[Transcript excerpt from The Quibbler Wandcast, 3 June 2019 episode, ‘The Albanian Conspiracy w/ historian Lee Jordan‘. Cyber-links have been added to connect files, unknown at the time of the interview, to Jordan’s prescient speculation. See pt. 1, pt. 2.]
[. . .]
QUIBBLER: Can you give us just a clear, straight-forward rundown? Because I think some of our listeners might be a bit –
JORDAN: Confused? What? I don’t understand, this is all so straightforward – not convoluted at all [laughs].
QUIBBLER: Right, right, of course. Just in case someone’s gone to the loo or something, then – a quick recap.
JORDAN: Sure. Well, back to the start, then. In the mid-1980s, Ministry intelligence catches wind of an occult group called the Knights of Kulshedra, KEK, executing Dark-adjacent activities in Shköder County, Albania. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement moves in around 1988, but they quite quickly learn that they’re late to the party, that the Department of Mysteries has infiltrated and essentially taken over the group since as early as 1986. The DMLE’s intent there is to catch Dark wizards, but the DoM is running a much more clandestine operation involving the importation of various illicit materials and the maintenance of an alleged tree-spirit known colloquially as ‘the kukudh‘. All of this is being administered by a known DoM asset, a French wizard by the name Alexis Gage, a man who’s best known as a dealer of peculiar artefacts and the owner of a library that makes the Hogwarts Restricted Section look like the children’s shelf at Flourish and Blotts.
Now, in 1990, a variety of things happen. First, Albus Dumbledore, either because he’s not so sure what the DoM is running or just because he’s an itinerate meddler, who knows why, Dumbledore sends one of his professors, Quirinus Quirrell, to study the KEK and report back what he finds, ostensibly for academic purposes. And whether it was by Dumbledore’s designs or somebody else’s or just sheer dumb human nature, Quirrell falls hook, line, and sinker into Gage and the KEK’s influence. The DMLE, led at the time by the famous Mad-Eye Moody, set up a scheme to entrap him for the importation of unicorn blood, but – and here are some of the biggest question marks of this entire story, part of why it’s so hard to lay the story straight – for some reason, Quirrell gets sent back to Britain before the DMLE can catch him. Now, we can quite safely suspect that the DoM wanted the DMLE out of there just to be rid of their meddling, to get any Ministry scrutiny out of their comings and goings – but why the DMLE didn’t just move in and arrest Quirrell – that’s a bit harder to parse out.
QUIBBLER: Yes, that’s – sorry to interrupt – that’s where I’ve been confused as well. I see why the DoM would want the DMLE out of Albania, that makes perfect sense, but I don’t understand why Amelia Bones’s and Rufus Scrimgeour’s DMLE – these are two famously sensible people, by-the-books operations men – why they wouldn’t just ship out of Albania, bring Quirrell along with them, and then slap him in chains the second he hit British soil. It seems – I don’t know, neater, doesn’t it?
JORDAN: I agree. It’s all peculiar.
QUIBBLER: What do you make of it?
JORDAN: Do you want my opinion?
QUIBBLER: Sure.
JORDAN: I think that Bones wanted an eye on Dumbledore. She knew he had some part to play in Albania, and she knew that even if she couldn’t have her people there any more she could still get a stab in his eye if she sent a major sting operation and its accompanying investigation into Hogwarts. She knew Quirrell was Dumbledore’s man. She wanted Quirrell out of Albania, she wanted an excuse to get higher surveillance on Hogwarts, she wanted scrutiny on Dumbledore, she wanted him embarrassed. So she sent Quirrell back. It got Moody out of the picture, too – another pain out of her arse. Some people think it was some deviousness on Dumbledore’s part. Nah. It was Bones, all the way. She sent Quirrell back, knowing it would bungle anything Dumbledore and the DoM had planned in Scotland. She sent him back, then got her hands clear out of Albania. She could see where that was going and she wanted nothing of it. It was no skin off her back letting that up to the DoM. I – I don’t want to ever underplay the despicable bullshit of the DoM, but let’s not forget that the DMLE pulls just as many strings when we’re talking about Ministry power. So I think this was all Bones’s game more than some would like to think.
