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