World Of Secrets - The Darkest Web: 1. Meeting a monster

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

US Special Agents Greg Squire and Pete Manning work together to track down people who sexually abuse children and share images of their abuse online. They thought they knew what they were dealing with but they’ve just discovered they have no idea. In a prison in Amsterdam they meet a prolific paedophile, Robert Micklesons, who reveals to them the vast online world created by paedophiles to share images and video of child sexual abuse. When they get back to the US they get an urgent call. A police officer in Denmark on has found images of a girl in America who appears to have been sexually abused for six years. But no one has any idea where she is. Their job is to find her. But how will they do it? Season 11 of World of Secrets, The Darkest Web, is a BBC Eye investigation for the BBC World Service. This podcast includes some upsetting scenes, discussions of child sexual abuse, and there’s some strong language. For further information on the issues raised in the programme, contact support organisations in your own country. For a list of organisations in the UK that can provide support go to bbc.co.uk/actionline.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If there was a big rent button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Before we start, this series follows the work of two US special agents who fight child sexual abuse.

So I need to warn you that we will be discussing this throughout. And there's some strong language. In January of 2014, we had gotten information from a very, near and dear friend of ours, Mads, and he had discovered some images of a girl, and her pictures were being distributed across the dark web. Somewhere, a 12-year-old girl is being sexually abused in her own home. The abuse began when she was just six years old. And it was his determination that this girl was likely an American.

So we raised our hand, you know, ready to go and willing to, you know, do as much as we could to try to locate this girl. Her abuser is sharing photographs of her with a vast community of child abusers on the dark web. An encrypted corner of the internet only accessible using special software. Software designed with privacy in mind. Users are untraceable. abused for over six years. And I can't even... Every time in this job you say I can't even believe it, somebody proves you're wrong. But hidden amongst the paedophiles are two men whose job it is to try and find her.

US Special Agents, Greg, Squire and Pete Manning. They work for the Department of Homeland Security in an elite unit whose job is to safeguard cybersecurity. safeguard cyberspace. There's definitely no off-switch, you know, but they didn't choose this. But Greg and Pete are choosing this. They're choosing to enter one of the most secretive places in the world. This is a child who is just enduring something. We can't even imagine what it feels like and never want to know firsthand, you know.

If they don't understand how they operate, and they can't stop them. To look at her as a six-year-old little girl and to see her eyes and the light that is quite normal in a child that age. And then to look at her in that 12-year-old range and just to see that start to dim, you see what looks like an old woman buying those eyes. And to go, who has the right to extinguish that?

It's not going to be easy. Because all they have to go on are the horrific images of abuse, the details they can see in the background of the pictures. Can they find her? Going on nothing more than a few bits of furniture and a bare brick wall. Somewhere in America. This is World of Secrets.

Season 11. The Darkest Web. A BBC World Service investigation. I'm Sam Piranti, a documentary maker. Episode 1. Meeting a Monster. I first heard about Greg and Pete from a contact, who told me about two remarkable men fighting a secret war against invisible enemies. I knew I had to speak to them, to learn more about what they were doing.

I spent months trying to arrange a meeting, emailing, calling, trying to win their trust. Before finally, in 2018, they agreed to meet. And so now I'm here, standing with my recording equipment in a sandwich shop in Boston, about to enter a hidden world. I'm staring at the menu, trying to decide between turkey and pastrami. Pete walks in first. He's medium height, with dark hair, he's friendly enough, but reserved, watchful and contained. Just as you would expect from a former Secret Service agent. I'm Pete Manning. I'm a special agent with Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security investigations.

Special agent Greg Squire is the opposite. He's tall, muscular, loud and tattooed. Where Pete blends in, Greg stands out, and his energy soon takes over the small cafe. The two men had never met before they got partnered up by their managers at Homeland Security, who thought they might work well together. Pete and I had a great first couple of interactions. We didn't have a desk for him when he came on, and Pete came with a very good reputation from Secret Service, you know,

really smart guy, you know, dedicated. And so when we met, you know, we obviously started talking about families and his two daughters were just one younger and one older than my kids. And so we had, you know, a lot in common from, you know, a family and a social perspective. For some reason we got onto this guy because he was around that border. It's immediately obvious that they share a close professional bond. I enjoyed learning more about the competitive. computer nerd kind of stuff, and Pete was a genius.

