Who Trolled Amber? - Into the Dirt - Episode 4: Chicken feed

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Rob is adamant that in all the years he was undercover, he never sent information back to his spymasters that harmed the campaigners. But when you're the only one in control of the decisions, can you always get it right? 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.

ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of a 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 We all tell ourselves stories to put the best gloss on the things we've done,

and every one of us is a great audience for them. To begin with, if they're not completely true, we know that deep down. But time works its magic. A few years down the line, after we've repeated the story often enough, the doubts slide away. The story is the truth. Rob Moore starts telling himself the story of being a double agent soon after he goes undercover among anti-asbestos campaigners. He's paid to spy by the corporate investigations agency K2 starting in 2012. Pretty soon he's telling the story to other people too. The other story Rob tells himself is that he can stay in control. He can dictate who knows what so that neither K2 nor the campaigners

know the whole truth about him. It isn't easy. There are the suicide headaches and the more he discovers about who he's really working for, the more frightening it all is. But he's telling himself he can do it. He's convinced he can still turn poison into medicine, as he calls it,

without getting found out. I'm Kerry Thomas, and from Tortoise, this is Into the Dirt, episode four. Hello. Hello, how are you? I'm very good, thank you. I'm here to see Mateo. By early 2015, Rob's got his two feet planted in separate walls. Of course. Oh, Rob. Rob, yeah. One in the world of the anti-asbestos campaigners and the other solidly in K2s. He's making good money on that side. Over four years on Project Spring, he earns about £330,000. And there's another £130,000 in expenses. And for that,

he's expected to trot around the world, listening in on the campaigners and passing information back to K2. Most of what he sends back is in written reports. Ah, hello. Hello, mate. You're looking a bit more haggard. Don't. But then so am I. Don't dress up too much for me, then. But a few times a year, Rob goes into K2's offices in Mayfair in London

to be debriefed face-to-face by his handler, Matteo Bigazzi. To begin with, he doesn't record those meetings. Or if he does, I haven't got my hands on the recordings. So, how are you? But by 2015, three years into Project Spring, that's changed. Deliverables. Even if you're not there, whether it's this came through the grapevine or...

I think we can... But there needs to be a constant deliverable. The client needs to understand what the industry are doing. They need to know that what is happening is making it a very, very difficult place to be in and to be not the sore thumb. I've appeared from nowhere.

And, you know, I keep thinking... You've been there for three years. But I keep thinking, you know, that someone's going to go that famous phrase, if something is too good to be true, it probably is. The deliverables from Rob, as Matteo Begazzi calls them, are constant. Rob sends photographs, emails between him and anti-asbestos campaigners,

screenshots of presentations and long reports on all the places he goes and the meetings he has with campaigners. I've seen a list of 138 different documents he sends K2 over four years. What Rob says is that nothing in all those 138 harms the anti-asbestos campaign or puts the campaigner at risk. We'll come on to that. And all the while, the fear of getting found out is growing. will come on to that. And all the while, the fear of getting found out is growing.

What I'm badly in need of, apart from your love and protection, I really do need it, mate. I really... I can't tell you how stressful it is. You know, there's only one way this will blow, and it's if someone's indiscreet. I'm really looking at my office at the moment and thinking, right, I want to shred things, and I want to put locks, bigger Bannum locks on the door, you know, because even if it's just a lazy...

In the room with Matteo Begazzi, exactly what Rob wants protection from isn't clear, but two things are never far from his mind. Whoever's hired K2 might set someone on him like he thinks they've set him on the anti-asbestos campaigners. But someone more violent, maybe. Or the campaigners might find out the whole truth about him and his world will come crashing down.

Look after me, please, Matteo. Please look after me, because it's me, it's my family, it's my friends, it's my sister. It's so important and it's us, I have to be protected. There can be no granularity, they mustn't know at all who I am. Honestly I've never gone out this far on a limb for anybody. I want to create a lot of value for you. I don't have as much interest in, I disagree with someone investing in this stuff. But I want to create a lot of value for you. I don't have as much interest in... I disagree with someone investing in this stuff.

But I want to create value for you. I just want to be protected as well. And I need you to protect me. But if it's time to call... Yeah, I always know that. And believe me, there's a jump call, the stop button. I will hit it. I will hit it.

