Who Trolled Amber? - Pig Iron - Episode 3: The lonely impulse

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Basia traces Chris's career as a young freelancer. By now, it's clear his death is tied to his life as a reporter. But who was he trying to be? Just how close was he to a group of fighters? And after years in Ukraine, how did he end up in a remote corner of South Sudan?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.

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...more evocative, more awful. C.J.K. Allen, wasn't it? Yeah. So when were those messages sent? On the 17th of July 2014. In 2014, Roland Oliphant was based in Moscow. He'd recently got a job reporting for the Telegraph newspaper. That year, he'd spent a lot of time in Ukraine. That's where the story was. He was there for the Maidan revolution in Kiev and for Russia's annexation of Crimea. And so where were you when you heard that a plane had

been shot down in eastern Ukraine? I was in my kitchen in Moscow. But that summer, when a new story began to travel. Roland was back in Russia. The phone rang and it was the foreign editor of the Telegraph, David Monk. He said, what about this plane that's been shot down, Roland? I said, you know, I don't know. Several planes have been shot down, you know, jet fighters, whatever. He goes, no, no, no, they've shot down this airliner. I said, no, no, no, I think I'd have heard about that, I foolishly said,

and turned on the internet and bang, straight away, I realised it was true. It was the 17th of July, 2014. Flight MH17 had been in the sky for around three hours. As it passed over eastern Ukraine, over a part of the country controlled by separatists, armed and supported by the Russians, the plane lost contact with air traffic control. Essentially, what we understand happened, the Russians completely deny all of this, by the way. They deployed this high-altitude air defence system.

They turned on the radio. They saw a blip on the screen. They thought it was a Ukrainian aircraft. And they pressed fire. And it was in fact a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, full of 298 people, including passengers and crew. And they didn't stand a chance.

Blown out of the sky at 30,000, 35,000 feet. Dutch investigators would later confirm that it had been hit by a Russian-made missile. But no one, including Roland, knew any of this at the time. All he knew was that he had to get to the scene of the crash and start reporting. So he jumps in a cab and heads to the airport. But when he arrives, he finds out that Aeroflot, the Russian airline,

has grounded all flights to Ukraine. Then there's a scramble around. I tell the desk I'm not going to get there quickly. Eventually, he finds another way, but it's going to involve a mix of trains and hire cars across the border. He thinks it will be another 24 hours before he gets to the crash site. But Christopher Allen is already hours ahead. I'm Basha Cummings.

From Tortoise, this is Pig Iron. Episode 3, The Lonely Impulse. is Pig Iron. Episode 3, The Lonely Impulse. That month, July 2014, was the beginning of Chris's second, longer trip to Ukraine. He'd been and done his thrilling spring break, and now he was back for the summer. He wrote on Twitter that he was going back there to do some reporting. He takes a train to the city of Donetsk, the capital of the Donbass region, where the separatists are trying to break away from Ukraine. And so he's there when, a few days later, the news breaks that a plane has been shot down into sunflower fields just 80 kilometers away. He'd often told people that he wanted a seat on the front lines of history.

Now he was really about to get one. Pictures appear to show the plane after it came down near the Russian border. Ukraine and Russia both deny they shot it down. When did you first hear from Christopher Allen? I heard from Chris. I might even have still been at my kitchen table in Moscow. And I got a direct message, an unsolicited direct message from him saying, hi, my name's Chris. He said, hi, I'm a freelance photographer, stroke journalist and wanted to say I'm currently in

East Ukraine. I'll be at the site of the crash tomorrow morning and can help with reporting if you're interested. What's incredible is that Chris definitely doesn't have the credentials to call himself a photographer stroke journalist yet. But then again, the BBC reporter David Loyne once wrote that the only skills that really count as a foreign correspondent are the ability to live easily in difficult places and enormous self-belief. And I'd say that Chris was already displaying one of those skills. And of course, this is no time to ask questions. Chris is in the right place at the right time, half the battle of being a reporter. And so Roland replies,

knowing that his boss wants somebody on the ground as soon as possible. So I immediately forwarded his email address to our desk in London, who got in touch with him. I guess what they said was what they'd always say, which is, get off the crash site, file us as much colour as you can. Chris is just a two-hour drive away from the scene. Through five separatist-controlled checkpoints, he races east to a village called Hrabowa.