QUIBBLER: You can’t prove it though.
JORDAN: No. No. I can’t prove it.
QUIBBLER: But if that’s true, then that was a mistake, yeah? Because the DMLE pulling out, that opened up the DoM –
JORDAN: That opened up the DoM to do whatever the fuck they wanted in Albania. That’s right. Sure, Bones fucked the Scotland end of the operation. That was a disaster. But the Albanian Conspiracy? Well, how could that have gone better?
QUIBBLER: Well – yes. We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves.
JORDAN: Right, so onward then. So, however, why-ever it happens, the DMLE ships out, Quirrell goes back to Hogwarts, the DMLE keeps an eye on him, and the DoM continues operations with Gage at least thinking that he’s at the helm in Albania. Now all of this coincides with two major shifts, possibly related, possibly not. One, the DoM sends Unspeakable Gareth Greengrass out to oversee operations in Albania. And two, the famous Harry James Potter matriculates into Hogwarts.
Now this is perhaps the most well-known part of the story, and we needn’t go into the gory details here – just the relevant parts. Potter – the DoM and Dumbledore are very interested in Potter. And from the second the needle drops at Hogwarts, the DoM is doing something very peculiar with him. They’re very much – well, trying to make him a celebrity. We won’t get into the whys of that, that’s a very different, and a very long episode – but the DoM and Dumbledore are at the start of a years-long orchestrated effort to transform Potter into a millennial Messiah. There’s some evidence – I won’t get into it here, but you can find some forums out there if you dig deep enough – that they at first planned to make this happen by transforming him into a Quidditch star. That’s all a very funny theory – I don’t know what to make of it. But when Dumbledore gets news that Quirrell’s coming back, and that the DMLE is setting him up to continue harvesting unicorn blood to send back to Shköder County – then Dumbledore cooks up a new scheme, an extremely whacky scheme, one we all now know – Dumbledore contrives to lure Quirrell into stealing the Philosopher’s Stone from an underground chamber at Hogwarts, and for Harry Potter – eleven-fucking-year-old Harry Potter – to stop him.
QUIBBLER: I – I know we all know this story so well, we all know it’s at least somewhat true – but it’s just so ridiculous when you say it out loud.
JORDAN: I know, I know. And – well, full disclosure, I suppose, though it won’t surprise anyone – I was at Hogwarts at the time.
QUIBBLER: As was I.
JORDAN: You and me, we go way back, eh? Well, we can talk a bit about what it was like maybe, later in the show, to live through it all. But the entire 1991-92 school year, it was defined by this silly propaganda operation between Dumbledore-slash-the-DoM and the DMLE to transform Quirrell into a baddie, to harvest unicorn blood off to the KEK – which, mind you, was the DoM – and then to steal the Philosopher’s Stone, in order to send that back to the KEK – and then to have a little boy figure all of this out and stop him. I – well, we don’t know the full story here, there’s a whole team of independent researchers in London – people we both know – who are figuring all of this out, digging out long-lost documents and memories – but it seems they had the media ready, they had a spectacular show-arrest ready, a whole team of Hit Wizards – just this massive spectacle that was going to arrest Quirrell, make the DMLE look great, make the Ministry look great, make Potter look like – well, like the Chosen One.
QUIBBLER: But it didn’t work.
JORDAN: God, how it didn’t work. We don’t know yet how badly it all fell out – but, well – well, I suppose what do you expect when you’re trying to orchestrate a national spectacle with a child, a nervous wreck, an archaic faculty, and multiple rival government agencies? It was the broth ruined by three incompetent cooks too many. Potter I suppose ‘saved’ the Stone and won us the House Cup and all that –
QUIBBLER: Say ‘us’ all you want – God, we hated you lot –
JORDAN: – but the DMLE pulled out, the Prophet pulled out, Quirrell – we don’t know what happened to Quirrell, but seeing as he never showed up again, it’s pretty evident that he ended up dead. I don’t know if we’ll ever know all the details about what exactly happened down in that dungeon, but we sure as hell know that it wasn’t what Potter said happened. There certainly wasn’t any Lord Voldemort showing up in the back of anyone’s head –
QUIBBLER: Yes, I’m sorry. What on earth sort of spellcraft could contrive such a thing? It’s just so incredible to me that that sort of lunacy was never addressed, that we were just asked to accept it as truth when the first memoir came out. When, in all of the history of magic, has possession resulted in a – in a blasted face turning up on the back of someone’s head? Like, what is even the physics, or anatomy, or – argh, it’s just so – silly. Sorry, go on.