I'm beginning to worry about you, Rob. I think maybe it's time you pull out. Yeah. Always interesting. What have we got ourselves into? Whatever Rob's got into, in 2015 the offer is there to get out. And he doesn't take it. He still thinks he can stay in.

And stay in control. This collaboration, OK, which, as the person who is bringing you the story, and it's about me and I'm the only person who actually knows what's happened and I can prove every bit of it, that's...that's. That's mine. Rob's possessive about his story, but it would be unfair to say he's the only person who's interested in control. In their own way, everyone involved in this story,

and how it's told, is fighting for it. The corporate intelligence agencies depend on control. Their whole business relies on them keeping the lid tight. And journalists like me intelligence agencies depend on control. Their whole business relies on them keeping the lid tight. And journalists like me, we insist on control. When someone like Rob walks in with a story, we say we'll listen, we'll do our homework, and we'll talk to a bunch of other people as well as you. But in the end, we, I, am going to decide how to tell it. From the beginning, Rob and I arm-wrestle over it. He agrees up front that he won't be able to dictate how I tell his story,

so he knows that, but he pulls the levers that he can. He points us in the direction of some friends, and he hears back from one when the interview doesn't go quite as he hoped. Things start to come to a head about a year after we first meet. This is November 2020, and Rob's in a meeting room at Tortoise, the newsroom where I work. It's not long after we've started interviewing people connected to his story, verifying what he says and testing his tale.

And the frustration for me is feeling that it's been taken out of your hands and someone who actually hasn't grasped it. I mean, if Eddie phoned me up and he's a lovely man, he said, it left me feeling anxious. I don't think he understands it. One of the people Rob steers us towards is Eddie Kanfor Dumas, his Buddhist friend who he consults about the ethics of being a double agent. Rob's anxious about how that interview went, a little agitated.

It comes up more than once in this meeting. That feeling of out-of-controlness seems to be returning. But his anxiety isn't directed at me. I'm in the room, but during this exchange, he's looking squarely at my colleague, Alexei Mostras, because it was Alexei who spoke to Eddie. But he's one person, and after Alexei, he was a bit like, I'm a bit worried, I spoke to them for about an hour,

and I don't think they really get it, Rob. And that's difficult. I understand why that can feel like that. But he was the only person you've spoken to who knows my story and who I spoke to lots about it. And he plays some interesting moments in the story which I don't think you got on to. So I'd like the chance to... I think you should see this person.

If you've listened to other Tortoise investigations, you'll know Alexei from podcasts like Sweet Bobby and Hoaxed. But before any of those, he was working on this. He's been there with me reporting since the start. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thank you for having the time. But around the time of that interview with Eddie Canford Dumas, the relationship between Alexei and Rob became strained.

This time, he's concerned that Alexei didn't get it when he was speaking to Eddie, didn't understand Rob's story, his decision-making, his justifications, and the frustration cut both ways. The thing that drives me mad about Rob is that he pretends to want something, one thing, when he actually wants another thing. And he pretends to welcome journalistic scrutiny. He, initially he was really attracted

to the idea that I was trained as a barrister, because he said you could go over the documents, you'd be brilliantly placed to go over all the documents, I'm really pleased that you're involved in this. And then the more that I did that and the more that that process went on, the more uncomfortable he seemed to get. And I think that's because he wants interrogation right up until the point where it starts deviating from his own narrative. Not long after Rob said he was worried Alexei didn't get it, I started to think I understood what he really meant,

because he asked a question which, considering how important it is, hardly ever gets asked of journalists. He kept saying to me when he was going through these documents, do you believe me? And I was like, well, it's not my job to believe you or not. And he'd get really cross with that and um so I think that there could definitely be a moment in the next few months where he has the same doubts about you well he asked me actually in this room I think he said to me do

you believe me and maybe the my different answer to that question is part of the reason why would you know why things have worked out as they have so so I said to him look if we didn't believe you at all we wouldn't you know we wouldn't be using you as a source or working on this thing with you if we didn't think if we we thought you were a complete fantasist wouldn't be here so So to that extent, Rob, yes, I believe you. At least I wouldn't feel good if all we wanted to do was to... ..expose him yet again as a fraud and a sham, whatever,