Roland arrives there hours later after dark. And by the next morning, he's met with the same horrifying scene that Chris has just witnessed. We realised at that point we were sitting in a field full of bodies and bits of bodies. And then if you looked at the wheat field, you could see these little white ribbons attacked sticks. Each of those ribbons was a body.

It's a young girl, probably seven years old. She had no visible injuries, just dead. She's asleep, other people in pieces, some people still strapped into their suits, some people still wearing oxygen masks. They obviously had time to put it on after the missile hit and they'd obviously dropped down um other people had not been wearing their seat belts who had unbuckled them and had been ripped into bits and amongst all this death you have all their personal belongings so your cabin baggage your lonely your underwear, your contraceptive pills, absolutely everything that

goes in the plane, just splatted over an area of, I mean, square miles. Because Chris gets there so quickly, and the Telegraph are keen to get some material, he gets a commission, and you can still find his article online. The opening reads, they lie among the sun bleached wheat, the bodies torn, broken, burnt. I think because maybe he was quite, you know, young and fresh, he wasn't constrained by journalistic convention, right? It's quite, it's pretty raw copy. It's pretty, almost, you know, literary, poetic, punchy, you know, this is the horror in your face. This is what I can see. And I think it works. That did the shocking scene justice.

But Chris isn't the only person to have raced there, and neither is Roland. 24 hours after the plane is shot from the sky, the world's press arrives. And you can imagine that for Chris, this feels like a real moment. He's just started boldly calling himself a journalist, and suddenly he's writing for a prestigious British newspaper. You'd think that if he needs proof that he has it in him to be a journalist, here it is. But it's not quite as simple as that. Because in the media scrum around him, Chris sees something that he doesn't like. He writes on his blog that TV presenters were preening themselves in front of bodies and wreckage, trampling whatever was in their way, that luggage and possessions were being organised in neat piles and laid out in order to photograph.

I think it's a small girl's bag, isn't it? But it looks, I think, a set of keys, a toothbrush. I mean, we shouldn't really be doing this, I suppose, really. But look... After hundreds of complaints, a reporter from Sky News apologised for picking items out of a suitcase live on air. He said, Too late. I realised that I was crossing a line.

I've been in many places where I felt uncomfortable with the behavior of the herd mentality of journalists. And I can understand. You say that he was affected by it. What are you getting at? What was his...

Well, he said to friends and to family that he was pretty disillusioned by the media circus and pretty disgusted with how some of them had behaved. And I think my impression is that if this was his kind of first taste of what journalism as an industry might be, I think he felt like that bit of it wasn't for him. industry might be, I think he felt like that bit of it wasn't for him. Yeah, I can imagine that. I mean, I think everybody has that moment and there are times when you think, I don't want to be a part of this. Chris saw the press pack and he thought, that is not for me. When we came back from Maine, our investigation into what happened to Chris out there in South Sudan kicked into gear. It says calling, but it sounds ominous.

Jeremy was working hard on getting back in touch with various sources that he'd spoken to over the years. Sorry, I'm Christopher's cousin. Just keep an eye on the WhatsApp. And I'll make contact with a couple of these people who you mention, okay? And the essay writer kept messaging, kept asking, when are we meeting? There was this urgency hanging over us. As Jeremy focused on South Sudan, I started to figure out what kind of journalist Chris had been.

Because it feels totally clear to me that his death was tied up in his life as a reporter. I need a guide to the front line, someone to tell me what the rules out there really are. And so I turned to Anthony Lloyd, one of Britain's most respected war reporters, and the author of that book that Chris had so carefully underlined. the author of that book that Chris had so carefully underlined. Yeah, I'm sure this is like when you're sitting in a trench in Ukraine thinking, I'll be going home soon. It's not too bad to come back here. Wow. My God. On a humid day in June, Gary, my producer, and I drove to meet Anthony at his home. It was a drive from London into the lush, wild landscape of Devon in the southwest of England.

