The Observer Magazine of 23 November 1990 had a mock-up on the cover of Sean Connery lying side by side with Saddam Hussein, referring to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait a few months previously (‘If only Bond had been there: a guide to spying in the 90s’).
David Walker argued that with the Gulf war and the Falklands in 1982 ‘what was missing was a good old-fashioned spy on the ground’. It was, he wrote, ‘the difference between getting satellite pictures showing Iraqi tank positions near Basra and having Hussein’s mistress on the payroll and his pillow talk on the record’.