then, you know, that's not... That doesn't have any kind of purpose to it. I shouldn't be surprised that Rob asked about belief when not being believed by Global Witness and all the campaigners who trusted him has been the ruin of him. But perhaps he shouldn't be surprised that neither Alexei or I could give him exactly the answer he wanted at the time when he asked. Because belief is a kind of control as well. In the end, I think, Rob's got a right to know if we believe him or not after we've been through evidence and talked to enough people to make a call. But if we told him we believed him two or three years ago,

there'd be no point doing any of that research or talking to anyone else. We'd have given Rob control of the story. He could have written it himself without any help from us. It might have been a good memoir, but it wouldn't have been the whole truth or anything like it. When I talked with Alexei about why things have worked out as they have, what I meant was a decision Alexei and I had taken. Because Alexei and Rob weren't seeing eye to eye, I was going to tell Rob's story, and Alexei would go bigger and wider,

trawling through evidence and investigating the whole world of corporate investigations agencies. And it's only fair to Rob to say he didn't want us to concentrate there. He said he'd help us look at the agencies, but what he really hoped was we'd follow leads he said he'd uncovered about the asbestos trade and who controls it there is a really interesting investigation to be done into all of that but in the end we decided the world of the private investigations agencies was a more urgent

focus and one that's really in the public interest because it deserves a lot more attention than it gets yeah yeah yeah okay so i remember ago, you came across this story about this company called Arcanum. Yeah, Arcanum. So can you just sort of step me through that? Because it was fascinating. Sure. When you come across a story like Rob's that takes you into the corporate investigations agencies, you always have that niggle at the back of your mind. Are we dealing with an outlier? Is K2 the only agency that would send someone undercover or use subterfuge? Pretty soon, Alexei comes across a story through court documents that takes the edge off that worry.

It's to do with an investigations agency called Arcanum. On the face of it, a respectable company. And yet, what I've learnt was that it was partially responsible for a sustained, highly sophisticated, cynical and calculated campaign of disinformation. The story starts with a newsreader called Anastasia Novikova. She was in her 20s working in Kazakhstan and for a while she was the girlfriend of the son-in-law of the Kazakh president. And they were kind of a couple, but then I think that they split up and she moved with her young baby to live in Beirut in Lebanon. Anyway, on the 19th of June 2004, she was found dead and she had fallen five stories from her Beirut apartment.

And it's pretty gruesome. She was impaled on railings below. And no one really knew what had happened. The Kazakh authorities accused the son-in-law of willful murder. Alongside two British-based businessmen called the Harani brothers. All three denied the charges and then things went quiet for quite a few years. And what happened in 2014 was that one of the Harani brothers who lives in this amazingly flash house in Chelsea, like drew his curtains one day and saw on his street a whole bunch of protesters holding banners up that said in sort of big red letters,

justice for Novikova. And they were chanting like outside his house, murderer,, murderer, murderer. And so it's like a proper protest. So one of the Harani brothers thought that there was something odd going on. So he went to court claiming that he was being harassed, but the claim was initially made against persons unknown. And the only clue that this guy had as to who had potentially organised the protests was a single number plate that he got from the van of one of the protesters. It's a proper thriller, isn't it? He traced back this number plate and found that it belonged to someone who worked for a British

advertising agency. And the more he looked, the more he realised that this advertising agency had, together with a US security consultant, got together and literally employed actors to pretend to be protesters. Standing there with fake banners, they were fake protesters. None of this was real. It was a disinformation campaign. Even though by this point, we're 10 years after Anastasia Novikova was found dead on those railings, there was a court case and the Hirani brother was paid some damages. And there was no sign of the Corporate Investigations Agency, Arcanum, being involved in the fake protest in any way.

