Who Trolled Amber? - Pig Iron - Episode 6: The rope

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

The team tries to understand the connection between Chris's trip to South Sudan, and one taken by a group of American fighters just weeks before. Could this explain why Chris was called a white rebel? And after months investigating, Basia finally speaks to the fighter who fascinated Chris, and she asks – how close really were you? 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 You know, big feelings, big thoughts on life and death. You don't have to force it if nothing comes to mind.

You know? He wouldn't shoot again in the chest. Big thoughts on life and death. I still feel like he has woven together a narrative that he thought could better his circumstances. Being in Donetsk, being in eastern Ukraine, you're conscious of how quickly a life can be taken. That life is a really fragile thing.

I'm not sure if there's anything more to add than that. We've been in Nairobi for days. Me, Jeremy, Halima, our fixer, and our producer, Gary. It's taking you back to zero, right? Do you feel like that, Asia? No, I don't feel like I'm going back to zero. I think slowly I can see that there are these like shards of truth and they're kind of, it's sort of splintered all over. I think it's right. There are glimmers of truth from everyone and it's up to us to try as best as we can

to corroborate them now. We're piecing together what we've learned from the essay writer and the eyewitness and all the other conversations that we've had while we've been here. A lot of it is conflicting. Even an eyewitness who saw Chris get killed on that day in Kaya isn't completely reliable. There are many shades to the truth. It's like what the essay writer told us. But it's hard to understand. That the truth is hard to understand.

Unless you are out there. In the fog of war, shots can move. Injuries become confused. used. Jeremy and I are left thinking differently about the essay writer. I feel that he was trying to help in some warped way. Jeremy feels duped. But we do know more than before. We know that the arrival of the two Reuters journalists really changed things for Chris. We know that Chris ran ahead to take pictures and lost the protection of the rebels around him.

We know that any journalists or white people with the rebels were considered a target. And the eyewitness told us that his death was celebrated, which might explain those trophy photos published later. What happened to Chris is clearer, but the why isn't. And the next step is to contact the South Sudanese government directly and ask them for their version of events. But before I do that, there is a final turn of the dial, because I have a theory. Now it's time to test it. I'm Basha Cummings, and from Tortoise, this is Pig Iron.

Episode 6, The Rope. Like I must be able to connect the one thing to the other. It cannot be random. You do not have two guys, one a journalist, one a mercenary, coincidentally find themselves in South Sudan a few weeks apart. And I just don't know yet what the connection is. One of the things that somebody told me is that Craig Lang went to his memorial and said that the reason that he was there was because he felt guilty. And I really want to find out if that's true and why he felt guilty.

Was it Craig Lang that led Chris to South Sudan? I don't know. Craig Lang used to be in the US Army. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he ended up getting injured. In 2013, he allegedly drove from Fort Bliss, Florida, to North Carolina to try and kill his wife. He was arrested, and his father told local reporters that his son had developed PTSD. After he was dishonorably discharged from the military in 2014, he went looking for something new.

And so it was 2015, when he was in his mid-20s, that he traveled to Ukraine and joined the paramilitary battalion, Right Sector, fighting on the Eastern Front. And it's where he met Chris, who had embedded with the battalion that same year. Craig Lang is a recurring character in Chris's journals, a source of fascination. Chris pitched articles about him, trying to understand his history of violence. And that history means that very few people want to talk about him. One person warned me, everyone who gets pulled into Craig Lang's orbit gets fucked. But ever

since we found Craig's name on Chris's emergency contact sheet, right back at the start of all of this in Maine, I've wondered about what their relationship really was and what it might say about Chris's life and his death. And people close to Chris have told me conflicting things. But Craig would be a friend of Chris's, would you say? Yeah, so Chris knew Craig. Chris was. He was friends with them. No. No, I wouldn't say they were friends. No.

