The rebellion | Walter's War Ep 3

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Speaker 17 Tortoise.

Speaker 20 My guest today, Oliver Lewis, is an advisor and former executive for Improbable, a British-based tech startup that recently teamed up with their British government to create arguably the most complete simulation ever of how the internet works.

Speaker 19 It's October 2017. Oliver Lewis has just left Improbable, leaving the world of unicorns and simulations for somewhere rather less sexy, the British Civil Service.

Speaker 19 He starts working in its digital wing, where old-time civil servants mix with developers and data scientists to transform online public services. But Oliver's interests remain the same.

Speaker 20 Oliver is an academic and innovation advisor and British senior civil servant with interests in near-future technologies, institutional and corporate culture, diplomacy and national security.

Speaker 19 And prior to joining... He appears on podcasts, on panels, at conferences.
He's just in his early 30s. There are always these long, impressive introductions.

Speaker 20 I'll ask him about that.

Speaker 19 In this podcast, it takes the host, Ira Apful, more than a minute to describe his work.

Speaker 21 Oliver Lewis, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 22 Thank you, Ira. Whenever someone describes me, it always sounds like someone I'd prefer to meet.

Speaker 20 Yeah, yes, it definitely made you sound quite exciting and a bit of a polymath, so I definitely wanted to delve into all of that. But I wanted to start by talking a bit about...

Speaker 19 What would you like to meet?

Speaker 20 If I were to meet you at a cocktail party and said, so tell me what you do, what would you say?

Speaker 22 Probably the... The main thing I try to do is

Speaker 22 understand what others have called the central drama of our time, which is the human-machine interface.

Speaker 22 How are technological innovations, existing and potential future innovations shaping and reshaping the social fabric of our societies?

Speaker 20 When did you grow intrigued by

Speaker 20 that interaction of the human and the machine?

Speaker 22 I think the truthful answer would probably be watching Star Wars when I was a kid,

Speaker 22 which I think many of us would share.

Speaker 23 For sure.

Speaker 22 But beyond that.

Speaker 19 Even if someone in British intelligence knew about Oliver and his tissue of lies, as that text to his ex-girlfriend Charlie suggested, it certainly didn't seem to be hampering his career.

Speaker 19 For now, he was back in Whitehall.

Speaker 19 At the same time, across the Atlantic, a man called Chris Lynch was also working in government.

Speaker 24 Walking the halls of the Pentagon in his hoodie, Chris Lynch has been mistaken for a repairman.

Speaker 19 But unlike Oliver, Chris Lynch was a true outsider, and proudly so.

Speaker 26 This is the weirdest moment of my life. I never thought I'd show up in government.
I never thought that I'd be working at the Pentagon.

Speaker 19 He didn't come from the world of government or the military. He was a self-proclaimed nurse.

Speaker 27 You know, if you were to go and visit the DDS office, it looks like Star Wars threw up all over it.

Speaker 27 There is that, but it's more than just the aesthetic. It is, it's sort of this hope and belief that we can change the future.

Speaker 19 Chris Lynch was also into Star Wars in a big way.

Speaker 26 We're kind of a SWAT team for nerds.

Speaker 24 Bureaucracy busters.

Speaker 19 His LinkedIn photo is an image of him flying backwards in the air in front of what looks like a Jar Jar Binks model and a Portaloo.

Speaker 19 And when Chris Lynch and Oliver met, it's not hard to see why they soon became partners. They both appeared to be high up in government, trying to bring it into the digital age.

Speaker 19 Both of them into Star Wars, both working with defense departments.

Speaker 19 Before long, they were in a coffee shop with a third co-founder, Nicole Camarillo, who had worked in the U.S.

Speaker 19 Army Cyber Command, and they were hashing out the ideas that would become Rebellion Defense.

Speaker 18 I brought my laptop because I thought you guys are going to keep talking about this, but if nobody starts committing it to paper, then it's not real.

Speaker 25 And I laughed.

Speaker 19 They were at the very start of of a remarkable rise, soon to attract some of the biggest names in venture capital, drawing on their deep connections in government and the military, promising to transform war.

Speaker 19 But the funny thing about this story is, the deeper you delve into artificial intelligence, the more you come to learn about human intelligence, too.

