An English gentleman | Walter's War Ep 1

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

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

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. 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.

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

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. 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.
It's going to take experiments. It's going to take disruption.

The future will team with artificially intelligent

unmanned systems, which fight,

gather reconnaissance data, and communicate

at breathtaking speeds.

...and being candid about the good, bad, and ugly

of AI.

And it all started

a long time ago, in a galaxy

not far away. At least,

I think it did.

I'm Basha Cummings and you're listening to Walter's War from Tortoise, episode one, An English Gentleman. so you've come to talk about somebody that you met a long time ago and i guess we we'll get onto sort of your life now and what you think about that time in your life.
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.
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.

The city is buzzing. 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. I was living in my first flat share with some friends, so it was a really fun, exciting time.
I had my first proper job that I was getting paid for, but it was just really exciting. 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. And she starts dating too.
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. 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.
You'd write a profile and you would send somebody a message and wait to see if they responded to you. She messages back and forth with a few people, but the first person to really catch her eye and her imagination is Oliver.
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.
He's 5'10 and a few years older than her. He seems intellectual, worldly.
They connect easily over books, Graham Greene in particular, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and films and politics too. The emails fly back and forth.
But there's a hitch. When I was messaging him to begin with, he wasn't actually in the country.
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. She's impressed.
The war is often in the news. In the often volatile Helmand province was the third of seven.
There has been no immediate claim of responsibility. But the Taliban said they would...
So we messaged quite a lot to begin with because he wasn't available to meet. It all seems quite exciting.
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. As they talk, it becomes clear to her that their backgrounds are quite different.
So he told you that his name was? Oliver William Twizzleton Wickham Fiennes Mallinson Lewis. 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.
Something came up and I made a joke. I said, like, did you go to Eton or something like, ha, ha, ha.
And then he just responded, fuck no, harrow. 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. Not just Churchill.
On the long list of old Herothians, 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. 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. 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, like it was a real burden.
No, but my dad is. 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, that moment at least geography she thinks that they make a good fit. And so when he got back from Afghanistan how soon after that did you meet? 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 and then he he messaged me from there saying do you want to meet up next Sunday when I'm back so in November they meet in the heart of London to get coffee and to go clothes shopping 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 which is a bit taller than me.
And then when I met him, he was like exactly the same height as me, which I have no problem with whatsoever. I mainly go out with men that are about my height.
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.
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.
It helps break the ice. And regardless of a few missing inches, she thinks he's very attractive.
So he was like, very fit, very lean and muscular, had a bit of a few missing inches, she thinks he's very attractive.

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. 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.

He's dressed in chinos and a vintage leather jacket,

and he wears a small ring on his little finger.

And he had a signet ring on, which is not something I had come across before,

but then later sort of came to learn it was a bit of a signal of power maybe and wealth.

They walk to find coffee, making small talk.

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. It was the one in which Judi Dench stops being M and Ralph Fiennes takes over.
And I was expressing my disappointment in this because I didn't love Ralph Fiennes and I really liked Judi Dench. And he kind of laughed and was like, oh, he kind of looked a bit uncomfortable,

like humorous but uncomfortable was kind of the expression on his face.

And I was like, sorry, do you like Ralph Fiennes or something?

And he said, oh, it's just he's my cousin.

And I was like, oh, OK.

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.

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

Is that going to be?

And he's like, no, no, no, I'm just saying. And I was like, OK, fine.
It's a really wonderful afternoon together. She's intrigued by him.
Wealthy but self-deprecating. Well-connected but quite shy.
After they part ways, Charlie goes home to her flat share and concludes, yeah, big crush.

Why do you think you really fancied him?

What was it about him that you really liked?

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.

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.
Soon after that first date, they meet again. He invites her for dinner and she meets his friends.
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. She likes him and she likes the idea of him.
And she's continually impressed by how much he does. 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. 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. You're kind of painting him out and 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 gentlemanly. Like P.G.
Woodhouse or something like, yeah, very much like that. OK.
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? What else did you learn about like the main thing I learned about him I guess were 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 I was under the impression that maybe at some point he had actually been like in combat like 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.
I definitely thought that. The Grenadier Guards came up as being, like, the unit that he was attached to.
But, again, I don't remember how that happened and how that came up, but it did. 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. And he suggests that she read a book, England Made Me by Graham Greene, a story about Anthony Ferrant, a character who's boasted his way through jobs all over the world.
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.
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.
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.
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? She is, after all, not a part of his world, and he doesn't really seem to

want to let her in. Many months into her job at the market research company, Charlie starts to get frustrated.
I was at that time thinking like, well, 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.

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.

At that time I just saw an advert for a job with the intelligence services

and I thought, why not give it a go?

