Who Trolled Amber? - The Gas Man: Episode 1 - The Special Agent

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

In the 1980s Special Agent Dennis Bass received a tip-off that changed the course of his career. 30 years on reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou sets out to solve the mystery of how an international fugitive got away with his crimes – and why he's still on the run.To find out more about Tortoise:Download the Tortoise app - for a listening experience curated by our journalistsSubscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentBecome a member and get access to all of Tortoise's premium audio offerings and moreIf you want to get in touch with us directly about a story, or tell us more about the stories you want to hear about contact [e-mail]: Chloe Hadjimatheou Producer: Claudia WilliamsEditor: Jasper CorbettNarrative editor: Gary MarshallSound design: Hannah VarrallOriginal theme music: Tom KinsellaOriginal artwork: Jon HillFX credit: Telex by YleArkisto at freesound - License: Attribution 4.0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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And we were like, well, how did this all start? Well, let's just start with how it all started. Yeah. And so, you know, we thought we'd start with you and a punch in the street in Germany. Yeah. Seegberg. That's right. Yeah. This is Mike. We first met over 20 years ago when I was making an undercover documentary. You contacted me, didn't you? You and Dahlia contacted me. I didn't really know what I was doing back then.

It was my first move into journalism. I'd rigged up this tiny spy cam in a clutch bag and along with a friend started filming. Mike helped us turn all those hours of footage into a passable documentary. We stayed in touch drifting in and out of each other's lives from afar until last year when we went for a coffee around the corner from the Tortoise Office. And then it was really weird, because we were drinking coffee

and we realised we'd both done documentaries on Syria. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And then I got talking about the chemical weapons documentary that I had made. Mike started telling me about this one film he'd made over a decade ago. It was about chemical weapons, the militaries who'd used them and the victims who'd suffered devastating consequences. And as he was running through the story,

he mentioned one of the people featured in the documentary, just in passing. What was interesting was this guy had been on the run for 20 odd years. He was on Interpol's red list of international criminals. Mike was interested in him because he'd admitted to selling massive amounts of illegal chemicals in the 1980s. Chemicals that could be used to make nightmarish weapons that fill the air with poison, killing men, women and children indiscriminately. This man only appeared in the film for a few minutes and to be honest Mike had moved on but I was hooked. This guy had confessed his crimes but somehow he seemed to have gotten

away with it. Suddenly he was all I wanted to know about so I made Mike tell me everything he knew. The man's name was Peter Wallischek. Mike had tracked him down to a city in Germany and his brief appearance in the film is a memorable one. We went out there, me and my cameraman, Anthony, and lay siege to his house from five in the morning. Then about eight o'clock in the morning, this old guy with glasses, who we recognise from the dusty old photo, came out with his two big dogs, put the dogs in his car, got in the car. I said, Ant, let's go.

In the footage, you can see Mike walk up to the man who has this kind of comically dyed black hair and a gold chain. And although he's an older guy, he's still quite imposing. Mike starts very politely asking questions. Do you know how long time it is? Therefore no comment. Oh I'd just like you to tell your story. I'll hit the thing out of your hand.

But get away quickly. Peter Valacecek thrusts his shoulders back and starts to almost square up to him. Yeah, luckily his dogs didn't jump out of the car and attack us. There's this tussle, and the guy takes a swing at the cameraman and knocks him down. Run.

He really likes it. He had quite a punch though, it turns out. takes a swing at the cameraman and knocks him down. He had quite a punch though, it turns out. Mike's still trying to get him to answer questions about how he's evaded justice for so long, but the man marches off into a nearby police station. Then he started speaking German, complaining about me to the police, and I was shrugging my shoulders and saying, I just want to ask you these questions about what you've sold. When Mike told me this bit of the story, my mouth was just hanging open. I mean, this guy's a wanted law breaker and he's treating Mike like he's the criminal. The police take no action. No action against Mike, but also no action against this fugitive from justice.

Germany was hiding him, keeping him there. Long after my coffee with Mike, I keep coming back to Peter Wallischek, the chemical dealer in Germany. It's like he thinks the laws of justice and morality don't apply to him. A decade after Mike's encounter, I feel like there's more to the story, and Mike agrees. So I start digging. The more I dig, the further from home I find myself, following a trail from Europe to Baltimore, and then Baghdad, Canada, and the Netherlands. What I uncover is a global game of cat and mouse, a catch me if you can. But this story's not about my hunt to track this guy down.

