are there any well known essays about the fiction trope of "hypercompetence"? that is, the spy or asssassin who can slip into any building completely undetected and always has ten backup plans, the ninja who can throw down a smoke bomb and disappear from a locked room, the gunman who can shoot an apple off someone's head, firing from the hip at 100 yards
it's one of the most common phenomena in fiction that deals with the military and espionage. i have always assumed it's absurdly unrealistic. even without any direct knowledge of the subject matter i remember watching Munich (2005) and feeling like it had to be a more realistic portrayal of the facts of covert operations.
movies would suggest that the CIA, mossad, MI6, etc. can track you down despite your using an alias; can get a room on the floor beneath yours without arousing suspicion; can place a bomb that perfectly obliterates you in your bed with no collateral damage; but how would they know how to do that? how often has any intelligence agency blown up a hotel room?
how often have assassinations really happened? the CIA may have a thousand agents, but how many assassinations have happened, total, in all of history? could any one operative really be that experienced, that competent? if you said two hundred members of foreign governments died in suspicious circumstances in the 20th century, how many specific operations could that be per-agent? one or two at best? and in many cases, only assisting, not doing the deed directly.
how could a james bond exist? as awful as even the US or UK are, even with their imperialist bullshit, how could there be a person who actually has enough experience doing these things to be able to slip in, silently put a bullet in a person, and slip out undetected? or is the reality far messier? i have always suspected it is.
If you read about the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, or all the times the CIA has hit itself with its own paranoia, it gives you an entirely different vision of state actors. They’re bumbling weirdos that just have a lot of money and resources at their disposal.
One of Fleming's fellow agents, childrens book author Roald Dahl,
this sentence jumped out of the screen and flicked my forehead