Who Trolled Amber? - Into the Dirt - Episode 1: The truth

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Three years ago a former private spy came to our newsroom at Tortoise. He told an incredible story about infiltrating a campaign group, deceiving people for years but all the while being a 'double agent', before his world fell apart. And it all played out in the opaque world of corporate intelligence. Since then, journalist Ceri Thomas has been asking who Rob Moore really is and what his motivations were. Listen to the full series today. For the premium Tortoise listening experience, curated by our journalists, download the free Tortoise audio app. For early and ad-free access to all our investigative series and daily and weekly shows, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.If you’d like to further support slow journalism and help us build a different kind of newsroom, do consider donating to Tortoise at tortoisemedia.com/support-us. Your contributions allow us to investigate, campaign and explore, and to build a newsroom that is responsible and sustainable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Gimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin,

and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of the nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com Hello, it's Basha here. Thank you for listening to Tortoise Investigates.

This series is Into the Dirt. It centers around the story of a former spy. He came to our newsroom and told this incredible story about how he'd infiltrated a campaign group, deceiving people for years. And then he told us how his world fell apart. And it all played out in this opaque world of corporate intelligence. For three years, my colleague Kerry Thomas worked on this particular investigation. And it took a while to bring the story to light. But I think you'll agree when you hear it that it was worth waiting for. It raises questions about truth, the stories that we tell ourselves, and how we justify the decisions that we make. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is one of those promises

that trips off the tongue so gently that most of us never give it a moment's thought. I didn't much until a man called Rob Moore came along. More than three years ago, Rob came into our newsroom with a story to tell. In his version, he'd been done a terrible injustice. He told me he was a whistleblower on a corrupt and deadly industry. But the people he was hoping to help had got him all wrong and turned on him as a traitor. He was on a mission to clear his name and he was sure he could do it if only someone would believe his story. Someone like me.

What Rob was obsessed with the first time I met him was that his whole story hadn't really been told. His pitch to me was that he wanted to tell it, the whole truth and nothing but. He wanted to put the record straight so people would understand and history would be kinder to him. I am in desperate need of being able to tell my story which I haven't been able to tell and had I been able to tell my story people might have understood. In the end, the truth is the easy bit. If you don't tell lies, you're most of the way there. But the whole truth is a different beast. How often do we know the whole of it? We see glimpses. We see stray angles and reflections.

Very often what we don't see at all is the whole truth about ourselves. There is a truth, of course. It can just be incredibly hard to get to, and messy when you arrive. I'm Kerry Thomas, and from Tortoise, this is Into the Dirt, Episode 1. Well, it's very nice to see you and I've been looking forward to this meeting. It's the 1st of June 2016, about three years before Rob came to see me, in the booking office restaurant at St Pancras Station in London. Rob has come to tell the truth to a stranger. It's something he hardly ever does.

And telling it here today will wreck his life. Brilliant. Don't really know where to begin, really. I mean, you've probably got lots of questions. It must have been quite a weird call. Yeah, it's a very strange call, but... It's a beautiful place, the booking office. There are wood panels on the walls, oysters on the bar

and great dramatic chandeliers. And it's lively. It's not a great place to record a conversation, if that's what you want to do. But Rob records nearly everything. He's been doing it for years. Sometimes he might tell people he's doing it, he has today, but often he doesn't.

They know that I'm meant to be meeting you. That was one of my tasks. They obviously don't know the nature of the conversation, so we can probably get this through on them. Are you sure? They, as Rob calls them, are spymasters in big companies that call themselves corporate investigations agencies. Because Rob is a spy.

Not for MI5 or the CIA, but for one of the biggest players in the corporate world, a private detective agency. A lot of what these people do is above board, but some of it, some of it, is real spying. Deceitful and underhand stuff, sometimes illegal. That's the part of this world where Rob's been working as a corporate spy for almost ten years on and off. He's the part of this world where Rob's been working as a corporate spy for almost 10

years on and off. He's been undercover, but the reason he's here in the booking office today is to step out into the open. His story is he's been building up to this moment for years, agonising about whether he should tell the whole truth and who to. It's complicated, and he thought he'd brought a book along that would help him explain. Annoyingly, I also bought Agent Zigzag, and I had it off Amazon, and I left it at my table today, and it was the one thing I didn't pick up and take in,

because it could be instructive. It's a fantastic story. I find the Agent zigzag thing fascinating. What Rob's here to talk about is serious, and what happens because of it is going to do untold damage. But he really minds that he thinks he's forgotten to bring along a paperback about a man who was a double agent in the Second World War, because somehow it seems to him the best way to explain who he actually is,

who Rob is. But I think, and this is why Agent Zigzag is so good, and once I kicked myself and didn't bring it in, and I really don't know what I did, it really just sums up. I did! You did? Shit, man, I just suddenly thought, why didn't I, we left it there. OK, this is for you.

