by Jon Ronson
“How many people died in your carriage?” I asked Rachel.
“Twenty-six people,” she said.
Rachel was walking wounded. She had a piece of metal embedded in her wrist deep enough for her to see the bone, but that was about it. The carriage had been so packed, the people closest to the bomber had taken most of the force of the blast.
When she got home from the hospital, she started blogging. She wrote and wrote, a torrent of blog postings. Of course thousands of blogs about the July 7 attacks went up that day—there had been four bombs in all, three on tube trains and one on a bus, and fifty-six people died, including the four suicide bombers—but Rachel’s was unique. No other blogger had been so caught up in the events, so close to the bombs, actually in the same carriage as one, plus her writings were immediate and powerful and evocative, and so her site began to attract fans.
Thursday July 7th 2005.
. . . Everything went totally black and clouds of choking smoke filled the tube carriage and I thought I had been blinded. It was so dark nobody could see anything. I thought I was about to die, or was dead. I was choking from the smoke and felt like I was drowning. . . .
Saturday July 9th 2005.
. . . Couldn’t stop watching news. When I heard that the bomb was IN MY CARRIAGE I just flipped. I was alternately pounding with anger and adrenaline and having mini-flashbacks, then feeling falling over tired. I drank several whiskies. . . .
Typing it “was like cleaning a wound,” Rachel said. “I was picking all the grit and the smoke out of my mind.”
Other survivors found her blog. They began leaving supportive messages for one another on it. Eventually someone pointed out that they may have been chatting away but they were doing it all alone in their respective rooms. The Internet was giving them the illusion that they were being gregarious, but in fact they were performing an empty, unsatisfying facsimile of it. They were becoming isolated and angry. Why didn’t they do the old-fashioned thing and meet in real life, in the flesh? So they began to, once a month, in a pub in King’s Cross.
“Some of us found we were unable to feel any joy in being alive,” Rachel said. “Every time we went to sleep, we had nightmares, of banging our hands against the glass of the train, battering away, trying to smash our way out of this train that was filled with smoke. Remember, we all thought we were going to die, entombed in the smoke. And none of us had expected it.” Rachel paused for a second, then she said: “We’d all just been on our way to work.”
After a while they decided they wanted to do more than just meet for a monthly drink. They wanted to become a pressure group. They wanted to know if the attacks could have been prevented, if intelligence had been botched. They gave themselves a name: Kings Cross United. She carried on writing her blog.
And this was when things began to get strange. People she didn’t know started posting cryptic comments she didn’t understand on her site.
“You can install a thing that tells you where your visitors are coming from,” she said, “and I noticed a few weeks after installing it that I was getting an awful lot of hits from a particular website. So I went to look at it.”
It took Rachel a while to grasp what she was reading. Somebody was using phrases she’d written—Totally black and It was so dark nobody could see anything—to suggest she wasn’t describing a bomb (a bomb would have caused fire, which would have illuminated the carriage) but some kind of “power surge.” The writer complimented Rachel on her “courage” for whistle-blowing the true story of the power surge.
Rachel read on. These people evidently believed an accidental power surge had coursed through the London Underground that morning and that the British government wanted to cover up this corporate manslaughter by blaming it on Islamic suicide bombers. These conspiracy theorists were part of a much wider group—the 9/11 truth movement—which had become vast. Conspiracy theories were no longer just to be found, as they had pre-9/11, on the fringes of society. Now everyone knew someone who was convinced 9/11 was an inside job. They were armchair Agatha Christie sleuths, meeting on forums, sending each other YouTube links, telling each other they were right. Only the most extreme magical-thinkers among them were 7/7 conspiracy theorists, too: while 9/11 obviously wasn’t an inside job, 7/7 OBVIOUSLY wasn’t an inside job. And now these people had brought Rachel’s blog into it.
As Rachel read all of this, she wondered how they’d account for the Tavistock Square bus bombing. When Hasib Hussain blew himself up on the No. 30 from Marble Arch to Hackney Wick at 9:47 a.m., the explosion ripped the roof off the top deck. The thirteen passengers who happened to have been standing at the rear of the bus died with him. There were photographs of blood and flesh on the walls of the nearby British Medical Association headquarters. How would the conspiracy theorists account for that?
And then Rachel saw their explanation: the bus hadn’t really exploded. It was actually a fake stunt, using fancy pyrotechnics and stuntmen and actors and special-effect blood.
It’s obvious what Rachel should have done: nothing. It shouldn’t have come as a bolt from the blue that people were wrong on the Internet. But she’d just survived a terrorist attack, and maybe she was spending too much time alone in her room staring at her computer, whatever, she wasn’t thinking rationally. She wasn’t about to do the sensible thing.
“By that stage,” Rachel said, “I’d met people who had lost loved ones on that bus. To call the people on the bus who died actors and stuntmen was, I thought, abhorrent. So I read all this stuff, and then I came up for air, and I thought, ‘They don’t realize. As soon as they actually talk to a real person, someone who’s been there, they’ll realize it’s a load of old nonsense and they’ll give up.’ [Someone] was inviting comments on his website. So I left a very angry one: ‘How dare you misquote me in this way. Power surges do not tear people’s legs off.’ And he responded by saying, ‘You didn’t even know the bomb was in your carriage! You keep changing your story!’”
Rachel was furious. She felt it was her duty to make them understand they were wrong.
