Brad Whitaker - Background

Background

Brad Whitaker is an international black market arms dealer. He is fascinated by war, but his actual military career is a failure, so he turns to arms dealing to organize 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 Ulysses S. Grant was in charge of the Union at Gettysburg, he would have crushed the Army of Northern Virginia, ending the war.

Whitaker has a pantheon of "great military commanders" in his headquarters, which includes 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". 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.