An English gentleman | Walter's War Ep 1

Transcript

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Speaker 28 Tortoise

Speaker 28 I recently read something by a psychologist who was trying to understand why we lie.

Speaker 28 We all do it in various ways all the time, but some people, well, they do it differently.

Speaker 28 For those people, this psychologist said, lying is like a perfume. When you first buy a new one and you put it on, it smells strong.
You feel conspicuous.

Speaker 28 You're reminded of it momentarily as you move through the world. But after a few days of wearing it, you begin to smell it less.
It becomes a part of you, this new scent, and it blends in to you.

Speaker 28 And after a month, you might not smell it at all.

Speaker 28 And this podcast is about just that. About how a story blended in to a man.
And how, over time, he found a home in a world of even bigger stories, ones that we've all struggled to sniff out.

Speaker 28 A world where we're being warned about a coming threat, a fight between good versus evil, and where just a handful of plucky rebels are going to build the tech to save us all.

Speaker 15 It's going to take experiments.

Speaker 15 It's going to take disruption. The whole field of the future will team with artificially intelligent unmanned systems which fight, gather reconnaissance data, and communicate at breathtaking speed.

Speaker 15 About the good, bad, and ugly of AI.

Speaker 28 And it all started a long time ago in a galaxy not far away. At least, I think it did.

Speaker 28 I'm Basha Cummings, and you're listening to Walter's War from Tortoise, episode 1: An English Gentleman.

Speaker 28 So,

Speaker 28 you've come to talk about somebody that you met a long time ago. And I guess we'll get onto sort of your life now and what you think about that time in your life.

Speaker 28 But I kind of want to start by painting a picture of what you were like back then. So, what year are we in? How old are you? Okay.
Let's start there.

Speaker 15 So, it was 2012, so just over a decade ago, and I was 22 years old, just moved to London in the past, I guess, four or five months from Edinburgh where I'd been at university.

Speaker 28 The city is buzzing.

Speaker 28 It's about to host the Olympics that summer and the thing that everyone was expecting to be, well, a bit crap, has actually turned into this weird and wonderful celebration of Britishness.

Speaker 15 I was living in my first flat share with some friends, so it was really fun, exciting time. I had like my first proper job that I was getting paid for.
It was just really exciting.

Speaker 28 This is the start of real life and Charlie throws herself into it. New friends, new flat.
She's just out of university and she gets a job in market research just to pay the bills.

Speaker 28 And she starts dating too.

Speaker 28 This was a time before Tinder and Bumble, so she joins Guardian Soulmates, a website run by the newspaper with the tagline, where like-minded people find great dates.

Speaker 15 But it was like a good old-fashioned dating site where you would make a profile and I feel like this would really sound strange to like a 20-year-old now.

Speaker 15 You'd write a profile and you would send somebody a message and wait to see if they responded to you.

Speaker 28 She messages back and forth with a few people, but the first person to really catch her eye and her imagination is Oliver.

Speaker 15 I saw a picture of him and his profile was really nicely written. I really liked his picture.
He looked really, I thought he was really handsome. I guess we matched, maybe.

Speaker 28 He's five foot ten and a few years older than her. He seems intellectual, worldly.
They connect easily over books, Graham Greene in particular, Evelyn Waugh, Mural Spark, and films and politics too.

Speaker 28 The emails fly back and forth. But there's a hitch.

Speaker 15 When I was messaging him to begin with, he wasn't actually in the country.

Speaker 15 He was in Afghanistan, working there because he worked for the Ministry of Defence and he was there in a kind of academic capacity with the Ministry of Defence but would be coming back in the next, I think it was like in the next month.

Speaker 28 She's impressed. The war is often in the news.

Speaker 26 In the often volatile Helmand province was the third of seven.

Speaker 15 So we messaged quite a lot to begin with because he wasn't available to meet.

Speaker 28 It all seems quite exciting.

Speaker 28 Even though he's far away, Charlie opens up to Oliver about her life, how she'd grown up in the countryside and had been brought up by working-class parents, how she'd won a scholarship to a local private school.

Speaker 28 As they talk, it becomes clear to her that their backgrounds are quite different.

Speaker 28 So he told you that his name was

Speaker 15 Oliver William Twizzleton Wickham Fines Mallinson Lewis.

