Brad Whitaker is a fictional character and villain in the James Bond film The Living Daylights. He was portrayed by American actor Joe Don Baker.

Joe Don Baker as Brad Whitaker in ‘The Living Daylights’.

Novel biography: Brad Whitaker is an international black market arms dealer from the US. He is fascinated by war, but his actual military career is a failure, so he turns to arms dealing to organise his own personal military force. Expelled from West Point for cheating, he spends a short stint as a mercenary in the Belgian Congo before working with various criminal organizations to help finance his first arms deals. He loves military history, and it is implied that he wargames various historical conflicts using automated miniature figures and effects, such as the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and Gettysburg. In a conversation with Bond, Whitaker believes that Pickett’s Charge should have been made up Little Round Top, and that if Grant was in charge of the Union at Gettysburg, he would have crushed the Army of Northern Virginia, ending the war.

Whitaker even has a pantheon of “great military commanders” in his headquarters, which included some of history’s most famous and infamous figures, such as Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Attila the Hun. Whitaker holds these men in high regard and calls them “surgeons who removed society’s dead flesh”. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this collection is that all representations of these “surgeons” (or “butchers” as Pushkin describes them) are sculpted to resemble Whitaker himself, which is highly noticeable when Whitaker hides among the statues waiting for Pushkin to visit.

Film biography: Whitaker hires the help of Soviet General Georgi Koskov to secure a large shipment of opium from the Snow Leopard Brotherhood in Afghanistan for $500,000,000 worth of diamonds that he had obtained from an arms deal with the Soviets. At the same time, they attempt to use Bond to eliminate the Soviet head of secret operations, General Pushkin, on the basis that he has instituted an ongoing operation called “Smert Shpionam” meaning “Death to Spies.” Actually, it is their men, especially Whitaker’s henchman Necros, who are involved in killing British secret service agents.

After thwarting Whitaker’s plans, Bond hunts him down at his Tangier headquarters and kills him after a game of cat-and-mouse in his gaming room, with him using high-tech weapons (such as a light machine gun with an integral ballistic shield), and Bond using his Walther PPK. After Bond hides behind a bust of British commander Wellington, he sets his key-ring finder behind it. Whitaker gets right in front of it, and the key-ring finder explodes, triggered by Bond’s wolf whistle. The explosion topples the bust and podium on top of Whitaker, crushing him.

See also:

• Bond villains