But there was a reason for that. And it turns out that they'd paid a lot of money and spent a lot of time trying to keep their name out of that initial court case. Their involvement actually only came out a few years later. And that's because Arcanum had a dispute over money with lawyers who were part of the case. The budget for the misinformation campaign that included the fake protests was half a million dollars and the lawyers said they hadn't been paid. So their lawyers took them to court and said Arcanum who helped pay for this misinformation campaign,

haven't paid us. And the only reason why this story ever came to light was because of an internal dispute that very, very, very easily might not have happened. Yeah. I mean, it's completely plausible that we would, even to this day, we wouldn't know about this, isn't it? If Arcanum hadn't fallen out with their lawyers, then we'd all still be in the dark,

which is extraordinary. Bonkers. Exactly. And it makes you wonder how many other similar kind of campaigns are taking place. This story has sat there in court documents since 2017, and Alexei's the first person ever to spot it. Of course, undercover spying isn't the same as organising fake protests, accusing someone of murder,

but both Arcanum and K2 are very respectable-looking companies, and they've both been prepared to do extraordinary things. We've made several attempts to get hold of Arcanum to ask them about this case, but we haven't been able to.

One of the things about Rob, I think, is that he has this idea that he can control not just his relationship with the campaigners, but his relationship with K2 and what they do with the information he gives them. He's trying to spin both those plates all the time. And he really believes, I think, that he can control what K2 do with the stuff that he gives them. What do you think the lessons are of the Arcanum story for that idea that you can

control these people? I mean, I think the lesson is you can't control them. The key relationship is between the client and the intelligence agency. And a single contractor who's employed in one way might very easily only be part of that puzzle, part of the wider structure. Rob may be able to control the things he can see, the information he passes back to K2, but what about all the things he can't? Things that K2 and the client might be able to control the things he can see, the information he passes back to K2, but what about all the things he can't? Things that K2 and the client might be doing to fight bans on asbestos that maybe we don't know about to this day. There's no way he can control those.

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Price and participation may vary. Extras, taxes, and delivery additional. Expires April 8th. 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 2015 is a key year for Rob. He wrote once in a long summary of everything he did on Project Spring that, in 2015, I thought I'd worked out the theory of everything.

The client's identity, his strategies for blocking campaigners' efforts, and his vulnerabilities. Of course, at this stage, Rob hasn't really worked out anything. Not completely. He's got little bits of information that seem to him to add up, but they're way short of proof. To get any further, he'd need to keep going on Project Spring. There's this thing called the Shambhala Warriors, and they would go in dressed in plain clothes and then take things down from the inside.

Because the theory being that if things are made by men's minds, they can be unmade by men's minds. In Rob's mind, the grand theory is still the Buddhist idea of turning poison into medicine. But there's a step before that. First, you have to do no harm. Everything rests on that. If you fuck up, obviously, if, like, like it's only good intentions but you don't actually create

real value and you change and make something happen and you actually cause damage and harm, there's no kind of, first of all forgive you for your good intentions and know that it was right. It's simply a kind of law, a physical law that will cause an effect that will lead to a lot of shit. So it's very important for me to get this right. Also I was very, very heavily exposed to asbestos, really bad asbestos at school. Now Rob believes he knows who's paying him to go undercover. And if they do own an asbestos mine, directly or indirectly, there's only one conclusion he can draw. They want him to do harm to the campaign to get asbestos banned.

Why else would they have hired K2? But Rob's adamant he can outsmart the client and K2. In all the hundreds of reports and other pieces of information he sends up the chain, he says there's nothing which does harm. Instead, there's what he sometimes calls chicken feed, sometimes rubbish, sometimes utter bollocks. somehow he says he dresses it all up so smartly that the client keeps paying to get it for four years he's put himself on a high wire and it's a hard act not to fall off in all that time so one of my objectives here was to look like i had written a lot i wanted it to make it look like i'd really, I'd found some things out that might be interesting and legitimate for an investor to want to know about his products. But really what I'm doing is I'm filling up space.

I'm filling up space to make it look like it's a report. But obviously, we must stop at anything that looks remotely confidential, personal or private. There's certainly a lot of rubbish and deflection in the written reports Rob sends to K2. There's massive amounts of padding and sometimes he puts in things he's discovered himself and says someone else has found them out. Like some news about the chairman of that investment company, Custo, which Rob came across. A Kazakh oligarch called Yurkin Tatyshev. And I put this information in my report because I wanted to alarm the client into thinking he needed to keep employing me. Last summer,

Rob and I talked about the information he sent to K2 and the harm it might or might not have done. And I wanted to continue being employed on this case until I had got the documentaries off the ground, until I had another source of funding for this. My time in asbestos was going to be very limited. And your judgment of this report in the round was that it didn't tell the client anything useful? That was 100% my absolute belief, yeah. There's a character in Rob's story who's really important

to everything he thinks he discovers about how the trade in asbestos is really run. He's a director of a company that makes what they call roof sheets, those crinkly grey panels that you mostly find on farm buildings in this country. In places like Thailand, they're everywhere. And unlike here, a lot of them are still made using asbestos. I know the roof sheet director's name, but I'm not going to mention it in case he wouldn't want me to.

