The Trojan Horse Affair - Trailer

Speaker 1 Syria listeners, Sarah Koenig here to announce that we have got a new show. It's called The Trojan Horse Affair and it's great.

Speaker 1 I know this because, well, of course I've heard all the episodes and because I've been editing it for more than a year now, which involves a lot of arguing and laughing and shaking of fists, the whole tussle of investigating a mystery alongside the reporters.

Speaker 1 And the reporters? Well, one is Brian Reed, whom you might already know as the host of our hugely popular podcast, S-Town.

Speaker 1 And the other guy you probably haven't heard of because he's a brand new talent. His name is Hamza Syed.
He used to be a doctor before he decided to go to journalism school.

Speaker 1 And it was Hamza who brought this incredible story to Brian, a classic mystery, which, like all good mysteries, ends up exploring way more than first meets the eye.

Speaker 1 The Trojan Horse Affair unfolds in eight episodes. You can listen to all of them now.
So please subscribe on your podcast app. The Trojan Horse Affair.
In the meantime, here's a trailer.

Speaker 2 I happened to to be in Birmingham, England, one night when this journalism student came up to me at an event.

Speaker 2 His name was Hamza Syed, and he wanted help on his first ever story about a mystery in Birmingham, his hometown, that no one had ever solved. It had begun a few years earlier.

Speaker 2 when news of a strange letter exploded in the press.

Speaker 1 A leaked letter outlining a plot by hardline Muslims.

Speaker 2 The letter looked to be...

Speaker 2 Well, Hansa, you want to explain this part?

Speaker 3 The letter looked to be a secret communique between Islamic extremists who had been infiltrating the city's schools in a supposed plot called Operation Trojan Horse.

Speaker 3 The letter was bizarre, unsigned, incoherent, badly Xeroxed, yet still, it sparked one of the biggest school scandals in British history. Government investigators descended on Birmingham.

Speaker 3 The country beefed up its counter-terror policy. By the time it all died down, schools were revamped, teachers lost their jobs, some people were banned for life from education.

Speaker 4 The fallout has been huge. Prime Minister David Cameron, as we said, is calling a special meeting of the government's extremism task force.

Speaker 3 The former head of the United States.

Speaker 3 But what I always found suspicious about this whole affair is that this dodgy letter suggesting extremists were taking over our schools, nobody ever found out who wrote it or why.

Speaker 3 Remarkably, none of the investigators even tried. So I convinced Brian Reid over here here that we should go for it.

Speaker 2 Is this about to be the first radio interview we've ever done? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Hams and I spent years running this down.

Speaker 3 I'll give you a clue.

Speaker 2 Who is the letter defending?

Speaker 3 Is the question you have to answer.

Speaker 2 But figuring out who wrote the Trojan horse letter.

Speaker 3 I didn't write it. I don't know who wrote it.
What my job to find out who wrote it. I'm not the author of the Trojan horse letter.

Speaker 2 That was only the first mystery we were up against.

Speaker 2 It started to seem like officials knew more than what they were letting on, all the way from a local primary school to the highest levels of British government, and that Hams and I were poking at something that people did not want to talk about.

Speaker 3 Can you give us a bit of details about that situation? No. It is particularly important that I don't.

Speaker 3 She answered, and she just immediately started saying, I'm busy, I'm busy, and started trying to shut the door on me.

Speaker 2 You look a little confused.

Speaker 1 It's just a very unusual line of questioning.

Speaker 2 Why? Can't talk to you about why can't you talk about that? Sorry.

Speaker 2 You're leaving us? You're waving us goodbye

Speaker 2 coming February 3rd from Serial Productions and the New York Times. I'm Brian Reed.

Speaker 3 And I'm Hamza Said.

Speaker 2 It's the Trojan Horse Affair: a mystery in eight parts that a lot of people don't want you to hear.

Speaker 2 Can you hear me? Yeah, hey, I just got a letter of threatening and injunction.

Speaker 2 We are