Who Trolled Amber? - Into the Dirt - Episode 3: Poison into medicine

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Rob Moore says he can justify going undercover among anti-asbestos campaigners because he was following a Buddhist principle, turning poison into medicine. To this day he believes that if the people he infiltrated would really listen to his story they'd understand him differently. But does his story really stand up to scrutiny?Listen to the full series today. For the premium Tortoise listening experience, curated by our journalists, download the free Tortoise audio app. For early and ad-free access to all our investigative series and daily and weekly shows, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.If you’d like to further support slow journalism and help us build a different kind of newsroom, do consider donating to Tortoise at tortoisemedia.com/support-us. Your contributions allow us to investigate, campaign and explore, and to build a newsroom that is responsible and sustainable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of a nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com It's got to have some very solid foundations.

In most of the recordings of Rob Moore I could get my hands on. The ones I listened to to get a sense of whether or not he was the real deal. A genuine double agent working for the anti-asbestos campaign while he was being paid to work against it. There are other people in the room. There are interviews all over the world that go on for hours and conferences that last for days. It's too controversial for you to say what the government is doing.

Strategising, sharing information and plans, getting together now and then for meetings in Brussels, New York, Bangkok. That's what the activists do. And Rob tags along and records them. Please come and sit here. Come and sit here. You should be at the front. But once in a while, it's only him, apparently thinking out loud, leaving voice memos for himself.

I guess it's possible a particularly cute kind of double agent would do that just to leave a trail lying around that sounds authentic, because it might help convince people one day that you were always trying to do the right thing but that would be quite a stretch so on balance i've always taken moments like this at face value i'm going to put myself in a world in a very legitimate place to ask for very good information for the greater good. Rob's recording this moment near the beginning of his time undercover. It's December 2012, about six months after he takes the job infiltrating the anti-asbestos campaigners.

He's in a car in Thailand, in between interviews with activists, at an important conference which K2 have sent him to. They're the private detective agency he's working for. He's not calling his plan turning poison into medicine, that idea he says he gets from his Buddhist faith about taking something bad and making it good. But that's the way his mind seems to be turning. There are great long gaps between the sentences, nothing flows, he's not thinking clearly. But it's all here. All the elements of the story Rob tells to this day about why he did what he did.

And all the massive holes in his plan as well. You guys are going to benefit from that because I am going to respect the confidences I am given. You guys must be the campaigners he's got in amongst. They're going to benefit from the medicine, he says.

And Rob will control the poison by not passing on everything he knows to K2. How am I going to... ..respect those confidences across the area. Well, just because you know things, you don't have to say them. But then, suddenly, there's a shift. The you he's talking to isn't the campaigners anymore. For me, this is a way of funding.

Getting some very interesting funding for why I should sort these out. I want to take a look at the work I've done for you and really look at the extra potential there was for further courses of action, further sales. Further sales? Further sales. Now, Rob can't be talking to the campaigners. He can only be talking to K2, trying to figure out how to earn more money for them

and more of what he calls funding for him to sort things out. It's quite a trick, riding two horses side by side like this. Then, after a few more minutes of driving around and fumbling for the right words, the U flips back again, back to the campaigners. I still can't listen to this moment without my eyes going wide,

just like they did the first time I heard it. I think there could be times when I have to get information to you in certain ways. So it's a partnership, really. It's a partnership relationship. Where I'll respect the confidences of my partners. A partnership?

Really? When Rob hasn't told any of the campaigners he's being paid by K2 and it sounds like he's made up his mind he won't ever do that. It's a funny old partnership and a little piece of a bigger problem which is that even telling yourself

something is true, even believing it's true, doesn't make it the whole truth. I'm Kerry Thomas and from Tortoise, this is Into the Dirt, episode three. Dirt, episode three. The job codename Project Spring was to go undercover among groups of anti-asbestos campaigners all over the world to try to understand how they worked and who was funding them. Rob's version of events is that soon after he took the job, and certainly by the time he was recording that memo in his car in Thailand, he'd realised he was working for the wrong people and jumped sides. He became a double agent. I've come back to near the beginning of Rob's story, just after he took that job in the summer of 2012. A lot of what happened after that you know by now.