Speaker 19 Because I spoke to another woman, for whom the tissue of lies felt alarmingly familiar.

Speaker 19 It became clearer to me what the central question of this investigation is beyond the obvious one, who's checking this stuff.

Speaker 19 Because if nobody else in the military, in government, in AI, in big tech, in investment, was really sorting truth from fiction in a story like Oliver's, If this was all about, in fact, who you knew and how you presented yourself and the strength of a story, then what does that say about scrutiny in that world at all?

Speaker 19 A world where we know very little about the people who are building the tech that could impact our rights and our safety.

Speaker 19 I'm Basha Cummings, and from Tortoise, this is Walter's War, Episode 3: The Rebellion.

Speaker 19 The Rebellion Defence website is impressive. On the homepage there's a black and white video that plays grainy footage from warplanes and it sets the tone well.
It looks slick.

Speaker 19 The opening text says that this is a company that builds technology for defence and national security. There are these references to the warfighter and the modern mission stack.

Speaker 19 References to rebels and the rebellion. The Star Wars theme is very evident.

Speaker 19 And in fact it made me think of the opening text from the first Star Wars film, crawling across the screen and disappearing into deep space, where it reads, it is a period of civil war.

Speaker 19 Rebel spaceships striking from a hidden base have won their first victory against the evil galactic empire. And like in George Lucas's 1977 film, Rebellion drops you right into the story.

Speaker 19 The coming war, the modern adversaries, I guess in the company's case, the evil galactic empire means China.

Speaker 19 And the rebel spaceships are Rebellion's engineers, who, the company says, lead by, quote, practicing transparency and leading with empathy and courage.

Speaker 28 Rebellion Nova emulates adversary cyber campaigns to ensure that weaknesses are identified, critical missions are protected, and defense never stops.

Speaker 28 Start by viewing your network like an adversary.

Speaker 19 At its most ambitious, Rebellion Defense was proposing to automate decision-making in military settings, which I understood to mean a range of things.

Speaker 19 Yes, at one end, weapons that can think for themselves or killer drones and intelligent unmanned guns. But it also means the tech to feed decision-making.

Speaker 19 AI that helps politicians and generals choose targets or develop combat strategy.

Speaker 19 And the questions that all of this raises are huge.

Speaker 19 One expert in his book, I Warbot, asks us to imagine what will happen when a military force consists of technicians and thousands of robots rather than pilots and sailors and soldiers.

Speaker 19 But you wouldn't get a sense of any of that from Rebellion's website. It's showing us the opening titles, or a trailer at best.
This isn't the film itself.

Speaker 28 Nova automatically assesses the mission risk of each discovered vulnerability based on whether it's exploitable, if adversaries are actively using it, and which segments of your network are exposed, so you can quickly fortify your most critical assets.

Speaker 19 I knew that I wasn't alone in trying to decipher what all this means. This is new to almost all of us, and that's part of the problem.

Speaker 28 Nova delivers cyber readiness for institutions that protect us.

Speaker 19 The scale of what AI could do in our daily lives really hit the public's bloodstream in November 2022 with the public launch of ChatGPT.

Speaker 19 Suddenly, we were all asking this mega chatbot questions, watching it write essays, watching it solve complex problems and prompts in seconds.

Speaker 19 But how AI was being developed for warfare, that I knew very little about.

Speaker 19 And neither, it turns out, did our leaders. This is what Palmer Lucky, who founded Anduril Industries, one of the most successful new AI and defense companies, said in an interview about ChatGPT.

Speaker 30 ChatGPT has probably been more helpful to Anduril with customers and politicians than any technology in the last 10 years.

Speaker 30 All of a sudden, you'll have congressmen who will go and use ChatGPT and he'll type some stuff in, and he's able to use it.

Speaker 30 And he's able to see that it does things that he never imagined a computer could do.

Speaker 30 And then when I see him next, he says, you know, I think I really understand what you guys were talking about with AI being a big deal. This seems like it's going to be really important.

Speaker 30 It sounds crazy, but it's just been so true.

Speaker 19 And just to keep going with the fantasy theme, it's worth knowing that Palmer Lucky's company takes its name from a different franchise after a sword in Lord of the Rings, Angeril, that translates from the elvish to mean flame of the West.

