Who Trolled Amber? - Pig Iron - Episode 1: White rebel

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Five years after his death on a distant frontline in South Sudan, the truth about what happened to Christopher Allen is still a mystery. Was he a reckless freelancer? A mercenary? Or a young and ambitious reporter, caught in the crossfire? Approached by a family member looking for answers, journalist Basia Cummings begins investigating.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 Hello, it's Basha here.

Thank you for listening to the Tortoise Investigates feed, the collection of all of our best series in one place. Back in 2022, I spent months trying to work out what had happened to a young war reporter called Christopher Allen. He was killed on the front line of a forgotten conflict in 2017. And when he died, some people said that he was reckless, that he was a young journalist who just got in over his head. But others said that something much more sinister had happened and his family were desperate for answers. My investigation took me to the US, to Europe and Kenya, on the search for the truth about what happened to Christopher Allen

and what happens out there on the front line of war. Go ahead. Ready? Yeah, I'm ready. For weeks, this European capital has been the scene of a violent uprising. My name is Christopher Allen. I'm a writer and photojournalist focusing on covering conflict. The president tonight is in hiding, and just look at the images coming in now.

Families wandering the grounds of his luxury house. I worked in Turkey for the Independent, for Al Jazeera, for Vice. What we saw here today was a revolution. For the second time in a decade, Ukraine has ousted its president. Just let her roll. So what now? I've introduced myself.

What now, Chris? What do we do now? It's April 2014. For months, hundreds of thousands of protesters have been gathering on Maidan Square in Kyiv, Ukraine. It's one of those moments that you can feel the gears of history turning. The battle between Russia and the West has just resumed. Russian troops are spreading out throughout the strategic Crimean Peninsula. And travelling to the heart of it is Christopher Allen,

a 23-year-old American graduate studying European history. For him, this moment is just too important to miss. He's bored of academia and frustrated by the feeling of being outside the world, looking in. He decides that his spring break is going to be different. The conflict in Ukraine was just beginning and history felt like it was happening there and better to be on the front lines of history than to be in the library studying it. He buys a ticket to Ukraine

and heads straight for the new front line in the east of the country where a war is unfolding. Catching buses, riding in cabs, he travels to Donetsk, the centre of the action. There, a group of rebels wanting to break away from Ukraine have just seized control of a government building. Chris joins the growing crowd of protesters outside. And when he gets inside the building, he sends his mum a picture. Then he heads to a nearby town.

He's just set up a Twitter account and he posts what he sees. Checkpoints, Molotov cocktails, sniper rifles. There's a photograph of him from around this time. He's standing with two guys, both of them wearing bulletproof vests labelled Press. They're both standing boldly, looking at the camera. But Chris looks very different. In just a T-shirt and a backpack, he looks so young. This lean 23-year-old with short, thick brown hair

and intense dark eyes. He's totally winging it, but he's getting exactly what he wanted, a front-row seat to the biggest story in Europe. And in amongst all of this drama, he's a complete unknown, a student, a tourist, smoking Ukrainian cigarettes and tweeting into a void. But it doesn't matter, because Chris is hooked. After two trips to Ukraine that year, he starts to figure out who he wants to be

and how he can keep coming back. Journalism seems like an obvious choice. He's grown up on a healthy diet of books by the great war reporters, those golden age, cigarette-smoking, suit-wearing hacks of Vietnam or the leather jacket press corps of Bosnia. Reporting is a reason to be there. It's a passport to war. And so he starts writing and he gets published. The thing is, he's not the only American to have travelled to the front line.

Plenty of other Westerners have arrived. They too have chosen this war. Only they're there to fight. In the various battalions that have sprung up to defend Ukraine against the separatists who want to be closer to Russia. So he came out to us and embedded myself in the foreigners that were... Chris finds them immediately fascinating. want to be closer to Russia. Chris finds them immediately fascinating. These men on the extreme of life.

They go by code names. Franco, Wanderer, Skull, Swampy. to the east, usually what he would do is he would message me and I could get him out there with me and the other foreigners that were out there. He notes in his journal that some of them proudly call themselves soldiers of fortune, mercenaries, though they're barely getting paid. And he scribbles a line from one of his favorite books, All Quiet on the Western Front, about World War I. This is the front. Now we're within its embrace. He starts writing about these fighters too, trying to understand why they're there.

