The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (25 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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“I was in the
CARRIAGE
!” she shouted.
 
Around that very same time, in another part of London, I happened to be looking myself up on Google when I came across a lengthy and animated discussion thread entitled
Jon Ronson: Shill or Stupid?
It was in response to something I’d written about how I didn’t believe 9/11 was an inside job. The people on the thread were split. Some thought I was a shill (a stooge in the pay of the shadowy elite), others thought I was just stupid. I got very annoyed and left a message saying I was in fact neither a shill nor stupid. Almost immediately a few of them posted messages warning the others to beware of me because I was clearly “another Rachel North.”
“Who’s Rachel North?” I thought.
 
 
I typed her name into Google. And that’s how we ended up meeting.
I spent an afternoon at her home. It was just an ordinary house, not far from mine. She told me the whole story, from the day of the explosions through to the moment people started yelling at one another in the pub. It was over for her now, she said. She wasn’t going to engage with them anymore. She didn’t want to be on the radar of crazy people. She was going to wind down her blog and stop defining herself as a victim. The last thing she said to me when I left that afternoon was, “I know I exist.” She looked at me. “All the people on the train who have met me know I exist. I got off the train covered in blood and smoke and glass in my hair and metal sticking out of my wrist bone. I was photographed. I gave evidence to the police. I was stitched up in a hospital. I can produce dozens of witnesses who know I was there and that I exist. And that I am who I say I am.”
There was a short silence.
“There is no doubt that you definitely exist,” I said.
And for a second Rachel seemed to look relieved.
 
 
I e-mailed David Shayler. Would he like to meet with me to talk about Rachel North?
“Yes, sure,” he replied.
We got together a few days later in a café just off Edgware Road, in West London. He looked tired, unhealthy, overweight, but what was most striking was how fast he talked. It was as if he couldn’t contain all the words that needed to be said. They tumbled out of him, like when you get on a motorbike for the first time and you accelerate too hard and you just shoot off.
He didn’t talk fast at the beginning of our conversation. This was when I asked him about the old days, about how he first got his job with MI5. He smiled and relaxed, and the story he told was spellbinding.
“I was looking for work and I saw an advert in the media section of
The Independent
saying ‘Godot Isn’t Coming,’ ” he said. “Having studied the play in English and French, I read on. It sounded like an advert for a job in journalism, so I sent off a CV.”
His CV was good but not amazing: Dundee University, where he edited the student newspaper; a career running an eventually failed small publishing business . . . Still, he was called in for an interview with a recruitment consultancy. It was all quite ordinary.
But the second interview wasn’t ordinary at all.
“It took place in an unmarked building on Tottenham Court Road, in London,” he said. “The building was completely empty. There was nobody else there apart from one guy at reception and the one guy who interviewed me. He really was like an intelligence officer from Central Casting—pin-striped suit, tall, patrician, swept-back gray hair. You’re in this crazy building with this bloke asking you all these questions.”
David had, like I had, walked down Tottenham Court Road a million times. It is unremarkable: discount electrical shops and
Time Out
magazine. The last thing you’d expect is some parallel spook universe unfolding just behind some unmarked door.
“What questions did he ask you?” I said.
“Whether I had any religious beliefs when I was twelve. How I formed my political beliefs through my teenage years. What had been the milestones on my journey? What were the points in my life when I believed I’d done something useful? It was of a much higher level than a normal job interview. He asked me about the ethics of intelligence. He kept saying, ‘Why do you think you’re here?’ I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to look like an idiot. But he kept asking the question. Finally I said, ‘Is it MI5?’ He said, ‘Of
course
it is.’”
 
 
For a while after that job interview, David became paranoid. Was the whole thing some complicated charade designed to destroy him?
“I kept imagining him suddenly saying, ‘We spotted you a mile off and now you can fuck off!’” David laughed. “ ‘ We’re going to ruin your life!’ ”
I laughed. “That’s exactly the kinds of crazy thoughts I have!” I said. “Really! I have thoughts like that! They can be quite intrusive!”
 
 
(“Intrusive Thoughts” are all over the
DSM-IV
, by the way, as symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, etc., all the disorders characterized by an overactive amygdala. I used to see them as positive things: journalists
should
be quite obsessive and paranoid, shouldn’t we? But ever since I read about “Intrusive Thoughts” in the
DSM-IV,
I’ve found the idea of them a little scary, like they’re something serious. I don’t have them
all
the time, by the way. I wouldn’t want you to think that. Just sometimes. Maybe one a week. Or less.)
 
