The special agent | The Gas Man Ep 1

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Speaker 29 Tortoise.

Speaker 29 And we were like, well, how did this all start? Well, let's just start with how it all started.

Speaker 29 Yeah. And so, you know, we thought we'd start with you and a punch in the street in Germany.

Speaker 7 Yeah, versus Siegberg.

Speaker 7 That's right, yeah.

Speaker 29 This is Mike.

Speaker 29 We first met over 20 years ago when I was making an undercover documentary.

Speaker 7 You contacted me, didn't you? You and Dahlia contacted me.

Speaker 29 I didn't really know what I was doing back then. It was my first move into journalism.

Speaker 29 I'd rigged up this tiny spy cam in a clutch bag and along with a friend started filming.

Speaker 29 Mike helped us turn all those hours of footage into a passable documentary.

Speaker 29 We stayed in touch, drifting in and out of each other's lives from afar. Until last year, when we went for a coffee round the corner from the tortoise office.

Speaker 29 And then it was really weird because we were drinking coffee and we realized we'd both done documentaries on Syria.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah, that's right. And then

Speaker 7 I got talking about the chemical weapons documentary that I had made.

Speaker 29 Mike started telling me about this one film he'd made over a decade ago. It was about chemical weapons, the militaries who'd used them and the victims who'd suffered devastating consequences.

Speaker 29 And as he was running through the story, he mentioned one of of the people featured in the documentary, just in passing.

Speaker 7 What was interesting was this guy had been on the run for 20 odd years.

Speaker 7 He was on Interpol's red list of international criminals.

Speaker 29 Mike was interested in him because he'd admitted to selling massive amounts of illegal chemicals in the 1980s.

Speaker 29 Chemicals that could be used to make nightmarish weapons that fill the air with poison, killing men, women, and children indiscriminately.

Speaker 29 This man only appeared in the film for a few minutes, and to be honest, Mike had moved on. But I was hooked.

Speaker 29 This guy had confessed his crimes, but somehow he seemed to have gotten away with it.

Speaker 29 Suddenly, he was all I wanted to know about.

Speaker 29 So I made Mike tell me everything he knew.

Speaker 29 The man's name was Peter Valiszek.

Speaker 29 Mike had tracked him down to a city in Germany and his brief appearance in the film is a memorable one.

Speaker 7 We went out there near my cameraman Anthony

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 lay siege to his house from five in the morning.

Speaker 7 Then about eight o'clock in the morning, this old guy with glasses, who we recognised from the dusty old photo,

Speaker 7 came out with his two big dogs, put the dogs in his car, got in the car, and said, Aunt, let's go.

Speaker 29 In the footage, you can see Mike walk up to the man who has this kind of comically dyed black hair and a gold chain. And although he's an older guy, he's still quite imposing.

Speaker 29 Mike starts very politely asking questions.

Speaker 7 Do you know how long time time it is?

Speaker 30 Oh, I'd just like you to tell your story.

Speaker 29 Peter Valischek thrusts his shoulders back and starts to almost square up to him.

Speaker 7 Yeah, luckily his dogs didn't jump out of the car and attack us.

Speaker 29 There's this tussle and the guy takes a swing at the cameraman and knocks him down.

Speaker 7 He had quite a punch though, it turns out.

Speaker 29 Mike's still trying to get him to answer questions about how he's evaded justice for so long, but the man marches off into a nearby police station.

Speaker 7 Then he started speaking German, complaining about me to the police. And

Speaker 7 I was shrugging my shoulders, saying, I just want to ask you these questions about why you sold.

Speaker 29 When Mike told me this bit of the story, my mouth was just hanging open. I mean, this guy's a wanted lawbreaker, and he's treating Mike like he's the criminal.

Speaker 29 The police take no action.

Speaker 29 No action against Mike, but also no action against this fugitive from justice.

Speaker 7 Germany was hiding him, keeping him there.

Speaker 29 Long after my coffee with Mike, I keep coming back to Peter Waliscuk, the chemical dealer in Germany.

Speaker 29 It's like he thinks the laws of justice and morality don't apply to him. A decade after Mike's encounter, I feel like there's more to the story and Mike agrees.

Speaker 29 So I start digging.

Speaker 29 The more I dig, the further from home I find myself. Following a trail from Europe to Baltimore and then Baghdad, Canada and the Netherlands.

