Truth serum | The Gas Man Ep 5

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Before we start, I just need to tell you that this episode includes an incident of anti-Semitism. It also includes a description of torture.
Only an idiot wouldn't know why Iran wanted so many barrels, 55-gallon drums of thiodyglycol.

Special Agent Dennis Bass worked for the Baltimore Customs Office for 25 years.

He put a lot of criminals behind bars during that time,

a lot of big-time drug dealers and traffickers.

And I think it's fair to say he doesn't have much time for people who break the law. He prided himself on his ability to follow through.
But ultimately, he just wanted the job done. So he was perfectly happy to help law enforcement officials elsewhere to close a case.
Look what happened with Franz van Anrat. We were never able to get him here to the US.

Franz van Anrat, the guy who supplied Saddam Hussein with chemicals used to make mustard gas.

He hid from Denne Spass in Baghdad for more than a decade.

When he returned home to the Netherlands, the US authorities didn't need to go after him

because Dutch prosecutors charged him with complicity in war crimes. And they were so incensed by what he did, they went above and beyond.
Walachek fled, he went back to Germany, and they didn't do a thing to him. Nothing.
Dennis Bass is disappointed that the Germans didn't take the same approach towards Peter Valaschek, who'd pleaded guilty but fled before he could be sentenced. But the thing is, the two cases aren't exactly equivalent.
Franz van Anrat's chemicals had helped create mustard gas which was shown to have killed people. Peter Valaschek's chemicals may well have been used by the Iranians, but there's no definitive evidence to prove it.
It makes no difference. The crimes that both of them committed, as far as we were concerned in the United States, were violations of the Export Administration regulations,

making numerous false statements on US documents, money laundering. It doesn't have to be

that mustard gas was ever made or used. What he wants to know is why didn't Germany

prosecute Peter Valesczuk for customs violations?

On the face of it, there's a simple answer.

I've been looking into old news coverage of the Valaszczuk case from the late 80s,

after he escaped back to Germany.

According to the New York Times, a spokesman for the German embassy said

he couldn't be charged under German law because the transactions had taken place outside the country. I've been back and forth with legal experts on this point.
It's complicated to dig into after so long, but it looks like it wasn't a crime the Germans could prosecute, even if they'd wanted to. And there's something else too.
That same New York Times article claimed that the case illustrated the weaknesses of German export laws. It warned about the role other Western companies were playing as facilitators or enablers in the creation of chemical warfare programs all around the world.
And that rang a bell. When I worked in export controls, the go-betweens, the people like Peter Walachek, the people that the Irans and Iraqs and Libyas, the embargoed countries, that they would find to act as go-betweens on their behalf and make these illegal exports happen

were German nationals. And, you know, the reason clearly was because Germany doesn't

do anything to their citizens when they do things like this.

Is it possible that the German government was just turning a blind eye to what was going

on? And what's that meant for Peter V Valischek's links to Iran since then?

I'm Chloe Hajimotheou from Tortoise.

This is The Gas Man.

