Serial - The Trojan Horse Affair - Part 2

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

Hamza and Brian think the source of the Trojan Horse letter might be hiding in plain sight. After learning about the petty personnel dispute that probably gave rise to the letter, they’re even more bewildered about how it ever could have been taken seriously. To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts. To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter. Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [e-mail] 

These first two episodes of The Trojan Horse Affair are free. But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows. And it's super easy. You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Time subscriber, just link your account and you're done. Hamza and I are sitting behind two children's school desks. We're in the covert classroom at the front of Tahir Alam's house, talking about the Trojan horse letter, those four pages that

painted Tahir as the ringleader of an extremist plot. Tahir clearly has strong suspicions about who wrote it. The motive was quite an interesting one. Even though the plot wasn't real, the Trojan horse letter still prompted authorities to investigate and ultimately dismantle the education movement Tahir was leading. A successful movement, outcomes for Muslim students had improved dramatically. The national government also beefed up counter-extremism policy and tried to prevent

Tahir and his colleagues from ever working or volunteering in schools again, all in the aftermath of the letter. Tahir believes if they'd ever bothered just to investigate who wrote the thing, it would have been very difficult for the government to justify its actions. Because, he says, it would have been obvious the letter had nothing to do with a conspiracy or with him. He's sparse on details with us this first day, but he does give us that tantalizing hint that the letter came from someone close

to him. But whoever wrote the letter they knew you know, they knew me I think. Or possibly more than one person. Were they from Birmingham? Were they involved? They're from Birmingham.

They are well known to me. I know them quite well. And they know me quite well, too. I know them and I meet them often, you know, in an educational kind of environment and setting. Is there a reason we're playing 20 questions here? Can we just ask you who it is? Because I'm not able to, obviously I don't want to name anyone because I can't prove that. I'll give you a clue. If you read the letter, just from a literary point of view, just read the letter. And all you have to do is, who is being defended?

Just read the letter with that in mind. Who is the letter defending is the question you have to answer, and you will arrive at your own judgment. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Brian Reid. I'm Hamza Syed. Let's see if we can figure out who wrote the Trojan horse letter. All right, you want to do this? Okay, so let's move these drawers. We're going to have to drag them up. We need a place to hunker down.

A place to scrutinize the letter. A place to think. A place to throw names on the wall. We need a headquarters. And for this purpose, Hamza has generously offered up his parents' bedroom. Get rid of the things on the top, because they kill the vibe. Hamza's been crashing up his parents' bedroom. Hamza's been crashing in his parents' old flat here in Birmingham. They live in Abu Dhabi these days and are planning to retire to Pakistan. So I guess they're not here that much.

I hope not, because we're completely rearranging their bedroom. Pushing the bed up against the closet, sliding the bureau into the corner, packing away Hamza's mom's jewelry at his insistence. You want no reminder that this is your parents' bedroom? Mate, I'm serious about this. It's headquarters. Do you have a toolbox? Yeah. Clearly, being in England, sleuthing for the author of a mysterious letter,

alongside a doctor, was having an effect on Brian. He was going fully into Sherlock Holmes mode. He detached the TV from the wall and replaced it with whiteboards, a corkboard, and multicolored note cards which were connected with string. Success. I'd have the heart to tell him that Sherlock didn't really do the whole murder wall thing.

What are you seriously going to do when your parents come? I'll just tell them to sleep in different rooms, you know what I mean? Really? No, I mean, we'll figure that out when they come in. Should I get the Hoover? HQ was ready.

Operation Trojan Horse had been very carefully thought through and has tried and tested within Birmingham. Hamza sat in his parents' bed and read the letter aloud. As I paced around, scribbling names and schools on the whiteboards, circling some, crossing off others. H.T. Springfield. Okay, keep moving. Tahir had told us, read the letter and think about who is it defending? That word choice seemed deliberate, defending. Remember, the whole conceit of the letter is that it's written as if it's from an accomplice of Tahir's in Birmingham

to a co-conspirator in another city, describing how they can start implementing this plot Tahir had devised, called Operation Trojan Horse. The author of the letter breaks the plan into five steps, all aimed at pushing out headteachers, what they call principals in Britain, so you can bring in your own leadership, who will make the school more Islamic. You're supposed to get conservative Muslim parents to give the headteacher a hard time about classes such as sex ed, install a sympathetic governor on the governing body to basically

spy on the head from there, find staff to complain about the headteacher from within the school. But the author also explains what Tahir and his co-conspirators are currently up to in Birmingham. The author names four headteachers at four specific schools who the plotters are on the verge of successfully unseating, and explains how they're pulling it off. At one school, they'd frame the head for doctoring test scores, and now she was under investigation. At another, they'd instigated a nasty fight over one of the headte's disciplinary decisions. At another, they'd accused the head teacher of fraud. These schools and head teachers named in the letter were all real, by the way, and so were the scandals the letter described, or at least the gist of them. Each of these head teachers

had been in actual trouble, in real life, for doctoring test scores, facing allegations of fraud, etc. What the letter claimed, though, was that these weren't random incidents of supposed wrongdoing. Instead, the letter claimed all these incidents were the result of the Trojan horse conspiracy run by Tahir Alam and his cronies. Therefore, it was these headteachers who we think Tahir meant when he told us to consider who the letter defends. Because in real life, these four teachers really had been at risk of losing their jobs. And then the Trojan horse letter showed up, suggesting they hadn't actually done anything wrong. That they were victims, in fact, of Operation Trojan Horse.