JORDAN: Look, like I said, this could really spiral into a million different conversations. We’ll take Grinlow’s writing to task another day. For now, we can just say that, whether you take my Bones hypothesis as fact or not, the Scotland end of the operation got pretty well bungled. It’s – in a 50-year run of Dumbledore playing his cards pretty well fucking right, this was the beginning of the end.
QUIBBLER: But this is just one side of the operation. The Hogwarts side spiralled, but on the other end of it all is the Albanian operation. You mentioned Greengrass.
JORDAN: That’s right, I did. So Greengrass shows up in Albania, most likely in theory as Gage’s handler, someone to make sure everything out there was staying in line with the DoM’s plans.
QUIBBLER: And who is Greengrass, exactly?
JORDAN: Well, there’s not much to say. Greengrass was a DoM spook, plain and simple. There’s not much backstory on him. He’s an American, he’s not through Hogwarts – he’s related to the rather famous Greengrass family, an old through-and-through pureblood Slytherin clan, one who never got too mixed up with the Death Eater business, took the straight path through government and Galleons – but he’s just a cousin, and an American cousin to boot, which is almost worse than blood traitor for some. He’s still around down there on Level Nine, as far as I know. But at this point, in 1992, he was quite young, pretty fresh out of Ilvermorny and only a few years into his work at the DoM. But he got sent out there to keep an eye on Gage, and by all accounts he did a pretty good job. It seems they were rather close. I’m sure at this point that Gage was getting in over his head, starting to realize what exactly was going on, trapped out on the wrong side of the defunct Curtain and looking for anyone he could find for a kindly Western support.
So from July 1991 or so on, Greengrass is really the one running the show in Albania. Gage is in the driver seat, but Greengrass is keeping him on a tight leash, reporting everything he sees back to London. And here’s where the story sort of runs blank – because, due to the nature of the Department of Mysteries, and due to the fact that, even if their records were accessible, they’ve all been destroyed – well, we really can only speculate what happens after Greengrass moves in with Gage and starts to direct the Albanian end of things. There’s only one thing we can say for certain, which is that, sometime around mid-June 1992 –
QUIBBLER: Gage wakes up dead.
JORDAN: Oh, I don’t think he woke up [laughs].
QUIBBLER: He was found dead, in his house, in June 1992 –
JORDAN: 15 June 1992, that’s right. Now unfortunately, that’s all we can decisively say – the news reports differ on the nature and exact details of his death. The French wizarding papers tout it to be a rather noble death, quite ambiguous, maybe an accident on holiday, maybe a death in one’s sleep – regardless, a dignified death for a dignified – that is, wealthy – man. But the local muggle paper, the Albanian national newspaper, tells a very different story. And that states that Gage was found, well, er –
QUIBBLER: Naked with his head cut off.
JORDAN: Now we don’t know that it was his head! The paper reports a ‘member’. Is the head a member, exactly? I don’t know, Hogwarts never put human anatomy on the docket. But, yes, speculation in Albanian Conspiracy circles is that it was his head. Regardless, whatever happened to his body it was rather grizzly. Grizzly and strange enough that the muggle papers were willing to attribute it to occult activity.
QUIBBLER: So, working off Occam’s Razor, as you say – the most likely story here is that he was offed by the KEK.
JORDAN: Well, that’s the application of the Razor that slashed up his innards, yes. It seems someone offed him in hopes of creating the appearance that he’d been – ritualistically sacrificed, or something – by the cult-y band that he was known to pal around with. In other words, someone did it making it look like it’d been the KEK. It was a small enough community – and my ground research confirms this – that people around Theth – muggle people – and greater Shköder County knew that there was something funny about Gage, that he was something of a ringleader in the Shtrigë circle. And people certainly knew there was something very funny – scary, even – about the KEK. So it seems like a sensible framing, if someone wanted to off him, Gage, that they’d do it by slashing him up right and cult-like to make it seem it’d been done by a pack of half-mad pagans.