That's very sweet. This is a fucking cool book. It's a great read. It's an extraordinary... It, this is for you. That's very sweet. This is a fucking cool book. It's a great read. It's an extraordinary... My first translation of the whole thing. The tactics that he used is so funny. It's an amazing story. Okay.

Anyway. Operation Agent Zinkler. I've never heard of it. I've heard of the... Now that you've shown me this, I have seen it, but I've never read it. It's a stunning story. Okay.

It's so exciting. It's basically what I'm pitching to you now. Certain bits of truth, certain stage things. He's also crooked, which I'm not. At least, you know, only class B's that can make that. The man sitting across from Rob Moore in the restaurant is from a charity called Global Witness

that fights the good fight for human rights and environment and against corruption. And Rob's here to pitch him an idea that must sound wild. The investigations agency where Rob's working is paying him to get inside Global Witness to spy on the man he's talking to. And he's here offering to turn the tables,

to be a double agent, to be Zig Zag. You basically, you You basically become my handler in the way that they are now, right? They're reverts. Exactly. If that sounds like a crazy idea, Rob would probably say it doesn't seem that way to him. Because, he says, he knows

exactly what being a double agent is all about. He says he's already been one for years on another job. And he's aware there's a lot on the line. He keeps saying it in case it's not obvious. He's terrified it could all go horribly wrong. So my father's worried about me losing my house and actually my life because the Russians who we are dealing with

and the Kazakhstans are really, really brutal, and we know that they've taken out other people. They're not very nice. So she's got a number of concerns. As it turns out, the Russians and the Kazakhs didn't do brutal things to Rob. The ones he mentioned are wealthy beyond your wildest dreams and up to their necks in an unscrupulous business, trading deadly asbestos around the world.

They're part of this story, just not in the way he feared. But some of the things Rob's partner was concerned about were on the money. She didn't need to fret about him losing his life, but the house, yes, and all the money he'd ever saved and his reputation, his friends, his career, all of that. The first time I met Rob, we sat on a scrappy little sofa in our office. He seemed at home there because he was in a newsroom and he looked like a media type in his mid-fifties. He takes care of himself. He's got a sharp, manicured beard and his hair is shaved close.

He's usually got a bit of a tan and he always looks healthy. He's been through a trauma, but I'd have to say it doesn't show on his face. He was warm and back then, more than three years ago, he seemed like someone I'd probably get along with, although things have turned out to be more complicated than I thought. Then the words poured out of him, and I found myself clinging on to the tale of a wild story, trying to slow it down so I could make sense of it all.

It's a story Rob has told again and again. So you would go in for a meeting, you would get a brief. The bones of the story are this. The second or third case they gave me just sounded really dodgy. They asked me to find out whether the campaign to ban asbestos was motivated by lawyers' money. Asbestos is one of the most dangerous materials in the world. It's banned in a lot of countries,

but not every type of it is banned everywhere. And it's still big business. The corporate investigations agency Rob worked for had been approached by a client who wanted inside information on the campaigners who were pushing for a complete ban. To what extent is anything improper going on? He draws up a plan to go undercover and infiltrate the campaigners,

but soon realises he's working for the wrong side. So he becomes a double agent and starts secretly working with the campaigners, not against them. I decided to stay in the case, but write rubbish about what I was being asked to do and mislead them. And then... And he does this for years without telling the campaigners, building friendships and close relationships in that world,

until it goes horribly wrong as a result of that meeting in the booking office. By the time I met Rob, I knew from digging around online that his reputation was in tatters. I knew there were people who could barely bring themselves to speak his name because they felt so betrayed by him and so shattered by what he'd done. I knew there'd been legal action against him and he'd lost. I knew there were people, people he'd been paid to spy on, who will never believe a single word he says.

