An unlikely duo chases down the origins of a mysterious letter that caused a national scandal.

The Trojan
Horse Affair

A strange letter appears on a city councilor’s desk in Birmingham, England, laying out an elaborate plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate the city’s schools. The plot has a code name: Operation Trojan Horse. The story soon explodes in the news and kicks off a national panic. By the time it all dies down, the government has launched multiple investigations, beefed up the country’s counterterrorism policy, revamped schools and banned people from education for the rest of their lives.

To Hamza Syed, who is watching the scandal unfold in his city, the whole thing seemed … off. Because through all the official inquiries and heated speeches in Parliament, no one has ever bothered to answer a basic question: Who wrote the letter? And why? The night before Hamza is to start journalism school, he has a chance meeting in Birmingham with the reporter Brian Reed, the host of the hit podcast S-Town. Together they team up to investigate: Who wrote the Trojan Horse letter? They quickly discover that it’s a question people in power do not want them asking.

From Serial Productions and The New York Times comes The Trojan Horse Affair: a mystery in eight parts.

Published Feb. 3, 2022
Brian Reed is the host and co-creator of the podcast S-Town, a production of Serial and This American Life, which won a Peabody Award for being “a pioneering classic of the form.”
Hamza Syed, a doctor turned reporter, joined Serial Productions in 2018 to report The Trojan Horse Affair.
Serial Productions are the makers of the hit podcasts Serial, S-Town, Nice White Parents and The Improvement Association. Serial Productions joined The Times in 2020 to make more groundbreaking longform podcasts.
Tune in, and tell us what you think at trojanhorse@nytimes.com.

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A mysterious letter shocked Britain in 2014, alleging an Islamist plot to take over one city’s general schools. But who wrote it? From Serial Productions and The New York Times, “The Trojan Horse Affair,” an investigation that became bigger than we ever imagined. All eight parts are coming next Thursday.
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00:00 / 03:07
Part 1

The Letter in the Brown Paper Envelope

A strange letter appears outlining a plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate Birmingham schools. Hamza and Brian visit the supposed mastermind of the plot, and he tells them he did take over a bunch of schools — just not for the reasons in the letter.
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00:00 / 59:15

The Trojan Horse Affair

Part 1

Transcript

[March 3, 2022: This episode has been updated to include a response from Nick Timothy.]

HAMZA SYED

This my first story as a journalist.

I hadn't planned for it to be my last story, but it probably will be given what's happened in the years I've been working on this.

It's about a letter that surfaced in my city and had huge consequences for Britain.

This letter launched four government investigations, changed our national policy, and ended careers.

It's hurt some of the country's most vulnerable children, a letter that many people who've seen it agree is ridiculous.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

It's unsigned, undated.

It didn't look like a serious document.

It just seemed comical.

What the hell is this?

I remember looking at it for some time and thinking, what on Earth is this?

The infamous letter -- was it written on parchment, in blood?

So you're presenting me with a document that turned our lives upside down.

HAMZA SYED

I first learned of the letter in 2014.

I wasn't a journalist then.

I was a doctor.

I quit medicine, living in Birmingham, England, making my breakfast at 1:00 PM, listening to the news, when I heard about the discovery of a secret communiqué between Muslim extremists.

They were discussing a plot to infiltrate our city schools and run them on strict Islamic principles, potentially with the aim of radicalizing students.

Someone had forwarded the letter anonymously to the local government, the Birmingham City Council.

But it was missing the first and last page.

So it's unknown exactly who wrote it or who they were sending it to.

According to the intercepted pages, the plot had a code name --

Operation Trojan Horse.

I have to admit, when this story about Muslims in Birmingham first broke, as a Muslim in Birmingham, I was alarmed.

It sounded possible.

Kids across Britain, across Europe, were flying off to Syria to join this group called ISIS.

And Birmingham has been home to quite a few terrorists.

My neighbor was a terrorist.

The guy who killed five people and then tried to run into parliament with a knife, he did his planning in a flat above the Persian restaurant across the street from me.

So I wasn't surprised watching, as over the next several months, Operation Trojan Horse snowballed into a huge national story --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

A number of schools in Birmingham have been infiltrated by hardline Muslims.

HAMZA SYED

-- headlines like Islamist plot, jihadist plot.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Alleging a conspiracy by --

HAMZA SYED

And the government responded with full force.

The prime minister got involved, convening his cabinet to discuss the threat.

The national government sent in a bunch of investigators, including Scotland Yard's former head of counter-terrorism, to look into two dozen schools in majority Muslim areas of Birmingham.

Like I say, this was all very frightening until a few months later, when the various investigators finally start reporting their findings.

They had found no plot called Operation Trojan Horse.

They had seen no signs that anyone had been radicalized, no evidence of violence or planned violence.

They didn't bring any terror charges against anyone working at the schools they'd looked into.

But despite all of that, despite finding no plot, investigators still concluded that something terrible was happening in Birmingham schools.

The letter helped them uncover that Muslims had influenced the schools in a dangerous way.

Government officials snapped into action.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Things that should not have happened in our schools were allowed to happen.

Our children were exposed to things they should not have been exposed to.

The fallout has been huge.

Prime Minister David Cameron, as we said, is calling a special meeting of the government's extremism taskforce.

HAMZA SYED

Officials removed educators, revamped schools and renamed them.

They mandated all schools in the country start teaching what they termed "British values" to make kids less susceptible to extremist ideas.

They beefed up Britain's counter extremism laws by making public sector workers like teachers and doctors part of the state surveillance apparatus to now inform on their co-workers and students and patients.

Today, if you stop someone on the streets of Britain and ask them what happened in Birmingham schools in 2014, if they follow the news, they'll likely tell you that a bunch of Muslims were up to no good.

There is another version of the story, though.

It's one less told and far less popular.

That version of the Trojan Horse affair is that nothing happened, that these bearded brown educators were set up, and the nation fell for it.

But it's always seemed to me that there's a simple way to figure out what really happened here --

the letter.

Even with all the government inquiries, no authority, none of the investigators ever figured out who wrote it.

Remarkably, none of them even tried.

And that, to me, seemed like a pretty glaring oversight.

The reason the country was looking at these schools with suspicion, the reason they were investigating them at all, was because this dodgy letter showed up portraying the people who worked there as nefarious plotters, claiming they were sneaking Islam into schools like a Trojan horse.

The letter is what put the idea in authorities' heads.

So I didn't see how you could know what Operation Trojan Horse was or wasn't, unless you got to the bottom of the Trojan Horse letter.

Who wrote it, and why?

A few years later, I decided to go to school for investigative journalism.

But my professor wasn't completely sold on the story I wanted to report for my student project, Operation Trojan Horse.

This was investigative journalism.

He wanted me to unearth something new, not recover some years old story.

As a doctor, though, I'm familiar with the concept of a second opinion.

So the night before my masters was set to start, I went looking for one.

BRIAN REED

A doctor came to see me for a second opinion.

One night, in fall of 2017, I'm in a theater in Birmingham.

After my podcast, S-Town, came out, I went around doing some Q&As.

Afterwards, people would sometimes come backstage to chat.

And so this guy comes in, introduces himself as Hamza Syed.

He said he was changing careers to become a reporter.

He was beginning a masters program in investigative journalism the next day, actually.

And he wanted some advice.

He was speaking fast, like I might walk away at any moment.

HAMZA SYED

To be fair I was told that I had five minutes with Brian Reed, after which I'd be escorted out of the building.

BRIAN REED

I did not know that.

Anyway, Hamza ran through the Trojan Horse story for me, elevator pitch style.

I've never heard of it, but a guy I was with backstage, a producer I know from the BBC, he had.

And he jumped in as Hamza was talking.

Yeah, yeah, Trojan Horse, he said.

That was a big thing a while ago.

Some bad stuff went down.

Muslim educators have been up to no good.

But it was cleared up -- old story.

There was something Hamza said, though, which afterwards, I couldn't get out of my head.

He kept talking about a letter which had set off this whole cascade of consequences, whose origins were still a mystery.

So when I got home to New York, I read the letter.

It looked like a caricature of a missive between two terrorists, filled with Islamophobic tropes about conniving and scheming Muslims.

It's missing pages.

Parts of it are too dark to read, like it got jammed in the Xerox machine.

It instructs the recipient to destroy it after reading.

It struck me as a funky document for a government to take seriously, especially because from what I read, the government hadn't even looked into who wrote the letter or why.

There was a strange lack of curiosity about this instigating document.

I thought to myself, it seems like somebody should try to figure out who wrote that thing.

And then I thought, well, wait, this journalism student's doing that.

Maybe I had to give him a hand.

And here we are, years later, at the end of a dizzying fascicle and enraging investigation, in which one mystery led to another, led to another, tracing this letter's path of destruction across multiple continents.

HAMZA SYED

In defiance of many unhappy officials and some aggressive attempts to shut our reporting down,

BRIAN REED

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Brian Reed.

HAMZA SYED

I'm Hamza Syed.

BRIAN REED

Presenting to you the most elaborate student project ever.

This is The Trojan Horse Affair.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

I got the call from Brian when I was in class.

My phone started ringing from a New York number.

I asked my professor if I could take it.

He said no.

I asked if I could go use the toilet.

He said yes.

I answered, and Brian told me he wanted in on my investigation, but that I would need a producer.

I said, yeah, sure, all casual.

I had no idea what a producer did.

Soon, he started getting in touch with missions for me to complete.

First one, he'd secured a recorder for me in Birmingham and said there's something I had to do.

BRIAN REED

It was supposed to be a basic bread and butter assignment -- go record a meeting.

Hamza had seen an event advertised called Trojan Horse, The Facts, where some of the educators who've been accused of carrying out the plot would be speaking publicly.

They insisted the Trojan Horse affair was just an Islamophobic stitch-up.

The event hashtag was #TrojanHoax, and they were trying to clear their names.

They'd never gotten their lives back on track after the story died down.

They'd lost their jobs and had been made into pariahs by the national media.

But afterwards, Hamza calls me and says when he showed up at the spot, the community center, at 5:00 PM, the receptionist told him --

HAMZA SYED

It's been canceled.

The event's been canceled.

BRIAN REED

Did they give you any -- but wait, did they give you any other information, like --

HAMZA SYED

No, they said it's been canceled, and that was it.

I said, no, this is --

I spoke to the event organizer a few days ago.

They said, yeah, it got canceled today.

So I felt like an idiot, to be honest, because I was standing there with this big mic stand that looks like a fishing rod.

I got my box of equipment.

HAMZA SYED

This can't be a good omen, I thought, to mess up your first journalism assignment.

But then more people started showing up, confused like me, until a man in one of those safety vests swings around the corner, tells us to follow him and takes us up the street to a wedding hall, where everyone was gathering instead.

It's a lot of people, maybe over 100.

And as I explained to Brian, while I'm setting up the microphone --

HAMZA SYED

I start catching all the whispers in terms of what happened.

And it turned out that the original venue had received phone calls from the national newspaper, specifically this guy, Nick Timothy.

BRIAN REED

He's like a reporter or a publisher?

Or what is he?

HAMZA SYED

He's a columnist, I think, for The Telegraph.

HAMZA SYED

And not just any old columnist.

Nick Timothy used to be the chief of staff to the prime minister.

He was essentially Theresa May's right-hand man.

I spoke to the guy who ran the community center, who told me Nick Timothy had actually emailed, not called.

He wouldn't let me see the email, but according to others at the meeting, the implication was: If you hold this event, I will associate you with extremists in the newspaper. And the community center pulled the plug.

Nick Timothy denies contacting the community center, and says he doesn't know who did or what they said. But he wrote a triumphant column about the planned meeting -- which I'd missed, because I was on YouTube all day watching instructional videos on how to use my recorder -- in which he noted, quote: "When the Daily Telegraph discovered this, and contacted the owners of the venue, they rightly cancelled it." He went on to suggest the event organizers .. were extremists.. and described the proposed meeting as, quote: “a shocking attempt to deny the Trojan Horse scandal.” And, quote: “The people behind Trojan Horse are trying to do it all over again, and right under our noses.”

[APPLAUSE]

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

And welcome to Trojan Horse or Hoax, the discussion and debate.

HAMZA SYED

So here they were, the teachers and school volunteers allegedly behind Operation Trojan Horse, along with their defenders, academics and activists and an educational barrister and a union leader packed in this wedding hall instead.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

I am really, really concerned that simply holding a public, open meeting like this becomes controversial.

Just the fact we are holding this meeting seems to be an act of resistance right now.

HAMZA SYED

The people at this meeting called for an inquiry to correct the record on the Trojan Horse affair.

They believe the government had set them up, to the fact that a former chief of staff to the prime minister, Nick Timothy, went out of his way to attack a grassroots event at a community center, years after the Trojan horse affair.

It just reinforced their suspicion, and mine, quite honestly, that there was something dodgy the authorities were still keen to hide.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

And then it was like a witch hunt.

Heads were rolling this way and that way.

BRIAN REED

Hamza sent me the recording of the meeting.

I listened to it, and I was interested to hear that one of the people who got on stage and spoke was the man named repeatedly in the Trojan Horse letter as the mastermind of Operation Trojan Horse, the plot's alleged ringleader, a longtime school volunteer named Tahir Alam.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (TAHIR ALAM)

I've never been a danger to anyone.

I've never hurt anyone.

I've never had any police case against me or anything of the kind.

I wasn't running a plot.

We are very proud of what we did --

I do not regret nor apologize for anything that I've done.

There was nothing clandestine, hidden, or sinister about what we were doing.

We're very open and very transparent.

BRIAN REED

So when I landed in Birmingham to begin reporting, that's who we decided to go to first, to hear Alam.

We figured, we're looking to find the source of this mysterious letter.

Might as well start with the guy it outed as an extremist plotter.

BRIAN REED

Is this about to be the first radio interview you've ever done?

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

I need to be schooled beforehand, mate.

BRIAN REED

What do you mean?

Like, how so?

HAMZA SYED

Well, I mean, if this is me flying solo, I'd be like, well, whatever.

I'll just do it my style, you know?

But this is -- you know.

BRIAN REED

And what is your style?

Do you have a style?

HAMZA SYED

I don't know.

I feel like I'm a lot --

BRIAN REED

How many of these have you done?

HAMZA SYED

None.

But I have an idea in my head of what my style could be.

I think you're a lot more sensitive than I am, put it that way.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, you're --

BRIAN REED

I'm the more sensitive one?

HAMZA SYED

I think so.

Don't you think so?

BRIAN REED

I don't know.

I don't know you that well.

HAMZA SYED

I wonder what he will be wearing.

Salaam, Tahir.

TAHIR ALAM

Salaam.

HAMZA SYED

Salaam.

TAHIR ALAM

Hello.

BRIAN REED

Hello.

BRIAN REED

Ill-fitting button-down shirt, khakis.

TAHIR ALAM

Welcome.

BRIAN REED

Thank you.

TAHIR ALAM

We're going to be in that room there.

BRIAN REED

This room?

TAHIR ALAM

So.

BRIAN REED

We kick off our shoes.

He shows us to a room at the front of his place.

TAHIR ALAM

Sorry you have to sit on slightly uncomfortable chairs there.

BRIAN REED

Hamza and I squeeze behind two school desks meant for children.

There are protractors lying around, a whiteboard with sketches of geometric shapes, a creative writing workbook titled, Descriptosaurus.

Tahir's converted this room from his garage into a tiny makeshift classroom, where it appears he tutored students quietly, because one result of the Trojan Horse letter is that the government has banned him from ever volunteering or working officially in schools again.

Tahir's in front of us in his office chair, confident, erudite, framed by his bookshelf filled with texts about Islam and British history.

I pull a copy of the letter out of my backpack.

TAHIR ALAM

It's a completely anonymous letter, undated, claiming that there is a plot to take over and Islamize the schools in Birmingham led by Tahir Alam, which is myself.

But I speak from a vantage point where I actually know the truth.

I know the reality.

BRIAN REED

Tahir denies being an extremist.

He denies engineering a plot.

He says the reality is that rather than corrupting schools as a radical conspirator, he, a first generation immigrant from a poor Pakistani family, was responsible for one of the most miraculous school turnarounds in British education, until, he says, the letter arrived and destroyed him.

HAMZA SYED

The story of this turnaround, it's not a secret.

It's one Tahir has shared with journalists before, not that it's done him much good in terms of clearing his name.

But this backstory does explain why the Trojan Horse letter was so persuasive because, Tahir told us, some of what was in that letter was true.

Tahir begins the story one night in 1993, when he's watching TV, and a show caught his attention.

TAHIR ALAM

I just happened to be just lying on the sofa, really, and the program came on.

HAMZA SYED

It was a documentary, part of the BBC series, Panorama.

TAHIR ALAM

Nine times out of 10, I would switch to something else.

But I was just sitting there, and I started watching.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Britain's new underclass is Asian and it's Muslim.

A once tightly knit community is now in crisis with drug abuse, crime, and family breakdown on the increase.

TAHIR ALAM

And the title of this documentary was Underclass in Purdah.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

In tonight's Panorama, we investigate an underclass in purdah.

TAHIR ALAM

Purdah meaning cover, meaning a veil, if you like.

Underclass in the veil, you know?

ARCHIVED RECORDING

In tonight's program, we lift the veil on this new underclass.

A report from --

HAMZA SYED

The documentary opens with shots of brown men skulking around dark, cobblestone streets in a Muslim neighborhood, in what the correspondent calls the "Muslim ghetto."

ARCHIVED RECORDING

At night, it doubles as the local red light district.

It's a seedy world of vice and illicit drug dealing.

Lurking in the shadows is a new Manningham phenomenon --

the Pakistani pimp.

HAMZA SYED

He's like a regular pimp, but in a kurta.

Part of the documentary takes place in Tahir's neighborhood in Birmingham called Alum Rock, on the east side of the city.

It's one of the poorest areas in England and is majority Pakistani and Muslim.

If you're not from Birmingham and you're not brown, you may have heard that Alum Rock is a great place to find a terrorist.

If you're not from Birmingham and you are brown, you'll have heard Alum Rock is a great place to find a wedding dress.

Admittedly, this BBC documentary is racist in a '90s TV kind of way, but it had a big impact on Tahir because amidst the awkward brown-gazing, some truly sobering facts emerged.

The presenter reports that Pakistani Muslims are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates.

She says they have some of the highest rates of joblessness.

They're suffering from devastating health issues, terrible housing, domestic violence, with one underlying cause of it all --

a lack of education.

This is the number I found most shocking --

about 20% of white students were leaving school without any qualifications, meaning they failed to pass exams that would essentially be the equivalent of a high school diploma in the US.

And that rate, 20%, was roughly the same for most people of color as well.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

But for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, an astonishing 50% hold no qualifications whatsoever.

HAMZA SYED

50%, half of us, were basically failing school.

That hit Tahir hard.

TAHIR ALAM

That the extent of education failure was so bad that we were at risk of creating an underclass of Muslims, who were, basically, uneducated, prone to crime and unemployment.

So I kind of sat there, and it made me feel guilty, actually, guilt because I was one of the few people who made it from my family, one of the first ones to make it to university and to have a good job and so on.

But there was also a sense of humiliation, really, because I was from this community.

HAMZA SYED

Tahir's family brought him to England in the '70s, when lots of people from Kashmir were moving here, largely because the British designed this huge dam that flooded swaths of land and displaced tens of thousands of people.

And one solution the Brits got behind was to invite displaced Pakistanis over to England so they could improve the British economy by working in British factories and mills, which is what Tahir's dad did.

Tahir arrived in England as a nine-year-old who didn't speak any English and wouldn't become fluent for several years.

TAHIR ALAM

I knew one word of English only, which was F-O-R-D. I mean, I don't know X, Y, Z, but I know F-O-R-D. That's it.

HAMZA SYED

I can relate.

I couldn't speak any English when I first came here.

TAHIR ALAM

All right.

HAMZA SYED

I couldn't even speak Ford.

I was just like, mute.

Football -- that's what I knew -- football.

TAHIR ALAM

That's right.

So that's how we arrived here.

And the first school, when I came here, we arrived --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

-- country is growing up angry and alienated from white society.

HAMZA SYED

Now Tahir watched as the documentary captured the next generation --

Pakistani kids who were born in Britain, being educated in state schools, still struggling to read, not able to recall basic English words.

The camera cuts to a park in Birmingham.

It looked to Tahir like Ward End Park, which is right across from where he went to school in Alum Rock.

TAHIR ALAM

I recognized the park.

We used to go and play there.

And then I saw some children, and I said, oh, that's our neighbor's children.

I recognized the kids there, even though it was from a distance.

But I recognized who the kids are.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

We filmed an encounter with two Asian lads in a park in a Muslim quarter of Birmingham.

HAMZA SYED

These Asian lads --

we use Asian to mean South Asian, by the way --

they're skipping school.

And Tahir knew which school they were skipping.

It's the one he'd gone to as a kid, right next to that park --

Park View School, another majority Muslim school with miserable academic results.

It's a secondary school, ages 11 to 16.

It was a school where Tahir had done well enough to make it to college and then university before getting a good job in telecommunications.

The documentary made him realize how rare his success was and how little he'd done with it.

BRIAN REED

So Tahir decided to do something.

He started a tutoring program for kids in the neighborhood, but what he was really interested in was volunteering at his old school, Park View, on what's known as their governing body.

In England, a governing body oversees how a school is run, like a corporate board does a company.

It's sort of like a school board in the US, except it's specific to one school.

They can have a lot of influence.

So anyway, Tahir says one afternoon, a couple of Park View parents he didn't know knocked on his door.

We hear you're interested in becoming a governor, they said.

It was like they'd read his mind, though, actually, Tahir had been talking about wanting to be a governor at a recent wedding, and these parents got wind of it.

Resentment and frustration had been festering for years among parents in Alum Rock, who'd been trying and trying to get the authorities to do something about the dismal schools.

These parents at Tahir's door had joined the Park View governing body in an attempt to make a change, but they didn't speak fluent English and hadn't gone to university.

Tahir was a professional with a degree who still lived in the neighborhood.

We'd love to propose you, they told him.

And with that, Tahir found himself at the next governing body meeting of Park View School, being voted in not only as a member, but as the chair.

TAHIR ALAM

So that's when I became a governor on the 7th of January, 1997.

BRIAN REED

You remember the date?

TAHIR ALAM

Yeah, well, I was to remain there for 18 years.

BRIAN REED

When Tahir started, Park View was one of the worst secondary schools in the country.

Only 4% of students were passing --

4%.

The National School Inspection Agency had recently placed the school into special measures, the lowest possible ranking, an emergency status, basically, meaning Park View was in danger of being shut down.

There were brawls breaking out in the schoolyard.

On a tour of the building, Tahir saw vandalized bathrooms, with stalls missing locks and toilets missing seats.

But where Tahir really trained his focus was on the complacent teachers and administrators.

TAHIR ALAM

We initially just started by saying that, obviously, children should be achieving higher, that the achievement was not acceptable, and the fact that the school was to blame for the failure.

BRIAN REED

This statement, so obvious to Tahir, that the kids in Alum Rock were as capable as kids anywhere was met with massive resistance.

TAHIR ALAM

It was very difficult getting the school to accept that they were the problem.

People didn't want to accept that because they had been blaming the community for maybe two decades.

They had such a low expectation of children.

BRIAN REED

One thing Tahir noticed early on was that the staff of this school with nearly 90% Pakistani students had only one full-time Pakistani Muslim teacher.

So Tahir began searching for more Muslim staff and governors.

He gave presentations, held workshops.

He became a fixture at events around East Birmingham, standing behind his little table or booth, evangelizing for people to get involved in their local schools.

MOZ HUSSAIN

I loved it.

I loved it with the children because I felt as though I could make a difference.

BRIAN REED

This is Moz Hussain, the first Muslim teacher Tahir hired.

He taught math.

MOZ HUSSAIN

I could use my language, my background, my understanding of where they come from, to make a difference.

I knew their families.

BRIAN REED

Moz can point to a specific moment, by the way, when he decided to go into teaching.

MOZ HUSSAIN

There's a Panorama program.

It's called an Underclass in Purdah.

BRIAN REED

Powerful segment.

HAMZA SYED

Moz Hussain says from the very beginning, he encountered serious prejudices among the mostly white staff.

MOZ HUSSAIN

I had a group of children come to me, and they said, look, there's this one teacher in school.

He always calls us Pakis.

He's calling us Pakis.

He's doing it in a jokey way, but we find it offensive.

They're not able to tell anyone else, but they're telling me that, look, he's swearing at us.

HAMZA SYED

That's a slur in any context, but especially shocking for a teacher to say to Pakistani students.

Moz told them, I think the best thing to do, have your parents write to the school.

He talked them through the procedure for doing that, in case their parents didn't know.

He says eventually, the school looked into the teacher's behavior.

MOZ HUSSAIN

And while they're investigating, he resigned.

And he gave his final leaving speech in the staff room and goes, it should be our culture dominant in this school, not the kids'.

And he finished off with the words, "The West is the best," and all teachers clapped.

All teachers clapped.

BRIAN REED

The racism was pervasive.

Razwan Faraz, a former governor and math teacher, says at one of his first governing body meetings, he was shown a list of places the students had been given work placements through a program at the school.

And it was all restaurants, supermarkets, clothing stores.

MOZ HUSSAIN

And there was no surgery, doctor surgery, or law firm, or anything like that.

And I said, how is it that --

did the children decide these?

BRIAN REED

And Razwan says the vice chair told him --

MOZ HUSSAIN

Well, their parents want them to go and become doctors and engineers and et cetera.

But the reality is these kids will become taxi drivers, shopkeepers, so we've got to prepare them now.

And for a good while, I was struggling to process what he was saying.

This is me, a brown person, a Muslim, and he's saying to me that they deserve to have these kind of jobs.

BRIAN REED

This is this community's role in society.

MOZ HUSSAIN

That's right.

That's right.

JOHN BROCKLEY

We just failed the kids.

We just failed the kids, and didn't even feel bad about it.

Didn't even -- we didn't!

We didn't even feel guilty!

BRIAN REED

John Brockley was one of the non-Muslim teachers at Park View.

He was a math teacher who'd been there since the '80s.

He was frank with us about the bigotry that he and his colleagues held towards the students and their families.

JOHN BROCKLEY

We thought that we were a superior culture.

And we looked down.

We looked down on these people who didn't know about education.

BRIAN REED

You're talking about yourself here?

JOHN BROCKLEY

I'm talking to you about myself, but I'm also talking about many of the people that I worked with.

BRIAN REED

The teachers attitudes are documented, by the way.

A former head teacher of Park View -- a head teacher is what we Americans call a principal --

did a master's thesis while he was at the school for which he collected opinions from the staff, including from John, as to why Muslim children were drastically underperforming compared to their peers.

In the thesis, teachers say the kids' parents are ignorant, wrongly claim the students don't speak English.

The teachers try for a while, one teacher said, but end up feeling like, "Who gives a damn?"

That's a quote.

It makes John cringe to think back on it.

JOHN BROCKLEY

It's only when you move away from a situation like that, that you can realize how awful it is.

I don't normally think about this sort of thing because it's too embarrassing.

TAHIR ALAM

Once we created the shift in the belief of the teachers, then the job became much easier.

HAMZA SYED

Tahir says by the early 2000s, Park View was changing.

The school began taking basic, but transformative steps, setting individualized achievement targets for each student, to follow them from year to year, and preparing students for qualifying exams, which, amazingly, hadn't happened before.

The school started awarding trophies for good marks, inviting parents to ceremonies when their kids did well.

Tahir and the governors hire a new head teacher, a non-Muslim woman from a girls' school, who embraced Park View's new aspirations.

Test scores started to rise.

Students were heading to college.

Park View's reputation was turning around.

But there were other changes Tahir instituted at Park View, which, later, officials would view as suspect, changes that investigators would point to as the trademarks of Operation Trojan Horse.

That's coming up.

BRIAN REED

You don't get labeled the leader of an extremist conspiracy simply by raising test scores at your neighborhood secondary school.

The main accusation against Tahir Alam, the overarching assertion of the Trojan Horse letter, which the government supported and which has defined Tahir's reputation since then, is that he was "Islamizing" schools.

This is not a word I'm particularly fond of, "Islamize," because Islamize in relation to what?

Some assumed non-Islamic baseline?

Has this story been Islamized by Hamza's involvement?

HAMZA SYED

Yes.

BRIAN REED

It's a word that isn't inherently negative, but gets used that way.

Anyway, that's what the letter said Tahir was doing --

Islamizing schools.

And funnily enough, it's also what Tahir says he was doing.

TAHIR ALAM

We were valuing the cultural and the faith background of the children.

And we were allowing that to be expressed, if you like.

We catered for children so they could perform their daytime prayers if they wanted to.

We made a prayer facility available for them in a room.

BRIAN REED

Religious accommodations like this are legal in British schools, by the way, whether they're explicitly designated as a religious school or not, which Park View wasn't.

It was the equivalent of a regular public school in the US.

TAHIR ALAM

And since 98% of the children happen to be of the Islamic faith background, we obviously are catering for the constituency that the school serves, in line with the regulatory requirements.

BRIAN REED

Tahir ascribed to an educational philosophy that, the way he and other Park View staff talk about it, reminds me of Afrocentric or Black excellent schools in the US, that students will do better academically when their schools incorporate and celebrate who they are.

And there's research that backs this up.

So under Tahir's leadership, Park View allowed students to pray if they wanted.

They installed facilities for wudu, the ablutions you do before prayers.

They celebrated Ramadan and altered the schedule during that month to facilitate fasting.

They served halal food.

TAHIR ALAM

And I felt that this was our school.

I mean, we were proud to say that this is our school.

We wanted our children to say that this was their school and that they were proud of it.

HAMZA SYED

In the wake of the Trojan Horse letter, government officials would declare that the way Tahir and his colleagues were running Park View School had undermined, quote unquote, "British values," that they were limiting the children's ability to thrive in modern Britain,

which is an interesting charge to bring against Tahir because I have to say, I haven't personally met an English Pakistani more confident that he's British than Tahir.

Deciding whether or not to call yourself British is a fraught and personal thing for us.

Speaking for myself, even though I came to England when I was eight and became a British citizen with a British passport, even though I have a British education, went to British University, worked for Britain's National Health Service, I didn't call myself British.

I was never precious about nationality, so I didn't really care what I was called.

But sure, I'd also picked up on the subliminal messaging that in order to be proper British, you had to be white.

Tahir, on the other hand, not only calls himself British, but does so proudly.

I got to talking to Tahir about this one day.

He and Brian and I were getting tea at my favorite chai shop on an Alum Rock road.

TAHIR ALAM

This is the hangout.

HAMZA SYED

And as we sat outside on one of the main thoroughfares of Islamic Britain, around the corner from where Tahir grew up, with double decker buses passing by sweet shops and fabric stores and halal chippies, I told him my reason for why I'd finally, only recently,

started calling myself British.

HAMZA SYED

So for a long time, I never called myself British.

HAMZA SYED

I was about 30.

I'd been reading a book about the British empire.

And I learned how rich India, which, at the time, included Pakistan, was.

According to some economists, before the British took control --

HAMZA SYED

I believe the statistic is, roughly, it controlled about 24% or something like that of the world's economy at the time.

TAHIR ALAM

Yeah, 23% of the world's economy, yeah.

It was the richest nation in the world.

HAMZA SYED

Right.

HAMZA SYED

24% of the world's economy is roughly what the U.S. controls today.

I know this is somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison because the world wasn't organized into a globalized economy back then, but it does show how rich India was in relation to other countries at the time.

When the British left the Indian subcontinent after some 200 years of economic exploitation, India and Pakistan were among the poorest nations in the world.

I didn't learn this stuff in school because Britain's colonization of a quarter of the planet is not a compulsory part of the national curriculum, which is why I only discovered it as an adult, that so much of the wealth I saw in Britain was actually extracted from the place I come from.

HAMZA SYED

And so from that point onwards, I've started calling myself British.

I was just like, well, I'm British.

I own this country.

This is my money with which you have raised everything around me.

TAHIR ALAM

Yeah, so I mean, that's very similar to the position I am arrived at.

HAMZA SYED

Except, for me, proclaiming I'm British is somewhat of a finger in the eye.

For Tahir, it's sincere.

It also came to him later in life.

He says, he was at an event held by a British Muslim organization, and they began saying very clearly, you're never going back to Pakistan.

Your children are never going to move back.

TAHIR ALAM

It's not going to happen.

HAMZA SYED

That's what you had been thinking of to that point.

TAHIR ALAM

Yeah, because our parents spoke like that to us.

Our homes are in Pakistan.

We are Pakistani.

Our parents spoke to us like that.

My father never told me we are British.

Because that's not what he felt. He lived in Pakistan most of his life.

Why would he say that?

So --

HAMZA SYED

The people at this event were saying, you live here now.

TAHIR ALAM

We were part of this country and that it was important, as Muslims, we should benefit to this country.

And so ever since then, I've been kind of dissing the idea that we are other, that we are outsiders, that we don't belong here.

Islam is part of Britain.

It's not alien.

I don't accept that.

Can you see?

So this is why --

HAMZA SYED

So for Tahir, not only was incorporating Islam into the school an academic strategy, it was also a British value.

STUDENT 1

It was really nice for me that --

STUDENT 2

It was during school --

STUDENT 1

-- I'm doing something at home and now my school is helping me do it.

STUDENT 2

Yeah, I didn't want to have a different life at school.

If I'm praying at home, I want to pray at school, too, because --

BRIAN REED

These are two students who graduated from Park View in 2014.

We're not using their names because such is the stink of the Trojan Horse scandal, they don't want potential employers to know where they went to school.

They actually keep it off their resumes.

When Hamza and I met them four years after they graduated, they were both studying law at university, some of the first in their families to go on to higher education.

They've been best friends since school, the kind of friends who don't need words to communicate.

STUDENT 1

Are you talking about --

yeah.

I don't know if I said --

STUDENT 2

Oh, that.

STUDENT 1

We're telepathic, basically.

BRIAN REED

The students told us about these assemblies they would have in the mornings, which included religious teachings and sometimes prayer.

This is something that, as an American, made me do a double take when I first heard about it.

The idea of teachers in a public school leading prayers during assembly is not normal to us.

But in Britain, there's no separation between church and state.

The queen is head of both.

So not only is prayer allowed in schools, some form of worship is legally mandated in all schools that are publicly funded.

Schools don't always adhere to this, but students are supposed to take part in what's called a daily act of collective worship.