I mean, he's just a really, really bright guy. They have been partners for nine years and had formed something of a double act. Greg was always with Pete. We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't either know about or they know about and have no real need to use or don't care to use it. It's called the dark web. Before long, Greg starts telling me about the case they worked on which opened the door into the world they now occupy, one of their very first cases, before they discovered the dark web.

I had been working for a year or so with a confidential informant, and that informant had been giving us information about, you know, people that were visiting a website that was dedicated to the discovery. of child abuse. And, you know, it was sort of like a veiled, you know, this is about support, you know, not about abuse, but about support. But, you know, that's just how they kind of got away with those conversations back then. It's 2010.

And Greg is just beginning to understand how dark this new world can be. These people would meet on this support site and then they would go off to email or instant messenger and have real conversations about sexual abuse. Greg started his career in the army, but he didn't want to do it forever, so he became a postman. But after seven years, he was done delivering letters. So he applied to join Homeland Security, hoping for a more interesting career. He was instantly assigned to the cyber team, where he was soon partnered with Pete. The internet was still quite new, and for investigators, there was opportunity in the technology of the time.

of the guys that was communicating with our CI had been sending like just stupid pictures of himself. The man had been sending images of himself completely naked. Early day webcams, you know, that would sit on top of the monitor, which again, this was good fortune down the road, but pictures of like a background of an office. And in the communication, he had sent a picture. picture of a little baby boy, and again, not being like as technically savvy as Pete, but having been on the job then for three years, I had seen a fair amount of pictures.

It's not just what's in the picture that attracts Greg and Pete's attention. This picture that came through was really high quality. You could tell it was a good, clear photo, which to us as investigators, you know, sort of pops out as something that might be new, that might be unseen by anyone else. Pete had had some experience prior to working with us with Secret Service, working crimes against children, and obviously had more technical background. And we both kind of agreed, hey, this looks new to me. Like it looks like a new image of abuse.

Greg and Pete suspect their confidential informant is in touch, not with someone dealing in images, but perhaps someone themselves. committing abuse. Usually as these images and files find their way through the network of abusers and everybody involved, the file size is reduced so the resolution gets lower and so when you see something that's so high-res, it stands out. It was this one image, you know, it had a lot of detail in it. The picture that Greg's confidential informant has been sent is of a very young boy in an

orange jumper. Less than three years old. But it's only one image. They need more evidence. They have to get a warrant to search the property of the man who had sent the image to the informant. One team searches the man's house, while Greg and his colleague John goes to the man's office, a bank in downtown Boston. Maybe five minutes into the interview. We just straight up to ask him. Is this your screen name? You know, like, are you this person that's been sending pictures to this other guy he thinks is a bad guy? And he said, yeah, to top that off, what he did was reach into his desk drawer and pull out a blue SD card and basically held it up in his two fingertips saying, this is what you're looking for. I was a little stunned still that he was providing this, not just this confession, but this.

SD card with what he called, you know, had the evidence in. It turns out the man they question isn't making the images himself. They're being shared with him. With the young boy still in danger, Greg and Pete need to establish where the boy is. Fast. Thank goodness for Pete because somebody walked it outside. Pete was there with all his forensic equipment and he took possession of the SD card and started ripping through it.

Long story short, what he discovered was even more images of this boy and this orange jumper. That orange jumper makes all of the difference. That and a small toy. The little boy was actually also holding a little white bunny that ended up being Miffy. That's like a old cartoon character in Europe and I guess very popular in Holland as well. So the fact that this child was likely Dutch, you know, was just... exponentially growing. With the boy likely to be in Europe, Greg and Pete need to ask for help.

So unlike here in the US, the Dutch police have the right to have a little blurb during TV shows, during a news program over there. So maybe December 6th, maybe December 7th, they aired an edited photo of this little boy on the news in Holland. The Dutch police really took a risk and decided that they needed to go public. The years of investigation that we've done that we've considered this technique is really tough because you're basically putting an image out there that is a child victim that you're asking the public to be able to help in some sort of way identify. this child that's having the worst moment of their life.

It's a gamble, but it pays off. I was driving on post road in Northampton when my phone rang. I, of course, had no idea what this would evolve into. But what she was telling me that night was when they aired the image of the little boy, the little boy's grandfather was watching the news program. And he called the little boy's mom and says, hey, why is he on the news? The mother had not been watching it. She was, you know, busy taking care of the kids.

