The escape | The Gas Man Ep 3

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I mean, did you have an inkling that he might try? You know what? In the line of work I was in, you suspect everybody's going to do something like that.

You don't trust any criminals. I sure didn't trust him.
He was a slimy sort of guy. You could tell from the minute I met him.
The operation to get Peter Valaschek behind bars in the summer of 1988 was massive. It involved a global investigation, cooperation

between enforcement agencies in the US, Pakistan and Germany, two separate sting operations

and months of sifting through piles of documents.

When the German finally pleaded guilty to selling chemicals that could be used to make

mustard gas, he also agreed to help prosecutors nail his handlers in Iran. It was ambitious, but Special Agent Dennis Bass could almost smell the win.
He just needed a few more months to tie up the investigation.

By December, he was getting close.

But then...

It was all over in a phone call.

Yeah, the halfway house, you know, reported it.

He's going.

Peter Valaszczuk had disappeared from the halfway house he was living in while waiting to be sentenced.

The authorities had lost him.

I was more than pissed, if I can say it that way.

I was beyond belief.

It's been three decades, but clearly it still gets to Dennis Bass.

And losing him like that, it hurt.

And even now, he has no idea how Peter Valaszczuk escaped. There's only one person who can answer that question.
When Special Agent Bass wanted answers from Peter Valaszczuk, he tricked him into coming to the US. And then a few nights in Baltimore jail helped persuade him to talk.
I'm going to need a slightly different approach. First, I have to find him.
So I dig around online. He's not exactly been discreet.
It's obvious he's still in Germany. Some more digging and a few calls later, and I'm pretty sure I have his mobile number.
As far as I can tell, he's never answered any questions about his crimes or his escape, and so I have no idea how he'll react to a call from a journalist. I'm desperate to ask him how he found his way out of the US and onto Interpol's most wanted list, how he's evaded justice for so many years, and most importantly, whether he feels any remorse for his role in helping a brutal regime create chemical weapons.
All right, I hit call. OK, here we go.
Hello, Mr Valeschek. On the phone, I suggest an interview.

I say I think he's had a fascinating life and that I want to know more about it.

He seems amused by the fact that I'm prepared

to come all the way to Germany to meet him.

But he tells me he has been thinking of writing a book about his life

and agrees that he has a good story to tell. No, thank you.
Is Siegberg bigger than Cologne? So that's how I end up in a taxi with Claudia, the producer who's making this series with me, on our way to the small German city of Siegberg. It's very picturesque, lots of traditional German houses, little castle up on a hill, a very quiet place.
Most of what I've heard about Peter Valaszczuk so far has been what Special Agent Bass has told me, that when he arrested him in the 1980s, he was cold and calculating. The only other information I have is from, of all places, a profile he created on a dating site called Russian Match.
It's from a few decades ago.

He was using a fake surname then.

But the photo of the man with the big warm smile,

it's definitely him.

He describes himself as

an interesting and honest businessman and pharmacist

with own company who likes nature,

animals, theatre, travelling, dining outside,

cosy home and family life, and perhaps you.

SIGBERG Driving through Siegberg, on the way to the interview, I'm struggling to reconcile these two quite different and admittedly outdated versions of him. Are either of them the real gas man? We're here.
Great. Thank you.
To be honest, Claudia and I aren't sure what kind of reception to expect.

We've not forgotten what happened to my friend Mike and his cameraman when they tried to approach Peter Vallesjeck a decade ago.

But in the end, all I can think about is that after more than 35 years,

we might finally be about to find out how he got away with it.

Are you happy to start the interview? You're happy to hear this. I can tell you a story.
I'm Chloe Hadjimathay from Tortoise.

This is The Gas Man.

Episode three, The Escape. support for this podcast and the following message is brought to you by e-trade from Thank you.
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This is Claudia. She's the producer.
Producer. Come here.
Thank you. For weeks, I've been thinking about this mysterious figure and what I picture is that sharply dressed businessman in his late 40s, the one who stared into the camera for his mugshot with those unsettlingly vacant eyes.
Now he's about to turn 81. What's left of his white hair is cut back very short and he's wearing a slightly grubby tracksuit.
He still has the glasses, but the large thick frames with the reddish tint

have been replaced with a more discreet wire-rimmed pair.

