Dan Snow's History Hit - Disinformation and the White Helmets in Syria

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Chloe Hadjimatheou joined me on the podcast to talk about the death of James Le Mesurier, the man who co-founded the White Helmets, a Syrian civil defence force who filmed themselves pulling survivors and bodies from the rubble of bombed out buildings.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a great podcast for you today. We're going to be talking all about the White Helmets, conspiracy, murder, war. It is exciting stuff. But before I do, I've got big news. The tour is now on sale. The tour is on sale. We're taking the History Hit podcast on tour. We're going to some of the great cities of the UK. Cardiff, Newcastle, Edinburgh, a little place called London. And each of those cities, we're going to be interviewing historians about, as we do always on this podcast, what's going on in the world, the books, the breaking news, the things we need to understand in the world at the moment.

We're also going to be learning about the history of the place that we're in. I'm going to go for a little adventure during the day, film a little something, show the film that night, and then we're going to be talking to experts where we're at. So Newcastle, I don't know, we haven't sorted it out yet, but we might talk about George Stevenson, the legend who effectively invents the modern railway system. Down in Cardiff, we might talk about England's revolt. We might, in fact, talk about the fact that Henry I locked his brother up in Cardiff Castle for decades, the Duke of Normandy. I think it actually suited him

quite well. So we do all that kind of stuff. So head over to historyhit.com slash events to get your ticket. Cannot wait to see you. We're going to be in the same room, breathing the same air, embracing each other, optional. I'm going to be having a great time post-vaccine. Let's celebrate. Come and see us at the tour. Anyway, in this podcast, I'm talking to the wonderful BBC journalist, Chloe Hajimotheou. She is going to be talking to me about the death of James LeMessurier, the man who co-founded the White Helmets in Syria. The civil defence organisation used to pull people out of the rubble. This is a story about disinformation, truth on the battlefield, great power rivalry, conspiracy, the internet. It's got it all. It's

modern history at its best. Enjoy everybody. And then afterwards, head over to historyhit.com slash events. Chloe, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Great to be here. I mean, where do we even start with your new remarkable podcast? Should we start with the central figure of James Measurer? I never met James Measurer. I've got to know him posthumously. Almost exactly a year ago, he was found dead in Istanbul. He lived there with his wife on a quite amazing island just

off the coast of Istanbul, about a 40-minute ferry ride away. But he also had a small apartment above his office in central Istanbul. And about five o'clock in the morning on November the 11th, 2019, some early morning worshippers were on their way to mosque and they found a man's body in a narrow alleyway crumpled against a wall. And they called the police. It turned out to be James LeMessurier who had fallen from the roof terrace of this apartment above his offices. His wife was still asleep in their bed and only found out about his death when the police banged on the door in the morning.

So that was where my starting point was. I literally knew very little more than that. I knew that he was the co-founder of the White Helmets, these Syrian rescuers who've been trained specially to deal with the aftermath of a bomb attack. So what James LeMessurier did was he would pull out these young men and women from neighbourhoods all around the rebel-held area of Syria, and they would be trained actually by the earthquake rescue force in Turkey on how to deal with collapsed buildings and how to get people out. And then he would send them back into the war zone. And so they would go back into their neighbourhoods and when a bomb would fall, they would pull people out. That's all I knew. And I knew that this guy had died. There was loads of speculation that he might have

been killed. That was interesting for me straight away. Why would people think that this man had been killed? And the reason was that just days before his death, a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman accused him of being a spy quite publicly. against him ranged wildly from he was a British spy involved in something slightly underhand to he was a murderer and a kidnapper and involved in an organ harvesting racket. This is something that's being said by governments at the United Nations. There have been various press conferences at the United Nations, one in particular in 2018, where the Russian and Syrian delegations spent over an hour laying out the accusations and what they claim to be evidence against James LeMessurier. As you started to look into James LeMessurier, what areas became important? So I would say that James never had an issue. Nobody ever sort of suspected him. There was no rumours about him, no conspiracy theories about him until about 2015 when Russia joined the

war. And it was at this stage that the White Helmet started sort of gaining notoriety. And I have to sort of take a small sidebar here to explain that the Syrian war is like no other war in history. Usually in a war, journalists like myself working for the BBC are desperate to know what's going on on the ground, but it's usually too dangerous for us to go to most places in a war zone. There's bombs falling all over the place, people shooting each other. The Syrian war is totally different. We have been able to watch what is happening on the ground playing out on our screens almost in real time. This is the first war in history where everyone has a camera on their mobile phone. Everybody has been filming what's been going on in their neighbourhoods and uploading it.

And so it's been fascinating watching this. But here's the thing, when that footage contains things like bombs falling on civilian areas, bombs falling on schools, on medical facilities, suddenly that footage is propelled to a whole new sphere. Suddenly it might contain evidence of war crimes. And now there's a lot more at stake. So people start questioning that footage. Could people who have a vested interest in trying to push for Western intervention be faking these things? Could those videos be made up in order to tug at Western heartstrings so that we might go out and protest and say to our government, we need to put boots on the ground in Syria. We need to overthrow President Assad.

