Rosa Klebb

Colonel **Rosa Klebb** (Роза Клебб) is the head of the Operations and Executions department of the Soviet counter-intelligence agency SMERSH .

## History

### Early career

Colonel Klebb is a high ranking member of the feared Russian counter-intelligence agency SMERSH, where she serves as the supervisor of Department II (operations and executions). She has a reputation for overseeing the interrogations of enemy agents in which, after exacting various methods of torture on the target, she speaks to them in a warm and motherly tone in an unusual and apparently effective method of extracting necessary information.

She made her name in the mid-1930's fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the socialist faction. She gained the favour of ranking intelligence officer, Andreas Nin and became his assistant and mistress. She cleverly avoided grouping with any factions within the Red Army and survived all of Stalin's purges. Eventually she took her superior officer's place after he was killed, which the novel suggests may well have been by her hand.

After the death of Lavrentiy Beria in 1953, Klebb gained the position of Head of Operations for SMERSH (Otdyel II - Operations and Executions). Klebb was present at every torture session conducted since she had became the Head of Operations. She would sit inches away from her victim on a small wooden stool, telling the torturer to use certain methods (in codes like "No86"). Then she would act nice to the victim, saying the pain could go away if they told her their secrets. She acted as a mother would to a pained child.

### *From Russia With Love*

Klebb is assigned to spearhead an operation to discredit MI6 and get revenge on James Bond for his involvement in the deaths of two SMERSH operatives, Le Chiffre and Mr. Big. Teaming with Kronsteen and Red Grant, Klebb sets a trap for Bond, enlisting a cipher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, to pretend to defect, claiming to fall in love with Bond. When Bond takes the bait, Grant will kill him. This plan backfires, however, when Tatiana really does fall in love with Bond. After Grant is killed, Klebb must attend to Bond herself.

She tracks him and Tatiana to Paris and he encounters her in a hotel room, dressed as a wealthy widow. Bond however, had noticed her nicotine stained moustache, when the room was empty of ashtrays, and had also noted that the call bell had no wires leading from it. He followed his instincts and leapt out of the way just in time.

After failing to kill him with a gun hidden in a telephone, she successfully poisons him by means of a venom tipped dart hidden in her shoe; she is then captured by Bond's friend René Mathis, of the Deuxième Bureau. The novel ends when Bond collapses to the floor; Fleming had intended to end the series at that point with Bond's death.

### *Dr. No*

In the next novel, *Dr. No*, M reveals that Bond survived due to Mathis' timely intervention, and that Klebb had subsequently died.

## Personality

Fleming explicitly stated in the novel, that Klebb is a lesbian. She is described as hard, almost masculine in appearance, coupled with several instances when she touches Tatiana and comments on her beauty. She, at one point, attempts to instigate congress between her and Tatiana, who runs out of the room screaming when she sees Klebb wearing lingerie.