There's no sign of the aggressive man who confronted Mike.

He's actually pretty friendly.

He whisks us through a side gate

and up some stairs to a small office attached to his home.

I don't know what I imagined it to look like, but definitely not this.

Stalin!

Come in.

Pictures of Stalin.

At the top of the stairs,

hanging just above the entrance to Peter Valeshek's office,

is a huge portrait of the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. When he opens the door, there are speakers blaring out meditation bells and chanting and we realise Stalin's just the beginning.
He goes off to get us some water, leaving us alone for a moment.

Maybe just while we're here, just describe to me just what you can see. OK.
Half the walls are old, really quite beautiful, golden, orthodox icons of the Madonna and baby Jesus. and surrounding all of that on top of all the cupboards and all along the windowsill are these small busts of Lenin, Chairman Mao, Karl Marx, and Stalin and Trotsky.
It's a kind of strange cross between a church and some kind of communist era museum.

It's a nightmare of competing ideologies.

The office is dusty, there's stuff everywhere.

Statuettes of bulldogs.

And then there's a whole load of stuffed birds, a massive stuffed crow, a puffin,

and on the other wall a duck and a pheasant. This is from Iceland.
Not allowed to bring it in anymore. In custom, oh.
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 looking.
Taking advantage when customs inspectors aren't looking. Ah yes, that sounds familiar.
It's the gas man all right. Sitting in his claustrophobic office, I'm trying to work out what all this says about him.
Communist?? What is this? I see Mao, I see... I was before a very hard communist.
You can see this, you can see the flags. The flags are from 1945 from Russia, yeah.

My wife is also communist.

Is she Russian?

Yes, she's Russian.

We start setting up for the interview,

working out how the three of us are going to sit in the office.

Yeah, could you move slightly forwards?

And that means Claudia's getting out microphones

and asking Peter Valeschek to move around a bit. I shouldn't touch a lady.
Not too close. He keeps suggesting it might be better if I sit on his knee.
But you will not sit here, no? No. It's not the first time I've been faced with a sleazy man during an interview.
But given the gravity of the conversation, I thought he might take it all a bit more seriously. After all, I'm here to try and understand his role in an international chemical trafficking network.
So I ask him to start at the beginning. How did he get into the chemical trade? My beginning of my life was in a small village in Germany.
Growing up, the young Peter wants to study physics or astronomy, but his father won't let him. Instead, his only options are pharmacy or law, and he goes for pharmacy.
I don't like pharmacy. Why? Is it boring? Shit.
Pharmacy is nothing. Given where he ends up years later, perhaps law might have been the better option.
I'm surprised to find out that after his studies, he works as a researcher at a university and even as a part-time high school teacher. But his main career is as a pharmacist, a pharmacist who can't stand sick people.
All the old ladies, I could not see them anymore. I hate it.
I hate it. At some point, he struck off and has his licence revoked.
I haven't been able to find out why. But he closes up the shop and starts a wholesale pharmaceutical business.
Then there was coming this Iranian from the embassy and said, can you make an export? I said, OK. At this point, I haven't asked Peter Valaschek anything about his dealings with Tehran.
And so, sitting there in his office, less than half an hour after meeting him, I'm surprised by his openness. He tells me that one day, a man approaches him.
He's from the Iranian embassy in Germany and he asks him whether he'd be interested in exporting medicines to Iran. It's 1987.
Germany is still split between the capitalist West and communist East. While lots of the world's been cutting ties, pulling diplomatic staff and citizens out of the new Islamic Republic, West Germany's become Iran's biggest trading partner.
It sees the new theocracy as an antidote to the growing socialist threat in the East. Perhaps Peter Valaschek's communist sympathies don't run that deep, because he agrees to export pharmaceuticals to Iran.
But before long, his contact at the embassy is asking him for other things too. This is one very funny story.
Iran was asking me, because I'm a pharmacist and chemist also, for some chemicals. He jumps at the new business opportunity.
What they really want, they tell him, is thiodyglycol. It's a key ingredient in mustard gas.
Peter Valaszczuk's happy to oblige. His first two orders from the chemical company Alkalac in Baltimore go ahead.
Hundreds of barrels of thiodiglycol leave the harbour and end up in Iran. Peter Valaszczuk has no idea that Special Agent Dennis Bass from the Baltimore Customs Office has spotted his third shipment.
No idea that the chemicals in the barrels have been switched for water. And he still hasn't worked it out when he gets a call from the nice export manager at Alkalac.
A free trip to America? Well, that doesn't sound so bad.