Presumably, one of them could have written the Trojan horse letter to help themselves get out of trouble. So I list these heads on our detective wall. We have narrowed it down to, we've got the head teacher at Regents Park Community School, the head teacher at Adderley, the head teacher at Saltley School, and the head teacher from Springfield School. We take a step back and stare at the board, pensively, beard-strokingly, as the cogs turn in my partner's brain.

As my partner swallows his first meditative sip of a British cuppa. And after about, I don't know, what was it, five minutes? We had ourselves a theory about where the Trojan horse letter came from. The letter came from Adderley Primary School. That's the most plausible theory. I told Brian this before he came to Birmingham, but he was new to the story. He reminded me I was new to journalism, and he

insisted we should start by idolizing the letter with an open mind, which we did. And then we ended up at Adderley Primary School. In three years, we've added almost nothing new to the murder war. Sorry for the trouble, Dr. and Mrs. Sayan. It's not really that sophisticated. If you read the Trojan Horse letter, sure, the author goes on about a grand citywide plot, but there's one school that the author seems to be obsessed with, Adderley Primary School. In the middle of the letter, the author goes on this long tangent about bizarre employment dispute between the headteacher at Adderley Primary School and four teaching assistants there, four classroom aides.

The author says this employment dispute is part of the plot and describes it in excruciating detail. None of the other schools get more than a few sentences devoted to them, relaying information you could have read in the news or online. But Adderley, Adderley gets paragraphs stuffed with particulars that at the time were not public, including a bunch of different characters and events. We're going to wait to read this part of the letter to you because it's so in the weeds, it's going to make a lot better sense once you know more. But for now, just know that, yeah, there's no mistaking, whoever wrote the Trojan Horse letter had deep insider information about this Adderley case. And we're not the first

to notice this, by the way. More than a year after the Trojan horse letter was made public, this employment dispute went in front of a judge. And in his decision, the judge said, Undoubtedly, whoever wrote the letter had intimate knowledge of the allegations going to the heart of this case. What are your thoughts regarding that quote? In our first interview, I actually read to hear this line from the judge, because even though he wouldn't come out and say explicitly where he thought the letter came from, I suspected he was talking about Adderley.

The quote is very insightful and very accurate. Okay. I think the judge there has made a good observation. So, okay. Adderley. Tahir is pointing there. This judge, independently of Tahir, is pointing there. When you just read the letter as a layperson, your head goes there. But who at Adderley?

And why? Well, let us tell you the perplexing story of what happened at that school. It begins not too differently from the story of Parkview, with a troubled school in East Birmingham and an ambitious new leader who comes in, story of what happened at that school. It begins not too differently from the story of Parkview, with a troubled school in East Birmingham and an ambitious new leader who comes in determined to turn the school around. Adderley Primary School is about a mile from Parkview, on an industrial edge of the same neighborhood, Alum Rock. It's a red brick Victorian building inside a spiky blue fence. It's a big school, almost 600 students, twice the size of an average state primary school. And for a long time, it had a reputation

for having a volatile staff, difficult to manage. In seven years, it had been through nine headteachers, which wasn't good for the students. Ofsted, the agency that inspects Britain's schools, had labeled Adderley inadequate, failing. In 2008, the Birmingham City Council turned to, among others, Tahir for help. By then, Tahir had a reputation for revitalizing schools, and the council asked him to apply the Parkview formula at Adderley.

He joined the Adderley governing body, which went searching for a new headteacher for the primary school. And they found someone they were excited about, a Muslim woman who'd been a deputy headteacher at another East Birmingham majority Muslim primary school, which under her team's leadership had vastly improved. Her name was Razvana Dar. Tahir says she was a standout candidate. She was very ambitious. She was very passionate as a person.

She came across as being very child-centric as well. In other words, children's interest comes first rather than let's keep some teachers happy and let's keep the unions happy, which is part of the dynamics in schools. But she came across as being somebody who would put the children's interest first. That came across very strongly to me. You won't be hearing from Rizvana Dar. She's declined to talk to us. But we're able to tell you what went down between Mrs. Dar and the teaching assistants, because they ultimately ended up in a knock-down, drag-out legal fight over this in an employment tribunal, which means we've been able to read pages and pages of exhibits

and witness statements and legal briefs and the resulting judgment, all of which sets out their competing versions of what happened. The people we have spoken to, who know or have worked with Rizwan Adar, nearly every one of them says she was super impressive. She, you know, has a genius mind. There's no question about it. Razwan Faraz is one of the locals Tahir recruited into teaching.

He lost his job after the government accused him of wrongdoing in the Trojan Horse affair. Razwan worked under Rizwan Adar at Adderley as an assistant head before they had a falling out and Razwan moved on to another school. He and Razwan Adar were close. It wasn't that she was really good at one thing. She was really good at everything she did.

She was really good at training teachers. She was really good at monitoring. She was really good at planning. She was really good at assessing curriculum development. I've learned more from her in the career of teaching than anybody else. Rizwan Adar, Riz, as lots of people call her, was a big part of the reason Rizwan took a position at Adderley. She was exciting to work for. She was tireless. Rizwan says sometimes she'd show up at 5 or 5.30 in the morning and leave at 10 at night. And she implemented many of the same kinds of changes that Tahir's recruits had at Parkview.