I find Craig Lang as compelling a person as Chris, another young man drawn to war. And I think if I can understand how their two trips to South Sudan might be linked, it could help explain why Chris was killed. But from everything I've been told, Craig Lang doesn't speak to journalists. Hello? Hi, Craig. It's Besha. Hi, how are you?

I'm good, thanks. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Great. We're in our hotel in Nairobi. Craig Lang is in Kiev. He now has a Ukrainian wife and a family. I do have a fairly negative atmosphere associated with my identity right now. Okay, yeah. I don't want to be used to bring Chris down or anything like that.

Yeah, I understand. No, I think it would be disingenuous if I said I didn't. Craig has agreed to be interviewed, but the subject of the double murder charge in which he's accused of killing two people in Florida and stealing $3,000 from them in 2018. That's off limits. He denies the charges and he'll only talk about Chris. When when did you first meet chris let's start at the beginning so i met chris uh i want to say late 2014 chris was actually the way that i came into ukraine i found him on a volunteer page he was he was talking about the war and I kind of reached out to him and he connected me with some of the various volunteer battalions like Right Sector and Azov. And he was kind of,

you know, someone to help get me out here. When they finally meet up in person, they click. They're two young American men in the middle of a war that they've both chosen. Craig later told a Vice reporter that he'd picked fighting in Ukraine over, say, Syria, after seeing the Maidan revolution on the news, and saw that, quote, these people fucking want change. I'm not sure what I was expecting from Craig, but on the call he seems open, open about what Chris did for him, setting him up with the volunteer battalions in the first place.

And Craig says that Chris was one of the smartest guys he'd met. And whenever he wanted to go to the East, usually what he would do is he would message me and I could get him out to one of the right sector battalions, or I could get him out there with me and the other foreigners that were out there.

And whenever I was in Kiev, I could contact him. You know, I could sleep on his floor at his apartment. You know, it started out initially just helping each other out, doing favors back and forth. And then it kind of went into a friendship. I mean, there's a lot of people that are much closer to Chris than what I am. You know, I like to say that he was a friend. Yeah. of people that are much closer to Chris than what I am you know I like to say that he was a friend yeah and in some of Chris's journals that his family have have let me have a look at it's clear

that Chris was really drawn to the foreign fighter way of life he really had a lot of respect for what the volunteers were doing but he also I think it feels like in his journals he toyed with the idea of like maybe he should be a volunteer maybe he should be a fighter did you ever get that sense from him so i'll actually i'll share a story so when i actually met chris in person he'd came back to ukraine and he'd actually he had made the decision that he wanted to fight that he was tired of reporting that he wanted to actually, you know, pick up a rifle and fight. And I actually had trained him for about two weeks, two, three weeks.

I sat there doing training drills with him, teaching him maneuver drills, teaching him medical care, like, you know, tactical combat, health care, things like that. He never, he never stayed with it. I knew about Chris firing the mortar, but this is a step further. Weeks of training together. It begins to feel that a code of honour,

a loyalty to Chris, is behind Craig's decision to speak to me. They looked out for each other. It's a camaraderie that Chris didn't find in journalism. And these fighters seem to offer Chris so much, both his biggest story and a sense of belonging.

Maybe that's why the line between writer and fighter felt so blurry to him. You know, we always told him, hey, if it comes down to it, don't pick up a rifle because you're a journalist. And his response to that was, you know, the Russians are going to shoot me anyway. I might as well pick one up.

I guess at that stage in his life, the boundary between being a reporter and being a volunteer was maybe not as clear as it would have been after many years in Ukraine. Do you think that's fair? Yeah, no, I think that's fair yeah no i think that i think that's extremely fair i think at times you know the the line would kind of get uh muddied a little bit and you know sometimes it was more of like he was a fighter than you know a journalist so i mean you know he didn't take part in actual combat operations he was there for combat operations but he wasn't carrying a rifle but he did always kind of seem ready to help if somebody was wounded or ready to help if something had to be done.