Speaker 29 What What I uncover is a global game of cat and mouse. A catch-me-if-you-can.

Speaker 29 But this story is not about my hunt to track this guy down. That's the thing.
It was easy for me to find him. He's still on the run, but he's hiding in plain sight.

Speaker 29 And he not only admits his crimes, he actually revels in them. taunting those who've tried to bring him to justice.

Speaker 7 I knew he wouldn't have been caught because he's protected, you know, officially protected.

Speaker 29 What I want to know is, how can a man who's been on Interpol's most wanted list and never faced justice wander so arrogantly into and out of a police station?

Speaker 29 An international fugitive involved in the trade of chemical weapons who's so confident he won't be caught that he punches someone and then goes to the cops for protection.

Speaker 29 What I found is a story about the middlemen, the people who go unseen, who rarely make the headlines, but who keep the wheel of evil turning.

Speaker 29 About how the guy next door just might be a wanted criminal whose crimes appear to have simply drifted away, evaporated into the atmosphere, right under everyone's noses.

Speaker 29 I'm Chloe Hajimafeu from Tortoise. This is The Gas Man, Episode 1, The Special Agent.

Speaker 31 So it took me a little while, but I'm here.

Speaker 7 Well, you didn't miss this game. It was really depressing.
Oh, no. My hometown lost.
Oh, no. I'm pissed.
Oh, I'm sorry, Dave. Don't worry about it.
That's life.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 29 A few months after that coffee with Mike, and it turns out just weeks before the Super Bowl, I flew to meet the other man at the heart of this story. The cat in this global game of cat and mouse.

Speaker 29 Dennis Bass lives in the States. I'd tell you where exactly, but he's got to be careful.

Speaker 29 What I can say is it's a quiet community. There are palm trees and he's got a pool.

Speaker 29 He's tall and tanned with sparkling white teeth and he has that wiry frame of an older man who works out lots and puts the younger lazier people like me to shame.

Speaker 29 He's also, I find out, a huge fan of technology.

Speaker 32 Someone was detected at your backyard.

Speaker 7 I thought that was turned off. You can do anything from the phone.
I have this whole house wired for like everything.

Speaker 29 He spends his time walking his dogs and playing pickleball at the country club with his wife, Helen. It's mandatory membership.
If you buy into this community, you have to belong to the country club.

Speaker 7 People specifically buy here because of that country club. I mean, they don't come here and get surprised.

Speaker 29 But our story starts before the country club and the pool. Back in a much grittier period in his life, the late 80s, when he was special agent Dennis Bass.

Speaker 7 We really could pick our own investigations and if you were good at what you did and you were held in high regard, you could almost write your own ticket.

Speaker 7 You were successful in undercover if you had something to offer bad guys. Whatever type crime it was, whether it was buying drugs, you were paying more money than anybody else.

Speaker 7 If it was selling arms to somebody, my job was to get that for them.

Speaker 29 In photos I've seen from those days, he looks different. For a start, he had hair back then, black and curly.
He reminds me a bit of one half of Starsky and Hutch.

Speaker 29 I was a kid in the 80s. Ronald Reagan was on his way out.

Speaker 7 No to the drugs.

Speaker 29 And George Bush Sr. was on his way in.

Speaker 7 Guilty as charged.

Speaker 29 Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street. If you take that view, there'll be no progress at all.
Everyone was worried about AIDS and the nuclear threat.

Speaker 7 If we are attacked by nuclear weapons, these are the warning sounds you must recognize.

Speaker 29 The Iron Curtain hadn't fallen yet, and the nightly news was filled with images of tanks shooting across desert landscapes as Iran and Iraq fought a war that seemed to go on forever.

Speaker 30 Condemned Saddam Hussein regimes because he's bombing his own people with chemical weapons.

Speaker 29 Back then, Dennis Buss was working in Baltimore, his hometown, a city that was so down and out in the 1980s that even its own football team had walked out, leaving in the middle of the night without any notice.

Speaker 29 Baltimore was struggling with a crime epidemic fueled by a growing heroin and crack cocaine problem.

Speaker 29 The drugs were coming into the city on ships.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Baltimore has a pretty busy, pretty big harbor. But there were always crewmen that would bring a lot of narcotics in, and I did a lot of undercover work on ships.