Speaker 19 AI quickly became like a magic pixie dust, everything and nothing, the future of modern warfare, the killer of the human race, the way to save British and American lives on the battlefield, and the way to win the next big war that was surely coming with China or Russia.

Speaker 19 But how it actually worked? Who could actually build it? And who was checking if any of this was true?

Speaker 19 Well, those were the questions that I wanted to answer.

Speaker 19 ChatGPT was a public turning point. But Chris Lynch and Oliver and a whole gang of other startups, like Angeril, had seen an opportunity years before we were all introduced to the mega chatbot.

Speaker 32 We need a new breed of defense technology companies to reboot the arsenal of democracy.

Speaker 25 What is going to make that happen? Introduction. Right?

Speaker 28 It's going to take experiments.

Speaker 27 It's going to take disruption. And by disruption, I want to be very clear.

Speaker 19 I started contacting engineers and academics, military commanders and venture capitalists.

Speaker 19 And what I learned very quickly is in the meeting of defense, not known for its openness, and tech, which is also a highly guarded industry, I was going to need someone to show me the way in and to give me a starting point.

Speaker 25 Who would you recommend, particularly in that kind of private sector?

Speaker 19 Anyone that you think has a different perspective to yours or a similar one or just people you know. Which is how, after many, many conversations and dead ends, I was introduced to Laura.

Speaker 33 I'm Laura Nolan. As you can probably tell from my accent, I'm Irish.
I've been a software engineer for, well, all my professional life. In the

Speaker 33 I was working for Google. And I guess the interesting part of this story is when I learned about Project Maven first.

Speaker 19 Laura lives in Ireland, but back in 2017, she was working at Google, where she was a tech lead responsible for part of the company's cloud infrastructure.

Speaker 19 And one day, she was called into a meeting room. at Google's HQ in Mountain View, California to talk about a new project.

Speaker 33 I was having a meeting with a senior colleague and he said, Well, so there's this Project Maven thing happening, and we need to figure out how to build some air-gapped data centers.

Speaker 33 And wasn't given a lot of information about it at the time, but what we did understand was that it was related to machine learning processing of defense drone wide area motion imagery.

Speaker 33 So basically analysing drone footage using machine learning. Quietly,

Speaker 19 Google had taken on a contract with the US Department of Defense to build AI to help improve drone targeting.

Speaker 33 It's fair to say that Maven is not in itself an autonomous weapon, although it's very possibly something that you might use to create the inputs to build your autonomous weapons.

Speaker 33 So really what Maven was trying to do was it was trying to enable them to do more of this drone video surveillance, analyze it more thoroughly, get more data out of it.

Speaker 19 The former head of Project Maven said that initially they had approached Google because they wanted to process high-res footage of entire cities taken from MQ-9 Reaper drones.

Speaker 19 And although he claimed that this was all purely about surveillance, Project Maven's official title was the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, whose goal was, specifically, increasing lethality.

Speaker 19 And it was made clear that the Pentagon wanted to start using this tech in the war against ISIS and in Syria.

Speaker 33 Certainly, even at the outset, we knew that this was a departure from what Google had typically been involved in, or at least openly involved in, and we were concerned.

Speaker 19 Laura was specifically asked to build air gaps, a way to allow Google to run code for the Pentagon, but without Google engineers being able to see the classified data.

Speaker 19 It would basically allow for the separation of government computers from other computers on a network, and it could allow Google to pitch for many more sensitive military contracts.

Speaker 33 It was never an official policy, but for years Google recruiters had been going around telling people that they were talking to as prospective employees that, you know, Google didn't do defence contracting and didn't do war stuff.

Speaker 19 It wasn't what Laura had signed up to do, and she wasn't alone.

Speaker 33 In around February 2018, suddenly it was all over the internal Google Plus messaging platform and people were asking, starting to ask questions about it on big internal mailing lists and at big internal meetings.

Speaker 33 That was when it all got quite intense.

Speaker 19 A few months later, Google erupted in scandal.

Speaker 19 More than 3,000 employees wrote an open letter to the Google CEO, Sunda Pichai, requesting that Google cancel the contract.

Speaker 19 Its opening line, we believe that Google should not be in the business of war.

Speaker 19 And what all of this did, really, was expose a culture clash. Laura, like many others, resigned.

Speaker 33 I think ultimately it was a decision that I had to make.