QUIBBLER: So you’re saying –
JORDAN: It’s only speculation, so I don’t want to say it too affirmative – but it seems pretty evident to me that the DoM assassinated Gage and made it look like the KEK.
QUIBBLER: Do you think Greengrass did it himself?
JORDAN: I don’t see why it wouldn’t be Greengrass. I mean, he could have had someone in the KEK actually do it. Some poor muggle bloke, imperiused or just hopped up on, what do they call it, speed. Ketamine. MDMA. I don’t know, er, muggle drugs, at least. I’d suspect – knowing a bit of Greengrass’s style, I’d suspect it was that. I don’t think he liked to get his hands personally dirty. And he’d like the extra security, having had someone else actually committing the – deed. Avoid the Priori Incantatum or, er, what do the muggles call it – forensic evidence. But it seems impossible for me really to believe that it wasn’t Greengrass who orchestrated it.
QUIBBLER: So the DoM, however it happens, offs Gage. And then?
JORDAN: Well, here’s where things get interesting. So very little gets leaked out of this house, but I did dig up – and this took some digging – I dug up spending reports through Gage’s business title, Exotiques Gaulois. This is all public filing, but its a nightmare in a country like Albania, especially with a war going up in between then and now. Most of it is a mess, most of it is unfindable. I doubt I found all of it. But eventually I found this one, and it’s a liquor import business. And there’s some normal things – or none of it is normal, these liquors are insane – but the oddest thing on there is two categories: Okinawan Habushu and Chartreuse Blanc. And of these, there’s an enormous amount.
QUIBBLER: How enormous?
JORDAN: Over 500 litres of each.
QUIBBLER: That’s – that’s a very large amount of quite rare spirits.
JORDAN: Yeah. I mean, I’m not saying this guy was impressive with his records in any particular way, but – well, those are very rare liquors. I don’t think there’s anywhere in the world that stockpiles that much. So something’s – something’s off there.
QUIBBLER: To play the, somewhat rare on this programme, role of angelic advocate – could it be a simple misfiling?
JORDAN: Well that’d be nice. But no, I’d suspect that this is what you’d call a cover.
QUIBBLER: Covering – what?
JORDAN: Well – you want to know what I think, or what we can prove?
QUIBBLER: Let’s go prove first.
JORDAN: Well, nothing. There’s no evidence that 500 litres of White Chartreuse exists in the world, much less that it exists in Shköder County, Albania. So I think that’s evidence that it was something else. Now, it could be drugs, it could be, I don’t know, weapons, it could just be some type of embezzlement. But we know that Gage for years was a smuggler of blacklisted dark objects and ingredients. So I think we can posit that these are two materials. Ingredients. For some sort of potion, I’d suspect, something that he was brewing, or preparing to brew, in that villa. Or rather, stockpiling for someone else to brew. Creating a laboratory in his ‘cottage’, an off-site laboratory as it were for the DoM. To do – experiments.
QUIBBLER: And what’s your theory? What do you think it was? That he was importing?
JORDAN: Well, do you really want to – ? It’s, er – it’s whacky.
QUIBBLER: I think we can handle a bit of whackiness around here.
JORDAN: Well – you remember what Quirrell was sent to Scotland to harvest?
QUIBBLER: Unicorn blood.
JORDAN: That’s right. And – well, we’ve got a white liquor and a liquor that’s – I don’t know if you know anything about habushu, but essentially it’s a Japanese liqueur infused with the venom – the entire body, really – of a habu. That’s a snake. A venomous snake. A pit viper.
QUIBBLER: Fascinating. I can’t say I’m eager to try it.
JORDAN: Well. Now, we know, even from the most official sources, Potter’s memoirs and all – we know about the Rudimentary Body Potion.
QUIBBLER: The – ?
JORDAN: Well, the two chief components of it are snake venom and unicorn blood.