Episode 5. Truth Serum.
All right, it's recording. Gavi Mehron is a lawyer based in Chicago.
He's speaking to us from his large, noisy office, all glass panels and piles of paperwork, with the city traffic blaring outside the window. We have in-house our own research facility made up of ex-intelligence officers, analysts from MI5, from United States Intel, from Israeli intelligence.
Over the last quarter of a century, his firm has won cases against banks, oil companies, and state sponsors of terrorism. And they've collected more than $1.5 billion in compensation for their clients.
Gavi Marone's latest case just concluded in a civil court in Iraq where he's been representing some of the victims of the 1988 Halabja chemical attack. But the reason I'm interested in all this is because it's not the regime of Saddam Hussein who's in the dock.
The defendants in Gavi Marone's case include West German companies. And it's a case that's helped me understand the country that Peter Valaschek escaped to in 1988.
Gavi Marone and his team allege that Iraqi officials hired German companies in the 80s to build chemical weapons factories under the guise of creating pesticide plants. And one of their top guys in intelligence, he went to Germany and he contracted with, we became three West German companies to build the entire chemical weapons plants.
Prusak was the key link. And Prusak today, it changed its name.
They today are called TUI, and they're the largest tourism organization in Europe. Are you saying that TUI, the travel company, knowingly built a chemical factory in Iraq for Saddam to manufacture chemical weapons? Much more than that, I'm saying.
Thuy was the chief co-conspirator with the Saddam regime to clandestinely build it. Yep, that Thuy.
Before it changed its name, Thuy was a big player in mining and chemicals. I'd heard a little bit about this case before speaking to Gavi Mehrone, but still, it seems incredible that a company I associate with sunshine and family holidays could be implicated in something so dark.
Tui sent us a statement denying the allegations made in the lawsuit. The company claims a group of employees was responsible for these clandestine deals with Iraq without the main company's knowledge and that they were subsequently let go.
Previous attempts to prosecute the company have been unsuccessful and a verdict in Gavi Mehrone's case is expected later this summer. But it's not just him who's making these types of claims about West German companies.
In 2012, Claudia Rott, a German politician who was then co-chair of the Green Party and is now Minister of Culture, publicly apologised for what she described as German participation in the Kurdish genocide. And here's where I'm really going with all this.
Lots of companies around the world sold all sorts of weapons, technologies and chemicals to Saddam Hussein in the 80s. Yes, in Germany, but also in the

Netherlands, France and even here in Britain. In fact, a British company built a factory in Iraq which was used by Saddam Hussein to manufacture chemical weapons.
Years later, that same factory was cited as a reason for Britain to go to war against Iraq.

The thing is, Gavi Mehron's lawsuit argues that West German companies were selling far more than anyone else, and that without their help, it's likely Saddam Hussein would never have had the capability to carry out atrocities like the one in Halabja.

This was the context in which Peter Valaszczuk was developing his own international business interests. When Peter Valaszczuk escaped from the US in the late 80s, it was big news.
And then I was on the first page of famous... Washington Post, New York Times.
New York Times. First page.
I was there. Understanding the Germany he escaped to has helped me make more sense of things.
Why his arrest by Dennis Bass would have been unlikely to leave a dent on his

entrepreneurial spirit. Why would it? Other than a bit of media attention, there didn't seem to be any real consequences for anyone engaged in this type of business.
But what about Peter Valaschek now in 2024? Well, the only real difference seems to be that his client list has expanded. We have two companies making export of medicine then, with countries what the Americans say they are the bad countries.
North Korea, China, Iran. Sitting in his dusty office in Siegberg, Germany, surrounded by busts of dead Soviet heroes, he reels off the list of sanctioned countries he's been trading with, as if he's trying to impress me.
He has a few companies registered under his name and he tells me they mostly trade pharmaceuticals, chemicals and equipment. Maybe it's the language barrier, but I find it really hard to pin him down on the details.
It's unclear what his involvement is now that he's in his early 80s. Sometimes he tells me his wife's taken over

everything. Other times that he still goes on business trips.
But he's happy to show off the fact that he's travelled extensively to these countries since the 1980s, at the invitation of the governments themselves, no less. And North Korea, how was that? This is also invited from government.
I had a car with a car and driver and we were going to the border to South Korea. It was very interesting.
Not many people get to see that. Is that unusual? I know, I know.
But we have given them medicine and such things. Tehran? Did you go to Tehran? I go there as a friend.
One week, two weeks. I have there many friends.
They were all from the heart. Like Hamas or so.
Like Hamas? Yeah. We're speaking just weeks after the Hamas terror attack on Israel that happened in October 2023.
For decades, Iran has been one of the strongest supporters of Hamas. I said it was right what they were doing.
I don't like Jewish. Why not? Because they are Jewish.
They make the whole world, the whole centuries, only trouble. It's really shocking to hear this kind of brazen anti-Semitism.
But actually, this is pretty typical of my conversations with Peter Valaszczuk. He uses racist and sexist language, and I try not to react because I suspect it's deliberate and intended to shock.
And also, maybe, an attempt by him to deflect and avoid answering the real question. I realise that, even after all this time, I still don't really understand him.
I can't get a grip on what's real and what's a performance. What I really want to know is why he's chosen to trade specifically with countries that have a reputation for being so repressive.
Iran, Russia and North Korea, all considered to be state sponsors of terrorism and all of them sanctioned. Peter Valaschek tells me that even these countries need painkillers.
Only I'm not exactly convinced that's all he's been selling them.