And it's about as far from the front line as you could imagine. Inside Anthony's cottage, photographs of the wars that he had covered line the walls. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone. While we spoke, his two dogs snoozed in the room next door. But the chickens were less obliging. I can't do much about the cockerel, however, if he... I was going to ask, but I thought I knew the answer. If he is in the front garden, I can chase him out,

but he might start there. Right. Just let it be known that you forced Anthony Lloyd, war correspondent, to chase a chicken to the back of his house mid-interview. I asked Anthony to take me back to the beginning. I was 25 or 26 years old. It was January or February 1993. I had left the British Army not long before, about a year before, after five years. And I remember that first day in Sarajevo and the Santa Machine Gun fire echoing through the streets and laughing in a way that seems, you know,

quite strange from outside, but I knew exactly what I was laughing for at the time at the incredible thrill of finding myself in a real war actually in the first day of a real war in my life it was something which I had kind of sought to experience in the British army and never really found and Sarajevo day one the sound of kind of heavy machine gun fire echoing through the streets, the orbit of sniper fire, which sounds very different. And I remember, yeah, laughing at the thrill of that sensation on that first day. And at that moment, what was the goal? Was the goal journalism or was it just to be there? What was the goal? Was the goal journalism or was it just to be there?

It was both. But of course, with the passage of time, if I look back now, then I can kind of analyse my reasonings for being there much more efficiently. But at the time, as a guy in my mid-twenties, I was there a lot for the shits and kicks. There's no doubt about it. There were other, it wasn't just the shits and kicks. I had a loosely defined wish to be a journalist, certainly a foreign correspondent, and definitely a war correspondent. And that had really grabbed me. I thought, my God, there could actually be a job that involves going around in helicopters listening to Jimi Hendrix and getting stoned and you'd found it yeah I was like can it get better

as I thought at the time so I would like to emphasize the kind of altruism and professionalism behind it all but certainly the reality was a sense of adventure inevitably there was a lot of kind of discovery and thought along the way about uh and guilt too at various times what is it i'm doing here is it just a day trip in someone else's nightmare. The guilt and that question, is this just a day trip into someone else's nightmare, hung over Chris too. After filing his article for the Telegraph, Chris left the MH17 crash site.

I got the feeling that he didn't think that there was that much left for him to do there now that Roland had arrived along with hundreds of other reporters. He organises to join up with a battalion in the area, one that's made up mostly of Ukrainians and a few foreign fighters. And he ends up making some close friends there. And in his notes from later that summer, he describes being with them on a particularly dangerous mission. While walking

along a train line, they come up against separatist snipers. Suddenly, four men are killed around Chris and five are wounded. And when he gets back to the camp, he sits alone and bursts into tears. He writes, I was overcome with a sense of sadness, not just from what I'd seen and felt on the front, but from what I knew I'd lost forever. Something which I know will have a permanent effect on me. My tongue stings. My lungs are tight. I feel weary and sad. He knows, I think, that he's through the looking glass now. There's in the epigraph to your book, there's a quote from the Irish poet WB Yeats, and it says, nor law nor duty bade me fight, nor public men nor cheering crowds, a lonely impulse of delight.

Drove to this tumult in the clouds. Exactly. Sorry to cut you off. No, no, no. It was better that you did. What's the lonely impulse? At the real heart of it, you know, talk about other things like altruism or a sense of adventure. or a sense of adventure, at the heart of my decision,

and I see it in other people as well, but the heart of my decision to go off to wars then and now is something which is quite difficult to describe. Yeats touched on it in that magnificent poem about the Irish airman who foresaw his death, in that he had gone off to fight in the First World War and he didn't have to. He was an Irishman. He wasn't obliged to fight in the First World War, and he didn't have to. He was an Irishman. He wasn't obliged to go and fight at all. But he was driven to this kind of the war in the sky, the chaos in the clouds,

by this inner impulse of delight, something very... that only Yeats or perhaps Joyce could have described, some yearning of the soul. A lot of that book is also about having a kind of split personality between the experiences and the sort of changes to your soul that you experience on the front line and then trying to make sense of those changes when you come back to whichever beautiful suburb you may be living in or your London flat or your

girlfriend at the time and trying to reconcile this kind of tectonic shift in your young being with you know normal life and it's hard or maybe impossible and so much of that those those pages seem to be you kind of grappling with what the fuck you're gonna do i think i did i they were grappling with what i was meant to do because at the time i was trying to unify everything and become one coherent person i think oddly as time's gone by and this is 30 years on I have learned that to be peaceful with myself I have to live with two people I don't try so much to reconcile I try to accept that is another life to an extent another personality and this is the bigger life and the main personality but stop trying to yeah i don't really try and match what goes on out there

which is every bit as much of this reality as this is but i just try and accept there's two quite different entities and i don't shouldn't really try and expend too much energy and try to match them up or or coalesce them. 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. 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.