But I haven't really tested his story yet. That's the job in front of me. That's what I want to be able to do. I want you to challenge me on those things. Poison into medicine, challenging questions. Great, go for it. Because what happened isn't always the most important part. Why can matter just as much?

And how? How did Rob infiltrate the anti-asbestos campaigners so brilliantly. One of the first things Rob Moore noticed when he got going in corporate intelligence, long before the asbestos job, was that some of the people around him really knew what they were doing. That, and the glamour of the world he walked into. It was vast. And the staff, I remember there were a lot of really attractive women

who were kind of like they could have been in CSI Miami or something like that, really beautiful. And then there was like lots of old coppers who were a bit like Tosh Lyons from The Bill. And of course you had these other remarkable characters. There was one guy whose job was just to break into army bases, to test their defences. So that would be one of the services they were contracted to do.

Oh, I see, OK. And all kinds of other specialists too. When I first got there, there was a list of jobs that you thought that you could do, and I put down, you know, a stakeout, who can do that, following people, I could do that. But a senior colleague put him straight. No, no, no. The people, I could do that. But a senior colleague put him straight. No, no, no.

The people who do the following, they've been following people for the British Army or for MI5 or MI6, so they really know how to do it. But Rob had something to bring to the party. He could blag his way into places. He could pull the wool over people's eyes. If I was given the brief he got, going undercover among any bunch of campaigners, I'd probably trip up right at the start. I suspect I'd try to go through the front door and just sign up for the campaign. And it would be too obvious. It wouldn't be as clever as what Rob did, because saying you're a journalist making a documentary gives you licence. As a journalist, you're expected to ask questions. And you don't have to explain why you've suddenly arrived on the scene.

I'm not even sure if I didn't learn that back in my news days, because it's quite standard in research, you know, when you're approaching a subject. Journalists don't lay all their cards on the deck to start with, right? So it wasn't like a completely new skill. It's one of the interesting paradoxes about Rob. I don't think self-awareness is his strongest suit, but he can be really smart about other people. I'm trying to avoid saying anything about Rob Moore. You're going to get there? Yeah. Don't worry. I can feel you. We're building up.

When Rob goes undercover among the anti-asbestos campaigners, the first big call he makes is to Rory O'Neill. Rory runs a magazine called Hazards and does a lot of work on dangerous materials for trade unions around the world. Okay, let's talk about Rob. So I think, putting myself in your shoes,

the sad fact is that he used you first of all, didn't he? Yeah, he did. I was his gateway to the networks. I mean, the networks, I say, are so precious. Quite fragile and precious, but, yeah, I was the way in. Can you remember how you first heard from him? I got a call from him on the 25th of June 2012,

and I get a lot of calls from journalists because one of my interests is double standards in trade which covers everything from pesticides through asbestos through to industrial chemicals and things like that so there's generally going to be a story about that bubbling up somewhere sometime so he called it was another journalist and I had a chat. And I think at that stage or early on he wasn't even talking about doing something just about asbestos he was talking about doing something about asbestos among a range of other habits is that right? With a benefit of hindsight he's certainly done his homework he talked about double standards wealthy nations exporting chemicals to poorer nations and the

consequences of that and that's my bread and butter you know there's a real strategy play out there isn't there yeah i mean you know we spend a lot of time trying to engage the media to expose the truth you know and go around saying why won't they tell the story about asbestos why won't they tell this story and when someone comes offering that then your defenses go down a bit and then when they say they're going to do a lot about it and they've got these resources they go down some more and so by increments we gave up too much I gave up too much he I mean the target he'd been given by K2 was Laurie Kaznellan she was the person I think they asked him to go after. Presumably she doesn't blame you for opening that door.

She'd been very gracious about it. If I was in her shoes, I'd blame her for it. And I do feel guilt for that because she certainly didn't deserve what she got. You can tell the world you're a TV producer, of course, but not forever. Did you ever say to them, where's the bleeding film? Yeah, repeatedly.

