10 James Bond Villains Who Simply Vanished
9. General Georgi Koskov
Sadly, Timothy Dalton’s debut film as Double-0 Seven, The Living Daylights (1987) was not particularly strong in the villains department, despite it being an expertly-made film.
This is particularly the case with Jeroen Krabbé’s General Georgi Koskov. Although he was inspired by real-life KGB agent, Vitaly Yurchenko, whose defection to the West in 1985 prior to returning to Soviet Russia several days later was hailed as a successful infiltration operation, Koskov is perhaps the most uninteresting of the film’s lead villains.
After his thrilling defection to Great Britain, based on Ian Fleming's posthumously-released 1966 short story, The Living Daylights, Koskov purely becomes a greedy, manipulative, womanising coward. Nevertheless, his defection also serves a secondary purpose: it proves to be his undoing.
Returning after James Bond and KGB chief, General Leonid Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies) have defeated Koskov’s arms dealer cohort, Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker), Koskov feigns his innocence to his superior. Appearing to believe him at first, Pushkin instructs his men to put Koskov on the next plane to Moscow before coldly adding “in the diplomatic bag”, much to Koskov’s dismay.
Whilst Koskov might have been executed on the spot and his body returned to Moscow, given the corrupt general's very public defection, it is just as likely that he was to face a public trial in Moscow as a deterrent to other would-be defectors.