Speaker 33 I was not sleeping well at night with the thought that I would be contributing to, you know, something that would lead to people being blown up in their beds. So, I mean, that's the end of it, really.

Speaker 19 After the protests, Google Google announced that it wouldn't be renewing its contract on Project Maven.

Speaker 19 This was a big moment in the relationship between Silicon Valley and the military.

Speaker 19 The head of Project Maven had said himself, this was the pilot, the pathfinder, the spark, he said, that kindles the flame for the use of artificial intelligence across the rest of the Defense Department.

Speaker 19 And he was right, because in the wings were smaller, newer companies who saw great opportunity. Companies run by people whose credentials and whose values and ambitions we don't really know.

Speaker 19 Companies whose names most of us have never heard of. Angeril, Palantir, S.H.I.E.L.D.
AI, Epirus, and Rebellion Defense.

Speaker 1 Hey friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro.

Speaker 5 I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens, and the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver.

Speaker 6 My kids are obsessed.

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Speaker 27 We started an unlikely journey to create something different, something new, something that didn't exist.

Speaker 26 And that became Rebellion.

Speaker 19 In early pitch documents circulated widely in Silicon Valley to raise capital, Rebellion Defense described itself as, quote, an unconstrained Project Maven.

Speaker 19 And Chris Lynch had been openly critical of the Google staffers who had protested the Maven contract.

Speaker 19 In an interview with Wired magazine, he said that AI technology is too important not to have America's greatest minds on it.

Speaker 19 And I guess he had a solution to that of sorts.

Speaker 31 It all kind of starts with this gentleman, Chris Lynch, who's a kind of Seattle Silicon Valley adjacent founder guy. I could never really figure out how he got

Speaker 31 into the kind of inner circle of the Obama White House. Like it sort of doesn't or didn't make sense.

Speaker 19 Chris Lynch's background was in developing internet sites and games. After a stint at Microsoft and a company called Adaptive, he had run a men's gifting website, Thoughtful.co.

Speaker 19 Then from 2013, he ran Celeb Hookup. The game's blurb read, choose from the sexiest famous celebrity men and women from Hollywood movies.

Speaker 19 Create and share your ultimate celebrity hookup list with celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, and Miley Cyrus. And then he ran Sparkword, a word game.

Speaker 27 It started with this idea. What if we were to mix Scrabble, boggle, and then we were to bring in a little bit of Tetris in there too.
Things blowing up, make a change.

Speaker 19 It wasn't until 2015 that he performed something of a handbrake turn.

Speaker 19 After an infamous pitch to the Pentagon, during which he wore a hoodie, Chris Lynch became director of the Department of Defense's digital service, the DDS.

Speaker 21 This sort of like,

Speaker 31 I don't know, a crack team of technologists trying to solve problems within the Pentagon that reported directly to the Secretary of Defense.

Speaker 31 So he had this kind of immense buy-in from the most important military leader.

Speaker 19 He was only there for three years before he was launching his own defense company. It was quite the leap from celebrities to national security.

Speaker 19 From the information that's publicly available about rebellion's origins, the three co-founders raised over 10 million in seed funding from two investors in 2019.

Speaker 19 One of them was a woman called Ling Wong, a scientist, entrepreneur and investor whose website describes her as linging across industries, fueling multi-billion dollar funds and creating multiple firsts.

Speaker 19 And the second investor was the well-established venture capital firm Venrock, which was built in 1969 on the Rockefeller family's money.

Speaker 19 Two years later, in an exclusive to the website Axios, the company announced a host of new investors with incredible CVs. They'd secured $150 million

Speaker 19 and Rebellion was bringing Nick Sinai, the former deputy chief technical officer under Barack Obama onto its board, alongside the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the former Fox Corp CEO James Murdoch.

Speaker 19 These were the big guns and Rebellion was just two years in already a good news story.

Speaker 19 But what was happening inside the walls of the company was much harder to find out.

Speaker 19 Oliver had already decided not to speak to me.

Speaker 19 We'd had a conversation on the phone, emails back and forth, but the exchanges had become increasingly difficult and it became clear that he didn't want to meet.

Speaker 19 And I'd approached the other two co-founders, but no response. So I started speaking to former staffers, mostly engineers and developers.