If I want to get anywhere, I'm going to have to find someone who can tell me more about what Peter Valescek's really been up to since the late 80s, and whether he's still breaking the law to export illicit goods to rogue states. He was interesting and he was very busy.

Just tried to get contacts and to earn money. Aha, so he was focused on business.
Yes. This is Karl.
He was one of Peter Valaszczuk's business associates in the late 90s and early 2000s. He's agreed to speak to me on the condition that he remains anonymous.
Karl, as we're calling him, was involved in selling pharmaceuticals and medical equipment with Peter Valaszczuk for a couple of decades. It was in the 1990s.
We're chatting over the phone. He's at home in Germany with his daughter there in the background to help if he gets stuck with his English.

We had a company dealing with chemicals for schools and universities for research, trading with relief organizations like the Red Cross or CARE.

And we packed things for deliveries to countries like Bosnia, Herzegovina, Africa, and so on. Oh, wow.
So he was sending aid, you were helping him send aid to war zones? Not only a war, but also natural catastrophes and things like that. I have to admit, this takes me totally by surprise.
It seems there was good money to be made from disaster relief at the time. But still, it doesn't fit with the image I have in my mind of Peter Valiszczek.
So I asked Karl about the Peter Valiszczek he knew, what he was like as a business partner and a person. He was a fan of Stalin, you know, the former Russian leader.
Yes. You see that he has been a communist, that's a capitalist communist.
So it's very difficult to understand what's going on in his mind. It's good to know that I'm not the only one who finds Peter Valaszczuk difficult to read.
And it looks like any animosity he might have had for America before his arrest... I hate the US.
A good American is a dead American. ...becomes all-encompassing afterwards, driving him closer to the countries he still does business with, countries he gleefully calls the axis of evil.
He bought no cars that were produced in the US and things like that. He didn't like that at all.
So that was the reason, I think, he made then business with countries like North Korea, Iran, Cuba, which were also against the United States. It's helpful to hear this.
I realise that until Karl confirmed who Peter Valaschek was doing business with, I was slightly suspicious he was doing with Iran? In the time we worked together, I saw several of the shipments. This has been only laboratory equipment and medical devices.
So it was equipment, not drugs or chemicals? Yes, also chemicals, but not something like the thing in the 80s with the TOD-glycola. Of course, also with medical equipment, lab equipment and chemicals, you have always a problem with dual-use products.
Dual-use is anything that can be used for both civilian and military purposes. Karl says he never saw Peter Valaszczuk selling anything illegal, but he does remember times when he ran foul of German customs over dual-use exports in the 90s and early 2000s.
He doesn't think any of it was deliberate, and he tells me these types of mistakes are pretty easy to make. To me, it doesn't sound like Peter Valaszczuk learnt much from his time in prison in Baltimore.
But of course, officials from the custom and things, they had a look on him, what he's doing. They checked everything very close.
I have no way of knowing Peter Valaszczuk's intentions. I've tried to ask him about these things, but he just dodges the question or tells me I should read the Bible, not the papers.
And I'm not sure that customs would agree with Karl's take, that it's not such a big deal to make mistakes with dual-use exports. But here's what I think's important about all this.
Karl is saying that Peter Válezsík was known to customs.

And a source in the customs office has confirmed they were keeping an eye on him.

