The Trojan Horse Affair - Part 8

You can't count on much these days.

No way, Jim.

This is incredible.

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Since I pitched this story as my student project, I've always felt that if it was to make any difference, what you need is proof, incontrovertible, unassailable, beyond a doubt proof of who authored the Trojan horse letter.

And we didn't have it.

Brian, I had a lot of compelling circumstantial evidence of who might have written the letter.

and a sound theory of why it might have been written.

But that wasn't going to be enough.

The Trojan Horse Affair means something to powerful people in my country, to its political and media class, to our decision-makers and mood setters.

When they're looking to justify policies or general political support, it's part of the infrastructure that allows them to shorthand that Muslims are dangerous.

When others have pushed back against the Trojan horse narrative, they've done it by calling out the Islamophobia and racism that drove the affair.

focused on the damage it's done to Muslims in Birmingham and Britain.

But none of that's really worked.

And I think it's because that approach requires people to care about Islamophobia, to care about Muslims.

And we're a long way from that.

That's why I'd focused on the letter.

I believed exposing the author of Operation Trojan Horse would give us an agnostic fact, would sidestep the need for people to care, and would force everyone to acknowledge what really happened here, even if it's through gritted teeth.

And that's also why we're headed to Perth, Australia.

Our next and final stop in this investigation.

And it wasn't just Brian and me me going.

We're taking with us to Perth.

Stay with me now.

This is a very multicultural moment.

A South African dentist we'd met in a windswept town on the coast of Wales named Ahmed Ducosta.

We didn't plan to travel to Australia with Ahmed.

The adventure we'd end up on together.

It started with a visit to his tiny flat in the town of Cardigan.

You are from America.

I'm from America.

It's my first time to Wales.

Oh my god.

Yeah.

We'd driven to Wales to see Ahmed because we wanted to ask him about Rasvana Darr.

Ahmed had moved with his family from South Africa to Birmingham some years back, where he began volunteering as a governor in schools.

We'd heard that he and Rasvana Darr had been close once.

Before she went to Adderly, Mrs.

Darr worked at the school where Ahmed was chair of governors, Oldno Primary School.

Ahmed stayed friends with Mrs.

Darr after she moved on from Oldno, would go visit her at Adderley, where his wife was also a governor.

And then the Trojan horse affair happened.

Because of the scandal, Ahmed was banned from education, labeled an extremist in the newspapers, and ended up shutting down his old dental practice in Birmingham and taking a position here in Cardigan.

This room, yes.

This, you see on the floor, you see the lines behind you?

They used to pray in this room.

As we stepped inside his place, Ahmed pointed out the faint lines in his carpet, which showed people where to stand for prayer.

Back when his apartment used to be a mosque, now the mosque is downstairs in a little storefront space, the Cardigan Islamic Cultural Center.

Ahmed could live anywhere in town.

He makes a fine living as a dentist.

But he told us he likes the convenience and familiarity of this place.

Easy to pray, easy to get halal takeout at Abdul's curry shop next door.

Hams and I were hoping, because Ahmed knew Mrs.

Dar, he might have some useful information for us about the Adderly dispute or even the Trojan horse letter.

But Ahmed made it clear pretty quickly.

He wasn't interested in discussing Rizvana Dar.

I can't speak bad of Riz.

What happened with the teaching assistants?

I don't know.

I wasn't there.

What happened with the Trojan horse letter?

I know many of my colleagues say that she wrote it.

I don't know.

But what I do know is my relationship with her was extremely good.

She was an outstanding teacher.

I only love Riz.

I only have good relationships.

Ahmed told us he didn't have much interest in the Trojan horse letter or its origins at all.

Still, we ended up staying at Akman's the whole day because being with him, him, it was like recognizing a far-flung relation.

Someone seemingly as preoccupied as we were with straightening out what had happened during this whole affair.

There was plenty Ahmed did want to talk about, adderly aside.

What he was prepared to discuss.

And when I say prepared, in the middle of the room, he had a tripod set up with a projector on it.

But didn't just be this thing I'm sorry,

was the legal case he was building against the government for what they'd done at Old No Primary School during the Trojan horse affair.

It was pretty similar to what happened at Parkview, a school that was rated outstanding until the Trojan horse letter broke.

This is how we'd spend the next few hours, taking in an exhaustive presentation of volumes of files Ahmed saved from Oldno, which he projected from his laptop on the wall above his bed.

It's like a spreadsheet full of text messages.

This is word for word, literally die for die.

Also emails, meeting minutes, school paperwork.

Did you create this timeline yourself?

I did.

Ahmed's hoping he can convince a solicitor to build a case out of this material, to hold the officials involved accountable.

That was Ahmed's main reason for talking to us.

He was very clear.

He doesn't have a high opinion of journalism.

But he thought possibly our story could catch the interest of a lawyer, willing to help him pro bono.

All this effort Ahmed was putting in, it wasn't even to exonerate himself.