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Would he, as an aspiring young war reporter, have picked up a weapon? And he told me about a moment in Sarajevo. He was with a sniper team and a guy hands him a rifle. It's dark and suddenly a figure pops up in the distance. I was like, I could shoot this guy. This is really quite a moment. He's not long out of the army he could have fired but the moment passes it feels to me like a similar moment of instincts to chris's a moment when the theater of war takes you in anthony didn't pull the trigger, but in lining up the shot, he stepped right up against a line.

But Chris, in firing, stepped up to the line and crossed it. Not for the first time, I felt like a referee in the wrong game rattling off mostly to myself the rules that I thought that Chris had been breaking don't pick up a weapon don't wear combatant clothing always identify as press but Anthony and Roland too were telling me yeah those rules exist in principle but when you're out there on the front line, it doesn't always work like that. Yeah, so here's how it is. By its nature, people get killed in war. War is ruled by the dynamic of chaos. You can try and control your outcomes in a war as best you can, but there's no guarantees. Now that applies as much to journalists as it does to anyone else. You've got to be really stupid as a journalist

if you go into the arena where other people are killed, killing, getting wounded and messed up and thinking that that is not going to happen to you. So there's an awful lot to take on board. And that's a very tight calibration in the way you behave there, an awful lot to take on board and that's a very um tight calibration in the way you you behave there given that we're talking about something that's governed by the dynamic of chaos you're never going to get it right the whole time you are going to make mistakes everybody makes mistakes in war somewhat selfishly my response to all this was relief because i drove back to london thinking chris wasn't alone in going to ukraine and winging it how else was he meant to do it and maybe he

wasn't alone in testing the boundaries either but i kept returning to the mortar that he'd fired at the town when he'd wondered if he might have killed someone, because he did really agonize about it. He knew the second he'd fired that he'd really messed up. He wrote how angry he was at himself, that it was unforgivable. And so I figured maybe it was actually the mortar fire, not reporting on MH17, that turned him into a journalist. He crossed the line and he knew it. And he knew that that side of the line wasn't for him. After this, Chris really seemed to commit to freelancing.

Ukraine had gotten under his skin and he'd made some close friends. He kept going back to the east and eventually he moved to Kiev full-time, pitching himself as an expert on the foreign fighters. With Chris's parents' blessing, Jeremy gets access to his inbox and from there I could better map out his career as a freelancer. He sent dozens and dozens of story ideas to editors and he comes across as, I'd say, quite a spiky character, thoughtful, reflective, committed, yes, but also arrogant, stubborn. He has quite a big idea of himself, which again, let me tell you, is not unusual in reporters. And it seems that Chris's reporting idols were from a different age, from the 60s and 70s, I got a strong sense that he had

a kind of borrowed nostalgia for those days. I'm not John Wayne Jr. You know, I'm not a blood and guts guy. I just had a very strong attraction to war. Though there were many great female war reporters, the era that inspired Chris was one of, let's face it, mostly celebrated men who wrote

books and long essays and shot film and smoked cigarettes and got deep into the action. I'm trying not to sound like an old-fashioned Hunter Thompson or something. We were the acme of the profession. You know, at that time, the work of the foreign correspondent was very different to what it is now. Those were the days when doing that kind

of reporting could actually make you a living. A time when you could be this adventuring war reporter paid a handsome salary by a prestigious newspaper with carte blanche to travel the world. But Chris was about to enter a very different era of journalism. So right behind me are three illegal oil refineries. The police have been amassing a large presence of buses. There are about eight tonne of water cannons. That year, 2014, was the dawn of the Vice News era. 2014 was the dawn of the Vice News era.

Vice, which had started as this zeitgeisty magazine for millennials, had spun out into a high-octane digital news operation. It had just gotten this enormous injection of cash from the media tycoons, the Murdochs, and had launched a brand-new news channel. Vice knew what played, and in the chaos of online content, war and adventure played. Vice weren't alone, of course, but they set the tone. They made foreign reporting seem cool again. And it's curious because while Chris seemed to be seeking out the high octane and the visceral, he didn't seem to feel like he fit into this new world.

