Upon request by Donovan, Ian Fleming was contacted to write a lengthy memorandum describing the structure and functions of a secret service organisation.

Bond teams up with CIA agent Cedar Leiter, daughter of his old friend, Felix Leiter, to investigate one Markus Bismaquer, an ice cream tycoon who is suspected of reviving the criminal organisation SPECTRE, which was believed to have been disbanded years earlier following the death of its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, at the hands of Bond (in You Only Live Twice).

The British Secret Service learns that Bismaquer is an obsessive collector of rare prints, so Bond and Cedar visit the man's huge ranch in Amarillo, Texas posing as art dealers.

NORAD personnel are supplied with ice cream contaminated with a mild narcotic which makes consumers susceptible to following orders without question.

Bond is directed to inspect NORAD and obtain from the drug-affected military personnel computer tapes relating to the satellite system.

His Times Literary Supplement review called the book "an unrelieved disaster", Gardner "not the most self-assured of writers", and said that the plot was "absurd" and "blundering".

Amis said, "What makes Mr Gardner's book so hard to read is not so much its endlessly silly story as its desolateness, its lack of the slightest human interest or warmth.

"[3] Writing in The New Republic, Robin W. Winks wrote, "Bond is dead, and John Gardner's second effort to remove the nails from that coffin, though not so dreary nor so silly as the first, is nonetheless very thin gruel."

Fleming, however, did offer the reader one thing no imitator can possibly duplicate: total identification with and commitment to his hero and his works as the products of an uninhibited wish fulfillment."

"[6] Mystery novelist Reginald Hill, writing in Books and Bookmen, admitted "I was not pre-inclined to like John Gardner's second James Bond adventure For Special Services, and I didn't.

The result is very fair escapist stuff, but time and again I found myself asking the, I hope, not impertinent question, if this man wasn't called James Bond, how good a thriller would this be?

The Globe and Mail crime critic Derrick Murdoch praised Gardner's vast research "on the state-of-the-art technology affecting satellite chasers, hydraulics, automobile and monorail engineering design, weaponry, optics and pyrostatics."

Murdoch also praised the novel's final scene set "in a mock-decrepit palace in the middle of the Louisiana swampland, is played out in maniacal fury, total illogic and superb idiocy to enchant the mind.