Who Trolled Amber? - Walter's War: Episode 2 - The secret life of Walter Mitty

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Basia begins unravelling the ‘tissue of lies’, but it becomes clear that some of Oliver’s claims exist in the grey area, and in the secretive world in which he works, it’s hard to sift fact from fiction. Did he serve in the military? Is he an aristocrat? And as she traces his rise in national security, she is pulled into a bigger story – about a company, and a threat that is facing us all. The first three episodes are available to Tortoise members on the free Tortoise audio app, and subscribers to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.You can find out more about Tortoise:Download the Tortoise app - for a listening experience curated by our journalistsSubscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentBecome a member and get access to all of Tortoise's premium audio offerings and moreIf you want to get in touch with us directly about a story, or tell us more about the stories you want to hear about contact [e-mail] 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 Tortoise I can't remember if I got upset.

I think I was more just stunned. When Charlie receives that strange text message in 2013 telling her that the man she's been in love with for nine months hasn't been honest with her, she has no idea what to do. I didn't want to just go to him like a blazing rage of, oh my goodness, what have you been doing? I wanted to think a bit first. They aren't talking, they've broken up,

and she has no proof, really. Just a text from someone in British intelligence telling her her boyfriend didn't go to Harrow School, his father isn't a lord, and he didn't serve in the Grenadier Guards. She tries to figure out what it might mean, what it was for, and for that she needs time. So she goes back to her old job, which she still hates, and resumes her life. Weeks pass. The fact that I didn't get vetting meant that I didn't get the job, which was a massive disappointment to me. And then I decided to confront him about it. On a weekend that she knows he'll be in London,

she messages him. And I had said, can I come and see you? And he'd kind of tried to palm me off a bit and been like, oh no, I'm really tired. And then I was just like, no. And I said to him, there's something I want to talk to you about. He agrees to meet, but now he's a mystery. He really is a character from a book. And with that mystery comes fear. She tells a couple of her close friends that she's going to meet him in Kennington, in South London,

near a pub that they used to go to. I really don't think he had a clue what I was going to tell him. He looked a bit concerned, in a way that you might if you thought somebody was going to say, I'm having your baby. I sat next to him and I just said to him I know I know about all the lies that you've been telling me and his face just went white the blood just drained out of him. His face tells Charlie that he knows what she's about to say.

And so, sitting on a bench, he tries to explain. He didn't deny it at all. He was like, I'm really, really sorry. I'm so sorry. He didn't try to deny anything. But what starts as an uncomplicated admission, yes, I haven't been truthful with you, turns into something more revealing. And then I was kind of asking him like where did it come from like why did you start doing this and he started to psychoanalyze himself a little bit and then it was really weird to me because

a story that he used to psychoanalyze himself happened to be a story from my back catalogue of family stories, if you like, that I had told him before. Months earlier, Charlie had told him something about her own life, that her grandfather was an American GI who had come over to the UK during World War II and had gotten her grandmother pregnant. Oliver had never before signalled to her that this was true of his family too. But now he was telling a similar story back to her.

Oh, and I said to him, what, like my grandfather? And he was like, hmm. It felt like he had just remembered the story from somewhere, stored it up, used it again and forgotten it was my story. And that when I just said to him, oh, that's my story, right? He was like, oh, yeah, like the same, yeah. That's what it felt like. I asked if it might be an insight into the way that he tells stories. Yeah, I think he kind of takes bits from other people.

No confrontation is ever as satisfying or complete as you imagine it in your mind. If Charlie had gone to that park in South London hoping for a definitive answer, well, she was only halfway there. Oliver admits that he's lied throughout their relationship, but she's no closer to understanding why, or where the fiction ends and the truth begins. So she switches modes. It was such an overload of stuff,

and about how tired he was through it all. And I just went into this mode that was like, be super caring, be really empathetic. It wasn't, hang on a minute. I was just like, oh gosh, that must be so awful. Yeah, that's really hard. That was kind of how we left it. And maybe'd said to him you need to change because I remember things like his LinkedIn were just like blatant lies on his LinkedIn like where he'd gone to

school and university and stuff and I was like maybe you need to change a few of these things and he's like yeah I should start there. Ever since that night Charlie's wondered about that line between truth and lies in the life of a man who went on to work in government and the civil service and intelligence and now at companies that are focused on national security. I'm Basia Cummings, and from Tortoise, this is Walter's War. Episode 2, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I've investigated a missing ship, a wrongful murder conviction, a terror attack, a suspicious killing in the fog of war. But I don't know Oliver's new world, artificial intelligence and the military. I'm calling because I need to fact check. And since I began reporting, it's become clear that this is a world that likes its secrecy.