Speaker 28 And there are signals in the way that he writes his messages to her. Signals of class and power, which if you're English, you're supposed to just get.

Speaker 15 Something came up, and I made a joke. I said, like, did you go to Eton or something like, ha ha ha?

Speaker 15 And then he just responded, fuck no, Harrow.

Speaker 15 So that's how I realised, oh, that's like a really posh private school that I've heard of. Crikey, like Churchill went there or whatever.

Speaker 28 Not just Churchill.

Speaker 28 On the long list of old Harovians, as they're called, are seven former British prime ministers, not to mention future kings, Nobel laureates, and even Sherlock Holmes himself, the actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

Speaker 28 Like Eton, it's a school that occupies a particular place in British high society. It costs 50,000 a year to send your son there, so at the very least, it suggests wealth.

Speaker 15 I can't remember exactly how it came up, but he intimated something to me, and I said, What? Are you a lord or something, in a kind of jokey way? And he said,

Speaker 15 like it was a real burden

Speaker 15 no but my dad is

Speaker 28 charlie isn't hugely impressed by these details they're a bit alien to her but she already knows she fancies him beyond the gulf of class and for that moment at least geography she thinks that they make a good fit

Speaker 28 and so when he got back from afghanistan how soon after that did you meet?

Speaker 15 I think it was a couple of days later because he'd messaged me saying I'm coming back and he said he'd gone for like a decompression in Cyprus, which they do for a couple of days when they've been away.

Speaker 15 And then he messaged me from there saying, do you want to meet up next Sunday when I'm back?

Speaker 28 In November, they meet in the heart of London to get coffee and to go clothes shopping.

Speaker 15 And my first reaction was I was kind of surprised because he had said on his profile, I think he said five foot ten, which is a bit taller than me.

Speaker 15 And then when I met him, he was like exactly the same height as me, which was, I have no problem with whatsoever. I go out with, like, I mainly go out with men that are about my height.

Speaker 15 But it was weird to me that he obviously wasn't 5'10 and he said that. So actually, the first thing I did say to him was, you're not 5'10.
And he just kind of laughed.

Speaker 28 Any woman who has been through the pain of online dating will know this is a thing, a curious quirk of the single man. A little lie so common, it's a running joke.
For Charlie, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 28 It helps break the ice, and regardless of a few missing inches, she thinks he's very attractive.

Speaker 15 So he was like very fit, very lean and muscular. He had a bit of a tan at the time.
He did look like he was a bit older than me.

Speaker 15 I'd say he looked quite a lot older than me, but I think that was just because he was quite thin and had been in Afghanistan, I guess.

Speaker 28 He's dressed in chinos and a vintage leather jacket, and he wears a small ring on his little finger.

Speaker 15 And he had a signet ring on, which is not something I had come across before, but then later sort of came to learn that it was a bit of a signal of power, maybe, and wealth.

Speaker 28 They walk to find coffee, making small talk.

Speaker 28 Charlie's just been to see the new Bond film at the cinema, Skyfall, with Daniel Craig as Bond and Javier Bardem as this former MI6 agent turned cyber terrorist intent on killing M.

Speaker 15 It was the one in which Judy Dench stops being M and Ray Fiennes takes over. And I was like expressing my disappointment in this because I didn't love Ray Fiennes and I really liked Judy Dench.

Speaker 15 And he kind of laughed and was like, oh, oh, he kind of looked a bit uncomfortable, like humorous, but uncomfortable, and was kind of the expression on his face.

Speaker 15 And I was like, sorry, do you like Ray Fiennes or something? And he said, oh, it's just, he's my cousin. And I was like, oh, okay.

Speaker 15 And I was like, well, I'm not going to feel bad about dissing your cousin. I still don't think, I don't love him as an actor.

Speaker 15 And I was kind of like, oh, do you think I'm going to be impressed by that? Is that going to be...

Speaker 15 And he's like, no, no, no, I'm just saying. And I was like, okay, fine.

Speaker 28 It's a really wonderful afternoon together. She's intrigued by him.
Wealthy, but self-deprecating. Well-connected, but quite shy.

Speaker 28 After they part ways, Charlie goes home to her flat share and concludes, yeah, big crush.