High academic standards, inspiring lackadaisical staff, getting parents involved, making religious accommodations. And it was working. Within just a few years, Ofsted, the school inspectors, raised Adderley from its lowest ranking to the second highest. They credited Mrs. Darr as a head teacher of, quote, great vision and energy. But this is where the story at Adderley takes a turn for the unusual. Because a very peculiar series of events began developing at the school, the details of which would become an important part of the Trojan horse letter. One day in December 2012, about a year before the letter surfaced,

Mrs. Darr calls a teaching assistant named Hillary Owens into her office. We've heard some people involved in schools describe teaching assistants as, quite frankly, a nuisance, resistant to reforms and a drain on resources. And there are strong unions in the UK, so it's hard to just up and fire someone because you don't get along. But according to Mrs. Darr, her experience with Hillary Owens was on another level. In a witness statement, Mrs. Darr describes Ms. Owens as rebellious and emotional,

an employee who would take to, quote, throwing her arms in the air, crying, lying on the floor, or spreading herself across a table when she didn't get her way. One big disagreement between Mrs. Darr and Hillary Owens was over the classroom Ms. Owens had been assigned to. There were specific grades and teachers Hillary Owens felt comfortable with, and she'd gotten a health assessment saying it'd be better if the school could accommodate those preferences. When Mrs. Darr didn't accommodate that, by Ms. Owens' own account, she started weeping in the staff room, which led to her taking a leave of absence, which meant the school had to pay her even when she wasn't coming in. And then came that day in December. Hillary Owens was back at work, and according to Mrs. Darr's telling, Mrs. Darr finds an envelope in her mail cubby. It's a

letter from Hillary Owens tendering her resignation. Yet Ms. Owens is still coming to work like everything's normal. So Mrs. Darr calls Ms. Owens into her office. Hillary Owens sits down and Mrs. Darr says, I've received your letter of resignation. I accept it. Can I have your key fob, please? You're free to go. To which Hillary Owens responds, what letter of resignation. I accept it. Can I have your key fob, please? You're free to go. To which Hillary Owens responds, what letter of resignation? I didn't write a letter of resignation. I haven't resigned. Hillary Owens also declined to do an interview with us, but we have a recording of her describing this moment to the police. Yes, the police would eventually get involved. I said, but I haven't written a letter of resignation. And she said, you're now on garden leave. I need your security

fob. Garden leave is administrative leave, basically, when you're on your way out from a job. And I thought, did she hear what I said? She clearly didn't because she carried on talking. And I kept saying to her, but I haven't written a letter of resignation. I haven't signed a letter of resignation. I haven't given you a letter of resignation. May I see the letter? She said, I don't have it. And she said, I need your security fob, which I was wearing around my neck. I said, you may have this fob if I can see my signature on that letter. And she said, this meeting is over. And with that, Ms. Owens says, Mrs. Darr got up and stood by the door.

It's pretty strange, isn't it? Get this though. Just a few days before this meeting with Hilary Owens, this is also laid out in the court records, Mrs. Darr says she'd received three other resignation letters from three other teaching assistants at Adderley Primary School. They were employees Mrs. Dar also had a difficult run with. There were three Muslim women who lived near the school and had worked there a long time. Like Hilary Owens, they weren't keen on Mrs. Dar and the changes she was making to the school. They too had been fighting with the headteacher for many months, and by this time in December 2012, were all on paid leave due to work-related stress. When Mrs. Dahl received

resignation letters from these three TAs, she quickly wrote back to them at their home saying, I'm accepting your resignation. Best of luck with your future. Each of the three TAs replied, what are you talking about? We haven't resigned. Hate to be a broken record here. We'd love to hand the story off to those TAs, but they've also declined to talk to us. So, to the court files. These TAs were named Raheena Khanum, Shanaz Bibi, and Yasmeen Akhtar. They were close. Two of them were sisters.

One had sent her kids to Adderley. And Hilary Owens was friendly with them. Sometimes she'd give one or the other a lift home. When they learned they were all in a similar predicament, their boss claiming they'd resigned, they started coordinating. The TAs asked for a copy of the resignation letters they were supposed to have sent, and when Mrs. Dahl provided them, they said someone had fabricated these letters and forged their signatures. Ms. Owens is forensic about this in her interview with the police. A cop shows that the letter is supposedly signed by her. That was not my signature.

First thing I said, that's not my signature. Is it similar to your signature? No, not at all. The H is wrong, the C is wrong, the O is wrong, the S is completely wrong. The N is wrong. It's not even close. Right, OK. I don't understand.

So, four of Rizwan and Dar's employees were insisting someone had forged their resignation letters. But Mrs Dar, as she later explained in a witness statement, still believed the letters were authentic, despite what her employees were saying. She refused to let them come back to work. At which point, the TAs came to the conclusion that Mrs. Da must have been behind this. What did you make of that story? Well, I mean, I was completely amazed because it seemed quite far-fetched, really.

The notion that a headteacher forges resignation letters. You couldn't imagine a headteacher going to those lengths. Jackie Hughes used to be Assistant Director for for school improvement for the Birmingham City Council. When his resignation fracas happened, she'd left that job, but Adelaide was a school she knew well, and Hilary Owens came to see her for advice. She was just so adamant over and over again. Riz Dar has lied. She has treated us very, very badly. We did not write those letters. And the head teacher didn't want them in the school, that they were part of the old guard from the previous head and that she was making up stuff solely to get rid of them so she could have her own people.

And I thought that was quite plausible because that's, you know, does happen, doesn't it? But how about faking resignation letters? Well, that is just the bit that is completely bizarre. Have you come up with an explanation for the bizarrity? It strikes me, Riz likes to write the script for everybody. You see, I like Riz very much as a person. However, she was quite ruthless in getting her own way and making sure that her school, and it would be hers, got the outcome she wanted.