By default, it's supposed to be broadly Christian in character, but schools can apply to change it to other faiths if that better suits their students, which is what Park View did.

It got approval for its worship to be Islamic.

The students told us at Park View's assemblies, they would sit in the main hall, and a teacher would tell parables or lessons, usually from Islam, but other faiths, too.

BRIAN REED

Do you guys remember actually learning things in the assemblies, or did they make you think?

Or were they just kind of boring teachers -- blah, blah, blah, blah --

like -- you know?

STUDENT 1

No, they really made us think.

STUDENT 2

You know, I really enjoyed those assemblies because I didn't learn this from anywhere else.

BRIAN REED

They still remember this one assembly all these years later about charity.

STUDENT 2

Talking about charity, and they say, when you're giving charity, put your hand in your pocket and take out -- don't care how much you give in.

Just put it in.

Don't count what you're giving and what you have left because when you give, you receive tenfold.

STUDENT 1

Yeah, and charity does not make you poor.

Quite literally, sometimes when I see somebody who is asking for money and things like that, I'll put my hand in in my purse.

STUDENT 2

Take it out.

STUDENT 1

I'll take it out, and I don't look at what's in it.

STUDENT 2

Yeah, I do that all the time.

STUDENT 1

Just because I remember that one teacher.

STUDENT 2

One teacher.

STUDENT 1

He literally said it like that.

STUDENT 2

Like that.

Give so that your left hand doesn't even --

STUDENT 1 & STUDENT 2

-- know what your right hand gave.

STUDENT 1

Yeah.

Yeah.

STUDENT 2

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

When Tahir became chair of Park View's governing body in 1997, 4% of students were passing.

By 2010, that number was 71%, a 17-fold increase.

TAHIR ALAM

We had not changed the children.

We had not changed the parents.

But slowly but surely, we took the results so that they were consistently in the 70s, which means the school actually is kind of guaranteeing an outcome.

HAMZA SYED

Park View was now actively preparing its students for the eventuality that their academic success would lead them out of East Birmingham.

STUDENT 1

Something that a lot of teachers said to me, you live in a bubble.

HAMZA SYED

Again, the former Park View students.

STUDENT 1

And I was like, what do you mean?

They were like, you live in an Asian community.

You go to an Asian school.

You're very safe.

You don't know what it's like to branch out.

I remember we learned about the population and how it's divided in UK.

And I think it was something like 2% of the population in the UK is Asian.

And I was like, wow, only 2%?

STUDENT 2

It seems like a lot more.

STUDENT 1

I was like 2%?

How is it 2%?

Everybody I know is Asian.

STUDENT 2

Every person that I've come across is Brown.

How is that possible?

STUDENT 1

So it was so odd.

HAMZA SYED

The UK is actually 2% Pakistani, 7% Asian.

The point being, there was a vast majority of the population that these students and their classmates were not bumping into day-to-day in Alum Rock.

The school organized visits to Cambridge University.

They took them on camping trips.

They visited the Houses of Parliament in London.

Some students went on a week-long trip on a sailboat with kids from all over, including a bunch of white kids.

STUDENT 2

Apparently we weren't used to mingling with people who were not Pakistani.

So they were exposing us to you guys.

OK.

BRIAN REED

You're looking at me?

STUDENT 2

This is what they were preparing us for.

HAMZA SYED

Parents clamored to get their kids into Park View.

The school had a waiting list.

TAHIR ALAM

We were given all kinds of accolades nationally in the press.

We had officials coming in and out of our school, really.

They're saying, what are you doing?

Perhaps we can learn something.

And they invited us actually that why don't you support other schools?

HAMZA SYED

Tahir became well regarded in education circles.

And over the years, he expanded his reach beyond Park View.

He was certified as an inspector for Ofsted, the agency that monitors and rates schools in Britain.

The Birmingham City Council hired him to train other governors throughout the city.

The National Department for Education even asked Tahir and his colleagues at Park View to take over two other troubled schools in East Birmingham, which they did.

Tahir was invited to tea at 10 Downing Street and met Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Back in Birmingham, though, some people resented him.

MOZ HUSSAIN

Yeah, he had made enemies of a lot of schools in the area.

He became hated amongst a lot of people.

HAMZA SYED

Moz Hussain, who became Park View's acting headteacher around this time, was in full support of Tahir's, but still, he and other former colleagues told us they wished Tahir was a bit more circumspect in the way he went around to other schools, advocating for reform.

He was self-assured, blunt, and particularly unsparing when laying out for head teachers and other school leaders the way their schools were failing Muslim students.

MOZ HUSSAIN

To tell other schools, look, Park View can do it.

Park View can do it.

Park View can do it.

Same family, same children that you got.

They can do it.

That's not an excuse.

We used to tell Tahir off for this a lot.

Stop using us as a beating stick because it's isolating us amongst other schools.

JACKIE HUGHES

He was actually pointing the finger and saying directly to head teachers, you're not doing a good enough job here for these kids.

HAMZA SYED

Jackie Hughes used to be in charge of school improvement for the Birmingham City Council.

And she says she can name head teachers that she knows Tahir made enemies with.

Many of them were used to having the final word on academics.

And then here was Tahir, this volunteer with no professional teaching experience, waltzing in and criticizing their work.

JACKIE HUGHES

I mean, actually, people come to me and say, I can't understand why you give Tahir the time of day.

He's a terrible man.

He said to me, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And they would go sounding off.

HAMZA SYED

Colleagues and friends warned Tahir, you might want to consider softening your approach.

But Tahir wasn't having it.

TAHIR ALAM

You have to fight for justice.

Justice is not going to be handed to you on the plate.

You have to make space for yourself.

So the fact that some people may not be OK with that is irrelevant to me.

That's their problem.

HAMZA SYED

In 2012, Park View received the ultimate validation and what was probably its proudest moment in Tahir's nearly 18 years there.

Ofsted arrived for an inspection and deemed the school outstanding, the highest rating possible.

Among the many things inspectors praised at Park View were the, quote, "wide range of opportunities for spiritual development, including voluntary Friday prayers."

In his time as chair of governors, Tahir had taken Park View from the lowest ranking, the verge of closure, to the very top.

The person in charge of Ofsted, the chief inspector, said, quote, "Every school in the country should be like this."

BRIAN REED

Less than two years later, on November 27, 2013, an envelope arrived on the desk of the leader of Birmingham City Council, a man named Sir Albert Bore.

Inside was a cover sheet addressed to him, marked, "Very important, confidential."

Mr. Bore, it said, this letter was found when I was clearing my boss's files.

And I think you should be aware that I am shocked at what your officers are doing.

You have seven days to investigate this matter, after which it will be sent to a national newspaper, who I'm sure will treat it seriously.

Sincerely, AN -- anonymous, presumably.

Behind that note was the Trojan Horse letter, four poorly copied pages, shadows at the edges, instructions to destroy after reading.

The letter was written as if from a collaborator of Tahir's, describing a conspiracy Tahir had been running to take over and Islamize schools by deception.

It took weeks for Tahir to learn about it.

He heard rumors there was a mysterious letter making its way around Birmingham, around the city council and to head teachers in town, which named him as the orchestrator of a plot.

One of Tahir's friends rushed to his house to tell him that he'd been getting a haircut over on Washwood Heath Road, and afterwards, his friend's barber had beckoned him into the back room of the shop and showed him a copy.

Tahir did not know what to make of it.

Finally, he got a hold of the document himself.

TAHIR ALAM

Obviously, I was thinking, what is the source of this letter?

Who wrote this letter?

Why was this letter written, is what's ringing in my head.

BRIAN REED

The front page was missing, so there was no, "dear whoever."

It just started as if it had been going on for a page or more already.

And the letter ended mid-sentence, too, with the phrase, "I would also like," so there's no sign-off, which meant Tahi couldn't tell exactly who it was supposed to be to or from.

But whoever wrote the letter said explicitly, "Tahir and I."

TAHIR ALAM

It's supposed to be from somebody who knows me well in Birmingham.

And he's talking to somebody in Bradford.

BRIAN REED

Another British city that's home to a lot of Muslims.

TAHIR ALAM

He's talking about Tahir, what he's done here, we can do it over there.

BRIAN REED

And he's your friend or your associate.

TAHIR ALAM

Yeah, supposed to be.

BRIAN REED

Or she, whoever.

TAHIR ALAM

Whoever it is, yeah.

BRIAN REED

Can you keep reading just the first few paragraphs?

TAHIR ALAM

OK, Operation Trojan Horse has been carefully thought through and is tried and tested within Birmingham.

Tahir and I would be happy to support your efforts in Bradford.

This is a long-term plan and one which we are sure will lead to great success in taking over a number of schools and ensuring that they are run on the strict Islamic principles.

In Birmingham, the benefits --

BRIAN REED

The main tactic of Operation Trojan Horse is to target headteachers at the schools you want to take control of, to make their lives so miserable, that they'll resign or else, be fired, at which point, you can install your own people, who will implant Islamic extremism in the school.

The author gives several examples of schools in Birmingham where Tahir and his cronies were supposedly in the middle of doing this.

"We have caused a great amount of organized disruption in Birmingham," the letter says, "and are on the way to getting rid of more head teachers and taking over their schools.

While sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things, you must remember that this is a jihad.

And as such, using all means possible to win the war is acceptable."

BRIAN REED

What was your feeling or your attitude?

Were you laughing at it?

Were you actually kind of taking it seriously and frightened?

What were --

TAHIR ALAM

I mean, the claims --

I wasn't laughing actually because I knew the serious nature of the allegations that were being made.

But as far as the claims themselves were concerned, they were laughable.

So I knew that there was something not right about what was going on here.

BRIAN REED

Tahir contacted the Birmingham City Council, where the letter was first sent.

He'd done training for them for years.

TAHIR ALAM

And I said, look, I work for you.

And this letter apparently is going around, claiming certain things.

And I'm surprised that you haven't spoken to me to at least to get my view on the matter.

At least ask me to explain or if I know anything or whatever or something.

And the gentleman there actually from the city council, he said, Mr. Alam, to be very honest with you, we don't think anything of the letter.

We think it's a completely bogus hoax letter.

And we don't believe there is any truth in it.

And therefore we didn't take any action.

We didn't do anything with it.

BRIAN REED

Did you feel reassured by that, or how did you --

TAHIR ALAM

Not really, no, because then the letter began to be printed in the national media as well.

HAMZA SYED

Someone leaked the letter to the Sunday Times of London.

And from there, it became a frenzy.

One story turned to two, turned to dozens, in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Spectator, Sky TV, many of them giving credence to the letter, saying that extremists like Tahir had allegedly been infiltrating UK schools for years.

Reporters camped outside Park View.

They stalked Tahir down the street --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

We tried to put these allegations to the Academy's chair of governors, but Tahir Alam --

HAMZA SYED

-- turned up at his house.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (TAHIR ALAM)

Hello.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Hello, Mr. Alam.

Mr. Alam.

Hello?

HAMZA SYED

The government kicked into gear to investigate the swarmed Park View.

Ofsted, the school inspector, arrived for two surprise inspections.

TAHIR ALAM

And then we had the education funding agency investigation, which was about 10 days, I think.

They were in there for 10 days.

And as soon as they left, we had the PWC --

HAMZA SYED

PricewaterhouseCoopers, a big outside auditing firm.

TAHIR ALAM

-- looking into the financial affairs of the school.

So then we had them for four or five weeks in the school as well.

I said, what are you looking for?

I said, what are you looking for?

You've been here three weeks.

You must have a family.

BRIAN REED

There was more.

The secretary of state for education called in England's former counterterror chief from Scotland Yard, a man named Peter Clark.

And the Birmingham City Council appointed its own special investigator, and they scrutinized Park View, along with 20 some odd other schools in Muslim neighborhoods.

In the middle of the melee, some politicians and journalists were saying that the letter itself was likely a hoax.

There were some obvious factual inaccuracies.

Yet the government believed it still warranted this action.

Honestly, I don't think any authority explained this logic with much clarity at the time, but my understanding of how the thinking went, is that even if the letter itself wasn't an actual communiqué between two real life conspirators, it could still be pointing at a real problem.

Even if it was fiction, the thinking went, the letter could have been fabricated by someone who had legitimate concerns about Muslim extremists scheming and wielding influence in schools.

And maybe the letter was their creative way of raising an alarm.

So rather than look into who wrote the letter and why, instead, the government put out general public calls for information about these schools.

And people started coming forward, mostly anonymously, with complaints.

Again, investigators found no evidence of radicalization, no evidence of violent extremism, and no plot.

What emerged instead was a kind of grab bag of Islam adjacent allegations, many of the same things authorities had celebrated up to that point, but apparently now were seeing in a different light, like these educators weren't merely allowing students to pray --

they were pressuring them to pray.

They weren't innocently recruiting brown Muslim staff --

they were hiring their buddies, who thought the same way as they did, and possibly discriminating against non-Muslim candidates in the process.

School governors, including Tahir, they weren't holding head teachers to a high standard.

They were pressuring them, harassing them, and exercising more power than a governor was supposed to.

Investigators also said they'd found instances of intolerance towards LGBTQ people and unequal treatment of women and girls.

They said Park View had held assemblies and invited speakers with anti-Western views, and that Tahir and people aligned with him allegedly subscribed to, quote, "an intolerant and politicized form of extreme social conservatism that claims to represent and ultimately seeks to control all Muslims."

All of this, as the then secretary of state for education put it, as she presented the findings on the Trojan Horse letter to parliament, meant that students --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Instead of enjoying a broadening and enriching experience at school, young people are having their horizons narrowed and are being denied the opportunity to flourish in a modern, multicultural Britain.

It is for this reason and with a deep sense of injustice and sadness that today, we are announcing our intention to resign our positions at Park View Educational Trust and allow new members to assume responsibility.

BRIAN REED

After months of scrutiny, in early July 2014, Tahir, looking tired and stressed, stood at a lectern outside Park View's gates and resigned.

Tahir told us he and the other Park View governors only agreed to do that because the Department for Education promised that the head teacher and other on the ground leadership at the school would be kept in place.

TAHIR ALAM

But soon as school opened in September, all of those people were suspended.

All the leadership was basically sacked, ruthlessly.

They went about destroying their careers, destroying their reputations and they did that systematically.

We had worked for 10, 15 years, really, to build this school.

They destroyed it within months.

BRIAN REED

The government renamed the school.

It's no longer Park View.

It also notified nearly every teacher and governor you just heard from, Tahir included, that it was bringing proceedings to ban them from education for the rest of their lives.

In the years since, student achievement has plummeted at the school formerly known as Park View, from more than 70% passing to, in recent years, from the low 40% to mid 50% range.

HAMZA SYED

So that's the story Tahir told us, that first meeting in his makeshift teaching room, that this letter, which was never fully investigated, that described a plot called Operation Trojan Horse, which is never found to have existed, inspired all of this --

the ruining of careers and an educational movement, the fear mongering headlines against Muslims that continue to this day, the government instituting policies that encourage us to spy more brazenly on each other.

We've been talking with Tahir for a couple of hours by this point.

BRIAN REED

What time is it?

I know you need to leave at some point.

I don't want to --

TAHIR ALAM

I mean, I have to go to Friday prayer now.

So 1 o'clock, I'm there, really.

BRIAN REED

I understand there's a lot to talk, so if you wanted to --

TAHIR ALAM

There's a lot to --

no, no, I don't get tired of talking these things, really.

I mean, you probably could tell.

Obviously, when I talk about that, you begin to relive it, isn't it?

And I have to say that it does sadden me, actually, as what has been lost for the children, for the community, the irreparable damage that has been done, for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

So, anyway, can I get you guys some tea or something?

HAMZA SYED

At that event I went to, where we all got redirected to the wedding hall, one of the speakers, a columnist named Peter Oborne, put it well.

He said Operation Trojan Horse has become a "social fact" in Britain.

That even though within weeks of the Trojan Horse letter hitting the news, people acknowledged it was probably a hoax, that's never seemed to matter.

Whether Muslims in Birmingham were conspiring or not doesn't matter.

The intimation that they were has persevered, to the extent that the prime minister's former chief of staff was outraged that some people in the community center would dare to say otherwise.

But we don't need to settle for a social fact because there are actual facts.

HAMZA SYED

Why, up to this point, has no one cared about who wrote this letter and where this letter came from?

TAHIR ALAM

Well, that's my question.

HAMZA SYED

That's my question.

TAHIR ALAM

This is what I've been arguing.

This is why I went to the police to see what they could do.

This is what I wrote in my letter to the Birmingham City Council, that you need to get to the bottom of who wrote the letter.

This is what I wrote to the Department of Education as well.

You need to get to the bottom of the letter.

Who wrote the letter?

Because that will then unravel why the letter was written.

You see?

So this is what I have been arguing, but the Department of Education is not interested.

The police are not interested.

The Birmingham City Council is not interested in answering that question.

HAMZA SYED

Why?

TAHIR ALAM

Because they have used this letter.

And on this hoax, they have built so much policy.

Do you think now they want to launch an investigation into the letter to have it proven that it was written for completely different reasons?

Yeah?

How would that make them look like?

A bunch of monkeys.

HAMZA SYED

As I've been saying, if you could just find out who wrote that letter and why, that's the only thing that might change Britain's understanding of Operation Trojan Horse.

TAHIR ALAM

But whoever wrote the letter, they knew me, I think.

And I like to think that I know them, too.

HAMZA SYED

Does that mean you think --

TAHIR ALAM

I have a strong hunch as to who wrote the letter.

I strongly believe that I know who wrote the letter.

And I strongly believe that I know that why was the letter was written as well.

BRIAN REED

So you think you know the who and the motive.

TAHIR ALAM

Yes.

HAMZA SYED

That's next on The Trojan Horse Affair, the case of the four resignations.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Hamza Syed and me, along with Rebecca Laks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig, additional editing by Ira Glass and by our contributing editor, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Fact checking and research by Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Mellor, with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.

Sound design, mixing, and music supervision by Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Ndeye Thioubou.

Executive assistant is Alberto DeLeon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.

HAMZA SYED

Audio is provided by NBC, Getty Images.

Special thanks to my journalism professor, my yoda, Richard Danbury, Kimberly Henderson, The Barclay Agency, Kenneth Pomeranz, Greg Clark

BRIAN REED

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.
Part 2

The Case of the Four Resignations

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.
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00:00 / 55:20

The Trojan Horse Affair

Part 2

Transcript

BRIAN REED

Hamza and I are sitting behind two children's school desks.

We're in a 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.

TAHIR ALAM

The motive was quite an interesting one.

BRIAN REED

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.

TAHIR ALAM

But whoever wrote the letter, they knew --

you know, they knew me, I think.

BRIAN REED

Or possibly more than one person.

HAMZA SYED

Were they from Birmingham?

Were they involved --

TAHIR ALAM

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.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

Is there a reason we're playing 20 questions here?

Can we just ask you who it is?

TAHIR ALAM

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.

BRIAN REED

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Brian Reed.

HAMZA SYED

I'm Hamza Syed

BRIAN REED

Let's see if we can figure out who wrote the Trojan Horse letter.

[THEME MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

All right, you want to do this?

HAMZA SYED

OK, so let's move these drawers.

We're going to have to drag it up.

BRIAN REED

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.

HAMZA SYED

OK, we're going to lay the things on top, because they kill the vibe.

BRIAN REED

Hamza's has 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 --

HAMZA SYED

Oh my God.

BRIAN REED

-- pushing the bed up against the closet, sliding the bureau into the corner, packing away Hamza's mom's jewelry at his insistence.

BRIAN REED

You want no reminder that this is your parents' bedroom?

HAMZA SYED

Mate, I'm serious about this.

It's headquarters.

BRIAN REED

Do you have a toolbox?

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

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 multi-colored note cards, which were connected with string.

BRIAN REED

Success.

HAMZA SYED

I didn't have the heart to tell him that Sherlock didn't really do the whole murder wall thing.

BRIAN REED

What are you seriously going to do if your parents come?

HAMZA SYED

I'll just tell them sleep in a different room, you know what I mean?

Like --

BRIAN REED

Really?

HAMZA SYED

No, I mean, we'll figure that out when they come in.

Shall I get the Hoover?

[VACUUM RUNNING]

BRIAN REED

HQ was ready.

HAMZA SYED

Operation Trojan Horse had been very carefully thought through, and is tried and tested within Birmingham.

BRIAN REED

Hamza sat in his parent's bed and read the letter aloud, as I paced around, scribbling names and schools on the white boards, circling some, crossing off others.

BRIAN REED

HT Springfield.

OK.

Keep moving.

HAMZA SYED

All right.

BRIAN REED

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 framed the head for doctoring test scores, and now she was under investigation.

At another, they'd instigated a nasty fight over one of the headteacher's disciplinary decisions.

At another, they'd accused the headteacher 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 headteachers had been in actual trouble in real life, for doctoring test scores, facing allegations of fraud, et cetera.

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.

BRIAN REED

We've narrowed it down to --

we've got the headteacher at Regents Park community school, the headteacher at Adderley, the headteacher at Saltley school, and the headteacher from Springfield school.

BRIAN REED

We take a step back and stare at the board pensively, beard-strokingly, as the cogs turn in my partner's brain.

HAMZA SYED

Oh.

HAMZA SYED

As my partner swallows his first meditative sip of a British cuppa.

BRIAN REED

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.

HAMZA SYED

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 analyzing 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 wall.

BRIAN REED

Sorry for the trouble, Dr. and Mrs. Syed.

HAMZA SYED

It's not really that sophisticated.

If you read the Trojan Horse letter, sure, the author goes on about a grand city-wide 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 a 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.

HAMZA SYED

What are your thoughts regarding that quote?

HAMZA SYED

In our first interview, I actually read Tahir 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.

TAHIR ALAM

The quote is very insightful and very accurate.

HAMZA SYED

OK.

TAHIR ALAM

I think the judge there has made a good observation.

BRIAN REED

So OK, 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?

[MUSIC]

Well, let us tell you the perplexing story of what happened at that school.

It begins not too differently from the story of Park View, 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 Park View, 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 head teachers, 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 Park View formula at Adderley.

He joined the Adderley governing body, which went searching for a new head teacher 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 Rizvana Darr.

Tahir says she was a standout candidate.

TAHIR ALAM

She was very ambitious.

She is 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 we have 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 interests first.

That came across very strongly to me.

BRIAN REED

You won't be hearing from Rizvana Darr.

She's declined to talk to us.

But we're able to tell you what went down between Mrs. Darr and the teaching assistants, because they ultimately ended up in a knockdown, 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 Rizvana Darr --

nearly every one of them says she was super impressive.

RAZWAN FARAZ

She, you know, has a genius mind.

There's no question about it.

BRIAN REED

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 Rizvana Darr at Adderley as an assistant head before they had a falling out, and Razwan moved on to another school.

He and Rizvana Darr were close.

RAZWAN FARAZ

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 learnt more from her in the career of teaching than anybody else.

BRIAN REED

Rizvana Darr --

Riz, as lots of people call her -- was a big part of the reason Razwan took a position at Adderley.

She was exciting to work for.

She was tireless.

Razwan says sometimes, she'd show up at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning and leave at 10:00 at night.

And she implemented many of the same kinds of changes that Tahir's recruits had at Park View, high academic standards, inspiring lackadaisical staff, getting parents involved, making religious accommodations.

And it was working.

Within just a few years, Ofstead, 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."

[MUSIC]

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 Hilary 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 Hilary 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 the table when she didn't get her way."

One big disagreement between Mrs. Darr and Hilary Owens was over the classroom Ms. Owens had been assigned to.

There were specific grades and teachers Hilary 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 Miss Owens's 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.

Hilary 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 Hilary 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.

Hilary 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 Hilary Owens responds, what letter of resignation?

I didn't write a letter of resignation.

I haven't resigned.

Hilary 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.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (HILARY OWENS)

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.

BRIAN REED

Garden leave is administrative leave, basically, when you're on your way out from a job.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (HILARY OWENS)

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.

BRIAN REED

And with that, Ms. Owens says, Mrs. Darr got up and stood by the door.

HAMZA SYED

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. Darr also had a difficult run with.

They 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. Darr and the changes she was making to the school.

They too had been fighting with the head teacher for many months, and by this time in December 2012, were all on paid leave due to work-related stress.

When Mrs. Darr received resignation letters from these three TAs, she quickly wrote back to them at their homes, 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.

I 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 Rehena Khanom, Shahnaz Bibi, and Yasmin 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.

But when Mrs. Darr 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 her the letter supposedly signed by her.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (HILARY OWENS)

That was not my signature.

The first thing I said, that's not my signature.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (OFFICER)

OK, is it similar to your signature?

ARCHIVED RECORDING (HILARY OWENS)

No.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (OFFICER)

No.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (HILARY OWENS)

Not at all.

The H is wrong.

The C is wrong.

The M is wrong.

The S is completely wrong.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (OFFICER)

So it's not even --

ARCHIVED RECORDING (HILARY OWENS)

The M is wrong.

It's not even close.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (OFFICER)

Right, OK, that's fair.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (HILARY OWENS)

I don't understand.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

So four of Rizvana Darr's employees were insisting someone had forged their resignation letters.

But Mrs. Darr, 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. Darr must have been behind this.

BRIAN REED

What did you make of that story?

JACKIE HUGHES

Well, 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.

HAMZA SYED

Jackie Hughes used to be assistant director for school improvement for the Birmingham City Council.

When this resignation fracas happened, she'd left that job.

But Adderley was a school she knew well, and Hilary Owens came to see her for advice.

JACKIE HUGHES

She was just so adamant over and over again.

Riz Darr has lied.

She has treated us very, very badly.

We did not write those letters.

And the headteacher 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?

BRIAN REED

But how about faking resignation letters?

JACKIE HUGHES

Well that is --

BRIAN REED

Less plausible?

JACKIE HUGHES

That is just the bit that is completely bizarre.

BRIAN REED

Have you come up with an explanation for the bizarrity?

JACKIE HUGHES

It strikes me Riz likes to write the script for everybody.

[MUSIC]

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.

HAMZA SYED

Some of the same people who told us that Mrs. Darr was brilliant -- who awed at what she'd accomplished, lifting Adderley out of its academic abyss --

they also saw flip side to her ambition.

Here's former assistant head Razwan Faraz.

RAZWAN FARAZ

Every single classroom had to look the same.

The boards had look the same.

Every single book had to look the same.

You know, there was a level of control down to that detail.

HAMZA SYED

Control freak, slave driver, these are some of the words people who know Rizvana Darr 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 color-coded by subject, the margin size staff was supposed to be printing with.

RAZWAN FARAZ

She would say pencils need to be all together.

They cannot be mixed with pens, and --

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BRIAN REED

This is a real example?

RAZWAN FARAZ

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

It would be very, very dictatorial.

HAMZA SYED

How would she would even be aware of this, like, as a headteacher?

RAZWAN FARAZ

Oh, she would scrutinize.

HAMZA SYED

And she would, like, march around the school and inspect these little --

RAZWAN FARAZ

100%.

HAMZA SYED

-- things?

RAZWAN FARAZ

Yeah, and expect the leadership team to do the same.

DAVE HUGHES

You go into some headteacher's offices, and you can tell they belong to a particular headteacher, but they're obviously places of work.

HAMZA SYED

Dave Hughes was a member of the Adderley governing body that hired Mrs. Darr.

He's an experienced governor, who served for decades on the governing bodies of schools throughout Birmingham, including at Park View with Tahir.

Dave's also married to Jackie Hughes, who's sitting next to him, eyeglasses hanging around her neck, nodding her head.

DAVE HUGHES

Yeah, this might be a family photograph or something, but you can 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.

JACKIE HUGHES

Yeah.

No, I did also.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Exactly right, yeah.

DAVE HUGHES

Which is why I think she could be capable of doing whatever's necessary to protect that fiefdom.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

Mrs. Darr 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.

Rizvana Darr also started getting a lot of grief from parents about how she was running the school, in particular, more Orthodox parents, people Mrs. Darr 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. Darr 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. Darr 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. Darr's leadership team say they saw behavior like this, and that the TAs were behind the bullying.

But the TAs say that Mrs. Darr 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. Darr 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 the letters.

They filed a report with the police.

None of it was working.

They asked for advice around the neighborhood.

SAJAD AKRAM

They said they wanted their job back.

They want to stay at Adderley.

They didn't want to leave, and they've been forced to resign.

BRIAN REED

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.

BRIAN REED

Were they upset, were they mad?

SAJAD AKRAM

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're losing their job.

So I said, the best advice I can give you is go and see Tahir.

BRIAN REED

Tahir was the guy you went to when there was a problem with a school in East Birmingham.

Plus, he'd helped recruit Rizvana Darr to Adderley.

SAJAD AKRAM

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 Rizvana, it would be Tahir, because they respect him.

BRIAN REED

The women approach 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 Darr's employer, saying that Mrs. Darr had quote, "fabricated the charade, and that in all her years, the representative had never seen someone more drunk on power -- " that's a quote --

"than Rizvana Darr."

Until finally, the Birmingham City Council stepped in, and instructed Mrs. Darr that she should not terminate the TAs' 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 Zakis a solicitor who represented one of the TAs, Hilary Owens, remembers when he read Adderley's argument.

DANIEL ZAKIS

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 headteacher, and that their resignations were part of a plot.

HAMZA SYED

These four people, including Hilary, were part of a plot to undermine Rizvana Darr?

DANIEL ZAKIS

Yeah, to convert the school to one based on strict Muslim Salafi teachings.

BRIAN REED

Salafi being that more conservative interpretation of Islam, the interpretation Mrs. Darr 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, Hilary, 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. Darr had forged them to get her in trouble.

DANIEL ZAKIS

To say that they all resign --

genuine resignations.

They then all deny that they've resigned.

And that would then cause uproar.

It's not the, you know, greatest plot.

HAMZA SYED

Bear in mind, everything we've been talking about up to this point --

this whole resignation dispute --

it all happened before the Trojan Horse letter existed.

So when Adderley's legal team filed its defense in spring 2013, this was the first Hilary Owen's solicitor was hearing about an Islamic plot in a Birmingham School to undermine a headteacher.

[MUSIC]

As the hearing date approached, a handwriting expert was brought in to analyze the signatures on the disputed resignation letters.

And the expert concluded that the TAs signatures were, in fact, not authentic.

They had been forged.

By the month of the hearing, November 2013, Adderley defense was looking pretty strained.

Mrs. Darr 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 in 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 on 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," end quote.

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 Adderley's defense in the case.

"Mrs. Darr," 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 for Mrs. Darr 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 arrange to have them delivered.

This account lines up exactly with the claims made in the employment case.

It ends with an explanation of Hilary Owens's unique role in the Salafi plot.

Quote, "as the English woman dropped her letter off in the head's staff 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 will blame the English woman for planning and implementing the whole campaign to cause disruption amongst the Muslim staff and the Muslim headteacher."

[MUSIC]

That's how the Trojan Horse letter describes what was going on 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 Rizvana Darr.

It's incredible reading.

The Trojan Horse letter was just the evidence Rizvana Darr 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.

Rizvana Darr was accused of fabricating letters, and another letter materialized to come to her rescue.

BRIAN REED

And rescue her it did.

Rizvana Darr 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. Darr 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 headteacher of Adderley Primary school to this day.

More after the break.

HAMZA SYED

Once the Trojan Horse that started floating around East Birmingham in early 2014, for people close to the schools involved -- people who knew and worked with Rizvana Darr --

it didn't take too many reads for their minds to wander over to a spiky blue fence, and the headteacher inside.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

What I remember distinctly coming to mind was seems to be a lot of information about Adderley here.

In the Trojan Horse letter, a lot of it relates to Adderley, and things that wasn't in the public domain.

Who else would know this?

Who else at the time would know this, other than Riz Darr?

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 Rizvana Darr.

It's like she's written this to cover her ass.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

We've seen no direct evidence that Rizvana Darr authored the letter.

No court has ever found that she did.

And the Birmingham City Council sent us a letter in which they said any suggestions that Mrs. Darr was involved in authoring the Trojan Horse letter and the teaching assistants' resignation letters is false.

But the content of the Trojan Horse letter, its timing and the circumstances surrounding it, point towards Mrs. Darr, or someone who supported Mrs. Darr, or maybe some combination of the two as the likely authors.

And if it was Mrs. Darr 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 center.

And the cop called 9-1-1 --

well, 9-9-9 -- pretending to be a civilian, reporting that people at the prayer center were planning to kidnap and kill cops in the name of ISIS.

Counter-terror detectives looked into it, realized it was a hoax.

The crooked cop got a seven-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. Darr was up against a city council which had abandoned her, an employment tribunal which is about to sit in judgment 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. Darr --

TAHIR ALAM

I dismissed it all.

HAMZA SYED

Not only was Rizvana Darr 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. Darr for the Adderley headteacher position.

On top of that, he was close to Mrs. Darr's husband, a guy named Kadir Arif.

It's 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 Rizvana Darr.

And then when the letter leaked to the press, the stories started running about him being a dangerous extremist, Tahir waited for a call from Kadir or Rizvana.

BRIAN REED

Because you knew them well enough for them to check in if something like that happened.

TAHIR ALAM

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.

HAMZA SYED

Any lingering doubts Tahir had about who wrote the letter --

the silence quashed them.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

If the purpose of the Trojan Horse letter was to help Mrs. Darr 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 Rizvana Darr around this time, who said Mrs. Darr 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 TAs' 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 of 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 that Operation Trojan Horse Plot was real, and suggesting Tahir was the one who should be scrutinized, not them.

The school also contacted Tahir directly.

TAHIR ALAM

I received a legal letter.

BRIAN REED

From the school's lawyers, saying his insinuations that the Trojan Horse letter came from Adderley were quote, "wholly baseless, and that -- "

TAHIR ALAM

If I made those inferences again and so on, that I will be, you know, taken to court.

HAMZA SYED

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 Kadir Arif, and say --

TAHIR ALAM

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 over 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 call, hello, hello, Kadir, how are you doing?

It's not an easy thing for me to do.

You have to appreciate that.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

TAHIR ALAM

You know what I'm saying?

It's not an easy thing for me to do.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BRIAN REED

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 Rizvana Darr 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 --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

A leaked letter outlining a plot by hard line Muslims to take over schools --

Accusations a plot by hard line Muslims to take over --

By hard line Muslim --

Radical Muslims in Birmingham have got together to take control --

BRIAN REED

It 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 claims 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.

[MUSIC]

Assuming you could 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-counter-terror 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.

IAN KERSHAW

I draw no conclusion about the letter.