Speaker 28 And why do you think you really fancied him? What was it about him that you really liked?

Speaker 15 I was physically attracted to him, but also he had like a charm about him. And I, like a man with like a little twinkle in the eye, and he had that.

Speaker 15 He came across as just quite impressive and sorted, like he knew where he was going in life and that he was probably going to do really great things. That's the impression I got.

Speaker 28 Soon after that first date, they meet again. He invites her for dinner and she meets his friends.

Speaker 28 And they tumble into an intense relationship, as you do when you're young and imagining your life as much as you are living it.

Speaker 28 She likes him and she likes the idea of him, and she's continually impressed by how much he does.

Speaker 28 He's working for the government, but also commuting between London and Cambridge, where he's doing a PhD, and that's on top of a role at Oxford and charity work and military stuff too.

Speaker 28 But in the evenings and at weekends, they meet and they go to the gym together a lot and the cinema, sometimes with his flatmate. He takes her on a day trip to Oxford to show her around.

Speaker 28 you're kind of painting him out in like the image I'm getting is like a sort of a young English gentleman. Oh, totally.
Tweed brogues will walk you to the platform, very polite, very gentle.

Speaker 15 Peachy Woodhouse or something like, yeah, very much like that. Okay.

Speaker 28 From that kind of English gentleman, went to private school, was really ambitious and academic. What other bits of his personality did he kind of start to reveal to you?

Speaker 28 What else did you learn about him?

Speaker 15 Like the main thing that I learnt about him i guess were two like two things one was just he was just so kind and lovely i can't emphasize that enough because it is important to say and over the this period of time as well i'd kind of thought that he might have been in the military at some point i can't remember when he explicitly told me that but he wore a lot of like military garb type stuff a lot of khaki type things he had this big bag he carried around that was like a military bag that you'd wear if you were going like on tour or something he had a lot of friends in the military, and

Speaker 15 I was under the impression that maybe at some point he had actually been like

Speaker 15 in combat, like he would get himself involved in like veterans charities and things, and have a lot of friends who had been at the front. So he gave me the impression that he had two.

Speaker 15 I definitely thought that the Grenadier Guards came up as being like the unit that he was attached to. But I, again, I don't remember how that happened and how that came up, but it did.

Speaker 28 Charlie becomes friends with Oliver's flatmate, too, an eccentric academic who's studying war, and he adds to the allure of this world for Charlie.

Speaker 28 And he suggests that she read a book, England Made Me, by Graham Green, a story about Anthony Ferrend, a character who's boasted his way through jobs all over the world.

Speaker 28 But it's not all quite so poetic. No matter how caught up in him Charlie is, there's a distance between them that she can't quite understand.

Speaker 15 I probably romanticised it a bit. It's funny to say now, because I probably thought, oh, he's like a character from a book, you know, like a beautiful book that I've read.

Speaker 28 There are other things, too. He goes to balls at Cambridge without her and attends members' clubs and dinners that she's never invited to.

Speaker 28 They've been seeing each other for months now, and so she turns inwards. She wonders why he isn't inviting her.
Is it because she's just not good enough for him? Is he maybe a bit embarrassed of her?

Speaker 28 She is, after all, not a part of his world, and he doesn't really seem to want to let her in.

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Speaker 28 Many months into her job at the market research company, Charlie starts to get frustrated.

Speaker 15 I was at that time thinking like, well,

Speaker 15 I would like to do something that's not about making money for other people because I always knew that wasn't what motivated me.

Speaker 28 She sees an advert online and in it she sees a way to be closer to Oliver who she is by now totally in love with.

Speaker 15 At that time I just saw an advert for a job with the intelligence services and I thought why not give it a go?

Speaker 15 And I suppose a part of me also thought oh he'll think this is really cool. Like this will really impress him.
He'll think this is really great.

Speaker 15 It will give me something a bit in common with him as well that maybe he'll start to see me a bit more on his level intellectually.

Speaker 28 I can't say which organisation she applies to or what the role was. I can say that it was an entry-level job.

Speaker 28 And with her background in analytics as well as her straight A grades, Charlie thinks she could be a strong candidate. And it's the type of job that demands more than your usual HR background check.

