John O’Sullivan concludes a review of Skyfall with an odd comment:
Standpoint editor Daniel Johnson tells me that historical research has confirmed that the plot of Greenmantle was rooted in real attempts by Imperial Germany to rouse the masses of the Muslim world against the British empire. Yet it is still oddly topical today. Mutatis mutandis – i.e., Chinese, Russians, or even North Koreans in the role of Kaiser Wilhelm – Greenmantle is a plot waiting to be ripped off for the next Bond movie.
It’s true that Germany and its allies tried to stir up the Muslim colonial subjects of its wartime enemies during WWI, but what goes unmentioned here was that these efforts were almost complete failures. Peter Hopkirk wrote a popular history of the German and Ottoman attempt to turn Britain and Russia’s Muslim subjects against them, and it makes for interesting reading. This part of the history of WWI should also teach us that the Germans and Ottomans badly overestimated the effectiveness of pan-Islamist and caliphalist appeals to most Muslims, which should warn us against doing the same thing.
If what we want is greater realism, replacing Wilhelmine Germany with Russia or China in a new version of this story would be one of the last things one would want to do. (Putting North Korea in this role would be like giving the script of Die Another Day to the writers of 24.) Unlike Germany in the early twentieth century, Russia and China have strong internal political incentives to discourage Islamic militancy rather than to stoke it. As it happens, they aren’t the states currently aligned with the leading exporters of the most severe and militant forms of Islam.
Bob Mitchell 
Cornel Lencar 
Jack 
Charles Cosimano 
FWIW, perhaps a germ here for an edgy, spy-v-spy screenplay? Israeli conflict with Iran looms in the background, etc.
“WASHINGTON — The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in.
“The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel.”