Some of the same people who told us that Mrs. Dahl was brilliant, who ordered what she'd accomplished, lifting Adelie out of its academic abyss, they also saw a flip side to her ambition. Here's former assistant head Razwan Faraz again. Every single classroom had to look the same. The boards had to look the same. Every single book had to look the same. You know, there was a level of control down to that detail. Control freak. Slave driver. These are some of the words people who know Razwan Adar have used to describe her to us.

Razwan says she would monitor the most menial of her employees' tasks, the way workbooks needed to be colour coded by subject, the margin size staff were supposed to be printing with. She would say pencils need to be all together, they cannot be mixed with pens. This is a real example? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It would be very, very dictatorial. How would she even be aware of this as a headteacher? She would scrutinise. And she would

march around the school and inspect these things? 100% yeah and expect the leadership team to do the same. You go into some headteachers offices and you can tell they belong to a particular headteacher but they're obviously places of work.

Dave Hughes was a member of the Adelaley governing body that hired Mrs. Dahl. He's an experienced governor who served for decades on the governing bodies of schools throughout Birmingham, including at Parkview with the Hare. Dave's also married to Jackie Hughes, who's sitting next to him, eyeglasses hanging around her neck, nodding her head. There might be a family photograph or something, but you tell it's a place of work, a professional place. Riz's office was like an extension of her home. There might be a family photograph or something but you tell it's a place of work, a professional place Riz's office was like an extension of her home

lots of personal belongings in there as well as professional stuff pinned on the wall The whole school had the feeling of not being an independent institution which she was leading but her fiefdom was how it felt to me No, I'd endorse that. Do you think that's right? Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Which is why I think she could be capable of doing whatever's necessary to protect that fiefdom. Mrs. Darsh saw the four TAs as a threat to her job. That's clear from the court files and her witness statements. She said they were miserable during the workday, constantly fighting her. Rizwanidar also started getting a lot of grief from parents about how she was running the school, in particular more orthodox parents, people Mrs. Dar referred to in the litigation as Salafi Muslims.

Salafism is a conservative interpretation of Islam. Groups of parents started sending in complaints or showing up at school to raise a stink, efforts to which Mrs. Dar seemed coordinated. She knew the Muslim TAs had connections in the nearby Salafi community and thought they were riling up these parents on purpose. She also blamed Salafi parents

for spreading rumors about her personal life, weaponizing the fact that she wasn't married at the time and didn't wear a hijab. Mrs. Doe writes about this in her witness statements. I regularly stand in the playground, welcoming the children in the morning or waving them off in the afternoon. As I do so, I receive a high level of insults from parents. In response to my good morning, they call me bitch and slag and tell me I am not a good Muslim, not a good enough role model for their children, due to not covering my

head, that I should be married, that my clothes were inappropriate, and I was too modern and too Western. We haven't talked to anyone from Adderley who observed this abusive behavior directly, but in witness statements, members of Mrs. Dar's leadership team say they saw behavior like this and that the TAs were behind the bullying. But the TAs say that Mrs. Dar was the real bully. They, along with a few other colleagues, lodged formal grievances against her

through their union for bullying, intimidation, and harassment. The TAs claimed that they were, quote, constantly undermined and belittled by Mrs. Darr, and that some of them had to seek medical help and go on medication. These grievances were significant and serious. They had the potential to cost Mrs. Darr her job. And notably, it was shortly after the TAs had filed these grievances that Mrs. Darr informed them that they had resigned, that she had received resignation letters from them.

According to the TAs, it was these official grievances. That's why Mrs. Dar was so desperate to get rid of them. The TAs tried everything they could think of to get their jobs back. They contacted the Birmingham City Council. They contacted their representatives in Parliament. They made a declaration in front of a magistrate asserting that they did not write City Council. They contacted their representatives in Parliament. They made a declaration in front of a magistrate, asserting that they did not write the letters. They filed a report with the police. None of it was working. They asked for advice around the neighborhood.

They said they wanted their job back. They wanted to stay at Adderley. They didn't want to leave, and they were forced to resign. Sajad Akram used to be a teacher at Adderley, and he'd also been involved with hiring Mrs. Darr. He lives around the corner from one of the TAs. Were they upset? Were they mad? They were upset. They were very concerned, actually, because they felt that they were

on their last legs and they had no ground to retain their job. They were losing their job. So I said, the best advice I can give you is go and see Tahir. Tahir was the guy you went to when there was a problem with a school in East Birmingham. Plus, he'd helped recruit Rizwan Adarda Adderley. I said, look, speak to Tahir. He will be able to help you because he's obviously in the know about legislation. Because I didn't know the truth, but I suspect what they were saying was true. But I said, look, if anybody's got some influence over Rizwan, it would be Tahir because they respect him.

The women approached Tahir, though Tahir tells us he doesn't really remember much about it. He says he bumped into one of the TAs at the grocery store, and she explained a bit about the situation. But he says he doesn't recall it going any further than that. One organization did intervene for the TAs, their union. Their rep was firing off emails to Birmingham City Council, which is Rizvana Dar's employer, saying that Mrs. Dar had, quote, fabricated this charade, and that in all her years, the representative had never seen someone more drunk on power, that's a quote, than Rizvana Dar.