Because he's the one who helps Rob get interested in Yurkin Tatyshev. There have been a handful of reports in the press over the years that have linked Yurkin Tatyshev's name with allegations of wrongdoing of some kind. They're out there in the public record, and Yurkin Tatyshev has dealt with some of them in the interviews he's given, and denied absolutely that he's been involved in any way. He's never been charged with or found guilty of anything, as far as I can tell. But for Rob, in his one-man inquiry,

Joachim Tateshev becomes what you might call a person of interest. Despite all the denials and the lack of hard evidence, Rob believes he plays some sort of role in the asbestos trade. He makes Joachim Tateshev a target in that one-man inquiry. But in spite of that, when he discovers some information about Joachim Tadeuszew he thinks is important and brand new, he sends it back to K2. And he does that not knowing what might happen to it, not knowing, for example, if somehow or other it could even find its way back to Yurkin Tatochev himself in the end. This morning we were talking about whistleblower, double agent,

and you landed on the word activist as the kind of best definition. I guess my question is, any activist or any journalist who had discovered that piece of information about their target there's no way on earth they would pass that back to the target okay have we told him who told him that did i write down and go there's this loud mouth roof sheet director no i don't is there the fact that, you know, the industry have been accused of quite a lot of bad things, and do you see them covering up successfully

the evidence of the contamination and the disease they're causing? No, they just know that no-one's going to fund it. Do you see the... So if you think that in this report, that idea that the news, that more people know that the industry bribed governments, for me, I cannot see that that with no informational details around it. Everyone, you know, these guys are accused of all kinds of double play anyway by the campaigners all the time. Rob and I talked for hours at a time. Every so often we'd need a break. When Rob went out for some fresh air, I glanced back over the report we'd been discussing. It revealed a moment which

shows how tricky it is to keep control of things, even if you've convinced yourself that's what you're doing. I realised while we were sort of out of the room, we'd been looking at that report 134, the Southeast Asia update, that we'd been looking at. Actually, we'd looked at the wrong bit of it. OK. So that bit at the top there. The director of a Thai roof sheet manufacturer has claimed that, yeah, OK, employees of Kazak Kristallnacht told him in 23 and 24 yeah um so there you go I I did name them I still maintain

that without naming the roof sheet director or being asked by them who this roof sheet director was because there are a number of companies I didn't endanger him. But it makes it, compared to what we discussed here on, that's more useful information. I hear that that could have been a slip-up. I don't think it was. Do you know how many roof sheet manufacturers there are in Thailand? I think there are about five. You created quite a small group of people who've blown the whistle. And then Rob gave me a few examples of information he did know about the roof director that might have identified him more clearly and he could have passed on but i didn't say that but he didn't i'm not giving information i know i'm holding back

loads of stuff from that no i appreciate you haven't created a threat to a person's life because you haven't identified a person but i think it's still a big call to say, I'm going to take a small risk with a big group of people. I'm going to take a small risk with a bit of information that I found out through my efforts. I'm not ruining anyone else's journalism. That makes it worse. Why? Because I found it out through my efforts.

You found it and you passed it on. Yeah, because it's one of those bits of information that has a ring of truth about it, but there was no follow-up. And yeah, it might have been a big call, but I made quite a few big calls on this whole story, didn't I? I mean, it was a big call to stay in the game. But in the end, the objection, I suppose, Rob, will be that you're entitled to make a judgment about risk to yourself, but you're much less entitled to make judgments about risk to other people. Yeah, but it's difficult, this one, isn't it? Because as nothing did happen to the Rouge Sheet director,

we're talking about the potential that I might have got that judgment call wrong, OK? And I would suggest that the reason I didn't get it wrong is that nothing untoward ever happened to him. The real difficulty for Rob, I think, is because he needs to keep control of who knows what. He's the only one making these calls. There's no mechanism to rule on what's harmful and what's not. It's just him deciding.