Speaker 7 I would develop informants of certain nationalities. They were source countries for heroin, and I'd go on and meet crewmen, and crewmen would tell me, well, we have five keys of heroin on the ship.

Speaker 7 You know, do you have any money?

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I would get money to show them, and then we would usually just arrest them.

Speaker 29 Was it dangerous?

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 I've often been asked that. I felt comfortable because I knew what I was doing.
The more that I did it, the more and I would prepare.

Speaker 7 I always used to tell new agents in undercover school, I would tell them, I felt more comfortable going on an undercover assignment than I did working on the electrical panel.

Speaker 7 in my house because I knew what I was doing undercover wise. I don't have a great knowledge of electricity, and to me, that was a quicker way to get killed than going undercover.

Speaker 29 These operations weren't about busting dealers on street corners. Special Agent Bass and his team were after the big players.

Speaker 29 And so he'd wear snazzy suits and ties and carry expensive briefcases, pretending to be a super-rich businessman looking to buy huge quantities of heroin.

Speaker 29 He plays it down now, but there were hairy moments, times when he had to think on his his feet to convince a target he wasn't doing exactly what they suspected him of doing, setting them up and wearing a wire.

Speaker 7 These people wanted to see that I had the money, but I would always do it in a way when they were never expecting to see it.

Speaker 7 I would get on the phone and I'd say, hold on a minute, and I'd say, hey, Joe, bring me that briefcase. And they had no idea this was going to happen.
And then somebody would show up.

Speaker 7 They'd bring it back into the conference room, which was wired for audio and and video. And I'd say, oh, by the way, to the bad guy, you wanted to see if I was able to come up with the money.

Speaker 7 You want to count it? There were a couple instances where I'd get a million dollars in cash.

Speaker 29 His work in narcotics took him around the world, to the sources of the drugs, to places like Pakistan or Turkey.

Speaker 29 It would involve diplomatic missions, dodging local customs officials, always looking over your shoulder. And he did this for years.

Speaker 7 What happened was I had spent almost my entire career up to that point

Speaker 7 in narcotics investigations.

Speaker 7 And so my agent in charge said to me, you know, there's a big push on in customs to do these what we call exodus cases, these export cases.

Speaker 7 And you've been very successful with drug cases and you're a good investigator. Would you consider going in the group that does the export investigations? It was called the strategic group.

Speaker 7 So I said, you know what? I would. I think I'm ready for a change.

Speaker 7 It was more of a nine-to-five type thing, whereas when you work narcotics investigations, you get calls in the middle of the night, your informant's in jail, or this or that.

Speaker 7 So I said, yeah, I'm ready for a change. It sounds like a challenge.
So this would have been 1988.

Speaker 7 I would have been 37.

Speaker 29 So, one warm April morning, Special Agent Dennis Bass leaves home to start work in a new department.

Speaker 7 And on my very first day in that group, I initiated an investigation that turned out to be one of the larger and more important investigations of my entire career.

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Speaker 29 The export investigations team Dennis Bass joins is dealing with illicit goods leaving the US. On the surface, it doesn't seem as exciting.
No more undercover drug stings. But that's okay with him.

Speaker 29 He's done all that. He's ready for a quieter life.

Speaker 29 His new department's housed in an old building overlooking Baltimore's harbour.

Speaker 7 We each had individual like cubicle type things. People had wanted posters, you know, taped to them and all.
You had a computer and a desk and a phone, not even a direct line.

Speaker 7 Usually they'd have to call the main line and then the secretary would forward it to your extension. And just about the day that I got into the group, I get this call from one of the inspectors.

Speaker 29 It's nothing big. It looks like a slightly dodgy shipping form.
potentially just an error. But it's from a company that the team's been warned about before.

Speaker 7 But the inspector remembered that and basically he called me to say, hey, there's, you know, a shipment of theirs going out and, you know, it's going foreign. Well, I said, listen,

Speaker 7 Bill,

Speaker 7 I just got in this group. Let me do some checking and I'll get back to you.

Speaker 29 He pulls up the file on the company, Alcalac International.

Speaker 29 It's a large organization with a big factory and several offices based in Baltimore.

Speaker 29 It produces all sorts of chemicals for use in things like cosmetics, cleaning products, textiles, lots of different industries.