But there were just the two of us on the sofa that day. There was no room for self-doubt on Rob's side of it. Yeah, I'm just really pleased to have the chance to finally talk about it on the record. Rob came to that meeting with two maps. One of the world of asbestos trading and all the corruption and death that surrounds it. And the other one, a whole landscape of those private detective agencies, corporate investigators, whatever you want to call them. It's dotted with landmarks that are usually hidden away. The money spent by rich people and big companies that skews what we see and what stays hidden. In the contours you can see how powerful interests prey on weaker ones, with no chance of being held to account. It's all done with the help of people in jobs like the one Rob did, off

the grid. He was offering to walk me through those maps With a compass that he wanted to convince me was reliable A moral compass really But the more I explored that world and Rob's story The clearer it became that he's not the only guide And some people don't trust his sense of direction Their stories are as important as his If we're going to find true north,

if we're going to get to the whole truth. The impression Rob gives, which I think is true, is that when he started work at his first investigations agency in 2007, he didn't have a clue what he was letting himself in for. What he found out quite quickly is that a lot of the agencies are run by ex-spies or ex-army types or former police officers and journalists. They talk a lot about managing risk by finding out things that are difficult to get to or not meant to be found out at all. What they don't advertise is the limits of what they're

willing to do. That stone wasn't properly turned over until ten years after Rob got going, on a job that was nothing to do with him. As part of his campaign to cover up for his crimes and abuses, Weinstein hired a private Israeli intelligence firm called Black Cube... ...to befriend a number of his accusers in order to obtain personal information and then use it to discredit them should they decide to come forward. I have been silenced for 20 years. I have been slut-shamed.

A female black cube operative posed as a women's rights advocate to meet with Weinstein victim Rose McGowan. Offensively, a private intelligence agency, and anything that their clients want is available and carried out by people who've usually been trained in Israeli intelligence. In the shade where corporate intelligence works, the Harvey Weinstein case stands out because it lets so much light in. Once that stone was lifted, what was underneath it

was ugly enough for the whole industry to squirm in the glare. There'd been other moments, plenty of them, when other stones were turned over. There was the case of a former MI6 agent called Christopher Steele, who set up his own investigations agency in London. In 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign to be president and the Democrat Party in Washington asked him to investigate rumours that the Russians were trying to help Donald Trump get elected. And Christopher Steele came up with what eventually became known, infamously, as the Steele dossier. It's been in the shadows for five years.

It's been five years since that dossier exploded onto the scene. Steele immediately became the world's most famous and infamous private spy. He had been hired with funding from the Clinton campaign to look into connections between Donald Trump and Russia. The raw intelligence he gathered was damning, some of it salacious. It was a sort of high alcohol mix of political skullduggery and rumours of sex tapes involving Donald Trump and prostitutes in hotel rooms in Moscow. A lot of it turned out to be true, but a few important bits didn't.

What matters about the Steele dossier isn't only what's in it. It's what it tells you about the way the corporate investigations world works. Because even while Christopher Steele is getting paid by the Democrats to dig dirt on Donald Trump, it turns out he's sharing everything that matters with the real security services in London and Washington. The boundaries on the map Rob showed me are blurry. And in the end, it's no surprise that the Steele dossier is all published on BuzzFeed News. The boundaries on the map Rob showed me are blurry. And in the end, it's no surprise that the Steele dossier is all published on BuzzFeed News. It's a feature, not a bug of that system, that corporate detectives and journalists find each other very useful.

They do a lot of work together. Actually, a lot of people think it's because it's cosy, with security services and journalists at the same time. The corporate investigations industry has never been properly investigated. You can go back as far as 2001 and find Shell and BP sending a corporate spy undercover into Greenpeace, posing as a documentary filmmaker. That caused a bit of a stir. Some have described this as having the makings of a Grisham novel, but ultimately what we've got here is...

Well, just a few years ago, there was the Swiss bank Credit Suisse hiring another agency to spy on one of its own senior people because they thought he might poach some staff to take with him to a new job. It ended with a chase through the streets of Zurich and the spy trying to rip the banker's phone out of his hand. Credit Suisse got it in the neck for that. Much more than the agency did.