Speaker 19 And I soon learned that for a company claiming that one of its key values is transparency, the reality was rather different.

Speaker 19 Most people who had left the company had signed a non-disclosure agreement and were really nervous about speaking. Nearly everyone spoke to me on the condition of anonymity.

Speaker 34 Months that I was working on it, and then I learned about Rebellion and was inspired and intrigued by the mission, and it's just that simple.

Speaker 19 One former staffer had worked in the company's Seattle office working on AI product management and simulation. And he largely felt positive about his time there.

Speaker 34 Similarly, of like, we need to come in and we need to try to shake things up, but we need to also bring the government with us. We can't come in and just be adversarial.

Speaker 34 That's never going to get it done. So I think Chris and Ollie just got connected because they figured out they were kind of doing the same thing

Speaker 34 across the Atlantic.

Speaker 19 He had understood that Oliver was Chris's counterpart in the British government.

Speaker 19 They both seem well qualified and well connected, and they had a simple message to the engineers and developers that they were hiring.

Speaker 19 One former engineer described it like this: Do good for your country, but get paid well for it, too.

Speaker 19 It was new and exciting, and at that early stage, the mission was all they had. Whether they could fulfill it was a different question altogether.

Speaker 34 The best thing about it for me was this mix of people like me who'd only ever worked in industry and mostly in startups and small companies, you know, going from zero to one and not knowing a damn thing about how it's all going to work and being very comfortable with ambiguity.

Speaker 34 Rebellion needed those people.

Speaker 19 Another former engineer said that after he joined, he realized that everyone was reading the same book.

Speaker 15 They were really into this book called The Kill Chain.

Speaker 34 And in the case of AI, you know instantly, it was all about collapsing that kill chain.

Speaker 19 That book, The Kill Chain, is written by Angel's chief strategy officer. And it opens with this terrifying scenario.

Speaker 19 And it's the story that Rebellion and others have been building on, the celluloid from which they projected their mission to investors and to governments.

Speaker 19 Because the book says, there is a reality that's been hidden from us, the public, that America is failing as a tech power, that it's falling behind China and Russia, who are rapidly developing advanced weapons.

Speaker 19 And that in the many war games that have been conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense, simulating wars against China and Russia, the US has, quote, a nearly perfect record.

Speaker 19 We have lost almost every single time. And the way to avoid these simulations becoming real, to avoid an American defeat, well, it's simple.
You have to improve the kill chain.

Speaker 19 And that means three things, really. Improving the military's understanding, improving its decision-making, and making it act faster.

Speaker 19 And it seemed that in 2019 and 2020, it was what everyone in this world was talking about.

Speaker 35 These are people who are saying that, you know, it's our obligation to innovate the kill chain, to make the military more agile.

Speaker 36 But also to go extraordinarily hard at the enemy's kill chain as well.

Speaker 29 An integral part of this is the cyber kill chain, developed by Lockheed Martin.

Speaker 19 Rebellion set to work. One way to improve the kill chain? Well, one former engineer told me, fusing data from satellite and drone imagery.

Speaker 23 One of the products was a dashboard where they took information from everything from drone footage to security cameras and they'd look for patterns.

Speaker 23 For instance, one tool would use security cameras to track a quad cab toy at a pickup, which is the favorite pickup of terrorists.

Speaker 23 So they would say, okay, here's a pickup, and then it would follow that pickup around.

Speaker 23 I mean, if people got out and met a person and showed deference to that person, If there was a person that other people showed deference to and was dressed a certain way, ah, then that's someone we track.

Speaker 23 So then they would be tracked. They're putting together two pieces of information: a pickup truck and deference.
Put that together, and they have a high-value target.

Speaker 23 I mean, were the video feeds real? Was any of the data real? I don't know.

Speaker 19 Another project the engineer told me was seeking out adversaries closer to home.

Speaker 23 Tracking social media posts. They are really big in tracking social media.
So they would track a person. They post about dog shows or blah, blah, blah.
But they also post some anti-government screeds.

Speaker 23 Then who are they talking to or who are they connecting to? We had extensive communications from certain people. It was pretty amazing how much information we got about people and the patterns we saw.

Speaker 19 It sounded sophisticated, to be sure. Intrusive, certainly, but also incredibly difficult to build.
So I contacted the company itself.

