Spying 101 - Part 2

SPYING 101 (PT 2)

Pursuit and observation.

As a spy, pursuit is important, as is (obviously) spying.

The key is not to let people know you are following or observing them, as this will somewhat defeat the point and the 'mark' (technical term for the person you are following, or followee, which can become confusing if the person you are following is actually called Mark) might behave differently.

When observing someone, it is best to never make eye contact with anyone and at the same time to pretend you are not listening to their conversation whilst storing up anything that can be used against them. Scowl to yourself as though you something much more important on your mind than them. Or play with your i-pod headphones whilst tutting. As an actor I try to imagine I am a fourteen year old EMO girl and this usually sets the right tone.

If you have access to recording equipment (mobiles sometimes have this capacity - or you could use a dictaphone - best of all is if you can bribe a nearby employee to give you access to their CCTV and have a secretarial assistant with good shorthand skills sit with you, though I'm aware that not everyone has this facility, including me) then use it so that you have a concrete record of any naughtiness which may occur.

If you should gain employment with the CIA you will find that all of the above happens as a matter of rote, though you will probably not be given access to it until your lawyer demands it, and even then it's touch and go.

Learn to read their body language - they may appear nervous or perhaps agitated, which could be a sign that they are up to something. Though I have learned to my cost that it does occasionally mean that they have noticed you watching them and they don't like it. At this point use your judgement to decide the best time to leave (before the police arrive is my advice).

If the 'mark' should move then you have to be able to 'shadow' them without arousing suspicion. The best thing would be to have two or three 'agents' follow them in a kind of 'tag-team', but this is not always possible. A change of clothing can help to throw them off. By this I mean a different jacket or hat, maybe even shoes. Changing your trousers in the street is often counter-productive. False moustaches, wigs, contact lenses for close-up work and even false teeth can help too - they will also disguise your accent in a unique and simple way. If you are a proficient actor, like me, change your accent regularly as well as your facial expression - or pretend to have a strange facial tic (though be frugal with this last one, there is fine line between disguise and psychosis).

Practice. This cannot be emphasised enough. Find ways to hone your skills, especially with people you know. This makes shadowing harder, as they are more likely to recognise you, but is less embarrassing if you do get caught. I began with the tabby cat from over the back garden. Standing still when it was looking and creeping slowly up when it looked away. After I few goes I managed to get quite close and then realized I was in next doors garden and the old lady who lives there was watching me. She opened the window and leant out to tell me to fuck off. Luckily I was wearing a long ginger wig and a black boiler suit so I don't think she recognised me.

For the last few weeks I have been following my wife Anna to work and to the shops - even into the garden. I even managed to hide in the laundry basket whilst she went to the toilet, though I almost suffocated when she piled a load of dirty nappies in there - though she did say afterwards that it was a shock to find me there as she had no idea where I was.

Following her has put all of my skills to the test. Ducking into doorways, running around back lanes and side streets in order to get ahead of her and then waiting in shops for her to pass, changing between my overcoat and hoodie. And today I even ducked into a taxi and had him circle the block whilst she was in Bravissimo. Then my phone went and it was, of course, a text from Anna telling me that if I didn't 'stop being a silly bugger' and following her around, she would 'get a restraining order against me.' How we laughed. Or I did. Still don't know how she spotted me.

I headed for home and began following the old man from across the road. Very difficult, as he has a rottweiler that kept growling at me and glancing back, so I had to hide in bushes or behind cars. He shouted that he could see me and was going to call the police, but I don't think he could, as I was in number 62's wheelie bin at the time.

I waited until I was sure he'd gone and sneaked back to our house. There I found the tabby cat from across the back garden shitting on our doorstep. I tried to sneak up on him and catch him in the act but he heard me coming and was gone before I could get close enough to get a photo. Took a couple of shots of the poo though and cleaned it up. Will go around and have words with the owner later, once I've 'cased' the joint and made sure it's not a sociopath or anything that he lives with. There are some strange types around.

Must go now. Anna is home and seems to be having a somewhat fraught conversation with the rottweiler owner from up the road. She keeps looking up at the house in what can only be described as an agitated manner. Time to put my concealment skills to the test, methinks...

SPYING 101

SPYING 101

Most people do not choose to become spies. Fact. They are either recruited from other fields (the Army, Navy, Civil Service, Police, Gentlemen’s Clubs or drug dens - though the last two are almost synonymous).  Or like me you may just find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and may have no choice but to take on and foil a worldwide criminal network for the greater good.  This means that most spies do not know what they are doing from one moment to the next – so it’s not just me.

This handy guide is meant as a basic course in spying, should you find yourself in a position, like I did, where the safety of the country is in your hands, God help us.

