And Greene is not a pawn
I didn't claim he was. I think he is going to establish a rivarly in future Bond films.
A while ago I was toying with a concept for a fan fiction that had some backstory about Quantum in it, and his is what I had come up with:
Quantum started early in the twentieth century as the Phoebus cartel, fixing the price of lightglobes, and making an absolute killing from it. During the stock market crash of 1929, they were by good fortune some of the few who actually made a profit. They did not manipulate the economy, which would later become a favoured tactic, but rather survived by pure chance. The cartel formally disbanded during the Great Depression, but resurrected themsevles under a new name seeral years later. By this time, their influence had extended across the Atlantic Ocean and into Europe, and it was implied that they were a part of installing Adolf Hitler into power. During World War II, the organisation was a part of the military-industrial complex, but were actually supplying both sides of the war.
They disbanded again once the war was over, and re-formed themselves to become instrumental in clearing up Europe after the bombs had stopped falling. They made even more money clearing up the destruction they had sown, and returned to supplying weapons during the arms race. Many events of the Cold War, such as the Cambridge Five, were simply ploys by the organisation, selling secrets between the Americans and the Soviets to keep the arms race even and the deamnd for weapons high. They managed to draw the Cold War out for as long as possible, but eventually the Soviet economy came to a grinding halt and the Berlin Wall fell. Proxy wars in Vietnam and Korea had been their trademark, but the group that would come to be known as Quantum learned quickly. They had no part in the 1972 Munich Massacre or many of the early terrorist groups, but they saw the potential in it and in the 1990s they were responsible for many of the conflicts that ravaged Africa. Likewise, they engineered the Asian Economic Crisis, making billions of dollars.
With the turn of the millenium, the group disbanded for the fifth time in ther history, and re-forged themslves as Quantum. As M described in Casino Royale, they were the ones repsonible for the September Eleven attacks, their most public display of their workings. They spent time funding terror groups and then arming the Americans, trying to create a new Cold War scenario out of the War on Terror, and when that war ended, they would win the re-building contracts like the ones in Iraq.
This is where the caonocity ends and my story begins: the Senior Management of Quantum are worried that with the world becoming smaller, it will be easier for them to be found, and so they adoptd a new tactic. They sought to not only carve their own private fiefdom out of an existing nation, but to become and economic power in their own right. To this end, Dominic Greene is tasked with overthrowing the Bolivian government and seizing control of the water supply. But Bolivia is just the beginning ...
Blessed with the world's largest remaining reserves of crude oil, a large section of central Russia declares its independence from Moscow. And an oil-thirsty Kremlin, its resources spent on the war in Georgia (also created by Quantum to have the Russians distractd) has no choice but to acknowledge them, for the alternative is to lay siege to the "Central Siberan Republic". Quantum are responsible, seeking to control the last reserves of oil and are looking to establish themselves as being in control of the post-oil economy. Elsewhere, they become the largest suppliers of arms and armaments in the world, control private military corporations, manipulate economies so that entire nations are dependent upon them for survival, seize control of the healthcare sector by tainting pre-established medicines and establish their own companies, break into the informaton and media markets and so on, looking to replace the pillars of modern society with themselves.
However, given the load of assignments I have going on, I had to put the story on hold ...
I like it !