Chris moves deeper into the world of the fighters. It seems that he starts to feel their gravitational pull. And freelance work is hard. He's getting just a handful of articles published here and there, but it's not enough to make a living. And he can't justify the long embeds with the fighters for the few hundred pounds he's being paid. He starts thinking about writing a book about it all.

Maybe that will allow him to go deeper. And it seems that he really does want to understand them. He writes in 2015, He embedded with Right Sector several times, but his journals really focus on people and their motivations. There's no mention of the crimes that some of his friends and sources would later be accused of. More recent reporting gives some idea

about what might have been happening around this time. In 2021, BuzzFeed reported that US authorities were investigating Craig Lang and other American fighters under the Federal War Crimes Statute for allegations that they took non-combatants as prisoners, beat them and held them underwater. In the autumn of 2015, Chris writes to his girlfriend, Helena, about a line of rope. I know there is this rope which connects me with the world I left behind, he writes. Relationships, friends, family.

Will this rope fray? Will it break? Those who know one half of the truth are here. Those on the other side of this rope know the other half. The war, the book. Fighter, writer. Was the rope fraying by June 2017, the month that Craig Lang travels with two other men to South Sudan? So I wanted to ask you about South Sudan in particular

because I've wondered for a while what the connection is between your trip to South Sudan and Chris's. When did you first get interested in going to South Sudan yourself? So there was another fighter who had fought in South Sudan. It was trench warfare in eastern ukraine and craig wanted something new yeah i was like okay i'm thinking about going to africa and we uh we flew to kenya where we were going to go up with Chris's contact with the rebels. And again, Chris seems to be the link, the fixer.

First to right sector, now to the rebels. Can you remember the guy's name? I think this could be Colonel Lamport Gabriel, the rebel spokesman who had met Chris in Kampala and who had taken him to Equatoria. But Craig can't remember. The fighters had planned to travel into Uganda, across the border into South Sudan, and eventually join up with the rebels, the same way that Chris would later travel.

But it was too expensive. So we made the decision that we would go straight into South Sudan from Kenya. We were going there to see what was there and to find somebody to fight with. It wasn't really a match so much of who it was, you know, just out there. I think that was one of the biggest problems that we had is we didn't have a clear plan in place. And I think that's what kind of doomed our trip from the beginning. plan in place. And I think that's what kind of doomed our trip from the beginning. Craig and the two others he was with walked across the border from Kenya to South Sudan.

And they didn't care, really, who they ended up fighting for, the government side or the rebels. They weren't going there for the money. There was none. They were going there for the adventure. Right. And did you guys have military equipment with you? Did you have guns? Did you have ammunition? Yeah, yeah, we had all that stuff with us. Craig says that they picked up weapons outside a British army base in Kenya. And he says it as if it's totally normal.

It's an extraordinary detail, a glimpse at a parallel world, a foreign legion for the Redder Age, an experienced cohort of fighters who treat the world like a violent playground. So what ends up happening is we cross the border and we're in South Sudan and we're going to this town. And as we get to the town, we meet somebody from the army, and the army seems really excited to take us. They want us to work with them for fighting and everything. And then there comes a little bit of a disagreement because one guy in the group starts saying, oh, we're medical volunteers.

And it kind of confuses the guy because the guy's like, are you here to fight or are you medics? And there's two people saying we're fighters. And there's one person saying we're medics. And that caused a little bit of confusion. And then the border guy showed up. The border officer showed up, the border officer showed up at the town, and when he saw it, he immediately recognized us because we were the only three white guys in South Sudan.

Craig says they were handed back over to the Kenyans and at the request of the U.S. Embassy, they were held in prison for three weeks. At this point, they needed help. And when we didn't make contact after a while, Chris actually was the one that contacted the embassy asking about our wear belt. So that's kind of what he was set up for, was that if it all went wrong, he was supposed to step in. Back in Maine a few months ago, Chris's mum, Joyce, had told me something. That Craig had stayed at Chris's Kiev

apartment on his way to South Sudan and there Chris agreed to support Craig if anything went wrong in East Africa and when Chris stepped in and tried to help when you were detained I guess by that time it would have been in Kenya what did he do? So he just started making phone calls to all the embassies, the embassy in South Sudan, in Juba embassy, in Nairobi. And I think that's what sort of like got the American government looking for us. It's time to test my theory on Craig.