He was trying to help another person, the Department for Education band, the former head teacher at Old Know.

The guy had only gotten the job a couple months before the Trojan horse letter went public.

Ahmed says any Islamizing that the government was concerned about at the school.

This new headteacher had little to do with.

He'd just taken charge.

If anything, Ahmed says the changes at Old No are on him as chair of governors.

Ahmed felt responsible for the headteacher losing his career.

Still feels responsible.

At one point, Ahmed got up to stir something delicious smelling on the stove, a South African rice dish.

I looked around and I realized it almost seemed like he was camping out.

The drafty flat, the twin bed he was apparently stuffing himself into each night.

Ahmed's a big guy, well over six feet tall.

The space heater, the ironing board doubling as a side table.

There was no artwork or photos or anything personal in there, apart from piles of red and blue and green document boxes filled with hard copies of Trojan horse records, which Ahmed told me he lugs around every time he moves house.

I asked him, Where's your family, by the way?

Your wife, kids.

Apparently, they're in South Africa,

permanently, and then your house here.

But I can't leave until this justice for this Trojan horse.

Oh, that's why you're here?

Yes.

Solely because you want to try and get justice for this whole Trojan horse thing?

I can't go back permanently until he has at least some form of terric or justice.

Just because I know at some point we're gonna go to court, isn't it?

Someone will come along.

If not you, if you're not, if your story, someone somewhere, the truth always come out.

And on the side of truth is time.

Something about Ahmed became apparent as the day went on.

He was driven to talk at length about the Trojan horse scandal and the lies he was sure the whole thing was based on.

But when Brian and I would try to bring up the place where it seemed like the whole thing started, Adeli and the Trojan horse letter, he would pull back.

Do you remember?

Can you remember when you first heard about the Trojan horse letter?

Oh my word, I can't remember that.

Do you remember when you first read it?

I don't think I ever did it.

You've never read the Trojan horse letter.

No.

This is the letter that started it all.

I know.

This guy, who was living thousands of miles away from his family, to seek justice for the Trojan horse affair,

had never read the Trojan horse letter.

It begged belief.

We tried to get him to read our copy now.

Why would you want me to read it?

Because you've never read it.

And we want to talk to you about it.

Yeah, but I'm not.

I don't read like you read, you see.

I like to read with a pen and with a highlighter.

You'll see, I've got...

So you see on there the back with these coloured pencils.

Do all of that.

While you do that, I'll make a cup of tea.

He barely looked at it.

But later, as Ahmed was doing the dishes and plating up a New York-style cheesecake he'd bought especially for Brian.

His avoidance of Aderley and the letter started to relent.

Who have you spoken to from the Adderly leadership team?

Ahmed asked us.

We told him we weren't having much success with that one.

Nobody.

And that's when Ahmed started talking about Mark Walters.

Mark Walters, the former deputy headteacher of Adderley Primary School, who had offered that curiously late testimony, saying he was inside the room with Rasvana Darr as she opened the envelopes from the Muslim teaching assistants and pulled out resignation letters.

It turned out Ahmed knew Mark too, because like Mrs.

Darr, Mark had also worked at Old Know.

And after Mrs.

Darr took the job at Adderly, Mark joined her.

I liked Mark because he was a very good teacher.

He was a gentleman, nice man.

Mark had taught Ahmed's kids.

He'd given special attention to his older son, who'd been having a hard time academically.

Ahmed and his wife credit Mark with turning their son's whole school career around.

Mark had been to Ahmed's house.

Ahmed wrote references for him.

He and Mark and Mrs.

Darr would see each other at a local tutoring center on Saturdays.

They even talked about going to South Africa together to do work in schools there.

However, when Trojan was happened,

Park View was in the front in the newspapers.

But I said, look, Odno is going to be next.

So then

I contacted Dariza.

I emailed her and I said, the inspector said they're coming to Odno.

Can you write me?

Can you email me something that I can present to these people?

Because you were in the school.

That there is no extremism in Odno.

I didn't hear a word from her.

I heard nothing from her.

You've never heard from her since then?

Not a word since then.

She was like my sister almost, you know.

Our relationship was very good.

So I was shocked.

For me, that was the biggest shock.

Ahmed also wrote to Mark Walters asking for the same support.

Mark ignored him, too.

And then

he'd up and move to Australia without Ahmed ever seeing him again.

Ahmed told us he was sure Mark had first-hand knowledge about the TA resignations at Adderley and maybe about the Trojan horse letter too.

He said if we were interested in nailing down who wrote the letter,

Mark was definitely someone worth pursuing.

But if he's pressured, he will speak.

You think if he was pressured, he would speak?

He will speak.

Because we've contacted him.

We've written him and called.

Yeah, he will speak.

In fact, on my Facebook, I put in Mark Walters a million times to try and find him.

Really?

The weakness I can tell you is Mark Walters.

About a week after our visit to Wales, I got a message from Ahmed.