That's the thing, it was easy for me to find him. He's still on the run, but he's hiding in plain sight. And he not only admits his crimes, he actually revels in them, taunting those who've tried to bring him to justice. I knew he wouldn't have been caught because he's protected, you know, officially protected. What I want to know is, how can a man who's been on Interpol's most wanted list and never faced justice, wander so arrogantly into and out of a police station. An international fugitive involved in the trade of chemical weapons who's so confident he won't be caught that he punches someone and then goes to the cops for protection.

What I found is a story about the middlemen, the people who go unseen, who rarely make the headlines, but who keep the wheel of evil turning. About how the guy next door just might be a wanted criminal, whose crimes appear to have simply drifted away, evaporated into the atmosphere, right under everyone's noses. I'm Chloe Hajimathau from Tortoise. This is The Gas Man, episode one, The Special Agent So it took me a little while but I'm here. Well you you didn't miss this game it was really depressing. Oh no. My hometown lost. Oh no. I'm pissed. Oh I'm sorry too. Don't worry about it. That's life. A few months after that coffee with Mike, and it turns out just weeks before the Super Bowl, I flew to meet the other man at the heart of this story. The cat in this global game of cat and mouse.

Dennis Bass lives in the States. I'd tell you where exactly, but he's got to be careful. What I can say is it's a quiet community. There are palm trees and he's got a pool. He's tall and tanned with sparkling white teeth. And he has that wiry frame of an older man who works out lots and puts the younger, lazier people like me to shame. He's also, I find out, a huge fan of technology. Someone was detected at your backyard.

I thought that was turned off. You can do anything from the phone. I have this whole house wired for like everything. He spends his time walking his dogs and playing pickleball at the country club with his wife Helen. It's mandatory membership. If you buy into this community you have to belong to the country club. People specifically buy here because of that country club. I mean they don't come here and get surprised. But our story starts before the country club in the poor. back in a much grittier period in his life, the late 80s, when he was Special Agent Dennis Bass.

We really could pick our own investigations and if you were good at what you did and you were held in high regard, you could almost write your own ticket. You were successful in undercover if you had something to offer bad guys. Whatever type crime it was, whether it was buying drugs, you were paying more money than anybody else. If it was selling arms to somebody, my job was to get that for them. My job was to get that for them. In photos I've seen from those days he looks different. For a start he had hair back then, black and curly. He reminds me a bit of one half of Starsky and Hutch.

I was a kid in the 80s. Ronald Reagan was on his way out. No to the drugs. And George Bush Sr. was on his way in. Guilty as charged. Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street. If you take that view, there'll be no progress at all. Everyone was worried about AIDS and the nuclear threat. If we are attacked by nuclear weapons, these are the warning sounds you must recognise.

The Iron Curtain hadn't fallen yet. And the nightly news was filled with images of tanks shooting across desert landscapes as Iran and Iraq fought a war that seemed to go on forever. Condemned Saddam Hussein regimes because he's bombing his own people with chemical weapons. Back then, Dennis Bass was working in Baltimore, his hometown, a city that was so down and out in the 1980s that even its own football team had walked out, leaving in the middle of the night without any notice. Baltimore was struggling with a crime epidemic fuelled by a growing heroin and crack cocaine problem. The drugs were coming into the city on ships.

Yeah, Baltimore has a pretty busy, pretty big harbor. But there were always crewmen that would bring a lot of narcotics in. And I did a lot of undercover work on ships. I would develop informants of certain nationalities. They were source countries for heroin and I'd go on and meet crewmen and crewmen would tell me, well we have five keys of heroin on the ship, you know, do you have any money? And I would get money to show them and then we would usually just arrest them. Was it dangerous?

You know, I've often been asked that I Felt comfortable because I knew what I was doing the more that I did it the more and I would prepare I always used to tell new agents in undercover school I would tell them I felt more comfortable going on an undercover assignment Than I did working on the electrical panel in my house because I knew what I was doing undercover wise. I don't have a great knowledge of electricity and to me that was a quicker way to get killed than going undercover. These operations weren't about busting dealers on street corners. Special Agent Bass and his team were after the big players.