Mostly, nothing changed. A few people grumbled that we needed to get control of corporate investigators. Nobody did anything much. And to begin to get the picture, the corporate investigations agencies will dabble in politics, they'll infiltrate groups fighting big business. They'll dig dirt on a business's competitors. They mostly work for well-off businesses.

But if your own pockets are deep enough, they'll work for you too. I don't think all of them would take any job you wanted to put their way. But if you've got the money and you're prepared to fish around, you'll find someone who will. It's a dark picture. But back when he was getting going in his early jobs undercover, the picture Rob paints leaves out all that darkness. I don't blame him for that. I think we've all left out far too much of it. much of it.

OK, so I guess one important thing is to realise how I got into this whole world. OK, it wasn't like I started off as an investigator. I actually got the job because I used to work on Brass Eye and someone used to work in TV. Since the first time I met him in 2019, Rob and I have talked for hours, actually for days, in person, on Zoom calls, in cafes and studios. But wherever he is and whoever he's talking to, Rob tends to start his story in the same way. OK, so my story is I came into this world, never sort of sorted out, but I got asked to do it on the basis, and I think I might have told you of some work I'd done on Brass

Eye. It only ran for seven episodes, but Brass Eye lit up TV comedy in the 1990s. It was tough satire, really tough on the people it took down. I'm not at all sure you get away with it these days. Incorporating British opposition to metabolically bisturbile drugs. Facts and Bombs was free the United Kingdom from drugs, incorporating British opposition to metabolically bisturbile drugs. Their single aim... Facts Unbombed was free the United Kingdom from drugs, incorporating British opposition to metabolically bisturbile drugs. And it was a campaign to stop a fake drug called cake.

Well, in fact, a made-up drug. Obviously, we were trying to get people to stop taking cake, otherwise it would lead to the summer of death. I'm Bernard Ingham and this is a piece of cake. The pills, as we kept showing them to the celebrities and politicians, got bigger and bigger and bigger and they had all these stupid names like Looney Toad Quack and Joss Ackland's Spunky Backpack. Some of the side effects of cake were terrible.

Hi, this is Bruno Brooks. We all like to party, right? Absolutely. But only the fool would say, yeah, I'll enter the nightmare of cake. It would cause a thing called check neck, where your neck would swell up and then engulf your mouth and your nose like a roll-neck sweater, and one young girl threw her own pelvis up, I think. It was essentially about if you give people a problem and you let them join the two key dots,

that you can take them anywhere after that. Skills that would then obviously lead me to where I went to. You can start Rob's story in a whole bunch of places, but he's right. This is the one that makes the most sense of how he became a spy. Rob got into hard-edged comedy because he'd done a bit of journalism and there was some useful crossover there. But a lot of what he did on Brass Eye was blagging, slipping into character

and tricking famous or powerful people into making fools of themselves. In the end, those skills, the blagging skills, were the thing that made him interesting to the investigation's agencies. And his comedy career can make Rob a hard witness to read sometimes. What's serious? And what's for laughs? I certainly don't think my motivation in anything is money, at all. I'm also not really motivated by self-interest. Certainly not as a practicing Buddhist. That's not the case. A lot of my cases that I did were fascinating

because you'd start off with one set of preconceptions and then it would completely flip. So it was a rather rare and fascinating insight into a level of society that you literally have no idea exists. And I was kind of amused about how I could get into certain worlds. I found it fun. Well, actually, let me go with that word,

because it does sometimes seem to me that fun is perhaps the biggest motivation for you. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I think if you looked at my career, even when I was doing current affairs or, you know, factual programming, I definitely think I was one of the less serious people in the office, you know. I mean, there's a boyhood thing with that. You know, even as a boy, I remember, you know, spying on people, spying on my parents,

spying on my brother and sister when they were playing games, just because that's a thing that you could do by yourself and you could tell this you know this story a little thrill attached to it yeah just i mean you know if you're a kid growing up in the 1970s you do get to watch the war movies you have action men you there's a kind of quite a lot of role play around action and good guys and bad guys and those sorts of things you know so tell me tell me about, so when you're, you know, spying is a big word, but when you're spying on brothers and sisters or friends, what did you do? Oh, just literally, no, I didn't send any reports to anybody.

I didn't record them. No, it was literally just like, you know, they'd be playing some game, they were younger than me, and to entertain myself, I would be trying to get close and not be seen. But I don't think that's just me. Is it a bit about getting caught, do you think? I was always getting caught. Not by them, but at school for the things I did wrong.

