Were there ever secret agents "licensed to kill" in real-life?

Were there ever secret agents/spies/assasins given a government-sanctioned "licence to kill" in the real-world by America, UK, Soviet Russia or in the rest of Europe? A la James Bond, the globe-trotting trouble-shooter.

I have a feeling that there were, but I would really like to know more as well as members here possibly making recommendations of books/articles to read on this subject matter?

Thanking you for reading.

It's a tricky subject, largely because outside of the US most Secret Services don't really maintain open public relations, at least until fairly recently. SIS didn't officially exist until 1994 or something. The Japanese PSIA (what Tiger Tanaka was head of) wasn't officially acknowlegded until very recently.

Generally, I don't think there is such a thing as a "licence to kill". I mean, the laws are different in wartime, of course. But we know about enough secret CIA assassinations and so on to know that there are agents whose missions are "to kill", and as government agents acting on their country's behalf against enemy nations, their actions are sanctioned by that government. And since the government makes the laws, that essentially clears these agents legally.

But the idea of a agent who has a Carte Blanche "licence to kill" outside of whatever their mission may be? Seems less likely. If anything it would probably be similar to the standards governing police officers who discharge their weapons in the line of duty.

Meaning that for every SPECTRE operative Bond kills in a firefight, there's probably a big load of paperwork waiting for him to fill out in Regent's Park.

F-S is right, of course. It's a fictional construct, and doesn't happen like this in real life for all those reasons and a few more. As a former C put it recently, gathering intelligence usually means wanting to keep people alive! But if we don't take it so literally, but instead take it broadly to mean have secret agents killed people in the sort of way we might associate with James Bond, I'd suggest:

USSR - Nikolai Khokhlov springs to mind. A good starting point on that is Soviet Spy Net by EH Cookridge. Henry Chancellor revealed a few years ago that Fleming owned this book and used it as research for From Russia, With Love and a couple of the other novels. Well, did he ever! Chancellor didn't go into too much detail, but if you get the book you'll see that tons of it made it into FRWL, often near-verbatim or just moved around a bit. Grant, Klebb and Ivanova all have elements directly inspired by it, and in the case of Grant all his training is directly from it, and the Khokhlov case in general looms over the novel, and is mentioned by name a few times.

Britain - look at Operation Foxley, which is about as Fleming as you can get. Iideed, it involved Geoffrey Household, from memory.

US - CIA rumoured to use mafiosi, nothing ever proven.

There's a lot more, of course.

The MI6 of Fleming is more or less the MI6 Fleming wished had existed. We must remember that most of Fleming's ideas in WWII were rejected by his superiors for being too risky or outlandish.

Also, Fleming's MI6 works under the auspices of the MOD, whereas the real thing operates under the Foreign Office.

Fleming's MI6 is actually more Cold War Era SOE than SIS, and one must imagine an alternate history where the plan to integrate SOE into MI6 and place it under the Defence Ministry (which was considered) went through rather than the disbandment of MI6 and the subsequent mismanagement of MI6 throughout the 1950s and 60s under the Foreign Office.