And so he'd wear snazzy suits and ties and carry expensive briefcases, pretending to be a super rich businessman looking to buy huge quantities of heroin. He plays it down now, but there were hairy moments, times when he had to think on his feet to convince a target he wasn't doing exactly what they suspected him of doing, setting them up and wearing a wire. These people wanted to see that I had the money but I would always do it in a way when they were never expecting to see it. I would get on the phone and I'd say, hold on a minute and I'd say, hey Joe, bring me that briefcase. And they had no idea this was gonna happen and then somebody would show up they'd bring it back into the conference room which

was wired for audio and video and I'd say oh by the way to the bad guy you wanted to see if I was able to come up with the money you want to count it there were a couple instances where I get a million dollars in cash. couple instances where I'd get a million dollars in cash. His work in narcotics took him around the world, to the sources of the drugs, to places like Pakistan or Turkey. It would involve diplomatic missions, dodging local customs officials, always looking over your shoulder. And he did this for years. and he did this for years. What happened was I had spent almost my entire career up to that point in narcotics investigations. And so my agent in charge said to me, you know, there's a big push on in customs to do these,

what we call Exodus cases, these export cases. And you've been very successful with drug cases and you're a good investigator. Would you consider going in the group that does the export investigations? It was called the strategic group. So I said, you know what, I would. I think I'm ready for a change. It was more of a nine-to-five type thing, whereas when you work narcotics investigations, you get calls in the middle of the night, your informants in jail or this or that. So I said, yeah, I'm ready for a change.

It sounds like a challenge. So this would have been 1988. I would have been 37. So one warm April morning, Special Agent Dennis Bass leaves home to start work in a new department. And on my very first day in that group, I initiated an investigation that turned out to be one of the larger and more important investigations of my entire career. you. In a meeting of allied intelligence agencies, a group of operatives reunite with a colleague from one of the top intelligence agencies in the world, revealing the nickname they gave him, the Master.

Growing up undercover, I had another name for him, Dad. Yes, Omri, something else you want to say? Join us in our espionage podcast, Spies and Lies, where we delve into and analyse acts of espionage throughout history. Follow Spies and Lies wherever you listen to podcasts from. You won't want to miss it. The export investigations team Dennis Bass joins is dealing with illicit goods leaving the US. On the surface, it doesn't seem as exciting.

No more undercover drug stings. But that's OK with him. He's done all that. He's ready for a quieter life. His new department's housed in an old building overlooking Baltimore's harbour. We each had individual cubicle type things. People had wanted posters taped to them and all and you had a computer and a desk and a phone, not even a direct line. Usually they'd have to call the main line and then the secretary would forward it to your extension.

And just about the day that I got into the group, I get this call from one of the inspectors. It's nothing big. It looks like a slightly dodgy shipping form, potentially just an error. But it's from a company that the team's been warned about before. But the inspector remembered that and basically he called me to say, hey, there's a shipment of theirs going out and it's going foreign. Well, I said, listen, Bill, I just got in this group, let me do some checking and I'll get back to you. He pulls up the file on the company, Alkalac International.

It's a large organisation with a big factory and several offices based in Baltimore. It produces all sorts of chemicals for use in things like cosmetics, cleaning products, textiles, lots of different industries. And I pulled the file and I saw like three years earlier, customs in our headquarters had gotten some general information from the Dutch embassy. A tip-off? Yes. It was a serious tip-off about the company and what they were up to. But Dennis Bass won't tell me what was in it,

just that it came from official sources in the Netherlands. He's been retired for years, but even now, he sticks to the rules about what he can and can't say. What he can tell me is that the team before him looked into it. They visited the company and took a look around, gave some advice about suspicious orders. We didn't let them know we had a tip, company and took a look around, gave some advice about suspicious orders. We didn't let them know we had a tip, but they said, yeah, we do make that chemical,

but we sell like a barrel at a time. It turned up nothing, but that tip-off makes him look again at the dodgy shipping form. Yeah, there were a number of red flags that made it suspicious. First up, there's the size of the shipment, 55-gallon barrels, 430 of them. They fill seven shipping containers. That's someone ordering at scale.

And those containers aren't the usual kind rented out by the shipping company. They're brand new, bought by whoever ordered the chemicals. It is very unusual. It would be like you coming to the US from the UK and going instead of going to Hertz and renting a car, you go into a car dealership and buy a car and then you stay here three days and you go home. Why would you buy a car? Why would you buy the shipping containers? One of the reasons you buy the shipping containers is because you own them, they're not tracked. If a shipping line rents you to containers, they keep track of wherever they go because they're expensive.

It's enough to make Dennis Bass very interested. The quantity, the shippers own containers, the documents, you know, weren't filled out properly. And in fact it didn't even have the name of the chemical, it had the brand name. It almost feels like someone's trying to hide the chemical that's been ordered. So he decides to check, and quickly. That night, when everyone's packed up and left the harbor, he slips down to the ship, opens up one of the containers, and takes a sample of liquid from a barrel.