That means, no matter what Dennis Bass might think,

German law enforcement has been on to I work mainly for German public radio. So I've worked on chemical weapons and chemical weapons regulations.
And we met at a chemical weapons convention. We did meet in The Hague at the German embassy where you were on a panel where they discussed the chemical weapons and chemical weapons regulations.
When we first met, Martin Hahn told me to give him a ring if I ever needed any help with an investigation I was working on. A very risky thing to offer.
Because a few years down the line, and I've roped him into helping us with the parts of this investigation that require a German speaker. Investigating what kinds of things Peter Valaszczuk's been trading and whether the customs officer has ever charged him with anything.
And you've been helping us loads. I've tried.
You've tried. Because it's not that simple in Germany.
The country has these super strict privacy laws that significantly impact the information authorities will give out about things like investigations or criminal records. We have two cases in the German history, the Third Reich under Nazi Germany and the Stasi Secret Service.
So I think these two things basically are the reason that data protection today is so strong and is seen as a safeguard against these intrusive, insumane surveillance measures by the state. It means that Martin Hahn hasn't been able to get any answers about Peter Valishek's possible criminal history, whether he was charged in any customs cases, as Carl mentioned.
I also find a news article that suggests he was investigated for fraud and forgery, but we can't stand that up either. So wherever I went, really, the answer was, we don't know and even if we knew, we wouldn't be able to tell you.
The guy Martin Hahn talks to in the customs press office is able to comment more broadly. He admits they're limited in what they can do.
So they take random samples and check that, but there's no guarantee that every single shipment that is mislabeled will be flagged. So it feels like there isn't anything substantial that we're going to get from official channels.
But I do remember something that Peter Valaszczuk mentioned when we were in his strange office in Siegberg. He had all those rows of bookshelves filled with taxidermy, all the weird, dusty, stuffed birds.
And as he was telling me about them, I realise now that he actually admitted to pulling a fast one on German customs. This is from Iceland.
Not allowed to bring it in anymore. OK, but when you brought it, it was OK? They didn't see it.
Sometimes custom is not looking in the airport and sometimes it was a long time ago, five years, ten years.

To be fair, it was just a stuffed puffin.

I don't have any evidence he tried to sell anything illegal

to any of the rogue states he deals with.

Until I discover a new case, this time from 2012, when Peter Valaschek was caught sending another potentially deadly substance to Iran. On The Edge is a not-for-profit media and conservation organisation

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Okay, my name is Markus Helwig. I'm a reporter for the newspaper in Germany called Bild am Sonntag.
It's a weekly newspaper in Germany. Markus Helwig first came across Peter Wallischek in 2012.
But to understand the events that led him to the gas man, we have to scroll back about a year and a half before that. In 2010, Marcus Helwig was in Tehran for a pre-arranged interview with a source when the door slammed open and a group of Iranian state security officers piled into the room.
They were playing close and they just told me I should stop talking and give away my cell phone. And that was like, OK, what will happen next? I don't know.
Being arrested in Iran is no joke. there's no guarantee you'll get access to a lawyer and certainly no guarantee of a fair trial.
They accused me of being a spy and threatening their security. And after that, I was a terrorist.
Then the situation became worse. So they took me in this secret prison, and that was a kind of torture prison.
They tortured people there. Iran's use of torture against people in detention has been really well documented by human rights groups.
I was blindfolded the whole time, and there were a lot of, I think, soldiers from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, I guess. I couldn't see them, but I hear them.
And then the staff from the prison, they started to work at eight, sometimes nine o'clock. And then you can hear, or I heard the people crying and screaming.
Marcus Helwig was tortured too. Electric wires were attached to his head and searing bolts shot through his jaw and skull.
It's been years, but he still can't bring himself to talk about it. Instead, he describes the tiny space he was kept in.

I was in a very, very small cell, so it was not possible to just stretch your arms and legs.

And the light was on the whole night, 24-7.

