger.

Following Diamonds Are Forever, SPECTRE and Blofeld were retired from the Eon Films series, except for a cameo by Blofeld ( not identified by name, but accompanied by the character's trademark cat ) in For Your Eyes Only.

Despite speculation that SPECTRE would return for the Daniel Craig era of Bond films, 007 has instead tackled an underground terrorist organisation similar to SPECTRE, known as Quantum.

Henchmen working for SPECTRE, one of its members, or directly for Ernst Stavro Blofeld:

* Emilio Largo – " Number 2 ," second in command of SPECTRE and designated by Blofeld to oversee all field operations for Thunderball ; killed by Domino Vitali

* Strelik – " Number 10 ," a former SMERSH member ; shot dead by Largo for questioning the loyalty of the other SPECTRE members

* In the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball, a SPECTRE officer states that the criminal organization earned £ 250, 000 as a consultation fee for the robbery.

The story centres on the theft of two atomic bombs by the crime syndicate SPECTRE and the subsequent attempted blackmail of the Western powers for their return.

Numerous titles were proposed for these works, including SPECTRE, James Bond of the Secret Service and Longitude 78 West.

Both McClory and Fleming claim to have come up with the concept of SPECTRE ; Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett and John Cork both note Fleming as the originator of the group, Lycett saying that " proposed that Bond should confront not the Russians but SPECTRE ..." whilst Cork produced a memorandum in which Fleming called for the change to SPECTRE:

The yacht is a hydrofoil craft purchased with SPECTRE funds for £ 200, 000.

In the film, Kronsteen ( Vladek Sheybal ), works for SPECTRE, and is tasked with planning Bond's killing and disgrace for killing Dr. Julius No. Ultimately, he fails and is murdered at Ernst Stavro Blofeld's behest.

He is believed to be either a direct descendent or a confidant of Ernst Stavro Blofeld and to have resurrected the evil organization SPECTRE Gardner alludes, on more than one occasion, that Bismaquer in truth is a homosexual and possibly had fallen for Bond.

The game is a third-person shooter in the same style as Everything or Nothing, with expansions in the story and certain details changed ( such as trading SPECTRE for OCTOPUS, due to legal problems ).

Although the story follows the same general storyline, there are some changes: the film shows Dr. No to be an operative of SPECTRE and his island fortress is nuclear powered ; No is killed not by the mountain of guano, but by drowning in reactor coolant.

SPECTRE is not aligned to any nation or political ideology, enabling the later Bond books and Bond films to be regarded as apolitical.

In Ian Fleming's novels, SPECTRE is a commercial enterprise led by Blofeld.

SPECTRE is headed by the supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld who usually appears accompanied by a white Persian cat in the movies, but not in the books.

Apparently disbanded afterwards, SPECTRE is said to be active again in the next book, The Spy Who Loved Me, although the organisation is not involved in the plot.

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the second chapter of what is known as the " Blofeld Trilogy ", Blofeld has revived SPECTRE, and Blofeld's final appearance, sans SPECTRE, is in the final novel of the trilogy, You Only Live Twice.

In the films, SPECTRE usually replaced SMERSH as the main villains, although there is a brief reference to SMERSH in the second Eon Bond film, From Russia with Love.

After being absent from Goldfinger, SPECTRE returns in Thunderball and subsequently is featured in the following films You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever.

It is interesting to note that in the Bulgarian subtitles of Quantum of Solace, the name Quantum was translated as SPECTRE, with the title changed to " Spectre of Solace " (" Спектър на утехата ").

SPECTRE is shown, but never mentioned by name, in the game GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.

In the first book to include SPECTRE, " Thunderball ", it is stated that the numbers of each member changes periodically ( it " advances round a rota by two digits at midnight on the first of every month ") to avoid detection and Blofeld is in fact number 2.

Blofeld is head of the global criminal organisation SPECTRE and is commonly referred to as Number 1, an official numerical position given to members of SPECTRE.

Blofeld is absent from the next book, The Spy Who Loved Me, though its events take place while Bond is battling SPECTRE in North America.

While attending prep school at Warfield Academy, James Bond Jr. with the help of his friends IQ ( the hitherto unmentioned grandson of Q ), and Gordo Leiter ( the son of Felix Leiter, also not previously established ), fights against the evil terrorist organization SCUM ( Saboteurs and Criminals United in Mayhem, which is an offshoot of organizations like SPECTRE ).

The film version contained some changes to the novel, with the leading villains switching from SMERSH to SPECTRE, a fictional terrorist organisation.

Largo eventually became the second-in-command of the terrorist organization SPECTRE.

SPECTRE began in the novels as a small group of criminals but became a vast international organisation with its own SPECTRE Island training base in the films, to replace the Soviet SMERSH.

Dr. No and Auric Goldfinger appear as SPECTRE members, with Dr. No "...( Doctor Julius No ) having broken ranks with our organisation.

Although the From Russia with Love video game mirrors much of the plot of the eponymous film, it uses an organisation called OCTOPUS rather than SPECTRE to avoid copyright issues.

SPECTRE and its characters have been at the centre of long-standing litigation starting in 1961 between Kevin McClory and Ian Fleming over the film rights to Thunderball and the ownership of the organisation and its characters.

The Russians were originally the villains, but this was later changed to the international organised criminal organisation, SPECTRE.

For more than a year, James Bond, British Secret Service operative 007, has been involved in " Operation Bedlam ": trailing the private criminal organisation SPECTRE and its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Blush and her charge, a United States Air Force pilot named Jack Petachi, are operatives of SPECTRE, a criminal organisation run by Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Bond teams up with CIA agent Cedar Leiter, daughter of his old friend, Felix Leiter, to investigate one Markus Bismaquer, who is suspected of reviving the criminal organisation SPECTRE, which was believed to have been disbanded years earlier following the death of its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, at the hands of Bond ( in You Only Live Twice ).

In both stories, the returning protagonist ( Schofield in Scarecrow, James Bond in NLF ) is the target of a monetary contract posted by a villainous organisation ( Majestic-12 in Scarecrow, SPECTRE in NLF ) that requires delivery of the target's severed head, and both stories include the protagonist's loved ones ( Gant in Scarecrow, May and Moneypenny in NLF ) being used as leverage against the protagonist.