But there's another story in his emails, one that's actually a lot bigger than Chris. And it goes something like this. It's been a tough couple of weeks for the digital news industry. More than a thousand workers, many of them reporters, have lost their jobs at companies like BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Vice. Just five years ago, these digital news outlets were seen as the future of journalism. After the enormous excitement of the internet, which had brought millions of new readers to the news online, newsrooms had been hit by a perfect storm.

The digital media bubble had burst, advertising the way that newsrooms had traditionally made their money in print and online, had collapsed. By 2014, if anyone had money to spend on ads online, they were switching to Facebook or Google. Why speak to a million readers when Facebook could deliver you 1.4 billion? So nearly all the big newsrooms were struggling and figuring out how they were going to survive. And you can see what this really means for freelance reporters in Chris's emails. Newsrooms wanted material from the many, many freelancers in Ukraine, but they didn't really want to take much responsibility for them getting it. Because let's be honest, responsibility equals cash. It means time and

energy and cost getting someone out of a sticky situation. It also meant that everything was happening at arm's length. From his emails, I could see that not a single editor seemed to ask Chris about his experience, his training, or how he was going to stay safe, even when he was pitching some pretty hairy stuff. Not one person seemed to check, at least in writing, if he was who he said he was. And yes, a lot of journalism is about trust. But this was different. There just wasn't the money to pay anymore. And so when an editor did commission Chris, they often didn't pay much. We're talking 250 quid for a feature from the front line that might have taken him weeks to report. That's nowhere near enough to make a living, let alone pay for insurance or safety gear or even

really food. I mean, he writes directly to you at one point, dear Basha. I'm a British journalist based in Ukraine, so that's his. So this was when he was in Ukraine. In going through the emails, Jeremy found that I'm in there too, copied as one of the editors in a series of emails at The Guardian where Chris is commissioned, then left waiting for weeks until finally his pieces spiked, cancelled for a tiny fee. Chris's inbox is like peering under a rock and seeing all the bad bits about journalism that none of us really want to think about or talk about. And there were these other more slippery emails, the ones that dangled the possibility of a paid commission. So, this is pertinent.

So, just on the question of what newsrooms do and don't do. So, there's a screenshot here from Chris's emails, which is an email from one of the editors at The Telegraph to Chris on the, this is in 2015, regarding an article pitch that he sent saying Europeans fighting in Ukraine. And it says, Hi, Christopher, thanks for getting in touch.

I'm afraid we cannot, for insurance reasons, commission you to embed with the Foreign Legion or encourage you to go. But if you decide to go ahead with the project, please do let us know afterwards and we can have a chat about it. Best wishes. That's interesting.

And I'm not saying this to you because as i said i think this is industry-wide but that sort of incentivization of no absolutely i mean it is it's real um that there is that incentive to go and put yourself in danger yeah i wasn't aware of that email um but yes i mean yeah, bang to rights. I'm not here as a spokesman for The Telegraph, by the way. But I think it speaks to that kind of really delicate and complicated thing at the heart of why I think Chris's story is so important, which is there are always going to be young freelancers

who are pitching and wanting to go to dangerous and exciting places. And where is the line of the responsibility? Where is the line? Where's the line of responsibility between you being, the line of responsibility between newsrooms and freelancers? I don't know. And I think it's one of those many things in this job that you kind of navigate by intuition

and occasionally you're going to get on the other side of it or not. Because you have to be, to a degree, you have to be realistic about the way the world works. If somebody has witnessed something that's a really good part of the story, are you really going to say no to it? I mean, this is how we gather the news. And this is a risky business.

Part of my thing is that, you know, those in glass houses, I know when I was young, and starting out, I definitely did things that I shouldn't have done. Definitely, without a doubt. Stupid things. And I was lucky. I shouldn't have done. Definitely, without a doubt. Stupid things. And I was lucky.

I got away with it. And I would never advocate that kind of behavior. But it's part of it. And a lot of us have been through that kind of cycle. Does that email make you feel uncomfortable? It doesn't make you feel uncomfortable? Does it make me feel uncomfortable? In the context of this conversation, yes, of course it does. But I wouldn't necessarily have thought twice about it if I'd seen it,

or if I'd received it, because I'm not necessarily so focused on this particular issue the issue being this contradiction between what we're officially told to do and how safe you should be and oh please don't do that and oh you're

no story is worth your life you know but you know, if you come back with video of you running across a field with, you know, gunshots going on, you say, we're under fire. We will put it bang at the centre of the website

and you'll get a note of congratulations from the editor. Right? That's the reality. It's all part of the journey to an answer. Who killed Chris and why? I know that Chris's work was drying up in Ukraine by 2017 and I know that he was looking for a new story. Was that why he went to South Sudan?