 
MI5 offered David the job. Later he asked them how many other people were recruited from that “Godot Isn’t Coming” advert, and they told him none. Just him.
He was, he discovered on his first day, to be an office-based spy, in a quite mundane room, nowhere near as entrancing as his conspiracy-minded friends imagined life inside a shadowy organization like MI5 would be. (David was not a conspiracy theorist at all back then. He became one only later, when he was out of the demystifying world of shadowy elites and back in everyday life.)
“It was just a perfectly normal office,” he said. “You’ve got an in-tray and an out-tray. You process information. The difference is if you don’t process the information correctly, people die. I was happy to be making the world a safer place, stopping men of violence. It was good work.” But it was not without its weirdness: “They had files on all sorts of people, like John Lennon and Ronnie Scott and most of the people who would eventually end up in the Labour cabinet. People were being accused of communism for all sorts of stupid reasons. There was a file on a twelve-year-old kid who’d written to the Communist Party saying he was doing a topic on communism at school and could they send some information? They’d got him down as a suspected communist sympathizer.”
“Would this kid ever have known MI5 had a file on him?” I asked.
“No, of course not,” David said.
From time to time he’d go out into the field, but not often. “One time I went to a demonstration dressed as an anarchist. This guy thrust a leaflet in my hand going, ‘What do you know about the Anti-Election Alliance?’ which I was then studying in MI5. I felt like saying to him, ‘A lot more than you do, mate.’ ”
We talked about his now famous covert meeting with PT16B, about the plot to assassinate Gadhafi, the flight to Europe, the months on the run, the arrest and imprisonment, and then the conversation turned to Rachel North. He was, he said, still convinced she didn’t exist.
“Let me talk about Rachel North being a composite MI5 person,” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing the intelligence services would do.”
“But you’ve met her,” I said.
“Yes, I know I’ve MET her,” he said. His voice was rising now, getting faster. “She may exist as a human being but that’s not to say there aren’t five people behind her posting in her name on the Internet.”
“Oh, come
on
,” I said.
“You should look at the evidence of her copious postings,” David said. “You should look at the evidence of how many posts she was doing at one point.”
“She was posting a lot,” I said. “I have no doubt of that.”
“People in the movement have come to the conclusion that there were far too many posts to have come from one person,” David said.
“Oh, you know what bloggers are like,” I said. “They write and write and write. I don’t know why, because they’re not being paid.”
“I am also very suspicious of the fact that she refuses to sit down and have a dispassionate briefing about 7/7,” David said. “Why won’t she allow somebody to patiently talk her through the evidence?”
“She was in the
carriage
!” I said. “She was in the
CARRIAGE
. You really want her to sit down with someone who was on the
Internet
while she was in the
carriage
and have them explain to her that there
was no bomb
?”
We glared angrily at each other. I had won that round. But then he smiled, as if to say he had something better. It was, his smile said, time to pull out the big guns.
“When Rachel North came to one of our meetings in the upstairs room of a pub,” he said, “I thought her behavior showed signs of ”—he paused—“mental illness.”
“You think Rachel’s
mentally ill
?” I said. It was a low blow.
“It was the degree to which she attacked me,” David said. “She stood up and came running towards me and shouted at me. There was a
madness
to this—”
“But that’s because she thinks it’s nonsense—” I interrupted.
“She won’t look at the
evidence
,” interrupted David. “I’m getting the same sort of vibe off you here, Jon. A viewpoint arrived at without evidence is
prejudice
. To say Muslims carried out 7/7—those three guys from Leeds and one from Aylesbury—to say they did it is RACIST, Jon. It’s racist. It’s racist. You’re being RACIST to Muslims if you think they carried out that attack on the evidence there.”
There was a short silence.
“Oh,
fuck off
,” I said.
 
 
That evening I telephoned Rachel to tell her I’d spent the afternoon with David Shayler.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“That you either didn’t exist or were mentally ill,” I said.
“It’s all because of that stupid meeting,” she said. “They make it sound like I got up from the floor, marched up onto the stage, and started declaiming away. That’s not what happened. The whole room erupted in shouting. Everybody started shouting. Yes, I raised my voice to be heard over them shouting. But they shouted. I shouted . . .”
 
 
My interview with David Shayler—the “fuck off ” included—was broadcast one night a few weeks later on BBC Radio 4. I began panicking during the hours before it aired. I believe my amygdala went into overdrive. Was I—in telling David Shayler to fuck off—about to open a Pandora’s box? Would I incur the wrath of the 7/7 truth movement? Would they come after me, guns a-blazin’, in the same way they had endeavored to ruin Rachel’s life? There was nothing I could do. Wheels were in motion. Somewhere inside some BBC building the tape was stacked up, ready to be broadcast.
 
 
For the first few hours the following morning I was too nervous to open my e-mail in-box. But then I did. And it was—I discovered to my delight—filled with congratulations from listeners. The consensus was that I had struck a blow for rational thinking. This felt good: it is always good to be commended for thinking rationally. It became one of my big interviews. It caught the public’s imagination. I didn’t hear from the July 7 truth movement at all. My amygdala went back to normal. Life moved on.
 
 
A few months passed. And then David Shayler was everywhere. He was on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show and BBC Five Live’s Steven Nolan show. There was a double-page spread in the
New Statesman
magazine. The reason for this ubiquity was that he had developed an unexpected new theory:
I ask Shayler if it’s true he has become someone who believes that no planes at all were involved in the 9/11 atrocity. [His girlfriend Annie] Machon looks uncomfortable. “Oh, fuck it, I’m just going to say this,” he tells her. “Yes, I believe no planes were involved in 9/11.” But we all saw with our own eyes the two planes crash into the WTC. “The only explanation is that they were missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes,” he says. “Watch the footage frame by frame and you will see a cigar-shaped missile hitting the World Trade Center.” He must notice that my jaw has dropped. “I know it sounds weird, but this is what I believe.”
—BRENDAN O’NEILL,
New Statesman
, SEPTEMBER 11, 2006
 
 

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