Introducing: Into the Dirt
The Walkers: The real Salt Path | Tortoise Investigates
The Observer
4.6 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2023
⏱️ 3 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over three years in the making, Tortoise introduces Into The Dirt – investigating the extraordinary story of private spy, Rob Moore and the shadowy world of corporate intelligence. Rob was tasked with working undercover to extract information from an environmental campaign group but he ended up turning on his employers and supporting the group he was meant to be infiltrating. Only it wasn’t that straightforward. Neither side knew the whole truth.
Was Rob a misunderstood whistleblower or a traitor to a cause?
Into the Dirt is a wild story about truth, spies and the stories we tell ourselves.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Three years ago, a man called Rob Moore walked into our newsroom. |
| 0:08.1 | I am in desperate need of being able to tell my story, which I haven't been able to tell yet. |
| 0:12.8 | He wanted to set the record straight on a story that's ruined him. |
| 0:16.3 | And had I been able to tell my story, people might have understood. |
| 0:20.4 | In the year since we first met, Rob has described himself as many things to me. |
| 0:25.5 | A whistleblower. |
| 0:26.2 | Destroy this person who clearly has come to them as a whistleblower. |
| 0:29.6 | A journalist. |
| 0:30.3 | He gave me because I said I was a journalist and he said, well, have this. |
| 0:32.5 | But over a decade ago when all of this started, he was a spy. |
| 0:36.3 | A corporate spy. |
| 0:39.9 | He worked for a corporate intelligence agency, and in 2012, he took on the case that would define the next decade of his life. He went undercover |
| 0:47.2 | posing as a filmmaker to extract information from an environmental group. I was kind of practiced |
| 0:52.6 | in the art of deception. |
| 0:54.9 | But his story goes, he soon figured out he was working for the wrong side. |
| 0:59.2 | So he decided to become a double agent. |
| 1:01.6 | He'd keep working for the intelligence agency, |
| 1:03.7 | but actually be supporting the campaigners. |
| 1:06.6 | Only he never told them. |
| 1:09.6 | The whole truth. |
| 1:11.8 | You know, he just said, |
| 1:13.0 | Hamida, how do you know Rob Moore? |
... |
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