Speaker 7 And I, you know, pulled the file and I saw like three years earlier, customs and our headquarters had gotten some general information from the Dutch embassy. A tip-off.
Yes.

Speaker 29 It was a serious tip-off about the company and what they were up to. But Dennis Bass won't tell me what was in it, just that it came from official sources in the Netherlands.

Speaker 29 He's been retired for years, but even now, he sticks to the rules about what he can and can't say. What he can tell me is that the team before him looked into it.

Speaker 29 They visited the company and took a look around, gave some advice about suspicious orders.

Speaker 7 We didn't let him know we had a tip, but they said, yeah, we do make that chemical, but we sell like a barrel at a time.

Speaker 29 It turned up nothing. But that that tip-off makes him look again at the dodgy shipping form.

Speaker 7 Yeah, there were a number of red flags that made it suspicious.

Speaker 29 First up, there's the size of the shipment. 55 gallon barrels, 430 of them.
They fill seven shipping containers. That's someone ordering at scale.

Speaker 29 And those containers aren't the usual kind, rented out by the shipping company. They're brand new, bought bought by whoever ordered the chemicals.

Speaker 7 It is very unusual. It would be like you coming to the US from the UK and going, instead of going to Hertz and renting a car, you go into a car dealership and buy a car.

Speaker 7 And then you stay here three days and you go home. Why would you buy a car? Why would you buy the shipping containers?

Speaker 7 One of the reasons you buy the shipping containers is because you own them, they're not tracked.

Speaker 7 If a shipping line rents you the containers, they keep track of wherever they go because they're expensive.

Speaker 29 It's enough to make Dennis Bass very interested.

Speaker 7 The quantity, the shippers own containers, the documents, you know, weren't weren't filled out properly. And in fact, it didn't even have the name of the chemical.
It had the brand name.

Speaker 29 It almost feels like someone's trying to hide the chemical that's been ordered.

Speaker 29 So he decides to check and quickly.

Speaker 29 That night, when everyone's packed up and left the harbor, he slips down to the ship, opens up one of the containers, and takes a sample of liquid from a barrel.

Speaker 29 And when the lab tests come back, they're definitive.

Speaker 7 That this company, Alkalac, was exporting thiodiglycol.

Speaker 7 What's thiodiglycol? That was what I said to myself. And first I said, how do you say that even? And how do you spell that?

Speaker 7 And so I did some checking, and it's a chemical. It's generally used in inks and dyes.
It's used in like ballpoint pens for the ink.

Speaker 7 However, when mixed on a one-on-one basis with hydrochloric acid, it becomes mustard gas.

Speaker 29 Mustard gas, a man-made chemical weapon. Actually, it's not really a gas.
It's an aerosol spray. First used during World War I,

Speaker 29 when a yellowish fog would drift across battlefields, smelling faintly of garlic or mustard, blistering its victims' skin, destroying their lungs, and leaving them choking and convulsing in their tens of thousands.

Speaker 29 After the war, in the 1920s, a global treaty made it illegal for any country to use mustard gas. So in the 1980s, the chemicals that could be used to make it, like thiodiglycol, were highly regulated.

Speaker 29 Most of these chemicals are not illegal because as Dennis Bass says, they have other uses, like in ballpoint pens.

Speaker 29 But 430 barrels of thiodiglycol, it's a lot more than you'd need for any pens.

Speaker 29 And here's the thing. The original tip-off from the Dutch embassy, it came with one more detail.
a suspicion about where the chemicals were going.

Speaker 7 That this company Alkalac was exporting thiodiglycol

Speaker 7 and that it might be going to Iran.

Speaker 29 That would definitely make the shipment illegal.

Speaker 29 Because in April 1988, Iran and Iraq are in the middle of a war so brutal in terms of tactics and casualties that it's been compared to the First World War.

Speaker 29 And like the First World War, it involved chemical weapons.

Speaker 31 Everything is dead, my mother and my father, with the birds with the chicken, with

Speaker 7 all of them dead.

Speaker 29 By this point, Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein has used mustard gas and sarin to kill thousands of Iranians, leaving tens of thousands more with debilitating injuries.

Speaker 30 We have got to prove that Iraqi regime used

Speaker 30 these weapons.

