Necros

Background

Tall, blond and steel-jawed, he belongs to the Red Grant model of henchman common in the earlier films. He is General Georgi Koskov's highly trained and disciplined killer, with KGB affiliations but ultimately loyal to Koskov, speaks of comrades fighting for world revolution, plays The Pretenders on his personal stereo, and favours strangulation among his many techniques of killing. Across the film he impersonates an American jogger, a Cockney milkman, an upper-class MI6 agent, an Austrian balloon salesman and a doctor in Morocco; his name means dead in Greek.

His first priority is to bring Koskov safely from the British safe house to Brad Whitaker's Tangier estate. Disguised as a milkman he gains access to the intelligence compound, radios a report of a major gas leak to force an evacuation, and in the confusion abducts Koskov, killing several agents with explosive milk bottles. Later, disguised as a balloon salesman in Vienna, he sets a bomb that kills Saunders, head of Station V, as he leaves his rendezvous with Bond, part of the operation to convince the British that the Soviets have instituted "Smiert Spionem", death to spies.

He dies after a midair struggle with Bond on the holding net of a Hercules cargo plane thousands of feet above Afghanistan, pleading for his life while hanging on to Bond's boot until Bond cuts the laces and drops him. Sally Hibbin counts him among the most memorable Bond villains for his stature, false accents and love of pop music, while Steven Rubin felt he was not on screen long enough to make any true impact; Pfeiffer and Worrall call him the most intriguing of the film's three main villains.