Until finally, the Birmingham City Council stepped in and instructed Mrs. Dar that she should not terminate the TA's employment. The council warned her in a letter that if you treat these resignations as valid and the employees sue the school for wrongful termination, we won't defend Adderley. We will not pay for your lawyers or any damages you're liable for, like the council normally would for one of its schools. You'll be on your own.

And Mrs. Darr, she ended the women's employment anyway. To no one's surprise, the TAs brought a case against Adderley Primary School for unfair dismissal. And the Birmingham City Council did exactly as it said it would. It left the school on the hook to pay for its own defense and for any potential damages if the TAs won their case. Mrs. Darr plowed ahead. And the defense Adderley Primary School submitted ahead of the hearing was certainly novel. Daniel Zakas, a solicitor who represented one of the TAs, Hillary Owens, remembers when he read Adderley's argument. They said that their case was that all four of the claimants had engaged in a course of conduct

over a period of years to undermine the head teacher, and that their resignations were part of a plot. These four people, including Hillary, were part of a plot to undermine Rizwan Adar. Yeah. To convert the school to one based on strict Muslim Salafi teachings. Salafi being that more conservative interpretation of Islam. The interpretation Mrs. Adar said, the parents whom the TAs were whipping up against her subscribed to. Daniel Zakis thought, that's an odd accusation to make about classroom aides at a primary school,

and especially about his client, Hillary, who attended Anglican Church every Sunday. Adderley's defense filing doesn't use the word plot, but that is what it describes. The school's lawyers wrote that the resignation letters, quote, have been used as a contrived and malicious means of falsely creating a scenario which would bring into question the headteacher's reputation. In other words, the TAs had schemed together to all submit resignations

and then pretend that Mrs. Dard forged them to get her in trouble. To say that they all resign, genuine resignations, they then all deny that they've resigned, and that would then cause uproar, is not the greatest plot. Bear in mind, everything we've been talking about up to this point, this whole resignation dispute, it all happened before the Trojan horse had existed.

So when Adderley's legal team filed his defense in spring 2013, this was the first Hillary Owens solicitor was hearing about an Islamic plot in a Birmingham school to undermine a headteacher. As the hearing day approached, a handwriting expert was brought in to analyze the signatures on the disputed resignation letters. And the expert concluded that the TA on the disputed resignation letters,

and the expert concluded that the TA's signatures were, in fact, not authentic. They had been forged. By the month of the hearing, November 2013, Adderley's defence was looking pretty strained. Mrs. Dahl was facing the real prospect of the school losing the case. And it was that month that someone, claiming to be an anonymous whistleblower, forwarded the Trojan horse letter to the Birmingham City Council. A letter apparently written from one shadowy conspirator to another, describing a plot to oust headteachers and majority Muslim schools.

The letter outlined the process of taking down a headteacher in five steps. Step one, identify a poor performing school based in a Muslim area of town. Step two, quote, select a group of Salafi parents. The letter is very specific about this. The parents should be Salafis. The goal is to get these Salafi parents, quote, fired up and ready to give the headteacher a very difficult time on a daily basis. If you can get them to be very vocal in the playground as they drop off or pick up their children, that will stir up other parents, end quote.

Step three, put your own governor on the governing body. Step four, identify key staff to disrupt the school from within. Here too, the letter is very specific. The best people for this job are TAs because, quote, they are less educated and from the local community, so are much more easily influenced. The letter continues, quote, It is also important where possible to ensure you have an English face amongst the group.

It's clear from the context the letter doesn't mean my type of English face. It means a white person. Because according to the letter, this person can give cover to the fact the Muslim TAs are part of a religious conspiracy. And finally, step five. Start a campaign where you complain to authorities about the headteacher, including the city council and your local MP.

If you're hearing those five steps and thinking, Adderley, you're not the only one. And that's not even the part of the Trojan horse letter that's directly about Adderley. The Adderley part is a good half a page and it's about this specific resignation case. The author includes it as one of the main examples of how the plotters are maneuvering against headteachers.

Listen to how closely it mirrors Adeli's defense in the case. Mrs. Dar, it begins, is not a good Muslim and was not open to our suggestions of adhering to strict Muslim guidelines. She's very procedurally strong and so we had to find a reason for her to be sacked linked to procedures. Three of our Muslim sisters and a governor have been disrupting the school and causing issues in Missitar since she took over the school. These sisters are a great example of what can be achieved by only three people. They, along with an English woman, who is their close friend,

have raised an allegation of fraudulent resignation letters against the head, even though they did actually write the letters themselves. From there, the Trojan horse letter goes on to give a meticulous account of what happened with the resignations, how and where the TAs drafted them, how they arranged to have them delivered. This account lines up exactly with the claims made in the employment case. It ends with an explanation of Hillary Owens' unique role in the Salafi plot.

As the Englishwoman dropped her letter off in the headstaff box, it adds another angle of fraud against the head. And because she's English, it will take the focus off the other Muslim sisters. If all goes wrong, everyone is briefed, and we'll blame the Englishwoman for planning and implementing the whole campaign to cause disruption amongst the Muslim staff and the Muslim head teacher. That's how the Trojan Horse letter describes what was going on at Adderley. That support staff at a primary school, three aunties from East Birmingham, and a Christian lady from the Burbs, were in reality secret agents,

conspiring with extremists as part of a broader Salafi conspiracy to take down Rizwan Adar. It's incredible, really. The Trojan horse-dutter was just the evidence Rizwan Adar needed to support her version of the resignations. Up to the point when it appeared in November 2013, hers had been a singular and unconvincing claim

that she was the victim of a Salafi plot by four of her teaching assistants. But now here was proof of that plot. One of the conspirators had conveniently written it all down. Incredible. Rizwan Adar was accused of fabricating letters. And another letter materialized to come to her rescue. And rescue her it did. Rizvan Adar would go on to use the Trojan horse letter to clear her name.