Speaker 28 This is the kind of organisation that would see right through a bit of CV inflation. In fact, you'd hope they'd see right through anyone.

Speaker 15 Because of the high level of security, you have to go through a vetting process, which you do with a lot of jobs within the civil service, but there's kind of levels of vetting and this is like the highest level.

Speaker 15 So it was quite a weird experience for when you're going for a job. It's unusual.

Speaker 28 After you make it through all the application forms and competency tests, they want to know more about your life.

Speaker 15 Is there anything you're hiding? Do we know everything about you? Obviously, they ask you about people that you know.

Speaker 15 I don't think that's like a secret or anything that anyone's going to be surprised by. They ask you about close relationships.

Speaker 15 And I said to him, because I had always kind of been a bit confused about whether we were actually like in a committed relationship or not, I asked him, oh, do you think I should put you on my form?

Speaker 15 I wondered whether I should put him. And he said to me, no.

Speaker 15 Don't put me on your form. There's no need for you to do that.
They don't mean that. They mean if you're married or or engaged or you live with somebody.
They don't mean just going out with somebody.

Speaker 15 I think it was only at that point then when he started to just like draw back a bit.

Speaker 15 He wasn't like stopping encouraging me, but he was just like, don't put me on this.

Speaker 15 I kind of thought he's just not like interested in the relationship.

Speaker 28 Charlie gives it some thought. It hurts her, Oliver's apparent flippancy, but she decides to put his name down.
Better to be honest, she thinks. They're gonna find out anyway.

Speaker 15 For me, he was like, almost like a, it would be like a bonus to have him on the form, you know, because

Speaker 15 he's so part of that world that they'll just be like, oh, great, you know, him, then you're in.

Speaker 28 But it doesn't quite go as she'd planned.

Speaker 15 Ollie broke up with me. So it was between me submitting the form and having the interview that he broke up with me.
And he just ended it by email.

Speaker 28 She's heartbroken. And in her vetting interview, she tells them so.

Speaker 15 I told them that I

Speaker 15 we'd broken up and I told them that I was still completely in love with him is the words I remember saying very innocently. Yeah.

Speaker 28 The interview seems to go well. Yes, she's in shock.
She's trying to figure out why Oliver has just suddenly dumped her and doesn't want to talk to her.

Speaker 28 But she has this distraction, an exciting job that she feels is within her reach.

Speaker 28 And so when did you first realise that something was wrong with the job application?

Speaker 15 Um

Speaker 15 well, I wasn't sure there was anything wrong with the application, but I knew there was something wrong with Ollie when I was at work one day, so my old job.

Speaker 15 I was just sat at my desk and I looked down at my mobile phone and I got a text.

Speaker 15 I was nearly sick when I read it. The text came up on my phone and I could only see like the first few words and I opened it and

Speaker 15 it was clearly from the message, like, not meant for me,

Speaker 15 but it was about me, or it was about Bully.

Speaker 28 It's a text message from the person who interviewed her for the job, but it appears to have been sent to her by mistake.

Speaker 15 So it said, um,

Speaker 15 hi, it's all a tissue of lies, no harrow, no grenadier guards, nothing.

Speaker 15 And yeah, I just couldn't believe it.

Speaker 15 Like the bottom fell out of everything. I was just so shocked.

Speaker 28 Soon she receives a letter on official headed paper. She's failed vetting.
All she's left with is, apparently, a tissue of lies.

Speaker 28 Charlie and I first met many months ago when this story, already a decade old, tumbled out over breakfast in a cafe in Westminster.

Speaker 28 Sitting opposite my producer Gary and me, she told us what happened and all the feelings that she described, the intense insecurity of being 22, of not being good enough, of trying to navigate class and wealth when you don't quite feel that you belong.

Speaker 28 All of it felt so familiar, true of so many young women at that point in life.

Speaker 28 But Charlie, now 33, in a good job, in a steady relationship, still had this unsolved mystery hanging over her long after the insecurity had faded.

Speaker 15 What could the motivation possibly be? I still think that's how I feel a little bit today, and it's probably why I'm here right now, is because I just want to know why he's done this.

Speaker 15 And that creeped me out, like that I didn't know what it was for.