He's still annoyed he fell for Special Agent Bass's sting operation. And I said normally my thing was,

a good American is a dead American.

Normally not, but OK, I'm doing it. But it was wrong.

And now I go there in airport.

You are Peter Válezsék? Yes.

Come in prison. That's the Baltimore jailhouse Dennis Bass was pretty sure helped break him.
Now, decades later, Peter Valeshek insists his time in jail didn't bother him. And who was in a double bed with me?

A double murder.

I said, why you have killed him?

Why not?

Was it scary for you?

No.

He was nice.

He's watching me gleefully to see if he'll get a rise.

I'm not so scared. I begin to notice something of a pattern.
He revels in anything he thinks might seem shocking or sinister to me. And I just can't tell yet whether it's an attempt to provoke me or just the truth.
In any case, Peter Valaszczuk says he's surprised to end up in jail because, he insists, he didn't know anything about the export restrictions in the US. And you didn't know that it was illegal to export the chemical from America? No, because I told them, I don't know your law.
I know my law. And I was asking, is it allowed or not? And here the customs said, no problem.
But you didn't know that there's different customs in different countries? I was asking an American company and they said, no problem.

It's the same line he stuck to when he was questioned by Special Agent Bass and the prosecutor Martin Himalas. He clearly knew enough about what was and wasn't allowed to hide the final destination.
You said, can I send this to Iran? And they said, no problem. We have, I told them not to Iran.

I said, we I send this to Iran? And they said, no problem. So you didn't tell them it was Iran's? No.
First to me, the chemical.

I realise if I was expecting some kind of confession or expression of regret, I'm not going to get it from Peter Valeschek. and now here are, back where we left him in Special Agent Bass's story.
He's living in a hotel under armed guard. He's pleaded guilty.
Some of the charges against him have been dropped in exchange for cooperating with the authorities. Still, he's likely to be looking at a couple of years' jail time, but not until the rest of the investigation is wrapped up.
So his lawyer petitions the court to let him out on full bail. He's been a model prisoner, and so the judge agrees.
But there are restrictions. He has to live in a halfway house where there are curfews.
All the Baltimore halfway houses are full, so the court sends him to neighbouring Washington, D.C.

I was never happy about the arrangement that the judge made to let him be in a halfway house in Washington, D.C.,

which was even out of my jurisdiction, basically.

And we certainly didn't have the manpower to keep watch on him. A bureaucratic twist of fate removes Peter Valaszczuk out from under the watchful eye of Dennis Bass and his team.
He's not quite on his own. He has to stick to the halfway house rules.
But there's not the same level of security. And as though that's not enough, he's given the opportunity to work as a volunteer.
You can go in a zoo, you can make something with old people. I said, no, old people not.
No. And how long did you work in the zoo? For four months.
Actually, Peter Wallischek's English is a bit misleading here. It wasn't a zoo.
Yeah, he worked in the basement of the US Department of Commerce, the agency whose laws he violated in the aquarium. He was like a volunteer there.
Why do they have an aquarium? It's the US government. They do a lot of strange things.
It was just something they had in the basement or the first floor of their building. And that's where he worked.
Which was across the street from US Customs Headquarters at the time. Yeah, bizarre.
In any case, that's where Peter Valaszczuk went every day when he left the halfway house. I like it because I like to work with animals.
This was good. And meanwhile, I have time to look how I can escape.
It turns out that it's not just Special Agent Bass

who's into hatching clever plans. It's at this point that Peter Valaschek decides he's not going to stick around and do his time.
And why would he? He's out on the streets, free to do as he pleases. It's a risk, because if he's caught, he'll be sent straight to prison.
He's already facing a couple of years jail time, and if his escape plan fails, they'll increase his sentence. But he's confident he can pull it off, because with Dennis Bass so far away in another state, he's been able to get some help from his friends.
I was going to a normal telephone cell with coins. A phone box.
That they are not... Checking.
It was funny. The Iranians.
He's been talking to them using a nearby phone box. They sort out everything.