In the wake of the letter, the Birmingham City Council reversed course and paid for Adderley Primary School's legal case. The police raided the teaching assistants' houses at dawn and arrested them for conspiracy to commit fraud. The cops didn't end up bringing any charges, but all of this delayed the TAs' case against Adderley for years. Once the hearing began and Mrs. Dar finally did go in front of a judge, Adderley's legal team used the Trojan horse letter as evidence to support the school's case that the TAs had conspired to unseat Mrs. Darr. In the end, the judge concluded that Mrs. Darr did not fabricate the resignation letters. Rizvana Darr is the head teacher of Adderley Primary School to this day. More, after the break. This is Sarah Koenig, host of The Serial Podcast.

If you're hooked on this show, and I'm guessing you are, then I'm hoping my job here is pretty easy, to get you to subscribe to The New York Times so you can listen to the rest of it. My father was an ad man who taught me the best ads are declarative, no puffery. So here goes. Serial shows are expertly reported and inventive. Nobody makes them like we make them. But Serial's great serials aside, when you subscribe, you get all the Times shows. The Daily, Ezra Klein, Wirecutter has a new podcast. My advice, though, don't just get an audio subscription.

Go big. Subscribe to the paper, all access, the whole magilla. Serial is part of the Times, so technically I work at the Times, and honestly, I'm kind of cheap. But I subscribe for the news, obviously, and the games, and the cooking, and the magazine, and Serial. I think of the Times as a staple. Even my kids, who are not budding journalists and who don't even really listen to Serial, they both asked me for Times subscriptions. All the cool kids are doing it. So please, sign up.

You can do it through Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Or if you're already a Times subscriber, sign in. It's worth it. Once the Trojan horse letter started floating around East Birmingham in early 2014, for people close to the schools involved, people who knew and worked with Rizwan Adar, it didn't take too many reads for their minds to wander over through the spiky blue fence and the headteacher inside. What I remember distinctly coming to mind was,

seems to be a lot of information about Adli here. The Trojan horse letter, a lot of it relates to Adli and things that wasn't in the public domain. Who else would know this? Who else at the time would know this other than Rizwanatar? It was just so obvious.

I just found it very strange that a lot of those things were in the letter. The architect of this letter was somebody clearly out there to safeguard Rizwan Adar. She's written this to cover her ass. We've seen no direct evidence that Rizwan Adar authored the letter, nor court has ever found that she did.

And the Burma City Council sent us a letter in which they said any suggestions that Mrs. Dahl was involved in authoring the Trojan horse letter and the teaching assistant's resignation letters is false. But the content of the Trojan Horse letter, its timing, and the circumstances surrounding it point towards Mrs. Dar, or someone who supported Mrs. Dar, or maybe some combination of the two as the likely authors. And if it was Mrs. Dar who wrote the Trojan Horse letter. The bit that might surprise you is that a Muslim could have done this. That a Muslim could write a letter

trafficking in Islamophobic tropes with the potential to do untold damage to Muslims. It is messed up but it happens. I remember another case in the same area of East Birmingham actually where a Muslim cop had a personal beef with a guy who ran a prayer centre and the cop called 911, well 999 pretending to be a civilian reporting that people at the prayer centre were planning to kidnap and kill cops

in the name of ISIS. County terror detectives looked into it realised it was a hoax the crooked cop got a 7 year sentence. I think of this phenomenon kind of like judo. When you learn that you can use your opponent's strength as a weapon against him. Here, Mrs. Dahl was up against the city council,

which had abandoned her, and the employment tribunal, which is about to sit in judgement of her. Maybe she could manipulate those institutions by using the latent, credulous Islamophobia within them to her advantage. Tell them the TAs are Islamist plotters. Racist judo. It's a depressingly well-known move that us browns know we can make.

But it's not an easy thing to accept. When a friend first suggested to Tahir that the letter probably came from Mrs. Dar. I dismissed it all. Not only was Rizwan Ad Dar a fellow Muslim in Birmingham, working in schools with a similar goal of helping Muslim children, this was someone Tahir knew. He'd helped hire Mrs. Dar for the Adli headteacher position. On top of that, he was close to Mrs. Dar's husband,

a guy named Qadir Arif. It was hard for Tahir to imagine that someone close to him might have created a letter maligning him as an extremist kingpin. But as Tahir read and re-read the Trojan Horse letter, he couldn't shake the impression that it did seem designed to help Rizwana Dar. And then, when the letter leaked to the press, the story started running about him being a dangerous extremist. Tahir waited for a call from Qadir or Rizwana.

Because you knew them well enough for them to check in if something like that happened. Absolutely. They would have phoned me same day or following day. Not a diddly squat. It is now five years

and not one of them has contacted me. Any lingering doubts Tahir had about who wrote the letter, the silence quashed them. If the purpose of the Trojan horse letter was to help Mrs. Dar out of a very specific mess she'd gotten herself into with a handful of TAs at her school, why would Mrs. Darr, or whoever wrote

it, take pains to smear Tahir as a dangerous mastermind? Tahir himself struggled to find an explanation. The best he could come up with is that Mrs. Darr got the idea he was helping the TAs in some way with their unfair dismissal case, though he insists he wasn't. We also talked to someone who was on the Adderley governing body with Rizvan Adar around this time, who said Mrs. Adar was really angry at the educational trust Tahir ran for poaching some of Adderley's teachers. In any case, as the Trojan horse letter took off in the press, Tahir tried to push back. He drafted statements, which he sent to various agencies and reporters, and posted online, imploring people to look into the origins of the letter. And he publicly pointed to Adderley and the TA's resignation case as its likely source. The only outlet we've seen that picked up this line of inquiry with some seriousness was The Guardian.

