Ernst Stavro Blofeld

Ernst Stavro Blofeld is a fictional character from the James Bond universe. An evil genius, he is the archenemy of the British Secret Service agent James Bond and head of the global terrorist organization SPECTRE with aspirations of world domination.

Blofeld usually appears with a white Persian cat in the films (but not in the novels). It was also briefly a convention of the Bond films not to show Blofeld's face, only a closeup of Blofeld stroking his cat. This convention was later broken in the film You Only Live Twice and subsequent films.

Fleming details Blofeld's background in the novel Thunderball, though none of his past is ever revealed in the Bond films. According to the novel, Blofeld was born on May 28, 1908 to a German father and a Greek mother in Gdynia. After World War I, he became a Polish national. Blofeld attended the University of Warsaw where he studied economics and political history, and then the Warsaw University of Technology to study engineering and radionics. He then took a communication position at the Polish Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, and used his position for buying and selling stocks at the Warsaw Stock Exchange.

Foreseeing World War II, Blofeld made copies of top-secret wires and sold them to Nazi Germany. Before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he destroyed all records of his existence, then moved to Turkey, where he worked for Turkish radio and set up an intelligence organization. During the war, he sold information to both sides. After the defeat of Erwin Rommel, he decided to back the Allied war effort; ironically, he was awarded numerous medals by the Allied powers after the war's end. After the war, Blofeld temporarily moved to South America before founding SPECTRE.

(Wikipedia)