But as time passes, the bits and pieces of reporting work that he's had dry up. Freelancing is tough. The reality is the Ukraine story is getting old. The news cycles on. Syria is claiming the world's attention. ISIS has just declared its caliphate. The moment of history has seemingly passed.

But what can Chris do? Taking a normal job, a desk job, feels impossible now. He's no longer a fresh-faced kid from the Philadelphia suburbs. He's changed. He's been in and out of Ukraine for three years now. His journalism career hasn't yet had a chance to take off. It's now the summer of 2017. He's 26 and he's after a new adventure. While Chris is figuring out his next move, he considers going to Syria or maybe Libya.

But in the end, he lands on South Sudan in East Africa, the world's newest country. It's a place that's been on his mind for a while. He's mentioned it to his cousin, Jeremy. I think he mentioned it on that day that we met. In Paris? Yeah. In 2015? Yeah.

Which was another moment where I felt like, don't do that. It came up with his roommate too. When did you hear Chris talk about South Sudan for the first time? Do you remember? I don't remember exactly, but there was this group of foreign fighters who wanted to go through Uganda to South Sudan to fight there. And Chris had contacts of people from the side of rebels of South Sudan. He buys a ticket and flies from Ukraine to Uganda, and he lands on the 1st of August 2017.

From there, he embarks on a 500-kilometer journey to a remote corner of the world, a pocket of South Sudan right at the meeting point of Uganda and the Congo. And he's heading there because he's made a plan to report on a brutal war that rarely makes international headlines, despite hundreds of thousands of deaths. To put it bluntly, it's a war that very few people care about. A fractured conflict between the government of South Sudan and opposition rebels who are challenging the leading party. But this, this sprawling remote front line, is Christopher Allen's final destination.

I received the messages from Chris, the 5th of August, saying that he was in August at 9.16 in the morning. He said, all good, crossed the border in Kayokeji now. Connectivity is really bad. Might be some time till I am in touch. Kiss you, girl. At the rebel headquarters, Chris starts to bed in. He's planning to spend a few weeks there. He interviews locals, takes portraits of them, takes notes.

Days and days go by. He messages his girlfriend, Helena. With rebels. No fighting at the moment. Been thinking of you, Helena. Kiss your girl. He's waiting for an attack, one that's been promised to him as something of an exclusive by the rebels. So on the 18th of August, he says, Helena, I wanted to write to you because we are leaving the camp today and headed out to the front line. I'm not sure what connectivity will be, but I hope I will be able to write you again by the end of the month.

will be, but I hope I will be able to write you again by the end of the month. Then, suddenly, two other journalists appear from one of the biggest news agencies in the world. Chris is upset. He thought he had this one to himself. But he sticks with his plan, and very soon he joins the rebels in a long trek for hours overnight through long elephant grasses taller than him, through driving rain, through rivers, to reach a place called Kaya. It's hard work, even for him, who's trained hard for this trip, spending hours at a climbing gym back in Ukraine to get in shape. But still, this is all new to him.

His first time in Africa, his first time reporting in these kinds of conditions. He keeps careful notes as he goes, and he writes, Death seems a very close counterpart to life here. Until now, his messages to Helena, his girlfriend, have been fairly routine. But after this long trek to the front line, his tone changes. On the 25th, I woke up thinking of you today.

We have such good memories together, girl. Anyway, tonight and tomorrow, you could light a candle. I'll write you as soon as I can. And in the meantime, I will be thinking of you and looking forward to being with you soon. Yeah, so that was the last message. On the 26th of August, the rebels leave early in the morning, before sunrise. The journalists join the walk

into Kaya, a town on the border with Uganda. I remember feeling, this is superstition shit, but I felt like very low. I said

something like we have so many good memories and so many good memories to come. I mean, and then the shooting starts. But this message never arrived. My name is Denise Knapp. I'm calling from the U.S. Embassy in South Sudan. I need to speak with you as soon as possible. You may contact me and ask to be connected to the consul at the U.S. Embassy in South Sudan. Thank you. Around five or six in the morning, I woke up with a jolt, and I looked at my phone,

and it still hadn't arrived, And I was getting really worried. But somehow I managed to fall asleep again and then woke up, went out. And it was then that I received a phone call of an unknown number. And I thought it was Chris, and when I pick up the phone and I heard another voice. Helena picks up the phone to the spokesman for the rebel group that Chris had been with. When I heard it wasn't Chris, I knew that something terrible had happened. So it was Lampal telling me, well, I asked, like, is Chris all right? And he said, no, Chris is dead.