BRIAN REED

Apparently not.

This is an education consultant and former headteacher 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 --

IAN KERSHAW

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.

It wasn't my job to find out who wrote it.

BRIAN REED

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 counter-terror chief Peter Clarke, 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 Clarke, 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.

IAN KERSHAW

Whoever wrote the letter --

whatever their motive was was not really the point, from the council's point of view.

Their question is going 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.

BRIAN REED

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.

Park View 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.

RAZWAN FARAZ

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 letter.

What can you tell us about it?

BRIAN REED

And once that narrative solidified, it was insurmountable.

[MUSIC]

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.

HAMZA SYED

Just spoke to Habib Rehman.

It is a hard no from him.

BRIAN REED

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 Rehman was the former chair of governors from Adderley, who had previously agreed to get coffee with us.

HAMZA SYED

He doesn't think there's any value in the story.

The 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 Faria Shafaq's door again.

BRIAN REED

A former finance assistant from Adderley.

HAMZA SYED

Sian said --

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 in my face.

I even tried to plead with her through the post box.

So eventually, I just felt ridiculous, and I've just come back to the car.

I'm not too sure what else to do.

Oh, mate.

BRIAN REED

Hamza was like a tire that was slowly losing air.

HAMZA SYED

Hey, mate, so here's the update of the evening.

First we're off to Rehena Khanom's house.

BRIAN REED

Rehena Khanom was one of the four teaching assistants in the resignation case.

HAMZA SYED

And her husband answered.

He 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 that --

BRIAN REED

Hamza 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 Alum Rock, talking into his phone.

HAMZA SYED

God, I'm just looking, the message is already eight minutes long.

So this is --

I'm sorry about this, mate.

HAMZA SYED

Listen, I think some people tied to the Adderley case had stuff to hide.

I will 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 that editors asked reporters to find Muslim stories, because they sell papers.

And when these stories were analyzed, the majority were negative, with the most common theme being terrorism.

The same press, that when pleaded with by the head of a Muslim organization 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 Alum Rock, 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.

[MUSIC]

I was also apparently an idiot.

HAMZA SYED

This is it.

You solve this one question, the rest does not matter.

The rest just kind of falls waywards anyway.

HAMZA SYED

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 Adderley.

If you could substantiate that it was indeed written by Rizvana Darr or someone close to her for that resignation case --

HAMZA SYED

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 skeptical about any accusations from here on.

Because look, what happened with this one.

It spiraled out of control for no reason.

The 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.

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

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 a hysteria.

And instead of taking the rational approach of just looking into the Adderley case, it ended up embarking on a thoughtless adventure.

I figured what I was trying to correct wasn't oversight.

But now I know it wasn't an oversight at all.

That's next on The Trojan Horse Affair, Sir Albert and the Missing H.

[THEME MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Brian Reed and me, along with Rebecca Laks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass, and by contributing editor Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Mellor, with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.

Sound design, mixing, and music supervision by Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Ndeye Thioubou.

Executive assistant is Alberto DeLeon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.

BRIAN REED

Special thanks to Hamza's parents, Syed Athar and Atiya Athar, Alvin Melaithe, Aviva DeKornfeld, Rasmus Bitsch, Brum Radio, Media Dog and Victoria McEvedy

HAMZA SYED

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.

[THEME MUSIC]
Part 3

Sir Albert and the Missing “H”

In a state of surprise, Hamza and Brian leave a meeting with the man the Trojan Horse letter was first sent to. And they learn about an internal investigation report that local officials have kept hidden, but which they think could contain a bombshell.
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00:00 / 40:45

The Trojan Horse Affair

Part 3

Transcript

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Brian Reed.

HAMZA SYED

I'm Hamza Syed.

BRIAN REED

This is The Trojan Horse Affair.

Here's what Hamza and I have figured out.

The Trojan Horse Affair wasn't a mistake.

The government didn't overreact simply because they'd failed to investigate the source of the Trojan Horse letter.

It hadn't tricked them.

They hadn't actually missed the link to Adderley Primary School and Rizvana Darr, and then pressed ahead anyway with teacher bans, legal cases, school takeovers, enhanced national security policy.

To tell you the story of how we figured that out, we're going to go all the way back to our very first week of reporting to an interview we did with a key figure in this saga, the first person the Trojan Horse letter was sent to, a man named Sir Albert Bore.

ALBERT BORE

It came to me in a brown paper envelope.

HAMZA SYED

Unmarked.

There's nothing remarkable about the envelope.

ALBERT BORE

The envelope just was addressed to me.

Now, that would have been November --

BRIAN REED

When the Trojan Horse letter arrived in November 2013, Albert Bore was the leader of the Birmingham City Council.

He's not leader anymore, but he's still a council member.

He's one of the longest serving in Birmingham, first elected in 1980.

Councilor Bore is a physicist by training, with bushy gray eyebrows, and a shirt with its three top buttons undone, and a gold chain against his chest.

He was given a knighthood in 2002 for his service to local government.

This conversation we had with him, it was before we'd done any digging into Adderley Primary School ourselves, before we'd really focused on Rizvana Darr and the legal troubles she was facing when the Trojan Horse letter popped up portraying her as an innocent victim.

At this point in our reporting, we were still just gathering basic info about the letter.

ALBERT BORE

My staff, they opened the letter and brought it to me and said that --

HAMZA SYED

We were hopeful Councilor Bore might have something useful to share, because not only was he the first person to receive the letter, but he seemed like one of the few politicians likely to be candid with us.

I remember, back in 2014, during the hoopla, he came across as a skeptic of the Trojan Horse letter.

He publicly said the letter was probably a hoax and called it defamatory.

He also attacked the Department of Education's decision to send former counter-terror chief Peter Clarke to investigate Birmingham Schools.

He thought handing the inquiry to a high-level terrorism investigator was overkill and risked alienating Birmingham's Muslims.

It's not the Albert Bore dismissed the idea that there was something worth looking into.

The council did appoint their own non-terror investigator.

But overall, he'd been a defender of the city and its schools.

So here inside the city council building, Council House, Albert Bore walked us through his very first moments with the Trojan Horse letter when it arrived here in his office.

ALBERT BORE

I of course, looked at it, read it, reread it.

HAMZA SYED

And he brought the letter to the attention of other top officials of the council as well as the local police, who got back to the council and said this wasn't a matter for the cops.

ALBERT BORE

They didn't see that, at that point, there was anything illegal going on or unlawful.

And therefore their view was there was nothing there for them to investigate.

That surprised me a little then and it surprises me a little now.

BRIAN REED

What surprised you about it?

ALBERT BORE

Well, because statements in the letter which would have indicated that there were individuals who were acting in a manner which was leading to changes in schools against the normal --

I guess the sort of change that would be allowed for by the regulations, if you like, within which we operate.

HAMZA SYED

I sat there next to Brian, confused.

For one Councilor Bore seemed to be exerting an abnormal amount of effort to construct his sentences.

And what it sounded like he was saying in those sentences was that he's always read the letter seriously as a viable threat.

ALBERT BORE

There appeared to be a systematic attempt here to change the ethos of the school.

There were things going on which we could not condone.

And it was about dealing with --

HAMZA SYED

But he'd said, back then, the letter was probably a hoax.

And now here I was, watching him reach across the table for our copy of that same letter.

ALBERT BORE

Just look at -- and I've opened up the letters to look at the steps that the letter sets out.

First step, identify the school.

HAMZA SYED

And reading through the plot steps --

ALBERT BORE

Third step, put in some governors.

HAMZA SYED

-- as if they were real plans for a real conspiracy.

ALBERT BORE

These steps were having the desired effect in a number of schools.

HAMZA SYED

What was he doing?

Why was he waving the letter around, talking like this.

I thought I better say something.

ALBERT BORE

I wanted this matter to be looked at and looked at urgently.

HAMZA SYED

But this is --

ALBERT BORE

But --

HAMZA SYED

Sorry.

Go on.

ALBERT BORE

But equally, from the very start --

HAMZA SYED

OK, that didn't go well.

Mental note -- stop skipping class at journalism school to go do these interviews.

BRIAN REED

Who do you think wrote the letter?

Do you have a thought about that?

ALBERT BORE

I have no idea who wrote it.

BRIAN REED

You've never considered it.

ALBERT BORE

Oh, I have.

I've sometimes asked the question, I wonder who wrote this letter.

[MUSIC]

Someone set this out.

For what purpose?

Was this a hoax?

Was it not a hoax?

Who might have written it?

Who might have sent it?

These were questions which were always about and never answered because they couldn't be answered and they still can't be answered.

HAMZA SYED

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess, for me, discovering who wrote the letter, it's not just a curiosity thing.

It's about figuring out the motivations of the person who wrote it.

If you find out more about the person who wrote it, you might figure out more about whether their allegations made within are actually real or not.

ALBERT BORE

Look, you're seeking to become an investigative journalist.

I commend you for trying to find out who wrote the letter.

Your objectives are good.

But those objectives weren't my objectives.

My objectives were to find out whether steps 1 to 5 in any way happened amongst Birmingham Schools.

And if --

HAMZA SYED

I was at a bit of a loss for how to proceed.

He was just acting so differently than I'd expected.

From what I knew, Albert Bore had a well-established relationship with Muslims.

He represents a ward with lots of Muslims in a city with a big Muslim population.

He's a member of the Labour Party, which is the liberal Party most British Muslims support.

He was married to the first Asian Muslim woman elected to Birmingham City Council.

He has Muslim kids.

Yet he was putting stock in the Trojan Horse despite his initial misgivings about his authenticity and despite what he'd seen with his own eyes in East Birmingham.

For instance, Park View, the school that been having such success that bore Albert Bore's city such pride before the Trojan Horse allegations, Councilor Bore had visited that school.

ALBERT BORE

I can tell you, I went to Park View School.

And I was amazed by some of what they were doing, absolutely amazed.

This was before Trojan Horse.

HAMZA SYED

Then can you understand what I mean about the nature of this letter, that you marveled at the same school that this letter had you convinced.

ALBERT BORE

But educational achievement is one thing, but operating a school with an ethos with other values is something we also have to reflect on.

HAMZA SYED

An ethos, other values, words I'd become pretty familiar with from clash-of-civilization type texts that argue Muslims aren't compatible with the Western way of life.

We pushed Councilor Bore to explain what he was alluding to with these words.

BRIAN REED

What have you learned that you are shocked by?

HAMZA SYED

What precisely had the Muslim educators who were working in these schools done that was so concerning to him?

He kept referring to reports from the Trojan Horse investigators.

But when we asked Albert Bore what from those investigations had shocked him, it was telling that apparently nothing was disturbing enough that it stayed with him.

He could only point to how governors and staff in East Birmingham had created what he called, ominously, an atmosphere.

ALBERT BORE

Where a school governing body is putting unacceptable pressure on teachers, unacceptable pressure on the head teacher, to do things in a way which is not acceptable to enable certain objectives to be realized in that school.

BRIAN REED

You're saying "certain matters" and "certain objectives."

What's the inappropriate thing that was actually happening?

Because words like "things" are a little vague.

ALBERT BORE

Well, yeah, well, sure, they're vague.

But if you read these reports, it's quite clear that things were -- things were happening which was against the run of what should be happening in that school.

BRIAN REED

I don't find it so clear.

I feel a little confused by the reports, having read them recently, quite honestly.

What exactly about this is bad, like undue religion?

Against what standard is that being measured?

When you read it, it's a little hard to get your grasp on what exactly the report is saying.

And you know, and I've read it in good faith and really trying to understand it.

HAMZA SYED

This was part of the reason we'd come to Albert Bore, to try and get some clarity.

The evidence and conclusions in these reports seemed fuzzy to us.

So we were hoping Albert Bore could help us understand what had made officials go from celebrating these schools for incorporating the students' faith and culture to condemning them.

Instead, what we got from Councilor Bore were insinuations.

There were, quote unquote, "matters of concern," he said, a set of activities, individuals acting in common.

By the end of the interview, he'd come up with exactly one example of a practice that was found going on in these schools that appalled him.

ALBERT BORE

In some schools, there were certain activities which it appeared were being done on a single-sex basis.

HAMZA SYED

And those activities, Albert Bore told us, were PE and sports.

ALBERT BORE

And that was because of the so-called Muslim ethos that was being applied.

HAMZA SYED

Is that unusual for schools?

ALBERT BORE

Oh, totally, yes.

It's totally against the normal activities of a school.

HAMZA SYED

The government doesn't give statistics on how many schools teach PE to boys and girls separately, but the Department for Education specifically allows for it.

And from my own experience going to school in England and every Brit I can remember ever talking to about this, that's pretty standard in schools, Muslim ethos or not.

Councilor Bore said he thought there were other inappropriate changes, changes he said would have been OK, by the way, if these have been denominational schools, which they weren't.

But again, he wasn't positive what changes he was talking about.

In our 2 and 1/2 hours with him, PE was all he could remember for sure.

BRIAN REED

So there's no evidence of anyone being incited to violence, incited to join a group that --

ALBERT BORE

I don't think there's any evidence which could lead you 100% to that view.

There might be evidence around.

HAMZA SYED

Councilor Bore picked the Trojan Horse back up.

ALBERT BORE

It's a partial letter, or it appears to be.

You see, there was something before this first page, and it would appear that there could be something after the final page.

Because it says, "I would also like," and then it stops.

So that sentence --

HAMZA SYED

He's referring to the bottom of the last page of the letter, that final sentence fragment, "I would also like," as if the thought would have continued on the following page had it ever been found.

ALBERT BORE

So this was part of a bigger document.

Was there some further steps towards the end of this letter which is about Islamic extremism?

I don't know.

BRIAN REED

So all right, well, we learned where Albert Bore stands, right?

HAMZA SYED

Fucking surprising, I'll tell you that, mate.

BRIAN REED

Hamza and I headed out of Council House.

We put its columns and dome and clock tower behind us and started walking.

Hamza was animated.

HAMZA SYED

That's fine.

But now to sit here and talk as if, from day one, you received this letter, you accepted it, you went around, and you tried to get other people to reflect your agency.

No one else was on board like you were.

No.

Bullshit me.

BRIAN REED

I love how mad you are.

HAMZA SYED

Mate, I'm pissed.

BRIAN REED

Why?

HAMZA SYED

Look at the power that the letter had on officialdom.

Right, look at it.

Four years on, it is so ingrained in their mentality that all these things are sinister as fuck, all these things were happening that they had to be stopped, these practices, these steps.

What the fuck was concerning?

Tell me what's concerning, mate.

Just break it down to me.

BRIAN REED

You're literally poking me in the chest right now.

HAMZA SYED

I'm seething.

The audacity to say that the results --

BRIAN REED

Hamza and I kept walking around city center, past the clothing stores and the cathedral and a lane called Needless Alley, then pass the clothing stores and the cathedral and Needless Alley again.

It occurred to me we're not actually going anywhere.

HAMZA SYED

-- don't give me that shit.

I'm just like, I couldn't believe him.

The way in which he was describing a situation, the terms in which he was kind of addressing this issue, I'm like fucking hell, mate, you are saying some radical shit, essentially about me.

I cannot think, off the top of my head, a moment where I've sat opposite someone and they have just disparaged Muslims in the way that Bore did today.

BRIAN REED

Really?

HAMZA SYED

Honestly, I have not.

BRIAN REED

Without quite doing it.

HAMZA SYED

Without quite doing it openly, but in a kind of like "nod and a wink" kind of way, suggested that, mate, come on, these guys are fucking extremists, let's be honest.

Do you know what I mean?

And do it so casually, so comfortably.

HAMZA SYED

I guess Councilor Bore's attitude towards the Trojan Horse affair shouldn't have been such a surprise to me.

But he had said the letter was probably a hoax, defamatory even.

When I looked back at his earlier statements, I noticed that he had always equivocated, purveying the same logic that so many others had, the even if the letter wasn't genuine, it could still be pointing to serious issues.

What pissed me off, though, was Councilor Bore's reliance on the letter throughout our interview and the vague language he was using alongside, his innuendos about extremism.

I don't think Albert Bore is a racist.

I believe he has sincere concern and sensitivity about Birmingham's Muslims.

But he still managed to make people like me sound alien and dangerous in some way.

And I didn't feel good.

HAMZA SYED

And I actually thought, at one point, like, does he know what my name is?

Obviously he's been corresponding with Brian Reed.

Does he know there's a Hamza Syed in this room?

Personally, it was eye-opening.

BRIAN REED

Really?

This interview?

HAMZA SYED

Well, yeah.

It's a conversation I've had with my friends, with my conservative Muslim friends, who've always held this belief that there's a bigger, wider conspiracy, and like everyone's against Muslims, and there is no success for us in the West.

And I never entertained any of it.

HAMZA SYED

I know it's common for us immigrants to get twisted up in our split-cultured existence.

But honestly, I've been able to make it work for me.

I grew up in a conservative Pakistani family, but we always lived in white neighborhoods.

I'm a Muslim, but I went to mostly white Catholic school.

I was in mass service more than a mosque.

And it's helped me carve out a pretty sweet spot for myself, a brown person who white people were at ease around because I dress like them and speak like them.

I can get them to pay attention and care about what I have to say, like convincing a Brian Reed to fly over from New York to join this hunt.

This is part of what I was hoping to do as a journalist.

I thought I could get access to white rooms of power and focus them on our brown issues.

So when my Muslim Pakistani mates who aren't as native to white spaces tell me that the West has it out for all of us Muslims --

HAMZA SYED

I've always denied it.

I've always said they're paranoid.

And it's talk like that that's held us back.

It's talk like that --

BRIAN REED

So you fight with your friends about this?

HAMZA SYED

I used to fight with them every opportunity I had.

I've always, always, always argued against that.

And then I sit opposite Albert Bore.

I mean, look, I didn't feel like I was sitting in front of a bigot, just a rational man, well educated, well learned, in a position of power.

He's even married a Muslim once.

And yet here is someone who can only look at this matter in terms of something sinister.

He was more willing to entertain the idea that the page that was missing at the end of this Trojan Horse letter, this was going to ultimately lead to radicalization and extremism --

he was more willing to entertain that than it was willing to entertain the idea that actually there might be something good happening in these schools and these kids were actually thriving.

BRIAN REED

Is that making you rethink the stance you've taken in the past, I guess?

Or is that what you're saying?

HAMZA SYED

It just makes me think that as much as I was convinced that their stance wasn't right, maybe my stance wasn't right either.

And that makes me a little bit uneasy.

BRIAN REED

Because you really believed that stuff.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

I mean, God, it was very important for me to believe that.

It gave me the impetus to kind of explore other fields, other careers, because I didn't think that was some kind of fundamental distrust of Muslims.

But, like, who the fuck was I defending?

BRIAN REED

What do you do with these feelings as a journalist, I wonder.

HAMZA SYED

I don't know, mate.

Because for me, the worry is --

and I don't like talking about this --

because for me the worry is, what if you become the Muslim reporter?

Right?

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

Say this is a society that you're operating in, where if Muslims take over a school and turn it around, it's a threat.

Then imagine a Muslim journalist who's coming in, what if people start listening to their words?

Is that not equally a threat?

If you weren't here on the story with me, I don't know if what we arrived to together as a conclusion, even if I arrived at the same conclusion on my own, would have enough credibility.

Because these words are coming out of my mouth, they're going to be received differently.

[MUSIC]

[MURMUR OF CONVERSATION]

For the shisha, can we get vanilla and rose?

And can we just get a pot of mint tea as well, please.

BRIAN REED

When it got dark out we ducked inside a shisha cafe, a hookah lounge.

It was cool.

It was up at the top of this abandoned movie theater.

I put my recorder down.

I thought we were done for the day.

Hamza picked it up.

HAMZA SYED

At some point, I should ask you questions.

BRIAN REED

At some point, I should ask you questions, he said.

Which, fair enough.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, it's fine.

HAMZA SYED

Because, like, OK, so I want to know --

BRIAN REED

Why was I here, he asked me, doing this story with him?

What was I hoping to achieve?

BRIAN REED

I did this story this summer where I went to Alaska.

And --

HAMZA SYED

Of course, Alaska.

That's exactly where I thought this would go.

BRIAN REED

Keep driving, keep driving, go through Anchorage, and keep driving another, like, five hours.

HAMZA SYED

Brian told me about how he'd been reporting a story about immigration there recently, in a town called Homer.

BRIAN REED

That's the end of the road in America.

And that's Homer.

And they were fighting --

HAMZA SYED

I googled the place after we talked.

Pictures of bears, lakes, and mountains popped up, a far cry from Birmingham, UK.

BRIAN REED

They were having this fight about immigration in their town even though they have no immigrants.

HAMZA SYED

But apparently stories about places like Birmingham had influenced people out there.

Brian kept interviewing Alaskans who told him they were afraid and angry at Muslims because they'd read online how, in Europe, we'd taken over large swaths of cities and turned them into so-called no-go zones where non-Muslims can't enter.

On a Fox News segment, Birmingham was famously accused of being taken over entirely by Muslims, the whole city.

He said it struck him how powerful these fears were in a place where Muslims were basically a theoretical idea.

There was only one Muslim guy, as far as Brian knew, who lived there on a boat, apparently.

The night I walked up to Brian backstage, he was looking to report a story in one of these supposedly captured European cities to dispel the myths about them.

HAMZA SYED

Cheers to no-go zones, mate.

[LAUGHS]

BRIAN REED

Are we in one right now?

HAMZA SYED

No.

BRIAN REED

I don't know, I heard all of Birmingham was one.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, I mean, it depends which outlet you tune into.

BRIAN REED

[LAUGHS]

HAMZA SYED

Do you think we'll change anyone's mind about anything?

Is that even an important ambition to hold?

Or it does not matter?

BRIAN REED

I don't think about that when I'm doing a story because I feel like it will often lead to disappointment.

The things that motivate me to do a story are because it's a good-ass story.

And I want to tell a good story.

And I feel like it can have all sorts of byproducts like changing people's minds.

But for me, I think I would get disappointed a lot.

Whereas like if you're doing a story where you personally want to know the answer to something, you personally want to do the best story you can, then that's where I try to derive the motivation from, you know?

HAMZA SYED

No, I didn't know.

Why would you do a story if you didn't care what impact it would have?

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

So that was our first week in Birmingham.

And like I said, it was before we knew much about Adderley Primary School or the resignation case against Rizvana Darr.

But in the coming months, once we piece together the resignation story and we saw just how strongly it suggests that the Trojan Horse letter was written to influence that Adderley case, we sharpened our strategy.

We started asking people, important people, did you connect the Trojan Horse letter to the Adderley dispute?

And what did you make of the connection?

But when we ask these questions, it became apparent that at Adderley Primary School was the no-go zone.

BRIAN REED

How about Adderley, the school that's talked about at length in the letter?

What did you do in terms of taking that on?

IAN KERSHAW

What --

what do you mean, taking it on?

BRIAN REED

Ian Kershaw, the consultant Albert Bore brought in to investigate the Trojan Horse letter for Birmingham City Council.

We pressed him on the Adderley dispute.

HAMZA SYED

Did you read up about that situation at Adderley that was developing at the time?

IAN KERSHAW

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HAMZA SYED

Can you give us a bit of details about that situation.

IAN KERSHAW

No.

It is particularly important that I don't.

BRIAN REED

Kind of touchy, huh?

[MUSIC]

IAN KERSHAW

And I'm certainly not going to comment upon it any further than I have already.

Do we understand that?

BRIAN REED

When we started filing Freedom of Information requests with the Birmingham City Council for documents we suspected had information about Adderley, they were touchy too.

They stalled, issued ridiculous denials, were found by a regulator to have broken the Freedom of Information law numerous times in their efforts to withhold documents from us.

When I asked the employment tribunal for its records from the Adderley resignation case, the Birmingham City Council hired a fancy barrister to fight me.

Not only do they not want the records released, the Council wrote to the tribunal that the case file ought to be destroyed.

And oddly, the city council submitted that request on behalf of Rizvana Darr and her husband, Kadeer Arif.

Even in Westminster, things were weird.

We went down there to the House of Commons to talk to the member of Parliament who represents Alum Rock, a guy named Liam Byrne.

We thought he'd be helpful because Adderley Primary School's in his district.

And we knew that one of the teaching assistants who accused Rizvana Darr of faking the resignation letters had gone to Liam Byrne for support.

We knew he sent a letter to the Birmingham City Council about Mrs. Darr, saying he wanted her investigated immediately, saying this was so serious he wanted to talk to a council representative directly, that Rizvana Darr was still at the school and, quote, "has the freedom to destroy evidence."

But when we tried talking to Liam Byrne about all that, about Rizvana Darr and the way she was described in the Trojan Horse letter --

BRIAN REED

This is the second page of the Trojan Horse letter.

This section in particular about Adderley Primary School, which is in your constituency --

LIAM BYRNE

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

Did it stand up to you in any significant way when you read it?

LIAM BYRNE

No more than the rest of the letter.

BRIAN REED

He would not engage with it.

We'd brought his own letters to talk to him about, but he sat there refusing to look at them.

It was really awkward.

HAMZA SYED

It's right there next to you, If.

You want to read it or not.

I think you're allowed to look at it.

LIAM BYRNE

Seriously, I'm just not --

I'm not going to comment on anything to do with correspondence or representations for individual constituents.

HAMZA SYED

You don't need to do that.

LIAM BYRNE

If you don't respect that, then I think we're going to conclude it here.

BRIAN REED

So you never had a conversation with anyone else about Rizvana Darr being the author of the Trojan Horse letter.

LIAM BYRNE

I can't talk to you about --

BRIAN REED

Why can't you talk about that?

HAMZA SYED

We're talking --

BRIAN REED

You're leaving us?

Why?

I don't understand.

You're waving us goodbye?

BRIAN REED

He stormed away.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

Meanwhile, back in Alum Rock --

BRIAN REED

Oh, just had another door slammed on us.

HAMZA SYED

-- this is moments after former Chair of Governors at Adderley, Jawed Iqbal, shut his front door in our faces.

It's not like we'd surprised him or anything.

We'd had a friendly conversation the week before, and he knew we'd be coming by.

But this time he threatened to call the police on us, the third person to make that threat in a month.

BRIAN REED

It's so weird to have someone make you feel like you're doing something criminal.

That move, trying to criminalize what you're doing, which is completely up front and decent.

You know?

HAMZA SYED

You're struggling with this more than I am.

I'm a fucking minority, mate.

My entire life is this, why we're doing this story.

Do you realize the story you're reporting on and who you're talking to. (IMITATING BRIAN) It's so weird to have people criminalizing normal behavior.

BRIAN REED

Shut the fuck up.

HAMZA SYED

I'm like, fucking hell, man.

BRIAN REED

You got me.

I appreciate the mirror you're holding up to me.

HAMZA SYED

I'm glad you're having these moments, right.

Welcome to my fucking world.

[BOTH LAUGH]

HAMZA SYED

It struck us that, on the one hand, officials were insisting they'd barely thought about where the Trojan Horse letter might've come from because it didn't matter.

And yet when we'd asked them about the relationship of Adderley Primary School to the letter, it triggered an almost Pavlovian response in them to run away as fast as they could.

But one afternoon, in a fit of research, Brian came across a clue as to what they might be running from.

We follow that lead after a break.

BRIAN REED

I was noodling around on this site one day called WhatDoTheyKnow.com, which helps people make Freedom of Information requests in the UK and keeps listings of them online, when I found a reference to a Birmingham City Council record with a title that piqued my interest,

Final Audit Report --

Adderley Primary School Alleged Falsification of Documents.

I saw that a woman named Pauline Geoghegan had requested this document, which looked to be an investigation report from the Council in 2014.

And the council had responded that they would not be disclosing it.

Pauline had asked for it again a couple of times over the years.

And each time, the Council had refused her.

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

Don't record this bit.

BRIAN REED

So we met Pauline for dinner, to find out what she knew about this report, at her favorite Italian restaurant in Birmingham city center.

BRIAN REED

How's the fish?

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

Good, lovely.

BRIAN REED

Though that makes the dinner sound like a much more normal evening than it was.

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

I'm not nice, am I?

BRIAN REED

Pauline's the kind of person who cultivates a certain mystique.

She wouldn't tell us the name of the restaurant to meet at, for instance.

She directed us to rendezvous at a statue instead, though as we found out, the statue no longer exists.

When we finally did make it to the Italian place, the proprietor beckoned Pauline to the host station, where he wanted to have a few words with her privately, which seemed mysterious in the moment,

but we later learned was because she hadn't paid him the last time she was here because her phyllo pastry tasted unusual.

BRIAN REED

Do you have evidence?

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

Oh, well, here's a little story.

BRIAN REED

Now, as we're eating dinner, I'm trying to coax out of her anything she knows about this report about the falsification of documents at Adderley.

BRIAN REED

What made you go to them?

And why --

BRIAN REED

But she keeps telling me to turn my recorder off.

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

Don't put that on there.

I'll kill you.

BRIAN REED

I'm still not clear what Pauline's profession is, by the way.

But for our purposes, I'm going to go with vigilante local journalist.

She used to run a Twitter account called News in Brum.

Brum is Birmingham's nickname.

The Trojan Horse scandal was one of her biggest stories.

Our dinner with Pauline was a bit disjointed.

So we met her again the following week.

This time, she, Hamza, and I packed into a carrel at the Birmingham Public Library --

our suggestion.

She'd wanted to meet on a gallery bench in the art museum.

She came bearing a bunch of old notes from her time reporting on operation Trojan Horse.

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

You can see how much I was immersed in it.

BRIAN REED

I can tell you we're immersed in it from afar.

I can tell it.

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

Yeah.

Because I knew people were lying, that's why, people who shouldn't be, at all levels, and people who are paid a lot of money to be leaders and honest and open.

BRIAN REED

Pauline told us that, while she was covering Trojan Horse, she got a tip from someone close to Adderley that, after the TAs there had complained to Birmingham City Council that Mrs. Darr might have fabricated the resignation letters --

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

The Council did an investigation.

And an audit report was written, which I have seen some of but not all of, despite many tenacious Freedom of Information requests which have been rejected by the Council.

BRIAN REED

I'd requested it too before meeting Pauline, and the Council also denied me.

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

I can't remember how many times I've asked for it.

BRIAN REED

We've asked for it at least twice.

PAULINE GEOGHEGAN

I've asked for it more than that because I've asked privately as well, not putting it on WhatDoTheyKnow.com.

Clearly they don't want us to see it.

Because so many people have asked for it.

I know that I believe BBC people have asked, I've asked, I know other journalists that work independently that have asked, you've asked.

Nobody's getting it, are they?

Really, if you wanted to put your money into anything in this investigation, it would be get that audit report.

BRIAN REED

Test, test, test.

HAMZA SYED

Test, test, 1, 2.

BRIAN REED

OK.

HAMZA SYED

What are you holding there, Brian?

BRIAN REED

OK, so we have just been given the audit report.

HAMZA SYED

[LAUGHS]:

BRIAN REED

Final audit report.

[EXHALES SHARPLY] It's in my hands.

[MUSIC]L

HAMZA SYED

This makes it sound easy.

But I have to tip my hat to Brian here.

Getting this audit report was quite an ordeal, not least because, as we would learn, one of the reasons the Council was so sensitive about this report is because they eventually, rather mystifyingly, retracted it, which we'll tell you a whole story about later.

Anyway, it took some maneuvering for Brian to dig it back up.

I'd catch him late at night in his hotel room, on his phone, swapping messages with sources, he'd say, about this audit report.

He once ran away in the middle of a football match we were watching together to continue some secret conversation.

I was weeks away from flagging this behavior to his wife when, one day, he came up to me and said, "Watson -- " I said, "stop calling me that."

He said, "follow me."

And we had it.

We had the audit report.

I can't say much about how we got it except that we obtained it legally, we were able to authenticate it by cross-referencing it with other documents, and that, on its way to us, it was held with gloved hands.

HAMZA SYED

Honestly I feel like we just acquired state secrets.

It sort of feels like, doesn't it?

BRIAN REED

It really does.

HAMZA SYED

Except it's about a primary school.

BRIAN REED

This is the cover page --

"Restricted."

HAMZA SYED

Oh boy.

It's substantial.

BRIAN REED

It's 16 pages.

HAMZA SYED

16 pages.

[PAGES RUSTLING]

HAMZA SYED

Brian read it to me.

The document was put together by internal investigators, auditors, including a kind of fraud specialist at the Birmingham City Council, looking into the dispute resignations from the four TAs.

BRIAN REED

(READING) " -- to determine whether the resignation letters have been falsified, and if so, whether Mrs. Darr was involved in their production."

HAMZA SYED

The report stated the 3rd of October, 2013, about seven weeks before the Trojan Horse letter appeared at the Birmingham City Council.

So this is the information the council had about Rizvana Darr and those resignations as they were deciphering the Trojan Horse letter.

This report, it's a brutal document for Mrs. Darr.

The Council investigators paint a picture of Mrs. Darr trying to get her Ocean's Eleven on to set up the TAs, but fumbling at every turn.

Let me share just one memorable detail.

Investigators observed that, on the resignation letter Mrs. Darr insisted was written by one of the teaching assistants, a woman named Shahnaz Bibi, Shahnaz's name is spelled incorrectly.

It's missing an H. Meaning, if Shahnaz Bibi had written it like Mrs. Darr was claiming, she misspelled her own name.

Then, a couple of weeks after Mrs. Darr announced that the woman had resigned, the school sent greeting cards to offer them parting notes wishing them well for the future.

That alone was, quote, "inappropriate for the school to do," the auditor writes, given that the employees were adamant that they hadn't resigned.

But on top of it, in the greeting card Adderley sent to Shahnaz Bibi, Shahnaz's name is also spelled incorrectly.

It's missing an H, the same H that was missing on her alleged resignation letter.

According to the report, when the auditors tried to interview Mrs. Darr for their investigation, she canceled on them four times.

The report says the lawyers for Adderley insisted, in an email, that Mrs. Darr and the school had, quote, substantial evidence, witness testimony, and forensic that she had not forged the resignation letters.

But they never provided any of it to the audit team.

Adderley's lawyers had advised Mrs. Darr not to participate in the investigation since the school was in a legal fight with the TAs.

The conclusion of the inquiry, the auditors write, is that although they found no direct proof confirming that the resignation letters were fabricated by Rizvana Darr herself --

BRIAN REED

(READING) "The manner and conduct in how she has chosen to deal with the resignations and this audit investigation is concerning and undoubtedly calls her integrity into question."

Wow.

"We have determined that the resignation letters have been falsified.

