The verge | Ep 5

I've never figured out exactly how Rob Moore managed to record so many conversations without people realising what he was up to, but he did, and he did it pretty well. Sometimes you have to concentrate hard to hear what's going on, but when he's in a quiet place, like K2's offices in London talking to his hand-limitator, Begatsy, there are moments when he could almost be in the room. Rob's just back from a trip to a conference in Vietnam about us best off, among other things, with a tale to tell. There's a moment when it sounds as if he shifts away from the microphone because the recording gets fainter. Something happened in Vietnam, which frightened the life out of him. He has a knock on the door of the Airbnb where he's staying, very late one night. He appears through the spy hole and he can't see anyone. So he rings the owner. So it's not a local heavy trying to put the frighten on him. It's someone who's come to clean the room and she's too shy to knock again and too short to spot through the spy hole. Panic over for the moment, but things are about to spin out of control. Rob's taking the Mickey adv himself of course, but it's obvious from this and other conversations that he also wants Begatsy to know he's getting more and more scared as Project Spring goes on, or more paranoid. And alongside that deliberate revelation, there's another of those unintentional ones, Roblet's slip now and then. He talks about the night manager, the BBC thriller which came out not long before he went to Vietnam. And it fits with a pattern. There always seems to be a TV series or a film or a book to compare his life to. There was Agent Zigzag, the Dallas-Bias club, now the night manager. Rob seems to be forever casting himself in someone else's drama. Maybe it's part of seeing yourself as a double agent, almost like being in two places at once, in the real world and slightly outside it at the same time. Running a life like that creates a danger. It means Rob can tell himself a grander and grand a story about what he's doing. It's further and further removed from what everyone else thinks he's up to. It's a recipe for starting with a huge gap between how you see yourself and how the world sees you by telling yourself and only you, you're a double agent. Then step by step, turning that into a gulf that can never be bridged. And from there into a catastrophe. That's the story of Rob's downfall, I think. I'm Kerry Thomas and from Tortoise, this is Into the Dirt, Episode 5. There are nine words Rob said to me once which sum up why he says he's so frustrated with the way his life came crashing down around him when projects spring unraveled. And why the world has found it so difficult to believe him. We were on the verge of doing great things, always on the verge. In four years on projects spring never quite getting there. You never actually filmed with him. Did you? It was quite early day, didn't you? I didn't record anything with him. Yeah. It's true the documentary he's working on with Dan Reed as well. It was very sort of preliminary. But I was sort of saying to him, look, if we're going to do something, we've got to crack on and start filming. It isn't that nothing's happening, but Dan Reed and Rob talk about making you feel for more than a year and talking is as far as they get. It's all a bit sporadic and there's a lot to think about. And I wrote, I was wondering whether you'd be the right person to give advice on the potential consequences for a private sector whistleblower. This is an email from Dan Reed to a well-known media lawyer called Mark Steen. He's obviously considering his options right now, but feels that he will soon have no other option than to come out. And when he does, he wants to do so with as much impact as possible on the nefarious activities he seeks to highlight. So together, Dan Reed and Rob go to get some advice. Can't play any of what Mark Steen says in that meeting because he goes out of his way to say right at the start that it's private and confidential. He doesn't know he's being recorded and he wouldn't let it happen if Rob had asked. Rob presses record anyway. And Mark Steen's doesn't even know who he's really talking to because Rob isn't introduced to him as Rob Moore. He uses one of his old stage names and his brass ideas in comedy. But what we're here to ask about is primarily what would be the consequences legally for Fergus if he steps out into the open and goes, this is what I've been doing. The advice from Mark Steen is tough. No amount of legal support could help him or media attention could help him. There's an urgent readout by the lifts on the way out. They're outside now and the car game pass makes it hard to hear what Dan Reed's saying. But he's telling Rob not to take the talk of assassination literally. It wasn't meant like that. It was more that his life would be attacked in a whole bunch of ways. Dan Reed didn't know any more than the lawyer Mark Steen's did that he was being secretly recorded that day. When I told him recently he was really unimpressed. He and Rob hadn't got far at all with making a film. As it turns out Rob never manages to get off the brink or across that gulf. He created. These days he talks about the film with Dan Reed as if it was definitely happening when in truth it was a long way from being made. Rob says the idea of making it died that day of the meeting with Mark Steen's. Dan thinks it didn't come to stop there and then it just fizzled out. Either way that day was as close as they ever got. He was in the middle of everything. All the campaigners, the major campaigners, everyone knew him as far as I could tell. As the clock ticks down towards Rob's cover being blown he's become a fixture on the anti-espistor scene. One of us to Harminder Baines and Krishnan-Dum Mukherjee, the