Trust No One

Wright placed his files in his safe each evening on top of tiny pencil marks, so that he could tell if they had been moved. One day, they had been. Only two men knew the safe’s combination: Mitchell and Hollis. “The shadows were gathering; treachery stalked the corridors,” he wrote. He put a camera inside Mitchell’s office behind a two-way mirror and watched him closely. (“It was an unpleasant task; every morning Mitchell came in and picked his teeth with a toothpick in front of the two-way mirror, and repeated the meticulous process again before lunch, after lunch, and then again before he went home.”) Wright searched Mitchell’s wastepaper basket, and painstakingly reconstructed pieces of paper that had been torn into pieces: nothing. Frustrated, he turned his attention to Hollis. Was he the spy? Certainly, that would make sense of Hollis’s “long-standing refusal to entertain any possibility of a penetration of the Service.” Wright began a “freelance” investigation of Hollis, mindful of the career consequences of investigating his own boss. He travelled to Oxford, and hunted through the university’s files for Hollis’s undergraduate transcript. He discovered that Hollis had never got his degree: “He left inexplicably after five terms.” Where did he go? Slowly, Wright built his case: “I had faith in his treachery as another man might have faith in God.”

- More Here from Malcolm Gladwell