And sometimes they hit me, sometimes it was quite brutal.

After five months, the newspaper he works for pays a $50,000 fine,

and the foreign minister of Germany flies to Tehran to bring Marcus Helwig back home.

But the reason I'm telling you this is because a year later, in 2012, when he's recovered and

Thank you. Marcus Helwig, back home.
But the reason I'm telling you this is because a year later, in 2012, when he's recovered and back working again, he gets a tip from one of his contacts at the customs office. It's about an illegal shipment they've managed to stop.
And they think Marcus Helwig might be interested because it was on its way to Iran.

You guessed it, Peter Valescek.

Only this time, he's sending a pharmaceutical.

5,000 ampoules of it. He wanted to export, it's a drug, it's called Thiopental.

Sodium thiopental has legitimate uses as a preoperative anaesthetic.

But under EU anti-torture legislation, its export's been restricted for countries that still carry out the death penalty,

including Iran, but also the USA, because it can be used as a form of lethal injection. It's sometimes called truth serum.
That's because it can be used to break down people's defences and make it more likely that they'll talk. For Marcus Helwig, it's a hell of a realisation that a German man was involved in the sale of a pharmaceutical that could be used as a torture aid.
Knowing that they kill their own people, knowing that they're torturing their own people, it was shocking. Activists in Iran suspect these kinds of chemicals may have been used to induce public confessions from prisoners.
So we asked Martin Hahn, the German journalist who's been helping us, to look into what happened to Peter Wallischek as a consequence of the truth serum case. Customs then confiscated that shipment and destroyed it.
I tried to reach out to the customs agency that was responsible back then, and they said the files have been destroyed. So we can't even find out whether he received a penalty of some kind for his infraction? No, all that falls under data privacy laws and data protection.
I reached out to the German Federal Police, the BKA, and even they said they couldn't help me. If he was found guilty, it seems the worst he would have got was a fine.
Peter Valaszczuk admits he tried to send the drugs, but again he says he didn't know it was illegal. When we spoke, he denied he was prosecuted and dismissed the case as nothing big.
Once again, nothing seems to touch Peter Valaszczuk. Still, German customs had done their job.
They discovered illegal goods heading for a sanctioned country and stopped them. But here's the thing.
There are also plenty of other goods that are allowed to go to Iran that won't be stopped by customs, but can be repurposed by the regime. In 2017, Bosch, the German engineering company, sold Iran thousands of CCTV cameras.
Last year, activists inside the country claimed the cameras were being used to crack down on protesters. Bosch says it wasn't aware the cameras were being used that way and that it didn't sell them directly to end customers.
The sales were legal, but the case caused a backlash and they were caused to boycott the company. Because that's the risk anyone who trades with a country

like Iran takes. You can't control how your products will be used.
And Germany is doing

far more of this type of trade than any other EU member state. It's Iran's biggest trading partner

in the bloc. In 2023, trade from Germany to Iran was worth more than 1.2 billion euros.
That's more than double that of Iran's next biggest EU trade partner. Well, I think Germany is the economic powerhouse of the European Union, right? Why is Germany the economic powerhouse? Because we are export champions, as they call Germany.
And that also means exporting into Iran. So Iran is just part of the whole puzzle.
It's worth remembering here that Iran has been increasingly belligerent recently, firing missiles at Israel, supporting attacks on ships crossing the Gulf Straits, and internally it's killed hundreds of protesters in the past five years and arrested thousands. To be fair to Germany, trade has significantly fallen in the past year, in large part because of those increasingly strained political relations.
So you have these really harsh critiques out there. Activists, journalists and now also politicians in Germany are calling for tougher sanctions and stricter rules to prevent all dual-use products from reaching the regime.
We do see parliamentarians speaking out against these practices. They are from the Social Democrats and the Greens who are in power, but also opposition politicians from the conservative CDU.
They say we must finally restrict these effectively and regulate it at a European level. If they don't, if they aren't changing it, that's the power of business in Germany for celebrities.
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Yeah? Yeah. A couple of days later, I'm sitting in the studio with Claudia, who I'm working with on this series, and we're waiting for an interview to start.
When, it's a WhatsApp message from Martin Hahn, which I read aloud. Oh my God, I just had a long chat with Peter Valaszczuk.
He called me after I reached out to his wife a few days ago, Martin. Hi Martin, can you talk? Yes, I can talk.
This is particularly exciting because when I talk to Peter Valaszczuk, I'm always a bit worried things are being lost in translation. This is the first time we have someone on our team questioning him in German about his business empire.
I said, this is such a hard business to do, exporting into heavily sanctioned. And he said, haha, yeah, customs officer also asked me that.
This is his whole thing. He thinks he's this renegade businessman doing business with the axis of evil.
He also probably made good money. Martin Hahn says the conversation was pretty friendly on the face of it, but it had an undertone.