And I said, no, that's not possible that's not true and Lampal told me like you gotta be strong now you gotta call the embassy you know get in touch with his family and friends because

and I got a message from my cousin Amy I haven't been able to reach out to them yet. And she wrote and told me that Chris was dead. And I remember feeling kind of disconnected from the news. Then I walked down the garden, up the metal stairs, and I think I probably called my mum to tell her and then it all started

to sort of unfold pretty fast. A man called Christopher Allen has been shot and killed but nothing beyond that single fact is clear. Not even who Chris really is and why he's there. A more sinister claim is made,

that Chris hadn't been there to report on the rebels, that perhaps he was a rebel. 48 hours after he's shot, the South Sudanese information minister dials into South Sudan in Focus, a radio show in the US. And in the fighting, 16 rebels, including a white rebel, were killed. The identity of that white man is not known, but he was among those who attacked the garrison. He was at his full gear, fighting in line. They were saying he's not a journalist, he was a rebel.

That was the first time they made that claim. Do you remember that interview? Yes, the Minister of Information, Michael McQuarrie, said that there was a white rebel shot. That is when we asked him, we said, this guy is a journalist. He said, no, this was a white rebel. The information minister tells reporter John Tanzer that Chris was a white rebel the information minister tells reporter john tanza that chris

was a white rebel a white man fighting the rebel cause what he's saying is chris was a mercenary when i started this investigation chris's story felt a part of my world. I'd probably wanted to be like him once when I was young and imagining what an exciting life could be. In fact, Chris and I are nearly the same age. Only my path ended up being very different. A month after Chris rocked up in Ukraine for the first time, I got my first job in journalism on the foreign desk of the Guardian newspaper in London.

Chris even emailed me once. And over time, I became one of the editors working with foreign correspondents. And with this window onto the world, I'd seen the myth and the mystique of the war reporter in action and heard stories of the complicated characters reporting the front line and in some cases the demons that pushed them there and then followed them home. And maybe it's because I've always been in the safety of the newsroom

that I always believed that there was a cardinal rule about war reporting, one that everyone followed, that you don't join the story, you don't get involved, you don't cross the line. At least, that's what I thought. What started here, in Chris's story, as a question about a mystery killing, has become an investigation into the people who choose the front line

and the decisions they make in the chaos of war. You cannot participate. You cannot pick up a gun. You cannot fire a gun, right? He was very interested about violence, what it means to be good, what it means to be violent. And he wanted to understand this. War is ruled by the dynamic of chaos. You can try and control your outcome. This is one of the... But there's no guarantees.

Great difficulties with working in war is that war is like pig iron on your moral compass. I'm Basha Cummings, and from Tortoise, this is Pig Iron. Episode 1, White Rebel. 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. 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 A matter of hours after his death, the South Sudanese government is saying pretty freely,

listen, he was killed because he was the enemy. Images begin circulating online showing Chris's dead body. It's been humiliated. In one image, he's been stripped naked. What was your gut response? Well, I was shocked. I was just shocked because we know this was Alan, Chris Alan. He has never been a rebel.

I was just shocked. Thousands of miles away in San Diego, California, in the middle of the night on the 26th of August, his parents, John and Joyce, miss calls from the U.S. Embassy. Then they wake up into a nightmare. I think the suggestion that he was something other than what he was was just horrifying. And to hear his death shrouded in an untruth felt terrible. Chris's body lies for around three days in a military hospital

in the South Sudanese capital, Juba. The US consul has to buy ice with her own money to keep it cool. Chris's parents are now in a race against time, a race to get his body back so that they can get a post-mortem performed to find out how he was killed, and a race to combat the idea that he was a fighter. This was not the Chris they knew. He chose to bear witness.

He chose to look unflinchingly at what was painful and to find the humanity within it. It's really hard to imagine the world without him. But the thing about suspicion is, it's infectious. The question sticks. And it sticks so successfully that here I am, five years later, still asking it. And if you were in my position, if you were me, what are the questions that you would be asking on this story?