As-salamu alamza, can you text me Mark Walters' phone number, school, and home address, please?

Thanks.

We gave Ahmed a call.

As-salamu alaykum to Qas Hamza.

And we could tell Mark had been on his mind since we left.

We told Ahmed we're thinking of flying to Australia to try to speak to Mark.

We knew he was a little crazy.

It's a long way to go for an interview with someone who might or might not help us crack open this mystery, but we're kind of desperate.

Over the course of the call, we realized...

I would have liked to have looked him in the eye to talk to him.

Ahmed was considering a trip too.

We all decided it made some sort of weird sense for us to go together.

Can you even go to Australia?

Like, I don't even know.

Like, don't you have like a dental practice?

As a friendly intermediary, Ahmed thought he could help us get our meeting with Mark.

But also, Ahmed could use the trip to try and get something he wanted, which was personal.

He wanted Mark to simply say to him, I know you're not an extremist.

I know you're not some dangerous plotting Muslim.

I want him to say that to my face.

And so, we were off to see Mark Walters in Australia on a glimmer of hope that he could help us put this letter and the affair is started to bed.

From Cereal Productions, the New York Times, I'm Hamza Said.

I'm Brian Reed.

I'm Ahmed Decosta.

This is the Trojan Horse Affair.

We arrived at our hotel near Perth.

Me from Birmingham, Ahmed from Wales, Brian from New York, a little worse for wear.

Ahmed had delayed a foot surgery to accommodate our trip and being all cramped up on a long haul flight hadn't been friendly to him.

and killed me.

It was killing me.

See, the top of my head, nothing you can see.

His foot did look bad, but there's nothing I could do for him.

All good, Ahmed said.

He put his trainers back on.

The truth needs to come out somehow, isn't it?

Those were his actual words as he did up his shoes.

Swollen feet be damned.

Ahmed was on a mission.

We turned up to Australia with the following information.

We knew that Mark Walters was a deputy principal in a suburb of Perth.

We'd called and emailed him several times over the previous year, but never heard back from him.

We'd also find a home address for an M.

Walters right nearby his school.

That's where we decided to approach Mark, at his home rather than at work.

Brian and I would knock by ourselves first without a humut and no recorders.

We figured that'd be a little less scary for him.

Alright man, you ready?

Nervous.

I was walking over it.

You're nervous?

A little bit.

Around 6.30, we headed to Mark's condo complex.

It had just gone dark.

Okay, I feel good.

I feel I'm gonna crack jokes, or I'm just gonna be self-aware and say that I know this is surprising.

Just

be there for each other.

Let's both be involved, okay?

Yeah, of course, of course.

All right, yeah.

All right, I'm turning this off.

Ready?

All right.

Okay.

We don't know if it was him showering.

We'd walked up to Mark's condo, and as I was about to knock on the door, I heard a shower going through the window beside us.

I mean, it probably is him showering.

We decided to wait in the car for a roughly shower-length amount of time, then headed back to the condo to try again.

I don't like seeing you nervous, because then you like make me nervous.

I wasn't nervous.

Just mellow out and chill, and then I'll be chilled.

Yeah, I'm not nervous.

Alright.

Fuck.

Oh, man.

Fuck.

This way.

Wrong address.

The unit was home to a Frenchman blasting club music with his friend and a case of booze.

He said he didn't know if a Mark Walters used to live there or not.

Our best shot had evaporated like that.

It was Friday night, which meant we had two days to try and find Mark at home.

Are you asleep?

No, no, no, I'm just reacting.

I'm recording, by the way.

Back at the hotel, we debriefed Akbud.

You successfully?

I wouldn't use the word successful.

Oh, that doesn't sound good.

Wrong address.

Some French guy.

But anyway, we found another address that looks actually quite nearby and also likely that we're going to go.

You do know what you look like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But we're going to go in the morning at 8.30.

Early the next day, we woke up a woman who was not Mark Walters, tried another address, another woman, also not Mark Walters.

Brian had joked that Mark might have chosen a greater berth area as his new home, not only for its remoteness and stunning weather, but also for his noticeably high concentration of M.

Walters's per capita.

And then suddenly Ahmed popped up.

He emailed us a file.

He tapped up a realtor who'd shared him on a database of property sales to people named Mark Walters all over Western Australia.

Over lunch, I started flicking through the attachment and a woman's name jumped out at me.

It was Brazilian sounding.

I had a vague memory of somebody in Birmingham saying something about Mark being Brazilian.

or marrying a Brazilian.

I googled her name and her Pinterest page came up with a picture of her and Mark.

That's Mark, right?

That's Mark.

That's his wife.

That's Mark.

That's his wife.

That's their address.

That's their address.

Ahmed!

Now

this is it.

Yeah.

This isn't like crap shoots anymore.

I'm gonna get a double espresso.

Yeah, I'm gonna get a nice smoothie for the road.

Alright, I'm texting Ahmed.

We've located

the right house.

Headed there now.

We'll report back later.