In the moment that you were detained did you ever say to any of the authorities that you guys were journalists uh no we did not however chris called it up to the embassies that we were journalists which embassy i guess he i think it was the i think it was the embassy in Juba. He called it up that we were journalists, I think. I think he was trying to sort of get an idea of where we were or if there had been anything reported. Right, okay. Because I saw that that had been reported at the time

that a South Sudanese government minister had said that you guys had been pretending to be journalists. Yeah, yeah, no, that was from Chris calling up that we were journalists, because we told them from the beginning that we were fighters. How do you know that Chris called the embassy in Juba and said that you guys were journalists? Is that something that he told you he had done? and said that you guys were journalists. Is that something that he told you he had done? Yeah, that was something that he had told us he had done. And then from another contact that I had, I'd also sort of said that, so. As Craig repeats the line,

Chris was calling up the embassies. I look at my producer. This is a moment. He may have been acting out of loyalty or friendship, but if Craig is telling the truth, then this might have put Chris and others in danger. It's not just that muddying the waters like this could have put him on the radar of the South Sudanese authorities, but it would have risked making any journalist a target of the South Sudanese government, as if anyone could be a mercenary in disguise. I've just been thinking that, you know, you guys go to Kenya and then try and cross over the border um and then pretty much six weeks later he crosses

the border into South Sudan he is killed either on purpose or accidentally but the government may have known at that point that there was some connection with you guys and that's why he they called him a mercenary do you do you think that there's any connection or do you think there's any truth to that theory? I think that it is quite possible. I think that it is a very legitimate theory. I think that there's a high possibility that there could be a correlation between us going into the country, getting kicked out, and then him going into the country, getting kicked out, and then him going into the country

and potentially being killed and potentially captured. I ask Craig if there's any way he can prove to me what he's just told me about Chris pretending that they were journalists, a text, a Facebook message, anything. He says he doesn't have anything, so it's an uncorroborated claim. But there is an email that Jeremy told me about a couple of months ago. Right. So over the past days, I've been trawling embassy in Nairobi. So that's obviously quite significant. In Chris's outbox, there's an email address to the US embassy in Kenya sent while the

fighters were detained there at the end of July 2017. That's very close to when he traveled though. 2017. That's very close to when he traveled though. Well, he arrived in Kampala the next day. Wow. Okay. Blimey. Yeah. Yeah. So he made, he, he sent an email to the embassy to say, what's up? What's going on with Alex Wevelhofer? It's from Chris, inquiring about the status of Alex Wevelhofer, one of the two people detained with Craig. So we know that Chris had made some contact on their behalf. I don't have anything else to hand in terms of the communication,

so I assume that was either by telephone, or maybe there's another email that we don't have. But certainly there was a chaser email, meaning he'd already been in contact beforehand. But certainly there was a chaser email on the 31st of July. Much of what Craig tells me about his own arrest is consistent with the FBI document I'd found a few months before, including the sworn statement by an FBI officer which outlined their trip to South Sudan. But the conversation with Craig is evidence of something else, of how intertwined his and Chris's lives were between 2015 and 2017.

I remember I told his mom when I went to his funeral, I was like, you know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I wasn't there. Because I did feel a little bit responsible for that because I wanted us to go into Uganda and link up with that team before he did. But everybody else just wanted to, you know, more or less drive us off the dam. Thanks so much for your time, Craig. Really appreciate it.

Okay, bye. That just feels very significant. I don't know how else to put it. It just, it just is it it just is a direct link between him mercenaries and the accusation of a journalist being a mercenary and vice versa And so what's the next step?