And she quickly turned it on, called Amsterdam police because that's a city she's living in. And she was the first one to say, you know, our son, he's always with us. However, he did have a babysitter one night. And that babysitter was Robert Mickelson's. 27-year-old Robert Mickelsons wasn't just the boy's babysitter. He also worked at his daycare. That's how he gained the parents' trust, which allowed him to enter their home. And it soon becomes clear that it wasn't just this little boy.

The phone lines at Amsterdam PD just exploded, basically. And it went from, we're going to have a news conference, you know, at the police department to, holy shit, the news conference has to be at a hotel. Because they fielded, I think, 75 calls the first day of parents who had let Mickelson's babysit their children. So not only was he working in this daycare during the day, he was offering and taking advantage of, babysitting these children in the nighttime and over weekends. And this had gone on for years. When Mickelson's house is searched, police find more than 46,000 child sexual abuse images on his computer.

Mickelson's will be sentenced to 18 years in prison. The material on his computer will lead to 43 suspected paedophiles being arrested worldwide. The scale of the case shocks the Dutch public and lead to a re-evaluation of men working in preschool child care settings. For Pete and Greg, seeing the outcome firsthand motivates them to repeat the operation's success. They don't know it, but their involvement in this case

has set them on a course which will alter their lives. It's like this hit of adrenaline, like, that you had some sort of. small part in this like identification of this ultimate mystery like the fact that there's this child out there a person whatever somewhere in the world and that you're able to take that one image and then narrow it down to be able to find one person in the entire world it's like uh it's quite the rush to be able to make an identification uh somebody who's going for this this horrific time and get them out of that situation is a great feeling. I don't say that in an arrogant way, like some sort of like, you know,

oh, like, savior of children everywhere. It's just, it's more of a, like, challenge on steroids that you'd be able to solve. Like, it's just, like, it's a great feeling. Greg and Pete want to know how Mickelson's was able to abuse these children for so long. So they book a flight from Boston to Amsterdam to go and interview Mickleson's. They want to get inside the mind of a monster. If there was a big rent button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead.

From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing, to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people, using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. What else did he know? Who else did he share these images with? Who else was there,

raping children, who might have possession of his whole collection? US Homeland Security Special Agents Pete and Greg are flying to Amsterdam. To meet a paedophile arrested after uploading photos and videos of his abuse, to the dark web. And, you know, these were our very first utterances of tour as well. That was our first eye-opener in 2010 that this tour network even existed. When Pete and Greg touched down,

they've got a vague idea of what tour is, but it's sketchy at best. When most of us use the internet, we open our regular browser window and then get chased around by companies who track where we're going and what we're looking at. And our browsing history is easy to find, and while it's tiresome to continually click, yes, I will accept cookies, you're probably fairly relaxed about this.

But many of the people who use the Tor browser are not relaxed about this at all. There are no trackers, no browsing history, and because Torr makes all users look the same, it's extremely difficult for users to be identified based on their browser or device. misinformation. To all intents and purposes, you're invisible. Which is great if you live in a country with an extremely restrictive political regime, which limits access to save the news, but also very convenient for people trying to access illegal content. If you're wondering, why can't the authorities just take these websites down? Well, it's not that easy. The sites are hosted on tour-specific servers, where most of the time the person running the server doesn't even know

the website is there. The creator of the website just rents a space on the server and then creates a website so heavily encrypted that it's almost impossible to access. Even if the police are able to access it and even shut it down, it mostly just pops up again the next day. Because just like your iPhone backs itself up, so do the individuals who run these websites. The people running these sites aren't just dangerous paedophiles. They've mastered this technology. Many of them, like Robert Mickelson's, virtually live online.

And that is why Greg and Pete are so keen to speak with him. He's a psychopath. You know, and extremely smart. I think he spoke seven languages at the end of the day. Very, very tech savvy, very manipulative, very charismatic. And on appearance, quite disarming. Kind of a slight kind of guy. Very harmless looking.

And I think people trusted him. As they enter the interview room, Mickelson's is very relaxed. He's sending out a clear message that he's in charge. He felt like he was in absolute control of the whole situation. It was as if he didn't have a care on the world. He had his tea, he had an orange or something. So he was seated when we came in.

