conclusion of operation black eagle (undisclosed source)
[Oral history from an undisclosed source collected by L. Jordan 2015 re: the end of Operation Black Eagle. Jordan reports that the source is a former DMLE auror and a participant in Operation Black Eagle.]
We’d been building a case for awhile on Quirrell. Us at the DMLE, I mean – the French, they didn’t care so much, they were there on something else. But over in London, they wanted him bad. Like I said, he was about the only one in there who wasn’t intelligence – he was the only legitimate target. Moody – Jesus, he wanted him. He was on his arse day and night, looking for anything, setting him up – just waiting for any sort of intent so he could stupefy him and drag him up off down to Level 10 himself.
It took a bit to find something they could stick on him, something that’d make a splash at the Prophet, get Scrimgeour out there as the reincarnation of Barty Crouch. I don’t know who thought of it, might have been fucking Dawlish, I can’t remember. But there was all sort of weird shite coming in and out of that Albanian ring, and eventually someone picked up on some of it being unicorn blood. Which is of course a class-B non-tradeable. That’s an Azkaban sentence, and it’s freaky too, great for the news.
It was my job to get Quirrell sold on it. It was already coming in, we just had to get his hands into it, get him to receive it. [. . .]
He didn’t take to it, nah. He thought it was nasty, I think he near chundered when he heard of it. But he agreed. He was scared to shite, he would have done anything. So we set up a whole thing. There was a shipment coming in, he was gonna go off and receive it, take it out to the woods, give it to Shtrigë, the whole thing. There were all kinds of little details we had to get right, Moody was mental over it. We even ordered the blood real MacKay through this French chap, straight out of Belarus. Poor ickle unicorns. But I swear, on the night we had it all set up, that we were ready to make the arrest, we get an owl from London, straight from up top. Scrimgeour says we’ve got to put a pin in it. We’re taking the whole operation back domestic. Bones I guess, you see wanted an arrest on home soil. Didn’t think an arrest like that would play too good so far from home. They needed the publicity bad, I guess. So before we get to pull the gambit on Quirrell he gets pulled back to Britain.
So the operation got shut down. The whole thing. By the end of the month it was done. The whole team split. All that bullshit, 5 years of it, through a revolution, undercover the whole damn time with these stinking fucking psychos for nothing. Bones ordered it shut down. All of us, Dawlish, me, Moody, [REDACTED] – we all went back home.
God, Moody was mad. You should have seen him. I got respect for the man that day, seeing him lose it on Scrimgeour over the telly glass. You’ve gotta have balls, man, to speak up to your superiors like that. Especially a superior like Scrimgeour. Of course, it bit him in the end. He was on a short march to retirement. He says he did it on his own, quit in anger over that at the end of the month. That’s the story around the department: Moody quit over Bones pulling the Albanian gambit. I reckon though he might not have had so much autonomy as he made it out. You don’t speak to a superior like that, even if you’re a legend. I think he got axed. No honours on the way out – only thing he got for his years of service is that they clammed it up that he got the bin.
You know, the joke around the department after that was they pulled Quirrell back to Britain because Dumbledore raised hell that we were arresting his Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. That he was short-staffed and education was more important than law enforcement, etc. etc. That he demanded we send the target back to Scotland and make the arrest there, just so long as we let him hang around ’til the end of the school year. Not a bad fix, right? Dumbledore gets his staff, we get a splashy arrest – there’s unicorns at Hogwarts, right? But I don’t know. The Ministry’s fucked, I ent gonna be nothing but cynical about how much shite gets shovelled around from one department to another, but nah – I don’t think it’s so bad as that. Funny story though, if it was.