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

so many lives off course, that it was used to justify cordial relations with such terrible regimes. He said that intelligence was a dirty business but a necessary one, faced with the threat of terrorism and the existence of hostile states like Russia and China. She said the tools spies used were the unimportant lives of others, that they would always find a way to justify the harm they did by pointing to matters of state. When framed in such black-and-white terms, how could the right of an individual to freedom and privacy compete with a country’s economic prosperity? He said that the alternative was to wait until an attack had been carried out and then investigate the perpetrators. If you wanted to find out what was going to happen before it happened, you had to be prepared to rummage around in people’s lives. She told him that was a shockingly casual way to describe it. She told him to stop pretending it was all about preventing attacks. Everyone accepted that a country needed the ability to do that – but what about secret courts and illegal surveillance and rendition and lethal strikes and torture? What about spies allowing politicians to distort their intelligence to start a war? He called her idealistic and naive. She told him to answer the question. At some point they opened another bottle of wine. He said that if he ever saw anything unethical or illegal he’d shout about it from the rooftops. She asked him to name the last British whistle-blower. In this community that you insist is filled with such good people, she said, who had come forward in recent years to alert the public to bad things? Or had there been no bad things? He said that all this talk of bad things made her sound like an undergraduate. But this is how big organizations work, she said. They encourage individuals to avoid thinking about personal responsibility by claiming that it’s the responsibility of the organization as a whole, as if an organization can possibly be responsible for anything. Everyone thinks they’re blameless, she said – look at the Catholic Church, look at tobacco companies, look at the police and its undercover officers. All of those organizations are filled with decent people who allowed appalling things to happen. For Christ’s sake, she said, look at the fact that the unofficial motto of the CIA – the agency that gave the world waterboarding – is a line from John’s Gospel. Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about which side of this argument you should be on?

They ran out of wine an hour or two before dawn.

“Do you want me to resign?” he asked, his head resting on her stomach. It surprised him to find the thought didn’t bother him. He’d been there less than two years – there were plenty of other things he could do.

“No. Don’t be silly, Gus. I don’t know. It’s just that —”

“I will, you know. You’re more important to me than a job. And I don’t disagree with —”

“It just feels like…”

“I would take a stand, you know, if…”

They were both quiet for a while.

“It’s a complex job.” She said it very quietly, to herself more than anything, as a way of working out what she felt. “And your attitude towards it must be equally complex. It can’t be straightforward. What you do might be, I don’t know, seventy, eighty, ninety per cent good, but there’s some pretty awful stuff hiding among those last few per cent.”

“Maybe I should only do my job seventy per cent of the time,” he said after a while.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

“Barely. What time is it?”

“Or only put in seventy per cent effort,” she said. “It’s 5.20.”

“Give thirty per cent of my pay to charity.”

And a little while later, when they were both very close to falling asleep, she said, “It just seems that you’ve got to acknowledge it somehow. In how you act.”

“What’s that?”

“That what you do for a living is not always a straightforwardly good thing.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Be willing to break the rules. Be willing to make your own decisions. Do the right thing, even if it isn’t what your superiors want you to do.”

“Huh? I would be. I am.”

“Are you though?” she asked. “I imagine everyone says that. How do you really know?”

“I suppose there’s no way of knowing until it happens.”

And that might have been the end of it. He closed his eyes, she closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed and deepened. A few minutes passed before he propped himself up on an elbow and looked at her. “Martha?” he whispered. “Are you awake? I’ll show you. I’ll do something to show you that I’m willing to break the rules.”

The promise slipped out unnoticed like a coin from the pocket of someone getting up to leave. Given the hour, given the amount of wine they had drunk, no one could have blamed him for never thinking of the matter again. But then his agent threw a bunch of keys onto the table and started to describe a lock-up in Walthamstow, and in an instant it all came back.

Things changed after that. Not just because he’d come so close to getting caught or interfered in the legal process with such potentially deadly consequences. If I’m going to break the rules again, he decided, it can’t be another gesture simply to show Martha I haven’t turned into a company man. If I’m going to break the rules, it must be to correct a state of affairs that is clearly wrong. It must be the right thing to do, regardless of official policy, regardless of regulations. It must seek to redress a wrong that is only allowed to persist for bureaucratic, reputational or political reasons. My actions mustn’t harm anyone, at least no one undeserving. It must feel fair. The planning must be precise and painstaking and the execution must be professional in every aspect. The tradecraft must be