And so we had been observing him just over the key. camera and he was having himself, it was some kind of undertone where this was going to be a cordial interview in that, you know, Mickelsons was doing us a favor by allowing us to interview him. And, you know, obviously he didn't have to be up for this. I guess he could have said, no, I don't want to talk to anybody. But his ego would never allow that. You know when you put them on a shelf and you think, what hell we have enough? Cold kiss? No, no, they're so old, but they are not adding it to the charge list.

Oh, okay. Why aren't they, what, there's 20 that are out? It's even now, actually. We wanted to sit down with him and go through all these usernames that we had of people he was in contact with. I don't know what I expected out of him. We weren't, obviously, as being U.S. law enforcement, We weren't in a position to offer him any kind of deal, and we wouldn't have anyway. So he didn't have really much to gain off of us.

So normally, if I would have played with 15 kids, they would have made case one, case two, case three, case four, five maybe, and the rest. They decided my case was so big and so... Excuse me. Pleasure. So big and so ordinary and exceptional that they were not making those choices. So they just put charge me with everything. Much as it pains them, if they want to enter his world, then they have to play his games.

He liked having U.S. law enforcement come over to interview him. In his mind, it made him like the star of the movie, maybe even the hero in his unique group of the worst people in the world, you know, that he was able to gather that much attention that people would fly thousands of miles to talk to him was just that really made him excited. So we tried to build on that. We also tried to build off of...

He's a very smart individual, technologically, socially. Like, it would be hard to build a better... Criminals not enough. It would be hard to build a better villain than Nicholson's just because of the combination of intelligence, social skills and sheer drive.

He probably spent the first two hours. I'd like to say quizzing us, but he was quizzing Pete. He needed, seemed like he needed to know we were smart enough to interview him. And he went round and round and round about computer forensics. about system setup, about all this stuff that was just sailing over my head.

And Pete, thank God, was on the same level as this guy. Like, they were able to kind of like create some rapport over the fact that, you know, Mickelson's was accepting him as an equal, which was nauseating to listen to. I had seen this guy rape so many kids. I couldn't like standing there, staring across the table at him and watching him be so relaxed and sipping tea and asking for more snacks and being treated quite well, I thought,

was burning a hole in my soul at the time. But as the hours pass, Mikkelsen begins to give things away, drip-feeding information that he just can't resist sharing, like what he and his husband had been making. What we learned from him was that his husband, Von Alphen, was very computer savvy,

like Mickelson's was, but even more so. And what the two of them had decided was they wanted to figure out a way to get Mickleson's, and I'll put air quotes up, artwork out to the world. So they wanted to figure out a safe way to share this art with all the other pedophiles in the world that would be able to enjoy it and revere Mickelsons for the god that he thought he was. So Van Alphen being very savvy had been the one to suggest that they create their own tour site and allow for users slash members to access the site and to, you know, regale Mickelson's as, again, a god amongst pedophiles.

Armed with this new knowledge, Greg and Pete know what they need to do next. Geat, obviously, having been, you know, computer science major, had heard of Tor. For me, it was a brand new word. But it was a real eye-opener that we sort of were looking at each other going, we're going to have to look into that when we get back to the U.S. It's when they get back, they get a call from their colleague in Denmark, telling them about a child they believe is in America.

And it's the 12-year-old girl we heard about earlier, who appears to have been sexually abused from the age of six. Half a lifetime of abuse available on the dark web. And her images were found on Mickelson's hard drive. Greg and Pete give her the name Lucy and set to work. This girl in very normal environments surrounded by the things that she would have in everyday life, her favorite clothes, her bed, her bed spread, the house, the wall coverings and the windows, and all these things that you normally see in just everybody's house

was now like captured in these, you know, these terrible moments that were surrounded by normal things. All they have to go on are the pictures, showing Lucy being abused and the room where it is happening. Pete begins combing through the images. Ten different videos to look at. For me to review, answer whatever, five or six test questions. Examining their metadata, information included in the image file that might give clues about what model of camera was used or even where it was taken. He begins trying to match this up with other clues from the images themselves, like the direction of light which might reveal the time of day it was taken.

He's looking for anything which might help narrow down the search. But the abuser is careful, taking care to cover his tracks and not giving too much away. There's little to go on. But then they have a brainwave. Facebook. If the special agents could give Facebook an image of this girl, then surely they could scan through all the images on their servers, all the photos people have uploaded.

She must be there. Somewhere. That's next time on World of Secrets. If there was a big rent button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is the interface. that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.

It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.