How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (pocket ebook reader txt) 📗

be closed. Which might have been the end of it if it hadn’t been for his parting comment, which struck August as so excessive and unnecessary that it could only be intended to obscure something else.

“You understand how serious this is, do you?” he said. “Leave the matter well alone. I will personally ensure disciplinary action is taken if you try to contact Jonas or his family.”

August caught a train from Charing Cross the next day and walked the half mile from the small country station to the cottage where Jonas’s parents lived. It hadn’t been difficult to find their address. The flower beds along the front were filled with roses, and ivy trailed up the red brickwork towards the roof. A woman in her seventies answered the door. She started to cry when she heard that August was a friend of her son and the noise brought her husband to the door. He walked with a stick and was bent at the shoulders but there was nothing gentle about the way he looked August in the eye and told him to leave them alone. As the door slammed shut he heard Jonas’s mother saying sorry over and over again while her husband comforted her.

He was on the platform waiting for a train back to London when he realized he’d forgotten to give them Jonas’s pocket chess set. He sat down on an empty bench and arranged the pieces on the board, trying to remember which opening moves Jonas had favoured. It was a beautiful day, the early morning mist slow to clear, and beyond the railway tracks he could see grey-wreathed hills and above them faint patches of chalky blue sky. Two figures made their way slowly across the hillside, and so profound was August’s distress that it was a while before he recognized them. Not really knowing what he was doing or where he was going, he left the station and found himself on a path that led through the churchyard and a fruit orchard before turning sharply and beginning to climb. The imprint of a walking stick was visible where the slope was steep.

They were seated on a wooden bench that looked over the village and the patchwork of surrounding fields. He didn’t want to disturb them, despite having followed them, and so he stood foolishly behind a clump of trees, far enough away that he couldn’t hear what they were saying, wondering if in his entire career he had ever intruded on someone’s privacy as thoroughly, as appallingly, as unforgivably as he was doing at that moment. As they stood up to leave Jonas’s father took out a handkerchief and wiped a plaque on the back of the bench.

They descended the hill more slowly than they had climbed it, as though reluctant to leave or carrying an extra burden. August approached the bench and read on the plaque: i found him whom my soul loves. i held him and would not let go.

He stood there for a long time, watching trains come and go while mist rolled across the valley like smoke over a battlefield.

16

file excerpt from investigation into august DRUMMOND

INKWELL/071

top secret

foia exempt

subject:Behavioural Science Unit proposaldate:13 October 2015

1. Following high-level disquiet caused by the latest INKWELL incident, and in the absence of any real investigative progress by the Gatekeeping team towards catching the perpetrator, we would like to propose a radical new method of identifying the individual responsible.

Update

2. On 23 September 2015 the NSA shared with the UK a piece of SIGINT reporting that detailed a British national’s possible terrorist reconnaissance of a shopping centre in Oslo. Despite our request to share this reporting with the Norwegian authorities as a matter of urgency, the US declined, citing the aspirational nature of the attack plan and the sensitive technical access that had generated the reporting.

3. On 2 October a high-level delegation from the Norwegian government was in London for an annual meeting to discuss routine intelligence-sharing procedures. Once the delegation had taken their seats and the meeting was under way, it was discovered that someone had inserted an extra page into the agenda on which was printed a copy of the classified US report. As each attendee had been given their own copy of the agenda, it was not possible to retrieve the US report before it was seen by the majority of delegates.

4. As far as we are aware, this marks the first time that anyone has ever leaked intelligence to representatives of a foreign government inside the building.

Proposal

5. We leave to others an assessment of damage done by this episode to the UK’s vital relationship with the US. What concerns us here is its corrosive effect upon staff discipline. Anecdotal evidence suggests that an awareness of INKWELL is widespread among staff, in part because of a widely read and deeply regrettable Behavioural Science Unit assessment that characterized the perpetrator as a “Robin Hood” seeking to help the unfortunate and bring the guilty to justice. This is clearly nonsense. Nonetheless it has found its way into the bloodstream of the office and captured idle imaginations.

6. It is evident that the investigative techniques traditionally used to counter the insider threat have not proved effective in this case. In light of this, we would like to propose something never before tried in the UK but which does have historical precedent.

7. In 1994 the CIA were trying to identify a Russian spy within their ranks. In order to whittle their shortlist of 198 down to a more manageable number, they chose 10 trusted individuals from across the CIA, presented them with the list of 198 suspects and asked them to pick the 5 most likely to be a Russian agent, relying on nothing more than their gut instinct. Astonishingly, the name Aldrich Ames featured on the lists of all 10 officers.

8. The list of INKWELL candidates currently stands at 32 names. Subject to agreement of seniors, and recognizing the privacy issues around sharing the