campaigning lawyers. Both Rory and Krishan Dormakshi thought of him as a brother as a friend and he'd been invited into their homes and he'd been recording conversations they'd had with them. He was deep. It's a feat of endurance staying in the game as long as Rob does but he doesn't know how much longer he can keep it up if the client stops paying the bills. So he does what he does so often and talks to one of his buddies friends about it. All through 2015 and 2016 Rob is checking in with the Buddhist to make sure it's okay to keep going on the asbestos job. Not long after Ketu Warnrob the client might not pay for projects bring for much longer in the spring of 2015 his thoughts turn to the idea of setting up his own anti-espistor's charity and they stay there for the rest of his time on the job. And I suggested this to the agency. I'd justification to the agency was, "Oh well you start with your charity, we'll find out if he gives us." It's one of the ways the gulf between him and the campaigners opens up even wider because it's audacious. Up till now Rob sold himself as a TV producer. Now he's asking to be accepted as an activist and one with enough stature to run his own charity. He tells Ketu about the charity and he tells them it's a real thing not a cover. I personally at that time didn't know of any anti-espistor's charity. us charities spreading knowledge of contains of spestos in the Asian country I just didn't know. A charity needs trustees to oversee it the more high profile the better your chances are being taken seriously so Rob starts recruiting a galaxy of great and good anti-aspestos campaigners for his I come into bains. It'd been in the back of my mind to try and do something about it so when he just popped up and said this I thought wow he seems to be driving it I'll I'll help him. Krishna new Mukaji in Roryo nearly academic and anti-aspestos activist sign up as well. One aspect as a charity was medical camps which are vital in the in the Indian context and global self-context I mean all of that was good to hear and you thought what the world needs that another aspect of charity I have those space for it to do to do something. Whilst that specific is being marketed and sold then yeah there's definitely an age for it so yeah it seemed like a good idea. What's obvious from everything they said and did is that none of the trustees were suspicious about Rob setting up a charity not at the time anyway. And it's really interesting this charity thing because I know to start with you are thinking that's surely all fake and certainly given that I set up fake charities on brass I to lure celebrities and politicians and people into d'arthed ideas. I certainly could have done set things up like that but when you look at what it was I set up how I use the donations who I'd got on the team to then lead the way I basically had put the greatest campaigners I could find in charge raise money to fund to investigate the client. In a sense the story of the charity is the whole of Robberstory boiled down. He starts thinking about it in early 2015 but even by the time he has his cover blown as a spy a year and a half later he hasn't got it off the ground. He hires those trustees he makes a website but he never manages to register the charity with the charity commission. So the best you can say is it was a nearly charity never the real thing. No wonder Rory, Harminder and Krishnan do the real campaigners are scathing. Do you think now looking back that there was something really going on there something to a genuine attempt to set up a charity? No there was no attempt to set up a charity at all. But when you had trusty meetings isn't it? Yeah you can have meetings about anything at any time it doesn't mean that anything's happening. It could have been useful but I don't think with hindsight that was the purpose I think it was to create a new narrative. I think his story was wearing thin he'd got all the information he should have needed to develop a story based on what we told him already and so now there was a new angle, a big sexy new angle. But for Rob the length he goes to the people he gets to help all the conversations he has about it their proof, irrefutable proof of his intentions that he meant to turn poison into medicine even if he didn't manage it. And when he makes that argument at least when he comes to the charity there's something which does seem to weigh in his favour. Because late in 2015 the client do stop paying K2 the corporate investigations agency for project spring for a time anyway they pull the funding but Rob keeps trying to set up the charity regardless. He might still be doing it for his own benefit but there and then it's hard to see how he's doing it for the client or K2. If it's poison it's not their poison. It would be easy to get lazy telling Rob's story. I don't think I'm particularly motivated by money. He's just someone who's just you know he did it for the money, simple as that. Have Rob say his intentions were good get a campaigner to say they don't believe him it can turn into a kind of ping pong and it doesn't help you understand very much in the end. There are a couple of big pieces of Rob's story his version of it anyway which he works on in 2015 and 2016 as his time on project spring is racing to a close. They're important and I'm just going to tell them straight. When Rob tells his story now he puts them at the heart of his case. It's not where Humminder Baines, Rorio Neal or Christian Andrew Mukaji would put them but you know that by now. The last two pieces of Rob's story go hand in hand and together they add up to that theory of everything. He says he worked out in his last year on project spring. It's a theory about how corrupt Yesbestos trade is and how far it's got its tentacles into a country like Vietnam. The first