As I understand it, a licence to kill is the official approval by the Government for a particular operative to kill people in the exercise of his mission. So if he kills someone, his/her own government won’t prosecute or punish him. I don’t think it gives him licence to shoot his brother for changing TV channels.
It’s also not the same as any soldier - if a soldier shoots civilians for no good reason, he/she is likely to get in trouble. An agent with a specific licence may not.
Also, anyone who goes killing people in other countries is going to be subject to the laws of those countries if he/she gets caught.
No random soldier can perform assassinations of any kind. Soldiers can only kill inside of a designated battlefield, and those by definition are not assassinations.
That in itself is enough to force the creation of a “license to kill” for anyone who kills outside of war.
Before he got his license, Bond was an assassin. He was given two specific targets to kill. He was given authority by his superiors to kill those two specific targets. In the movie Casino Royale he was given specific instructions to kill a mole and his contact.
The double-O prefix gives him autonomy. Once he got his license he is permitted to kill on his own authority. If he detects a mole, or an enemy agent, Bond can kill him without specific instructions from a superior.
Offhand I can recall only a few times in Fleming’s books where Bond’s mission was to specifically go out and kill someone. He kills lots of people in in self-defense and occasionally plants bombs that detonate at plot-dramatic moments, but premeditated targetted murder is relatively rare:
In Casino Royale, Bond describes two such missions he’d completed earlier in his career (he actually doesn’t kill anyone in the course of the novel’s plot).
From Russia, With Love: while in Turkey, he participates in a retaliatory kill with the local spymaster.
Dr. No: Bond buries the title character in bird dung. Seriously.
For Your Eyes Only: Bond goes on a revenge mission in, I believe, upstate New York.
You Only Live Twice: while on loan to the Japanese Secret Service, Bond is directed to assassinate someone who has become an embarrassment to the Japanese government.
The Man With the Golden Gun: Bond’s mission is to kill the title character. At the climax, he hesitates to do so and is very nearly killed himself.
The Living Daylights: Bond’s mission is to spot an enemy sniper and shoot him dead. He elects to shoot her (surprise!) rifle instead, likely injuring but not killing her. He expects to get in trouble for this.
Most of his missions were investigations, not assassinations.
One presumes that, if an ordinary agent finds someone they suspect is a mole, they report it to their superiors (or their superiors’ superiors, if they don’t trust their superiors either), and then there’s a whole process they go through to figure out the truth, and then if they confirm that the person is a mole, they take whatever action is appropriate. And one further presumes that this process is fairly accurate and reliable. But it’s also slow, and sometimes time is of the essence.
So you pick out a limited number of agents whom you deem to posses sufficient judgement to almost always get it right, in the moment. But even after a 00 kills a mole, you still go through that whole investigative process, because you want to be sure, and because you want to know a lot more information, like who the mole was working for, what they’ve already accomplished, and how they were put in place. And if you go through that process and find that they were innocent, well, maybe you were mistaken to trust that agent’s judgement, and so you revoke his licenxe to kill.
Well, before the whole mole thing became such a lazy cliche, Bond was,aware of such a person in MI6: Maria Freudenstein (from the short story “Property of a Lady”). It turns out the Service was well aware she was a double agent who was sending material to the Soviets so the only information she ever had access to were banal mundanities and occasional nuggets of blatant misinformation.
If he was in the US or Canada on a diplomatic visa then he’d have diplomatic immunity. Which would be plausible, it wasn’t uncommon for spies to travel to foreign countries under the guise of being “diplomats”. Of course diplomatic immunity doesn’t mean you can get away with murder; it just means you’re sent back to your home country to be prosecuted under their laws. If Bond murdered a random American civilian that had nothing to do with his mission, the US would probably revoke his visa and deport him, and the UK government would likely prosecute him for the murder. If he shot one of Goldfinger’s henchmen in the US in the course of carrying out his mission, the UK government would likely decline to charge him due to his “license to kill”.