A couple weeks after the Trojan horse letter went public, a reporter there published an article raising the possibility that the Trojan horse plot might have been manufactured to support Adderley's defense in the employment tribunal. But Adderley wasn't having it. The school sent an aggressive statement to the newspaper, saying the Operation Trojan Horse plot was real, and suggesting Tahir was the one who should be scrutinized, not them. The school also contacted Tahir directly. I received a legal letter. From the school's lawyers, saying his insinuations that the Trojan horse letter came from Adderley were, quote, wholly baseless.

And that. If I made those inferences again and so on, that I will be, you know, taken to court. Can you explain to me something? I know we've had this conversation before, and I'm just, I don't know, I'm still struggling to understand it. If I knew that my friends essentially had written a document that was threatening to ruin my life, I don't know why you've made no effort to go and speak to them. There's one thing to publicly infer about something. There's another thing to pick up the phone, call Qadir Arif and say... And say, what's going on here? I thought about that many, many times, actually.

And perhaps that's a conversation that, you know, perhaps I should have had, actually. But I didn't think it was going to be unraveled by a chit-chat or a cup of tea, obviously. I didn't believe that. Otherwise, I would have had, actually. But I didn't think it was going to be unraveled by a chit-chat or a cup of tea, obviously. I didn't believe that. Otherwise, I would have done that. It'd just be a no, and I didn't want to kind of, you know, sort of maybe embarrass myself.

So for me to have a nice little, hello, hello, Kadir, how you doing? It's not an easy thing for me to do. You have to appreciate that. You know what I'm saying? It's not an easy thing for me to do. Take a second to consider how the story of the Trojan

Horse letter changes if you begin it with the infighting at Adderley Primary School. If this theory of the letter is true, if it was created by Rizvan Adar, or someone near her, to strengthen the defense in the Adderley resignation case, think about the implications for Britain's understanding of Operation Trojan Horse.

Instead of news reports starting like this, A leaked letter outlining a plot by hardline Muslims to take over schools. A plot by hardline Muslims to take over schools. By hardline Muslims. Radical Muslims in Birmingham have got together to take control. They would have had to begin with, Someone appears to have fabricated a plot in an attempt to defend a headteacher

who's being sued for wrongful dismissal by four employees at a primary school who claim she forged resignation letters on their behalf. But the headteacher says the employees did submit resignation letters, but that they were pretending otherwise, as part of a plot to unseat her.

Assuming you can even twist your brain around that headline, that story might make News of the Weird or an obscure employment law journal, but it's not going to dominate the national media for months. It's not going to command the attention of Parliament, the Prime Minister, the country's ex-counterterror chief. It's not going to change counter-extremism policy. It's hard to fathom how this happened. We're not dealing with deep throat here. You've seen how easy it is to lay the Adderley case alongside the Trojan horse letter

and see how one could lead to the other. You can do it without much trouble, from the comfort of your colleague's parents' bedroom. The government had so many professional eyes on this letter, multiple independent teams of investigators. They must have looked into this theory and ruled it out for some reason. I draw no conclusion about the letter. Apparently not.

This is an education consultant and former head teacher named Ian Kershaw. He's the man the Birmingham City Council hired to conduct a thorough investigation of the Trojan horse letter. His resulting report was titled, Investigation Report, Trojan Horse Letter. And yet he proudly proclaimed to Hamza and me. I draw no conclusion about who possibly wrote it, why they wrote it. I didn't write it. I don't know who wrote it. What am I to find out who wrote it? Ian Kershaw says he didn't spend a single minute looking into that. In his 141-page report, he only mentions the case at Adderley in one

bullet point, or at least he appears to. It's splattered with redaction, writing that he didn't have time to pursue that incident in any detail. Former Counterterror Chief Peter Clark, the other main investigator who looked into the Trojan Horse affair for the national government, does a similar pivot. He does acknowledge in his report that whoever authored the Trojan horse letter had detailed knowledge of what was going on with the resignation case at Adderley Primary School. But then, he never discusses the case again. Both investigators, Kershaw and Clark, make clear that the letter itself, its origins, its authenticity, whether it was truly correspondence between two conspirators, that didn't matter to them or to the government agencies they were working for, which made total sense to Ian Kershaw.

Whoever wrote the letter, whatever their motive was, was not really the point. From a council's point of view, their question has got to be, is there something going on in our schools that we should know about? So the source of the letter, in a sense, became irrelevant. I cannot overstate how crucial this choice was, the choice to respond to the Trojan horse letter this way, to not worry so much about its text, all its details, or even whether it was real, and to instead look at its overarching theme, the notion that Muslims were colluding with each other to take over schools and potentially harm children. It's not clear where this peculiar and frankly Islamophobic logic first emerged,

but once it did, nearly everyone, from Westminster on down to the local media in Birmingham, followed suit. Parkview and Adderley teacher Razwan Faraz remembers giving interviews to reporters and investigators where he says he pushed them to look into the source of the letter and being frustrated. The feeling I got was that they weren't interested in the letter. They were interested in what's going on. The inquiry was more like, you Muslims are getting up to bad stuff, aren't you? Tell me why you're not getting up to bad things. As opposed to, we've heard that there's this stuff, aren't you? Tell me why you're not getting up to bad things. As opposed to, we've heard that there's this letter. What can you tell us about it?