Speaker 19 They were four years into their rebellion and I thought they must have some pretty impressive demos to show. But if those demos exist, they didn't want to share them with me.

Speaker 19 I spoke to two people from its PR team, and at first I was offered an interview with two senior leaders and a demo of a cybersecurity product, which the press officer joked on the phone was the only commercially viable product they have.

Speaker 19 And then the offer was rescinded. No one would be available, they said.
So much for that value of transparency.

Speaker 19 This was a different kind of air gap.

Speaker 19 In fact, the more I reported, the shakier it all started to seem.

Speaker 19 At the end of the summer 2023, rumours began circulating that, in fact, none of the original founders, Chris, Oliver, or Nicole, were even working at Rebellion anymore. That they'd been ousted.

Speaker 1 Hey, friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro.

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Speaker 19 I said that this is a story about human intelligence as much as it is about machine learning, even if, on some level, artifice is what links it all together.

Speaker 19 After speaking to Charlie and hearing her story, I contacted other friends and acquaintances from Oliver's life, and I was really careful about how I approached them.

Speaker 19 I didn't want to pull the rug out from anyone, and I didn't want to be unfair to Oliver either. I thought, what if Charlie had been a one-off? That is, until I called Alexandra.

Speaker 38 I was 23 when I moved to Cambridge in October of 2011.

Speaker 19 Alexandra isn't her real name, and when we spoke, she explained that she's from New York and she had arrived in Cambridge to start a post-grad in international relations.

Speaker 19 And she met Oliver in early 2012, before Charlie did, after they caught eyes at a gym at Cambridge University. And soon after, Oliver messaged her on Facebook, inviting her to meet up.

Speaker 38 Almost all of the sort of big ones he introduced in our first date, which included that he had

Speaker 38 gone to Harrow, that he had done two bachelor's degrees, one at Oxford, at Trinity College, because he had graduated at Lee from he was able to become an officer in the military without having gone to Sandhurst

Speaker 38 and was deployed in Afghanistan in a combat role.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 38 I don't remember if he said this on our first date, he told me at some point that someone had died underneath him, had been killed, and that it affected him so much that he left the military early.

Speaker 19 Alexandra was clear when I spoke to her. She's not an Anglophile.
She's not particularly interested in the royal family.

Speaker 19 And she didn't apply to Cambridge to get close to class or privilege or bask in that particular flavour of Britishness.

Speaker 19 And so a lot of what Oliver told her went over her head. They were just curious details, his father being a baron and his military background.

Speaker 38 None of it kind of rang any alarm bells for me.

Speaker 38 I mean, it seemed like a very impressive resume, but it didn't seem out of step with the way that he presented himself or the way that he talked about, you know, his work or what he was interested in.

Speaker 38 So, yeah, I mean, I'm sure that if I had met him after having been in the UK for several years, or if I was British, then maybe it would have rang some alarm bells, but certainly not at that time.

Speaker 19 Alexandra and then Charlie were presented with almost identical stories by Oliver. But with Alexandra, his combat background seemed to play a much bigger role.

Speaker 19 He told her explicitly that he'd been in Afghanistan fighting. In fact, it's what he told many people in their circle of friends.

Speaker 38 It was certainly woven into kind of how he presented himself, and I think maybe particularly presented himself to me.

Speaker 38 We shared a lot of friends and we had a lot of people in common, and everyone sort of had the same understanding of him.

Speaker 19 He told her that he'd been on a fast track to becoming an officer, so he hadn't needed to go to Sandhurst, the famous military academy.

Speaker 38 So we had a lot of kind of like military accoutrements. Like he had this big military backpack that he carried around.

Speaker 38 I feel like he had

Speaker 38 combat boots, like sand-colored combat boots.

Speaker 38 He also sent me a photograph of him in kind of like what looked like to me a military dress uniform.

Speaker 19 They dated throughout the spring and the summer of 2012. But then Oliver explained that he was being deployed to Afghanistan to Helmand, this time as an academic.

Speaker 19 And it was while he was there that he began to withdraw.

Speaker 19 He stopped calling and emailing.

Speaker 38 While he was in Afghanistan, like a friend of his asked me how he was, and I said, Oh, he's fine. He's in Afghanistan.
And he said, Are you sure? And I said, Yeah, what?