Speaker 29 To Dennis Bass, it seems plausible that this shipment is a sign that Iran is considering using chemical weapons in return.

Speaker 29 It's a horrifying thought, an escalation in a war that's already devastated an entire region.

Speaker 29 And so, Special Agent Bass knocks on the door of his new boss.

Speaker 7 And I said to him, listen, I have a feeling this stuff is going to like Iran or something because the way the paperwork is laid out, we'd found out that it was going to Singapore and the address in Singapore was like a high-rise office building and this specific company was on like the 20th floor or whatever.

Speaker 7 They weren't taking 430, 55 gallon drums up there.

Speaker 7 So he said, what do you want to do? I said, really, what I'd like to do is substitute it.

Speaker 29 What he's proposing is a switch. He wants to replace all the chemicals in the barrels for water and follow the shipment to its destination to prove where it's headed.

Speaker 29 And, if he's right about the end destination, to get the authorization to investigate who ordered it.

Speaker 29 Now remember, this is his first week on the job and his boss isn't convinced. He wants to wrap it all up with a quick seizure there and then.

Speaker 7 I said, if we just seize it, we have nothing. Even if they're going to admit that they, okay, made some mistakes on the paperwork, but what's the crime? There's no jury appeal here.

Speaker 7 We don't know that it was going to be used to make a chemical weapon, okay?

Speaker 29 His boss thinks about it. This new guy might have a point.
He reluctantly agrees to let Special Agent Bass go ahead with his plan.

Speaker 29 It all has to happen without anyone from the company or the ship working out what's going on. And it has to happen fast because the shipment's leaving the next day.

Speaker 29 Special Agent Bass waits as late as he can, and then he sends a squad of guys down to the harbor.

Speaker 7 So at night, they went and took the containers. They were stacked up, ready to be put on a ship.

Speaker 7 They took them, took them to a warehouse, brought in the volunteer fire department, brought in their empty 55-gallon drums, then had the fire department fill the 430 empty ones with water.

Speaker 7 stuffed them back in the original containers, the seven shipping containers, took them back to the pier and stacked them up where they were. They worked out all night to do that, and they got it done.

Speaker 29 They close up the last of the barrels, pack up and leave.

Speaker 29 The next morning, the ship's employees arrive at the harbour, load their containers and set sail.

Speaker 29 No one has a clue about how busy the harbour's been overnight. And now there's nothing left for Dennis Bass to do except sit on his hands and wait and see where the cargo ends up.

Speaker 29 It's hot in mouth stuff. It must have been because, you know, this is your first job in this new department and you've made a real stink.
You've kicked up a real fuss.

Speaker 29 Your boss doesn't want this case and you're insisting on it. So it must have been a bit nerve-wracking that it was.

Speaker 7 Oh, and let me add,

Speaker 7 when U.S. Customs seizes something, the owners are notified officially in writing to say your car's been seized or whatever it's been seized.

Speaker 29 He's been so careful. His team's managed to pull off the impossible.

Speaker 29 But the Baltimore Customs Office is a big place. And another department, which has no idea what he's been up to, alerts the chemical company that their shipments raised a red flag.

Speaker 29 It could blow the whole operation.

Speaker 7 They sent a letter to Alkalac to say, we've seized your 430 55 gallon drums of thiodiglycol.

Speaker 7 So when I heard that, I was like beside myself. I mean, I won't even tell you what I said, you know.

Speaker 29 Why did they do that?

Speaker 7 Because it's routine to do it. This, like, these seizures where we're doing substitutions, especially for outbound, doesn't happen very often.
They just routinely did it without thinking.

Speaker 7 And I know when the case agent called me, you know, because he was assigned the case also,

Speaker 7 he said, Dennis, I don't know how to tell you this.

Speaker 7 I said, oh my God.

Speaker 29 If the company knows the shipment's being tracked, they'll alert the customer who ordered the chemical and they might divert it.

Speaker 7 So I said, let me think about it.

Speaker 7 I'll find a way out of this. And I said, you call them and you say to them, this is the U.S.
government. We screw up on a daily basis and we screwed up.
There's nothing wrong with your shipment.

Speaker 7 It's proceeded out of the port and all. And they said, okay, great, fine.
And that was it.

Speaker 29 Crisis averted. Uncle Sam to the rescue.

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Speaker 29 The boat and its cargo set sail, headed east. Until the shipment stops.