And once that narrative solidified, it was insurmountable. So that even years later, when Hamza and I started trying to talk to people about what happened in Birmingham schools, lots of people didn't trust us, that we were after something different. Just spoke to Habib Rahman. It is a hard no from him. The wariness seemed especially stark among people connected to Adderley. There were stretches when I was back home in New York, and Hamza was soldiering on in Birmingham by himself, knocking on doors in between classes and assignments at journalism school.

And I would get these voice memos on WhatsApp from him throughout the day. Habib Rahman was a former chair of governors from Adderley, who had previously agreed to get coffee with us. He doesn't think there's any value in the story. Community's moved on. He's moved on. And eventually he just put the phone down. So he's a hard no. Hey man, I just knocked on Freya Shafak's door again. A former finance assistant for Matterly. She answered, and she just immediately started saying, I'm busy, I'm busy, and started trying to shut the door on me. And I said, Auntie, I just have one question to ask. Can you please just give me two minutes?

And she just shut the door on my face. I even tried to bleed with her through the postbox. So eventually I just felt ridiculous, and I've just come back to the car. I'm not too sure what else to do. Ah, mate. Hamza was like a tire that was slowly losing air. Hey, mate. So, um, here's the update of the evening.

First drove to Rahina Khanum's house. Rahina Khanum was one of the four teaching assistants in the resignation case. And her husband answered. He, um, wasn't pleased to see me there. He had an issue with his foot, so he had a walking stick with him. He was hobbling around. I immediately felt a bit guilty being there, if I'm honest. It became quite apparent quite quickly he was never going to let me speak to her.

She was upstairs, supposedly busy. He also threw in there a few times. Hamza had told me, as we shot the shit driving around Birmingham, that the reason he went into journalism was to take on stories like this one, in which Muslims felt burned by the press. Hamza used it as part of the pitch he'd make to people when we called them or met them at their front doors. I get it. I'm a Muslim Pakistani guy from Birmingham.

He thought this would be his calling card, would give him access to sources and stories that other journalists might not get. Instead, he found himself sitting alone in his car on a side street of Alam Rock, talking into his phone. God, I'm just looking at the message. It's already eight minutes long,

so this is... I'm sorry about this, mate. Listen, I think some people tied to the Adelie case had stuff to hide, and we'll get to some of that. But regardless, I have to say, this is exactly how I would react to a British journalist coming to knock on my door. This is the same press that's been called out

for systemic Islamophobia by its own media watchdog. The same press that's admitted called out for systemic Islamophobia by its own media watchdog. The same press that's admitted that editors ask reporters to find Muslim stories because they sell papers. And when these stories were analysed, the majority were negative, with the most common theme being terrorism. The same press that when pleaded with by the head of a Muslim organisation for more even-handed reporting about us because he feared people being poisoned like they were against Jewish people in the 1930s, responded with 21 articles ridiculing his argument, attacking him, and asking for his arrest. So yeah, I had hoped that being a local Muslim guy would mean that people in Birmingham would treat me differently, that they'd trust me. But instead, me walking around Alumrock introducing myself as a journalist,

only meant that after seeing all those headlines designed to hurt us, I'd gone and joined this industry. That I wasn't something different. I was also a sick person. I was also, apparently, an idiot. This is it. You solve this one question. The rest does not matter. The rest just kind of falls waywards anyway.

Back in the beginning, I'd ramble on to Brian about our mission. Sure, the people I thought I was helping weren't into me, but I still believed our goal was straightforward, that all you had to do was focus everyone on the question of who wrote the letter. Turn everybody's head back to Adelie. If you could substantiate that it was

indeed written by Rizwan Adar or someone close to her for that resignation case. If this was a hoax and intended by someone for a different purpose and completely made up and you get that as proof, everything that comes after it doesn't matter. For me, solving who wrote this letter is more powerful than just like this little case here in Birmingham. I feel like this becomes, you know, the flag that everyone can wave then to be like, well, let's be sceptical about any accusations from here on. Because look, look what happened with this one. Spiral out of control for no reason. This story, this letter then becomes bigger than this one series.

It becomes like a little reference point. A reference point to be like, just be skeptical. There was a problem with my premise though. When I first got interested in Operation Trojan Horse, I thought the government and press had made a mistake in overlooking who wrote the letter. A bigoted mistake, but an honest one, I assumed. That this provocative

document had surfaced, and the media had gotten into its usual frenzy. Words like extremism and jihad were being thrown around. And in a rush to act, the government lost itself in hysteria. And instead of taking the rational approach of just looking into the Adli case, it ended up embarking on a thoughtless adventure. I figured what I was trying to correct was an oversight. But now I know it wasn't an oversight at all. That's next on the Trojan Horse Affair. Saraba Brian Reid and me, along with Rebecca Lacks. The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass and by contributing editor Aisha Manazir-Siddiqui. Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronally and Ben Phelan. Original score by Thomas Miller, with additional music by Matt McGinley and Stephen Jackson. Sound design, mixing and music supervision by Stephen Jackson and Phil Domahowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company. Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor. Supervising producer is Ndeye Chubu. Executive assistant is Alberto de Leon. Sam Dornick is an assistant managing editor of the New York Times. Thank you. The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.