How I *MIS*-read HP books

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 183895

zanooda wrote:
><snip>
> Remember Harry's dream in OotP, where LV punishes Avery for giving 
him the wrong information about the DoM (p.584-585)? Avery assured LV
that Bode would be able to take the Prophecy. Then Rookwood, who used
 to work at the DoM, escaped from Azkaban and rejoined LV, and he
informed his master that only Harry and LV himself could remove the 
Prophecy.
> 
> This whole conversation sounded to me as if Avery also worked at the
Ministry, only not in DoM, but I can't remember this ever being stated
directly. <snip>

Carol responds:
I had the same impression. Why else would he have general knowledge of
the "fabled" Hall of Prophecy, as the Daily Prophet calls it
somewhere, which some Wizards aren't sure really exists, if he didn't
work in the Ministry? But he couldn't have been an Unspeakable (as
Rookwood possibly was, or else Rookwood was higher up the bureaucratic
ladder) or he'd have known that Bode couldn't touch the Prophecy. It's
not proof, it's only deduction, but I reached the same conclusion that
zanooda did for the same reasons.

zanooda;
> Besides, Avery was arrested at the MoM together with Lucius and 
others (right, Carol?) and he couldn't work at the Ministry after 
that. So Alla obviously meant someone else who worked there, not
Avery, but I can't think of anyone.

Carol responds:
Aha. This one I can answer definitively. The DEs arrested in the DoM
were Lucius Malfoy, Rodolphus and Rabastan Lestrange, Dolohov, Jugson,
Macnair (a Ministry employee), Rookwood (a former Ministry employee),
 Crabbe, Mulciber, Avery, and the injured Nott (who may have been sent
first to St. Mungo's but was identified as one of the arrested DEs by
Blaise Zabini in HBP). Bellatrix, of course, got away. The names can
be found (not in the order I listed them) in OoP "Beyond the Veil."
FWIW, Avery is paired with macnair, a definite Ministry employee
(would-be hippogriff executioner and ambassador to the giants for
Voldemort and possibly Fudge--I think he was a double agent of sorts
since he was clearly serving two masters). If anyone wants to know
which were escapees from Azkaban and got sent back again or theories
as to which one was the Baby-Head, I'm at our service.

At any rate, as of the opening chapter of DH, I don't think that any
DEs were Ministry employees before the coup, but there were certainly
DE sympathizers like Umbridge paving the way. Maybe Umbridge's
relative Selwyn (I believe her story that she's related to them even
though, of course, that's not what the S on the locket stands for),
who apparently was not even suspected of being a DE  like Malfoy,
Avery, Yaxley, and others who pleaded the Imperius Curse, might have
been. We see him later with Travers (one of the original escapees but
not at the DoM) as a Ministry employee sent after Xeno Lovegood, so
it's at least possible, but there's no canon either way. (BTW, and
forgive me for confusing everybody with details, but JKR seems to
think that Travers was at the DoM and arrested again. In fact, he was
one of the original escapees but was not among the second batch who
escaped with Voldemort's help between HBP and DH.)

Carol, who thinks that JKR should have kept a DE history file on her
desk (or computer) to keep them straight