It isn't often that the public gets to see that James Bond is alive and well and still has his licence to kill. On 22 March last year, Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist with a US passport, a wife back home and a mistress in Belgium, was shot dead outside his Brussels apartment with five shots from a silenced 7.65mm pistol. The assassin left behind $20,000 in cash which Bull had in his pockets. Two days later a Belgian newspaper ran a one-paragraph story headlined Meurtre d'un Américain. An extraordinary career had come to an abrupt end.

LRB 15 August 1991 | PDF Download