And there was always, this is happening, that's happening, I need to go to Vietnam, I need to go to India, I need to talk to Pakistan, I need to... There was... I mean, I just got to to Pakistan, I need to... There was... I mean, I just got to believe that it was a bit ineffectual. But that didn't stop me answering his questions. Rob tells K2 that's the problem he's going to run into in the end. If he doesn't actually do something, make some sort of film,

his cover won't last. And K2 get it. So early in 2013, six months or so into Project Spring, they pay for him to turn out a couple of short videos. In countries where they can avoid regulation, where they can avoid having to compensate their victims who develop asbestos-related diseases, and as long as they can avoid the cost of prevention and compensation. The videos are pretty unimpressive, to be honest. They're never going to change the world. They're just talking heads straight to camera, nothing that's ever going to cut through. The only version I can find is on YouTube. It's had 154 views in nine years and the channel has got 14 subscribers.

Thank you very much for having me. subscribers. Thank you very much for having me come speak. But they're calling cards. Rob's got something he can show now. It doesn't take too many months more before his name is on the billing at conferences like this one in the Philippines. I'm a TV producer from London and I'm developing a documentary about the way that asbestos producing countries are pushing asbestos into the developing world. Rob's early days on Project Spring, claiming he's a TV producer but not making anything solid,

open up some familiar questions. And I asked him, how can we help his campaign in a meaningful way? Is this all just for cover? Does he really want to make films to help the cause? Or has he got one eye on resurrecting his career in television? He said a film like this would help him counter the propaganda of the asbestos industry, who've been telling his government in Thailand that the evidence against asbestos is inconclusive. I can see from a lot of emails Rob's given me that in the months after he starts work on the asbestos case,

he does start talking to some old friends in TV about whether they can do something together. He puts them in the picture so they know he sees himself as a double agent. But in the end, those conversations have the flavour of mates chatting more than anything serious. There is one hint of something early on that goes beyond that. He drafts a pitch about asbestos to a TV producer who makes documentaries for Channel 4. I've seen the email, but I can't be sure Rob actually sent it.

And whatever combination it is, his own background in TV, his blagging skills, the little videos Rob makes early on, bit by bit, it starts to work. the little videos Rob makes early on, bit by bit, it starts to work. This film is different. It isn't like those slightly low-rent videos Rob made early on. This is a proper-looking thing. And it's one of the key moments he points to when he says he did make medicine.

And it's one of the key moments he points to when he says he did make medicine. Almost anybody living within that environment is potentially at the risk of developing cancer. It's not long. It's only nine minutes or so, but it's nicely shot. It's well put together and it tells a story about asbestos killing people in India. It's like dry drowning. And this is like you're trapped in an invisible box. Perhaps the most important thing is that after he lobbies hard in emails I've seen and meetings to make it happen,

Rob's commissioned by a respectable outfit to make it. The World Health Organisation, part of the United Nations. It's still on their YouTube channel today. Fear all those situations which can make them to walk. That first WHO film and a second one Rob makes later. They're not nothing. That would be unfair. India is still one of the countries where asbestos kills the most people. It stopped mining it, but it hasn't banned it.

So for the UN to call out the dangers would have been spotted. But if the film shows how far Rob had got setting himself up as a filmmaker working on asbestos, it shows he hadn't got that far either. Because in the end, it's a small project for a health organisation, not a big one for a broadcaster. And by the time Rob makes it, he's already been working for a health organization not a big one for a broadcaster and by the time rob makes it he's already been working for k2 for two years went out on the sort of southeast asia

youtube channel i think but did you ever see that yeah and did that do any good do you think um i don't think that was his purpose. I think his purpose was to convince us that he was heading in the right direction. So he produced nine minutes and there was nothing to object to there. But, you know, the truth is, everything that was there was stuff we'd won already. So it was just reflecting what we already had.

It wasn't changing anything. And so it was a product. Its selling wasn't worthless, but it wasn't taking us forward. There and then, it's the best example he can point to of turning poison into medicine, and he hasn't got close to making a full-scale TV documentary. The truth is, he hasn't really tried. Not yet. There was a strange disconnect between his expertise increasing

and his productivity decreasing. I didn't expect a story to come out tomorrow. He wasn't doing news, he was doing documentary. So you expected it to be a long project. But the story just... There was nothing happening. There was nothing being filmed. There was no real notes being taken you know no serious interviews as far as we knew it was just all been recorded

surreptitiously so i mean i think basically had a four-year project to pick our brains and abuse our trust but it became soident that there was not much of an effort to produce anything that would be broadcast. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin, and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles.