Well there's two things really, one is I need to figure out if I can what the FBI knew and when and what they thought Chris was and I also need to figure out what the FBI knew and when, and what they thought Chris was. And I also need to figure out what the South Sudanese government knew and when. And I need to figure out whether anyone can tell me what Chris said when he was contacting those embassies. But anyway, it no longer feels like the Craig Lang thing is a hunch of mine.

It feels like it's central to the story. Gary and I emerge from the hotel room and meet Jeremy for dinner. Shall I tell you about Craig Lang? Yes, please. I've made notes. There's a list of things I want to tell him, but I start with the key revelation. It was Chris who told the South Sudanese embassy

that they weren't mercenaries, they were journalists. So that came from Chris. What? Fuck. I mean, it suggests just a collaboration that is not great. I think it shows... I hate to say it, but I think it shows a real lack of judgment and I think a lack of understanding of the risks

of what getting involved with somebody like Craig in that environment might mean. All that I understand, this thing that... And I guess we sort of knew bits of, in a way. The thing that I find complicated But I understand. And I guess we sort of knew bits of, in a way. The thing that I find complicated is why Chris would have said that they were journalists. So I guess we'll just have to find out more. The claim that Chris said the fighters were journalists has never been mentioned before, not in any of the numerous conversations

that Jeremy and the family have had with embassies, the FBI or the US State Department. It's a totally new piece of information. I think the issue with the perspective that this is like a breakthrough is we're taking the word of a mercenary who's accused of doing terrible things, who, yeah, is suggesting that he's close to Chris

and being honest with you, but I don't feel like he's cut and dry a great reference point. He's a good one, but I still feel like that stuff has to be proved out. It has to be proved out, but I think at some point we have to we have to what would you in my scenario if you were saying it to me how would you respond i think i would first acknowledge that that's an enormous step and that that's a really important interview to secure and it's a

really big move forward and it's like right okay we've kind of we've gone somewhere and then i think i would um i think the reason i get tetchy is because i think that your instinctive position is to kind of push back against things that are difficult about chris or that don't you know that are going to be problematic and i totally understand why you do that but it's not what i said but it's the way it's it's how it becomes a kind of volley of like, but it could be this and it could be that, and it could be an infinite number of scenarios, but we can only go on the evidence that we've got, and the evidence is this on-the-record interview

with somebody who has no reason to lie, saying this is what happened. He might have got it mixed up. That's not evidence. But it's testimony, and journalism is a mix of evidence and testimony. And it's about balance of probabilities. And it's about what you feel.

I have to approach it from a different perspective. And I'm not a journalist. And I've only looked at stuff ever in this context through law. And it's not about balance of probabilities. It's not the test. And I know that he says that that's what he was told, but that's not evidence, you know? But you also have to imagine for me,

this is my relative, not a thing I'm reporting on. So I don't feel the same, you know, moment of revelation that you do. And I get that you do and you should. But I don't feel it like that because someone, firstly first that i knew but also that i'm related to and then i i don't know it doesn't feel i don't have those feelings i feel bad in a way that i can't sit with you and have like a eureka moment but i can't and even if we find out who killed it's not gonna be eureka moment. Yeah, because it's someone who I know that was killed.

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 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 After a long trip, we return to London, and I speak to Helena, Chris's girlfriend, who tells me that by 2017,

Chris had become a bit tired of the fighters, that he was relieved when they were finally arrested. But I know that even if he was telling her that, he was also trying to help them, jumping into action when they were arrested and detained. And then there's that rope that Chris wrote about, the one running between his two worlds, home, family, girlfriend,

and to the world of the fighters, the split personality. He is clearly conflicted. Perhaps he could feel the rope fraying, feel the rope pulling in different directions, just as he'd written. I'd like to ask Chris, did you see Craig as your ultimate story, someone you wanted to follow around the world and write about or did you see your friendship as primary i want to ask chris why the mercenary i can't ask him but there is someone else and so we travel to the kent coast in the south of england So when I was 17, my best friend had drowned,

stepped into a lake in France and that was it, died of cold water shock. And I had felt very much at the time, that's partly why I set off across Europe. I just wanted to live but you know you see your best friend die at 17 it's like okay that's like that's beyond the tragedy it's like it's destruction absolute and i just wanted to live stuff, like know what it meant to feel all the things that I knew he would never feel. Love, rage, disgust, hate, whatever.