Defense agencies will be very secretive. that likes its secrecy. Defense agencies will be very secretive. Partly because of what's classified, what's hidden behind the machinery of the military and defense, where knowledge is closely guarded. Where nothing is confirmed or denied. These are worlds that exempt themselves from the public interest.

And partly because this itself is a world of stories. The economy of AI right now is not a story of super powerful technologies. It's a story of really successful marketing and design. Where, as I got deeper in, I started to think that even the main characters, the builders of these worlds, don't quite know where the stories end and the truth begins. It is because we are in a scenario where these technologies and their utility, their actual strategic and tactical utility, are very much hypothetical. So anything goes. I started tracing what Oliver did next,

after that cold park bench meeting. How the next seven years of this man's career led him to found a billion-dollar startup. And the curious thing is, he really has been back and forth to Afghanistan. He has been in the room with important and intelligent thinkers about war and technology. And he really has thought deeply about the impact

that artificial intelligence is going to have on our lives. So while he may not have served in the Grenadier Guards, Oliver is interested in war. He's undertaken research and convened events and thought about where conflict is going, where it's taking us. Apparently overselling himself to partners and friends doesn't override those facts. But there is this other layer, a layer of wishful thinking that seems to run beneath it all. After studying at Leicester and Aberystwyth universities, he began working with a research

centre in Oxford called the Changing Character of War Centre. It's a meeting place for important academics and military experts, doctors, commanders, brigadiers, colonels, who are all taking on different research projects. He also stayed connected to Cambridge, where he was doing a PhD on elite transnational groups. Someone who knew him at the time told me they thought that meant spies and diplomats and espionage. And I started to contact some of his circle of friends from the time to find out who Oliver was back then. They were all studying there too,

and they knew him to be this thoughtful literary type, someone who enjoyed the fantasy and the magic of being in Cambridge. And one person who knew about the untruths said something that struck me. They said that they too had seen his career climb since Cambridge, but that he, quote, seemed to always be working for these companies or on projects with names that sort of seemed to tell on him. And when I realised where he started working next, I understood exactly what they meant. Now, you're probably all wondering, what is this? In 2015, Oliver joined an exciting new start-up.

The company was called Improbable. We wanted the experiences that we'd read about in books or imagined in fantasy to actually be games. It was founded by a computer science graduate, Herman Nerula, the son of a billionaire construction magnate, and his friend, Rob Whitehead, who'd made extra cash during his studies by selling virtual weapons in Second Life,

the huge digital universe inhabited by avatars. Together with the help of some of Herman's family money, these two gaming enthusiasts started Improbable with a very particular mission, to build new worlds. And we're not talking about virtual reality with headsets and consoles, how quaint. Improbable was talking about simulations, simulated cities that could model the behaviour of millions of people. This was a metaverse company before Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg tried to make meta happen.

And it was a successful idea. And we're now actually in active operational use in the UK government in supporting the simulation of conflict zones, cyber resilience. Within three years, Improbable had raised 20 million from investors with cash coming from one of the most respected Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz. I mean, to be honest, we were kind of idiots when we started this company. I think Rob, me and the others would agree.

We were all computer scientists. We all graduated out of Cambridge. We thought we could solve any problem, do anything. People liked the cheekiness, the sense of irony. Even the name was a bit of a joke. Herman Nerula told Wired magazine with a grin, By 2015, the company wanted to expand into selling its software simulations to the military. And that year, after being introduced by some of its investors, the company confirmed to me that Oliver was essentially hired to make connections.