It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of a nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts

and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com. And certainly at one stage when I talked to the guy I met on the beach, this was some way into the case. The guy on the beach seems to have an accidental role in Rob's life, opening doors for him. He opened the very first one that got Rob into this whole business.

And in 2013, when he finds out that Rob's working with the WHO, but not telling them the whole truth, he opens another. He's working very high up at another corporate investigations agency called Kroll. He's working very high up at another corporate investigations agency called Kroll. Jules Kroll is here. For decades he's been regarded as the consummate private eye. It's bigger and more established than K2. It's the granddaddy of the whole industry, really. And it was the first one Rob worked at.

The guy on the beach has got a feel for how things should be done. And he can smell a rat, apparently, about the asbestos job. From his view, Kroll would never have taken this case because, in his view, the level of infiltration wasn't justified by the allegations of improper funding and undue influence orchestrated by lawyers. He was kind of a bit horrified that I was being asked to infiltrate WHO. And I'm using that in a very shorthand way of describing what I was doing. But in a tabloid way, you could write that, in effect, they had asked me to go and get inside the World Health Organization. And he just said, you know, God, we would never do that because the allegations don't merit the level of infiltration.

So at least with Kroll, there was some level of proportionality. So if it all seems so disproportionate that the cover story doesn't make sense, maybe the story about who the client is doesn't make sense either. Rob's already started to figure that out for himself. In this theme that we're going to keep coming back to, I think the sort of poison medicine. Yeah. This is a moment, isn't it, where you can see quite a lot of the poison. Yeah.

K2 are probably not being straight with you. Absolutely believe that. You know that by that point. You'd be better aware of Chris Attal and the harm it does because he beat this conference. You like the campaigners. You don't believe thats lawyers are rigging this whole thing i haven't seen any yeah and you and the medicine yeah that you're using to counter that

yeah is this hypothetical thing yeah that at some point i might be able to make a film or do something that yeah i didn't know at this stage what i could do with it. But I'm basically wondering why you don't bail out at that point. Well, it's a totally fair question. Why don't I bail out at that time? I believed that I would be able to find out who the client was. So I thought that was a possibility. But yeah, I had no understanding of how I was going to find that out, how I was going to turn poison into medicine.

I didn't know the answers at that stage. I had a belief that I could create some value in my situation. I felt that my situation gave me something that no one else had here. There was an awareness of an outside force that was doing something that was asking of ultimately a place me here. But it takes another of his colleagues, someone who's got disaffected with K2, to help set him off in a new direction. And he would just say to me, God, this company is awful, Rob, let me know.

And we'd have those sort of conversations. And then eventually he said, I'm leaving, Rob, I'm getting out. These guys are working for all the bad guys. And I said, oh, I'm going to stay. So now two people, two people Rob seems to trust, are telling him how much poison he's swimming in. But it doesn't change his plans. And he said, well, in that case, you need to know the client is Custo.

And that was the first time I'd heard the name. And I didn't ask for any more details. I just went off and Googled it. So there it is. Rob's colleague tells him it's a company called Custer, not some American investor, which is paying for him to go undercover. He's never heard of them.

Eventually, I found the website. From memory, it was a Singapore-based private holding company which had investments in mining, engineering, all manner of different, a wide variety of industry, construction, all of those things. This is 2013, and Custo's website is bare bones, as if the brief to the designers is, we know we need to have a website,

but we'd like you to say as little as possible, please. It was a very vague sounding name and company. The website says Custo is based in Singapore. You can figure out even then, I think, its roots are actually in Kazakhstan. Even these scraps of information add up to what Rob believes is a real moment. That's one of the big breaks for me. He thinks being told it's Custo who are paying K2 for information about anti-asbestos campaigners is a breakthrough. He thinks they're the client. But he hasn't got proof. He's only got one person's

word for it. And if that person's got it wrong, then Rob's heading down completely the wrong track. It's one of the risks of operating solo like he is. He's come to believe something. He can't fully stand up. And he might have got it wrong, because for all the mentions of investments, construction and engineering on Custo's paper-thin website, there's one thing glaringly not there.