So there is definitely an element of a frisson of excitement when you're somewhere that you're not meant to be and that you're just blagging your way in, you know, and that... And I know I'd be terrible at it. Would you? I'd be awful. Is that because of a conscience or your bad life? Because I'd be too scared of getting caught.

Oh, yeah, OK, well, there's definitely a missing gene in me there because that, for me, never really came into it. Yeah, that can you get away with it, it's definitely part of the fun of life i think yeah you don't have to be any kind of private eye to work out that rob must have been pretty good at comedy he worked on some of the best shows around in the 1990s he ran a big british tv comedy studio he got jobs in los angeles driving around in a soft top car and working out of an office right under the Hollywood sign. And then it all came crashing down. He says he just ran out of ideas.

I remember thinking, my God, you know, I've just spent a decade in comedy where I basically know how to wire up this room and make something stupid happen in the middle of it. And that is a non-transferable skill. No-one else needs that. There's not any other line of work where my expertise was going to be at all useful. Now I know what depression feels like, and I've seen it in lots of other people. I can see that sort of shrinking of

perspective that shrinking of optimism that shrinking of almost you can get to a stage where you can feel paralyzed by indecision I didn't know what to do so it was that was a low point. And I remember at that point, in order to move forward in some direction, I decided to go to a horticultural college to learn how to work in the horticulture business. So Rob got into gardening, to make ends meet, of course, but also, I think, as a kind of therapy after his burnout. And for a while he potted around learning his new trade, Ken's meat, of course, but also, I think, as a kind of therapy after his burnout. And for a while he potted around learning his new trade,

only now and then glancing over his shoulder at comedy, reading the odd script, contemplating trying to get a project off the ground. But mostly gardening, about as far from the world of corporate espionage as you could possibly imagine. you could possibly imagine. So I was there with my children and my wider family, and it was just a very nice day on Carnegie Beach, probably throwing a frisbee and bodyboarding with the kids and a picnic or a barbecue on the beach, just a classic Cornwall day.

The first time I heard Rob's recording of the meeting in the restaurant, when he tried to use Agent Zigzag to explain who he was, I couldn't help thinking that I haven't met many people with the swagger you need to compare yourself to a character in a book. But there are times, I mean there really are, when a book does seem the best way to make sense of the twists and the turns in Rob's life. And not so much a true story like Agent Zigzag, more John le Carré. At the end of the day, as the tide's coming in,

you have to sort of pack up and get home or you'll get cut off. And as I was coming up the beach, I saw this guy doing Tai Chi, I think it was Tai Chi, coming up the beach, I saw this guy doing tai chi, I think it was tai chi, further up the beach, and I was a bit cynical, I was just like, oh, fucking, you know, what a poser. And so I was sort of giving him a wide berth as I walked past him. And then as we got nearer, I can't remember if I...

I think I must have... or he knows... I don't remember how it happened anyway, we realised we knew each other. And he was someone that I'd worked in television with back in the 90s. Back then, they'd enjoyed each other's company. And then we'd just lost contact. And when I met him, it was like, oh, what are you doing now? And, you know, that kind of conversation.

He said, oh, I'm a director at one of the world's... In fact, at the world's largest non-governmental detective agency. So, out of nowhere, on a golden Cornish beach, a door suddenly opens to that other world. And so it did sound quite exciting. And I guess what he meant by you'd be great at this is he knew that Brass Eye, on that programme, it was one of my jobs was to get into those difficult positions to create the world that the celebrities or politicians or drug dealers would then, you know... He knew you were a good black guy.

Yeah, I think that's probably fair enough. Yeah. And that was in 2006, I think. And actually, I was so down about things. Anyway, he told me to give him a call. You know, we often, we need people like you in my field of work. But I was quite down about life and I didn't have any confidence in myself. So I just didn't call him. I didn't know what I knew was I was quite down about life and I didn't have any confidence in myself so I just didn't call him I didn't know what I knew I knew I was going to go to horticultural college But a year later they bump into each other again

and this time, the second time Rob meets the guy on the beach he does pick up the phone ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin, and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of the nation. Hollywood Exiles from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Certainly, one of the things I did like about the job, a lot of it was really fun. To get a brief at the beginning of a day, someone says, right, you know, for example, we want you to try and find out if this oligarch owns this mansion because he owes lots of money to UK interests, blah, blah, blah. Go and find out how do you start that one?