Speaker 28 I left that meeting on a cold morning in Westminster, intrigued but unconvinced. I could see that for Charlie this was a formative event, something that had stayed with her.

Speaker 28 But for us, as journalists, that wasn't enough. And Charlie felt the same.
It felt good for her to share her story, but she wanted there to be a reason for us to investigate.

Speaker 28 Something that went beyond her personal experience all those years ago.

Speaker 28 In truth, it wasn't long before I forgot about Charlie's story. It was the end of the year, I'd just finished another big project, and I was feeling a bit burnt out.

Speaker 28 That is, until my producer Gary sent me a link to a news article. The headline read, Inside the Chaos at Washington's Most Connected Military Tech Startup.

Speaker 28 And it was about a company that I'd never heard of, called Rebellion Defense. So slightly reluctantly, I read it.

Speaker 28 And it was only when I got to the final few paragraphs that I understood why Gary had sent it to me.

Speaker 28 In this story about a company promising to revolutionize warfare using artificial intelligence, a name glared out.

Speaker 28 There he was, Oliver Lewis, the man who had disappeared from Charlie's life a decade ago, who had apparently woven a tissue of lies that may have denied her a job, was here now, reappearing at the center of a story about one of the most hyped new military tech companies in the world.

Speaker 28 So I started reading more.

Speaker 34 So if you wouldn't mind, I'd like you to welcome, please, Oliver Lewis to the stage. Thank you very much.

Speaker 28 After breaking up with Charlie, Oliver's star had appeared to be on the rise.

Speaker 35 Policy advisor and strategy advisor with two deployments to Afghanistan.

Speaker 28 Charlie had missed out on that job in intelligence. Oliver continued to work for the civil service, even after someone apparently knew about this tissue of lies.

Speaker 28 And then he went on to work for the Ministry of Defence and then for hugely successful companies.

Speaker 28 Now he was a co-founder of a startup that was valued at more than a billion dollars, a unicorn as they're known.

Speaker 28 And he was all over YouTube appearing on panels talking about national security.

Speaker 36 Oliver Lewis, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 37 Thank you, Ira. Whenever someone describes me, it's always always sounds like someone I'd prefer to meet.

Speaker 29 Yeah, yes, it definitely made you sound quite exciting and a bit of a polymath.

Speaker 38 With one caveat, I'm not a computer scientist, I'm a recovering British diplomat, so I can talk to you in Pashto Dari, but not Scala or C-sharp.

Speaker 39 But what I do know...

Speaker 28 I started to find it hard to keep up.

Speaker 28 From his presence online, I could see that he'd studied at Oxford, Aberyswith and Leicester universities, that he'd completed a PhD at Cambridge, that he'd been in the RAF, he'd been seconded to the Royal Household, he'd been the deputy director of the British government's digital service, and he'd taught at prestigious universities and co-edited a book about warfare for a major publisher.

Speaker 28 But what was most interesting in this long list of jobs was his latest venture, this company called Rebellion Defence.

Speaker 28 A reference to the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, who stood bravely against the evil of the Galactic Empire.

Speaker 28 It might not surprise you, it's called Rebellion, so Rebellion is still very much the idea of Star Wars, but the company had been set up in 2019 to sell artificial intelligence to the Ministry of Defence in the UK and to the Pentagon in the United States.

Speaker 36 Rebellion Defence is interested in bringing cutting-edge machine learning to the problems of defence and national security.

Speaker 28 And this wasn't just a punt. It was being backed by some of the biggest and best-known tech investors in the world.

Speaker 28 Alongside Oliver, there were two other co-founders who had the backing of the ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.

Speaker 28 And James Murdoch, son of Rupert.

Speaker 28 The article that my producer had found, written by an American journalist called Jonathan Geyer, explained that Rebellion Defense was one of a rush of new Silicon Valley-style companies that were trying to, as the quote goes, move fast and break things by applying artificial intelligence to war.

Speaker 28 And not only that, but this journalist was discovering that the company was not what it seemed.

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Speaker 28 Was there a particular quote or conversation that stood out to you at that time that really made you think, this is, this sounds bad?