That's what Simon Taylor from Global Witness meant back in episode one. I mean, that's great playing God, but did you do it right? There were literally hundreds of moments when I could argue the toss with Rob about whether or not he did harm to the campaign, even when he's telling himself he's only sending K2 tittle-tattle. Some of that tittle-tattle is details of where the campaigners live. At least once, it's about an affair one of them had, and Rory O'Neill told us Rob shared information about the health of one of his children. No one will ever know if those scraps of information were

useful to K2 and their client, or if they did use them somehow to get better insights into the campaigners, drive a wedge between them perhaps. But one thing I think I can say for sure, if I was a campaigner, I wouldn't have wanted the client to know any of that. All through 2015, Rob is on the move. He goes to conferences in the US and Geneva, but as the year goes on, K2's attention, and his, shifts somewhere he hasn't been before. To Vietnam.

He goes for a meeting there in the autumn and sends a long report back to K2. Full of utter bollocks, he says. He needs to be sure he's right about that, because the risks of exposing someone are high in Vietnam. It's a dangerous country to campaign against asbestos or anything else, with a track record as long as your arm of torturing, beating, arresting and jailing activists. could as long as your arm of torturing, beating, arresting and jailing activists. All this time, remember, Rob is more and more concerned about his own safety.

Even though he flies back home to a quiet town in Hertfordshire to write up his reports, while any activist he even mentions is still there on the ground. I can do it for myself. I can make decisions for myself and I can take risks and I can be cavalier about my own circumstances because I think there may be a benefit in exposing this. But I can't take that risk for someone in Vietnam. It's something Rory O'Neill finds unconscionable and still leaves him feeling guilty about having been robbed gateway to all the campaigners and activists. I can't take that risk for someone in India or Pakistan because they're working in a different landscape. You know, this is potentially life and death. It's certainly damaging.

They're going to face economic harm, reputational harm. They're going to face attacks of a type that won't come to me on my doorstep. So that's what makes me dismayed at what I did and, I guess, angry at Rob Moore. And I guess angry at Rob Moore. And I regret that I've placed people who placed trust in me in potential jeopardy. It's not surprising, perhaps, but Rob has a different lens on what he was doing. There was one famous time when I came out of a meeting with K2 where I had just been lying to Matteo.

I go down to Green Park tube station. I'm literally thinking, God, this is a surreal situation because I'm blatantly lying now and all of these things are coming down the line for the client. And I stood on the platform and there in front of me was this big poster for the Dallas Buyers Club, a great film with Matthew McConaughey about a campaigner who actually breaks some laws in order to import drugs

that are available in Mexico to help people with HIV, but for some reason hadn't got the DFA or whatever they're called, approval for being licensed. These were early medicines that were known to halt the rapidity of the disease. So he took all of these chances and got in great trouble with the law. But across the strap then, across it, it said, sometimes it takes a hustler to change the world. And in my naive way of sitting there, having just lied my face off to Matteo,

and to see something like that, for and this is totally naive but I thought that's a sign that's that's that's a sign. The contrast between the sheer recklessness that worries Rory O'Neill taking chances you can't possibly calculate with people's freedom and even their lives and, seeing a film slogan as a kind of message that he was doing the right thing is breathtaking. I'm not a natural liar, I promise. And I think the only reason I managed to play both sides is that the only thing I could sustain as a congruent, consistent story was the truth. So the one thing I didn't tell the campaigners

was that I was being paid by K2. But in terms of was I trying to make films? Yes, I was. And by 2015, I'm talking to highly credible people who could get commissioned just on their record. The films, the documentaries Rob's been talking about making for three years at this point. I said in the last episode that by the end of 2014 he hadn't really tried to make a serious TV documentary. But in 2015 I think it's fair to say he does. In March that year Matteo Begazzi at K2 tells Rob that the client might be about to pull the plug on Project Spring. And whether that's the reason or not,

in June, Rob starts talking to two of the best documentary makers in the UK. I now have an idea of what the programmes could be and I go and meet John Willis. I go and meet Dan Reid. Yeah, I think it's naive to think that the people who expose wrongdoing are all pure as the driven snow. They're not. And narcissism is a strong driver, and it can lead people to do great things.