That it appeared that he was well-placed to make links with senior military figures. And he invited some of the improbable management to a strategy forum at Oxford University. But it was a start-up, so he ended up doing a bit of everything, even if, by his own admission, he didn't totally understand how it all worked. did land some military deals, including one training contract in the US. And in fact, the company did go on to become a unicorn, landing a $500 million investment from the Japanese fund SoftBank. And it was in this environment, building worlds and artificial realities, that Oliver appeared to develop a more professional interest in storytelling. So if you're going to tell me all about the various aspects

of artificial intelligence and virtual reality and say this is coming and it's going to change the world, my eyes might glaze over. But if you give me a story... February 2017, Warner Brothers Studios in Los Angeles. Some of the biggest names in film and tech and the military get together to talk about artificial realities and storytelling. We're at Warner Brothers Studios and we're putting on a two-day event that brings together leading technologists,

policy makers and officials alongside the creative industry. So people from film, games, music and authors, to discuss some of the most pressing issues of the near future. This is an event in part organised by Oliver, and there are movie studio bosses and directors and software engineers and military figures who are getting together to ask, how do we use tech to help society and not get lost in, quote, abstraction and fakery? For a man accused just a few years before

of weaving an intricate tissue of lies, it all seems quite on the nose. The stories, the simulations. I can see what Oliver's friend had meant when they said to me that these things seemed to tell on him. So just how much is improbable about Oliver himself? I kept returning to that phrase from the text message to Charlie, a tissue of lies. And it doesn't mean, as you might first think, something that's flimsy or thin. It comes from a 14th century meaning for tissue, which means an intricate ornamental cloth.

So that phrase, a tissue of lies, it actually means untruths that are complex, interwoven, stitched together. So I returned to his CV. A month after speaking with Charlie, I sat down with my colleague Xavier Greenwood and some big sheets of paper. And over three days, we pulled together a list of all the claims that we could find

about Oliver's life and his work, noting all the variations in description and language, and we ended up with pages and pages to fact-check. We knew that he didn't have a quintuple-barrelled surname, but where did that come from? We knew that his dad wasn't a lord. But had he been in combat, even if his claim of being part of an elite British infantry unit had been untrue, had he maybe served in some other unit. And then there were newer things. In some places, he said that he'd been twice deployed to Afghanistan as an intelligence officer, elsewhere as an academic advisor,

somewhere else a principal advisor to the brigade commander. Then we found another claim that he'd been a reserve intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force. I'm very pleased to introduce and welcome Oliver Lewis, who is one of the three co-founders of Rebellion Defence. Rebellion is at the cutting edge of technology. All of this matters, because on the slick website for Rebellion Defence, the company selling artificial intelligence to militaries, he was described as these things and more. And then have just finished as the Deputy Director of the UK Government Digital Service.

As the Deputy Director of the British Government's Digital Service. And elsewhere as an editor for a major academic publisher, where he was listed as a doctor. And the reason why we think this is important... I watched videos of him speaking, and in one he's in front of a House of Lords select committee on tech and defence, making recommendations to politicians. It takes trusted networks back into the system

and critically for tech startups, it takes... In another panel discussion, he talks about his intelligence background. Yeah, so as an academic, an intelligence officer... He so clearly fits the part. But maybe that's the point. Like the heroes in the novels of John le Carré and Ian Fleming, there's something archetypal about Oliver's character. A man, you fool, don't you understand?

A plain, simple, muddled, fat-headed human being. We have them in the West, you know. That's what it's all about. Is that why you've become a spy? Proper, honourable, trustworthy. A character that we all know and love. And at times, he seemed to be playing with the idea that he was a character. In an old Twitter bio, he said that he's pretending to be an intellectual.

And in a piece of research at an American university, he planned to write a paper on the line between fiction and reality. he planned to write a paper on the line between fiction and reality. So I made some calls. Cambridge University confirmed he didn't finish his PhD. OK, thank you. So there's nothing on the system. OK, all right. Thank you so much for confirming that. It seemed that he dropped out around 2012, so he wasn't a doctor. But we found five places where, as recently as last year, he was listed as one,

including at a NATO conference in London. And it appeared that he didn't study at Oxford, despite the fact that on an academic paper that he co-wrote, published by Oxford University Press, it said that he had. I spoke to others who confirmed he had been in Afghanistan, in Helmand, but as a civilian, not a soldier. civilian, not a soldier. Lying is a blunt term, but untruths, misrepresentations, stories, inference, they're softer terms. They give things a wider birth. This was The Tissue, interwoven, intricate. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

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

Acast.com There's one photograph in particular that seems to sum up the version of Oliver that he wanted to project, taken, I think, at a ball in Cambridge in 2013. He's standing on a bridge, dressed in a smart black suit and bowtie, and he's looking at the camera, smiling gently, holding a glass of what looks like champagne, and on his lapel are two medals. It's an easy place to start, with the simple question, are those medals his? I took the photograph to Mark Smith, a military expert and a regular fixture on the Antiques Roadshow. I was expecting a quick identification, but instead... When I was small, my bedtime stories from my lovely old dad were not necessarily the normal stories that one got.