That's the accusation of the Russian and Syrian governments. They say the White Helmets is a completely fake organisation. in Syrian governments. They say the White Helmets is a completely fake organisation. James LeMessurier is an MI6 agent and the White Helmets are a bunch of guys who film all their rescues, completely make them up. They drug children or coerce children to wear fake blood and pretend to be rescued. This is really where the accusations against James started. But the thing is, they had a lot of fuel, because James had had a very long and fascinating life before he came to the Syrian War, to be involved in the Syrian War. He came from quite an elite family. His father was a colonel in the British military, a decorated colonel. He went to Sandhurst Military Academy, graduated top of

his class. And then he went on to have a 10 year career in the military, where among other things, in the war in Kosovo, he served as a military intelligence officer under Nick Carter, who's now Sir General Nick Carter, Chief of the Armed Forces in the UK. Now, lots of people thought that military intelligence officer meant MI6, military intelligence. In this particular case, I looked into it and it literally just meant providing intelligence for a senior member of the armed forces. So gathering open source information, giving them briefings on what the latest situation was on the ground, who the latest players were, and nothing more than that. There was no sort of spooky spy stuff involved in it. But then he left the military and went on to work on several different civilian projects, lots of private security work all around the Middle East. He spent some time in Iraq.

He spent some time in the West Bank working for a strange prison project there, which involved high stake Palestinian prisoners. They wanted reassurances that the Israelis wouldn't assassinate them. The Israelis wanted assurances they wouldn't try to escape. So they had internationals overseeing the prison. James was in charge of that. He did all sorts of private security work. I actually think that what happened was he spent some time in Iraq soon after the war. And I think he was really disillusioned with the way that Western money was being spent to rebuild the country. There was a population that had huge distrust for anything Western funded, and he thought there was a lot of wasted

money and wasted opportunities. And when the Syrian war started, he was working with an old colleague called Alistair Harris, who ran a company called ARC, and they were doing civil society projects. And James LeMessurier really wanted to try something different. The first thing they did was they got loads of Syrians out of Syria, out of the rebel-held areas of Syria, and sat them down, had meetings with them and said, what do you need? What do you need to run your communities properly? When the civil war started, these rebel areas were cut off

from all the financing of the state, from all the resources of the state. They had no fire departments, no ambulances, no running schools, nothing functioning. So they set up their own little administrations. And James was tapping into those administrations and saying, how can we help? We've got Western funding. What can we do to help you run your communities? And one of the things that he realised that they needed was a sort of civil defence force who could help with things like bombings. What do you do when a bomb falls on an apartment building? Who could then clear out the rubble?

Who could pick up the bodies? Who could put out the fires? That's what he did. He channeled Western money into this, funding these young people to do these things in their communities. And from there, presumably, it wasn't a huge jump to starting an organisation. They were funding the training of these small communities. And what James did then was to sort of unify them, to give them a code of conduct, to give them a kind of uniform, make them feel part of something bigger.

They were calling themselves the Syrian Civil Defence. The term the White Helmets was actually something the media came up with. They never called themselves that and James never called them that. Journalists who started reporting on them started calling them that. Interestingly, I heard a nice little story that in the beginning, they had all kinds of different coloured helmets. James opened up the brochure and he quite liked the idea of them all having red helmets, but they just weren't enough in stock.

So they ended up with white helmets. They could have been called something else quite easily. And so he kind of unified them and he gave them a code of conduct. And then at some point in around 2014, he saw something in this organisation that he thought was really special. At that Rescue, which was going to focus exclusively on the White Helmets. And so he started that in 2014. And he was brilliant at pulling in funding. He was a really charming character, very persuasive, very eloquent. Apparently he was amazing with PowerPoint. And he would host these meetings with donor countries

and persuade them to give him lots of money to spend on equipment, on uniforms, and eventually on a sort of little stipend so that these people could afford to feed their families. Quite rapidly, though, that organisation, I mean, a documentary about them won an Oscar award, right? So they became hugely celebrated and eventually got into the crosshairs of Soviet propaganda and intelligence, or Soviet, Russian, Freudian slip. I think really, it all started because James was, you know, hundreds of miles away in Istanbul, the white helmets were on the ground in their communities in Syria. And the donors were saying, how do we know if this funding is working? How do we know if the

training is having an effect on the ground? So James equipped them with little GoPro cameras for their helmets. And they would film what they were doing as a sort of training exercise and send it back to him so he could see how much of an effect is the training having on the ground. And those videos then were quite astounding. And so they started uploading them online and they went viral. There was one particular one called The Miracle Baby, in which it's an 18 hour dig, and the White Helmets can hear a baby, sort of several layers under concrete. And after 18 hours of digging, they managed to get this baby out alive. And it's just this incredibly moving and very positive story from a war where we're not getting many positive stories at all. This video went viral, and it made it into this Netflix