That felt very much like a kind of a brief that one might get from Chris Morris on Brass Eye, where you'd go out and try and do something outlandish. In this case, the brief Rob's been given by the corporate investigations agency he's working for is to prove that a particular oligarch owns a particular house in one of the most expensive streets in London. The question is, what do you do to get in? So for me, it was go to Peter Jones, the shopping store, buy an apron, buy a ridiculous bunch of flowers, and then turn up at this oligarch's door. He posed as a flower delivery man dropping off a bouquet to see if he could get through the door. And I was let in. And he was in for just long enough to take some photos of bills

which had the oligarch's name on. Proof that he was paying for the gas or electricity at that address at least. So that was kind of fun. So that sense of mischief and adventure, I really enjoyed about the job. I didn't get any enjoyment out of manipulating people. I would sometimes feel guilty. Mostly I felt I wasted people's time. The privilege of being a spy is that you're the only one who knows everything.

You know how you sold yourself to the people you're spying on and what you said to them. And you know what you've reported back to your handlers. To that extent, you're in control. Where are you on the sort of question of control? You know, all of us like to be in charge to some degree or other. Yeah. Where do you think you sit on that?

Oh, that's interesting. Obviously, the need to be in control of things is definitely one of the things that causes suffering, right? Because when you feel out of control, it's terrible. We had that conversation in the summer of 2022. What I didn't know then was how that issue of control would dog the making of this podcast right to the end. Rob and I would have bitter arguments about the story we're telling and what we're investigating. He threatened to pull out more than once, and often, it seemed to me, he changed his mind about what he meant by his story.

And then, finally, after hundreds of hours of work, dozens of hours of interviews with Rob and other people on the record, Rob told us he was withdrawing his consent to appear in the podcast. He thought the story was being told in a way he didn't like and hadn't expected. He wanted it told as he framed it. We explained why we couldn't and hadn't, but he felt we'd given

him assurances, even though time and again we'd made clear we could only do the story if we were in charge of the way it was told. The idea that editorial independence is the best way to get the best version of the truth has been a principle of journalism for a very long time. But if you're on the other side of it, it's easy to see that our independence looks a lot like our control too. When someone who's as central to a story as Rob is to this one pulls out and effectively tries to stop it being told, you have to ask yourself why you carry on.

In the end, I answered that question not by thinking just about Rob, but about all the other people we've talked to. To stop because one person says stop would be a betrayal of them, the time they've given, the effort they've made, the risks they've taken in some cases. They're part of the whole truth of this story. part of the whole truth of this story. Control is in the air back in the booking office restaurant in 2016. By coming clean to Global Witness and offering to be a double agent, working for them as well as the investigations agency,

Rob sacrifices it. Someone else is in on the secret now and it's dangerous. It's a risk to the whole careful way Rob has built his life for years. But he tries to make it as safe as he can. As I'm putting this together, I'm thinking, you know, my partner doesn't even know that I'm coming to talk to you. She's really against it. She's also very, very moral and she's terrified already because of what I've got on the industry. He wants to know he's dealing with people he can trust. How do you protect whistleblowers?

Will they look after him? Will they support him if the worst comes to the worst? Despite the risks, he's made a calculation. When it finally comes out, there will be shots. I hope there will be... He's pretty confident that when all his undercover work is laid bare, even the anti-asbestos campaigners he's deceived in the past, the ones he was paid to spy on,

will understand why he did what he did. For me, this feels like the only decent thing I can do, and I feel that it could actually enhance our protection because we can talk about things like this, right? Yeah, sure. I think it's fine. We just have to be cognisant of the... So my name is Simon Taylor. I'm one of the co-founders and directors of Global Witness.