piece is some work he does to understand how abestos is shipped from Kazakhstan and Russia. The Global Supply Chain Report is a pretty forensic analysis and the second is a meeting with a real estate agent in a mid-twenties in the capital of Vietnam Hanoi. It's wonderful, beautiful girl who happened to work from a state agent. I've taken out the name of Rob's friend and translator and where she worked because leaving them in makes me nervous. But Rob has already started work on my Global Supply Chain Report months before he meets her. Rob takes money from Laurie Kersen Allen that campaigned that he was sent to investigate first of all on project spring and another activist to pay for the report. He hires an old anti-Sbestos hand at guy called Bill Lawrence to do most of the spade work. Once you've read the entirety of this report it becomes clear that there are vast profits being made through fraud and that this is being instigated at every stage of the Global Supply Chain and it seems in every area. So that's the first half of the theory of everything. Rob can see how much whiterbestos is being shipped from Russia and Kazakhstan to Vietnam and he thinks he can see the price being rigged while it's at sea. This is new information that no one's uncovered before. The second half of the theory of everything comes in Rob's conversation with the young real estate agent. Through that conversation and some documents he lays his hands on Rob believes he sees a whole web of connections. They are also contributing to the profits. Is that right? Because they hire themselves. They've been property deals. Banks being propped up corrupt relationships within government and foreign businesses. Just how much Vietnam is in Hawk to the Asbestos trade. The purpose of the Supply Chain report, the purpose of investigating the corruption was that if you could show that this enormously influential business had this much sway within a nation that could persuade the government not even to act in its own citizens' health, that it might be embarrassing for a government to continue doing joint ventures with companies you can show how the money laundering is actually happening. Rob's theory of everything is a towering thing and he holds it up passionately even now. It's not just what's happening in Vietnam he says. It's a template for all the other countries where Asbestos hasn't been banned. But like every tower that ever was you need to look at the foundations and when half of the theory of everything is based on the conversation with a 20-something estate agent I've never wanted to lean on it too heavily. The beginning of the end of Rob's story is at the booking office restaurant at St. Pancre station in London where he meets Simon Taylor from Global Witness on June 1, 2016. We can get the agency to face it. They know that I'm a member of meeting you. That was all of my car. From there until the curtain finally starts to come down at the Royal Court of Justice, there's a little over four months. Things happen slowly at first and very fast indeed. And to say Rob is bitter about it all would be an understatement. We were on the verge of doing great things. Lead A-Cumman is coming with this bullshit thing that I'm this completely cynical, ruthless, cowardly, evil, false Buddhist manipulator of people for my own control. Some sort of character trait that I mean when I just love manipulating people. This awful despicable person who used his sister's name to try to persuade campaigners that he was a good person. Lead A is the legal firm where Harminder Baines, the campaigner and lawyer works. Rob nurses a sort of hatred for them that really isn't too strong a word. But of course they don't start his fall from grace. Global Witness do that. Rob we felt was not in a position to guarantee he hadn't put people at risk. And because he was carrying. From the moment Rob puts his offer to be a double agent for Global Witness to Simon Taylor and tells him about his four years undercover among the anti-Sbestos campaigners, Global Witness fret about how much of a risk he is to campaign as in dangerous countries, like Vietnam, India or Thailand. Eventually they're pretty clear. With everything Rob knows and all the information he's passed back to K2, even if he's convinced himself it's harmless. He hasn't only been a risk to people on the ground. He still is one. And because he was carrying on going, we felt that to stop. When we put it to him that we couldn't go ahead and that by the way we think you should come clean to the anti-Sbestos people, he said he wasn't able to do it. So that just felt like that for me just reinforced the sense, well you've been out this for four years and you've tried to sell this story that it's all benign but actually you don't really want to stop. Rob hates Global Witness as much as he hates Lee Day. His feelings flare up. In a document he puts together setting out a timeline of everything he does on projects. Spring after it's all over. It's sober and factual. But when Rob gets to mention global witness, he can't even write down their real name. He writes global shitness. After the meeting in the booking office, global witness have got three options. They can go with Rob's plan to run him as a double agent and we know they don't want to do that. They can turn down his offer but keep his story to themselves, don't expose him. All there's option three. They can do what they did. Turn him down and blow his cover. There's two variations of the third. One, we could have blown him out the water with a press release. We didn't do that. We chose to go to a lawyer, someone who was supposed to be a trustee of the charity he set up. And that's who got the information because it seemed to us appropriate that a lawyer should handle what to do about this. So that's what global