He's typing.

Thumbs up and a heart.

Have you prayed today?

I prayed this morning.

Aren't you supposed to do prayer right now?

All right, man, let's not bring that in.

God, I'm on the road.

We needed all the help we could get.

I'll pray.

I'll pray before the face.

I can actually.

That'd be really nice.

Yeah.

Hamza wandered over to a grassy knoll overlooking the Indian Ocean.

There was a breeze blowing.

He prayed.

Good prayer.

Good prayer.

Felt spot?

Felt strong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really nice.

Really, really was nice.

I should put my shoes back on.

Should we do it?

I need to help to articulate just to get in the right frame of mind.

Why should Mark tell us what he knows?

You know, what if he's just like, why do you guys care about this?

Quite honestly, it's like...

Oh man, it's like

it's about making him realize

that something that began so insignificant

had such a profound impact on so many lives.

So I'm talking about generally what was happening in those schools.

The message that you don't have to

strip everything that you stand for, the values that you're born with, or you live by, you know, it can all be achieved without you having to lose yourself and become something else.

You know,

it's not a binary choice.

I'm either this or I'm that.

In order for me to be successful, I have to be a certain kind of person and be a certain kind of way and believe in a certain kind of thing.

You know, if I'm precious about my belief system, if I'm precious about my background, if I'm precious about my culture, all of these things will actually hold me back and there's no success for me.

And so I have a choice.

No, that's not true.

So, I don't know how we're gonna put all that across on a doorstep of someone who clearly does not want us there.

It's gonna be difficult.

No, but this is helpful.

This is why I needed to get this back in my head because we've been so much in the minutia of the white pages and

Google Maps.

This is good, I feel good.

You ready?

Yeah, that's good.

Let's go.

All right, let's go to his house.

Hello.

Hey, Ahmed, it's Brian.

Hello.

Okay, so it didn't go great.

We're sitting in our rental car in a strip mall parking lot about 100 yards from Mark Walters' house.

Yeah, we knocked.

He answered the door.

I said, Mark Walters.

He said, Who's asking?

I said, I'm Brian Reed.

I'm sure this is very surprising.

And he said, You need to get off the property now and slam the door shut.

Not very good, is it?

No.

And we stood out there knocking a bit saying, we don't mean to cause you distress.

We're just doing our job.

We think it's really important to talk.

Please hear us out for five minutes.

We've come all this way.

And then we, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but we had written a letter

in which we explained that you're here and

how much you respect him and how you're hoping to speak to him.

And so anyway, right before we left, I said, I shouted in, I'm leaving you a letter, Mark.

Please read it.

We left the letter in the door, and then we kind of sat on the curb across the street for a while.

No one's stirring.

And now we're kind of just in a shopping center outside where he lives.

Yeah, I will just go speak to him.

I'll go to.

I don't think you'll shut the door in my face.

His first reaction is normal.

You know, the first reaction to most journalists

is where you want to shut the door in their face.

So I don't think you must be surprised about that.

So

you've been on the receiving end of this, I see.

Yes, I have been, unfortunately.

Normal people are just generally scared of journalists.

Journalists tend not to write the truth.

You see, sir, this is why people are scared.

And if you're crooked then you're also scared of journalists because they might write the truth.

So either way, the people that are honest and dishonest don't like journalists.

You have a lot of power over people's lives and people feel very helpless.

And especially now for him, because this is now his new home.

You are going to bring all the bad news back to his new life, and he doesn't want that.

And I think he's also a victim, you know, in all of this nonsense that went on.

I don't think he's

the bad guy.

So,

yeah, no, I'll go speak to him.

That's not a problem.

We went back to the hotel and found Ahmed in his room.

Oh, you horrible men.

You're ready to torture Mark.

By this point, it was late.

We wanted to give Mark a chance to read the letter we'd left for him, lodged above the front doorknob.

We'd take Ahmed over to Mark's first thing in the morning.

While we were out all day, Ahmed had made friends with the taxi driver at the mosque downtown, who'd offered to bring us some curry for dinner.

We sat in Ahmed's hotel room while we waited.

Ahmed asked if he could take a look at some of the court files from the Adderly employment case.

He hadn't seen them before.

I gave him the witness statements from Razvanadar and Mark Walters, and he lounged on his bed in a white t-shirt and sweatpants, reading them.

And I think he was surprised how much of their narrative struck him as odd.

You see, the bit I don't understand that makes no sense, Brian.

It says here in the first few bits, parents, you know, were criticizing and making derogatory remarks about the headteacher in the playground.

There are parts in the statements about conservative Salafi parents hurling abuse at Mrs.

Darr on a daily basis, which Ahmed had a lot of trouble picturing.

Why would you take abuse for years?

That makes no sense.

There were protocols for dealing with angry parents at schools, and especially knowing Mrs.

Darr, how authoritative she was.

Ahmed couldn't imagine her just taking it.

I'm not saying that there is no unruly behavior, but it's very easy to deal with it.