To up the ante. The riskier the story, the more likely someone might buy it. So where did the idea of South Sudan even come from? This was not a high-profile war. After we got back from America, Jeremy had shared his Facebook chat history with Chris. It's from when they first met in 2015 to Chris's death in 2017.

And it's where Chris had told Jeremy about his crazy tales from Ukraine. So 14th of October 2015, Chris again is talking about going to Africa. There's definitely a few months in this first six months of your conversations where it comes up quite a lot. It was obviously an idea that was really taking hold at that time, or perhaps the people he was

hanging out with were talking about it a lot. And he says to you, these European soldiers of fortune are trying to make plans so we'd all go together. Say that again. He says, these European soldiers of fortune, so the mercenariesaries are trying to make plans so we'd all go together and you reply to say we're in africa and he says we're waiting to hear from their contact on the ground south sudan it's chaos out there from what i understand and you reply to say you're brave and stupid yep any thoughts and stupid. Yep.

Any thoughts? It's hard with those things, because after an event like a death, you think, should I have said more? But I guess, you know, it was just the way that we interacted and the way that anyone interacts with someone who's still alive is you hope for the best. I mean, you do say, you do make clear what you think about it. Yeah. I suppose the thing that really jumps out at me is, and there is more, that at least at this point,

the question about going to South Sudan is only ever in the context of tagging along on a trip where they will go and participate in the conflict. Yeah. Which does feel significant, given what comes later. Yeah. Yeah, it does. It also makes sense in terms of where he's trying to position himself as this expert on mercenaries or soldiers of fortune. But yeah, of course it feels significant.

So it gets more intense, these exchanges. As part of the same conversation, he says to you, when talking about going to South Sudan, he says, I just know if it happens, it's going to be something crazy. I can't say everything over the Internet, but these guys are lunatics. And you say, well, now you sound a bit crazy. And he says, we'll be some other world completely. To me, that's fucking exciting. I get that.

I get that excitement of going somewhere completely new, completely different. Obviously, the comments about the mercenaries is unsettling, but I also understand the desire for discovering.

I think he wanted to be a discoverer. And, yeah, I said, no, you sound crazy. I guess the very thought of being around those guys was to make crazy. It's so complicated, isn't it? Did Chris see these guys as his biggest story? If he was, I'd say it could be pretty smart. When you're starting out, editors often say, find your niche, become an expert on something.

So maybe he was thinking, modern-day mercenaries, the foreign legion for the digital age, adventuring in South Sudan. Maybe he was thinking, this is a story I can tell. There are two men I want to speak to, two foreign fighters at the top of my list. Craig Lang, who was a fighter in right sector, number seven on Chris's emergency contact sheet, and another man, Chris Swampy Garrett. What would you prefer to be called, Chris or Swampy?

Chris is fine, Swampy is fine. OK. I went with Chris. He's a former tree surgeon from the Isle of Man. In 2014, he'd been in Burma clearing landmines, and when war broke out in Ukraine, he travelled to the east and joined the Azov Battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard. Chris Allen really liked him and described him as something of an island of empathy among a more extreme group of men, some of them Nazi sympathisers. Fast forward to 2022, eight years later,

Swampy is back in Ukraine. Since Russia's full-scale invasion, he teaches Ukrainian forces about demining and collects money and equipment for the war effort. He's a character with a popular Instagram account. Monday mornings, DJ Anna. Same room. Instagram account. He has a giant tattoo across his back, a skull and crossbones with the words DANGER MINDS in all caps. When I contacted him and I told him I was investigating what happened to Chris, he was immediately open to speaking to me. So he came out to us and embedded with myself and the foreigners that were there. And then we just stayed in touch. And obviously, you know, as journalists, so he was running around,

going here, there and everywhere. You said he was a bit of a mad bastard, though. What was it about him that you thought was mad? Well, when we first met, he reached out to me and said, you know, I'd like to go to bed. And I said, well, that's fine, but I'm going to be on the front line in a small village called Shrockner. By all means, if you can make your way there, you know,

