CIA officer and Pinkerton detective in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels

Felix Leiter is James Bond’s American friend and working partner in Ian Fleming’s novels. He first appears in Casino Royale (1953) as a CIA officer attached to NATO, and he takes part in six of Fleming’s books. In Live and Let Die (1954) a shark takes his right arm and half of his left leg. He leaves the CIA, joins Pinkerton’s detective agency and goes on working with a steel hook and an artificial leg. The CIA calls him back from its reserve for later operations. On screen he has appeared in ten Eon films, played by seven actors. The films keep him an uninjured CIA officer until Licence to Kill (1989).

Role in the novels

Casino Royale (1953)

Leiter is the CIA’s man at Royale-les-Eaux, on loan from the Joint Intelligence Staff of NATO at Fontainebleau. Washington wants Le Chiffre ruined as much as London does, and Leiter’s job is to give Bond whatever help he needs. The two get on at once. Bond orders the dry martini he later names the Vesper while Leiter looks on.

His one decisive act comes during the baccarat game. Le Chiffre wins Bond’s entire stake. An envelope then arrives from Leiter holding 32 million francs and a note that calls it Marshall Aid. Bond plays on with the American money and breaks Le Chiffre. Leiter is not present for Bond’s capture and torture afterward.

Live and Let Die (1954)

The story opens in New York. Leiter is the CIA’s liaison with Bond and the FBI in the case against Mr Big, a Harlem gangster and SMERSH agent who sells pirate gold to pay for Soviet operations. Leiter takes Bond round the Harlem clubs. Fleming adds that in his early twenties Leiter wrote a few pieces on Dixieland jazz for the Amsterdam News. Mr Big’s men capture them both. Bond has a finger broken. Leiter gets off with a light beating because he and his guard share a taste for jazz.

Bond and Solitaire travel by train to St Petersburg, Florida, and Leiter meets them there. Solitaire is kidnapped. Leiter goes back alone at night to search the Ourobouros Worm and Bait Shippers warehouse, which is Mr Big’s front for bringing the gold ashore. He comes back to their cottage on a stretcher, barely alive, with a note attached: “He disagreed with something that ate him.” The Robber, who runs the warehouse, had dropped him into a shark tank. Leiter loses his right arm and half of his left leg. Bond goes back to the warehouse, and The Robber ends up in the same tank.

Diamonds Are Forever (1956)

Leiter meets Bond in New York with a steel hook in place of his right hand and a limp. He lost his gun hand, so the CIA let him go, and he now works for Pinkerton’s as a private detective. His assignment is the Spangled Mob’s fixing of horse races. It crosses Bond’s diamond-smuggling case because the same gang runs both.

He drives Bond to Saratoga in his Studillac and bribes the jockey to get the mob’s horse disqualified, which costs the gang its winnings. In Las Vegas he puts Bond in touch with a reliable cab driver, Ernie Cureo. After Bond and Tiffany Case escape from the mob’s ghost town at Spectreville, Leiter picks them up in the Nevada desert and drives them to Los Angeles for a flight east.

Goldfinger (1959)

He is still at Pinkerton’s. Bond, held prisoner by Goldfinger, writes out the Fort Knox plan and hides it in the lavatory of Goldfinger’s plane, addressed to Leiter with a reward promised for delivery. The note reaches him. Leiter takes it to the FBI and the Pentagon, and he arrives at Fort Knox with the troops who break up the raid. He sees Bond off at the airport afterward, shortly before Goldfinger’s men hijack the flight.

Thunderball (1961)

SPECTRE steals two atomic bombs, and the CIA calls Leiter back. He tells Bond that former officers stay on a reserve list and that he has been drafted back for the emergency. In Nassau the two search the sea by amphibian aircraft, find the sunken bomber and settle on Emilio Largo’s yacht, the Disco Volante, as the place the bombs are hidden. They board the American nuclear submarine Manta to follow it. When the submarine’s swimmers go out to stop Largo’s men, Leiter insists on going with them despite the hook. This is his largest part in any Fleming book.

The Man with the Golden Gun (1965)

The CIA recalls him again. Bond goes to Jamaica to kill the assassin Francisco Scaramanga and gets hired as his assistant at the half-built Thunderbird Hotel. He finds Leiter and another CIA man, Nick Nicholson, already there. They are working undercover on the hotel staff and recording Scaramanga’s meeting with a group of gangsters and a KGB officer.

On Scaramanga’s excursion train Leiter is hidden in the brake van. He wounds Scaramanga, jumps with Bond before the train reaches a bridge he has mined, and breaks his leg in the fall. Bond follows Scaramanga into the swamp and kills him. It is Fleming’s last Bond novel and Leiter’s last appearance in his work.

Leiter is absent from Moonraker, From Russia, with Love, Dr. No, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. Fleming’s short stories do not use him.