documentary. And so they started getting notoriety and they started shaping the way that people were seeing the war because if the White Helmets were these heroes rescuing people from under the rubble, then the baddies were the Syrians and the Russians who were dropping the bombs on these neighbourhoods. And the Syrians and the Russians weren't happy with this particular version of the war. They wanted to influence the way the war was seen as well. And their version of the war was actually the mirror opposite, the exact opposite, in which the Russians and Syrians are the victims and the bad guys are the white helmets who are faking all these rescues and trying to persuade everyone this false version

of the war. I think you're not going to tell me this, but did James LeMessurier jump off the roof or was he pushed? The podcast is more of a why done it than a who done it. I'll tell you that much. James took his own life quite quickly. We clear that up. But I will say the podcast takes you on a journey. It's the slow unravelling of a man, a very strong and very resilient man. And in the end, what gets to him is not what you'd think. It is misinformation, but it comes from somewhere you wouldn't expect. Crikey. That sounds exciting. Well, I mean, that's right. That's what we got to do. We got to go and listen to the podcast. There's a wider story here, isn't there, within the context of misinformation, of destroying people's lives, of deep fake videos or just fake videos.

What has this journey told you about where we are at the moment? I think one of my favourite interviews in the podcast is Sean Penn. We interviewed Sean Penn, the Hollywood movie star, who met James LeMessurier and who was deeply suspicious of him in the beginning and of the white helmets. And I said to him, after you met James LeMessurier, were you persuaded? And he said, well, he was very credible. I really liked him. And he answered all my questions very eloquently. What does that mean? It either means that what he was saying was true or that he's very well rehearsed in answering these questions perfectly. And at the end of having met James LeMessurier, Sean Penn still said, I think the only thing anyone can ever say these days is I don't know. The problem is that there

is so much suspicion in the world these days that it's very difficult to persuade anyone of anything. very difficult to persuade anyone of anything. And I think part of the problem with this misinformation and disinformation is that it ends up in the mouths of some very persuasive people. I mean, part of why I was interested in this podcast was because these stories are not just coming from the Russian and Syrian states. They're also coming from British citizens. They're coming from university professors at some of our top universities in the UK. citizens. They're coming from university professors at some of our top universities in the UK. They're coming from a British blogger who, middle-aged English lady who has left the UK and now lives in Syria. And she has been responsible for amplifying a lot of these stories. If we just heard it from the Syrian and Russian states, we say, oh, well, there's something in

it for them. They've got a vested interest. I'm not sure if I'd buy that. But when you suddenly see it being said at the United Nations, when you see it being said by professors in the UK, when you see it being said by a middle-aged English woman, it suddenly becomes a lot more confusing and it's much more difficult to know what to believe. One thing we can believe, one thing we can believe is your reporting. I hope so. For me, when I approach this, I have to make a small confession, which is when I saw all these stories about James LeMessurier and the White Helmets, I thought I'm going to win a Pulitzer. I'm going to uncover that this guy is an MI6 agent and the White Helmets are completely faked.

And this is the biggest hoax that's been perpetrated on the West, you know, in the history of warfare. I was extremely excited. I was going to make my name. Sadly, that's not what I discovered. But I approached it with an open mind. I was very rigorous in my investigation of the White Helmets as well. You would not believe the hell we have to go through to fact check everything that we do. So in putting together this podcast, I had the script fact checked. I had to contact every single person that faces any kind

of criticism inside the podcast. I had to contact them well over a week before broadcast to make sure that they had a chance to respond to any of the accusations we make. I have to say at that point, all my emails made it online. I even had an article written about the emails that I had sent out people on RT. So I have to contact everyone. I contact the Syrian state and the Russian state and said, what do you have to say about these allegations? And then had they replied, you would have had to incorporate that in the programme. The Russians did. The Russian embassy in the UK did reply, and they were very generous in that they recorded their reply for me and sent me a recording so that I would be sure to

include it in. And I did. I did. And then I had a lawyer. And with this lawyer, we went through every single sentence to make sure that we were accurate. We have at the BBC something called Editorial Policy Board. So we have editorial policy advisors that check everything that we do to see that we adhere to accuracy, balance, fairness, all of the BBC principles. So I have to jump through a lot of hoops before I can put something like this on air, especially when we're making quite big allegations about people. Chloe, thank you very much for your hard work and jumping through all those hoops. It might have been hell for you, but it's heaven for us because we get to listen to your brilliant podcast. How can people find it? You can search in whatever podcast app you have for Intrigue Mayday

or you can download BBC Sounds and find it on there. Thank you very much, Come On History It podcast, Chloe. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me. Hi everybody, just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic. Because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys.

In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.