Very simple. There's another passport.
Well, how did you get the other passport? It's not easy to get. From Iran.
Iran gave you a second passport. Different name.
Right. And you just took the aeroplane from America to Germany? Yes.
Before we started this investigation, Special Agent Bass and US law enforcement had no idea how Peter Valaschek escaped from the US. All they knew was that one day he didn't come back to the halfway house.
But in the end, it was simple. He bought a ticket in the same fake name that was on his new passport and boarded a plane.
And just like that, he was gone. FBI and the Americans are stupid.
They're stupid. Listen, he got caught.

He got lured over here.

He spent time in jail.

He spent time under house arrest.

He spent time in a halfway house.

So I wasn't totally stupid.

I wasn't the dumbest guy in the world.

But I didn't get the end result that I wanted.

So, yeah.

From the moment the court granted Peter Valaszczuk full bail, Special Agent Bass has been dreading something like this. But when the call comes, it's still devastating.
I can't say I was shocked, but I was pretty upset. We all were.
I mean, you know, just getting him over here was a big accomplishment and losing him like that, it hurt. It was really, you know, you hate to do a really successful investigation and then one of the most culpable people in the whole case is in your hands and then he's not.
Under normal circumstances, if a convicted felon escaped to another country, the US government would apply for them to be picked up and extradited to face justice. But Germany doesn't extradite its own nationals.
And so, even though he knows where Peter Valaszczuk is, there's absolutely nothing Dennis Bass can do. So for now, at least, Peter Valaszczuk goes back to business as usual.
Of course, he's still a fugitive from justice as far as the American system is concerned. So you might think that Peter Valaszczuk would want to keep a low profile to fade into the background for a bit.
But he just can't help himself. He picks up the phone.
You called him from Germany? Yes, I said. Where are you? I said, I'm sitting on my chair in my office.
Ah, you escaped, you disappeared. Please tell me how you could do it.
I said, you know what? Listen, you'll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. And if that's what you want, then so be it.
I mean, I had no respect for him. He wasn't even man enough to face the music for what he did.
Peter Valaszczuk also called Martin Himalas. He says he had a bone to pick with him When he was being questioned back in the States the prosecutor had called him by his first name not respectful enough apparently And he was always saying Hi Peter, hi doing I said, my God, I'm not Peter I'm Mr Wal.
Walaszczak. This is not nice what you are saying.
And then I was here, escaping, and then I phoned with him and said, Hi, Marty, how you doing? Oh, my goodness. It's unbelievable to me that that was his thinking and that he recalls that.
Martin Himmelis remembers the call quite differently. He says the German hadn't called to brag, but to beg for his help.
He told me that he wanted me to represent him, that he was in Germany, but he was willing to come back because all of this had just been a terrible misunderstanding. There was no misunderstanding.
He had committed a very serious crime. So it was not a long conversation.
Peter Valaszczuk has got away scot-free. So why should he care about the charges back in the US? Well, because although he's safe in his hometown, the moment he sets foot outside Germany, he's a wanted fugitive with a profile on Interpol's red list.
An alert to police around the world that this is an internationally wanted criminal. Dennis Bass is right.
Any time he wants to travel, he will be looking over his shoulder. Because most countries around the world do have an extradition agreement with America.
Special Agent Bass is confident all he has to do is sit back and wait, because it's only a matter of time before Peter

Valaschek slips up. The cat account and get up to $1,000 or more with a qualifying deposit.
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See store or sleepnumber.com for details. Back in Siegberg, sitting in his strange office, under the watchful eye of all those Soviet ghosts.
Peter Valaschek's been happy to tell me how he sent these dangerous chemicals to Iran and to laugh about his escape. But until now, we haven't really touched on how he justifies all this to himself.
Did you have any worry if the Iranians would make chemical weapons from the chemical that you sent them?

