Conradiana, vol. 48, no. 1, 2016 © Texas Tech University Press False Flag at Greenwich: “Bourdin’s Folly,” the Nicoll Pamphlet, and Te Secret Agent 1 NIC PANAGOPOULOS national and kapodistrian university of athens Keywords: Te Secret Agent, Te Greenwich Outrage, history of anar- chism, false fag terrorism, nineteenth-century popular press ABSTRACT: Reviewing the extensive bibliography on the case, the present paper corrobo- rates David Nicoll’s thesis in Te Greenwich Mystery! (1897) that the terrorist outrage constituted a false fag attack designed to discredit the anarchist move- ment and justify changes to Britain’s asylum laws. Te paper also fnds that the Nicoll pamphlet, rather than private communication with an “omniscient friend,” represents the primary source of Te Secret Agent (1906), furnishing Conrad with details about the plot, the various parties involved, and even the explosive device used. On the other hand, although Conrad would have been suspicious of the ofcial narrative promoted by the press following the attack, professional reasons led him to emulate the London dailies to the extent of presenting the Greenwich bombing in a sensationalist and xenophobic light in Te Secret Agent. Moreover, it is argued that Conrad’s precarious position as a Polish émigré and asylum-seeker in Britain prompted him not only to psy- chologize many of the crucial political issues arising from the incident, but also to downplay domestic complicity in the terrorist plot in favor of foreign involvement from far-away “Crim-Tartary.” We conclude that the false fag paradigm which Conrad, following Nicoll, uses to account for the terrorist attack nicknamed “Bourdin’s Folly” implies that resistance is itself hijacked by those forces that have vested interests in sustaining a “bad world for poor people.”