And when the lab tests come back, they're definitive. That this company, Alkalac, was exporting thioglycol. What's thioglycol? That was what I said to myself. First I said, how do you say that even? And how do you spell that? And so I did some checking and it's a chemical. It's generally used in inks and dyes. It's used in like ballpoint pens for the ink. However, when mixed on a one-on-one basis with hydrochloric acid, it becomes mustard gas. Mustard gas, a man-made chemical weapon. Actually, it's not really a gas, it's an aerosol spray, first used during World War I I when a yellowish fog would

drift across battlefields smelling faintly of garlic or mustard blistering its victims skin destroying their lungs and leaving them choking and convulsing in their tens of thousands. After the war in the 1920s, a global treaty made it illegal for any country to use mustard gas. So in the 1980s, the chemicals that could be used to make it, like thiodiglycol, were highly regulated. Most of these chemicals are not illegal because as Dennis Bass says, they have other uses, like in ballpoint pens. But 430 barrels of thiolid glycol, it's a lot more than you'd need for any pens. And here's the thing.

The original tip-off from the Dutch embassy, it came with one more detail, a suspicion about where the chemicals were going. That this company Alkalac was exporting thioglycol and that it might be going to Iran. That would definitely make the shipment illegal. Because in April 1988, Iran and Iraq are in the middle of a war so brutal in terms of tactics and casualties that it's been compared to the First World War. And like the First World War, it involved chemical weapons. Everything is dead, my mother and my father, with the birds, with the chicken, all of them dead. By this point Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein has used mustard gas and sarin to kill thousands of

Iranians leaving tens of thousands more with debilitating injuries. We have got to prove that Iraqi regime use this weapons. To Dennis Bass it seems plausible that this shipment is a sign that Iran is considering using chemical weapons in return. It's a horrifying thought, an escalation in a war that's already devastated an entire region. And so, Special Agent Bass knocks on the door of his new boss. And I said to him, listen, I have a feeling this stuff is going to like Iran or something because the way the paperwork is laid out, we'd found out that it was going to Singapore

and the address in Singapore was like a high-rise office building and this specific company was on like the 20th floor or whatever. They weren't taking 430, 55-gallon drums up there. So he said, what do you want to do? I said, really what I'd like to do is substitute it. What he's proposing is a switch. He wants to replace all the chemicals in the barrels for water and follow the shipment to its destination to prove where it's headed and If he's right about the end destination to get the authorization to investigate who ordered it Now remember this is his first week on the job and his boss isn't convinced He wants to wrap it all up with a quick seizure there and then.

And I said, if we just seize it, we have nothing. Even if they're going to admit that they, OK, made some mistakes on the paperwork. But what's the crime? There's no jury appeal here. We don't know that it was going to be used to make a chemical weapon, okay? His boss thinks about it. This new guy might have a point. He reluctantly agrees to let Special Agent Bass go ahead with his plan. It all has to happen without anyone from the company or the ship working out what's going

on. And it has to happen fast, because the shipments leaving the next day. Special agent Bass waits as late as he can and then he sends a squad of guys down to the harbour. So at night they went and took the containers, they were stacked up ready to be put on a ship they took them, took them to a warehouse, brought in the volunteer fire department, brought in their empty 55 gallon drums, then had the fire department fill the 430 empty ones with water, stuffed them back in the original containers, the seven shipping containers, took them back to the pier and stacked them up where they were. They worked out all night to do that and they got it done. They close up the last of the barrels, pack up and leave.

The next morning, the ship's employees arrive at the harbour, load their containers and set sail. No one has a clue about how busy the harbour's been overnight. And now there's nothing left for Dennis Bass to do, except sit on his hands and wait and see where the cargo ends up. It's hot in mouth stuff. It must have been because you know this is your first job in this new department and you've made a real stink. You've kicked up a real fuss. Your boss doesn't want this case and you're insisting on it.

So it must have been a bit nerve-racking. It was. Oh and let me add, when US Customs seizes something the owners are notified officially in writing to say your car's been seized or whatever it's been seized. He's been so careful. His team's managed to pull off the impossible. But the Baltimore Customs Office is a big place and another department, which has no idea what he's been up to, alerts the chemical company that their shipments raised a red flag. It could blow the whole operation. They sent a letter to Alkalac to say we've seized your your 430 55 gallon trumps of thiodeglycol. So when I heard that, I was like beside myself. I mean, I won't even tell you what I said,

you know. Why did they do that? Because it's routine to do it. This, like these seizures, where we're doing substitutions, especially for outbound, doesn't happen very often. They just routinely did it without thinking. And I know when the case agent called me, because he was assigned the case also, he said, Dennis, I don't know how to tell you this. I said, oh my god. If the company knows the shipment's being tracked,

they'll alert the customer who ordered the chemical, and they might divert it. So I said, let me think about it. I'll find a way out of this. And I said, you call them and you say to them, this is the US government. We screw up on a daily basis and we screwed up. There's nothing wrong with your shipment. It's proceeded out of the port and all. And they said, OK, great, fine. and that was it. Crisis averted. Uncle Sam to the rescue.