So if this had been going on for years, that makes no sense to me.

Because no history.

No, no, no.

Which is what they're claiming it it was really bad.

But what I'm saying is, she's a very forceful person.

Miss Daw is very forceful.

And she will allow the parent to abuse her day in, day out.

Does it make sense to you?

Just think logically.

Don't try and be a journalist or, you know, don't be just use simple minds.

Ahmed had started off relaxed on the bed.

Now, reading what his old colleagues had sworn to in a tribunal, he was agitated.

You see, this is why I don't read these things, you know.

It's just.

You asked to read it.

Yeah, I know, but I don't want to read this, Brian.

All right, sleep well.

Get some rest.

Get some rest, okay?

Let's be fresh.

Thank you for the evening.

We called it a night.

I was in my room down the hall, about to get in bed, when there was a knock at the door.

It was Ahmed.

He said he couldn't sleep.

Could I lend him Mark Walters' witness statement for the evening?

He asked.

Um,

I read

this last night, um,

and I read it again this morning.

Hamza and Ahmed and I are headed to Mark's early the next day, Sunday.

Ahmed's dressed up for the occasion, a pressed shirt and blazer, and he has Mark's witness statement in his hands.

What do you understand by the term overacting?

Overacting.

I know my wife sometimes will they will say, oh, what a terrible actor or something and they will say she's overacting.

And how do you guys understand that?

You're exaggerating your emotions like more than a normal person would.

Or you're not being truthful in your performance.

You know, you're being a little hokey or fake.

That's what I thought of the resignation.

Ackman reads Mark Walters' account of the day the envelopes arrived from the three Muslim TAs.

I'll start with the first bit.

On the 6th of December 2012, at approximately quarter past one, I was in a route to Mrs.

Darr's office for a pre-arranged meeting.

I'll come back.

I'll come back to the bits that stand out.

As I approached the main school admin office, Ms.

Door appeared at the doorway.

I was accompanied by the other deputy, headteacher Anila Ashraf.

I walked the few steps directly into Ms.

Dar's office.

Ms.

Door held the door open for us, and I saw she had multiple envelopes in her hand.

The three of us entered the office and sat down at the large meeting table.

And I recall noting that the envelopes looked thicker than usual.

As I commenced discussions, okay, let's stop there.

I recall noting that the envelopes look thicker than usual.

That is something silly to say.

That don't fit.

Yeah, I was actually, actually, when you just read that aloud, I noted that too.

That doesn't fit because they come in all the time with envelopes under.

Why would you say that?

That just sounds suspicious to me.

That's just added for overacting.

And the resignation letters, I'm told, are two sheets.

How does two sheets make your envelope look thick?

Yeah, true.

It just don't feel right.

It's overacting.

And then she opened it up in front of them every time.

It's very very convenient with all of these resignations.

They're all together.

Mark is there, Anila is there, and she's there.

She's keeping the door open for them.

That's also a bit.

I've been in the office multiple times.

And she's not necessarily, you know,

I just find it,

or maybe it happened like that.

But

I just find that strange.

When we first met him a couple months earlier in Wales, Ahmed was very reluctant to accept the possibility that these people he thought highly of, Rasvana Dar and Mark Walters, might have done something untoward regarding the resignation letters.

By the time he trekked to Australia, I think it's fair to say he'd concluded that something had gone awry, but he wasn't sure what precisely.

And whatever had happened, he seemed to imagine that everyone's motives had been unmalicious.

A forgivable mistake.

But this morning, on our way to Mark Walters' house, Ahmed had come to see Rasvana Dar and Mark Walters' response to the TAs

as calculated.

I think these people were driving Riz up the wall and she wanted to get rid of them.

That's just what my gut is telling me.

And reading this man's response, don't make that disappear.

It feels choreographed.

If it was the truth, she would have had no problem to say, I was in my office, I opened it up, I saw these resignation letters, I called in my deputies and assistants to understand.

She would have had no issue.

But I don't believe that they were in the the room when she opened it.

That's it, right?

We pulled up to Mark's.

The letter's still there.

Wait till I see it.

The envelope we'd left for him was still wedged in the front door.

Oh, the letter's still there.

And his car, a yellow Toyota,

also appeared not to have moved since we were here yesterday.

Let's go knock.

There's no point us hanging around.

You came all the way from the UK to meet this man, so let's go meet him.

After the the break, Achman knocks.

All right, gentlemen.

All right, good luck.

Yeah, well, Lupis, good luck that way.

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Sunday morning.

I'm not walking up to Mark Walters' one-story house on the edge of a wall in development near Perth.

Brian and I parked a few houses down.

This is crazy.

All right, I'm looking through the back.

He's not, he's at the door.

He's knocking.

He's knocking.

Nothing.

No.

I'm so nervous, Raymond.

He's so brave.

Yeah, I'm nervous too.

Ooh.

He's kind of pacing at the door right now.

He stepped away a bit.

