The whistleblower cuts a lonely figure. Disruptive by definition, the whistleblower is the ultimate outsider – a shadowy player who ignores not only the rules, but the very team itself.
The whistleblower’s motivations are often misunderstood, and their habit of exposing difficult truths means they are easily smeared by their detractors as troublemakers, fantasists and traitors.
All of these qualities make the whistleblower an excellent character in crime fiction.
My novel, The Messenger, follows the journey of Alex, a young man who has just been released on parole for the crime of killing his father. Alex claims he was wrongly convicted, is desperate to prove his innocence and to find his father’s real killer. Eddy, his father, was an investigative journalist in Paris, where the novel is set, and in his quest to reveal the truth about Eddy’s murder, Alex uncovers secrets his father died trying to expose.
As Alex investigates Eddy’s death, he discovers a ring of corruption with a stranglehold on the city, a conspiracy whose deep roots are entwined in the civil unrest Paris is famous for. As the novel progresses, Alex draws close to Eddy’s enemies and comes to know his father in a way he never did when he was alive.
Like his father before him, the more Alex uncovers, the more isolated he becomes, and the more he is pursued for what he knows.
The novel has as its focus the insidious pull of corruption: how it drags people into its orbit whether they choose to get involved or not. The novel explores the dangers of staying silent and the even more risky act of speaking out.
In developing the characters and plot of The Messenger, I drew upon my own experience as a whistleblower in London’s financial sector.
At the time, I was working as a lawyer in a fast-moving, niche area where cutting corners was the norm. The deals were at the sharp end of the law, but they were legal: nothing out of the ordinary in an era of freewheeling, light touch regulation. There was one high-value transaction, however, that went beyond that, pushing into the realm of fraud. When I expressed my reluctance to participate in the deal, my bosses said they would make it worth my while.
It was not immediately clear what that meant, but the proposition held a vague, unlimited promise. No figure was mentioned, but my imagination bloomed. The deal was in the hundreds of millions of pounds so the sky was the limit. My bosses were asking me to name my price.
I was stunned, and in that moment of disorientation I have to admit, I considered it.
Not out of greed, but because going along with their scam was easier than speaking out.
The best crime stories come from insiders, but as we know from crime fiction, being an insider is a dangerous game. Faced with the prospect of speaking up or staying silent, most people keep their mouths shut. If they don’t then they are dealt with. The clock starts ticking; their days are numbered.
In real life too, whistleblowers are intimidated, victimised and harassed. Sometimes they are killed before their message gets out. That’s why the most serious crimes are the ones we never hear about.
That invitation from my employers also held within it, of course, a vague, unlimited threat. Was it really worth my while to refuse? I considered pursuing a middle course – staying silent while backing away quietly, watching from the sidelines and not playing an active part. But I was fixed with knowledge of what they were up to and if the deal went ahead, I knew I would be dragged into it one way or another.
I had no choice but to speak out, to try and stop the transaction. But what would happen to me if I did, I wondered? I would lose my job for sure, but what other risks was I taking?
These are the dilemmas all whistleblowers face as they consider stepping forward into lonely and dangerous territory. How will they be treated once they refuse to play ball? Turning against the team is precarious, particularly when you get between people and their money.
I soon found out what it meant for me. Within an hour of refusing my bosses’ offer, my access to the computer network was denied, security card cancelled and I was escorted from the building like a criminal. To this day I still don’t know what my colleagues were told about my sudden disappearance from the office. No doubt word got around that I had done something terribly wrong.
And indeed it felt like it. Suddenly the tables were turned and my employers created trumped up charges against me that I was forced to defend with expensive lawyers. My bosses combed through my employment history, emails, documents and correspondence looking for evidence that would cast doubt on my judgement, skills and character.
They had to neutralise me now I had gone rogue. They had to shoot the messenger before the message got out and that meant bullying and intimidating me, undermining everything I said. If they couldn’t find anything substantial against me, then they would wear me down with false allegations and legal fees.
Remarkably, there are lawyers who specialise in intimidating whistleblowers and the lawyers my employers engaged were experts in their field. They knew exactly how to scare me, sending motorcycle couriers regularly to my home to deliver intimidating documents. Once I was even served when I was in the playground with my kids. The message was clear from the helmeted, leather-clad messenger: not only did they know where I lived they knew my routine. So I stayed indoors, watching my legal bills rack up as I tried to make sense of the mess I was in.
The blueprint for this kind of treatment could have been plucked from the pages of a noir thriller: shatter the protagonist’s worldview; destroy their identity, mission and purpose. Alone and isolated, their mind becomes warped. Gaslighting activates paranoia and intrusive thoughts. Nightmares lean into suicidal ideation.
My employers didn’t find anything to hang me with and the charges they brought were baseless, but the process they instigated was frightening and deliberately drawn out, continuing for well over a year.
I hung in there, found another job while I fought the allegations and then finally, it was over. I received a settlement and critically, the transaction collapsed when financiers took flight at the adverse publicity. I had disrupted the deal, but at what cost to my health, family, career and sanity? I will probably never really know, but the experience certainly disrupted my view of the world and human nature.
Sometimes, the information revealed by whistleblowers is so disruptive it causes a seismic shift in our understanding of how society works. This happened in 2016 with the Panama Papers, history’s biggest ever data leak. The information disclosed to journalists from an insider at the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, showed the real workings of the global financial system. The Panama Papers revealed how the secret off shore industry was ‘not as had been previously thought a minor part of our economic system, rather, it was the system’. The Panama Papers exposed the role of off shore structures in the increasingly aggressive accumulation of wealth by a rich and often criminal élite.
“Making the decision to compile the data available to me at Mossack Fonseca took days and felt like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, but ultimately I had to do it,” the Panama Papers whistleblower has said.
Another massive shift in public perception occurred in 2013 when NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, exposed the extent of global mass surveillance, including the extent to which the US and UK governments spy on their own citizens. Whistleblowers who expose the secret machinations of the State are in even more danger than those who expose financial wrongdoing because national security legislation often trumps whistleblower protection laws. This leads to uncomfortable questions regarding the safeguards that are meant to be in place to stop a government overreaching its legally mandated authority.
No other whistleblower more exemplifies our conflicting attitudes towards whistleblowers than Edward Snowden. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and also vilified as a traitor deserving of the death penalty. A month after Snowden’s revelations, the US Department of Justice charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property, following which The Department of State revoked his passport.
Ironically, Snowden finally found refuge in Russia, a regime that itself treats whistleblowers and journalists as traitors.
I have never regretted blowing the whistle, but I often wonder whether I would do it again. Many whistleblowers say the same thing. Upsetting the herd requires the kind of recklessness you can really only do once, when you don’t know the ramifications.
Although the ending of my story was a satisfying one, the journey itself was harrowing. All whistleblowers subject themselves to the kind of treatment you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy. In their mission to reveal the truth they are forced to take the kind risks we wouldn’t dream of, and mostly they do this not out of choice, but necessity.
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