Thread by @michaeldweiss

MI5 After Action Memo, 24/4. Classification: Confidential

At 11:30 American Subject -- CODENAME: SOFTSKULL -- continued his avid search for pro-Russian war sentiment in London. He met with luck just once, at our orchestration.

Two King's College War Studies Department graduate students, both female and in their early twenties, were discussing their admiration for the tactics of the Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) at a Pret a Manger on Goodge St., where SOFTSKULL was dining at 12:35.

Both students were in fact AGENTS FIRELIGHT and BOADICEA, sent to monitor SOFTSKULL's increasingly agitated and erratic behavior. Their conversation, as intended, drew SOFTSKULL's immediate attention.

Russian military affairs, however, proved a fleeting topic of interest as SOFTSKULL quickly shifted the discussion to requesting a ‘selfie’ with FIRELIGHT and BOADICEA, apparently to display to interested parties back in the United States.

No selfie was taken. (AGENTS FIRELIGHT and BOADICEA would like it entered into the record that this ‘was not purely for opsec reasons’.)

At 14:14 SOFTSKULL was expelled from his two-star hotel in Paddington owing to what one member of the cleaning staff referred to as 'the smell,’ which apparently exacerbated her underlying respiratory condition. SOFTSKULL did not take the expulsion well.

He sought out the hotel manager, who happened to be the cleaner’s father, an awkward fact which made no impression on SOFTSKULL who insisted on the cleaner’s termination for ‘gross misconduct’.

At 15:23 SOFTSKULL rode the Jubilee Line near St. John's Wood. Here he encountered JAN, a young Polish IT consultant, who was wearing a Ukrainian flag button on his jacket.

'Why do you support Ukraine?' SOFTSKULL inquired of JAN, who replied that his wife is Ukrainian and had relatives trapped in besieged Mariupol. SOFTSKULL then pressed JAN on his wife’s family’s relationship to the Azov Battalion.

An angry JAN stood to confront SOFTSKULL. SOFTSKULL then proceeded to run the length of the Tube car to evade JAN, tripping and plunging headfirst into the lap of a Black female pensioner, who kindly offered to help SOFTSKULL get his bearings.

SOFTSKULL interpreted this gesture as a threat of physical violence and announced grandly that he had ‘witnesses’ to the phantom altercation. 'Witnesses' consisted of indifferent or perplexed Tube passengers, one of whom told SOFTSKULL to ‘fuck off’.

SOFTSKULL arrived at 17:30 at Speakers' Corner at Hyde Park. He was frustrated upon learning he would have to wait 45 minutes get anyone's attention in the midst of more popular harangues.

These included a disquisition on the 'non-medical uses' of Ivermectin, one on former Prime Minister Tony Blair's 'second family' with Ghislane Maxwell, and 'the one and only Doctor, David Tennant'.

When SOFTSKULL at last spotted his opportunity to intervene, he removed from his attache case a GoPro camera, which he affixed to his forehead by an accompanying strap, presumably to record the now much-diminished crowd’s reaction to his lecture.

It lasted exactly three minutes, twelve seconds and ranged in content from alleged U.S. support for al-Qaeda in Syria to the cost-benefit ratio of the ‘Moon Over My Hammy,’ which the service takes to understand is an egg-based offering at the American chain restaurant Denny’s.

SOFTSKULL was forced to relinquish the floor at Speaker's Corner prematurely and hastily owing to a crowd favorite who described himself as ‘a hunted defector from the Bilderberg Group.’ / ENDS