No mention of asbestos. Why would a company which doesn't claim to have anything to do with asbestos pay for a corporate spy to go undercover to find out more about the campaign to have it banned? And it's important to say, to this day, Kuster denied both the main things Rob came to believe about them. He thought they were K2's client on Project Spring, and they say they weren't.

And he believed they own an asbestos mine in Kazakhstan, either directly or indirectly. They deny that too. They did tell us that shareholders of Custo Group have ownership stakes in what they called relevant mining assets. But that's as far as they'll go. Let's imagine even if he was wrong about Custo, that Rob had eventually been able to prove categorically who owned the asbestos mine and who hired K2. I've always thought that knowing your enemy has to be some use to the campaigners, knowing the name of the company that's pushing asbestos into countries that haven't banned it.

But to this day, not just Rory O'Neill, but Krishnendu Mukherjee and Harminda Baines as well, they all say the same thing. Unless you can see a way to get to your enemy in a court of law somewhere, it's good to have a name, but it's not especially useful information. And none of them can see a way to put anyone in the dock. The truth is, there's a simpler story here.

We didn't need this intrigue to actually get to where we wanted on asbestos. What we wanted was time spent on actually moving forward towards a ban. We're so far away from having responsibility laid on anyone's head. You know, someone brought to justice for this. It's pretty far down my to-do list. You know, I'm dealing more, particularly at the moment, with getting rid of asbestos in the first place. I suffered the internal anxiety, living a double life, which I essentially was,

and lying to everybody, because I was lying to the campaigners about this great thing, but I was also lying to K2 and to the clients. That's a very difficult thing to maintain. Since he got going on Project Spring in 2012, Rob's been carrying around a jumble of jigsaw pieces. And now, two years in, he thinks he's clicked some important ones into place. It might feel good to start to see the whole picture. But it doesn't seem to make things easier.

The opposite, really. Now, as 2014 tips into 2015, he still says absolutely that he's a double agent. But he thinks he's working for the sworn enemies of the campaigners he claims as his friends. And the pressure has already started to tell. I felt utterly strange. I told someone next door, I think something's gone wrong with me, something's happening, and this very kind person laid me on the floor.

They got an ambulance. Rob calls them suicide headaches. You know, and I then, after over a period of three weeks, was going in and out of seizures. They weren't seizures, but I was suffering from enormous pain. They were putting me into... They thought I had a tumour. They thought I had a stroke or that I was developing epilepsy. So I was in and out of hospital. That's properly scary.

That was absolutely due to the stress of holding on to something that was incredibly mori complex, that was painful because of the deceit that was involved. I mean, it's the most stressful thing that one can do. No-one's forcing Rob to put himself through this. The campaigners definitely aren't asking him to. In fact, they say they'd have asked him to do something completely different.

To this day, Rory O'Neill thinks what Rob did was a waste of time. You know, we could have so many sideshows here when in actual fact we were diverted away from our primary purpose with story twist after story twist after story twist that were basically stopping us getting on with the job we were meant to be doing. The main sideshow is Rob's determination to stay undercover, not to tell anyone he sees himself as a double agent.

He says there are moments he comes close to spilling the beans. The out-of-controlness, actually, of what happens to that bit of information when you tell someone. But not that close. If I told them the best-case scenario is they went, thanks a lot, that's terrible, we'll keep it quiet, thanks. I wouldn't have been able to maintain an interest in this. I wouldn't have been able to have any sense of this mission that I went on.

The grand mission of turning poison into medicine. Being terrified of out-of-controlness is the price you're bound to pay if you try to control everything. Things that are yours to control, and in Rob's case I'd say things that really aren't. Big things like dictating who knows the whole truth about your life and who doesn't. And smaller ones like the telling of your story in a podcast. And however much it matters to you, however much you want it, much it matters to you, however much you want it, nobody can control everything forever. Coming up on Into the Dirt.

Yeah, I think it's naive to think that the people who expose wrongdoing are all pure as the driven smoke. They're not. Look after me, please, Matteo. Please look after me, because it's me, it's my family, it's my friends, it's my sister. And narcissism is a strong driver, and it can lead people to do great things. But I keep thinking, you know, that someone's going to go, that famous phrase, if something is too good to be true, it probably is.