“But I had no idea, then, what these people were like,” she said. “What comes through again and again is this complete lack of empathy. They would, for example, cut and paste the most harrowing descriptions by emergency services officers of going into carriages and seeing buckled walls that were streaming with blood and pieces of human flesh and stepping over body parts and stepping over the hole where the bomb had torn a crater in the floor. They’d post this and you couldn’t read it without wanting to weep, and then they would say, ‘Ah! See? The hole appears to be on the right-hand side.’ And that would be their comment.”
“They were only interested in the crater?” I asked.
“Just weird,” said Rachel.
“Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy,” I couldn’t help suspecting now, although I was beginning to feel differently about Bob’s checklist. I now felt that the checklist was a powerful and intoxicating weapon that was capable of inflicting terrible damage if placed in the wrong hands. I was beginning to suspect that my hands might be the wrong hands. But still: Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy—Any appreciation of the pain of others is merely abstract.
Rachel discovered too late that by engaging with the conspiracy theorists she herself became part of the conspiracy.
“They all started discussing me,” she said. “They formed the most bizarre theories about me. They decided that because I had this group that I’d set up, and I had this blog that I’d set up, I was feeding the official story to the survivors, and I was somehow controlling them, and I was a government mouthpiece who’d been tasked with disseminating disinformation. They became very suspicious of me. They formed this theory that I was some kind of counterintelligence professional or security services covert operative. Some of them thought I didn’t even exist. They thought I was a team of men who had been tasked with creating this Rachel North persona and maintaining it as a means of what they called Psy-Ops—psychologic
al operations—to control the population of the UK.”
The “Rachel North Doesn’t Exist” theory came about after some of the conspiracy theorists counted the number of posts and messages she’d left and mathematically determined that she couldn’t be a single human being. She had to be a team.
Rachel tried telling them they were fantasists and that it wasn’t nice to find yourself a character in another person’s paranoid fantasy, especially when you’ve just been blown up on the tube, but it was to no avail. The more prolifically she tried to convince them she existed, the more certain they became that she didn’t.
“I do not work for the government,” she wrote to them. “I am a normal person, I have a normal job in a normal office and I am requesting politely that you drop this and stop making accusations that are not true. Please stop.”
“It should be clear from Rachel’s disinfo tactics she’s part of the same lying media and police who set up this scam,” someone replied.
“Bet it ain’t even female,” someone else agreed.
It escalated. She received death threats from them. She had almost been killed—she ran a support group for people who had almost been killed—and now they were sending her death threats. They contacted her parents, sent them information regarding the “truth” about their daughter and July 7. Rachel’s father, who was a country vicar, found the letters upsetting and confusing.
So Rachel decided to confront them in the flesh. She would show them what she looked like. In the flesh. She read they were having a meeting in the upstairs room of a pub and so she turned up with a friend. As she climbed the stairs, she worried about what these ferocious Internet presences would be like. She imagined them to be physically menacing. And then she reached the top of the stairs and opened the door and saw a room filled with quiet, small, nerdy-looking men. Some were staring awkwardly into their pints. Others were surreptitiously glancing at her and her friend, intrigued and delighted to see that two quite glamorous-looking women had apparently joined their movement.
Rachel and her friend sat down at a table near the wall. Nothing happened for a while. And then the door opened and another man came in. He looked quite commanding, quite impressive. And Rachel recognized him immediately. She was astonished.
It was David Shayler.
David Shayler: In 1997 an MI5 spy, code-named G9A/1, went on the run after passing secret intelligence to the Mail on Sunday. He had, the newspaper reported, been at an interagency meeting where an MI6 officer, code-named PT16B, had announced a plan to covertly assassinate the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadhafi. The assassins were ready, PT16B had told G9A/1. They were members of an organization called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. They would place a bomb under a road they knew Gadhafi was scheduled to drive down. But they needed money for bomb-making equipment and food, etc., which was why they had approached MI6.
PT16B (whose name, it emerged, was David Watson) had brought G9A/1 (whose name was David Shayler) into the “need-to-know group” for one simple reason: MI6 didn’t want MI5 to start chasing after the assassins if they came into contact with them in some other context. The British government wasn’t to know, David Watson told David Shayler. This was to be strictly covert.
Shayler thought it was probably all hot air, that David Watson was a bit of a James Bond wannabe fantasist, nothing would come of it. But then, a few weeks later, a bomb was detonated under Gadhafi’s cavalcade. As it transpired, the wrong car was targeted. Several bodyguards died but Gadhafi himself escaped unharmed.
Shayler was outraged. He didn’t want to be part of an agency culture that involved itself in clandestine assassinations, so he decided to make a stand. He called a friend who put him onto a journalist who worked for the Mail on Sunday. He told him everything, received £20,000 in return, and the following Saturday night, the night before the story appeared, promptly went on the run with his girlfriend, Annie Machon.
They went first to Holland, and then on to a French farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. There was no TV, no car. They stayed there for ten months, living off the Mail on Sunday money. He wrote a novel. They went to Paris for a weekend, and as they stepped into the hotel lobby, six men—French secret service—surrounded Shayler.
He spent four months in a French high-security jail, and then another month in a British jail before being released, a hero to the legions of people who believed he had done a valiant thing, sacrificed his liberty in a stance against illegal secret government activities. Rachel North admired him from afar. So did I.
And now, five years later, David Shayler had, to Rachel’s enormous surprise, entered the upstairs room of that quite sleazy pub. What was he doing there, mingling with the conspiracy theorists?
And then it became clear: he was one of them.
He was the main speaker of the night. His credentials as a former MI5 officer gave him gravitas. The others listened intently. He said 7/7 never happened. It was a lie. There were vigorous nods from the crowd. The world had been fooled by a brilliant lie. Rachel couldn’t take it any longer. She stood up.
“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 consulta
ncy. 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?