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it is reasonable to conclude that Mrs. Darr may have been involved in the fabrication of the resignation letters in order to terminate the contracts of employment of four individuals who each have an unresolved grievance raised against her.

Birmingham Audit will be seeking the Directorate's agreement to refer the matter to the police."

HAMZA SYED

Wow.

BRIAN REED

Wow.

It's so dramatic.

HAMZA SYED

There you go.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

This was new to us, a bombshell.

The city of Birmingham was all over this case.

Their auditors have been scrutinizing it for months, down to a graphological analysis of greeting cards.

They determined that the resignation letters were fabricated, that Mrs. Darr might have been involved in refabricating them.

And as a result, they'd sicced the police on Mrs. Darr.

In the weeks before the Trojan Horse letter appeared, at the request of the City Council, Rizvana Darr was facing a possible criminal investigation.

HAMZA SYED

Mate, that's incredible.

She was in big trouble.

BRIAN REED

What we discovered in this audit report was proof that the Birmingham City Council, Albert Bore's Birmingham City Council, was intimately familiar with the Adderley case before the Trojan Horse letter ever appeared.

So when they read the Trojan Horse letter, their investigators had already concluded that the scheme to overthrow Rizvana Darr as head teacher, the most detailed example of Operation Trojan Horse, was based on the evidence they'd seen not believable.

They'd found no plot against her.

Quite the opposite.

They thought, if anything, Mrs. Darr may have been the one who had plotted to oust her colleagues.

They thought Mrs. Darr was out there possibly planting fake letters.

BRIAN REED

Dude, this is something.

This is something.

The city knew all this.

BRIAN REED

Next time on The Trojan Horse Affair, The Meeting and the Mole.

[MUSIC]

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Hamza Syed and me, along with Rebecca Laks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig, additional editing by Ira Glass and by our contributing editor Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Mellor with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.

Sound design mixing and music supervision by Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Ndeye Thioubou.

Executive assistant is Alberto De Leon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.

HAMZA SYED

Special Thanks to Valerie Caesar, Leonardo Faierman and Phoebe Wang.

BRIAN REED

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.
Part 4

The Meeting and the Mole

A series of frustrating interviews with Birmingham politicians leaves Brian and Hamza wondering if crucial information about the Trojan Horse letter was kept from officials in London. Then one rainy Friday afternoon, Brian hears back from a government source who wants to meet right away.
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00:00 / 47:34

The Trojan Horse Affair

Part 4

Transcript

BRIAN REED

As we uncovered more clues about who could have written the Trojan Horse letter, every so often, Hamza and I would go back and reread the letter itself to see whether the new information we were finding unlocked any of the letter's secrets.

We definitely did that after we got a hold of the audit report.

BRIAN REED

And that's the audit report.

[POOF]

BRIAN REED

This is the Birmingham City council's report about whether headteacher Rizvana Darr had faked resignation letters from four teaching assistants at her school, Adderley Primary.

The audit report, remember, predated the Trojan Horse letter.

And so after digesting the audit, Hamza and I gave the Trojan Horse letter another look.

HAMZA SYED

Oh my god.

BRIAN REED

Hamza started shaking his head.

HAMZA SYED

Let me tell you something.

BRIAN REED

The audit report, the fact of it, it looked like it had been incorporated right into the Trojan Horse letter.

Get a load of step 4 of the plot, Hamza says to me.

Step 4 is the part of the letter that says you're supposed to get TAs to cook up allegations against the headteacher in order to spark an investigation.

HAMZA SYED

To add credibility to the issue, it is always better to push for an external council investigation.

It is also --

BRIAN REED

That's the audit report.

BRIAN REED

What hadn't jumped out at us until we read the audit is that according to the letter, the TAs are supposed to push for a specific type of inquiry into the headteacher they're targeting, an external council investigation.

The audit investigation we just read was exactly that, an external council investigation into Rizvana Darr that the TAs at Adderley had asked for and participated in.

And step 4 continues.

HAMZA SYED

"We have Sally here who always pushes on our behalf.

And she has helped us a lot."

BRIAN REED

Sally is a name that's mentioned a bunch throughout the Trojan Horse letter, eight times to be precise.

That's far more than anyone else, aside from Tahir Alam, the supposed kingpin of the scheme who was also mentioned eight times.

In the world of the letter, Sally is a key accomplice to Tahir's in Operation Trojan Horse.

The letter describes her as a Birmingham City Council officer who's a mole essentially, aiding the jihad from inside the upper ranks of the local government.

"Sally has been very supportive and has helped our agenda progress," the author writes.

According to the letter, once the TAs make false allegations against the headteacher they're working to unseat, Sally is the one who makes sure the city council launches an external investigation into that headteacher.

BRIAN REED

So it's like any audit report you might see, any investigation from the council you might see, you know, especially something with this woman Sally's name on it, it's just a sham part of this plot, basically.

HAMZA SYED

It's a sham.

BRIAN REED

The name of the council officer who commissioned the audit investigation into Rizvana Darr?

Sally.

BRIAN REED

Let me look at the audit report.

Where's her name on there?

Let me see.

Yeah, I mean, Sally Taylor's the directorate.

She's head of the directorate.

Her name's on the bottom of the audit report here.

HAMZA SYED

Right.

BRIAN REED

Sally Taylor was a high ranking but inconspicuous bureaucrat at Birmingham City Council.

She was the person in charge of managing the city's schools during the Adderley dispute.

When the TAs reported to Birmingham City Council that Mrs. Darr might have falsified their resignation letters, it was Sally who received those complaints.

It was Sally who got the council's audit team to investigate the complaints.

And when the council decided to get the police involved, Sally was also a part of that.

The Trojan Horse letter makes it seem like she did all of that duplicitous in league with the Trojan Horse plotters.

HAMZA SYED

I mean, it's not even that clever.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

The Trojan Horse letter looks to us to be taking direct aim at one of Birmingham City Council's own staffers, ham handedly trying to make the audit investigation, which was so blisteringly critical of Rizvana Darr, seem rigged.

The Birmingham City Council is supposed to have fallen for this and considered the letter a real Islamist threat?

HAMZA SYED

It's ridiculous, actually.

BRIAN REED

What happened?

What happened?

Why is everybody looking away from this?

It's right here.

It's in the document.

BRIAN REED

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Brian Reed.

HAMZA SYED

I'm Hamza Syed.

BRIAN REED

This is "The Trojan Horse Affair."

Armed with the audit investigation, which officials had retracted and were committed to keeping reporters like us from seeing, we went back to Birmingham City Council, this time to the council's current deputy leader, a woman named Brigid Jones.

I know, I know, it's spelled differently though.

We went to Brigid Jones because during the Trojan Horse affair, she was the elected official who oversaw school policy.

And she was in charge of the Birmingham City Council's response to the Trojan Horse letter.

Albert Bore introduced us to her, actually.

Brigid Jones was a protege of his, a rising star in the local Labour Party, who, like Bore, is a former physicist.

Councilor Bore told his deputy leader Jones would have much more on-the-ground knowledge of how the city dealt with the letter.

So I asked her, first question.

BRIAN REED

When you got the Trojan Horse letter and you guys started discussing it here in the council, when was the first conversation you or the people at the council had about Adderley Primary School.

BRIGID JONES

Adderley, I don't think we had conversations for Adderley specifically for some time.

BRIAN REED

I told Brigid Jones, we know about the audit report.

We know when you received the Trojan Horse letter, the council had just finished an investigation Rizvana Darr and the resignations at Adderley.

BRIAN REED

So I'm wondering, what were the first conversations you had when you read the Trojan Horse letter?

And it's all about Adderley.

And you guys have just finished this audit.

BRIGID JONES

I wasn't personally involved in any of that audit work.

So just explain the politician versus the officer split.

We --

BRIAN REED

She knew about the audit investigation.

She knew what we were talking about.

But she explained, she's a politician, an elected official.

Much of the council's business, such as audits, is done by officers who aren't elected.

So even though Brigid Jones was the council member in charge of education and schools, she says an audit would rarely come to her awareness.

BRIAN REED

Now this one, one of the recommendations of it was that the matter be referred to the police.

So you wouldn't be aware of that even?

BRIGID JONES

Gosh you're asking, it was about four years ago now.

To be honest with you, I'd have to go back and look at my records.

BRIAN REED

So you don't remember talking about Adderley at length when the Trojan Horse letter came in?

BRIGID JONES

The focus when the Trojan Horse letter came in, we looked at it as a whole.

So it was more of a question as to whether this kind of thing was systematically happening.

HAMZA SYED

But the letter as a whole begins by listing examples, right, of schools where this plot was underway, with Adderley being the one that was discussed at greatest length.

So if you look at the letter as a whole, when did the council become aware that the Adderley case, we had just investigated this?

BRIGID JONES

I don't think I personally was aware that we had had that audit investigation so quickly beforehand.

BRIAN REED

You don't know when you became aware of that?

BRIGID JONES

For me personally, quite some time afterwards, I think, many, many months from memory, so --

BRIAN REED

The implication of what Brigid Jones was telling us is that as she was managing the fallout from the Trojan Horse letter, council officers didn't bother to share this information about Adderley with her.

But they never even mentioned the audit investigation to her for months, which is mind-boggling.

Councilor Jones was having meeting after meeting about the letter.

As the national government in London bore down on Birmingham City Council, castigating local officials for allowing a possible Islamic plot to spread on their watch, Brigid Jones offered her resignation to Albert Bore, which he refused.

She testified in front of Parliament twice about the council's handling of it.

As far as Brigid Jones could remember, through much of that, through these stressful Trojan Horse-related events, her colleagues never thought to say to her, hey, by the way, you know that intricate part of the Trojan Horse letter that mentions the headteacher at Adderley and bizarre resignations,

we actually just asked the police to look into those.

Because our auditors think the headteacher might be a phony letter writer, just FYI.

BRIGID JONES

Well, I didn't know that information was there.

BRIAN REED

How was that possible?

In fact, this is so important.

It's so relevant to this letter.

That's really shocking.

BRIGID JONES

Psychic.

BRIAN REED

But why wouldn't --

BRIAN REED

But she didn't need to be.

Sally Taylor, the council education director who commissioned and signed off on the investigation into Adderley, the person the letter claims is a mole, she and Councilor Jones worked together all the time.

They had weekly meetings about schools.

BRIAN REED

She wouldn't update you that we have a headteacher who's been accused of fraud and we're referring to matter to the police?

BRIGID JONES

So that kind of thing would usually come to a briefing.

But I do not remember that coming to any of my briefings.

I don't remember this anyway.

You've got to remember, this was --

HAMZA SYED

A couple of things were about to happen in his conversation with Deputy Leader Brigid Jones.

BRIAN REED

We can show you.

HAMZA SYED

Brian was about to pull from his backpack some council correspondence we had obtained, showing that Sally Taylor definitely was talking about the Rizvana Darr investigation in the weeks before the Trojan Horse letter showed up, to which Brigid Jones would reply --

BRIGID JONES

Where did you get these?

HAMZA SYED

-- "Where get these?" she'd say.

BRIAN REED

From reporting.

I mean, this is a letter from Sally Taylor, again, November --

HAMZA SYED

Brigid Jones would look at this official correspondence from Sally Taylor in which Sally is writing in November 2013, the same month the Trojan Horse appeared, about the audit investigation into Rizvana Darr and how the council were referring the Adderley matter to the police.

But Councilor Jones would say, again, yeah, that's Sally's thing.

I wouldn't necessarily know about that.

We would then point out to Brigid Jones, you had weekly meetings with Sally Taylor.

And she's named in the Trojan Horse era.

And Bridget Jones would interrupt.

BRIGID JONES

That's important to say.

Sally is not named in the Trojan Horse --

HAMZA SYED

Sally Turner is named in the Trojan Horse letter, who we --

HAMZA SYED

Which is a weird bone for her to pick because it's technically true.

The one time the letter mentioned Sally's last name, it says Turner, not Taylor.

But we have a document produced by the council which says right in it, the letter is probably referring to Sally Taylor because there was no Sally Turner who worked there.

Brigid Jones would remain steadfast.

She said she recalled no conversation from this time about Adderley Primary School, not with Sally, not with anyone at all.

BRIAN REED

At one point during this exchange, Brigid Jones said something that still makes me uneasy.

BRIGID JONES

So it's a really interesting line of questioning because nobody has ever asked me about Adderley before.

BRIAN REED

She got this mildly perturbed expression on her face.

BRIAN REED

You look a little confused.

BRIGID JONES

It's just a very unusual line of questioning.

HAMZA SYED

Why?

We're investigating the Trojan Horse letter and one of the primary claims made within, Birmingham City Council did an extensive audit into it and arrived at a complete opposite conclusion weeks before the Trojan Horse letter.

So it's not really unusual for us, and --

BRIAN REED

It seems obvious to us.

HAMZA SYED

Can you see the connection?

BRIGID JONES

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

And the reason why we're interested in this.

BRIGID JONES

Yeah.

It's just, you're asking me about something nobody's ever asked me about before.

HAMZA SYED

That in itself is like pretty telling.

What were people concerned about.

There was like two years of hell with this letter.

Why did no one at any point go actually, hang on a minute, let's look at the claims in the actual letter.

BRIGID JONES

Ask all the other journalists.

BRIAN REED

I think that's a rather revealing comment from Brigid Jones, "ask all the other journalists."

When she scheduled this interview with us, she clearly did not expect us to bring up Adderley Primary School in this way.

BRIGID JONES

I am going to have to go, I'm afraid, because I've got some more visitors coming in.

I'm sorry I can't help anymore.

BRIAN REED

There is a strange Adderley-shaped blindspot in coverage of the Trojan Horse affair.

Even people who are actively trying to reshape the Trojan Horse narrative years later sidestep that school.

Serious, well-intentioned people, who have done good work to correct the record of the Trojan Horse affair, even they have looked past the Adderley case.

A big Guardian feature story several years on, a well-researched book by academics, a docuplay based on interviews with many of the same people we've talked to, including Brigid Jones, which has toured the country, none of these discusses the Adderley resignation dispute or Rizvana Darr.

Just last year, the BBC aired a three-part investigative series about Operation Trojan Horse on a show that's called The Corrections, whose entire premise is to put right stories the media got wrong.

The first episode is called "The Anonymous Letter."

And still, the words "Adderley" or "Rizvana Darr" do not appear in any of the 20-odd minute episodes.

When the BBC does briefly discuss the letter's origin, they treat it like a joke.

The reporter interviews a TV producer who compares the story to a Scooby Doo caper where you expect to discover the answer at the end.

And the reporter says --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

I'm going to disappoint you.

There are many rumors about who authored that letter.

Unfortunately, none that are fit to print.

What -- oh.

BRIAN REED

This averting of the national gaze from Adderley, I think it's why politicians like Albert Bore and Brigid Jones have been able to equivocate, why misconceptions have festered, why the Trojan Horse affair has eluded genuine understanding all these years.

The way nearly everyone else talks about this story, it's powerful.

At times, it's made me question how Hamza and I are approaching it.

HAMZA SYED

Imagine we got it wrong.

BRIAN REED

I do imagine that.

You don't.

I do.

BRIAN REED

I have had moments when I've said to myself, we've got to be the ones thinking about this backwards.

There must be something I'm misunderstanding as a foreigner relatively new to this event.

And am I making just an epic miscalculation by casting my lot with this lapsed, often overconfident doctor squatting in his parents' apartment.

BRIAN REED

The fact that so many people have looked into this independently from the cops to counterterror expert from Scotland Yard to an independent investigator for the council to other reporters, you know, it makes you wonder if maybe you're out of your mind.

Like what why are we --

that's enough to make me second guess.

HAMZA SYED

It makes me second guess them.

BRIAN REED

(SINGING) And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green.

HAMZA SYED

This is what I'm escorting to Sally Taylor's house first thing in the morning.

BRIAN REED

(SINGING) Nor shall my soul.

BRIAN REED

We're in the English countryside.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, Brian saw some bushes and erupted.

HAMZA SYED

Are you listening to yourself?

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

You are just the most ridiculous human being, you know, any given day --

HAMZA SYED

Sally Taylor didn't talk to us.

Not this day, not any of the days we've knocked on the door, dropped letters at her house, written to her on Facebook, emailed her.

We got a single email back, quote, "I am no longer employed by Birmingham City Council.

I've provided extensive information to the various inquiries into the matters you referred to," she wrote, "and therefore have decided not to meet with you.

Accordingly, I trust you will respect my wishes not to receive or enter into any further correspondence or communication with you."

So we're left with Brigid Jones' word, as far as she recalled, Sally Taylor had not told her about the investigation into Adderley, which raised a disquieting possibility.

If Sally Taylor hadn't passed along that critical intel to someone like Brigid Jones, then it's possible that information also didn't make it up the chain to someone even more important, by far the most powerful person responsible for dealing with the Trojan Horse affair --

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

Now I know, Mr. Speaker, that there are some distinguished citizens in this country who have put on their cause a poster or sticker saying bollocks to Brexit.

HAMZA SYED

-- Michael Gove.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

But we now know from Labor's own frontbench that their official Brexit position is bollocks.

[LAUGHTER]

HAMZA SYED

Michael Gove was Britain's Secretary of State for Education when the Trojan Horse letter appeared.

He's a prominent figure in the Conservative Party.

Over the years, he's held several cabinet posts, run for prime minister.

He's currently an influential member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's cabinet.

Johnson put him in charge of executing Brexit, a serious responsibility --

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

In a word, which in Spanish translates as cojones --

HAMZA SYED

-- which he's debating here in parliament.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

-- and in English rhymes with Rolex.

Happy to give way.

HAMZA SYED

But there's more to this man than testicle euphemisms.

Michael Gove captained the country's response to the Trojan Horse affair.

Without Gove's urgent briefings to Parliament, the cabinet, the press about the extremist threat winding through our schools, without his decision to call in the former counter-terror chief for Britain, the Trojan Horse might have been a very different affair.

So it was important to know what, if anything, he was told about the Adderley audit report and its connection to the Trojan Horse affair.

That's after the break.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

To figure out what Michael Gove knew about the Trojan Horse letter and when he knew it, Brian and I came to focus on a particular meeting, a meeting which, to us, appear to have determined the fate of the letter.

We've been calling the meeting, inventively, the Bore Gove meeting, because it's between the then leader of Birmingham City Council, Sir Albert Bore, who we'd had that frustrating interview with in our first week reporting, and Education Secretary Michael Gove.

The Bore Gove meeting occurred on February 12, 2014.

On that day, Michael Gove summoned Albert Bore to London to discuss the Trojan Horse letter and the potential plot that was underway in Birmingham schools.

Just looking at the chronology of events, this is the day when everything seems to change.

Before this meeting, there was relative calm.

The Trojan Horse that was not public.

There was no media frenzy, no special investigators.

Before the Bore Gove meeting, it's possible the letter could have been stuffed away and forgotten in a dusty filing cabinet in Birmingham.

But after the Bore Gove meeting on February 12, that's when Michael Gove began pushing for sweeping intervention in Birmingham.

The letter hit the press and off it all went.

Now, the fact that Michael Gove was involved in a meeting that ushered in an onslaught against Britain's Muslims is not surprising at all.

The right honorable gentleman Michael Gove has been referred to as one of our country's most high-profile islamophobes.

He would reject this label, but it's one he's been awarded by too many of his peers and colleagues to ignore.

Conservative columnist Peter Osborne, who's known Gove for more than 20 years, described him as, quote, "the unsung commander-in-chief of the islamophobes inside the Conservative "Party.

The most senior Muslim politician in the Conservative Party, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi who worked alongside Michael Gove in the cabinet described his views on Islam as "extremist" and said that he'd radicalized --

she used that word with a bit of tongue-in-cheek -- radicalized her party and the prime minister against Muslims.

Gove sees Muslims as uniquely prone to violence and anti-democratic ideas through the ideology of Islamism, which he's preoccupied with.

I know this because he wrote an entire book about it called Celsius 7/7, a reference to the London tube and bus bombings on July 7, 2005.

Not everyone enjoyed the book.

A prominent historian described it this way in a book review, quote, "A confused epic of simplistic incomprehension riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any of the texts I've come across in some two decades of reviewing books on this subject," end quote.

You can understand then why people have often pointed to Michael Gove as the boogeyman of the Trojan Horse scandal, saying that because of his preconceptions about Muslims, he was either willing to believe in the Trojan Horse letter, no matter how blatantly shoddy a piece of evidence it was,

or that he used the letters cynically without investigating its authenticity to whip the country up against the Islamist threat he's so focused on.

BRIAN REED

We knew from the Birmingham City council's audit report that the council had already debunked the most detailed example of Operation Trojan Horse.

So the obvious question was, what went down in the Bore Gove meeting on February 12?

It seems like that's where the council would have told Michael Gove about the Adderley audit.

When we'd met with Albert Bore, we'd asked him, what happened at that meeting?

ALBERT BORE

Well, I have difficulty in recollecting absolutely.

BRIAN REED

Albert Bore spoke of his meeting with Michael Gove as if it were a theoretical event and he was imagining how it might have gone had it taken place.

ALBERT BORE

We'd have had put before us the Trojan Horse letter.

And we'd have had questions about, what have you been doing?

We'd have given an account of ourselves.

And then government would have decided to take whatever action it wanted to take.

BRIAN REED

We asked him, who else was there?

ALBERT BORE

It was myself, I'm presuming, and Brigid, I'm presuming.

BRIAN REED

But when we went to Brigid --

BRIAN REED

Were you at the meeting on February 12 with Michael Gove?

BRIGID JONES

No.

BRIAN REED

Somehow, this consequential meeting between Albert Bore and one of the most powerful people in the country, a meeting that most definitely happened in real life, no one we spoke to --

Albert Bore, Brigid Jones, top council officer Peter Hay was able to recall it --

not what was said, not who was there, not even if they themselves were there.

BRIAN REED

Were at the meeting with Michael Gove in February 12?

PETER HAY

I was.

BRIAN REED

Can you tell us about that meeting?

PETER HAY

Actually, I don't think I went to the first one.

ALBERT BORE

It was Brigid Jones, Peter Hay and the then --

BRIAN REED

Brigid Jones says she wasn't there.

Are you sure she was there?

ALBERT BORE

I don't know.

HAMZA SYED

Were you briefed about it when they got back?

PETER HAY

I would have been, by Brigid, yes.

BRIGID JONES

I was not there.

ALBERT BORE

Whoever was at that Michael Gove meeting beyond myself was -- who was the chief executive of that meeting?

BRIAN REED

I don't know.

You were the one at the meeting.

I wasn't there.

BRIAN REED

We could not for the life of us get anyone to elucidate the details of this meeting.

No one at the meeting from the DFE side would talk.

And Michael Gove has not responded to our multiple requests for an interview about the Trojan Horse affair.

Maybe everyone genuinely did have collective amnesia about this one meeting.

But a government meeting produces minutes, a tiresome byproduct until they're all you've got and then they become gold.

We went after them.

We put in a Freedom of Information request to the DFE for their minutes of the Bore Gove meeting.

They said that information was exempt and didn't give it to us.

When we requested the same minutes from Birmingham City Council, it got comical.

They came up with a bunch of cockamamie reasons to deny us.

Then when I questioned those, they went dark on us for months and months, far beyond statutory deadlines.

I got the Information Commissioner involved, the regulator in charge of FOIs, who agreed the council wasn't acting right.

But the council stalled with them too.

When I visited the council offices to find out what the problem was, employees there refused to come out and talk to me.

There was a phone call where I got more emotional than I'd like to admit about the importance of freedom of information laws to democracy.

So much time went by in our pursuit of these Bore Gove minutes that Britain installed a new prime minister, Brexit was finalized --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Demontford University Gospel Choir.

BRIAN REED

-- and Hamza graduated from journalism school.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

(SINGING) [INAUDIBLE]

BRIAN REED

His classmates had their families at the ceremony cheering them on.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Danielle Serrano.

[CHEERING]

BRIAN REED

Hamza had only me.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Winner of the Channel Four Prize, Hamza Syed.

BRIAN REED

He got an award.

I was proud.

[APPLAUSE]

[WHISTLE]

HAMZA SYED

Once I became an award-winning journalist, Brian and I were able to nail down one measly, but important fact about the meeting between Michael Gove and Albert Bore.

We were able to figure out from a council record we got who else from Birmingham City Council was present.

We learned it was just one other person, one other representative from the council besides Albert Bore, an officer in charge of education for Birmingham, one Sally Taylor.

The same Sally Taylor who was implicated by the Trojan Horse letter as a double agent was the person briefing Michael Gove about the Trojan Horse letter.

Sally, the supposed backstabbing sneaky Salafi sympathizer Sally, she was in the room with Michael Gove.

Did no one there acknowledge this?

And did they not talk about Adderley?

Sally was the person who had commissioned the audit investigation into Adderley?

Did she not bring that up, even just to clear her name to show the plot wasn't real, that she wasn't a mole in their midst?

We didn't know and had scant hope of finding out.

By this point, most of our council contacts were disappearing on us.

Deputy Leader Brigid Jones told us to stay in touch, but despite many messages and a dialogue with the press office, she did not respond for years.

Ian Kershaw, the council's specially appointed Trojan Horse investigator, who was so bothered after we asked about Adderley, didn't even reply to Brian's messages trying to reimburse him as promised for his overnight stay on a canal boat in Birmingham when he came for our interview.

And Sally Taylor's boss, Peter Hay, saying he was under pressure from the council, tried to retract his interviews with us, which is not something most journalists let people do.

We weren't sure what else to try.

The only person still replying to our messages was Albert Bore.

So Brian and I figured, we might as well take another crack at him.

What's the harm?

We set up a second meeting more than a year after our first.

BRIAN REED

So there's a resignation scandal that happens at Adderley Primary School.

Are you familiar with that?

ALBERT BORE

Familiar --

BRIAN REED

For the Trojan Horse letter.

ALBERT BORE

-- now.

I might have --

HAMZA SYED

We ran through all the stuff we'd learned since we last seen Councilor Bore, chiefly, the council's audit investigation into the Adderley case.

Brian pulled documents from his orange backpack.

BRIAN REED

The internal audit report by the city council said these resignation letters were falsified and that they were likely falsified by the headteacher.

Sally Taylor had referred and the council had referred the matter to the police.

ALBERT BORE

Sally Taylor had?

HAMZA SYED

Sally Taylor had, Councilor Bore asked?

BRIAN REED

Yes.

ALBERT BORE

In an opposite point --

BRIAN REED

Yes.

ALBERT BORE

-- to the Trojan horse letter, yeah.

BRIAN REED

Is this the first you're hearing about this?

Because --

HAMZA SYED

Really?

ALBERT BORE

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

You've really never heard of any of this?

ALBERT BORE

No, no, I have no memory whatsoever of there being an audit investigation one month prior to the Trojan Horse letter into Adderley school.

Now, I can see very much, not just the relevance, but the huge importance of this.

BRIAN REED

I'm glad you can.

We have the sense that the whole Trojan Horse saga could have gone very differently.

ALBERT BORE

I agree with you.

BRIAN REED

So you agree with that?

ALBERT BORE

I agree with that.

If I had known about this --

HAMZA SYED

Councilor Bore gestured toward Sally Taylor's letter about the audit investigation.

ALBERT BORE

-- which spoke about a totally opposite scenario to the Trojan Horse letter, we would have had a different story to tell to the Department for Education.

HAMZA SYED

Is this issue included in the reports by investigators Ian Kershaw and Peter Clark, Albert Bore asked us?

Albert Bore, the leader of the Birmingham City Council that hired Ian Kershaw and gave evidence to Peter Clarke.

Yes, but only minimally, we told him, like a few lines.

BRIAN REED

Why are you laughing?

ALBERT BORE

Well, it's just making the whole thing even more incredible.

What you're doing this afternoon is providing me with information which I'm more and more convinced I did not know about until you spoke about it this afternoon.

I'm shocked.

I have to say, as emphatically as I can, that I have no knowledge of an audit investigation into Adderley school.

I'm surprised that there wasn't someone in the city council who might have said, hold on, hold on, you need to know about this.

It worries me.

BRIAN REED

But Sally was in the meeting with Michael Gove.

So did she not bring this up with Michael Gove?

ALBERT BORE

Not to -- not that I can recall.

BRIAN REED

She really didn't bring it up?

ALBERT BORE

My recollection is no.

BRIAN REED

What did you talk about in the meeting then?

Did you say like, there's four schools where plot is underway, what's happening at those schools?

Wouldn't that be what you would talk about?

ALBERT BORE

I suspect we did talk about matters in that way.

BRIAN REED

What you guys are talking about, if this is true, Sally Taylor has a lot to answer for.

This is all in her head.

I mean, you know what I mean?

For months.

ALBERT BORE

No, no it's not just in her head.

It's in writing.

BRIAN REED

Can we tell you where we think this all points?

Adderley Primary School.

Everything we found points to the fact that this Trojan Horse letter was not a true whistleblower about an issue in --

does that make sense?

That it was used to direct attention away from a police fraud investigation.

HAMZA SYED

And it worked.

ALBERT BORE

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

Just so you know, like we are now well into a year of trying to get the minutes from that meeting from the city council through an FOI request.

So, I mean, I would love to clear this up since you don't have a memory of it, but the city council is actively withholding that information.

ALBERT BORE

If there was a briefing for the meeting, there would have been a briefing report for that meeting.

I don't have access to those computer files.

BRIAN REED

Someone in the city council does.

They've reviewed them.

ALBERT BORE

Well, I can only conclude though that someone doesn't want to make them available because there is something possibly that they don't want others to know about.

BRIAN REED

Can you get them for us?

ALBERT BORE

I'm rather interested myself to have a look at all of it.

BRIAN REED

Seems like it, yeah.

It would help clear this up.

ALBERT BORE

I find what you're telling me here this afternoon disturbing.

What you're describing to me is a council which I would now say is operating with motives which I do not understand.

There is an agenda here, which a number of people seem to have been complicit in.

I don't think I've found myself in a position as I would say as bad as this.

BRIAN REED

Councilor Bore had to go.

He left us alone inside Council House dumbstruck.

HAMZA SYED

(WHISPERING) Oh my fucking god, mate.

I can't believe what's fucking happening here, mate.

I cannot believe it.

BRIAN REED

Hamza started whispering.

I went to shut the door so the council staff outside wouldn't see my colleague talking to himself.

HAMZA SYED

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Can you believe this?

Whew.

BRIAN REED

You OK there?

HAMZA SYED

(WHISPERING) Oh my god, I cannot believe the words that fell out of his mouth today.

Have you ever been in a room with something like that going down?

I was like, is this real?

The man literally said that this had the capacity to change the entire trajectory of the Trojan Horse.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

It's the first time someone inside of this has seen what we've seen and agreed with it.

He's seen what we've seen.

HAMZA SYED

A couple of minutes later --

HAMZA SYED

OK.

BRIAN REED

He did understand it pretty quickly.

HAMZA SYED

-- out on Temple Street, the high subsided a little.

We thought about it.

With Brigid Jones, we turned up with the same evidence, the same questions, and she seemed off guard the whole time.

Albert Bore, presented with the same stuff --

BRIAN REED

There was just a bit of a quick grasp of the entire narrative.

HAMZA SYED

It was fucking rapid.

We didn't even have to push.

Like with Brigid, we had to keep pulling her teeth, pulling her teeth, pulling her teeth before she just gave us a bit of blood, right?

Him, he stabbed himself in the face as soon as he walked in.

It was crazy.

I was like, at least give us a chance.

No, my man was ready.

HAMZA SYED

This is the same Albert Bore who one year ago riled me up with talks of atmosphere and ethos and segregated PE.

But now, he tossed aside his previous stance so quickly.

HAMZA SYED

Here's what I really think happened.

He's already talked to Brigid.

He already knows exactly the questions that we had.

HAMZA SYED

Councilor Bore later told us he hadn't talked to Brigid ahead of time.

But, whatever, here was a politician telling us that what we'd unearthed was putting him in one of the worst messes of his 40-year political career, raising the possibility of a cover-up within the council while he was leading it

and really throwing some heavy blame on Sally Taylor and her fellow bureaucrats.

Brian did check in with Sally Taylor one more time and told her, we know she said not to ever communicate with her again, but he just wanted to impress on her the seriousness of what council leadership was claiming, that she didn't share the Adderley audit report.

And upon receiving this email, Sally Taylor called us back and spoke at -- just kidding.

She never replied.

BRIAN REED

Then, one rainy Friday, a few weeks after our second meeting with him, we heard from Albert Bore again.

Go to the side entrance of Council House at 5 o'clock today, he told us, under the archway, next to the green guard house.

We did.

And he appeared and led us to a room inside.

BRIAN REED

Wait, what, what?

You're making a weird face.

ALBERT BORE

Well, you might be surprised as well that I managed to do --

BRIAN REED

I noticed he was clutching some sheets of paper.

ALBERT BORE

I have got two things, three things.

I have got the briefing note that went to Michael Gove.

BRIAN REED

Oh.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, wow.

OK.

BRIAN REED

OK.

ALBERT BORE

I have the letter that accompanied that briefing note from me to Michael Gove.

And I have the notes of that Michael Gove meeting.

BRIAN REED

OK.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, wow, OK, OK.

BRIAN REED

Is that what you have right here in front of you?

ALBERT BORE

It is indeed what I have in front of me.

BRIAN REED

Are you willing to share it?

ALBERT BORE

I probably am.

You have to give me a little while.

BRIAN REED

We've been waiting for a year to hear this information.

ALBERT BORE

I know.

BRIAN REED

So we can wait another few seconds.

ALBERT BORE

Now you know.

So this was a briefing note --

BRIAN REED

Albert Bore starts reading a briefing note put together for him on February 6, 2014 in preparation for the meeting a week later in London.

And it was sent to Michael Gove ahead of time as well.

One by one, the council goes through specific schools the Trojan Horse letter claimed were being infiltrated by plotters and provides information about what the city council knew was actually happening with each --

Regent's Park, Salty, and --

Orderly School.

BRIAN REED

Which school, sir?

ALBERT BORE

Orderly --

Adderley, sorry.

BRIAN REED

Adderley, waiting for that one.

ALBERT BORE

Adderley.

BRIAN REED

Here's what the council sent to Michael Gove and the Department for Education about that school six days before their February 12 meeting.

ALBERT BORE

Adderley School is referred to in the Trojan Horse document.

The school was inspected in January 2012 and was graded as good with an outstanding judgment for leadership and management.

In 21st of December, which I presume is 2012, four support staff claimed through the city council whistleblowing policy that the headteacher falsified their resignation letters and they had never resigned.