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. 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.
I can't say which organisation she applies to or what the role was. I can say that it was an entry-level job.
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.
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.
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. So it was quite a weird experience for when you're going for a job it's unusual after you make it through all the application forms and competency tests they want to know more about your life is everything you're hiding do we know everything about you obviously they ask you about people that you know i don't think that's like a secret or anything anyone's going to be surprised by.
They ask you about close relationships. 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? I wondered whether I should put him.
And he said to me, no, 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 engaged or you live with somebody they don't mean just going out with somebody i think it was only at that point then when he started to just like draw back a bit he wasn't like stopping encouraging me but he was just like don't put me on this i kind of thought he's just not that interested in the relationship 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 going to find out anyway.
For me, he was like, almost like a, it would be like a bonus to have him on the form, you know, because he's so part of that world that they'll just be like, oh, great, you know him, then you're in. But it doesn't quite go as she'd planned.
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. She's heartbroken.
And in her vetting interview, she them so. I told them that I 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.
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. But she has this distraction, an exciting job that she feels is within her reach.
And so when did you first realise that something was wrong with the job application? 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, I was just sat at my desk and I looked down at my mobile phone and I got a text.
I was nearly sick when I read it. The text came up on my phone and I could only see the first few words and I opened it.

And it was clearly from the message not meant for me. But it was about me.
Or it was about Ollie. 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. So it said, hi, it's all a tissue of lies.
No harrow, no grenadier guards, nothing. And yeah, I just couldn't believe it.
Like the bottom fell out of everything. I was just so shocked.
Soon she receives a letter on official headed paper. She's failed vetting.
All she's left with is apparently a tissue of lies. Charlie and I first met many months ago when this story, already a decade old, tumbled out over breakfast in a cafe in Westminster.
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.
All of it felt so familiar, true of so many young women at that point in life. 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.
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. And that creeped me out, like that I didn't know what it was for.
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.

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.

Something that went beyond her personal experience all those years ago. 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. 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. And it was about a company that I'd never heard of called Rebellion Defense.
Though slightly reluctantly, I read it. And it was only when I got to the final few paragraphs that I understood why Gary had sent it to me.

In this story about a company promising

to revolutionize warfare using artificial intelligence,

a name glared out.

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. So I started reading more and more.
So if you wouldn't mind, I'd like you to welcome, please, Oliver Lewis to the stage. Thank you very much.
After breaking up with Charlie, Oliver Starr had appeared to be on the rise. Policy advisor and strategy advisor with two deployments to Afghanistan.
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.
And then he went on to work for the

Ministry of Defence, and then for hugely successful companies. Now he was a co-founder of a startup

that was valued at more than a billion dollars, a unicorn as they're known.

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

Oliver Lewis, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Ira. Whenever someone describes me, it always sounds like someone I'd

Thank you, Ira. Whenever someone describes me, it always sounds like someone I'd prefer to meet.
Yeah, yes, it definitely made you sound quite exciting and a bit of a polymath. With one caveat, I'm not a computer scientist.
I'm a recovering British diplomat. So I can talk to you in Pashto or Dari, but not Scala or C Sharp.
But what I do know... I started to find it hard to keep up.
From his presence online, I could see that he'd studied at Oxford, Aberystwyth 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. But what was most interesting in this long list of jobs was his latest venture, this company called Rebellion Defence, a reference to the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, who stood bravely against the evil of the Galactic Empire.
You might not surprise you, it's called Rebellion, so Rebellion is still very much the idea of Star Wars. The company had been set up in 2019 to sell artificial intelligence to the Ministry of Defense in the UK and to the Pentagon in the United States.
Rebellion Defence is interested in bringing cutting-edge machine learning to the problems of defence and national security. And this wasn't just a punt.
It was being backed by some of the biggest and best-known tech investors in the world. Alongside Oliver, there were two other co-founders who had the backing of the ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.
You want to avoid an arms race. And an arms race in AI could look a lot more...
And James Murdoch, son of Rupert. The article that my producer had found, written by an American journalist called Jonathan Geyer, explained that Rebellion Defence 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.
And not only that, but this journalist was discovering that the company was not what it seemed. Was there a particular quote or conversation that stood out to you at that time that really made you think, this sounds bad? Well, I mean, the money quote was, you know, what a former staffer told me was, rebellion is like fire festival led by Jar Jar Binks.
Jonathan Geyer 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.

It was almost too funny to be true.

And even people who I'd been speaking to previously that 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, you know. They were 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. 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. 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?

Suddenly, our conversation with Charlie

in that Westminster cafe seemed very different.

I don't want to say it was an obsession,

but I just always wanted to know,

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? 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. She'd started to think that maybe people had been trying to warn her.
She thought back to that book that his flatmate had suggested to her, England Made Me by Graham Green. What's the book about? 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 acts a part, if you like, he creates a persona for himself and acts a apart with a harrow tie in order to work his way up in life.

And people just believe him for who he is.

They take him at face value because why wouldn't you?

And that enables him to have success in some way.

But he's just kind of like a Walter Mitty character. 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 unravelling.
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 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. 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? To try and discover how governments and investors themselves check what's true, what's real, and what's exaggerated or imagined.
At a time when many people are genuinely scared of where artificial intelligence will lead us. Industry leaders, researchers, and others are now asking for a pause in the development of artificial intelligence to consider the risks.

And it all leads back to a simple question that Charlie was left with.

Where does the story end and the truth begin?

This is an AI arms race.

Whoever controls this technology has huge control over our future and our lives. Next in Walter's War.
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.

They tell you what you already believe.

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 What was the word that you used earlier the name for people who Walter Walter Mitty the man who makes up stories Oliver Lewis was contacted for this story but did not provide a comment Walter's War is reported by me, Basha Cummings The producer is Gary Marshall Additional reporting is by Xavier Greenwood and Imogen Harper 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.

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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