Oh, he's knocking quite close to the ladder.

He's pacing in front of the house.

Now he's doing a wide pace.

Hands in his pockets.

Beige blazer.

Khakis.

If you do have eyeballs on the front

and your mark and you don't know Da Costa's here, now you're gonna be like, what fresh hell is this?

Two journalists at my door yesterday.

Now I have a giant ex-colleague pacing around my front lawn.

How long has it been?

It's been about seven minutes.

It's been that long?

I thought it just felt that long.

No, it's genuinely been long.

Starting to become a scene, isn't it?

I'm aware of the neighbors.

I know.

Oh, there's a dog.

He doesn't like dogs.

No.

I thought this time would creep, but it's actually flying.

I'm like so on edge.

I think the neighbors told him to clear off.

Oh, really?

I think so.

Okay.

And he's watching him come back to our car.

Oh, he looks a little dejected.

You know, the neighbors have these.

You know, why are you knocking?

Because I'm knocking all the time, it's quite loud.

Ahmed got in the passenger seat.

But it's not a word, not a whisper, nothing in the house.

Did you shout?

Did you say like it's Ahmed?

All the time.

I went to the windows by each window, and this is what must have frightened the neighbors.

You know, I'm knocking loud.

What'd you say?

I just talked to the cost there, Mark, Ahmed.

I don't want to speak a few minutes.

I repeated it over and over and over like a lunatic.

The neighbors can hear me.

So surely he can hear me if he's inside.

So he must be inside the latest thing in the door.

We were on very good friendly terms.

You know, I planned for him and others to come to South Africa to come help us with our schools there.

It's very sad that it all ended in such a disastrous fashion for everyone.

We went for lunch and came back.

The envelope's gone.

Finally, some thrilling signs of action.

Now I'm just bored.

I was behind the wheel.

Suddenly, I'm with him Brian noted to someone behind us.

A woman, Mark's next-door neighbor, was coming at the car aggressively, with her phone out, photographing us.

I'm gonna go talk to her.

I'm gonna go talk to her.

Hi, ma'am.

Ama told Brian to take his recorder with him because he looked more like a journalist.

But in his rush to intercept the neighbor, Brian left it in the back seat, running.

It's better he steps out.

Brian walked up to the woman and offered her a business card to introduce himself, but she wouldn't take it from him.

She kept clutching her phone with a scowl on her face and continued taking pictures.

Then a man we assume was her husband came down the driveway.

You don't look very happy either.

Hey, Mark, you know, you could stop all of this, just open the bloody door.

Oh, Mark, you could stop all of this.

Just open the bloody door.

Ahmed mumbled.

Now the woman was right outside Ahmed's window with her phone in his face.

Ma, why are you taking pictures of us?

Because you're harassing us and you're stalking.

And we've already told the police we know exactly who you are.

Harassing you?

We've got nothing to do with you.

This is our neighbourhood.

This is our neighbourhood, leave.

But we're not coming to speak to you.

I could still see Brian in my side mirror, gesticulating and talking to the husband.

Oh no, I don't know what Brian is saying.

Is it really with diplomatism?

He's probably trying to explain what he's doing.

I don't know what.

The husband looked very aggressive.

I don't know if he's doing.

But you see, now it's a natural instinct when you look the same, but as of a feather flock together.

So they will listen to him a bit more than if they have to.

I had to be there.

Oh, yeah, obviously, they wouldn't give us two minutes, minutes but like I mean the fact that he's managed to keep him talking for this long is good enough.

Yeah I think he's a good decent diplomatist.

Yeah yeah he's good for this stuff.

He's good for this stuff.

I would have lost my patience about 20 minutes ago.

I would just ignore them.

I don't think that went well.

Oh I don't think so that they demeanor it's not really going.

Have you upset the neighbors?

The neighbors are not very happy with that.

But we gotta go.

I can't believe this shit.

That was crazy.

Woman's like, we know who you are.

We know what's going on.

This isn't Birmingham.

We know the story.

We know what's happening.

What?

Yeah.

Birmingham.

How did I know that?

So you must have spoken to them.

And they said he's not there.

They said he's left.

He's not even here again.

I said, that's fine if that's true.

That's good to know.

The wife was, I mean, way more upset than the husband.

They said they called the police.

I said, I'm happy to speak to the police.

We're not doing anything wrong.

Put your belt on.

I'm sorry.

I said, why are you filming his house?

I said we're not filming.

We have a microphone.

You're welcome to look at it.

We're talking to each other in the car.

We've not filmed.

He said who are the two cronies who were filming yesterday?

I said I've been here every time.

I'm with these guys.

Basically the Browns.

She's worried about two Browns.

She came to the car and said get out of our neighborhood.

Yeah.

No, I think there were some undertones there for sure.

I sensed

ethnic apprehension in her voice.

Yeah.

Yeah, she just kept saying, we know what the story is.

We know it's about.

We know who you are.

We know who you are.

We know who you are.

