SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is a fictional global terrorist organization featured in the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, the films based on those novels, and James Bond video games. Led by evil genius and supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the organization first formally appeared in the novel Thunderball (1961) and in the movie Dr. No (1962). SPECTRE is unaligned to any nation or political ideology, enabling the later Bond books and Bond films to be regarded as apolitical.