I wanted all of it. I was like, it was like being a camera with the shutters locked back and just bleaching the film out. That's what I wanted. Be careful what you wish for. James Brabazon is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist and the author of a book, My Friend the Mercenary,

about his bond with a South African man called Nick Dutoy, a former arms dealer, fighter and coup plotter. I guess I'm here because I'm looking for a guide. I can be a very unreliable guide, but I'll do my best for you. I'm looking for a guide into difficult friendships. Right, okay, I'm reasonably good at that. I want to know if James's friendship with Nick

was like Chris's with Craig Lang. James tells me about Liberia, where he travelled with Nick in the early 2000s to report on a new rebel movement. I got really ill. I was really ill. And it's the sickest I've ever been on location. I mean, it was just...

It was rampant amoebic dysentery with no antibiotics to control it. And I'll spare your listeners a full physical description of that. But at the point at which I'd stopped shitting blood, pus and water, I was beginning to wonder whether it actually was me that wasn't going to make it. It's very, very weak. I couldn't, I wasn't strong enough to get out of my sleeping bag either. Nick would take me outside and hold me up by my wrists so I could shit into a ditch. And then he'd wipe me and put me back into my sleeping bag. And there's a point at which when you've had another man

hold you up naked by your wrist so you can shit into a ditch, you're either mates or you're not. And he sent out rebels in every direction with the remaining cash that we had to try and find anyone that would part with antibiotics. And in the end, someone came back with a tiny handful of Flagyl metronidazole. I took that and I revived very quickly. And then we continued from there down towards the front.

And already our relationship had completely changed as a result. our relationship had completely changed as a result. I think back to Chris's theory of reporting, about getting as close as possible. Craig had told me a story from the front line in which a fighter in Ukraine was seriously injured to the leg and Chris called a doctor to help him. It's like what the essay writer had said about being out there, that maybe

lives do become intertwined in a way that only makes sense on the front line. And it's a question turned over by so many war reporters, the tension at the heart of being out there. Are you in the field to bear witness, to document history, or to help? Do you observe or do you participate? Did it ever cross your mind that a man like this could not be your friend? That the things that he had done made it impossible for you to become friends with him? No. No, it never crossed my mind.

Just so I understand what kinds of things are the unconscionable things that you heard at that time you have to put this into context he was a professional soldier fighting on behalf of apartheid South Africa so the entire framework

here is a man whose entire raison d'etre is to maintain and perpetuate the apartheid state. And if you were to describe, if I said to you, who is Nick Dutoy, how would you describe him to me? He's a good man. Good man. Saved my life.

saved my life he is a thinking feeling person who changed I spent a lot of time

with Nick when eventually he was released from prison years later when the other events that followed Liberia had all played themselves out.

And there was genuine contrition. As part of doing this whole investigation, I've been talking to various different war reporters about what the rules are. What are the rules of being a war reporter? There aren't any. No? No. Not something like

never pick up a weapon, never participate. Oh man, I don't know what wars these guys were fighting. Jesus Christ. Listen, if you're,

if you are in a frontline capacity, any, in any profession, but particularly as a war reporter, there's, there will come a point at which you necessarily need to exercise your natural and inalienable right of self-defense.

