Terrorism for the Sake of Counterterrorism: Undercover Policing and the Specter of the Agent Provocateur in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Abstract

This historically informed reading of Secret Agent wishes to complement previous contextual analyses. Thanks mainly to the historical detective work of Norman Sherry, there is wide agreement among critics today that while Secret Agent tells a fictitious story, Conrad closely studied newspaper articles and other printed material on the Greenwich Bomb Outrage of 1894, and that he additionally received oral information from friends familiar with the socialist and anarchist scenes. In Western World, Sherry did Conrad scholars the great service of citing extensively from contemporary press reports as well as reproducing, in unabridged form, an obscure pamphlet by the anarchist newspaper publisher David Nicoll claiming that the whole incident had been a police plot. While ample attention has been given to the parallels and differences between Secret Agent and the conspiracy theory propounded by Nicoll, however, the historical circumstances that gave rise to that theory are usually not dealt with in great depth. As the present article demonstrates, Secret Agent is a response to the emergence of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch as much as it is a response to the Greenwich Bomb Outrage and its surrounding media discourse. This is indicated by the fact that the only written source mentioned in Conrad's Author’s Preface to the 1920 edition of Secret Agent is a memoir by Sir Robert Anderson. A Home Office advisor on political crime during the Fenian dynamite campaign, Anderson had been the handler of the British government’s most valuable spy in the Fenian ranks, Henri Le Caron, from 1867 to 1889. Conrad's interest in such undercover police practices is clearly reflected in his novel, which depicts the explosion at Greenwich Park not as a simple act of political violence perpetrated by a single group, but as the result of an interaction of various factors. Individual fanaticism and scrupulousness (embodied by the bomb-making Professor) is just one of these factors. The others are state-sponsored espionage and incitement to violence in the name of counterterrorism as well as a system of secret policing in which an endemic lack of transparency first allows the bombing to happen and then hampers the investigation. My article considesr each of these three factors in a separate chapter, considering Conrad’s characters and plot alongside their historical counterparts.