The service director asked audit to investigate.

And they reported, that is audit reported, and said that in their view, there had been fraudulent activity and handed the report to the police.

HAMZA SYED

I mean, that is the audit report.

ALBERT BORE

That's right.

HAMZA SYED

That's the audit report and its conclusions.

That is the audit report.

ALBERT BORE

Yeah, that is the audit one that you referred to.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, the one you told us you'd never been briefed on before we explained it to you, the information you said could have changed everything had only you been told it.

It's right here in a briefing document prepared for you.

ALBERT BORE

Well, it's not spelt out particularly.

I can read it out --

BRIAN REED

He tosses the brief across the table to me.

Then he turns to notes taken by Sally Taylor of what was said in the meeting itself, the meeting on February 12 with Michael Gove in London, the meeting we've been working for so long to try and get inside, the meeting that we think set the Trojan Horse letter on its fateful path.

This is what officials said in the February 12 meeting about the Trojan Horse letter.

ALBERT BORE

The police recommendation, including the counter-terrorism unit, was that the document was bogus.

BRIAN REED

That's what it says there?

HAMZA SYED

That's the word bogus.

BRIAN REED

These are minutes of the meeting with Michael Gove?

ALBERT BORE

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

I scanned the briefing note Councilor Bore had just tossed me.

I could see the council had described the Trojan Horse letter to Michael Gove and the DFE this way.

Quote, "There is a serious credibility gap regarding the document.

The document contains serious factual inaccuracies and, in a number of areas, contradictions," end quote.

The council also explains that their auditors had investigated a number of allegations in the letter and, quote, "come to a clear view that there was no basis to these."

[MUSIC]

The council determined the Trojan horse letter was bogus.

Of course they did.

The council told Michael Gove to his face the counter-terror police thought it was bogus.

Of course they did.

Sally Taylor jotted down notes to memorialize that.

Of course she did.

She shared what her department knew with the politicians.

Her department compiled pages of facts showing what was actually going on in Birmingham schools and that the letter wasn't to be trusted.

And she and her colleagues briefed Albert Bore and Michael Gove about the fraud investigation into Adderley Primary School.

BRIAN REED

So you guys knew.

You knew this was a fake letter.

ALBERT BORE

Well, no one was wanting to say it was a fake letter.

BRIAN REED

Why not?

HAMZA SYED

And for the record, you did say several times in the media, is a fake, it's a hoax.

ALBERT BORE

Sure, sure, but, I mean, when you're given a snippet of the Trojan Horse document, you just --

it conjures up a lot of issues, doesn't it?

Is it a fake letter?

Is it not a fake letter?

What was it produced for?

What was the purpose of it?

Who produced it?

[MUSIC STOPS]

BRIAN REED

Nah, nah, we're not doing this again.

Councilor Bore is correct that Adderley isn't given particular attention in the briefing note.

It's bullet pointed along with a handful of other schools.

And, I get it, the briefing note doesn't say, "the Trojan Horse letter came from Adderley."

But something doesn't add up about the story that Albert Bore and Brigid Jones have been telling us.

Brigid Jones said in our interview that she didn't recall being informed about the audit investigation into Adderley by Sally Taylor or anyone else until well after the Trojan Horse letter arrived.

But we eventually got a hold of briefing documents showing that Sally Taylor and council staff did hold briefings for Brigid Jones where they talked about the Adderley audit, not once, but twice at least before the Trojan Horse letter showed up.

When we emailed Deputy Leader Jones about this, she wrote back and confirmed it.

She said she went through old records and saw she had been briefed on Adderley, but that it was just one of many schools on the agenda, which is why she hadn't remembered it.

She added that she trusted Sally Taylor and had no reason to believe Sally withheld anything from her.

So, OK, no one put two and two together, I guess?

Well, there is this other detail.

We've seen evidence that after the letter arrived, a council officer who was tasked with analyzing it did point out the obvious link between the Trojan Horse letter and the Adderley resignation dispute.

According to the transcript of an interview this council officer later gave to an investigator, she says she wrote a memo about it, which she reads from in the interview.

And she says she's sure this memo would have gone to Albert Bore.

But Albert Bore tells us he has no recollection of receiving it.

And when we requested the memo from the council, they told us it does not exist.

Why wouldn't the council just tell us all this from the beginning?

And by us, I mean everybody, the public.

When the Trojan Horse letter surfaced, shouldn't they just have said, yeah, yeah, we have a good idea where this letter might have come from and we're on it.

Don't worry.

It's not a real plot.

We've been investigating parts of this so-called operation for months.

We've already called in the police.

Instead, they've gone to such great lengths to hide the fact that they once used common sense.

When we ended that third interview with Albert Bore, he said when he had more time, he wanted us to talk them through the rest of our reporting.

So the next time I was in town, I called him.

As soon as he answered, I could tell something was up.

I've got difficulties, he said.

I asked if I could start recording, but he suggested I probably shouldn't, given what he was about to tell me.

To put it rather bluntly, he said, they're trying to gag me.

There have been discussions at high levels within the council, he said.

Brigid Jones was involved.

Legal was involved.

It had been made clear to Councilor Bore that they did not want a meeting with us.

He was miffed about it, he said.

He had plans to see council lawyers soon to discuss the matter and then he'd get back in touch.

A week went by, we did not hear back from Albert Bore.

But we did hear from the council.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, can you hear me?

BRIAN REED

Yeah, hey.

I just got a letter from the council threatening an injunction.

HAMZA SYED

Same here, buddy.

We are in trouble.

HAMZA SYED

So this is where we'd landed.

The Birmingham City Council was threatening to take us to court.

They were threatening to seek an injunction from a judge that would force us to hand over our copy of the audit report and would legally muzzle us from ever speaking about its contents.

And as for the meeting on February 12, we know Sally Taylor and Albert Bore told Michael Gove that the Trojan Horse letter wasn't credible, that the police thought it was bogus, and, yet --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Allegations made and what has become known as the Trojan Horse letter suggest that children were not being kept safe in Birmingham schools.

HAMZA SYED

Bore went to treat the letter as a real threat.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

The steps we are taking today are those that we consider necessary to protect our children from extremism and to protect our nation's traditions of tolerance and liberty.

HAMZA SYED

He commissioned investigations, allowed the media to run amok with the letter.

It looked as if Michael Gove ignored evidence that the Trojan horse was a hoax so he could take advantage of it for his own purposes, so he could pretend there was a jihadist conspiracy taking place.

How tidy it would to be able to say that's what happened.

But I can't.

Because lurking in the minutes of the Bore Gove meeting on February 12 was a fact, a fact that would help explain what happened and open a whole new door to this mystery.

There was another anonymous letter writer.

What are you asking now?

Is that my letter?

Yeah, did you read that?

Yeah.

Next on The Trojan Horse Affair, a study in scarlet.

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Brian Reed and me, along with Rebecca Laks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass and by our Contributing Editor Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Fact checking and research by Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Mellor, with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.

Sound design, mixing, and music supervision by Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Ndeye Thioubou.

Executive assistant is Alberto DeLeon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.

BRIAN REED

Special thanks to Cassie Howley, Frances Swanson, Seth Lind, Matt Tierney, Stowe Nelson, Christopher Swetala, and Julie Whitaker.

HAMZA SYED

The Trojan Horse is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.
Part 5

A Study in Scarlett

Read correction: Feb. 10, 2022

Hamza and Brian learn that the Trojan Horse letter wasn’t the only unsigned letter alleging an extremist operation was afoot in Birmingham. An interview with a couple who lodged complaints against their school starts out cordially, but six hours later, the atmosphere is so tense that not even an offer of tea can smooth things over. And Hamza stops pretending he’s not angry about what he’s hearing.
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00:00 / 01:00:08

The Trojan Horse Affair

Part 5

Transcript

HAMZA SYED

So Birmingham City Council told Michael Gove that the Trojan Horse letter wasn't credible.

That counter-terrorism police had decided it was a hoax.

And yet, Michael Gove used the letter to sanction numerous high level investigations into potential extremism -- in Birmingham schools, anyway--

which raises the question, why did he do that?

Well, little did we know we'd been staring at the answer for a long time without realizing.

BRIAN REED

All right, what do we have to talk about?

Is there anything else we have to put on the wall right now?

I'm tired.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, yeah.

BRIAN REED

I feel tired.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, yeah, we do.

BRIAN REED

We do?

HAMZA SYED

We need to put up there --

HAMZA SYED

About a year before we got the minutes of the Bore-Gove meeting, Brian and I were in HQ.

It was the end of a long day of reporting.

It was so early in the process, that we're still precious about our idea of a murder wall.

We were reading counterterror chief Peter Clarke's report about his Trojan Horse investigation and picking out names and leads from there.

And I threw this one out.

HAMZA SYED

Do we have the Birmingham Humanist Society --

oh, no, sorry, but British Humanist Association up there?

HAMZA SYED

We didn't.

BRIAN REED

What is the British Humanist Society?

What the hell is this?

HAMZA SYED

Oh, I don't know.

BRIAN REED

You've never heard of this before?

HAMZA SYED

I've never heard of this before.

I have no idea.

BRIAN REED

I just can't believe the British Humanists have been brought into this.

HAMZA SYED

And yet, there they were, mentioned a few times in the Clarke report, the British Humanist Association.

According to the report, weeks before the Trojan Horse letter went public and Michael Gove sent investigators into Park View, a group called the British Humanists had been working with whistleblowers from inside the school.

HAMZA SYED

Former members of staff, for whatever reason, in the middle of all of this, going to the British Humanist Association, to complain to them about what was happening in Park View.

Now why would teachers go to them, I don't know.

I have no idea.

Why would they have a say in any of this?

Why are they in the Clarke report?

BRIAN REED

That is--

I don't know.

But I don't think -- do you really think they're--

I don't think they're worthy of putting on the wall.

HAMZA SYED

All right.

Should we put--

OK, fine, just -- hey, I'm just throwing it out there that they're mentioned in the Clarke report.

BRIAN REED

We can do an out wall over here on the other side if you want to just put them on a card, and I'll put it up there.

HAMZA SYED

Brian humored me.

He wrote British Humanists on a note card and banished it to a spot just above the light switch over by the door.

And the Humanists stayed all lonely over there in the corner.

The only time they got any attention was when my brother, Usama, made a visit home.

HAMZA SYED

You're going to follow me to HQ.

Come on.

HAMZA SYED

I showed him and my sister-in-law what I'd done with Mum and Dad's room.

HAMZA SYED

And I want your immediate reactions. This is HQ.

USAMA

What the hell.

It looks like something from A Beautiful Mind.

Let me paint a picture of what I'm seeing here.

Just a random series of strings that have been very poorly taped together.

HAMZA SYED

Most of the string action was in the center of the wall, but Usama went straight through the door and started pounding his finger on the card above the light switch.

OSAMA

These guys.

HAMZA SYED

Wait, what are you pointing to?

USAMA

The British Humanist Association.

HAMZA SYED

What do you know about them?

USAMA

I've just heard very bad things.

HAMZA SYED

Usama knew about the British Humanists from his university days.

They're a group that supports secularism in the UK.

They sound innocuous.

Their website talks about promoting reason and evidence and the scientific method.

USAMA

I just know that within London and within the university Islamic society community, these guys were known.

It's just an organization non grata.

And everyone knows that they're peddling just rhetoric of Islamophobia and doing it in this kind of intellectualized way so that it's not the kind of Islamophobia that you associate with bigoted people.

But they do it through studies that they've done to show how backwards the community is and things like that.

So it's the most pervasive type.

HAMZA SYED

Around the time my brother was in school, the Humanists' honorary vice president, who'd been named Humanist of the Year in the UK and the United States, Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins, was issuing such takes as, quote, "I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world."

And, of course, you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Quran.

You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.

That neglected card in the corner, it would prove important to Brian's and my investigation because when we finally did get those minutes of the February 12th meeting between Albert Bore and Michael Gove, sure,

they made clear that Birmingham City Council had told Michael Gove police thought the Trojan horse setup was bogus.

But the minutes also made clear that the meeting, it wasn't just about the Trojan Horse letter.

Michael Gove and his aides showed up that day with another letter they wanted to talk about, a, quote, "letter received by the British Humanist Society relating to Park View Academy."

Unlike the Trojan Horse letter, this letter wasn't murky or fake-looking.

It's from identifiable people who'd worked at Park View and who were vouched for by the British Humanists, who said there really was a nefarious Islamization going on at the schools.

These whistleblowers seemed legit, and their coming forward, that might have been the true starting gun for the Trojan Horse affair, as important, maybe more important, than the Trojan Horse letter itself.

Over the years, these whistleblowers have mostly stayed in the background, out of public view.

But when we got in touch with them, we learned that they were eager to step out of the shadows and tell us what they saw happening at Park View School.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Those of us who tell the truth, we tell the truth.

The people who lie tell lies, don't they?

And the truth is difficult to establish.

HAMZA SYED

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Hamza Syed.

BRIAN REED

I'm Brian Reed.

HAMZA SYED

This is the Trojan Horse Affair.

SUE PACKER

Do you want some water or anything?

BRIAN REED

I'm OK.

You guys might.

HAMZA SYED

I think I might just have a bit of water as well.

SUE PACKER

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

All right, thank you, guys.

Sorry, we got caught up in the book.

BRIAN REED

Sue Packer is bustling around in jeans and a jumper, getting Hamza and me settled in her cottage out in the country, where we're setting up to interview her and her husband, Steve.

STEVE PACKER

Can I ask you how you got our emails and how you knew about us?

BRIAN REED

Sue and Steve Packer both used to work at Park View School.

Steven taught there his entire career, 35 years, primarily computer science.

Sue was the educational visits coordinator.

She oversaw field trips.

To answer Steve's question, we learned about him and Sue because they testified in disciplinary hearings against a bunch of Park View teachers, cases that grew out of the Trojan Horse investigations.

We'd gotten our hands on a transcript of the proceedings, which took place in what was known as the National College for Teaching and Leadership.

In the years since, Sue and Steve have been enjoying a quiet retirement from education, out here in the countryside, far from Alum Rock.

BRIAN REED

All right, so first of all, you guys haven't done this then, I guess.

You haven't done a long form interview about this.

This will be your first?

SUE PACKER

I did some anonymous ones when it was all going on because, obviously, I'd gone anonymously to the British Humanist Association, Humanists UK, because --

BRIAN REED

Sue and Steve say speaking out about Park View was not something they did lightly.

The school was important to them.

SUE PACKER

We absolutely loved our jobs.

We really did.

STEVE PACKER

If you asked me, I would've said I have the best job in the world.

SUE PACKER

We used to tell people that, didn't we?

STEVE PACKER

And the children were absolutely wonderful.

I wouldn't swap the children at Park View, but.

BRIAN REED

Steve was part of the renaissance at Park View.

He was there when the school was abysmal.

He was there in the '90s when Ofsted put the school on notice that if it didn't improve, it might have to close.

And he was there when Tahir Alam took charge as chair of the governing body, hoping to set Park View school on a new path.

STEVE PACKER

Listen, I actually taught him my first year in the school.

I was his computer studies teacher.

BRIAN REED

Tahir, really?

STEVE PACKER

Tahir Alam, yeah.

BRIAN REED

This was in 1983.

BRIAN REED

You look good, Steve.

STEVE PACKER

Thank you.

People are always shocked by that.

BRIAN REED

Steve remembers Tahir being a nice kid.

And he remembers when he turned back up as an adult, volunteering to run the governing body.

BRIAN REED

What did you make of his motivations for being there and what he was doing?

STEVE PACKER

I mean, he didn't necessarily talk about the Islamic Muslim side of things.

His was about the fact that children were underachieving and that we could get them to do better.

BRIAN REED

And he talked about that often?

STEVE PACKER

Yeah, yeah, that would always be his main focus.

I mean, I totally agreed with that because the one year, we were the worst performing school in the whole of Birmingham.

And something had to be done about it.

BRIAN REED

Steve was one of the old guard teachers who could see the new vision for the school, and he threw himself into achieving it.

When some teachers formed a Ramadan committee to help integrate the holiday into the school, he was a founding member.

He used to play the call to prayer from speakers in his office.

He held computer trainings for moms in Alum Rock.

When Park View became what's known as a business enterprise school where kids learned entrepreneurial skills as part of the curriculum, Steve was in charge of that.

He became a vice principal.

And he got close with a group of guys at the school, a mix of old timers and newer teachers, Muslims and non.

We've talked to many of them, most whose lives were turned upside down, careers were derailed, in part, because of Steve's testimony at their disciplinary hearing.

But they all spoke fondly of Steve.

They shared memories of traveling to China together, of going running on the weekend, of hiking together out in Wales.

They miss him.

And we could tell, talking to Steve, that these relationships had been meaningful to him, too.

But when Sue joined the Park View staff in the early 2000s, after marrying Steve, she questioned how his friends were running the school.

And that pushed Steve to see things differently.

SUE PACKER

He'd worked with these people for a long, long time.

I went there with a new set of eyes, and I could see things that I felt weren't quite right.

I mean, originally, it was way back in 2011, I think it was, when the first concerns happened, when these worksheets that were being given to the boys, they were just being printed --

HAMZA SYED

One day, Sue says, she and Steve got in the car to head home from work.

And Steve told her about something unsettling that happened that day while he was covering for a science teacher's sex ed class.

STEVE PACKER

The teacher was away.

I went down to cover the lesson.

There was no work left or anything.

So I went in there.

So the first thing I did is, what did you do last lesson?

And then one boy said, oh, we were told that if we want our wives to have sex with us, then they have to.

They can't refuse us.

I thought--

HAMZA SYED

One boy said we were taught that if a husband wants to have sex with the wife, they have to say yes?

STEVE PACKER

Yeah, yeah, they can't say no.

Well, first of all, I thought he was having a laugh.

I thought it was a bit of a joke.

And I said, you're joking.

You weren't told that.

And the kids were going, yes, we were.

Because it was just a boys' group.

Yes, we were.

I said, well, let me tell you now, that is wrong.

Any woman has the right to say no.

And if she says no, and he goes ahead, then it's rape.

And it was an uncomfortable thing to talk about because it was a bit of a shock, really.

BRIAN REED

Did they seem to accept it?

STEVE PACKER

They appeared to accept it from me.

I mean, at that point, I was assistant head.

So I was strong enough in the school.

I had enough clout to sort of say, this is wrong, I'm right.

And this question doesn't go any further.

HAMZA SYED

Sue was appalled by what Steve was telling her in the car.

The fact that one of their colleagues would say something like this was bad enough, but to teach it to students.

Sue heard that some boys in school when out taunting girls about it.

And then, she says, a worksheet surfaced from the lesson, which she said had religious quotes on it, about the roles and obligations of men and women in marriage and how women had to obey.

SUE PACKER

Yeah, and the shock of reading it and knowing that that had been given out to the boys, I was just horrified.

I was just so enraged by it.

It was just -- like you were sort of saying, it's such a serious thing.

So obviously, I spoke to you about it.

HAMZA SYED

Sue's turning to Steve.

She says they went to the person who was in charge of the sex ed curriculum.

But she felt the school wasn't acting fast enough.

She mentioned it to her son, Tom, one day on the phone.

Tom had worked at Park View for a year as a teaching assistant, when he was fresh out of university.

He's a science professor now.

TOM PACKER

I was mostly upset this was happening in a science lesson.

Sex education falls under science, and the content of that worksheet was religious.

HAMZA SYED

Tom remembers how distressed his mom was, explaining what happened.

She wondered if there's anything else she could do.

TOM PACKER

And I know I told her, don't go to the press.

I don't think we should be doing that.

HAMZA SYED

Tom was wary of how the British media covers Muslims, but he agreed they should do something.

He said to his mum--

TOM PACKER

We need to have some kind of third party intermediary who can help us do this in a responsible way that is not going to have prejudice on any particular community.

We didn't want a Daily Mail front page.

We didn't want right-wing newspapers putting their own spin on this.

And I was scared that that might happen.

And I decided the most sensible thing to do is to go through a third party.

In the end, I suggested the British Humanists.

HAMZA SYED

This is how the Humanists entered the story.

The Humanists aren't an immediately obvious place to take this matter, but Tom told us he'd become interested in humanism in grad school.

He thought of the British Humanists as proponents of tolerance, equality, science, and human rights.

One of the group's long-standing missions is to eradicate religious practices from British state schools, the regulations that require a daily act of collective worship in all state schools, the reason Park View School held Islamic assemblies.

The Humanists want those repealed.

So Tom told his mum --

TOM PACKER

Send me a copy of the worksheets, and what I'll do is I'll put an email together.

HAMZA SYED

Which he did.

Tom ended up on the phone with one of the Humanists' top people.

And they came up with a plan for how the Humanists would help them take the story to the press.

They're all ready to go, and then, they didn't do it.

Sue says the teacher who oversaw sex ed, Arshad Hussain, held an assembly for all the boys in year 10, where he disabused them of the notion that a wife is obligated to obey her husband.

SUE PACKER

They were told apparently that that wasn't the case, that girls had to be -- sex had to be consensual.

I just accepted that.

OK, that won't happen again, and we've got to move forward.

So things sort of settled down again then, really.

The school sort of had an outstanding Ofsted.

BRIAN REED

This was the watershed moment in 2012 when Ofsted, the school inspectors, awarded Park View the highest designation a school can get.

People from around Europe were visiting Park View for inspiration.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, praised it for closing the achievement gap.

And the Department for Education, under Michael Gove, asked Park View's leadership to start running two other East Birmingham schools that needed help through an initiative they were pushing called the Academy Program, which gave the school leaders more power and autonomy.

But according to Sue and Steve, it was during this peak of recognition and success that some of their colleagues started taking advantage of the independence they'd been given.

SUE PACKER

They wanted to give the children a good education, but it was just that, sort of, the religious element, wasn't it, that took over, really.

BRIAN REED

Everywhere Sue and Steve turned, they say, they saw changes being implemented that looked to them to be religiously motivated.

The holiday postbox, where kids used to deposit Christmas cards for each other, was removed.

The call to prayer, which Steve had supported as a Ramadan thing, became a year round fixture.

Pupils were leaned on, they say, to choose Arabic or Urdu as their language elective over French.

Steve chaperoned an overnight school trip and had to enforce a rule, to the kids' disappointment, that they weren't allowed to go to a disco.

Sue and Steve say girls and boys were prevented from mingling and dating.

And they say certain teachers were telling children that if they didn't pray, they weren't good Muslims.

The Packers felt like the school was shifting.

Rather than merely celebrating the kids' Muslim identities, Park View was pressuring kids to practice Islam, dictating to students how to be.

Most disturbing to Sue was the effects she felt the religious imperative was having on women and girls at the school, staff members and students.

SUE PACKER

There was a lot of unfairness going on.

Equality had gone out the door.

Everything was very strict, sort of thing.

Girls couldn't have their hair highlighted.

They were encouraged to wear their scarves.

Girls were being brought back from any sort of events where there was a male present.

BRIAN REED

For instance, Sue says, there was a tennis lesson organized for five Park View girls and five boys at another school.

When the teacher accompanying the kids saw that the instructor was a man, he brought the girls back to Park View because there was a school rule that sports were separated, boys and girls.

She says the girls were upset they didn't get to do the lesson that day.

Sue was furious.

SUE PACKER

Women weren't being treated properly.

Girls were not being given choices.

Girls were being dictated to.

There was a blanket rule that girls were not allowed to do things.

BRIAN REED

Sue and Steve had an idea of who was behind all this.

STEVE PACKER

I say that the person really pulling the strings was Tahir Alam.

BRIAN REED

To both Sue and Steve, all the official fawning over Park View seemed to have emboldened Tahir.

They felt he was exerting more influence on the school than a governor was supposed to.

He was still focused on academics, but they felt there was something else driving him as well.

BRIAN REED

What do you think Tahir's ulterior motive was?

You're saying there was something else going on that was driving him?

SUE PACKER

Controlled the schools to have them run the way he wanted them run.

BRIAN REED

But not to the ends of achievement, to different ends.

SUE PACKER

Achievement as well, but the emphasis on doing things in a certain way, the way they wanted it done, and not--

BRIAN REED

According to Islam.

Is that what you mean?

SUE PACKER

Well, that particular strain of Islam.

HAMZA SYED

What strain of Islam does Tahir practice?

SUE PACKER

Well, it's certainly the one that says that girls can't take part in activities when there's a man present.

STEVE PACKER

It says that children can't give Christmas cards to each other, whatever that is.

BRIAN REED

When the longtime headteacher of Park View, a non-Muslim white woman, was promoted in 2012, she'd now be overseeing all three schools that Park View was trying to reform.

The person the governors chose to take her place while they filled the position was a Muslim teacher who some staffers didn't feel was the best choice to run the school, but who was close with Tahir, Maz Hussein.

Maz taking over meant that all the top managers within Park View school were now men.

Sue also mentioned to us a focus group she took part in with the local police about combating violence against women in East Birmingham, where she learned that East Birmingham has one of the highest rates of domestic abuse in the country.

It all made her worry.

SUE PACKER

My main concern is that the girls were just able to access as much opportunity as possible and come out of school as equipped as possible to deal with whatever they come across in life.

My feelings were that girls needed to be strong.

They needed to be feel in control.

HAMZA SYED

Sue had tried to get the school to address these problems.

She raised them with the headteacher, Moz, but it wasn't getting better.

She was in the middle of making plans to go to speak to the governing body about these issues, when a former Park View student named Amina told Sue about something that happened on a field trip she had helped chaperone to a local museum, an interaction with another teacher that bothered her.

As Sue tells it, Amina was volunteering at Park View.

She was just out of university.

Her mom was in the governing body and her dad also worked there.

And Amina told Sue, on the way back from the museum, she'd been sitting on one of the buses with the kids when a teacher got on, a man, and said to her that she was on the wrong bus.

SUE PACKER

He sort of came onto the coach and said, you need to be on the coach with me, something like that.

So she sort of felt that he'd spoken to her very rudely in front of the children, and it was unnecessary.

So I just sort of said, well, look, you need to really go and speak to Moz about it.

BRIAN REED

Did it seem that serious, or did it seem kind of -- because that seems like not that big of a thing to register, I guess.

SUE PACKER

Because it was becoming commonplace, this sort of attitude to women.

HAMZA SYED

As far as Sue knew, Amina did mention it to a supervisor, but Sue didn't hear if there had been any follow-up from management.

She sent an email to the head teacher, Moz, and others, asking what has been done about the colleague who'd been rude to Amina.

SUE PACKER

And then the following day after I'd done that, I was called to Moz's office, and he was there, standing over his desk with these sort of papers on his desk.

And he just sort of exploded at me and just said, you're being vindictive.

Malicious, writing these emails about a member of staff.

I'm really disappointed in you.

There's going to be a full investigation.

And then I was accused of bringing the school into disrepute. Attempt to discredit a member of staff and slander, wasn't it?

STEVE PACKER

I know that the word "slander" came up because I was thinking, they've used the wrong word because it should be libel because it's written.

SUE PACKER

I was just absolutely speechless.

I just didn't know what to say.

I was devastated.

And I just thought, what have I done?

I was just so shocked.

Because I knew I hadn't done anything wrong.

OK, I was questioning a male.

But I was only doing it because there'd been complaints about him.

And I felt as in my position as educational vice co-ordinator, that was my job to do that because I had to make sure the people going on the trips were qualified, competent, and --

STEVE PACKER

It felt like you were being seen as a troublemaker.

HAMZA SYED

As if the leaders of the school were retaliating against her for calling out their discrimination.

SUE PACKER

I had a letter from the HR manager to say that the investigation was going to start, and I just --

I was just in a mess, wasn't I, really?

STEVE PACKER

Yeah, you've been a mess ever since it happened, since--

SUE PACKER

Yeah, I just was stricken with anxiety and just, I just couldn't handle it.

So I just wrote my notice and left.

HAMZA SYED

Sue had quit the school, but her husband was still there, friends, colleagues, students.

People she cared about were still there.

So Sue started contacting the authorities, imploring them to look into the creeping Islamization inside Park View.

She wrote to Ofsted, the school inspectors.

She wrote to Birmingham City Council.

She wrote these places anonymously because she was scared Steve might lose his job if their colleagues at Park View found out what she was doing.

But as far as she and Steve could tell, the agencies didn't do anything.

She made several calls to Ofsted.

Steve also wrote them anonymously.

Still nothing.

Months went by, and then came January 2014 and the moment that Sue accidentally helped ignite the Trojan Horse affair.

Unbeknownst to Sue, the Trojan Horse letter, which hadn't yet gone public, was making the rounds in Birmingham and London.

And it was at this same time that Sue sent an email to the British Humanists about Park View and Tahir Alam.

And her son, Tom, also wrote the Humanists, saying he wanted to resurface his complaint about the sex ed lesson from three years before.

More and more males with extreme religious views are being recruited, Sue wrote to the Humanists.

The children are not allowed to choose how to live their lives.

The Humanists moved quickly.

They had connections at the Department for Education, so they assembled Sue and Tom's allegations and sent them along.

Within days, Sue was finally on the phone with the Department for Education official, the deputy head of its Counter Extremism Division.

This division was set up by the DFE in 2010, the year Michael Gove took control of the department.

BRIAN REED

Do you remember what you talked about on that phone call?

SUE PACKER

I think they were just sort of clarifying because, obviously, there was the sort of anti-terrorism stuff, wasn't there, really?

And I sort of I made it clear, it's nothing to do with that.

This is just about human rights, girls being stopped doing things.

But obviously, I think my concern was when children are marginalized, and they're not feeling part of a community, I know that that can lead into other roads, can't it?

And I think that's what they were looking at, really.

BRIAN REED

Did they seem concerned --

SUE PACKER

Yeah, they --

BRIAN REED

-- or what did they say?

SUE PACKER

They sort of said that they had got concerns.

So I felt it was taken seriously.

BRIAN REED

The next day, Michael Gove's people in London wrote Sir Albert Bore's people in Birmingham to arrange that critical meeting on February 12th.

The DFE had had Trojan Horse letter for months at this point.

It was only after hearing from Sue that they kicked into gear.

When Albert Bore and the Birmingham City Council arrived at the February 12th meeting, everybody was talking about the Trojan Horse letter and Sue's complaints in the same breath, as two pieces of evidence that appeared to be corroborating the same threat.

The council told Michael Gove that the Trojan Horse letter was bogus, according to the analysis of counter-terror police.

And it's interesting the minutes note that Gove actually said in the meeting, we should try to figure out who the author is.

But according to the minutes, at least, nobody responded to that.

And they kept talking about the apparent troubles at Park View, until Michael Gove sent Councilor Bore away with an order --

to report back by the end of the week with a plan for how the council was going to deal with that school.

Just to say here, we did consider whether Sue Packer could have been behind the Trojan Horse letter.

She was writing a lot of letters, a number anonymously about Muslims in East Birmingham schools.

There's one letter of Sue's, actually.

SUE PACKER

So what are you asking now?

Is that my letter?

BRIAN REED

Yeah, did you write that?

SUE PACKER

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

Which bears a curious resemblance to the cover sheet that came with the Trojan Horse letter, the tone, the sign-off, some of the language.

That one even got Steve going.

STEVE PACKER

Well, I haven't seen that letter before.

BRIAN REED

You didn't know she wrote this?

STEVE PACKER

No.

I have to say, this is quite interesting now.

BRIAN REED

Sue reassured us and her husband.

SUE PACKER

I just want to make it clear that I'm not the author of the Trojan Horse letter because I feel as if that is the way this is possibly going --

BRIAN REED

No, actually, we don't think you wrote the Trojan Horse letter, Sue.

BRIAN REED

Not least because in all of Sue's writings that we've read, we've never seen her mention Adderley Primary School or the resignation case there.

She says she doesn't even know anyone at that school.

Adderley is the school the Trojan Horse author is most focused on and knowledgeable about, whereas Sue, in her letters, is concerned primarily with Park View.

And so we're left to marvel at the --

I don't even know what to call it -- unhappy confluence, supernatural forces, tragic coincidence, that led to letters from completely different people, both about Park View school, to land on Michael Gove's desk within weeks of each other, containing the same types of claims

and naming the same individual, Tahir Alam, as the ringleader.

HAMZA SYED

Sue said when she and Steve first heard about the Trojan Horse letter, they were glad for it.

Another source blowing the whistle on Park View, they figured that could only help back them up.

But then they watched as journalists and politicians took the issues they had raised and conflated them with this wild allegation of an Islamist conspiracy spreading through the schools.

And that frustrated them.

So over the next several months, the Humanists started arranging interviews for Sue, they say to try and refocus attention onto what she saw as a real issue in East Birmingham--

equality for girls and women and the improper inclusion of religion in schools.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Park View Academy at the center of this row since it began.

Three former Park View teachers took their concerns to the British Humanist Association.

One former member of its staff spoke anonymously to--

A former member of staff, their claims included--

HAMZA SYED

It's not like Sue and Steve and Tom were the only ones raising concerns about Park View and other East Birmingham schools.

They, along with the Trojan Horse letter, were the trigger.

But once the story became public, all sorts of people who had been involved in schools in Birmingham started bringing issues to authorities and reporters.

But the Packer family's concerns are emblematic of the kinds of complaints others were making.

And Sue and Steve stayed active in the affair for years, playing an influential role in the authorities' response.

To cooperate with the official inquiries, they spoke to Peter Clarke's team, to Ofsted, the school inspectors, to the member of parliament representing Alum Rock, who Sue met with.

They traveled to London to tell their story to a parliamentary humanist group, in what one lord called stunning testimony.

And finally, when the government started bringing disciplinary cases against Park View teachers, Sue and Steve took to the stand, along with some others, to testify against their former colleagues.

They were essential to the government's case, providing some of the most important first-hand testimony.

BRIAN REED

So this is how Britain ended up with multiple investigations into the Trojan Horse letter that weren't really about the Trojan Horse letter.

The Packers and the Trojan horse letter fused into an indomitable crossbreed.

The Trojan Horse letter made sensational claims about a sweeping Islamic plot, a jihad.

And now, here were all these specific complaints from the Packers and others like them, which read like evidence that something larger and diabolical could be afoot.

People took the Trojan Horse moniker, the code name of that supposed operation, from the letter and grafted that onto the Packers' concerns, which made allegations that might have otherwise been dealt with as employment issues or matters of school management,

seem like a national security threat.

Now the Trojan Horse letter had already been found to be fiction, but what about the Packers?

Had they been writing any fiction of their own?

That's after the break.