Do you know why journalists are being executed in North Korea?

I said, no, tell me.

And he said, well, because they're too curious.

There is obviously a way of reading that as a threat into our direction.

Back in 2012, Marcus Helwig, the journalist who was imprisoned in Iran, was confronted with the same hostile Peter Valaszczuk when he went to his office to ask him about the truth serum. And he was immediately very aggressive.
So he asked me to leave, so I was leaving his office. And on the street, he was insulting me and threatened me and was mooking about the customs, the general customs, so they can't do anything to me.
I'm safe here. I'm safe here.
There it is again. That same sense of impunity Peter Valaszczuk had when he walked into the police station with my friend Mike right at the start of this story.
It's like he's untouchable, like he's somehow protected. And maybe that's how he feels.
It was shocking for me that there are still a lot of loopholes so that you can do this kind of business, you know? Peter Valiszczek seems to know how to play the system. If he's been prosecuted by the German authorities, it hasn't stopped him.
A quarter of a century after he sent those chemicals to Iran that could be used to make mustard gas, he's sending banned substances like truth serum.

It's clear those he's selling to still see him as a middleman, an enabler.

In fact, he's felt comfortable expanding his trade into other countries with brutal regimes.

For him, it's just a business, you know.

No gewissen.

Possibly the only word I know in German, something I had to learn to question Peter Valaszczuk. A gewissen.
A conscience. Yeah, no gewissen.
Yes. Not at all.
When I try and put all this to Peter Valaszczuk, try to push him on his business deals and his relationships with sanctioned regimes around the world, he won't be drawn. And then he drops a bombshell, something he seems to think wipes the slate clean.
And then I said, what shall I do? Yeah, I have some Buddhist monks who are German. Then I said, perhaps it's something for me.
And then I was reading the books. Peter Valaszczuk is studying to be a Buddhist monk.
Then I was speaking with monks. and now it's question, should I go 800 kilometres from Bangkok down? And it's not in his native Germany.
I'm going to Thailand and there's no problem. But actually, there really might be a problem.

Because Thailand does have an extradition agreement with the US.

Peter Walachek pled guilty to the crime. So he'll be wanted until he's dead.

I'd be happy to dismiss the warrant once he's dead.

That's next time on The Gas Man.

Individuals like that are extremely dangerous.

So it might be some kind of nerve agent.

It might be.

Forget this fucking human rights.

I hate it.

There is no human rights. I hate it.
There is no human rights. Thank you for listening to The Gas Man.
It's reported by Chloe Hajmatheou and produced by me, Claudia Williams. It's written by both of us.
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. With additional reporting by Martin Hahn.
This episode was fact-checked by Jess Swinburne. With thanks to Kavita Puri, Matt Russell, Katie Gunning and Martin Hahn.
You can listen to more episodes of The Gas Man today by subscribing to

Tortoise Plus or by downloading the Tortoise app. You can listen to our previous investigations

right here on Tortoise Investigates while you wait for the next episode and to hear more from

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