witness do. I'm in derbained at Leadeh gets the call telling you that Rob's aspire on the 26th of September 2016. Then things move fast. October the 12th is Rob's first day in court. Because it's not a crime to tell the world you're a documentary maker if that's not the whole truth or not to tell people you're working for K2 when you are, the charges against him ought to do with mishandling personal information. I'm in derbained this personal information. Rorio Niels, they become some of the claimants in the case against Rob. So does Laurie Casan-Aber? I'm in derbained at Leadeh's phone in Lorry and telling her that I've been guilty of the greatest betrayal. And that's the story that's established. I write something in peace. I give her as much time and decil as you need. Lich and I literally want to come and defend. Very different story. And all of those things, they're no longer in Spongy report. In the two weeks between getting found out in his first day in court, Rob tries to persuade Leadeh to listen to him. To do what I've spent the chunk of the last three years doing in effect. He wants them to talk to him, go through all the documents and recordings, and in the end believe him when he says he was trying to turn poison into medicine. So I was looking forward to being able to talk to them. And yeah, I just thought, well, it's going to be the beginning of a painful process. But if we can keep it out of the courts, then K2 will never find out. And then the client won't find out. Because that was my overriding fear. So I'm very alarmed at this stage. But it's not about Leadeh. And it's not about the fact I've got tough questions to answer. Because I can answer them. I mean, I just assumed that there would be some space to talk to people. It's a big ask. More than that, really. It's a completely unrealistic ask. The anti-espesto campaigners have just found out Rob's been working for K2. They don't know what information he's passed back to them. They don't know what risks he's created for them or people in Vietnam, Thailand or anywhere else. Are they really going to spend weeks maybe longer trying to understand if he's a good guy? Or are they going to shut him down as fast as they can? In the end, the legal action against Rob that kicks off in October 2016 takes a little over two years to play out. Mateo Bigazzi, Rob's handler, and K2 become part of it as well. There's a series of hearings before it's all resolved. Different judges come and go. And three key moments. First, Rob is served with an injunction, part of shutting him down. Shutting down the risk the anti-espesto campaigners think he represents. And what did the injunction prevent you from doing? What was it? The injunction categorised. I had to hand over all my evidence, really. So any conversations with campaigners, anything to do with campaign, emails, all my camera rushes, all my video rushes, obviously there was everything I'd shared with K2 that was injunctive, but that's expected back. So I literally had nothing left. I had to hand it all over to my lies. And they were going to destroy it, but fortunately we managed to win that one over a period of a year to not have it destroyed. But it was a fight from the beginning. Second, Rob says K2 make him an offer. My lawyer said that K2's lawyers had said if I was to align my defence with theirs, they would pay all the costs and everything. It was impossible to do because in order for me to align my defence with K2, I would effectively be lining it with the industry, I felt. And it would mean that I'd have to, I presume, aligning one's defence would mean not telling people what actually happened because my actual defence, it doesn't read well, it isn't very good for K2, because obviously it looks like they've just got completely loose cannon in the shop. And no one giving him any oversight and he'd done all of these things, some of which were of extreme embarrassment to K2. So I turned it down, Matt was, I think it's an important point in your favour, because it would have preserved you financially. But I was convinced about what I'd done, say, yeah, it was just something I couldn't do. Not being able to speak to explain what really happened to people who you really love is a very weird situation to be in. But you know, this was a thing that I had given my life for really, so in terms of setting up a charity and continuing to investigate the client and continuing to work with campaigns, all of that was destroyed. And the third key moment is that eventually K2 offered to settle the case, to stop everything playing out in an open court. It's what anyone who knows their way around the legal system would expect K2 to do, and it creates a dilemma with people like Harminder Baines on the other side of it. So you launched the legal action. Do you launch it assuming that you're going to go to trial or.? Yes, which is why I was annoyed when it settled because I wanted to go to trial. And I wanted to see the defendants, including Rob Moore, Matt O'Bagatt, see, I wanted to see them because I wanted more information about who the ultimate client was. We never got that. So it took me through the decision to settle in rather than go to trial? Well, you disinditigation if the other side makes an offer. And it's the offer which you will not beat if you go ahead with the trial. You are at risk of costs. So they made an offer which we could not accept it. We had to accept it because we would not have gotten any better. And if we had proceeded to trial, there was a risk that we would have lost at court, and then we would have had to pay the cost there. Do you think to this day those things that you might have found out? Yes. You do. There was a lot more to learn. But that's why I think, obviously, that's why defendants make offers to settle. You know, pay damages because they don't want this information to get answered public domain. They wouldn't have made, they wouldn't have settled the case. They wouldn't have offered to make, you know, why would they? If they were telling the truth and they hadn't spied and there was nothing that they had done which is unlawful, why would they have settled and made those offers of damages? Yeah. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Rob complains violently that the legal action against him wasn't interested in that. It's why he hates legal action so much. Yeah, I had effectively handed legal action on a plate. They then do their action. Let the client know that the person they'd been funding for four years was in fact, you know, gathering evidence to expose them, that, you know, this bullshit that he'd been sending through to them with a lot of it was made up. You know, they were, they tipped off the client that there was an inside guy who was trying to sort of expose them. So, and who benefits from the charity was destroyed. If you run, if you try to replay both sides, that's the risk you run in the end they both turn on you. His feelings about lawyers pour out of Rob every time we talk. Interestingly, in all the days we spent together, he's hardly ever complained about K2, hardly ever. Morally, he puts them in a different place. And although he accepts he made mistakes, he doesn't seem that his plan was bound to go wrong in the end, with or without the lawyers. Of course, it's clear dated. Yeah, but yeah, of course, but they said it would be for the wrong reasons. Yeah, and the people you cared about turned on you? Yeah, I people I cared about turned on me. Yeah, it was, it was awful. It was a horrendous. In fact, I wasn't allowed to finish the job. And in fact, the messenger got shot and was put at the centre of a class action. And all the evidence that he'd been lying to K2, that he'd been talking to journalists and filmmakers, that he'd been acting against the industry's interests. You know, that could have been a good news story for the campaign. All the campaigners turned on Rob, but not all of them turned completely. Glad they could build. Bill Lawrence didn't, the guy who put together the global supply chain report. I know there's all sorts of problems around. Well after the court case started, he left the court. a voicemail. It's got a haunting quality to it. Bill Lawrence died a couple of years ago and he was mourned by his fellow campaigners, but also because it's the sound of a man struggling to reconcile what he thought he knew about a friend with what he just found out. I know Bill told some of the other campaigners he felt betrayed by Rob, but he couldn't bring himself to say that to Rob himself. "We were very close for a long time and I think we've got more in common than some people think we've got. Alright mate, look after yourself. Please look after yourself. Please look after yourself." The legal action against Rob finally wrapped up in October 2018, less than a year before Rob came to see me for the first time. The outcome was everything Rob feared. He was ruined in just about every way. He blames the law for building a case against him which he says wasn't the whole truth. Didn't even ask the question whether he was trying to turn poison into medicine. And he blames global witness for letting the world find out who he was. The point came when he blamed me too for picking the wrong side. But let me tell you the truth because I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few days. I think if I'd been Simon Taylor, I would have done the same thing. You would have gone to Lee Day and just handled him over. I would have said I can see the risk that Rob presents. We were recording that moment on video as well as on tape and I've been back over it. The physical effect on Rob is dramatic. He looks down, he won't look me in the eye, not just for a little while but for ages. But I can see the risk that there's a channel of information between you and K2 and that's from global witness perspective. That's a risk to them but it's a risk to Laurie and it's a risk to the others as well. So I can see one has been threatened. It's not about being threatened. We know in the end that Laurie felt that you'd undermine her life's work. That's a risk. I can see the risk and there's a clock ticking because why would I leave you out there with that risk alive when I can close it down by first asking you to go and tell the truth and secondly go into law. I'm afraid uncomfortable though is I can see why he did what he did. I think in his position I'm well as exactly the same. He wondered if I just said what I said for effect but I didn't. I think I'm more interested in the truth even though I use sub-defuture get it than lead A. I think I'm more interested in the truth than global witness and actually I think it takes individuals to stand up and have a bit of courage and go you know what I'm not going to just go along with this I'm going to do something good with it. It was the first moment when it felt as if we'd really begun to part ways. Coming up on into the dirt. So we are in deepest wilts or somewhere and Rob I think has done a bit of pruning on this garden you're using my story and I think I wouldn't have taken the asbestos job I was but you're not taking it to the medicine. So you are looking at the poison Kerry then we'll come to talk about that but I do not know how you can do this. This is bullshit that I'm having to to point out fucking things like this. You're not looking in the right places Kerry. Thanks for listening. New episodes of Into the Dirt will be released every Tuesday and Thursday. For the best tortoise listening experience curated by our journalists download the free tortoise audio app and please leave ratings and reviews it really helps.