By the end of the series, in the 1965 novel, "The Man with the Golden Gun", Black notes that an independent inquiry was undertaken by the Jamaican judiciary, while the CIA and MI6 were recorded as acting "under the closest liaison and direction of the Jamaican CID": this was the new world of a non-colonial, independent Jamaica, further underlining the decline of the British Empire. The decline was also reflected in Bond's use of US equipment and personnel in several novels. Uncertain and shifting geopolitics led Fleming to replace the Russian organisation SMERSH with the international terrorist group SPECTRE in "Thunderball", permitting "evil unconstrained by ideology". Black argues that SPECTRE provides a measure of continuity to the remaining stories in the series.