But how does she know the story?

That's what I'm interested in.

They seem to know, because I said, well, I said, you know, it's a story about a school that he used to work in.

I'm here all the way from New York because as part of my job, I need to make sure before I air it that I get a chance to talk to him and give him a chance to respond.

He said, well, he's obviously not interested.

He's obviously not interested.

I said, I understand that.

This is a situation where I still need to make sure he responds.

It's unpleasant.

I'm sorry that I freaked you guys out.

He doesn't want to deal with this shit, is what he said.

She looks so angry.

Their demeanor, their physical demeanor looks so aggressive and so angry.

She was very upset.

She was like, you're a liar.

You're a liar.

You're a liar.

I said, I'm a journalist.

She said, you're a liar.

I can understand they may be upset because they feel you there's something going on that they're not too sure what's going on.

Well, I think he told them something.

Ahmed took in what this could mean.

The way the couple was speaking to me, Mark doesn't want to deal with this shit.

You're a liar.

This isn't Birmingham.

It seemed like not only was Mark avoiding him, but he might have said something bad about Ahmed, or about all of us, to his neighbors.

I'm glad you experienced it a little bit.

You know, when you said X, and she said, no, you're lying.

Because that's what we experienced all the time as Muslims.

But

they would have calmed down because you spoke to them, Brian.

If I had to go out of the car, I don't think they would have been very calm.

No, for sure.

For sure.

You were okay because you were in their neighborhood and your neighborhood.

Yeah, and now, to be honest, it would have ended in minutes because I would have just stepped out.

So, fucking bugged the shit out of them.

Your colleague is a bit more aggressive than you, Brian.

This guy gets riled up.

This has happened before.

I don't understand, like, why, and honestly, I don't understand why

you have to take it.

But I wasn't taking it.

Not you, not you.

I just mean in general.

I mean, the royal you, you know, the royal you.

You did well.

You did really well.

There's a bigger picture.

Don't let them distract you.

If you want to

slowly show people the reality of Muslims, then you have to be better than them.

It don't take...

I know I don't expect you to agree with that.

Oh, above and beyond,

to be treated equally.

It's like, forget that, man.

Also, I feel like, alright, so if I walk on tiptoes and eggshells,

you might ignore me, but like...

It's like, you know what?

You're going to think whatever you think of me anyway.

What I'm saying is, the brown person,

you will always be seen as the aggressor.

You bummed, Ahmed.

I'm just disappointed, isn't he?

You seemed pretty confident that he would talk to you.

Yes, I was.

If I could meet him in person, he would speak to me.

Well, clearly, he doesn't.

Clearly, you being here hasn't helped.

Judging from, like, filtered through the osmosis of his neighbors,

sounds like he didn't frame it well.

He didn't seem sympathetic to your being here or moved by your being here.

I'm sorry, Ahmed.

No, no, it's not a problem for me.

People change,

but I don't know.

I think it's just scared, isn't he?

My cat told me that he's

a porn in all of this as well.

Right, so we might just have to sit here and accept the fact that, like, we are not going to get the truth.

No, no, no, no, no.

I believe that we can get the truth.

You might not be able to get the truth.

We can get the truth in a court of law.

Right, but then, but then, okay,

rephrasing that it basically means that the truth is further delayed.

Yeah, but that is, this is what I've told you, isn't it?

For me, the goal is not the end.

My goal is just the struggle.

And if you have that vision, then you're never completely defeated.

You have to be patient.

It was somewhere along this aimless car ride that I realized we weren't going to get an answer.

We weren't going to know for sure what happened in Rasvanadar's office that day with the envelopes, or why Mark Walters and Anilashrav's testimony about it was delayed for so long.

We weren't going to find out whether Mark or Anilashrav gave true accounts of what they saw.

We don't know whether they did anything wrong at all.

And most disappointingly, we weren't going to get a confession out of anyone involved in crafting the Trojan horse letter.

Not the author or authors or a first-hand witness.

Meaning, we have no ability to say for sure who wrote the letter or why.

Which is pretty much what Brian told me was going to happen the first night I met him.

Standing backstage as I blurted out my pitch for the story, what he said to me was, it's going to be really hard to figure out who wrote the letter.

You're probably not going to prove it.

But he also told me, that doesn't mean the story isn't worth doing.

Because if I was doing it right, I'll still make revelations along the way that could be meaningful.

What we can tell you is this.

Once upon a time, a head teacher named Riz Barnadar Darr was in trouble because of four teaching assistants and Burmese City Council's investigators.

We can say a strange letter appeared in the nick of time, claiming the TAs in the city council were part of a Muslim plot and that they had conspired to frame Mrs.

Darr.

We can say that this letter was very useful to Mrs.

Darr.

She brandished it around insisting she was the victim of a conspiracy and ultimately her name was cleared.

We can say the police knew the letter was bogus and that was told to Michael Gove.

That Sue Packer raised an alarm.

that Peter Clark produced his plot, no plot, but maybe plot, but I won't say plot report.

