Soviet counterintelligence selects James Bond for a carefully staged assassination intended to disgrace both 007 and the British Secret Service. The bait is Tatiana Romanova, a cipher clerk who claims she wants to defect from Istanbul with a valuable decoding machine. Bond is sent to bring her and the device west, unaware that Rosa Klebb, Red Grant and a wider SMERSH team have designed every stage of the operation.
The journey through Istanbul and aboard the Orient Express turns the mission into a contest of surveillance, deception and counter-surveillance. Fleming’s SMERSH is fictionalised beyond its historical wartime existence, but the novel captures the atmosphere of Soviet-Western intelligence rivalry, defection fears and clandestine operations that defined the early Cold War.