Speaker 38 And I was like, Yeah,

Speaker 38 yes. And he was like, Oh, well, he lies a lot.

Speaker 19 She didn't really understand what was going on and she didn't know how to make sense of that comment. Instead, she tried to keep in contact.

Speaker 19 But when Oliver returned from Helmand in the autumn of 2012, he refused to see her.

Speaker 38 While I was home for Thanksgiving, he sent me an email.

Speaker 19 He ended the relationship, and she was, as Charlie was, heartbroken and confused.

Speaker 19 I got in touch with Alexandra when I was a few months into this story.

Speaker 19 She said that she'd suspected that a lot of what she'd been told was untrue, and that she was relieved to discover that that her own fact-checking had been right.

Speaker 19 And she was relieved, as Charlie was, to know that she wasn't mad, that something significant and painful really had happened to her. But after digesting that first call, her thinking shifted.

Speaker 38 It's also destabilizing to think of him

Speaker 38 in these ever

Speaker 38 higher and more powerful circles with access to decision-making power. So, that also felt really destabilizing, and frankly, with the potential to be pretty dangerous.

Speaker 19 I had told her about the world that Oliver was now occupying, how his career had progressed since leaving Cambridge.

Speaker 38 It's a really scary concept to think of someone who has manufactured military experience be involved with influencing the way that money is spent, the use of AI, in particular within the military, the role of sort of actual expertise

Speaker 38 within these very, very

Speaker 38 high-stakes

Speaker 38 sectors.

Speaker 38 There is a lot of harm and a lot of violence, and there has been done onto the world by the British and American militaries. And recklessness or

Speaker 38 manufactured expertise is something that I find truly frightening in these arenas.

Speaker 19 She was surprised that he hadn't stopped.

Speaker 19 It's one thing to exaggerate and simulate and tell stories when you're at university, she said, but it's another thing entirely to do it professionally out in the real world.

Speaker 38 I think that if he was not

Speaker 38 a

Speaker 38 sort of semi-public figure and had not put himself like in the career that he's in now, this would remain a dinner party story that I tell about my early 20s.

Speaker 19 And it didn't stay that way because Alex and Charlie could see there's more at stake.

Speaker 38 And so it matters like who's in the room. It matters who is in the room when decisions are being made that impact people's lives, particularly when you're talking about military and warfare.

Speaker 38 It matters who's in the room. That's why I think that this is actually, this is not just a story of, you know, I had a bad ex-boyfriend.
This is a much bigger story than that.

Speaker 19 In many ways, I'd come to feel pretty sympathetic to Oliver. He'd projected a version of himself that he'd wanted to become, and he'd made it.
It worked.

Speaker 19 And that was a reflection on the worlds that he was moving in, as much as it was a reflection on him.

Speaker 19 And I believed the numerous people who told me he's kind, he's not malicious. But some things do feel unignorable.

Speaker 19 Like, why is there more scrutiny by friends and former lovers than there is in his professional life? Isn't that just the wrong way around?

Speaker 19 And I don't know what he's told Rebellion or Improbable or the Civil Service about whether the persona that he'd honed at Cambridge has continued.

Speaker 19 What I do know is that it's worth checking. It matters.
Particularly, as I learned, what happened next.

Speaker 19 Next time on Walter's War.

Speaker 35 It's a real like Tinkerbell effect that had a lot of people.

Speaker 27 Company at the Texas.

Speaker 35 Stop believing and stop clapping. Tinkerbell starts fading away.
And that is the story.

Speaker 31 They basically got pushed out of their executive roles sometime after that story came out. And then now they got pushed off the board entirely.

Speaker 19 Walter's War is reported by me, Basha Cummings. The producer is Gary Marshall.
Additional reporting is by Jack Paulson. Additional reporting and producing is by Xavier Greenwood and Imogen Harper.

Speaker 19 The sound design is by Carla Patella.

Speaker 19 With thanks to Elka Schwartz, Kenneth Payne, Jason Sadowski, Jack Paulson, and Tech Inquiry.

Speaker 19 We hope you're enjoying this series.

Speaker 19 Make sure that you follow the feed so you don't miss another episode and check out Tortoise's other award-winning investigative series while you wait for next week's episode.

Speaker 19 Tortoise

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