I didn't know that this chemical was a dual-use chemical.

But you knew it was possible?

No.

But you were a chemist. You must have known that it has many uses.

I'm not in touch with chemical weapons. If he genuinely didn't know how the chemicals could be used, does he feel bad about it now that he does? No.
You have no regrets? No. So your conscience is clear.
Conscience. Shall I look it up? Yeah, let me see if I can...
We pause to find the German word for conscience to make sure he understands. And he's not happy when he realises what it is.
Gewissen. Have the Americans have given what they are delivering to Iraq? I was on the border where they are fighting.
I saw it. I saw this was...
The chemical weapons. Yes, I saw it.
The Iranians were dead, hundreds.

At some point, Peter Valaschek says,

his friends in Iran took him to the battlefield

and showed him the devastation caused by the chemical weapons

the Iraqis were using.

They invited me.

They said, look, look where the dead people are.

So during the war, you went to Iran and you went to the... To the border where they were fighting.
Yeah. They were very blunt about it, about the kind of the process of what happens after you ingest chemical weapons.
And then the pictures were prominently featured in the news media. I still, it's etched in my memory.
I'm Husbanai. I'm an associate professor of international studies at Indiana University.
And I am a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT.

Hussbenai's childhood in Tehran was defined by memories of the war with Iraq.

I remember bomb shelters, having half days at school,

water rations, electricity rations.

I remember a lot of revolutionary propaganda,

a deep enmity towards Saddam and an Iraqi army at the time,

and rations. I remember a lot of revolutionary propaganda, a deep enmity towards Saddam and an Iraqi army at the time and the backers of his regime, especially the United States.
It's hard to believe now, but in those days, Saddam Hussein and Iraq were seen by the West as the good guys. Despite the fact that it was Saddam Hussein who'd invaded Iran, America and Europe continued to sell him weapons for years after the war started.
That's why Peter Valaschek asks whether the Americans have a gewissen, a conscience. The Iranian regime couldn't compete in terms of weaponry, so it used what it saw as its biggest strength, its much larger population, enlisting ever younger boys to go to the battlefront.
Children as young as 12 made to cross minefields to clear the way for more experienced soldiers. There was always murmurs of it when I was growing up in Iran, that the Revolutionary Guards used drugs to inject the kids right before they went to clear the minefields so that they were in a kind of a state of euphoria.
They didn't know exactly what was happening. It was a brutal war, and both sides were committing hideous human rights violations.
But it's not until a couple of years into the war that the first images of chemical attacks start appearing in Iranian government media. The Iranian government was making every effort possible to register these chemical attacks at the United Nations and it wanted resolutions passed against Saddam to show that he was really not just capturing territory, he was hell-bent on kind of annihilating the local populations.
All the attacks were coming from the Iraqi side, but the West was reluctant to criticize its ally, and Iran was becoming increasingly exasperated by the lack of acknowledgement. In a desperate bid to bring attention to the issue, the regime began flying out survivors to European countries for treatment.
The Princess Grace Hospital in London is one of half a dozen European centres where doctors have been trying to determine exactly what has caused the damage to their Iranian patients. It was hugely embarrassing for the governments who'd been supporting Saddam Hussein when newspapers began publishing photographs of victims in local hospitals.
In response to all the awful images of dead civilians, many countries, including the US and Germany, imposed restrictions on selling the chemicals that could be used to create these types of weapons, including thiodyglycol. It's possible Iran didn't even have a serious chemical weapons programme before it approached Peter Valeshek.
so the orders they purchased from him marked a potential escalation in a war that had already killed hundreds of thousands of people. And the chemicals were delivered after the restrictions.
So his explanation that he didn't realise he was breaking US laws because it was OK in Germany, it doesn't hold water. Is it allowed? If you're selling these types of potentially dangerous products, you should know how contentious they are and whether or not they've been restricted.
Here they said, no problem. But I didn't know.
But it's when we turn back to talking about that trip he took to the front lines on the Iran-Iraq border that it feels like I'm finally inching closer to understanding how he justifies all this to himself. When the Iranians took you to the battlefront, you saw...
Only an Iranian state. But you saw soldiers, but you also saw women, children, old people.
If the Iranians make chemical weapons, they will also kill women, children. And you don't feel bad about that? Who started it? It was the Iraqis who were starting it.
He seems to justify it to himself by saying he was helping the right side, the underdogs. Even if that's true, more chemical weapons would only increase indiscriminate human suffering, on whichever side.
He still denies knowing how the product he was shipping would be used. But Peter Valaszczuk says even if he had known how his chemicals would be used, he wouldn't have done anything different.
I can tell you if I would know now it is for Iran and they make chemical weapons, I would say make it. I would say these are my friends, I would help them.
If he's trying to paint himself as some kind of activist on behalf of Iranian survivors, it doesn't wash with me. I've not forgotten his response to Dennis Bass when he was first questioned in the 1980s.
He said if he'd known his chemicals would be used in weapons, he'd have charged the Iranians more. And his story keeps changing.
He was saying, we need it for this company. I know this company.
I was there and I've seen what they were doing for this ink for this. What they are doing, besides, I didn't know.
And I was not interested. Sometimes, he says, he didn't even know his chemicals could be used for weapons.
Other times, he tells me, he knew the Iranians were making weapons, but he was told his chemicals weren't involved. When I press him, he says it was a long time ago and he can't remember.
This is so... This is not an old story, it's an ancient story.
And I have to be fair to him, it was. But he was the one who brought it up.
And anyway, these aren't small business details. This is a moment that changed his life.
I feel like he's justifying his involvement in whatever way makes the most sense, depending on the question, trying to wriggle his way out of responsibility.