In the beginning, it was friendly at Sue and Steve's cottage.

They were excited to talk to us about their experience.

In fact, right after we walked in, we learned that Steve had recently finished writing a book about it, self-published on Amazon, which he had lying out for us, a green paperback titled Moonrise at Daybreak, with silhouettes of a chicken and a rooster and a rabbit on the cover.

STEVE PACKER

This is my telling of the story of what happened to us at school.

I've written it as an Animal Farm type story.

BRIAN REED

Really?

STEVE PACKER

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

The book's protagonists are two chickens, Scarlett and Croaker --

clearly, Sue and Steve --

who, with the help of the hares --

the Humanists -- fight an elite group of goats --

Muslim men -- who are controlling the sheep --

Muslim women -- while scheming to operate the farm, to quote the blurb, "according to their own doctrine by manipulating the other animals and grooming the youngsters."

HAMZA SYED

I mean, we're obviously going to get you to sign a copy for us.

STEVE PACKER

I've signed one.

I'll give you two, OK.

BRIAN REED

So is this fiction?

Is it non-fiction?

How would you describe it?

STEVE PACKER

It's a difficult one.

It's fiction, but it tells the story.

BRIAN REED

Before we met with Sue and Steve, we had not only read their testimony in the disciplinary hearing against Park View teachers, but also a bunch of other stuff from their involvement with the Trojan Horse affair--

emails they'd written, letters, transcripts of interviews.

And we'd noticed in the way they spoke and wrote about Park View that their worries about what was going on at the school seemed to be shot through with this kind of discomfort about the way that certain teachers and governors were expressing their Muslimness.

And we wanted to interrogate how much that was coloring what they saw happening around them and the way they represented it to authorities.

As we questioned Sue and Steve, we fell into a precarious pattern.

We pushed them on the particulars of their account, like, say, Steve's suggestion that there was something shifty about the fact that he saw Muslim men members of staff spending a lot of time in the headteacher, Moz Hussain's, office.

HAMZA SYED

What's threatening about men speaking to each other?

And why does it carry this sinister kind of edge to it that here's people filing into Moz's room and speaking, and they're all men.

There must be something dodgy going on.

STEVE PACKER

Mm.

OK, I get your point.

BRIAN REED

There'd be hmms and long pauses and lots of circling around.

Soon, Steve would say they weren't sure they wanted to continue the interview.

Then we'd pull back, talk about something easier.

They'd propose a beverage.

SUE PACKER

Can we have a cup of tea?

BRIAN REED

We'd say, yes, please.

Then we'd never get the cup of tea because things would get uncomfortable again.

It went on like this for seven hours.

STEVE PACKER

There are some things you can't describe in solid facts.

When you talk about the atmosphere in a place, when we talk about how oppressive it was, there was not necessarily anything tangible about that.

I thought you were coming here, we were going to give an opportunity to put our side across.

HAMZA SYED

But that's what this is.

There's a microphone under your chin, and you're talking into it.

Is that not putting your side across?

STEVE PACKER

Um, it is, yeah.

HAMZA SYED

Some of what Sue and Steve told us was corroborated by the staff and students at Park View, like the sex ed class, for instance.

Pretty much everyone agrees something happened.

And they all remember that the school did hold an assembly for the boys in that grade to tell them that sex without consent is rape.

That incident is perhaps more disturbing than Sue and Steve could even have known, though, because in March of 2021, after our interview with Sue and Steve and years after Park View ceased to exist, that same teacher who'd been teaching the sex ed class at Park View was convicted of sexual activity

with a child from another school he'd gone on to work at.

He'd convinced a 15-year-old girl that she was his, quote unquote, "wife."

He was sentenced to three years and three months in jail.

We asked leadership at Park View and others, teachers and students, whether an allegation of this kind surfaced about this teacher back when he was working at Park View, and they all told us no.

But it does seem from talking to people that while the school took the sex ed incident seriously enough to hold a special assembly, they did not do a formal investigation into this teacher and his conduct in the class, which seems like a horrible red flag missed.

The Packers wanted us to know that what they had done in the Trojan Horse affair, this years-long effort they'd embarked upon, was largely to protect this group of people they believed were suffering --

Muslim girls and women.

In the disciplinary hearing transcript, Sue testifies forcefully on their behalf.

To hear Sue tell it, she sacrificed her career defending a Muslim woman.

That's how committed she was to their well-being.

But let's consider that incident, what Sue cites as the impetus of her time at Park View coming to an end.

She testified about it under oath at a disciplinary hearing--

the incident on the bus where a Muslim woman colleague, Amina, was spoken to brusquely by a teacher, a man.

Sue told us this interaction was indicative of the wider issues at the school, where sexism was going unchecked and women and girls weren't being respected.

And she says that's how Amina saw it, too, that the atmosphere at the school had changed since she'd been a student there.

BRIAN REED

What were Amina's other specific things she told you that she saw as issues at the school?

SUE PACKER

Just this sort of pressure to behave in a certain way, not to be individuals, girls not to be individuals.

BRIAN REED

She said that?

SUE PACKER

Yes, yes, because she was very much an individual.

STEVE PACKER

I was her form teacher in year 7.

SUE PACKER

Yeah.

Oh, no, no.

STEVE PACKER

So I knew really well, yeah.

SUE PACKER

Beautiful girls.

HAMZA SYED

Why did Amina then watch you go through this investigation without coming to your defense?

She just went quiet at that point?

She clammed up?

What happened?

SUE PACKER

Well, I mean, no one would speak out.

BRIAN REED

Did you go to her and ask her, say, can you back me up here?

SUE PACKER

I didn't.

BRIAN REED

I was speaking on your behalf.

SUE PACKER

No, I didn't.

Knowing what had happened to me, I didn't want to possibly ruin her future.

BRIAN REED

I mean, just at the time even, when Moz said --

BRIAN REED

After visiting Sue and Steve, I got in touch with Amina to ask if this was how she remembered things.

She didn't want to do an interview, but she wrote back, pretty heated, this was a routine outing where a colleague was a little short, she wrote.

If this incident was as serious as Sue's fantasy, I would naturally have raised a formal complaint and ensured there was a reported outcome.

This was a professional school with all the normal accountabilities and procedures.

I am perfectly capable to raising the issue if that was my intention.

Remarkably, in all the years Sue has been talking about Amina and this bus aftermath, Amina told me no one, not the British Humanists, not any official investigator looking into Sue's allegations, not a single lawyer from the legal teams litigating the Trojan Horse cases,

has ever contacted her to ask if what Sue was saying about her was accurate.

Amina had no idea 'til I reached out to her that Sue had spent years pointing to this incident as an example of endemic sexism at Park View school.

Amina said she never personally experienced sexism there, nor did any colleagues tell her they did either.

Honestly, I got the sense from Amina's response that she was a bit annoyed with me for taking Sue's account seriously enough to write a whole email asking her about it.

Quote, "The account stipulated by Sue comes across as nonsensical.

In summary, she's implying she has lost her job as a result of taking it upon herself to represent the collective rights of all women suffering such strife at the hands of male persecutors in a world war-like setting

and has been murdered by the oppressive regime for absolutely no reasons of her own.

If anyone believes such prepubescent notions, they are clearly cut from the same cloth."

HAMZA SYED

By no means was Park View school devoid of sexism or patriarchy.

Women we've spoken to from Park View have been clear, there were problems, just maybe not the way Sue has been portraying it.

NASREEN QAMAR

I think what Sue's done is Sue's taken the more sensational route.

HAMZA SYED

This is Nasreen Qamar, who joined Park View as its acting head of English a year and a half before the Trojan Horse affair.

NASREEN QAMAR

She's saying we're oppressed.

Females are being shouted down by these men, or the girls in the classroom are not given their opportunities.

She's gone for more of the sensational, which is the word of "oppression."

HAMZA SYED

Park View had been led by a woman head teacher for about a decade.

But when Nasreen was there, it was all men at the top.

And Nasreen saw how that influenced the school's culture, a chumminess that she felt disadvantaged the women.

She found out some of her colleagues were in an all-male WhatsApp group, for instance, called the Park View Brotherhood, which eventually shut down.

But Nasreen's main complaint was that Park View's leadership had a blind spot when it came to elevating women into senior posts.

Of course, this wasn't just true at Park View.

It's true in secondary schools across the UK.

It's not a uniquely Muslim problem, but Nasreen says, at Park View, a certain faction of staffers was seeing things through that lens.

NASREEN QAMAR

Muslim men don't include women.

We don't have discussions with women, as though the women are second class citizens next to men because that's their perception of Islam.

So it came under that kind of umbrella, the anti-Muslim, anti-men.

HAMZA SYED

Sue told us she wasn't part of a group of any kind, but Nasreen and others from Park View have described this contingent as a sort of clique and said it included Sue and a handful of other staff members, mostly women and a few of them Muslim women.

To give a sense of their energy, Nasreen referred to one of the more vocal participants as PP, Poison Planter.

They'd rile each other up.

NASREEN QAMAR

They would just come into the office and openly discuss things.

They would sit around the table, and they would openly discuss it.

Look, there's more Muslim stuff coming in.

There's more Muslim this.

And do you know they have this WhatsApp group?

Or look, he's just got promoted.

And oh, did you hear what happened to Sue?

And it was very draining.

HAMZA SYED

Nasreen believes her co-workers were reading too much into things.

The tennis issue, for instance, when the girls were brought back from the lesson because the instructor was male.

To Nasreen, no big deal.

NASREEN QAMAR

OK, they've been brought back.

They wanted a female teacher, fair enough.

Because in PE lessons in this country, all PE lessons for girls are by females and all males are by males. And that's in every school.

But to them, it's a big, massive thing.

I remember Sue had a big issue with this.

BRIAN REED

And it wasn't just students at Park View this poison group was concerned about.

One of Nasreen's colleagues in the English Department, a teacher named Saddiqa Bi, married another Muslim Park View teacher.

He was later suspended because of the Trojan Horse scandal.

When Saddiqa Bi showed up after summer break newly wearing a hijab, Nasreen says assumptions started flying.

NASREEN QAMAR

Oh, my gosh, they're oppressing her.

He's oppressing her.

He's forced her to wear the scarf.

They've brainwashed her.

BRIAN REED

Was that word used, "brainwashed"?

NASREEN QAMAR

Yes, brainwashed.

Interestingly, another Muslim member of staff as well said it.

Had forced her to do it.

SADDIQA

I was just finding that I was so comfortable in this school, and I always wanted to embark on wearing the hijab.

BRIAN REED

Here's Saddiqa.

SADDIQA

And I just thought to myself, do you know what?

I mean, such a work environment that it just made me feel like I was welcome to be who I want to be.

So to be in a place where it was OK to not have to quietly hide, I was like, I'm just trying to have my own journey, my own little bubble, and my own little place.

And you're telling me, I was forced.

If anything, I was feeling nervous about putting the scarf on because of those opinions, because of the likes of Sue.

BRIAN REED

Sue says she's never had a problem with women choosing to wear a headscarf.

She told us she knows there are a variety of views among Muslim women, and she respects that.

She and Steve assured us that they were reflecting the views of many Muslim women at Park View.

But one thing we'd noticed, reading through the records from the disciplinary hearing against Park View's leadership where Sue and Steve testified, not a single Muslim woman from Park View School came to testify alongside them, to give evidence against the school's leadership.

The Muslim woman who did appear from Park View spoke in support of the school.

We asked Sue about this.

BRIAN REED

Why are there no Muslim women from Park View who kind of testify saying, we were discriminated against, we were oppressed?

Do you know why?

SUE PACKER

I think it's just because the women aren't very good at speaking out.

I shouldn't say the women, sorry.

A lot of women perhaps aren't confident to speak out in that community, especially female Muslims.

I think there's just sort of fear about speaking out.

BRIAN REED

The Packers wouldn't put us in touch with any of the colleagues they say they were testifying on behalf of.

They told us these people didn't want their names passed along to us.

Hamza and I have heard criticisms of Park View from some women who attended as students.

One said even though prayer wasn't mandatory, she felt there was a social pressure from some staff to take part and that the atmosphere could be strict.

She said she couldn't wait to go to college.

Other students told us they really appreciated having prayer at school and the other religious elements, but they did remember one or two moments from their time there that bothered them in retrospect, like when a male teacher told a girl that her skirt, which was fine for the dress code,

should be longer.

They agreed these were things that should have been addressed, but nearly all the women we talked to, staff and students, were uncomfortable with Sue being their emissary.

As one student put it, after we read her some of Sue's letters and writings about the school, that's a white person's view of Islam.

And they told us they were offended by the suggestion that they couldn't speak for themselves.

BRIAN REED

Do you think it's possible that you've misread some of the things that were happening at Park View or the way --

SUE PACKER

Absolutely not.

BRIAN REED

-- that women felt there?

No?

SUE PACKER

Absolutely not.

BRIAN REED

OK.

SUE PACKER

It was really hard because we're not prejudiced at all.

I mean, my closest friend is a female Muslim girl.

And I've got lots of friends.

We both have.

You're just afraid that you'll be made out that you're a racist, that you don't understand the cultures.

And I feel that we do understand the cultures.

But I mean, it was just about this group of men forcing one sort of form of Islam on a whole community.

BRIAN REED

Can I ask you about your Ofsted complaint, Sue?

SUE PACKER

Mm-hmm.

BRIAN REED

At one point at Sue and Steve's, I pulled out a copy of the letter Sue sent to Ofsted and Birmingham City Council about Park View School in the summer of 2013.

BRIAN REED

I just want to confirm that this is what this is.

Do you recognize that?

SUE PACKER

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

And this was sent anonymously?

SUE PACKER

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

OK.

BRIAN REED

In a story littered with letters, this one stands out.

Sue wrote it to Ofsted while she was in the thick of her dispute with Park View leadership over what had happened to Amina on the bus, which led to Sue's resignation.

She wrote this months before she went to the British Humanists, and then to the Department for Education, and then all the other officials and journalists and investigators she spoke to.

And this letter, it's pretty raw.

I see it as kind of a cast mold of Sue's mindset during this time before lawyers and officials had an opportunity to maybe sand down the edges of her account.

BRIAN REED

So in this letter to Ofsted, Sue, you say that children said in a class that homosexuals should be thrown off a cliff or burnt alive, and that the teacher who was head of that year agreed and said, that's what we believe.

It's what we believe.

SUE PACKER

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

You said the entire staff was told not to compliment girls in the school. In this letter to Ofsted.

SUE PACKER

Yes, we were, yep.

BRIAN REED

You said that young girls from Park View are being taken away to get married and that staff are not stopping it in this letter to Ofsted.

SUE PACKER

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

And then you say that there's a Sharia council promoting Sharia law in Alum Rock.

SUE PACKER

Mm-hmm.

BRIAN REED

I never saw Sue bring up these specific allegations again, the ones I listed to her.

Also interesting, I never saw her use the word "Sharia" again either.

BRIAN REED

You don't make these allegations again.

Why only here in this anonymous letter?

If it's true that children said in a class that homosexuals should be thrown off a cliff or burned alive and a teacher agreed, you never mentioned it again when you're on the stand or in giving evidence.

Why?

SUE PACKER

Because I wasn't witness to that, but I know other people were.

BRIAN REED

So the reason is because it was hearsay.

Is that why?

SUE PACKER

Yeah, I mean, a lot of things are hearsay, aren't they?

But the concerns that I sent to Ofsted were legitimate, truthful concerns.

BRIAN REED

But you didn't want to stand by it in a sworn witness statement, it sounds like.

Is that what I'm gathering?

SUE PACKER

Because I tried to --

BRIAN REED

And that's OK.

I just want to understand why if there were these serious things, they're in an anonymous letter, but not in a sworn witness statement.

SUE PACKER

I think with the witness side of it, I was trying to stick to facts, the things that I had actually, as much as possible, witnessed myself.

BRIAN REED

OK, so that's the difference here.

How come you just didn't do that here?

Why not always stick to facts?

SUE PACKER

Because I was trying to raise an alarm here.

BRIAN REED

All right, is that why you used the word "Sharia"?

SUE PACKER

Possibly.

But it's true.

There are Sharia councils in that area.

BRIAN REED

You say, "I feel what is happening there at the school now can only be likened to Sharia law."

This is what you tell Ofsted.

SUE PACKER

Mm-hmm.

This was an anonymous letter that I did after having the allegations made against me.

I certainly wasn't being treated properly.

I wasn't being treated fairly.

And obviously, I was just doing some research into Sharia law.

BRIAN REED

One last part of Sue's letter that's worth mentioning -- in the middle of her four pages, anonymously written, there are a couple of paragraphs about--

and I'm getting deja vu as I say this--

an employment dispute.

Sue goes on a tangent about the acting vice principal and how he had applied for a job, but the school had said they weren't going to give it to him.

She writes, it's because he's not Muslim.

Quote, "The leadership team promoted themselves into their new roles, and they have created jobs for male Muslims."

The acting vice principal who got passed over?

That was Steve, though Sue doesn't say in the letter that she has any relation to him.

HAMZA SYED

Sue told us again that she wanted to end the interview.

And this time, it was for real.

It had been dark for hours.

BRIAN REED

Good night.

HAMZA SYED

Anyway --

BRIAN REED

Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

SUE PACKER

OK, are you going to be OK?

BRIAN REED

Likewise.

Yeah, we'll be right.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, we should be fine.

BRIAN REED

It's this way?

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

HAMZA SYED

Brian and I shuffled out the cottage and jumped in the car.

BRIAN REED

Can we get out of here, please?

HAMZA SYED

On it, I told him, as I lined up the crooked driveway in my rearview mirror.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, jeez.

[CAR REVVING]

BRIAN REED

Ooh, dude, dude, dude.

HAMZA SYED

I may have run over some bushes.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, god.

HAMZA SYED

What struck me about Sue and Steve was how this mild-mannered couple, with their anonymous letters and gold-filled animal book, had been taken so seriously by government agencies, the media, the public.

Was it because they packaged their concerns as Muslim issues and that fit a worldview that so many hold, that Muslims are like this, that we're sneaky, controlling, the men misogynistic, the women meek?

The next morning, we went to see the person who played a large part in giving the Packers credibility --

Richy Thompson of the British Humanists, the secular lobbying group that was instrumental in empowering Sue and Steve.

They've since rebranded as Humanists UK.

As my brother alluded to, these British humanists have a reputation amongst some of being Islamophobic.

The Humanists deny it strongly.

And they say they've worked with lots of Muslims and ex Muslims.

But that's not what Brian and I were there to discuss with them that day.

We went to see Richy to find out why he and his fellow Humanists believe the Packers and what they'd done to verify the Packers' claims before endorsing them.

But in the midst of our back and forth, Richy would utter five words that were so callous, so enraging, that whatever so-called journalistic civilities I was meant to uphold came tumbling right down.

BRIAN REED

That's interesting, yeah.

HAMZA SYED

It started off friendly enough.

Brian went through his standard first 15 minutes of the interview butter up.

BRIAN REED

So from --

what's a humanist wedding, or --

HAMZA SYED

Somehow, he and Richy got into the contradiction of God in the omnipotence paradox.

RICHY THOMPSON

And that's a paradox because if he's all powerful, then he would be able to move the object.

Therefore, he can't create it.

HAMZA SYED

I lost my patience by the time they began reading George Eliot quotes off a poster on the wall.

RICHY THOMPSON

Wear a smile to make friends.

Wear a scowl to make wrinkles.

What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

Of course one thing interesting about George Eliot is that --

HAMZA SYED

Let's crack on with the thing that we came talk to you about today.

How did the British Humanists get involved --

HAMZA SYED

We asked him what, if any, fact-checking Richy and his colleagues did of Sue and Steve's claims about Park View.

And his answer was unsurprising.

RICHY THOMPSON

At the time, we did not go to any effort to verify the allegations beyond talking to them and seeing whether or not we felt, in broad terms, that they were credible.

HAMZA SYED

How do you make that assessment?

In broad terms, even, how do you make an assessment for talking to someone without seeing any evidence?

How do you get the confidence?

RICHY THOMPSON

Yeah, well, it's difficult. And of course, we can't be fully confident.

We just have to work out whether or not, just from a broad conversation, if they seem sincere.

And they did.

And--

He said he was in touch with two or three other people from Park View who shared similar concerns as the Packers, who alleged there'd been instances of gender discrimination and homophobia at the school. And he said as time went on, he felt the allegations were corroborated by other reporting. But he also told us

the Humanists didn't have an obligation to verify or investigate Sue and Steve.

Because as far as he was concerned, his organization was just the messenger, shuttling the Packers' issues over to the people in charge.

HAMZA SYED

Do you think it's dangerous to put allegations out there, specifically on the internet, unchecked, unchallenged, uncorroborated?

Do you think that's a dangerous thing to do?

RICHY THOMPSON

Well, it depends on the nature of the allegations, obviously.

BRIAN REED

It was while Hamza was questioning Richy about a bunch of claims against Park View that the humanists had published on their website without checking them or contacting the school first that Richy set him off.

RICHY THOMPSON

I would also say as well with regards to your reference to fake news that this, of course, was five years ago when the problems that we have seen since with fake news--

HAMZA SYED

Things don't happen overnight.

It's the climate that's created through years and years of this kind of stuff, these kind of stories.

There's a sentiment that has now taken hold and taken over and is informing everyone's political choices and everything else in the world because of events like this.

The Trojan Horse, which I'm sure you'll accept, as far as Britain is concerned, had a huge impact.

RICHY THOMPSON

What impact did it have then?

HAMZA SYED

What impact did it have?

BRIAN REED

Five words.

Richy had been a booster of the Trojan Horse affair for years.

He helped bring it into being.

He'd promulgated it through the halls of power and into the national consciousness.

He held a fundraising drive off the back of it with Sue.

But he was asking Hamza to catch him up on what impact the Trojan Horse had.

HAMZA SYED

It changed our educational policy.

It changed our counterterrorism policy.

It gave lifetime bans to educationalists in East Birmingham.

It destroyed Park View Trust that was doing things that people around Europe were coming to learn from.

It had a swarm of headlines.

This was referenced in the Tory Party conferences.

Do you know what I'm saying?

This is not a little thing.

This wasn't a little thing.

It continues to inform debate and dialogue about Muslims in this country.

RICHY THOMPSON

Yeah, sure.

Sure, OK?

HAMZA SYED

So you asked what -- that's the impact it had.

So I don't know.

You know, I--

RICHY THOMPSON

Well, I don't know that it's quite --

I think, obviously, I don't know what to say for that impact.

Clearly, all the impact and everything else that went around it was not on us.

BRIAN REED

Hamza and Richy kept at it.

Things were getting tense.

Humanists were looking at us through the glass wall.

I got why Hamza was pissed, but he was no longer doing what I'm used to doing in interviews.

He was supposed to be asking Richy for his take on events, not spewing his own take at Richy.

I didn't think it was getting us anywhere.

RICHY THOMPSON

I mean, that doesn't justify --

BRIAN REED

We've got to go.

We've got to go, man.

We've got to actually go to our next interview.

I mean, we'd like to know what these other people --

BRIAN REED

You seem quite angry, Richy said to Hamza.

HAMZA SYED

I'm angry because I feel like there's things being talked about, and the consequences of this are not quite registering with the people who are responsible for it.

That's why I'm angry.

RICHY THOMPSON

Let me ask you two final questions.

First--

BRIAN REED

Richy asked Hamza, do you think we were right to pass on the allegations to the Department for Education and Ofsted?

Yes, Hamza told him.

But he wished the Humanists had made clear, we haven't looked into any of this ourselves.

HAMZA SYED

So I think a bit of caution on your part may have helped.

What's your second question?

RICHY THOMPSON

The second question is--

BRIAN REED

Do you agree by the time the Humanists really started amplifying Sue Packer by sending her out for press interviews in April 2014, the Trojan Horse affair was already a massive story?

Nothing we could have done at that point would have made any difference anyway, Richy says.

HAMZA SYED

Here's what you could have done by April.

If you'd started by April investigating your own sources and if you found Sue Packer to be an untrustworthy source, that's what you could have done by April, before she gets in front of Peter Clarke, before someone is given a lifetime ban.

That's something you could have done by April to change the entire spectrum of this conversation.

So there was still something left for you to do in April if you'd done your job.

No comment?

BRIAN REED

Richy turned from us, stricken, and walked out of the room.

I packed up our stuff and headed out of the building to get us a cab.

I saw Hamza go look for Richy to shake his hand.

BRIAN REED

Did you just invite him for a drink?

HAMZA SYED

I want to --

because he's a young lad.

He's a young lad that hasn't, quite frankly, answered for things that are beyond him.

And I appreciate that we tried.

BRIAN REED

You got to stop yelling at people.

I think you can say exactly what you're saying and not yell at them.

That's what turns them off.

HAMZA SYED

I don't give a fuck, mate.

That isn't what turned them off.

That's what gets them to finally just stop fucking around.

This isn't a fucking joke.

You're asking me what did the Trojan Horse do?

Fuck this, mate.

BRIAN REED

"Fuck this, mate," is about as accurate a reflection as you could come up with of where Hamza was by this point, two years into our investigation.

And I'm not just talking about with the Trojan Horse story.

I'm talking about where Hamza was at with journalism.

HAMZA SYED

This whole thing is just --

it just makes me lose my mind sometimes, mate.

And you're asking me to stop screaming.

BRIAN REED

And this wasn't the first time he and I had had a disagreement about how to do this work.

Next on The Trojan Horse Affair, cucumbers and cooker bombs.

[MUSIC]

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Hamza Syed and me, along with Rebecca Laks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig, additional editing by Ira Glass and our contributing editor, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Mellor, with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.

Sound design mixing and music supervision by Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Ndeye Thioubou.

Executive assistant is Alberto De Leon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.

HAMZA SYED

Special thanks to Talha, Huraira, and Usama Syed, Sidra Syed, Iman Syed and Shirin Syed, Zosia Alchimowicz and Sam Dwyer at Fourth Drawer. Audio was licensed by LOLA Clips/ITV Archive.

BRIAN REED

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.
Part 6

Cucumbers and Cooker Bombs

Hamza takes a long, hard look at what the government found when it investigated more than 20 majority-Muslim schools in Birmingham. And our two reporters have a confrontation — with each other.
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00:00 / 01:04:56

The Trojan Horse Affair

Part 6

Transcript

BRIAN REED

I didn't feel great after I gave Hamza a hard time for going off on Richy Thompson, the British humanist.

And truth is, it wasn't the first time I'd done something like that, where I called him out for crossing lines I thought he shouldn't be crossing as a journalist.

The first time was early on in our working together.

[PHONE RINGING]

HAMZA SYED

Hey.

BRIAN REED

Hey, Hamza.

How's it going?

HAMZA SYED

It was my last week of journalism school, as I cramming to get my final project done, when Brian got in touch saying we needed to talk.

HAMZA SYED

I'm good.

What's good?

BRIAN REED

Well, it's not great, honestly.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, God.

BRIAN REED

So I just got this email.

HAMZA SYED

This was when we were looking into Adderley Primary school, trying to find information about the head teacher, Rizvana Darr and the four teaching assistants who said their resignation letters had been faked.

When Brian requested records from the employment tribunal about the case, the tribunal contacted the people involved to ask whether they wanted the records released.

It turns out, some of them did not.

Brian started reading a letter to me that just been sent to the tribunal by the three Muslim TAs in response to his request.

BRIAN REED

The main responsibility of a journalist is to report the news in a truthful, unbiased, and apolitical way, and to educate the public about events. and issues and how they affect their lives.

I do not believe these matter will be reported in quote, unquote, "an unbiased and apolitical way."

The lead figure in this exercise is Mr. Syed, a student journalist who intends to use Mr. Reed's radio station as a medium to advocate his opinions.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, wow.

BRIAN REED

We have received letters directly, indirectly, slash indirectly, from Mr. Syed, attached.

HAMZA SYED

They attached my letters?

BRIAN REED

They have.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, boy.

BRIAN REED

It is the contents of these letters which raise concerns.

We quote a paragraph from the letter addressed to Mr. Aslam.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, no.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, no.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

Mr. Aslam is the brother of two of the teaching assistants from early primary school.

Brian and I had a weird phone call with Aslam early on to ask if he'd connect us with his sisters.

He was reluctant to admit it was him we were speaking to.

He asked suspiciously how he got his number for his law office, even though it's just advertised online, and then he hung up on us.

It seemed like all he heard were the words journalist and Trojan Horse, and he shut down.

We decided to follow up with a letter.

Usually, Brian I look over each of other's emails and letters to potential sources before we send them, but Aslam had seemed especially distrustful of reporters.

Shortly after we talked, he actually changed his WhatsApp profile picture to a Malcolm X meme about media controlling the minds of the masses.

So I said to Brian, let me try a more personal appeal with this one.

Let him know there's someone with some shared background involved in this project.

Brother to brother I think are the words I actually said to Brian.

And so with this one letter, I drafted it on my own, sealed it in an envelope, and I dropped it off at Aslam's office.

I never heard back, until now.

As Brian read to me the court finding that he, and the people involved in the earlier case, including Rizvana Darr and the Birmingham City Council, had just been sent as well.

Quoting my letter to ask Aslam.

BRIAN REED

Quote, "I'm on a master's program for Investigative Journalism currently.

I graduate this September.

The Trojan horse began as my dissertation project, and it is my first attempt to start righting wrongs.

I never believed in the official narrative regarding the Trojan Horse.

I never believed the letter was authentic.

I never believed Tahir Alam was masterminding the sinister Islamic plot.

I never believed Birmingham City Council.

I never believed Peter Clarke.

I never believed Michael Gove.

I never believed Rizvana Darr and I never believed your sisters wrote those resignation letters.

What I believe is, I'm going to change this narrative, inshallah."

End quote.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, boy.

HAMZA SYED

With each, "Oh, boy," I was coming to terms with both how bad and how confusing the situation was.

By this point, I knew the TA's didn't want to participate in our story.

I've been trying to get in touch with them all sorts of ways, including through other family members, who told me the TAs didn't want this painful chapter dredged up again.

And the TAs said as much in this letter to the tribunal.

In fact, they went further, saying they're worried that being thrust back into the public eye could put their safety at risk somehow.

But, in addition, the TAs were not making the bewildering argument that they didn't want me to have the records from that case, because I was too biased in favor of them.

BRIAN REED

We trust the above sets out clearly our position as the applicants in this case.

Yours faithfully, Shahnaz Bibi, Yasmin Akthar, Rehena Khanom.

And then they've attached both your letter to Aslam and then your letter to Rehena as evidence.

So--

BRIAN REED

It's one thing, as a reporter, to have a read on a situation, to have theories.

It's another to have such an unambiguous take, and to spell it out in writing and send it around to people.

Others could do exactly what the TAs were doing, brandish what Hamza had written to try and discredit our work.

It could cause people to distrust our reporting.

Plus, we hadn't even asked Rizvana Darr for an interview yet.

She's obviously one of the key people we were reporting on, and I was hopeful she might talk to Hamza and me.

But this letter, this was likely Rizvana Darr's introduction to us, Hamza writing that he never believed her.

BRIAN REED

Dude, I wish you hadn't wrote this this way.

I've got to be honest.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, I know.

I know.

I don't even know what to do now.

I'm genuinely, genuinely so sorry for writing that, mate.

Clearly I was just trying to --

I was going too strong just to get him on our side, you know?

It wasn't what I thought would be, like, being passed around.

I thought, OK, we're not going to be able to win him with anything kind of half-assed.

You might as well just kind of go all in.

BRIAN REED

Listen, I understand why you wrote this.

And this is new for you.

I get it.

It's your first story.

HAMZA SYED

I'm sorry, man.

I'm just -- I don't--

I fucked up, mate.

I fucked up.

I'm sorry.

BRIAN REED

No, I'm not trying to -- dude, I'm not --

I'm not trying to shame you into an apology.

Don't worry about that.

But, I just -- like, it's not a front.

I want to be clear, I'm open to any possibility of the truth here.

HAMZA SYED

I'm the same way.

Same here.

Same here.

BRIAN REED

And I think you are too.

Like, I don't -- I read this, and it doesn't feel accurate to how you feel.

It's not just that we have our -- as a journalist, we have our opinions but don't say them, I really try to really be open while letting facts lead me towards conclusions.

It's not like I have some conclusion and then just don't say it.

You know?

I'm not trying to lecture you, I'm just trying to talk it out.

That's all.

Are you there?

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, I'm just --

I've, you know -- I've killed it.

Oh, man, can you just -- can you just call me back in five minutes or something?

I kind of just need to, just --

I just need to go drink some water or something.

[PHONE RINGING]

Yo.

BRIAN REED

Hey, I'm sorry.

I didn't mean to --

I feel like I was lecturing you there.

I didn't mean for it to come off that way.

I'm really sorry.

HAMZA SYED

No, that's right.

Listen, you got nothing to apologize for in this situation.

I have fucked us both up.

It's my fault. And you know, you're being surprisingly patient with me, if I'm honest.

If I was -- trust me, I would not be this diplomatic with you if that was you who'd done that.

Man, whatever, I'll own those words.

I will own those words, you know?

BRIAN REED

What do you mean own them?

Do you believe them?

Like, are they true?

HAMZA SYED

Well, OK, here's --

let me just be Frank here, OK?

What's that list again?

Who am I saying that I don't believe?

BRIAN REED

You never believed in the official narrative regarding the Trojan Horse.

That seems fair.

HAMZA SYED

Which I don't.

BRIAN REED

That's fine.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

I never believed the letter was authentic.

HAMZA SYED

Take that one.

BRIAN REED

You never believed Tahir Alam was masterminding the sinister Islamic plot.

HAMZA SYED

I didn't.

BRIAN REED

I never believed Birmingham City Council.

HAMZA SYED

I don't.

I still don't.

BRIAN REED

I never believed Peter Clarke.

HAMZA SYED

I don't.

BRIAN REED

I never believed Michael Gove.

HAMZA SYED

I don't.

BRIAN REED

I never believed Rizvana Darr.

HAMZA SYED

I don't.

I feel like what you have there is, like, the reality of just a human being.

You have my mindset as a person of what I thought this incident was, and you have my approach as a journalist of the way I'm pursuing it.

As a journalist, as I begin with, like, a hunch, like an instinct, based on things that I've researched --

BRIAN REED

Mm-hmm.

HAMZA SYED

That doesn't mean that when facts suggest otherwise I remain stubborn and I just stick to my original premise.

There's a reason this story isn't broadcast yet.

BRIAN REED

I understand what you're saying, but it also --

the wording is I never believed, you know?

