Brad Whitaker

Background

Fascinated by war but without real military experience, Whitaker was expelled from West Point for cheating, served briefly as a mercenary in the Belgian Congo and built an arms business with the help of criminal organisations, assembling his own personal military force. He wargames historical battles such as Agincourt, Waterloo and Gettysburg with automated miniatures, tells Bond that Grant would have crushed the Army of Northern Virginia, and keeps a pantheon of commanders including Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Caesar, Alexander, Cromwell and Attila, all sculpted to resemble himself, whom he calls surgeons who removed society's dead flesh and Leonid Pushkin calls butchers.

He joins forces with the rogue Soviet general Georgi Koskov to buy a large opium shipment from the Snow Leopard Brotherhood in Afghanistan with 500 million dollars of diamonds obtained from a Soviet arms deal. The pair also try to use Bond and MI6 to eliminate General Pushkin, Gogol's successor, by pretending he has revived the "Smiert Spionom" death-to-spies operation, when in fact their henchman Necros is killing the British agents.

After thwarting the plan in Afghanistan, Bond hunts Whitaker to his Tangier headquarters for a cat-and-mouse fight in his gaming room, Whitaker armed with an 80-round light machine gun with a ballistic shield, a bulletproof vest and a loaded antique cannon against Bond's 8-round Walther PPK. Bond primes a key-ring finder behind a bust of the Duke of Wellington, triggers it with a wolf whistle, and the toppling bust crushes Whitaker into a glass case holding his Waterloo diorama, so that Bond quips to Pushkin that he met his Waterloo. Baker, who later played the CIA man Jack Wade, called him a nut who thought he was Napoleon; Pfeiffer and Worrall thought him miscast and an unconvincing oaf.