My dad was a wireless operator air gunner during World War II. So when it was bedtime and he was going to tell me the story, he would get his logbook off of the bookcase and we would choose a raid to somewhere and then me and my dad basically would go on the raid together and he would tell me the raid together and he would tell me the story of the whole trip there and back i used to go down to see his mum my nan on a friday afternoon after school most weeks and in the parlor a very victorian lady my name

in the parlor there was a sideboard and in the sideboard was a box and inside the box were my dad's medals we're set my producer gary and, at the end of a big wooden table, just listening. I have always been fascinated by these things because one day dad said to me, we've got a new medal and what we used to do is we used to get the book and then I would write into my logbook, as it were, what we just bought. Where did we buy it, how much it was. This particular medal was for somewhere called Muhammad. And he would then say, well, where is it?

So we would go and get the atlas. So now you're learning how to use an atlas. And then once we'd found out where it was, he would say, well, what's the climate like? Well, it's India, so it's hot and it's jungles and tigers. And when you found out where it was, it wasia so it's as hot and it's jungles and tigers and when you found out where it was it was right up on the northwest front and it was snowing you know so how did you get the guns up there who were you fighting and then one day my dad said to

me so why do you think this man joined the army so i'm 10 so i said well you know he wanted to be a hero you know have a gun you know he's a soldier and my dad said yeah maybe but um do you know what maybe he was just hungry and that was the only job he could get. And that was the moment when the people who owned the medals became real people and I wanted to find out who they were and what they did. For Mark, a medal isn't a symbol, it's a story about a moment in time and about a person. And so it really matters who's wearing it. And every single person who has a medal, which is exactly the same medal as everybody else it has a completely different story and that's the fascinating bit it's the people and medals mean different things to

different people because medals have a life of their own they are very very emotive things emotive things. And in terms of your sort of expertise, have you got a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of medals and ribbons and you can identify things from just looking at them or do you have indexes and how does it work in terms of identifying what things are and giving them a value? If it's British, I just know. Well, that's music to my ears. Can I show you some pictures? Yes. So Mark leans in close to examine the piece of paper that I've just handed to him.

Are we going to say that that thing there is gold? Yes, I believe it is gold. So this is a civilian member of the Order of the British Empire? An OBE. It's an OBE. It's for doing something good. And this isn't a military one. This is a civilian one. An Order of the British Empire Civil Division, awarded to people who've made major contributions at a local level

or whose work has gained national recognition. And the second one was a civilian medal too. Is that the green and the blue? That's the... Afghanistan. Afghanistan, OK. That tallies... Afghanistan, yes? That's the... Afghanistan. Afghanistan, OK. That tallies... Afghanistan, yes, that's what that is.

So this one, I think, so just to give you some more context, so the person in these photographs has claimed that they served in Afghanistan as a civilian twice, and so that one, I think, tallies the possibility. As does that, because that's not military. Yes, but that is... For somebody who, as I i understand it was fairly junior in just look him up yeah no no i know he was junior he no no look him up this has to be gazetted that has to be in the london gazette okay it has to be and what is that

the london gazette yeah that's that's a publication which has been going since about 1660 Okay. It has to be. And what is that? The London Gazette. Yes. That's a publication which has been going since about 1660. And it records births, deaths, marriages, probates, companies going bankrupt, and for the military, promotions, awards, and civilian awards as well. Okay. So there should be a record of it. You cannot get an OBE unless you are in the London Gazette. We tried to look it up, but the website wouldn't load.