Part One – Lying

There is a reason why, if you should be writing a poem about spying (and I don’t know why you would be but bear with me here) the obvious rhyme that will spring to mind is ‘lying’ (though there is ‘crying’ but I think that’s just me.) To be a spy is to be a liar, to live a lie, to never let it lie. This is, luckily for me and the people I work for, very similar to my life as an actor, as will hopefully be made clear in the following guide.

There are three basic types of lie (for reasons of space I do not include here ‘Lying as a member of parliament’)

1.                              Dissembling. This is the kind of lying that is too dishonest and/or lazy to even call itself lying. It is allowing others to live with assumptions they have already made or with information they have been given by a third party. If someone assumes that I am Lord Crackenthorpe and that I am in on their dastardly deeds, then is it really my job to disabuse them if it is to my advantage. Also, as an actor, if I say on my CV that I have appeared in, say, Hamlet, and the director assumes I mean alongside David Tennant at the Globe rather than in a rather dodgy am-dram production that toured primary schools and ran at 29 minutes – who am I to disappoint him?

2.                              Lying by omission. Into this category falls my conversation with my wife, Anna, regarding my trip to the Television Awards in Edinburgh a few years ago. This was true. I was up for an award, I was travelling to accept my award, and up until the last few days that was my sole intention. The fact that I omitted my secondary role (to act as a mule in a somewhat illegal transaction involving disaffected members of the military who were planning to commit a terrorist act known as the RAIL project) was entirely for her own good. Not that she saw it this way. And I suppose the fact that she refused to tell me that she loved me for six months (let alone actually see me) was a kind of lying by omission. And the fact that, when I was recruited by the CIA I was given no idea of what the wage scale was. (It wasn't nearly so remuneratively attractive as you might imagine.)

3.                              The lie outright. When an actor sees the question ‘Can you ride a horse, use a sword, do a decent Jamaican accent and fly an aeroplane?’ the answer is always yes. In fact any statement beginning ‘must have experience of…’ is fair game for the actor to lie outright and then go and buy the relevant ‘Complete Simpleton’s Guide to…’ The spy is exactly the same. A basic crib sheet and the stupidity to think that this means you know what you are getting yourself into are the basic requirements in each case. In fact they are the only requirements. This means that when I run onto a train in the full knowledge that there is a bomb on board somewhere I am torn. Does one, as a spy, remain calm and collected and lie to the assembled company that there is no problem - whilst frantically but quietly searching for a solution? Or does one's innate sense of the overly dramatic lead one to run about like a headless chicken, screaming like a toddler who has just seen the Directors Cut of Bambi? The answer, dear readers, can be seen in the second instalment of my adventures, RAIL. But it is not pretty. Or necessarily true.

So, as an actor, spying suits me, in the way that working for Channel 5 suits a TV presenter or prostitution suits a law student, but lying for a living does give one pause for thought. The 'truth' becomes something flexible and slippery. And my life does seem, at the moment, to be heading in a very strange direction. Lying begets lying and I am only just beginning to understand the ramifications of that...

Join me soon for the second instalment of my thoughts on spying - Following, Tracking and Stalking - the Finer Points of the Law

Olympic Debacle

Whilst the news is never good concerning the Olympics - the bright spot for me this week has been hearing a Manchester Police Officer using the word 'debacle' at every opportunity. Never has the word been said with such feeling or meaning as in a Mancunian accent.
I did apply to work for G4S at the Olympics but my application was turned down, which I feel was an absolute disgrace, given my endless service to Queen and country as an undercover spy. I would like to reiterate that I single-handedly (well, nearly) saved the London Olympics from the hands of money grabbing criminals, though they seem to be cashing in anyway in the guise of security firms and builders... Though I did later discover that the reason I didn't get the job was mainly because my CIA handler refused to fill in my reference.
Probably just as well really, as I begin filming for the new Mockumentary based on the life of King William this week. Exciting script based on his lifetime spent trying to unite the country after invading it in the name of a foreign power (France) and sucking all of the money back into his European domains - topical no? Apparently he had to agree to huge list of demands and became known as the 'Yes-man', or William the Concurrer. Unfortunately I'm playing Harold so my screen time will be limited. Anna caught me winking into the mirror last night and couldn't stop laughing. Such is the price one pays for living ones art in the public sphere.
Good to see Greece managing to field a full crop of athletes though. Still feel a little guilty after what I managed to do to their economy a couple of years ago - can't go into details here but you can read all about it in Ramp, the third exciting installment of my biography, coming soon to a remainder shop near you.
My Ghost-writer (Alfie Crow) leads me to believe that it is the funniest/most exciting/most liberal with the truth so far - but then he would say that.