Speaker 29 It sits in the docks in Pakistan. Days pass, then weeks.

Speaker 29 At the customs office in Baltimore, they're terrified their gambit's been blown.

Speaker 29 They've been relying on shipping logs and word of mouth to follow the cargo. It's the 80s.
No tracking device has a battery that will last that long.

Speaker 29 Finally, they get word.

Speaker 7 And so on June 28th, which was approximately, what, April, May, two, two and a half months after it left Baltimore,

Speaker 7 DEA advised us that it was being loaded on an Iranian ship and it was going to Bander Abbas, Iran. So this was the best news of all.

Speaker 29 There's celebration back in the Baltimore customs office. The new boy has come good.

Speaker 29 Now they can get a warrant to search the offices of Alcalak, the chemical company.

Speaker 7 We raided all three locations. Were they shocked? Yeah.
Yeah, they were, to say shocked was an understatement. They were like floored.

Speaker 7 And, you know, we told them all to leave, except for the the ones we wanted to stay there to show us things.

Speaker 29 Dennis Bass has evidence that Al-Khalak helped send chemicals to Iran using dodgy documents. What he doesn't know is who bought it.

Speaker 29 So he starts the boring but essential part of the investigation, painstakingly sifting through reams and reams of documents.

Speaker 7 Their records in that company were horrendous. They were all over the place.
Files were mixed. They were stacked up, sitting on tables, in file cabinets.
It was just a real mess.

Speaker 29 He takes as many files as he can. But the next day, the export manager calls him out of the blue.

Speaker 7 And she said, there's some documents that you didn't get when you were here, which didn't shock me. Like I said, it was total chaos in their offices, their file keeping and all that.

Speaker 7 And so she, you know, I went back and picked them up.

Speaker 29 Was there anything in there that was interesting at the time?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, this was 1988, it was before the internet and cell phones and all those things.

Speaker 7 And so, a lot of businesses still communicated, particularly internationally, over telex.

Speaker 7 One of the things she gave me was a telex between her and the German national who she was dealing with, a guy named Peter Walaszek.

Speaker 29 The gas man,

Speaker 29 Peter Walaschek,

Speaker 29 In about three decades' time, he'll square up to my friend Mike in the street in his gold chain and square glasses. But in 1988, all Dennis Bass knows is his name.

Speaker 29 What he doesn't know is who this guy really is, or why he's sending a chemical that can be used to make mustard gas to a brutal regime in Iran.

Speaker 7 He thinks and considers himself, and I guess he is a player. You know, he loved being this evil entrepreneur.

Speaker 29 What Special Agent Bass couldn't have known is that this was a case he'd still be working on years later.

Speaker 29 Because in uncovering that one dodgy shipment to Iran and Peter Valaschek's name, Dennis Bass has unwittingly pulled on a thread on a global plot, the ramifications of which are still playing out in the Middle East today.

Speaker 7 Yeah, he's a porn. He's a piece on a chessboard.

Speaker 29 But before any of that, Special Agent Bass needs to work out how he's going to get the guy. And that's going to mean another sting operation.

Speaker 29 Coming up in episode two of The Gas Man, Dennis Bass comes face to face with his target.

Speaker 7 I wanted him in the U.S.

Speaker 7 Shot would be a good word, yes. Surprised.
I certainly thought of Mr.

Speaker 26 Balichek as an enabler.

Speaker 7 He said, Well, I didn't know that they were going to use it to make chemical weapons, because if I did, I would have charged them more money.

Speaker 34 Thanks for listening to The Gas Man. It's reported by Chloe Hajimathayu and produced by me, Claudia Williams.
It's written by both of us.

Speaker 34 Gary Marshall is the narrative editor and Jasper Corbett is the editor. The sound design is by Hannah Varrell.
Original theme music by Tom Kinsella.

Speaker 34 This episode was fact-checked by Xavier Greenwood, with thanks to Kavita Puri, Matt Russell, Katie Gunning and Innes Bresla.

Speaker 34 You can listen to more episodes today by subscribing to Tortoise Plus or by downloading the Tortoise app.

Speaker 34 You can listen to our previous investigations right here on Tortoise Investigates while you wait for the next episode.

Speaker 34 And to hear more from our award-winning newsroom, search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts.

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