QUIBBLER: So you’re saying –
JORDAN: I’m not saying anything. But I’m suggesting that, just maybe, what Gage was importing into Albania under his liquor-importing business was snake venom and unicorn blood. Some of it from Quirrell in Scotland, sure, but more of it from other places. There’s unicorns accessible by black markets all over Europe. And I’m suspecting that, after he snuffed it, that he left behind a nice little laboratory for the DoM stockpiled with litres and litres of those two ingredients to try and produce up – should I say it? I –
QUIBBLER: Oh, bugger, you can say it!
JORDAN: Well alright, I’ll say it. But this is – this is conjecture, right? I’ve got no proof – I’m not on record, not taking this to court, not –
QUIBBLER: This is a comedy show. Don’t worry. Whatever he says here, Madame Granger, it’s parody. Parody.
JORDAN: Alright, alright. Parody. I, well – they were stockpiling ingredients to produce batches of the Rudimentary Body Potion.
QUIBBLER: And – that’s – ?
JORDAN: It’s – well, it’s a rumoured potion that creates a rudimentary body out of a disembodied soul. It’s, well – it’s a rumour in books that are only rumoured to exist. Think horcruxes, but even more – buried. It’s only ever been suggested as a possibility, and that’s just batted around in stuff that – stuff that, let’s just say is very hard to find, and then once you’ve got it it’s even worse to try and get through with your er, lunch intact. Now, this is exactly the sort of library that Gage was famous for. And he had a big house, in a place no one was watching, and he had a DoM agent out there, moving in to live with him – and now you’ve got Gage dead, you’ve got the DMLE busted out –
QUIBBLER: You have the ingredients, you’ve got the recipe –
JORDAN: You’ve got at least the theory of the recipe. And now I think you’ve got the start to some experiments.
QUIBBLER: You’re saying –
JORDAN: Suggesting –
QUIBBLER: You’re comedically suggesting that the DoM started doing Rudimentary Body experiments in Theth starting shortly after Gage’s death in June 1992.
JORDAN: That’s the joke I’m making, yes.
QUIBBLER: And that entails –
JORDAN: We’ve not got to talk about what it entails. We can only guess at that. And – well, I don’t want to think about it, honest. But – yes. That’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking – well, we know that the DoM knew what was out there in those woods. And we know what eventually came out of those woods, and, if Potter’s to be believed, we know how they did it. And we know that the DoM was there, and that a known DoM asset ended up dead, and we know that asset was importing two mysterious ingredients that bear a hell of a resemblance to the two known ingredients of the Rudimentary Body Potion.
QUIBBLER: And those Rudimentary Body Potion experiments eventually resulted –
QUIBBLER: I think we’ll have to let them sit with that one for awhile.
JORDAN: It’s – it’s a pretty damning joke to make, that’s for sure.
[Pause.]
QUIBBLER: My only question – and perhaps there isn’t an answer – but – why?
JORDAN: Why?
QUIBBLER: Why all the silliness with Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone? Why go through all of that – this utter nonsense, absolute comic nonsense – and then at the same time go through this horrific, damnably expensive process, years and years of horrific transactions and contacts and murders – all to achieve an end that I believe we can all agree is an absolute horror?
JORDAN: [Sighs.] I don’t know. I don’t know. When I think about it, the only thing that comes to mind – there’s a muggle spy writer, John Le Carré, sort of the first and best of the muggle spy-thriller writers, worth the trip to a muggle bookshop – he says something along the lines in one of his books about the progression of ideology in intelligence agents. The purest ideology in intelligence, he says, is that in which ‘the ends and means are identical’. That’s what I think about it all. Why do any of this? There is no why any more, when you’re in this deep. There is no Wizarding War, First or Second. There’s only men in neat robes with empty desks back in London, doing work in a field they don’t understand, all for the purpose of doing it. The Albanian Conspiracy, if we were to put it down to one sentence – and I suppose this is the thesis statement for my book – the Albanian Conspiracy was something that was begun, and therefore something that had to be ended. And that’s really it.
QUIBBLER: But surely – surely there was some cause – some reason that after 10 years Dumbledore and the DMLE and the DoM and whoever else decided that it all needed to be brought back again. Some outside instigator, or – some reason. At the very least to justify the finances.
JORDAN: I used to think it. Really I did. I’d be open to it if there were. But if I’m to be honest with myself, and with you – I don’t know. I don’t think there is. I don’t think there’s anything.
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