And as we kept trying to refresh it, I asked Mark about a name that he'd mentioned when we were setting up for our interview. What was the word that you used earlier, the name for people who... Walter. Tell me what that is. Walter Mitty, man who makes up stories. It's a reference to a short story published in The New Yorker in the 1930s.

The full title, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And it's about a man who invents many different lives for himself. A fighter pilot, an assassin, a surgeon. Captain Mitty, ace of aces. Dr M pilot, an assassin, a surgeon. This was the second time that the name had been mentioned to me. But he's just kind of like a Walter Mitty character. In the military in particular, a Walter or walt is someone who invents an impressive career or wears medals that they haven't earned. And it is, it turns out, a pretty well-known term.

The answer is right in this. The answer is right here. Okay. He has to be in this list. So annoying. Does it usually work? Yeah, instantly. Every time.

Classic. Every single time. Classic. Every single time. You just press the button and away you go. Okay, so I'm just going to try one more thing. So later I tried to search the website again. Okay, so I've searched the London Gazette website. I've also downloaded the full list of honours around the time that I think he would have had to have been awarded it if he was going to be wearing that medal at the time that he was.

He isn't anywhere here. He's not on the website, he's not on the lists. It really doesn't look to me from what I can tell that he was awarded that medal. I guess the picture could be from a fancy dress party, but it seemed unlikely. More likely was that Oliver knew exactly the symbols to draw on to ease his way through a particular world.

Private school, aristocracy, military, medals, how to signal class and inspire confidence. As I carried on down the list of claims to check, I started making calls to the civil service and to the cabinet office. I wanted to check that he was the deputy director of the British government's digital service. It's a big and impressive-sounding job, and it's the last job that he held

before he catapulted into rebellion and the world of VC investors and unicorns. But quickly, I found a glitch. It was made clear to me that there are many, many deputy directors at that level in the civil service. And a quick search on LinkedIn reveals many of them listed there. And it appeared, from what I could find online, that Oliver was specifically the deputy director within a specific team,

learning and development. So while he presented himself as the deputy of the entire thing, the number two, the reality seemed quite different. It wasn't all untrue. That was clear. He has been in Afghanistan. He has performed public service. And even without the exaggerations of a PhD and more, he has had an impressive career. So I returned, really, to Charlie's question. Why? Why the untruths? And maybe more importantly, why wasn't anyone else checking? So I emailed him. It felt like the right moment. I wanted to know what was true and how he thought of his relationship with Charlie and, I suppose, his relationship with the truth.

And then I called him, and I told him fully about what I was trying to do, to understand how the story of a young man and a young woman on a park bench ten years ago snowballs into the world of big tech and big cash and good stories. Hi Oliver, it's Besha calling from Tortoise. I explained that I knew this was complex and sensitive, and I explained that I thought it would be easier to meet in person, to talk about it all, rather than just sending a blunt set of questions.

But he didn't want to meet. And I suspect that he would think that some of this is superficial and semantic, whether a person was a deputy or the deputy, for example. But I don't agree. I think it matters who we say we are and what we say we do. And then have just finished as the deputy director of the UK Government Digital Service. Because he played these jobs and these versions of himself into a much bigger thing. A tech startup working in building software for national defence.

Into the company that he co-founded, Rebellion Defence, and into the orbit of Google's ex-CEO, Eric Schmidt, one of the most powerful men in America, at a time when AI is going to war. You try and do something and then correct when it goes wrong because it will go wrong but we won't be able to design for perfection. So it really matters what's true and it matters who's checking what's true. In a highly volatile, dynamic war context where the enemy is always out to subvert your action and create subterfuge, it is not yet clear whether an AI system is reliable or trustworthy or good enough.

Because the consequences extend far, far beyond a young man and a young woman on a park bench. Next, in Walter's War. It's a really scary concept to think of someone who has manufactured military experience be involved with influencing the use of AI. I don't want to feel like I have blood on my hands, but I do a little bit. And so it matters, like who's in the room. It matters who is in the room when decisions are being made that impact people's lives. Xavier Greenwood and Imogen Harper. Sound design is by Carla Patella. With thanks to Laura Nolan, Christian Ennemark, Dr Peter Asaro and Kashmir Hill. We hope you're enjoying this series.

Make sure that you follow the feed so you don't miss another episode and check out Tortoise's other award-winning investigative series while you wait for next week's episode.