Quote Originally Posted by Killer Shrike
Bond might very well have gone into a well deserved retirement. He's too much of extrovert to go into a QUIET retirement however.
Right. And he isn't rich enough. His pension isn't going to run to Taittinger and custom-made cigarettes.

Eventually he has effectively formed his own personal spy network, although it is purely apolitical.
He'll need an extraordinary rep to come back to head a national intel agency after having brokered political and military intel on a free-lance basis. Perhaps we would do well to suppose that most of his work was with comercial and industrial intel rather than political and military.

Lacking the allure of patriotism, the endless budget, and access to top flight cutting edge spy tech, Bond's organization goes the low-tech route and uses relatively normal people for the bulk of it's eyes and ears.
Good line. This is the sort of unconventional ability that would give Bond an edge over conventional rivals for the post, and that would make him a strong candidate as a reforming M.

Meanwhile, in HMSS, with the loss of their best field agent and the changing times the double-0 program has been failing, as have many other top tier programs. Some suspect a mole, others suspect simple incompetance. Either way by the early 70's sufficient people have lost confidence in M to see him removed.
This is of course not the same M who was in the top job while Bond was active: Sir Miles Messervy is twenty-five or thirty years older than Bond, and will long since have been replaced.

He is knighted by the Queen herself privately, and he takes office as M.
Bond was offered (and refused) a KCMG at the end of Moonraker, and even though I will not be treating the novels as absolutely canonical in detail he is working at the level at which a KC** is expected at retirement. A KCMG (he works for the Foreign Office, so the Michael and George is the appropriate Order) is a knighthood.

Of course this opens the door for the PC's, who can be from all walks of life, to be part of this new organization Bond has developed
That is something of the idea I was aiming for. More State School alumni, and a fair number of people who had developed useful and unexpected skills outside of the intelligence community. One of the inspirations in the back of my mind is SF: Murder by Illusion: not for Brian Brown's acting, but because of teh idea of someone with special skills unknown to Intel fieldcraft throwing curves at the professional spies.