Well, my first question would be, how did Chris end up in Cairo? Who took him there? And finally, why were there so many different narratives? Why not one narrative? After ten days in limbo, Chris's body finally lands in San Diego. His parents are waiting on the runway. There's a hush of respect on the tarmac as his coffin is unloaded. The same day, they issue a statement with the Committee to Protect Journalists

saying that they're going to push for a formal investigation into what happened to their son. They've got so many questions and no answers. They're broken by his death, but they're also broken by the idea that anyone could say that he wasn't a journalist. And that's before other reporters start saying, privately, but some of

them online. Yeah, it's terrible that he was killed. But Chris was reckless. He was inexperienced. He was ill prepared. It all adds to the chatter around Chris's case. And it all becomes a bit uncomfortable, a bit complicated. Some of the newsrooms who commissioned Chris, who published his work, didn't even cover that he had been killed at all. And despite the family's calls for an official investigation to South Sudan, to the US and UK governments, nothing happens. It's naturally very distressing. I think the lack of investigation, the lack of clarity as to what happened has been incredibly difficult for the family. Because there's been no investigation...

Enter long-lost cousin Jeremy. Like a character from a book, this guy appears sort of from nowhere. The lack of truth is, I suppose, a roadblock to moving forward at the moment. Now, while the South Sudanese government has not admitted culpability... The thing you need to know about Jeremy is that he's into family research in a big way. He's in his early 30s, into art and films, a bit of a man about town.

And to cut a long story short, Jeremy's and Chris's families had been estranged from each other. And after years, Jeremy manages to find them. And in 2015, he strikes up something of a friendship with Chris on Facebook Messenger. And so when Jeremy hears that Chris has been killed, he feels like it's his duty to try and help. He's just found a cousin. Now he's lost him again. He contacts John and Joyce and he tells them that he'll do anything he can. And he does. He brings together lawyers and press freedom campaigners.

And over time, he helps orchestrate a campaign which argues, if Chris was killed for being a journalist, if he was targeted by the South Sudanese army, then a war crime could have been committed. And again, they call for a formal investigation into what happened to him. But to be honest, even that doesn't do it. The story around Chris is still too fraught. His death happened too far away. Not enough people knew his name or his work.

And he was a freelancer. He didn't even have a newsroom behind him. Which is how, five years later, I meet Jeremy. He pitches the story to Tortoise, the newsroom where I now work. Before I contacted you, I think we felt, well, I felt that we were running out of options. And I think just generally people were stopping to care. Before this, when Jeremy made contact in November 2021, I had been vaguely aware of Chris's story. I'd been interested in South Sudan when I worked at The Guardian, and so I'd seen the news of Chris's killing.

I didn't remember that he'd pitched to me, but I thought it was probably likely that our paths had crossed at some point. I'd even considered doing the story here at Tortoise a few months before I heard from Jeremy, but I think part of me thought, why this guy? The only white journalist killed in a country where scores of local reporters have been killed. I didn't really get it. So when Jeremy appeared, saying very clearly, there's more to this, I was willing to listen. We started talking, and just as I was grappling with whether to take it on and to make this podcast, a letter arrived. Out of nowhere. The timing was extraordinary. The idea to run a writing prize in Chris's honor came from a South Sudanese activist in Australia, who's been really involved in the case more or less since Chris was killed.

Her name's Neodol Neon. So it just felt as though it fit who Christopher seemed to be. And he was maintaining a different part of his identity alive. Even his family tried to struggle with finding justice. An essay competition set up with the help of a South Sudanese lawyer, Nia Doll, was a neat way to keep Chris's name alive. It was a competition for school-age kids in or from South Sudan. Jeremy, as he had been for years by now, was helping with the practical stuff.

My role was to monitor the email inbox that's associated with the writing prize on the website, primarily because from time to time you get fairly nasty notes and it was just better that John and Joyce didn't have direct access to that, so I'd be like a filter. But he made a mistake. An email came through with attachments. Jeremy skimmed over it, thought it looked basically fine, and forwarded it on to Chris's parents.

The handwritten letter, when it came, seemed fairly innocuous, so I just sent it on. And it came in an email? Yes. Funny, isn't it? It came in an email, but it was handwritten. So it was a picture of a handwritten note. And all the other entries had been word processed. And nothing stood out to me about the letter at that stage.