So I've been involved with the organisation right from the beginning. It's Simon who's sitting across the table from Rob in the restaurant that day. He was in on the start of Global Witness 30 years ago. And at the time, there were, I guess, traditionally human rights organisations that did human rights, and there were environmental organisations that did environmental issues, but nobody looked at the linkage between the two. And that's what we sought to do. Back in the restaurant, there's a locked digest, and Simon's there to listen. I was thinking, well, that's interesting. Let's

hear what you've got to say. And it was only was only you know in the quiet of day when you go home after as you think about it you go very interesting but how absurd. If those doubts are there they're coming together in Simon's head they're not on the booking office tape which means that he and Rob can go their separate ways with very different impressions of what just happened. We'd left the breakfast meeting with this idea that he was, you know, really grateful and that he was going to give it some thought and come back to me. And feeling safe. And then I went on holiday down to Cornwall. And I just felt that I could go away then,

at least thinking that I could just go and, you know, lose myself in rock pools and walks and sea air and just not have to think about it all again for a couple of weeks. When he got back, Simon got in touch with Rob. So I asked a colleague if he would sit with Rob and Rob came into our office. In that meeting, Rob tells his story again, gradually lifting the lid a little further.

They're the client. And I knew this because after about a year and a half, my friend who got me in said, Rob, I'm getting out of this place. All they're doing is whitewashing reputations. This company is thoroughly, thoroughly working for all the bad people. And giving up a bit more control to Simon's colleague. Sorry, which company is it? Well, OK, I haven't told anybody.

I didn't tell Simon, but I'll tell you it's called K2. Oh, that's second crowd. K2. They're a big deal in the corporate investigations world and for this story as well. At the meeting in the restaurant, Rob didn't breathe a word about them, but now they're out in the open too.

At some point, the light went on and we just sort of went, you know what? You may have the best of intentions, but it goes back to this thing, how did you stay in the game for four years without sending over actionable intelligence? And whatever you say, you have been filming people who are potentially at risk.

How do you know what's happened to that personal data, the identity, the whatever? Yeah, and I think for us, that was just a deal breaker. That was one of the problems Global Witness had, not the only one. To the point which I mentioned before, this sort of sense of being generous self-delusion about censoring things so that you're not doing any harm.

I mean, that's great playing God, but did you do it right? We felt he didn't live up to a credible explanation for his motive. Unlike Rob, Global Witness have got other things to worry about, not just his offer. And they're methodical. They think very carefully about what Rob puts in front of them. And they take their time. So after that second meeting Rob has a few anxious weeks. Global Witness aren't getting back to him, they're not making the promises he wants to hear. Emails go back and forth and Rob is getting more and more strung out. Then the one he's been waiting for finally lands. Global Witness have made a decision. So this is already legal speak as far far as I'm reading it, which also scares me.

So Simon Taylor says, We are unable to be a party to any proposal for the sharing of information. We are concerned that you are placing yourself at risk, a risk you appear to have chosen to assume. Your proposal will potentially expose our organisation, staff and others to risks. The whole complicated piece of clockwork that Rob's put together in his mind is starting to fall to pieces. K2, the agency he's working for, has been commissioned, paid a lot of money by a client, to get Rob to spy on Global Witness. The offer Rob made to Global Witness in the restaurant in 2016 was that he could be a double agent,

keep working for K2, but actually work with Global Witness to turn the tables on K2 and their client. Well, that was going nowhere. It is our strong view that the preferred way forward would be you take the necessary steps to inform all those you have deceived of your role. We must urge you to take the necessary steps to inform them as a matter of priority. So you were on holiday in Italy when you got this? Yeah, and I'll tell you what happened. I got it at night. I think within three minutes,

the level of fear that had gone through me from that, because it's a very cold email. I mean, I was horrified. I just could never believe that someone who had clearly put themselves on the line, as I had, to tell them that they were being investigated, I just never believed they could do what they did. Global Witness want Rob to come clean to everyone he's deceived in the past, when, according to him, he's been a double agent among the anti-asbestos campaigners.

All the people who don't yet know the truth about him. It's not just they think Rob has got a duty to those people. They think they've got one too. Global Witness want him to tell the whole truth. And if he doesn't, it turns out they will. Coming up on Into the Dirt. And I had this need to move on from just answering allegations. And had I been able to tell my story, people might have understood. If someone rings you up and says that, you know, you're someone that you've regarded as a friend for the last four or five years,

as a spy, would you believe it? He was always concerned about the ethics of what he was doing, you know, particularly the idea of deception. The only reason he's saying this now, I believe, he's just so ashamed of what he's done and he's just trying to now come out as a, you know, James Bond character. It depends if you're on the side of the angels. If I was investigating me, I think I would be looking at what really happened and thinking, well, it sounds crazy,

but that's actually, that is who this guy is.