The boat and its cargo set sail headed east until the shipment stops. It sits in the docks in Pakistan. Days pass, then weeks. At the customs office in Baltimore, they're terrified their gambit's been blown. They've been relying on shipping logs and word of mouth to follow the cargo. It's the 80s. No tracking device has a battery that will last that long. Finally, they get word. And so on June 28th, which was approximately April, May, two, two and a half months after it left Baltimore, DEA advised us that it was being loaded on an Iranian ship and it was going to Bandar Abbas, Iran.

So this was the best news of all. There's celebration back in the Baltimore Customs Office. Their new boy has come good. Now they can get a warrant to search the offices of Alkalac, the chemical company. We raided all three locations. Were they shocked? Yeah, yeah, they were, to say shocked was an understatement. They were like floored. And, you know, we told them all to leave,

except for the ones we wanted to stay there to show us things. Dennis Bass has evidence that Alkalac helped send chemicals to Iran using dodgy documents. What he doesn't know is who bought it. So he starts the boring but essential part of the investigation, painstakingly sifting through reams and reams of documents. The records in that company were horrendous. They were all over the place, files were mixed, they were stacked up,

sitting on tables and file cabinets. It was just a real mess. He takes as many files as he can. But the next day, the export manager calls him out of the blue. And she said, there's some documents that you didn't get when you were here, which didn't shock me. Like I said, it was total chaos in their offices, their file keeping and all that. And so she, you know, I went back and picked them up. Was there anything in there that was interesting at the time? Yeah, I mean, this was 1988. It was before the Internet and cell phones and all those things.

And so a lot of businesses still communicated, particularly internationally, over telex. One of the things she gave me was a telex between her and the German national who she was dealing with, a guy named Peter Walchett. The gas man, Peter Valaschek. In about three decades' time he'll square up to my friend Mike in the street in his gold chain and square glasses. But in 1988, all Dennis Bas knows is his name.

What he doesn't know is who this guy really is or why he's sending a chemical that can be used to make mustard gas to a brutal regime in Iran. He thinks and considers himself, and I guess he is, a player. You know, he loved being this evil entrepreneur. What Special Agent Bass couldn't have known is that this was a case he'd still be working on years later. Because in uncovering that one dodgy shipment to Iran and Peter Valaschek's name, Dennis Bass has unwittingly pulled on a thread on a global plot, the ramifications of which are still playing out in the Middle East today. Yeah, he's a pawn. He's a piece on a chessboard.

But before any of that, Special Agent Bass needs to work out how he's going to get the guy. And that's going to mean another sting operation. Coming up in episode 2 of The Gas Man, Dennis Bass comes face to face with his target. I wanted him in the US. He's shocked with being good for him, yes. Surprised. I certainly thought of Mr. Balachek as an enabler. He said, well, I didn't know that they were going to use it to make chemical weapons, because if I did,

I would have charged them more money. Thanks for listening to The Gas Man. It's reported by Chloe Hajimathayu and produced by me, Claudia Williams. It's written by both of us. Gary Marshall is the narrative editor and Jasper Corbett is the editor. The sound design is by Hannah Varrell. Original theme music by Tom Kinsella. This episode was fact checked by Xavier Greenwood, with thanks to Kavita Puri, Matt Russell, Katie Gunning and Ines Bresla. You can listen to more episodes today by subscribing to Tortoise Plus or by downloading the Tortoise app. You can listen to our previous

investigations right here on Tortoise Investigates while you wait for the next episode, and to hear more from our award-winning newsroom, search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts. Tortoise Hello, I'm Alexi Mostros, host of Who Trolled Amber, the podcast that investigates whether there was an organised trolling campaign against Amber Heard. I'm excited to announce that on Wednesday 12th June I'll be hosting a live event to discuss Who Trolled Amber with Jen Robinson, Amber Heard's lawyer, and Gina Neff from the Mindaru Centre for Technology and Democracy.

It's a great chance to hear insights into the world of celebrity PR, online disinformation and its effect on all our lives. You can book your place at torturesmedia.com forward slash book.