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, never is a strong word, I know.

I am not defending my language, nor the fact that I wrote that, or anything along that lines.

It just poisons everything.

It poisons everything.

Because now it's not in the hands of impartial journalists, now it's in the hands of, like, a biased mob.

God, I just wish we'd --

ah, God.

Oh, mate.

BRIAN REED

I'd worked with Hamza long enough to know that what he was telling me was true.

Sure, he had suspicions, but he was working hard to uncover facts and following the facts where they led.

I was frustrated that he'd written this breathless letter that didn't properly capture the work I knew we were doing.

But what I realize now, listening back to this call, with all my sorry man's and my discomfort, is that I was in the middle of a change, in how I understand my work.

There was a way I'd gone about my job for years that I'd begun to doubt without really admitting it to myself.

[MUSIC]

This change crystallized for me after our next leg of reporting, when we teased apart the government's investigations into Birmingham schools.

We dove into those investigations and the reports they produced, because for a year and a half Hamza and I had been hearing that there wasn't any value in focusing on the Trojan Horse letter, on its source or its purpose.

The letter, people would say, whatever its unknowns or factual errors, didn't matter anymore, because all of the subsequent investigations had found that something troubling was happening in Birmingham schools.

The most damning investigation was also the most prominent one.

Conducted on behalf of the National Department for Education, by the former head of counterterrorism at Scotland Yard, Peter Clarke.

And once we delved into Peter Clarke's report, that's when it really set in for me, what Hamza is up against, as a journalist covering this story and as a person.

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Brian Reed.

HAMZA SYED

And I'm a pain in the ass.

BRIAN REED

This is The Trojan Horse Affair.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

All right.

Peter Clarke.

As I'd made inconveniently clear in my letter to Aslam, which now filed away in the Midlands West Employment Tribunal, I was skeptical of Clarke, but I wasn't alone in that.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

The decision by the Department of Education to appoint the former head of counterterrorism was described as desperately unfortunate by the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police.

It's a concern that the choice of this former terrorism official to investigate --

HAMZA SYED

Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, was the one who chose Peter Clarke to run the Trojan Horse investigation.

And people started grousing the moment Gove appointed him.

The issues in Birmingham schools seemed to be about school procedures, curriculum, hiring, religious practice.

Clarke was known for executing high profile terror stings.

Why would you need someone with that background for this investigation?

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

-- counter-terrorism, we're dealing with allegations here, we're not dealing with al-Qaeda, who've had a number of...

HAMZA SYED

But Gove sent Peter Clarke to Birmingham anyway.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

If people have been unfairly alleged to have taken part in activities of which they're entirely innocent, then there can be no more effective figure to exonerate them of those charges than Peter Clarke.

HAMZA SYED

For three months, Clarke posted up in my city.

He and a team of D of E officials conducted 43 interviews, many on condition of anonymity, with staff connected to schools in East Birmingham and others.

And at the end of it, he published his report.

His conclusion was this, that there had been, quote, "coordinated, deliberate, and sustained action carried out by a number of associated individuals to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools in Birmingham," and that these people in positions of influence, quote,

"espouse, endorse, or fail to challenge extremist views."

Clarke writes that he conducted his investigation in an atmosphere where there was a great deal of rumor, speculation, and unevidenced assertion.

And so, quote, "I've treated the entire investigation as an exercise in fact finding and establishing a sound, verifiable, and whenever possible, fully corroborated evidence base."

When I read Peter Clarke's report for the first time, though, I was not seeing a fully corroborated evidence base.

Far from it.

For instance, let's look at Park View School, to which Clarke devotes a lot of attention in his report.

In one chapter, he includes a bullet point list of allegations about Park View.

And at the very top of the list, the first item.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Peter Clarke speaks about a terrorist video in the school.

Terrorist video in the school.

HAMZA SYED

This is Tahir Alam, Park View's former chair of Governors.

When we asked him about Peter Clarke's investigation, he remembered this video thing immediately.

It's one of Clarke's most incendiary findings from any school.

Quote, "IT technicians recording what appeared to be al-Qaeda terrorist videos into a DVD format."

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Now, what impression do you get from that?

In a school, should there be terrorist videos?

The answer is no.

So the school's done something wrong, haven't they?

Now, what information did Peter Clarke have from the people in the school?

That particular video was brought in by somebody who was working for the police.

HAMZA SYED

According to Tahir, someone doing an anti-crime program for the cops had noticed that the school had a DVD burner and asked if they could use it.

And the video they were copying --

ARCHIVED RECORDING

The terrorist video happens to be a Panorama program.

HAMZA SYED

You know that show.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

It was no terrorist video, it was a documentary done by the BBC Panorama program about, maybe, Afghanistan.

HAMZA SYED

Tahir says Park View shared this explanation with Peter Clarke and his investigation team.

In fact, they shared a lot of mitigating and controverting evidence for the claims people were levying against them.

Yet Peter Clarke includes little reference to that information in the report, beyond one line saying, quote, "It is only fair to point out that Park View had disputed most, if not all, of the allegations."

Today, if you go on the government's website, you'll see the terrorist video still leads the list of claims about Park View, even though the Department of Education later wrote an internal memo that we've seen, admitting they can find no proof to back it up.

[MUSIC]

I wanted to evaluate the other claims in Peter Clarke's report.

I knew that a year or so after a report came out many of the allegations had been interrogated, in public hearings, at what was known as the National College for Teaching and Leadership, when the government tried to ban a number of the Park View staff from the teaching profession.

During those hearings, Park View leaders and their lawyers had the opportunity to put forward their side of the story and cross-examine, not Peter Clarke himself, who didn't testify in the hearing, and also declined to speak to us,

but the DFE officials who investigated Park View with him and Clarke sources from inside the school.

So I got the transcript of the hearing against Park View senior leadership team.

It was thousands of pages and took a whole summer to slog through.

I'm going to take the next 2,000 hours to walk you through each allegation.

I'm kidding, sort of.

I am going to take you through a bunch of the Clarke allegations, ones the government focused on in their case against the teachers, because it's the only way, I can think of, to fully convey the sinkholes in Clarke's investigation, and why I don't think anyone

should be basing their understanding of The Trojan Horse Affair on this report.

A number of the claims in Clarke's report we've discussed already as part of our interview with Sue and Steve Packer.

Peter Clarke reports on the sex education class, the tennis lesson, the lack of promotion and opportunity for women, but there are a lot more.

For one, Clarke writes that Park View student prefects, our version of hall monitors, were trained, according to some staff, to operate as morality police, that they would provide the headteacher with the names of pupils who, say, had a boyfriend or a girlfriend,

or if a girl who wasn't sufficiently covered.

At the disciplinary hearing a year later, the government was unable to put forward any student who remembers this.

They actually put forward no students to testify against the school at all.

The testimony the government did provide to support this claim was from one Park View teacher who said on the stand that she believed student prrefects were monitoring the school as religious police, because she saw kids in detention and didn't know why they were there.

And another teacher told her, it was because they were in a relationship.

The school denied that was the reason students were being detentioned, but regardless, this teacher doesn't explain how she got the idea that it was student prefects who had snitched on their classmates.

Meanwhile, a number of other teachers testified that they never heard about prefects acting as a morality squad.

And a former prefect took to the stand to say, they weren't asked to do anything like that.

There's a lot in the Clarke report about the assemblies of Park View school being anti-American, or anti-Christian, or anti-Israeli, with indoctrination of students going on.

But at the hearing, from what I gathered reading the transcript, and this was confirmed by a lawyer involved with the case, most of the staff who made claims about the nature of assemblies admitted they'd never been to an assembly at the school.

Sue Packer was one.

Sue testified the school assemblies were only ever led by men.

And when confronted by a lawyer with the names of women on staff who'd hosted assemblies at school, Sue said her statement about it only being men was based on her, quote, "belief that that was the case."

One teacher who testified had attended assemblies.

He said during one of them Park Views acting head teacher, Maz Hussain, told children that, quote, "the answer to everything is iqra"" which he found concerning because, while iqra does mean read, or seeking knowledge, in Arabic, it's a religious term from the Koran.

And this teacher felt uncomfortable with that.

He also testified that he didn't agree that iqra is the answer to everything.

Peter Clarke wrote that some East Birmingham schools had, for religious reasons, prevented students from hearing musical instruments and from singing.

At the disciplinary hearing, a DFE investigator admitted that he hadn't checked inside the cupboard in Park View's music room, where the music teacher says the instruments were kept.

School staff spoke of Park View students singing at assemblies, of children being on stage with Roger Waters, the bassist of Pink Floyd.

Clarke also writes that he found financial mismanagement at Park View school.

One of his fellow investigators from the DFE stated at the hearing that they found no such thing.

BRIAN REED

This is the problem with the Clarke report.

He provides no clear sourcing or verification for the vast majority of his allegations.

There are scant facts, or figures, or footnotes, or context, which is not, by the way, Peter Clarke's normal style.

After The Trojan Horse Affair, he went on to become England's prison inspector.

And in the reports he produced for that job, he's way more transparent about his work and how his findings are corroborated.

The prison reports are annotated, full of statistics, whereas in his Trojan Horse report, you kind of have to take his word for it.

Even claims that were based on something that did occur, there was often more to the story than what Clarke reported.

For example, Clarke writes that there were attempts to stop Christmas celebrations at Park View.

It's true that to Tahir Alam and others believed that some parents would object to their kids participating in certain Christmas activities, such as playing a Christian figure in a nativity play.

The student body was around 97% Muslim.

But what's missing from Clarke's report is that the school did put up Christmas trees, held a Christmas assembly, where a pastor spoke about the holiday, organized a Christmas music concert.

At the hearing, Steve Packer, who seemed most concerned about Christmas, testified that all this was true, though he said there weren't Christmas songs sung at the Christmas concert.

Clarke also writes that Park View did not have a procedure for vetting external speakers invited to the school, which leadership acknowledged.

Peter Clarke returned several times to this one imam who visited from Australia, who despite the fact that the Australian government has called him a widely respected Islamic figure in the country, and a moderating influence on Muslim youth, Clarke says has a history of extolling extremist views.

The imam's name is Sheik Shady Al-Suleiman.

And the specific quote Clarke references, from an old sermon of Sheikh Shady's, was actually read into the record of the House of Commons by Michael Gove.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

The school invited the preacher, Sheikh Shady Al-Suleiman to speak, despite the fact that he is reported to have said, "Give victory to Muslims in Afghanistan, give victory to all the mujahideen all over the world.

Oh, Allah, prepare us for the jihad."

HAMZA SYED

I know Gove was reciting those words from Sheik Shady's old sermon as if they're scary, but at least, from my experience, that's a pretty generic sounding sign off for Friday prayers.

And we've read a lengthy dossier the home office prepared about Sheikh Shady after Peter Clarke's investigation, in which officials agree.

They write, quote, "This rhetoric is likely to be heard from imams and mosques around the UK and overseas, when they make specific prayers for people affected by wars and other calamities."

These words are, quote, "used in a very Common Prayer uttered by Muslims everywhere."

[MUSIC]

Peter Clarke's overarching allegation, the big charge that all these are the claims fed into, was that there was too much Islamic influence at Park View and other schools, that they'd become faith schools, as he puts it, in all but name.

But it's totally unclear from Clarke's report what standards or benchmarks are used to make that assessment.

The Department of Education provides pretty clear direction as to how schools should incorporate religious education and collective worship, none of which is referenced in the Clarke report.

And that may be because of a stunning revelation made during the hearing.

Clarke's lead educational advisor, the person from the Department of Education who is supposed to lend expertise about school regulation and management to the inquiry, admitted under cross-examination that she had never read nor provided Peter Clarke any of her own department's guidance

on religious accommodation in British schools.

If she had, Clarke might have had to explain in his report how Park View had run afoul of the requirement.

The school should, quote, "Aim to provide the opportunity for pupils to worship God, to consider spiritual and moral issues, and to explore their own beliefs."

Instead, Clarke's argument that there's undue Islamic influence in the schools, or Islamic influence of the wrong kind, is untethered to the statutory guidelines, a broad, free floating, subjective critique.

It's basically an opinion that there's too much Islam.

BRIAN REED

Peter Clarke marshalls this menagerie of allegations, some true, some kind of true, some that turned out not to be true, to lay out a wider story about East Birmingham schools, a narrative which he interweaves through the allegations that I'd summarize something like this.

A lot of these schools were doing pretty well, until a bunch of Muslim governors came in and started agitating for changes in line with an extreme Islamic worldview.

Their methods and motives were improper.

They started taking control at a bunch of schools.

And because the complaints and outcomes repeat from school to school, that means these aren't isolated incidents, they're connected.

The school at the epicenter of all this Islamization is Park View.

The person at the epicenter of Park View is Tahir Alam.

Tahir, he's the main villain in Clarke's report, which is not my phrase, by the way.

As officials with the DFEs Counter-Extremism unit were working with Peter Clarke to put the finishing touches on his report, one of them sent an email we've seen which refers to Tahir, and three other Muslim men who worked with them as governors, as their, quote, "main villains."

TAHIR ALAM

You will see Clarke published a spider diagram on me.

OK?

BRIAN REED

We actually have that printed out.

We wanted to show it to you and get your take on it.

TAHIR ALAM

Yeah, I don't deny any of it.

BRIAN REED

After the list with the terrorist video, turn the page and you'll see a tiny 90s clip art image of a man, who looks white, by the way, labeled Tahir Alam.

There are lines emanating from him in all directions, like a web, crisscrossing and connecting between Tahir and icons of schools, and office buildings, and other White looking clip art educators with Pakistani names, all individuals and organizations that Tahir was associated with.

TAHIR ALAM

This is painted as some kind of network, but these are things that I'm very proud of.

It says here, for example, he worked for Birmingham City council as a governor trainer.

Wow.

He's a vice chair of the Association of Muslim schools.

How bad is that?

And Birmingham governor's network associate.

I was a member of the Birmingham governor's network for many years, contributing to improving governance across the city.

So obviously, that's not, maybe, good either.

Let's go through it.

There's only a few more left.

BRIAN REED

More than a few, but Tahir insisted on finishing them.

He was a member of the local multi-faith organization, SACRE.

He'd been the chair of education for the Muslim Council of Britain, a big national organization.

He was a trustee at the Birmingham Central Mosque.

TAHIR ALAM

So Peter Clarke, with his tons of experience as a terror expert, you know, hunting extremists and terrorists down around the country, he's produced this.

BRIAN REED

It's basically your CV.

TAHIR ALAM

It is taken from my CV.

BRIAN REED

It's possible.

Tahir had provided his resume in an application to the DFE some years before, which had this information on it.

TAHIR ALAM

I submitted all of this.

They made it into a spider diagram, using it against me.

BRIAN REED

It's amazing when you take all the things that would, in a CV, be arranged like a resume, and arrange them in a spider diagram --

TAHIR ALAM

It gives a different impression.

BRIAN REED

--in a government report by a police officer, by a counterterror official.

TAHIR ALAM

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

It just has a whole different vibe.

TAHIR ALAM

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

That's right.

It's being crafted to give a certain image.

And the spider diagram is supposed to give an impression, as if I'm some kind of criminal who has infiltrated all these different organizations.

This is supposed to serve the idea of the Trojan Horse.

[MUSIC]

This is giving a reality to the Trojan Horse.

BRIAN REED

There's a critical fact about Tahir in Park View that Peter Clarke left out of his report, a fact that, if he had included it, could have thoroughly undercut his entire narrative.

Park View and Tahir Alam were taking over other East Birmingham schools, because they've been asked to by the Department for Education.

Park View was considered this huge success, and there were two other schools nearby that really needed help.

And so the whole takeover was authorized and set in motion by the DFE through a program that Michael Gove himself was championing, The Academies Program.

Amazingly, Peter Clarke never explains this.

So you'd be forgiven if you came away from reading his report with the idea that Muslim governors were making these moves illegitimately, if you thought they were scheming under the radar.

Omissions like this, along with all the allegations printed without context or rebuttal, the spider diagrams, it all contributes to a strong impression that Peter Clarke did uncover a plot in Birmingham.

But when you read the report closely, this is another confounding thing about it, Clarke never actually says whether he found a plot or not.

He does write, quote, "The key question is whether what has happened has been an organized plot, as described in the Trojan Horse letter."

But then he never explicitly answers that question yes or no.

This obfuscation, which is at the very heart of the report's findings, led to a telling moment as Peter Clarke was testifying in the House of Commons about The Trojan Horse Affair, when a member of parliament said to him.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Can I just ask Mr. Clarke first, in relation to some of the evidence that you produced to demonstrate that there was a plot, and in particular --

BRIAN REED

Apparently, this MP read the report and took away from it, plot.

Clarke had to correct him, tells him, I haven't actually said that.

I haven't said I found a plot.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

-- the coordinated, concerted action.

Yes, plot, to me, means something slightly different --

BRIAN REED

The MP pauses for a moment, then asks.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

How is that of interest?

How is that different from concerted action?

Well, you can have a continuum.

At one end, there's a lot of spontaneous things just happen, at the other end you've got a group of people, perhaps in a darkened room, sitting around a candle, deciding to do something in a very furtive way.

Somewhere between them, you'll have people, as I believe we have here, who, with a common mindset, common objectives, known to each other, worked in the same organizations, had worked in the same profession, have shared the objectives

and set about achieving those objectives using a set of tactics which are remarkably similar every time they emerge, and remarkably similar as it happens --

BRIAN REED

Peter Clarke's report, rather than clarifying that the Trojan Horse letter was a fake, the plot unevidenced, spun a web of legitimacy around both.

HAMZA SYED

To take my cue from Peter Clarke, I want to share some concerns I have about some people with a common mindset who know each other, have worked in the same organizations, had common objectives, and set about achieving those objectives.

Two people who fit that description are Peter Clarke and the man who appointed him, former Education Secretary Michael Gove.

Those two have known each other for many years, mainly through Peter Clarke's affiliations with think tanks that Michael Gove helped establish, which could form their own spider diagram, honestly.

These think tanks, and the politicians, and journalists, and officials who are part of them, have long advocated a view that ultimately made its way into the conservative government's policy agenda, that in order to prevent terrorism, authorities have to target so-called non-violent extremists.

Michael Gove has been pushing the strategy for years.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

In the past, there was an attempt to say that the only way in which we could deal with this problem is if we dealt with extremism when it became violent, and we waited too late.

And I think--

HAMZA SYED

He argues that there's a pre-violent stage to extremism, during which Muslims get drawn into the ideology of Islamism.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (MICHAEL GOVE)

Islamism is a totalitarian view, like communism, like fascism.

And in that respect, the only way in which one can understand the motivation is if you look at the totalitarian roots of the ideology rather than simply thinking that al-Qaeda are a national liberation movement like other terrorist organizations.

You mentioned the IRA --

HAMZA SYED

The difficulty with this is, what many people see as early signs of extremism, the markers of pre-violence, can be hard to distinguish from the elements of daily life for many Muslims.

Deciding to attend mosque more frequently, dressing traditionally, growing a beard, associating with certain Muslim groups, like the Muslim council of Britain, and having a worldview in which our religion and political opinion are intermingled.

For instance, identifying with Muslims around the world who are being victimized, criticizing Western powers for oppression abroad, or wearing a niqab, which Michael Gove in his book "Celsius 77" characterizes as, quote, "Not so much a mark of Islamic faith

as a badge of allegiance towards Islamist politics.

It marks the wearer apart as one who has become an internal exile."

Slightly more poetic, I guess, than our current prime minister who called women who cover their faces letterboxes and bank robbers.

Essentially, the concept of pre-violence puts all Muslims on a spectrum in which we're all capable of sliding towards violence, and so we all need to be kept under surveillance.

[MUSIC]

This conveyor belt theory of radicalization has been pretty roundly debunked.

Academics, and MI5, and the US Department of Defense, and former CIA agents, have all pointed out that there's no empirical evidence to support it.

Experts who study radicalization haven't found a single discernible pathway to terrorism and warned that trying to pin down some sort of pattern or ideology can be counterproductive, because it's not proven to work, and it can make people feel criminalized and alienated in their own countries.

Still, many of the people who shaped counterterror policy have held on to this theory.

Gove, Clarke, the prime minister at the time, David Cameron, future Prime Minister Theresa May, people in the US, too.

By the time the Trojan Horse had came round, Michael Gove had spent years, and a lot of political currency, investing in this worldview,.

If you read the Clarke report with a theory of pre-violence in mind, suddenly it makes a lot more sense, especially when you consider the most damning evidence in the Clarke report, his smoking gun.

That's next.

HAMZA SYED

It was a group chat.

That was Peter Clarke's smoking gun.

We've mentioned it before, it was a men-only WhatsApp group that a bunch of Park View staffers were part of called The Park View Brotherhood.

Somebody gave Clarke a transcript of some 3,200 messages from the chat, a year's worth, and he devotes a whole chapter to them, because, he says, "The messages are proof of the Muslim educator's collective mindset."

According to Clarke, most of the messages were mundane, about school events, job postings, ideas for assemblies, but among them were texts that he saw as evidence of the ideology

these men ascribe to, what Clarke called, "An intolerant and politicized form of extreme social conservatism that claims to represent, and ultimately seeks to control, all Muslims."

The messages he found concerning included an article about pro-european bias in the teaching of world history, a debate about the pros and cons of teaching boys and girls separately, criticism of the British military, an image of the Israeli flag on a roll of toilet paper,

skepticism and theorizing about media reporting on terrorist attacks, and a discussion about possibly having students write letters to the government to protest a far right Islamophobic group as part of their citizenship lessons.

Alongside those, Clarke flagged several really offensive messages, which, if you follow the Trojan Horse inquiries at the time, you probably remember hearing about in the headlines.

These are primarily from one teacher, whom we've interviewed for this series, Razwan Faraz In one exchange, Razwan makes a comment about women belonging in the kitchen, serving men.

In another, responding to an article about gay marriage and said, "These animals are going out full force."

Another time, a teacher posted a link about a shrine in Pakistan being used as a meeting place for gay men.

Several teachers in the chat registered their disapproval, including Razwan who wrote, quote, "The problem of homosexuality is rife in Pakistan."

These messages are misogynistic and homophobic, and clearly troubling coming from a teacher.

Clarke's report makes mention of staff for some schools who reported that they had to hide their sexuality.

If true, that's awful, obviously.

When we asked Razwan about the messages, he told us the kitchen comment was a joke, and that he has since changed his views on homosexuality and become an advocate for gay and transgender rights.

But after Clarke published Razwan comments, a judge found that they went beyond protected religious beliefs and amounted to a breach of professional standards.

[MUSIC]

Whether and how to talk about sexuality and gender in British schools is still an active controversy.

In 2019, a progressive new sex ed curriculum debuted at a primary school in East Birmingham, and parents lost their minds, protesting in large numbers.

Their opposition included some ugly, homophobic arguments.

Some parents even pulled their kids out of schools.

This isn't shocking, or at least it shouldn't be.

Many Muslims who adhere to conservative religious interpretation, Tahir Alam among them, aren't accepting of LGBTQ people.

The same is true of devout Christians in the UK.

Only 40% of them support gay marriage.

I'm not saying homophobia or sexism doesn't matter, because we're not the only ones.

I'm saying, it does matter, because we're not the only ones.

These problems require good-faith engagement from leaders.

And yet, rather than grapple with the important issues at hand, here's what our government did in response to these WhatsApp messages and the Clarke report.

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Other news now, the government is to fast track a tough, new crackdown on extremism.

It's a follow up to promises made in the aftermath of The Trojan Horse Affair in Birmingham, and the jailing of extremists such as --

HAMZA SYED

Once Peter Clarke's report was presented to parliament by the Department for Education, politicians set about using it to make sweeping changes to combat pre-violent extremism, which would have implications far beyond Alum Rock..

ARCHIVED RECORDING

Although, as we reported at the time, no evidence of radicalization was ever found, no evidence of violent extremism was ever found, there was no organized plot, but this is about the potential for problems in the future.

So the --

In a speech in Birmingham today, the prime minister compared the threat of extremist Islam to that of Hitler, communism and the IRA.

And in the past, he says--

HAMZA SYED

In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron stood in front of a Birmingham School and invoked The Trojan Horse Affair to lay out the rationale for a robust reimagining of the country's counter-extremism strategy.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (DAVID CAMERON)

We undertook an immediate review when it became apparent that extremists had taken over some of our schools in the so-called Trojan Horse scandal here in Birmingham.

But I have to be honest here, one year on, although we are making progress, it's not quick enough.

HAMZA SYED

The think tanks made hay of it.

The home secretary at the time, Theresa May, made her own trip to Birmingham to deliver a Trojan Horse-inspired speech by extremism.

Even the queen got on board, at the request of the Tories, in her own curt way.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (QUEEN ELIZABETH II)

Measures will also be brought forward to promote social cohesion and protect people by tackling extremism.

HAMZA SYED

This all culminated in the government expanding their counter-extremism policy, it's called Prevent, in a way that we're still living with it today.

Citing The Trojan Horse Affair, the government mandated that public employees would now be obligated to be on the lookout for people exhibiting the early markers of extremism, or other behavior they find suspicious.

Which means, now in Britain, citizens are informing on each other to the state, based on their own judgment about whether an action or comment is extremist.

Doctors are informing on their patients, workers on their colleagues, teachers on their students.

And the year since The Trojan Horse Affair, we've had an 11-year-old referred to the Prevent program, because in response to a question in school about what he would do if he came into a lot of money, said he would give alms to the oppressed, A-L-M-S,

which has misheard as arms to the oppressed.

And a four-year-old was referred for drawing an illustration of his father with a cooker bomb that was later understood to be a cucumber.

We can laugh at all this, except erroneous reports like these can easily follow kids all the way into adulthood, that they were flagged to Prevent.

They remain people of interest.

And these are just the crazy incidents that made the news.

The program has been found by numerous academics and human rights groups to be discriminatory against us.

We're referred in hugely disproportionate numbers.

As the director of an organization that monitors the program put it not long ago, Prevent injects suspicion and discrimination deep into the imagination of frontline workers, to the detriment of Muslims.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

We asked Peter Clarke, Michael Gove, and the Department for Education if they could explain some of the flaws we've seen in Peter Clarke's report.

In return, the DFE sent us a statement saying, "The Trojan horse investigation, led by Peter Clarke, rightly focused on whether the events and behaviors alleged actually happened, and the findings have subsequently been confirmed by a number of independent reports," end quote.

Just for a minute, a word about those other independent reports.

One the DFE mentioned, by the Education Funding Agency, was not independent of Clarke's.

The Education Funding Agency was part of the DFE, and some of the same people who conducted that inquiry were also part of Peter Clarke's team, even drafted whole chapters of his report.

Another investigation the DFE cited was by Ofsted, the school inspectors who had downgraded Park View from the agency's highest ranking to the absolute lowest.

A downgrade that dramatic is nearly unheard of.

Ofsted said it was because the school wasn't doing enough to prevent the possibility of extremism.

But a lot of people, including prominent education experts, claimed Ofsted had succumbed to political pressure.

Ofsted's chief inspector was even dragged in front of parliament and grilled about it.

And lastly, the DFE mentioned Birmingham City Council's Trojan Horse investigation by Ian Kershaw.

Kershaw collaborated closely with Peter Clarke too.

They did joint interviews, shared evidence.

And while he did determine that some governors had overstepped in pushing for academic and religious changes at their schools, unlike Clarke, he did not allege a sinister ideological threat.

When we interviewed Kershaw, he really minimized the whole affair, telling us, quote, "One should not overblow the Trojan Horse.

Some people say scandal, it wasn't big enough to be a scandal," end quote.

One of the recommendations Peter Clarke made at the end of his investigation was that the Department for Education should consider taking action against teachers who might have breached professional standards.

The DFE did.

It restricted or outright suspended more than a dozen teachers, mostly from Park View, with the charge that they had agreed to the inclusion at the school of a, quote, "undue amount of religious influence."

And the department started holding those disciplinary hearings to determine if the teachers should be permanently banned.

As we mentioned, the most prominent of the cases was against five of Park View's leaders, people who had been head teachers, and assistant heads, and the like.

Though not Tahir Alam, because he was a volunteer governor, not a teacher.

He was just banned outright, and when he appealed, he lost.

This hearing, it was the first time the Park View teachers would get a chance to try to formally clear their names.

Arshad Hussain was one of them.

ARSHAD HUSSAIN

The initial set of dates, I think the hearings were three months. Ended up going on for two and a half years.

They're making it up as they go along.

BRIAN REED

During this time, Arshad and his colleagues, two of whom, interestingly enough, aren't Muslim, which let themselves to a drab building in Coventry, where the government would argue that they weren't fit to work in schools.

ARSHAD HUSSAIN

You can't teach.

Your hearings are scattered across the two years, so you've got a day here, day there.

It was just horrendous.

HAMZA SYED

By this point, the charge against Arshad and his colleagues have been watered down significantly from when the Trojan Horse allegations first emerged.

As the government's attorney said in his opening statement, "Despite what you may have read or heard, this case is not, and I cannot stress this enough, this case is not about an evil plot to indoctrinate young children in extremist ideologies or anything like it."

He said the Department for Education was not suggesting that the educators were, quote, "malicious or ill-willed."

It was not suggesting that Park View hadn't had great success.

What the government was arguing, the attorney said, was that the teachers had failed to respect diversity by going, quote, "Too far in inculcating their own vision of the cultural identity they wish these children to have."

An all-White panel sat and listened to all-White lawyers argue about this until the case finally concluded in May of 2017, three and a half years after the Trojan Horse letter arrived on Sir Albert Bore's desk.

This essentially marked the end of The Trojan Horse Affair, and the end was its own magnificent, enraging shambles.

It was the final hour.

The disciplinary panel was drafting its decision, and there had been this back and forth that had been going on since the beginning of the proceedings about the transcripts of interviews that Peter Clarke's team had conducted with witnesses from Park View school.

The Park View teachers had asked for these transcripts repeatedly.

They had a right to see them.

And the whole time, the Department for Education's lawyers had said they didn't have them, that they weren't relying on those interview transcripts to argue their case.

But that wasn't true.

It emerged at the very last minute that the DFE did have them, and they had used them to mount their case.

The whole time, years, the government's lawyers have been deliberately withholding crucial evidence from the Park View teachers, their legal teams, and the panel.

The government had been sitting on at least 1,600 pages of documents, including the Clarke transcripts.

When the disciplinary panel learned this, on the eve of reading its decision, the panelists demanded that the senior solicitor for the government's legal team appear in front of them and explain herself, explain how she'd let this happen.

But she didn't show.

She said she had a partner's meeting for her law firm that she couldn't miss.

And so the panelists discontinued the case.

They issued no findings.

They were in a new decision which said of the DFE lawyer's actions, quote, "There has been an abuse of the process, which is of such seriousness that it offends the panel's sense of justice and propriety.

What has happened has brought the integrity of the process into disrepute."

ARSHAD HUSSAIN

I mean, the whole thing is a blur.

BRIAN REED

Arshad Hussain remembers sitting in the hearing room as the panel read its decision.

ARSHAD HUSSAIN

As they started pushing in that direction, the abuse of process, and hearing is going to be dropped, I started literally getting flashes in front of my eyes thinking, this has happened because somebody has withheld evidence.

The solicitor had withheld the evidence, and she couldn't come to the hearing, because she was on a flight that evening, conveniently.

And she couldn't come and answer the questions, whereas we'd been answering questions for two years.

She just wasn't up to -- available to answer the questions and explain why this happened, you know, why she'd done that.

You've messed how many people's lives up, and you just can't bother to show up.

I don't know, my mind, just --

I don't know, it just went --

I just couldn't cope with it, that somebody had decided to do that, for this amount of time, and yet I'm the one sitting here just sort of broke down, I think.

[MUSIC]

It just felt like, when you step on a beetle on the street, or you step on an insect, and there's no consequence, there's no feeling of, oh, what have I done.

It's just, yep, that's just part of what it is.

We've trampled on these people.

Yeah, OK, they'll get through it.

Yeah, we haven't won this one, but let's just carry on.

BRIAN REED

Eventually, every teacher's case in The Trojan Horse Affair, except for one, who was not from Park View, was thrown out because of the government's lawyer's misconduct, and their unwillingness to share the underlying material from Peter Clarke's investigation.

After all the drama, the headlines, the investigations, the parliamentary hearings, the banning orders, the million plus pounds spent prosecuting teachers, the new Prevent requirements compelling people to surveil each other, the commandeering of schools in East Birmingham

and worsening academic outcomes for students, that was how The Trojan Horse Affair ended.

It was officially resolution-less.

Park Views teachers weren't banned, but nor were they vindicated.

HAMZA SYED

So that's what I saw when we finally turned to Peter Clarke's report.

This investigative document that became the most common response by officials to questions about the Trojan Horse letter, to not worry about whether the letter was a hoax or not, or where it came from, because Peter Clarke produced a far more reliable document.

Well, it turns out that wasn't true either.

The Clarke report was also, in its own ways, bogus.

After I internalized that conclusion, I experienced a level of dejection that was hard for me to understand.

After all, this is what I believed to be true when I began the story, that the Trojan horse was much ado about nothing.

And yet the work of reporting on the Clarke report, a.k.a.

Britain's official narrative of the case, was emptying.

Sitting there surrounded by documents, I struggled to imagine what other group of people you could do this to in Britain and get away with it.

Trying to come to terms with how worthless people must think we are, that they'll be comfortable assembling an official report riddled with errors and mistruths, submitting it to parliament, sharing it with prominent journalist to write articles about, all with no expectation

that people wouldn't believe them.

More, far from repercussions, a number of Clarke's team, including Clarke, were promoted after the publication of his inquiry into the Trojan horse.

And then there's a process by which I'd arrived at this point, that being journalism, a field in which was made absolutely clear to me when my Aslam letter surfaced.

I'm obligated to keep an open mind, to be fair with the likes of Peter Clarke and Michael Gove, to consider their perspective, try to understand the choices they made, and even if I'm going to come at them critically, to rein in my tone and words

so it doesn't feel like I'm just out to get them in some way.

It did not seem like that kind of respect was mutual.

BRIAN REED

I've always known that reporting this story is a much different experience for Hamza than it is for me.

Ever since the beginning, when we burst out of Council House after our first interview with Albert Bore.

HAMZA SYED

What the fuck was concerning?

Tell me what's concerning, mate.

BRIAN REED

This became the subject of an ongoing discussion between the two of us about how you're supposed to do this work.