Speaker 19 Well, I mean, the the money quote was you know what a former staffer told me was rebellion is like fire festival led by jar jar banks

Speaker 28 jonathan guy was being told that the tech that they're hyping that artificial intelligence that was going to transform the battlefield well it doesn't really exist or at least the company doesn't seem able to build it and that rebellion that they promised well it's apparently failing to materialize

Speaker 19 It was almost too funny to be true. And

Speaker 19 even people who I'd been speaking to previously that were kind of weren't ready to go on the record, that I'd been talking to for some time about these concerns, they were so flabbergasted by the state of this company that they were just in this field, in this space.

Speaker 19 They're like, yeah, it's sort of weird that this company is valued so high, has such big names, but I don't hear about them. I haven't seen anything in practice.

Speaker 19 So that kind of led me to talking to as many people around this space as I could. And there it came out kind of several related storylines that the products didn't appear to work very well.

Speaker 19 Were they even AI products or were they just putting the label of AI on sort of data processing, which isn't nearly as interesting or sexy?

Speaker 28 Suddenly, our conversation with Charlie in that Westminster cafe seemed very different.

Speaker 15 I don't want to say it was an obsession, but I just always wanted to know.

Speaker 15 Like, all the time I was looking for stuff, looking for reasons, talking to friends about it, looking for stuff online, following his career, just out of curiosity to be like, well, what are you doing now?

Speaker 15 Oh, you've got away with this. You keep getting away with it.
Like, I've never been able to let it go because I've just wanted to find out more.

Speaker 28 She'd started to think that maybe people had been been trying to warn her. She thought back to that book that his flatmate had suggested to her, England Made Me, by Graham Green.

Speaker 28 What's the book about?

Speaker 15 So I did read it afterwards. It's basically about a guy who is from quite humble background.
In fact, I don't think he's got a lot at all. And he

Speaker 15 acts a part, if you like. He creates a persona for himself and acts apart with a harrow tie in order to work his way up in life.

Speaker 15 And people just believe him for who he is they take him at face value because why wouldn't you

Speaker 15 and that enables him to have success in some way

Speaker 15 but he's just kind of like a walter mitty character

Speaker 28 I had two ends of a story At the one end there was apparently a tissue of lies and at the other end a company telling a good story that was unraveling and now there was something for me to investigate so I started pulling at the thread to find out what was true about Oliver's story not just what he'd told friends and girlfriends but what he might have told people at work government officials and financial investors the press and the public Then I found myself asking what's true about the defense tech companies that he worked for trying to find out what we're able to know about where the money goes who spends it and on what.

Speaker 28 What's true about technologies that promise a future of precision lethality in warfare, but that's obscured by what's classified, what's proprietary, and what's confidential.

Speaker 28 To try and discover how governments and investors themselves check what's true, what's real, and what's exaggerated or imagined.

Speaker 28 At a time when many people are genuinely scared of where artificial intelligence will lead us.

Speaker 41 Industry leaders, researchers, and others are now asking for a pause in the development of artificial intelligence to consider the risks.

Speaker 28 And it all leads back to a simple question that Charlie was left with. Where does the story end and the truth begin?

Speaker 16 This is an AI arms race.

Speaker 38 Whoever controls this technology has huge control over our future and our lives.

Speaker 28 Next in Walter's War.

Speaker 33 It is about storytelling. What they do is figure out how you see the world, what the story you're telling about the world is, and they mirror it back to you.
They tell you what you want to hear.

Speaker 33 They tell you what you already believe.

Speaker 15 I sat next to him and I just said to him, I know about all the lies that you've been telling me. And his face just went white.
Just the blood just drained out of it.

Speaker 28 What was the word that you used earlier? The name for people who...

Speaker 21 Walter.

Speaker 28 And tell me what that is. Walter Mitty.

Speaker 35 A man who makes up stories.

Speaker 28 Oliver Lewis was contacted for this story, but did not provide a comment.

Speaker 28 Walter's War is reported by me, Bersha Cummings. The producer is Gary Marshall.
Additional reporting is by Xavier Greenwood and Imogen Harper.

Speaker 28 We hope you're enjoying the series so far. While you're waiting for next week's episode, check out Tortoise's other award-winning investigative series.

Speaker 28 For early access to the rest of Walter's War, subscribe to Tortoise Plus on Apple Podcasts or become a member on our Tortoise audio app.

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