Ultimately, I think this was all about money for him.

When you make business, you make it with government, and then you know that money is coming.

It was good business.

And here's the thing.

His handlers are still his friends.

Particularly the man who first made contact with him from the Iranian embassy in Germany.

What's his name?

Oh, that's his name. Sobani.
Sobani. Sobani.
And is he a friend now, old friend? Old friend. He confirms they've stayed in touch.
Peter Valaschek and Saeed Harim Ali Sobani. The man Special Agent Bass was hoping to catch.
Peter Valaschek had been offered a plea deal and bail release for information about this guy. When the Iranian diplomat realised US law enforcement was on to him, he jumped on a flight back to Tehran.
Dennis Bass had wanted both of them, and he ended up with neither. But I'm intrigued to find out that Peter Valaschek's still in regular contact with Ali Sabani Given that friendship and all the trouble the Iranians went to to get him a fake passport it makes me wonder whether Peter Valaschek's business dealings with Iran ended with his arrest.
I was very often in Iran. I was in North Korea.
So the countries you did business with are North Korea, Iran, China. China, then Cuba.
Cuba, uh-huh. Countries, what the Americans say, they are the bad countries.
I came to meet Peter Valaszczuk hoping for some kind of clarity about who he is and why he did what he did. But sitting in front of him, I feel like I've just opened a whole new door in this investigation.
Now I have even more questions than when I first got here. What's he been doing all these years since he fled the US? He wasn't laughing when he used to call me when he just got out of jail in Zagreb and when

he was getting out of jail in Austria. I don't think he was laughing so hard then.
Is he still

exporting chemicals to Iran or to other pariah states? Was he the only person doing deals like

this? That's next time on The Gas Man. It's bad enough what he did, but now he's making it public everywhere.
You know, he was working for the government, and so they charged him with, like, crimes against humanity and some other charges. I looked at Ramir.
Ramir doesn't cry. No noise, no nothing.
Pale. And just had a little bit of white stuff coming out of the mouth.
It was a chemical bomb. Thanks for listening to The Gas Man.
It's reported by Chloe Hadjimotheou 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. This episode was fact-checked by Patricia Clark, with thanks to

Husband I, Martin Hahn, Kavita Puri, Matt Russell and Katie Gunning. You can listen to more episodes

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