John and Joyce get the submission and they read it. Then I got a message from John and Joyce. We have a WhatsApp group. One of them wrote and said, are you fucking reading this? What they were reading, well, when I saw it a few weeks later, I had the overwhelming

sense that someone had taken time, a lot of time, to write these 12 pages. In biro pen, onlined A4 paper, this man, writing from a refugee camp, had filled the pages with reams of claims, filling them from top to bottom with phone numbers and annotations and place names and times and dates. There was barely any room left on the page and it felt eerie and uncomfortable. This essay is a kind of blow-by-blow account of the author's experience around the time that Chris was killed

and ultimately Chris's movements as he arrived into South Sudan and describes his killing. The thing that's really disturbing or crazy about it is he also gives names and dates, sometimes times, for everything that happened. So I was feeling very shocked and anxious, but also kind of there was, I suppose, a feeling of some kind of excitement as I was reading it,

because it felt like finally someone's come forward with first-person testimony about what happened to Chris, which is something we've been looking for for such a long time. Many people have said that they know someone who knows something, but no one actually was going on the record saying, I'm the person that knows. No one actually was going on the record saying, I'm the person that knows. Most importantly, it contained a single incendiary claim, something that the family had come to suspect, that Chris's death hadn't been an accident of war, not a crossfire death,

but a targeted killing. I guess the biggest message is that he was captured alive and handed over to military intelligence, who then, because Chris wouldn't cooperate with them, killed him. I think this was the first time that we'd heard specifics of I think a lurking fear of all of us that this was a targeted killing and that there was more to this than just crossfire Jeremy and I retained a healthy skepticism it could of course be a weird scam somebody pretending have information, maybe as a way of asking for money. It wouldn't be the first time that this had happened to Chris's family. Part of me is angry that someone would use a situation where a family is looking for answers to pitch something that is, to me, seems fundamentally dishonest.

I think it's sort of my bullshit that I just stand up from a lot of the things that come out from the letter. But you never know. South Sudan is interesting in that sometimes rumours have truth. I don't doubt that he would have heard stories about what have happened. Scam or not, I was hooked. I think for a long time we kind of just assumed that there's something to find out because we don't know the truth. And then these things happen and then you think, well,

maybe there's a basis for all of this. So we thought, why not just try giving this writer a call? Jeremy and I had still never met in person at this point, and we were still figuring out the basics of how we could work together on a story like this. But already it felt in motion. What started as a simple question, who killed Chris, had morphed into a more complex puzzle. Was Chris a journalist or a mercenary? Could he have been killed in crossfire, in an accident of war, or was he killed deliberately, as

the essay was claiming? We needed to call the writer. Yes? Can you hear me? We needed to call the writer. Hello? Yes. Can you hear me? I'm fine, I'm getting you clear. OK. Hello? Yeah, yeah, I can hear you now. How are you?

I'm fine, thank you. Jeremy. That's right. And in this long and nightmarish dig into the dirt of war and journalism, this was our first find. One that appeared right in front of us. One that in the end drives to the heart of this story. Just not, it turns out, in the way that any of us expected. So you think it's a good idea for us to meet him in person?

Carefully, but yes, I think so. What does carefully mean? You should always be careful in South Sudan. What impact did his death have on you? I was quite close to getting on a flight. Not that it would have done anything. I mean, revenge is a pointless thing. He knew what to do and what not to do.

He knew how far he could go. You know, then there are other layers to this. Like the pathologist who examined the body in San Diego seems to have suggested to the parents at some point that his brain was removed. You know, in a war situation, sometimes you go your own way. This also happens.

I go, what do you mean you wouldn't sell out Chris? I wouldn't sell him out. I know who killed him. And why? This series is written and reported by me, Besha Cummings. Additional investigation is by Jeremy Bliss. The producer is Gary Marshall. Additional investigation is by Jeremy Bliss. The producer is Gary Marshall. Additional reporting is by Xavier Greenwood. Sound design is by Carla Patella. Original theme by Tom Kinsella. With thanks to Charlotte Alfred, Palima Atumani, John Tanzer, Brian Adeba,

and the International Journalism Project. The executive producer is Kerry Thomas. Pig Iron is a Tortoise production. To be continued... a miraculous bed slung between two trees and fell into the best sleep of his life. You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights and hotels and hammocks for less. Expedia, made to travel. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishikesh 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.