And we can tell you about two essential eyewitnesses to the envelope opening, who Adeli Primary Score kept puzzlingly hidden for nearly a year.

But whether these revelations are meaningful, I doubt it.

I believe without someone saying, I wrote the letter, or I have proof of who wrote the letter, the Trojan horse affair will rumble on and on.

At one point in the car, as Ahmad was going on again about journalism being useless, Brian asked him a question, which you might as well have been asking me.

I don't, because people.

Wait, but wait, can I ask you this?

Why are you participating with us?

Why are you talking to us?

Yeah, I don't know.

It's a good question.

Because I trust.

Why bother with this at all, then?

With journalism?

Ahmad thought about it for a second.

In Islam, we are taught that when you're oppressed, you have to speak if you can't change it physically.

The only alternative is to speak.

One of the highest forms of

I don't like to use this word because it's not understood very well.

The word is jihad.

But one of the highest forms of sacrifice is to speak against the dictator or an oppressor and tell him to his face that he's an oppressor and a dictator.

I believe in this too.

The value of speaking if there's nothing else you can do to change something.

I went went to journalism on that premise.

This series is what that sounds like.

But while the implication of that guidance, to me at least, and I'm no scholar, is that speaking truth will lead to change.

I don't know if the Prophet, peace be upon him, actually said that,

actually said where it would lead.

He just said speaking truth in the face of oppression was one of the greatest forms of jihad.

Forms of struggle.

And so that's where I'm left, wondering if all of this, what we've told you, is headed towards change.

Or if this is just another profile of the struggle.

Can we not lose hope?

Just because, like, I don't want to lose hope until you are on a plane.

No, no, no, no.

Even if I go back to the UK, for me, this was positive.

You know, because I came here.

I did something.

I did warn Hamza.

I knew how these things normally go.

Rarely is there one big revelation that undoes years of misinformation and untruth.

Most decent journalism is an exercise in incremental understanding.

The Trojan horse letter, though, even with my tempered expectations, I was surprised by how willing people have been to let it stand unchallenged.

People are depressingly unbothered that this harmful myth about Muslims persists.

The mystery of the Trojan horse letter could be resolved.

The person or people who sat down one day to type out that document, or perhaps others who know about it, they're almost certainly out there right now, possibly strolling down Allen Rock Road, maybe even listening to this.

But in order for that resolution to happen, government officials or the police, the British public, they would have to decide that this task, determining the perpetrator of a massive nationwide hoax, is their responsibility, and probably should have always been, so that it wasn't left to a doctor-turned journalism student in search of a school project.

Which is to say, a bunch of people would have to care enough.

And Hamza's right.

We may just be a far away from that.

On our last day together with Ahmed in Perth, after having emailed Mark again and trying his wife a few times with no response, Hamza and I watched from the car as Ahmed strolled through a primary school gate and across the parking lot, and probably past the CCTV camera, into the school's reception area with an envelope in his hand containing a letter which Hamza and I had both witnessed him seal inside: a final written plea for Mark Walters to simply talk to him.

Ahmed would stand in that primary school reception area, just a few feet away from Mark Walters, who, as the principal let Ahmed know, was sitting in his office on the other side of a door, refusing to come out.

out.

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Hamza Syed and me, along with Rebecca Lacks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass and by our contributing editor, Aisha Menazar Siddiqui.

Fact-checking and research by Mark Cronole and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Meller, with additional music by Matt McGinley and Stephen Jackson.

Sound design, mixing, and music supervision by Stephen Jackson and Phil Domahofsky at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Nday Chubu.

Executive Assistant is Alberto DeLeon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

Also Solange Franklin Reed, Paula and Howard Reed, Adam and Stephanie Reed, Vera Franklin, Chris Olasevich, Abbas Hussain, Momina Shaheed, Katie Fuchs, Jordan Cohen, Jonathan Haywood, Elizabeth Davis-Morer, Elena Serrow, Susan Wesling, Clifford Levy.

Legal Reviewing Counsel by Dana Green, Alamein Somar, Martin Soames, Emma Lynch, Simone Prokas, Gavin Millar, Constance Pendleton, Allison Sherry, Robert Stankey, Selena McLaren.

The distribution team at the New York Times, Jeffrey Miranda, John McNally, Julia Simon, and Lauren Jackson.

The marketing team at the Times, Lindsay Fiskler, and Megan Shepard.

And thanks also to Raynam Borelli, Tara Godvin, Esla Atter, Peter Rentz, John Michael Murphy, Alexa Brown, Sam Posner, Matthew Likowitz.

The brand identity team of the New York Times, Kelly Doe, Jason Fujikuni, Hannah Ho, and Anisha Mooney, Lucy Jones, Catherine Roach, Lina Lassam, Matthew Lloyd Thomas, Stephanie Price, Telegandosi, Morgan Jones, and Christoplamatos.

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and the New York Times.

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