or I'll catch you, you know, I'll catch you when I get back off the front line. So I was up in a building getting shot at one day, laid out behind my sniper rifle. And next minute someone comes in going, Swampy, Swampy, there's some guy here to see. I'm kind of a bit busy now. And in comes this guy that turns out to be Chris,

wearing an absolutely huge plate carrier, a massive helmet that was too big for him. And just this enormous rucksack. He just looked so out of place. and it was just like, you know, what are you doing here? He's like, oh, I'm here to film. Can I get my camera out? You know, and it's just like, if you haven't noticed,

we're kind of getting shot at right now. Yeah. I think he thought that the laws of war didn't apply to him. Really? Yeah, a little bit. Do you think it was bravery or bravado or just kind of blissful ignorance? Not bravado.

It wasn't bravado. It was just, there's a story there and I want to film it. You're not going to stop me. I could see the scene somehow perfectly. Chris totally out of place and yet totally at home in this bullet riddled chaos and I wanted to ask Swampy about just how at home Chris was because there was one more unresolved

detail hanging over me from Chris's journals. Firing the mortar wasn't the end of Chris's curiosity with fighting. There are times when I dip back into Chris's journals when I fear that my conclusion that Chris had only focused on journalism was premature. Because in early 2015, after spending more time with the Azov battalion, Chris wrote, Here I was, writing an article on the Europeans fighting in the east of Ukraine

while I myself considered joining them. I came to get close to history. Now I want to enter it. And again later in 2015 when he writes about how split he is and refers to himself as torn between fighter and writer. Did he ever talk to you? Because in one of his journals that I've been reading, he's kind of, like at that time, I think he, I think it would have been sort of 2015,

he was struggling a bit with, it seemed like he was struggling a bit with journalism. He wasn't really getting the support that he wanted. And he was sort of toying with the idea of becoming a foreign fighter. Did he ever talk to you about that? Was that ever something that you had discussed? He had mentioned it a couple of times. So I think there was a couple of people that he had gone out to speak to, well, to document on the front line, Ukrainians that had been killed, been injured, and I think that kind of struck him a little bit.

I think he was maybe struggling a little bit with, you know, just... I think he got to the point a little bit where he was kind of looking at it and going, well, you know, what help am I doing with the camera? Maybe I should have a gun. Something inside Chris kept pulling him back to that blurry line. From speaking to his friends, his roommate, the fighters, I think there's no denying that he toyed with the idea of fighting, but ultimately decided journalism was for him. But that still leaves open the question of South Sudan.

Chris's Facebook messages with Jeremy suggested that the trip was always tied to the fighters. So why did he end up dying there alone, without them? And do you know whether there was any connection between

Chris's plan to go to South Sudan and their plan? That I am unaware of. I know that Chris and Craig didn't usually speak. I think maybe a conversation would have been had about, you know, it might be an interesting place to go, whatever. Again, Craig Lang's name had come up. I knew I wanted to speak to him,

but he didn't strike me as the kind of person you could just call up out of the blue. Swampy was now something of a war hero. Craig Lang had a much more complicated reputation. In the same set of notes in which Chris had described Swampy as more compassionate, he'd written this about Craig. For Lang, violence is the world's modus operandi. But Craig would be a friend of Chris's, would you say? Well, Chris and Craig knew each other quite well, you know, to go to an open beer and stuff like that.

So I think they got on well just to talk and everything else. So I don't have anything to do with these people. If you Google Craig Lang, Ukraine, Sudan, you'll understand why. Next time

in episode four. Fuck, I really thought I'd made that up. Wow, there's a lot more questions than I thought. And it turns out that Craig Lang had tried to get into South Stand just a few weeks before Chris arrived. So these two trips that before now seemed like two separate things now seem like they're actually very connected. Do you think it's safe for me to meet you?

Is there any risk? But at the same time you gotta is this worth it to you is it worth it to you you To be continued... Sound design is by Carla Patella. Original theme by Tom Kinsella. With thanks to Charlotte Alfred, John Jones, Christopher Miller, Amanda Sperber, Elizabeth Kantensch and the ACOS Alliance, Kacper Rekavec and David Ferris. The executive producer is Kerry Thomas. Pig Iron is a Tortoise production.