Dan Reed has a huge reputation as a documentary filmmaker. Most famously, four years ago, he made Leaving Neverland, about Michael Jackson's history of abusing children. But he had a long track record before that of brave and important documentaries about terrorism, natural disasters, corruption. When Rob comes to see him, he doesn't doubt why he's come. Whether it was effective or not, he clearly had a plan to turn the tables on the clients that he was working for.

But whether, you know, then it becomes, well, was he just a dreamer? Was he entertaining this as a sort of moral alibi? I don't know, I don't know. But certainly all my interactions with him left me feeling that he was sincere, that he was putting a lot of work into, you know, the moment when he would reveal everything, and that he was angsting a lot about it,

and, you know, going really to great lengths to try and make it happen. They talk about a lot of Rob's plans. Did he talk to you about setting up the charity that he was working on? Yes. The Anti-Aspestos Charity is one of Rob's main focuses around this time and we'll get to that in the next episode. But it wasn't going to be what Dan Reed's film was about. He was working on something much more cinematic

and a big moment that was Rob's idea. The plan was to tell the story of how Rob Moore began working for K2, realised who the clients were, the job he was required to do, his change of heart, his determination to expose what was really going on, and then the build-up to the Rotterdam conference, which I think was a big meeting about asbestos. He would have been there in his fake guise of a fake activist. So far, so familiar.

But Rob has a plot twist up his sleeve. And then he would stand up and say, look, actually, I have to tell you the truth about what's going on here. You may not know it, but I'm here and being paid by the very people that you're trying to expose. You know, I don't know how he would have phrased it, because that's a tricky thing. I think they might have jumped on him and beat him up. That's the madness, isn't it? Because it's such a high-risk play, isn't it, that he thinks they'll applaud, and as you say, it's equally possible they could have turned on him and torn him to shreds there and there.

That all added to the sort of complexity of the character and the story for me. We weren't going to tell him how to do it. We were just going to observe how he did it. A lot of the people that I've bumped into who've done really sort of groundbreaking things that have sort of you know exposed wrongdoing or achieve something remarkably um useful to humanity or whatever a lot of them have been quite narcissistic and a lot of them have been driven

partly by the desire to do good but also by the the desire to, for self-actualization to, you know, to make something of themselves. And, you know, I don't think the people who go and do great things and do good in the world, I don't think they're sort of born, you know, I'm going to do good now. And I'm, you know, Captain America and clean cut and, you know, no personality flaws and all that. I don't think that's the way people are. That's not the way heroes are, you know. I'm not saying Rob's a hero because eventually he sort of never met his moment, really.

For all Dan says, don't expect Captain America in real life, there's definitely a touch of comic book superhero. About that plan for Rob to rip off his shirt on stage at an enormous international conference and unveil the whole truth about himself. He'd be the hero in his own drama, and he'd keep control of the story right up to the final reveal. Yeah, I think, you know, my verdict is he was sincere. But in order to do what he was planning to do you need to be kind of

you need to be very resourceful very ruthless very determined and very disciplined and I think I think he found you know the reason he took so long is that is I think that final sort of right I'm gonna jump it was always lacking and it would have been a good film, wouldn't it? It would have been a great film, yeah. Yeah. But it didn't happen. All this time, Rob is reporting back to Matteo Begazzi,

his handler at K2, telling him stories, sometimes the same stories Rob tells himself, sometimes with stray words that seem more revealing than he intends about the mix of his motives. And also, now you've got someone, right, who's just a bona fide, totally can-be-backed-up activist. Is that what you want? That's what you've turned him into?

Yeah, it is, yeah. I come in here with my anonymous mask. Oh, dear. you've turned them into yeah it is yeah i come in here with my anonymous mask oh dear well anyway what a ride it's been it's been it's been thrilling the thrill is about to come to an end Coming up on Into the Dirt... We were on the verge of doing great things. He's obviously considering his options right now, but feels that he will soon have no other option than to come out. And it's not about the fact I've got tough questions to answer,

because I can answer them. I mean, I just assumed that there would be some space to talk to people. And do you think to this day there's things that you might have found out? Yeah. You do? Yeah. I wanted more information about who the ultimate client was, and we never got that. Thank you.