SPECTRE Irma Bunt, Blofeld's assistant, in his short story "Blast From the Past", which is a sequel to "You Only Live Twice". In the Eon Productions James Bond series, which began in 1962 with "Dr. No", SPECTRE plays a more prominent role. The organisation is first mentioned in "Dr. No" as the organisation for which Dr. No works. This was changed from Fleming's novels, which had Dr. No working for the USSR. In the films, SPECTRE usually replaced SMERSH as the main villains, although there is a brief reference to SMERSH in the second Eon Bond film, "From Russia with Love"
SPECTRE characters were at the centre of long-standing litigation between Kevin McClory and Ian Fleming over the film rights to "Thunderball" and the ownership of the organisation and its characters. In 1963, Fleming settled out of court with McClory, which awarded McClory the film rights to "Thunderball," although literary rights would stay with Fleming and thus allow continuation author John Gardner to use SPECTRE in a number of his novels. In 1963, Eon Productions producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman made an agreement with McClory to adapt the novel into the fourth James Bond film, also stipulating that McClory would