It doesn't matter how you do that. The moment that you act in self-defense in a war zone, you are necessarily a participant. So the idea that you can operate in war and not participate is just the most rank, unconscionable horseshit it's possible to smell. If you're there, you're in it it and if you're in it you're participating you might not like that you might try everything possible to convince yourself it's not true but you are

objectivity forget it um we're men not gods so there is no objectivity there is no detachment the issue is irrespective of that is your work credible and authentic

that's the yardstick you have to go by are you Is your work credible and authentic? That's the yardstick you have to go by. Are you telling the truth? And... But what about the means by which you get that truth? Because it's one thing to pick up a weapon and I take your point about self-defence, but what about relationships and access and how you find yourself to be there and who who's facilitated that truth and in war there are so many competing I mean it's like I keep thinking that it's like dropping a glass

and there are just thousands of shards and you can never piece them back together in the same way because everyone has a different perspective. You sound like Pontius Pilate. Hmm? What is truth as he washes his hands? It's easier, actually, just to say, oh, there are lots of many truths. It's very hard to... It's nonsense.

You know what's true. In your heart, you know. You know what's right and what's wrong. And this is one of the great difficulties with working in war is that war is like pig iron on your moral compass. It takes an effort of will to point true. A lot of people convince themselves that they're on the side of the angels.

convince themselves that they're on the side of the angels, I guess they must try very hard not to look at themselves in the mirror. And I think that's the hardest thing about working in war, is that you have to be relentlessly, brutally honest with yourself. Maybe that is the only rule. James is totally clear-eyed about war and journalism. And so I ask him how he reckons with the violence he saw in people he liked and became close to. How do you reckon with somebody else's violence towards others when they are good to you?

One of the most horrifying things about war is that when you strip away all of the architecture and trappings of war, you see that the people that you think are sort of bloodthirsty criminals, just like you. We are all capable of it. And if the mask slips, we can all do it. That was the horror, right? And, you know, maybe Chris understood that.

Maybe he understood the compulsion for something which is like you, but not you, an alternative you, perhaps. Did you feel that? Did you ever feel capable of participating? I did participate. But in a more direct, violent way. Did you feel the... Of course.

Of course. And do you think in the end that the difference between Chris and Craig or you and Nick or any number of war reporters who have gotten close to people who are on the front lines fighting their own wars, like, is the thing that's shared the thing that keeps them together rather than the thing that, like, the line between them is very... It's very thin.

We're all flies buzzing around the same carcass. The thing is, I don't agree with James Brabazon on this point, and I'm sure he would laugh at my piety. In fact, I'm certain he would. Because I do hold on to the principles of journalism that I think matter. I don't think that we're all flies, even though I can see how complicated and how darkly intimate reporting war can be. Chris and Craig were drawn to the same place,

and their lives were clearly intertwined. But they were different. In the end, Chris decided to travel alone to South Sudan. He went with his cameras and his notebooks, not with guns and ammunition. So even if the two trips to South Sudan by the mercenaries and then by Chris were connected, they were also ultimately different. What I can now do is ask the South Sudanese government, did you connect these two trips? Did Chris really say that the fighters were journalists? And is that why Chris was called a white rebel? Next time in episode seven, Jeremy and I had made a promise to Chris's parents that we would return to Maine and tell them what we had discovered

and that moment too was nearing I need to figure it out because I can't go back to Maine and be guided by not wanting to upset his parents because the thing that I promised them in the beginning was that I would be honest. A couple of people have suggested to me that you may have information about what happened. My fear about waiting so long to do this is that when do you start believing your imagined story as truth? Craig Lang denies involvement in the 2018 Florida killings. He also denies the accusations of war crimes in Ukraine and says that U.S. authorities have refused to provide evidence to his attorneys.

He says that he is currently a refugee residing in Ukraine with his family. This series was written and reported by me, Basha Cummings. Additional investigation is by Jeremy Bliss. The producer is Gary Marshall. Additional reporting and editing by Xavier Greenwood. Additional editing by David Taylor. The sound design is by Carla Patella. The original theme is by Tom Kinsella.

With thanks to Kacper Rekavec, Christopher Miller, Charlotte Alfred, Zoe Flood, Sarah Giazzeri, Stephanie Kirschgesner and Sebastian Junger. The executive producer is Kerry Thomas. Pig Iron is a Tortoise Production. Thanks for watching!