HAMZA SYED

We go through this step by step, kind of side by side, but you are just, like, unflappable.

BRIAN REED

Hamza perpetually bewildered as to how I was able to take the things we were encountering and learning in stride the way I do.

HAMZA SYED

I'm not going to lie to you, I do think about you sometimes, and I do wonder how you're wired.

BRIAN REED

Really?

HAMZA SYED

Sometimes I wake up and I think, I should be like that, and that's how I need to be in order for me to do well in this field.

BRIAN REED

And me, constantly struggling to explain me and my motivation.

HAMZA SYED

What are you doing here in Birmingham?

BRIAN REED

I don't know.

You're asking me to be introspective in a way that's difficult.

BRIAN REED

But by the time we were waiting through the Clarke investigation the tenor of our debate had changed.

I noticed Hamza becoming increasingly bitter about being a journalist, and he started to talk more about how maybe this new field he'd entered wasn't right for him.

Something about the job felt unnatural.

And he told me he was thinking he might not keep doing it after this series came out, which was dispiriting for me, because sure, Hamza had done a couple of things during investigation that seemed to me ill-advised, but he's a good journalist, dogged, sharp, intuitive, original.

He seemed as well-suited as anybody for this job.

But here's what I've come to realize Hamza and I were experiencing differently, working alongside each other on this story for so long, the Trojan Horse.

And I don't mean the Trojan Horse letter, or The Trojan Horse Affair, I mean the idea of the Trojan Horse, this idea which infected every aspect of the events we were investigating, the idea that Muslims, who are participating in civic life in the West,

are, in actuality, using Western Democratic systems duplicitously, as a vessel to sneak into societies and countries that are not really their own so they can subvert them.

That phrase, Trojan Horse, in reference to Muslims, it's not taboo, it's perfectly acceptable to use it in the name of official reports submitted to parliament, or as Michael Gove did in "Celsius 7/7," as the title of a chapter in your book about the Muslim threat, or in the name of your podcast.

It's acceptable to use it in your campaign for president of the United States.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (DONALD TRUMP)

This could be the great Trojan Horse of all time, because you look at the migration, study it, look at it.

Now they'll start infiltrating with women and children.

BRIAN REED

Donald Trump used the Trojan Horse metaphor to speak about Muslims over and over in his run for president.

It was part of his stump speech.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (DONALD TRUMP)

Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who probably, in many cases, not probably, who are definitely, in many cases, ISIS-aligned, and we now have them in our country.

And wait till you see, this is going to be the great Trojan Horse.

BRIAN REED

This trope of Muslims as a Trojan Horse, it's a racist lie, one that strikes me as not dissimilar in its potency and danger to, for instance, the anti-Semitic lie about a cabal of Jews nefariously controlling Western institutions.

That lie, it's worth noting, was also proliferated by a hoax document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The canard that Muslims are surreptitiously infiltrating Western countries also shows up in some scary places, white supremacist literature about the so-called replacement theory.

white supremacist terrorists, like Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway, or the man who massacred 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand, they both wrote at length about the threat of Muslims as invaders.

In the last few years, governments around the world have drawn on these same bigoted views to justify assaults on Muslims, the Uighurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar the terrible treatment of Muslims in India,

which seems to be getting worse, the US banning immigration from many majority Muslim countries.

People are carrying this trauma around.

Late last year, a relatively new Muslim member of parliament, Zarah Sultana, gave a heartbreaking speech about what her time in British politics had been like.

ARCHIVED RECORDING (ZARAH SULTANA)

Before being elected, I was nervous about being a Muslim woman in the public eye.

Growing up, I had seen the abuse prominent British Muslims were subject to.

I knew I wouldn't be in for an easy ride.

When young Muslim girls asked me what it's like, I'd like to say there's nothing to worry about, that they would face the same challenges as their non-Muslim friends and colleagues, but Madam Chair, in truth, I can't say that, because in my short time in parliament, that's not my experience.

So let me read out a few examples.

One person, for example, wrote to me, and I quote, "Sultana, you and your Muslim mob are a real danger to humanity."

Another wrote, I'm a cancer everywhere I go.

And soon, they said, Europe will vomit you out.

I have discovered that, to be a Muslim woman, to be outspoken, and to be left wing, is to be subject to this barrage of racism and hate, it's to be treated by some as if I were an enemy of the country that I was born in, as if I don't belong.

Madam Chair, this Islamophobia doesn't come from a vacuum, it's not natural or ingrained, it's taught from the very top.

These fires are fanned by people in positions of power and privilege.

Today, our prime minister mocks Muslims as letterboxes, and bank robbers, and far from scrapping for rent, earlier this year his government announced who would lead a review of the program, William Shawcross, a man who once said, and I quote,

"Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future."

Islamophobia is very real in Britain today.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

This is what Hamza was facing that I wasn't.

And thinking about Hamza's approach and reactions to our investigation this way, his outspokenness, his anger, his urgency, his sometimes crazed feeling that, no matter what we tried in our reporting, it was never enough, it makes every kind of sense.

HAMZA SYED

We have to stop holding back, mate.

We have to stop holding back.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

Every single opportunity we have to go hard, we pull back, we pull back, we pull back.

So I don't care if you think I'm rude.

I don't care if you think I'm a dickhead.

I want you to know --

BRIAN REED

And it makes every kind of sense why this journalistic process, which the way I'd learned it, encourages a detached standpoint, gives space for all relative sides to weigh in and give their perspectives, would, in this instance, with this story, repulse Hamza.

HAMZA SYED

I'm absolutely sick of this.

Mate, we've always been nice, we've always been nice.

BRIAN REED

Because what if the dominant perspective in a story is one that's enmeshed with a racism against you?

HAMZA SYED

At some point, we've got to --

BRIAN REED

I understand.

I understand.

I am with you.

But also, remember, we are in a long game.

HAMZA SYED

I'm not listening, man.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

I'm not listening.

I have never let myself just be shat on the way I have for a year and a half, never, never.

Fucking sit there and take it because I'm a journalist?

Fuck that.

Fuck this title.

Seriously, I'll throw this title in the fucking river if it means I can't just be myself.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

If I think back to the reasons I got into journalism, if you asked me back then why I was drawn to it, I would have told you, I like stories, I want to learn the craft, I'm interested in people.

I do distrust authority, I want to hold them accountable.

Making a change in the world would have been in there, but not at the top of the list.

But Hamza has been clear from the get-go about his reason for getting into this work.

In fact, aside from that unfortunate paragraph in his letter to Aslam, in which Hamza lists all the people he never believed, most of what he wrote in that letter amounts to a moving mission statement.

"If you believe journalism is an evil organ, capable of causing great damage," Hamza wrote, "then by default, you believe that same organ can reach as many people to cause great change.

That's the concept I've decided to dedicate my life to."

He would pursue this work, he wrote, "as a Muslim first and foremost, and as a journalist second."

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

Next on The Trojan Horse Affair, officials tell us we've gotten the story all wrong, so wrong they threatened to go to a judge to gag us from talking to you about it.

And we realized, actually, we did miss something.

That's coming up in "The Detail of the Deputies."

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Brian Reed and me, along with Rebecca Laks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass and by contributing editor Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Mellor with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.

Sound design, mixing and music supervision by Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski at the Audio Non-visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Ndeye Thioubou.

Executive assistant is Alberto DeLeon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.

BRIAN REED

Audio was licensed by BBC Motion Gallery, Getty Images, and Lola Clips ITV Archive.

HAMZA SYED

Special thanks to Fahid Qurashi, Faiza Patel, Shawkat Toorawa, Andrew Faux, Frank Langfitt, Clemency Wells, Dan Dolan and Sam Johnston Hawke from Reprieve, Al Ryan, Layla Aitlhadj and Paul Ruest

Some books and articles we’ve found really helpful that we want to mention: John Holmwood and Therese O’Toole’s "Countering Extremism in British Schools," as well as "Against White Feminism" by Rafia Zakaria; "The Muslim Problem: Why We’re Wrong About Islam and Why It Matters" by Tawseef Khan; "Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry," by Owen Bennett; "It’s Not About The Burqa," edited by Mariam Khan; Shamim Miah’s “Muslims, Schooling and Security: Trojan Horse, Prevent and Racial Politics," and Samira Shackle’s piece in the Guardian, “Trojan Horse: the real story behind the fake ‘Islamic plot’ to take over schools”. Also: “British Pakistani Boys, Education, and the role of religion - In the Land of the Trojan Horse” by Karamat Iqbal,James Fergusson’s "Al-Brittannia," "My Country; Medina in Birmingham, Najaf in Brent" by Innes Bowen; and "Cut From the Same Cloth," edited by Sabeena Akhtar.

The Trojan Horse Affair was made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.
Part 7

The Detail of the Deputies

Birmingham authorities struggle to explain why they disavowed their own findings about the Trojan Horse plot. But when Brian and Hamza make a discovery deep inside some court documents, everything suddenly makes sense.
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00:00 / 52:35

The Trojan Horse Affair

Part 7

Transcript

BRIAN REED

We're going to pick up a thread we left off a bit ago back from when Hamza and I were reporting in Birmingham.

And this happened.

BRIAN REED

(ON PHONE) I just got a letter from the Council threatening an injunction.

HAMZA SYED

(ON PHONE) Same here, buddy.

We are in trouble.

We need to figure this out very quickly.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, OK.

All right.

BRIAN REED

Hamza and I had been connecting dots for some Birmingham City Council members about the relationship between the Trojan Horse letter and Adderley Primary School.

The former Council leader Albert Bore had just responded by saying he was aghast at what we were telling him, that what we discovered could have changed the whole course of the Trojan Horse affair, when next we knew, Hamza and I each got an angry letter from Council lawyers

demanding that we hand over any confidential Council materials we'd gotten a hold of and stop our reporting on them.

And that if we didn't, they'd take us to the High Court of England and Wales and get a judge to gag us.

HAMZA SYED

Within hours of getting this threat, Brian had fled the city.

BRIAN REED

(ON PHONE) you know, I'm not in Birmingham right now.

I'm in an undisclosed location.

HAMZA SYED

He'd hidden our report materials somewhere I didn't know.

BRIAN REED

(ON PHONE) And then it sounds like we should both get out of the country.

HAMZA SYED

OK.

HAMZA SYED

And soon, we'd both be in Belgium.

SPEAKER

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Brussels, our final stop.

The main exit--

BRIAN REED

Which I know it sounds overdramatic, but escaping the United Kingdom wasn't my idea.

Hamza and I were warned that the way the law works in England, it was possible -- maybe not hugely likely, but possible -- that authorities could come knocking on our doors and try to make us hand over reporting materials.

We were worried about our sources, that they might be identified.

And there was one document in particular that the lawyers said, in their letters to us, the Birmingham City Council wanted back --

one document that this all really seemed to be about, that the City Council seemed deadset on making sure Hamza and I would not tell you about --

the audit report.

Remember that one?

It was passed to us via gloved hands.

The audit report contained the findings of the investigation the Birmingham City Council auditors had conducted into the resignation dispute at Adderley Primary School.

The Council finalized it right before the Trojan Horse letter arrived on Albert Bore's desk.

And it was the official report suggesting that Adderley head teacher Rizvana Darr had possibly forged the resignation letters of the four TAs at her school.

Because of the report, the City Council had even referred the case to the police.

And of course, it was the month after the audit was completed that the Trojan Horse letter appeared, suggesting the whole resignation situation and even the audit investigation itself was part of an elaborate Islamist conspiracy of which Rizvana Darr was a victim.

Well, the Council was now saying to us, in essence, you fools, you should never trust that audit report.

And they reminded us in these letters of something we knew but had never fully understood.

After the Trojan Horse letter blew up publicly, the Council had officially retracted the audit report.

They disavowed their auditor's findings, that Rizvana Darr might have been behind the resignation letters.

And quietly, they buried the document --

this document, which appeared to debunk the Trojan Horse letter.

HAMZA SYED

Frankly, the retraction of the audit report, to Brian and I, it looked like a cover up.

It's why long before the Council threatened us, I'd convinced Brian that we should get rid of the copy of the report that we had in the UK.

I knew it was sensitive.

And I could see where things might be headed --

that the Council might come after us for it.

So late one night, in yet another dramatic scene --

BRIAN REED

Can you not shine that in my eyes?

I can't see anything.

I'm just trying to--

HAMZA SYED

When we find ourselves with some time to kill near an empty field during a reporting trip in Wales.

HAMZA SYED

Should you do it here?

Into the bushes or something?

HAMZA SYED

We decided to make a ceremony of it.

BRIAN REED

I just want to say, as I'm lighting this document on fire, I really, really miss the First Amendment.

There it goes.

[COUGHS]

That's pretty.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

In their threat letter to us, the Council's lawyers denied directly that there had been a conspiracy to hide the audit.

They said there'd been no cover up inside the Council's ranks.

Yet they offered no explanation for why they'd retracted it.

They didn't say what evidence, if any, the Council had uncovered after the fact that made them reject what their auditors had found.

They said vaguely that the report was unreliable.

And the lawyers informed us, in bullying legalese, that if we consider the Council's audit report as a credible document, if we relied on it to suggest that Mrs. Darr had possibly concocted the resignation letters or authored the Trojan Horse letter, we'd be making a huge mistake.

They said we'd be getting the story totally wrong.

What they specifically said was that it would be, quote, mischievous and perverse of us to treat the audit report as credible.

They said unequivocally that Mrs. Darr did not write the resignation letters or the Trojan Horse letter.

The Council was implying that there was something they knew that we didn't, something that made them change their whole understanding of the Adderley case and of the Trojan Horse affair.

BRIAN REED

I don't know.

There's got to be some information they're acting on.

HAMZA SYED

In terms of the turn around?

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

There had to be some information that they got that inspired that.

HAMZA SYED

What did the Council know that we didn't?

[MUSIC]

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Hamza Syed.

BRIAN REED

I'm Brian Reed.

HAMZA SYED

This is "The Trojan Horse Affair."

[MUSIC]

The Council retracted the audit report in the Autumn of 2014.

And it wasn't some public announcement.

The decision happened behind the ornate facade of Council House in private meetings among officials and lawyers.

But helpfully, before the Council threatened us, someone had leaked Brian and me --

what else -- a letter.

We've taken to calling this one the Hay Letter, because it was written by a top Council officer at the time named Peter Hay.

And we're hopeful it'll provide some answers, because Peter Hey wrote this letter to Adderley Primary School and in it explained over two pages why the Council did it, why they nullified the audit report.

BRIAN REED

I would like to take this opportunity to detail the reasons why the audit report is incorrect and hence retracted.

HAMZA SYED

When Brian read it aloud, though, it was not what we expected.

BRIAN REED

Both myself and the Council have found that the audit report is fundamentally flawed, incorrect, wholly unreliable, and one-sided.

After a thorough investigation by the Council, we have come to the view that the conclusions reached in the report are completely incorrect.

And that the report was ill-considered, misconceived and poorly-timed.

HAMZA SYED

The Hay Letter is packed with so many synonyms for the audit report being wrong that we were certain somewhere in it Peter Hay would walk through whatever evidence had come to light to make the Council overturn the audit.

But he doesn't, really.

It says a few times that the audit report was one-sided, because Rizvana Darr and Adderley hadn't cooperated with the investigation.

They'd been advised not to by their lawyers while the TAs had an active legal case against the school.

Hay seems to put a lot of significance on that, as if the Council was surprised to learn that Mrs. Darr hadn't taken part in the audit --

even though that wasn't a new discovery.

The auditors talk about it at some length in the report itself.

Peter Hay also mentions that the police had changed their mind about what happened to Adderley, but again doesn't say why.

He just continues groveling in a please-don't-sue-us kind of tone.

BRIAN REED

It is wholly accepted that Ms. Darr was in no way involved in fabricating the alleged letters and is fully cooperated at all times with the authority.

I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for the personal distress and upset that this has caused Ms. Darr and fully understand what a harrowing experience this has been for her.

The Council and I recognize that it was a mistake to produce such an incorrect and biased document which had little factual basis.

What?

What?

Who -- what is going on?

HAMZA SYED

This reads to me, like, you know when a hostage delivers, like, a speech to a camera saying, I'm fine, I'm OK?

This reads to me like that.

BRIAN REED

What is the city talking about?

BRIAN REED

We were no clearer after getting this letter what the Council learned about Adderley that made them see things differently.

So we took the Hay Letter to Peter Hay himself to ask him if he could interpret for us, tell us what evidence he and his colleagues came across that made them believe their auditors had been wrong about Rizvana Darr.

It had been more than three years since he'd written this abject letter, so Peter Hay had to give it a quick reread.

And he seemed to spot something in it that explained the turnaround.

PETER HAY

There you go.

BRIAN REED

There you go what?

PETER HAY

Well, if you hold a constant mind when the evidence in front of you changes--

BRIAN REED

What's the evidence?

That's what we want to know.

PETER HAY

It's set out in here.

BRIAN REED

Is it, though?

PETER HAY

So you've got that -- that --

well, I've said it over two sides --

the failure to take into consideration things, Mrs. Darr's involvement, change of information from the police, the conclusions they've reached to, and the need to kind of have a relook at it.

BRIAN REED

That was about a specific and answer as we got from Peter Hay --

no more specific than his letter.

We went round and round on this.

BRIAN REED

But there's nothing we're missing that -- there was nothing else that you can remember that was causing this?

What do you remember about how this came about?

Like, even this letter is very --

it's very dramatic.

Like, you're really apologizing a lot.

There's a lot of adjectives.

What prompted this letter?

Do you remember writing this?

PETER HAY

I don't know.

And it's odd, because it's not fully laid out at the top as it would be laid out.

HAMZA SYED

Isn't this your letter?

PETER HAY

Don't remember.

It's got my signature on it.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, but we've got to ask.

This is a story about possibly fake letters.

I'm serious.

Did you write this?

PETER HAY

No -- it's got a signature on the bottom.

And it looks like my style.

I may have got some things wrong.

There are still some things in this whole instance that are unknown and are unclear --

and may remain unknown and unclear for some time.

BRIAN REED

We say goodbye to Peter Hay wondering if he was as bewildered as we were.

Did he honestly not remember why they disowned the audit?

Or was he getting so twisted up because he was withholding something?

The only concrete development he seemed to offer to explain why the Council flipped was because the police had undergone their own change of heart on the Adderley resignation case.

A quick timeline here --

the four TAs filed grievances against Rizvana Darr in 2012.

Just as the school is about to hear those grievances, the four disputed resignations appeared.

About a year later in the Autumn of 2013, Council auditors finished their investigation, issued the audit report, and the Council asked the cops to take on the case, because it looked to the auditors as if the TAs had been victims of a fraud which is a criminal matter.

PETER HAY

The view was, at that point, that Rizvana Darr and the school are misbehaving in some way.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

This is retired detective and present private eye Andrew Bannister.

The City Council asked his department, the West Midlands Police, to look into the Adderley resignations.

And they did.

They reviewed the Council's audit investigation.

And they got a warrant to go into Adderley Primary School on the last day of March 2014.

Detective Bannister says they entered the school with the following hypothesis.

PETER BANNISTER

That Ms. Rizvana Darr had orchestrated the resignations and the subsequent sacking of the staff and that the material was there to corroborate that the letters, the original letters, the resignation letters that she wrote the school hadn't been handed over, hadn't been analyzed.

And this was all because Rizvana Darr was corrupt.

BRIAN REED

But when the police left that visit to Adderley, they believed the opposite.

They were viewing Rizvana Darr as a potential victim in the fraud rather than a suspect.

PETER BANNISTER

The whole thing started one way and ended up different.

BRIAN REED

That's what we're trying to figure out.

PETER BANNISTER

Right.

BRIAN REED

Right.

So we asked Andrew Bannister, what evidence did you find that caused you to change your view of Rizvana Darr which in turn made the Birmingham City Council change its view of Rizvana Darr?

Detective Bannister wasn't at that school visit himself, but he knows the Adderley case well because he did a review of the investigation and the evidence.

And he told us when police officers got to Adderley that last day of March, they were surprised to find that Rizvana Darr and her leadership team were eager to cooperate with them.

The cops hadn't been expecting that, given Adderley's refusal to work with the Council's auditors.

And Bannister says Mrs. Darr and her colleagues had proof that the TAs did send resignation letters to the school.

ANDREW BANNISTER

My understanding is that they were able to say, straight away, that the letters had been delivered by hand by a third party.

And it was on CCTV.

BRIAN REED

The school had CCTV footage of letters being delivered by a school volunteer, a woman named Furzana Bibi.

Furzana Bibi is the sister of two of the Muslim TAs.

She was also on the governing body at Adderley.

The camera footage showed that Furzana Bibi had walked into the school reception area on the day of the supposed resignations at 1:04 PM with a stack of envelopes in her hand.

ANDREW BANNISTER

The envelopes were placed in a tray at the front counter.

The admin staff saw them being there.

And the CCTV corroborated that.

And those envelopes were collected by Rizvana whilst going immediately into a staff meeting, and that those envelopes were opened.

They were opened in the presence of the senior leadership team of the school.

So it tends to put a completely different slant on the matter.

HAMZA SYED

Got it.

Yes, there we go.

That answers our question.

That does put a completely different slant on the matter --

is how I would have reacted to Andrew Bannister if this fact that there were letters was new information which the police had uncovered that day, but it wasn't.

The teachers didn't dispute that they'd asked Furzana Bibi to drop off some letters.

They just said they were health-related forms that Mrs. Darr had requested while they were all on leave from work, not resignations.

This was all covered in the Council's audit.

So this vaunted CCTV evidence, aside from not being new, was pretty much meaningless, because it only corroborated something both sides agreed on, that envelopes had arrived at the school.

It didn't prove that there were resignations inside those envelopes.

In fact, the whole mention of CCTV footage for Birmingham City Council auditors, it only made them more suspicious of Mrs. Darr.

Because soon after envelopes arrived, when she called the HR Department at Birmingham City Council to tell them that some TAs had just resigned, she mentioned, unprompted, that the school had CCTV footage of a relative of the employees dropping off the envelopes.

The auditor notes the oddity of this detail, since why would you proactively reference CCTV evidence before any conflict had arisen?

It was as if Mrs. Darr was anticipating that the TAs would challenge their resignations.

So yeah, as we told Andrew Bannister --

BRIAN REED

Furzana Bibi being caught on CCTV delivering letters that wasn't new information that the police came across when they visited the school that was in the audit report they had that information.

So what knew at the school.

ANDREW BANNISTER

I don't think they had --

BRIAN REED

We spent a couple of hours parsing this with Bannister.

What had the police uncovered that was new?

What facts changed their understanding of this situation and of Rizvana Darr?

He talked about the alleged resignation letter of the white, non-Muslim teaching assistant, Hilary Owens, which turned up on a separate day from the others and in separate circumstances that would not sound out of place in a game of Clue.

ANDREW BANNISTER

She was the last person in the cloak room prior to the letter being discovered in the pigeonhole.

BRIAN REED

But that didn't get us anywhere either.

We could not understand what made the police switch to seeing Rizvana as a victim instead of a potential culprit.

ANDREW BANNISTER

I spoke to Rizvana Darr.

BRIAN REED

You spoke to her personally.

ANDREW BANNISTER

Yeah, I have spoken to her.

I found her to be open, forthcoming, and credible.

BRIAN REED

So what was she telling you?

ANDREW BANNISTER

Basically that she was trying to push the school in one way, staff were reticent, and that that has subsequently come to these resignation letters, that this was all motivated to get her out of the school.

HAMZA SYED

We were interested in knowing whether she told you something else that wasn't in the audit.

ANDREW BANNISTER

No, I think what she was able to do is probably put a greater explanation on it and put it into --

contextualize it.

BRIAN REED

Detective Bannister kept saying the difference was this, that even if the auditors had the same information, they hadn't talked to anyone at the school, whereas the police had.

BRIAN REED

But what did they learn in doing that was different?

What evidence came from that or what testimony came from doing that that changed the position completely?

ANDREW BANNISTER

My honest answer to that, it's not evidence, it's interpretation.

BRIAN REED

OK, so we're understanding that correctly.

There's not something we're missing here.

ANDREW BANNISTER

No.

BRIAN REED

If what Andrew Bannister was saying was right and all that had changed between the Council auditors' conclusion that Rizvana Darr was possibly the perpetrator of a fraud and the cops' conclusion that she was the victim of a fraud was a matter of interpretation and not any additional

facts, then it made us wonder if the only new piece of evidence -- and I'm using that term loosely --

the only new evidence that the cops had which the auditors did not was the Trojan Horse letter.

The Trojan Horse letter had turned up in this window after the Council issued its audit report but before the police headed into Adderley.

And it certainly brought new context to the situation at the school.

It certainly offered an intriguing new interpretation of what might have been happening there.

Except Detective Bannister had already made a point of telling us, right when we sat down with him, that this case was not about the Trojan horse letter.

In the first few minutes of our interview, he emphasized that at no stage were the West Midlands Police investigating that document.

ANDREW BANNISTER

Absolutely not.

It wasn't an investigation into the Trojan Horse letter.

BRIAN REED

Which makes sense, because we know the police determined, early on, that the letter was bogus and the plot it described wasn't real.

But here's where things get weird.

Hamza and I had found police records which showed that the Trojan Horse letter was a part of their investigation into Adderley.

We got this one report that was written by Detective Bannister.

And he says, in it, that one reason the police decided Rizvana Darr should now be treated as a potential victim in the case was because detectives had considered, quote, "the information outlined in a section of the Trojan Horse letter."

We showed that report to Bannister.

BRIAN REED

So the Trojan Horse letter was taken into account, was used as evidence, basically?

You're saying that the Trojan Horse letter was used as evidence in refocusing the investigation and treating Darr as a victim?

Because that's what this seems to be saying to me.

ANDREW BANNISTER

[STAMMERING] You have to -- because -- whether [STAMMERING]

BRIAN REED

He had a hard time explaining this one.

ANDREW BANNISTER

Whether the fact that the letter's a fake --

whether the Trojan Horse letter is --

whoever wrote the Trojan Horse letter, the facts within the Trojan Horse letter, there are some that you would look at it and go, well, that exactly mirrors what is taking place.

Was I cognizant that these circumstances fit with the letter?

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

But enough that --

ANDREW BANNISTER

You'd have to be a moron not to.

BRIAN REED

But even more specifically, you treated what the letter's saying about Adderley as relatively legitimate because you're pointing to it as a reason why Rizvana Darr should not be treated as a victim.

So you're basically buying what this letter that you think could be fake is saying about Adderley.

[BANNISTER PAUSES]

ANDREW BANNISTER

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

Within days of visiting Adderley and talking to Rizvana Darr, the police's theory of the resignation case inverted so completely that they secured a new round of warrants.

This time they went after the four TAs.

SPEAKER

You were arrested this morning on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation.

OK?

Is that right?

HILARY OWENS

Yeah, I understand.

Yep.

SPEAKER

OK, wonderful.

HAMZA SYED

They conducted dawn raids at their homes and confiscated the women's computers and electronics.

They arrested them all for conspiracy to commit fraud, and took them down to the station for interviews.

This is a recording of the police interrogating Hilary Owens, the white so-called "English" woman as she's referred to in the Trojan Horse letter.

We got this recording only after we spoke to Detective Bannister.

And if there was any doubt that the Trojan Horse letter guided the police, this puts the matter to bed.

When Brian and I first listened to it, we were kind of riveted.

The cop pulls out a copy of the Trojan Horse letter and starts questioning Hilary Owens about it.

SPEAKER

This is a letter you may or may not be aware of.

HILARY OWENS

The Trojan Horse.

SPEAKER

You said it.

I was going to ask if you were aware, but clearly you are.

I imagine you've read lots about it in the press and what have you.

I'm not going to go through all of this because it is quite lengthy.

Have you had a chance to read all of it?

HILARY OWENS

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER

OK.

Is there anything in it that jumps out at you?

HILARY OWENS

Well, only the thing about the English woman, which has clearly been put in about me.

SPEAKER

You think that's about you.

HILARY OWENS

Well, who else could it be?

SPEAKER

So the bit that you're referring to is --

I'll read this out for the tape.

(HUMMING) Do do do do.

"As the white English woman then --"

HAMZA SYED

The cop reads the Adderley part of the Trojan Horse letter to Hilary Owens, first the bit about the English woman's role in the plot, how she dropped off her own fake resignation letter, and how, if the whole scheme goes South and the TAs get found out,

the English woman will take the heat for the Islamists.

SPEAKER

When you read that, what did you think?

HILARY OWENS

I was horrified.

That's not me.

SPEAKER

OK.

HILARY OWENS

And it suggests that it is.

HAMZA SYED

Hilary Owens has to fend off questions from the cop about whether she's an Islamist plotter.

SPEAKER

Was there any sort of campaign to remove Mrs. Darr from the school?

HILARY OWENS

Never.

SPEAKER

No.

HILARY OWENS

Never.

SPEAKER

OK.

Had anyone ever spoken to you about changing the staff within the school?

HILARY OWENS

It's nothing to do with us.

We're TAs.

We've got no power whatsoever.

SPEAKER

Had anyone ever floated the idea -- not necessarily asked for help, but said, this is what I'm going to do?

HILARY OWENS

No, never.

This is why it's so ridiculous.

SPEAKER

OK.

It goes on to say that Mrs. Furzana

HILARY OWENS

Bibi.

SPEAKER

Yep.

HAMZA SYED

Furzana Bibi, the sister of two of the teaching assistants, who was captured on CCTV delivering envelopes to Adderley, and was a governor at the school.

She's also mentioned in the Trojan Horse letter as an operative in the plot against Mrs. Darr.

The cop keeps reading the letter.

Sister Furzana --

SPEAKER

"--has also been key to keeping us informed as to what the governing body and the head are discussing, et cetera.

And as a result, we have been able to execute this perfectly.

We will soon be moved into another school as a governor.

And over time, we will instigate the same process there."

HILARY OWENS

[SCOFFS]

SPEAKER

What process was going on at the school?

HILARY OWENS

I have no idea.

SPEAKER

No?

HILARY OWENS

No.

I have no clue.

SPEAKER

Were you aware of any underlying currents within the school?

HILARY OWENS

No, not at all.

This is completely out of the blue, this resignation letter of mine, (SARCASTIC) ha ha.

SPEAKER

OK.

Can you think of any reason why someone would put in a resignation letter on your behalf?

HILARY OWENS

I have no clue.

If I knew that, I would tell you.

I have no idea why somebody would do something that evil.

SPEAKER

OK.

Has anyone said, we're going to do this as a joke?

HILARY OWENS

No.

A joke?

That's not a very funny joke to resign me from the only job I've got.

To put me through financial hardship, (TEARFULLY) it's not a joke.

SPEAKER

No, I appreciate that.

HILARY OWENS

I'm sorry, but this is just too much.

And to think that I would do it myself just to unseat the head, it's ludicrous.

[SNIFFLING]

SPEAKER

Did anyone want you out of the school?

HILARY OWENS

The only person I can imagine is the person who has two grievances against her.

But I have no proof that it was she who did it.

SPEAKER

But you believe that it's Mrs. Darr --

HILARY OWENS

I don't know.

I honestly can't say that.

I don't know.

SPEAKER

Is that what you think?

HILARY OWENS

That's the only thing I can imagine, is the fact that I've got two unresolved grievances against Mrs. Darr.

And then, suddenly, I resign.

Why would I do that?

Why would I go to the bother of writing two grievances and then resign?

SPEAKER

And that's why we're here today.

We're trying to find out what happened.

HILARY OWENS

And then I get arrested.

It's ridiculous.

[EXHALES SHARPLY] Sorry.

SPEAKER

No, it's OK.

You take your time.

It's fine.

HILARY OWENS

It's just -- it's too much.

[SIGHS]

SPEAKER

I imagine it's a lot of pressure.

HILARY OWENS

Yes.

And all this rubbish going on in the paper saying, these awful people, this Islamic plot, this jihad.

It's nonsense.

I was just a TA doing my job.

HAMZA SYED

The arrests came to nothing.

According to Detective Bannister, the police found no trace of the resignation letters, or the Trojan Horse letter, for that matter, on any of the TAs' or Furzana Bibi's electronics.

They found no conclusive evidence at all, nothing that prove the TAs' guilt.

Long after the arrests, the cops would eventually drop the case.

But in the meantime, the police, having changed their take on the Adderley dispute and arresting the TAs, that caused the Birmingham City Council to question its audit report.

As Peter Hay confirmed to us, he and his colleagues at the Council started doubting their assessment that Mrs. Darr was maybe a fraudster.

On top of all of that, Adderley Primary School was now formally threatening to sue the Council over the way it had handled the resignation case.

We learnt about this by holding a light behind a poorly redacted Council document.

In response to the threat, Peter Hay and his Council colleagues started meeting with Mrs. Darr and other Adderley leaders.

And after months of back and forth, they ultimately promised to renounce their audit report.

And Adderley promised to drop its legal threat against them.

Peter Hay composed his "we're so sorry" retraction letter.

And the Council, as part of this whole agreement, restored legal support to Adderley, defending Rizvana Darr's school in the employment case brought by the four TAs.

I don't know if any cop or Council official paused to consider what was happening, that they were letting a fake letter influence their decisions.

But evidently, Mrs. Darr was quite convincing when she had the Trojan Horse at her disposal.

In early 2014, she wrote to her union, NAHT, the National Association of Head Teachers, complaining that they hadn't been supportive of her in the resignation dispute, and placing them, quote, "on notice of Operation Trojan Horse."

She wrote, "it is clear to me that I've been the target of a prolonged, organized, and systematic attack designed to discredit me and make my position as head of Adderley untenable."

A union rep quickly set a meeting with her and offered to help her out.

And then there was the employment tribunal, where whether to have brought their unfair dismissal case against Adderley School.

Once the Trojan Horse letter emerged, Mrs. Darr drafted a witness statement for the tribunal that focused entirely on the letter in which she went through the Trojan Horse plot step by step to explain how she'd been one of his targets.

The TAs, in turn, tried to enter the Council's audit report as evidence to support their claim that Mrs. Darr was the one plotting to oust them.

But the Council's lawyers fought the TAs' petition and they were successful.

The judge in the tribunal case, while he knew an audit report existed, never got to see it.

But the Trojan Horse letter, the judge definitely saw that.

The Council submitted the letter as a primary piece of evidence in their defense of Adderley.

And that defense was that Rizvana Darr had been the victim of an Islamic plot carried out by the four teaching assistants as described in the letter.

The Council argued, in front of the judge, that the Trojan Horse letter was true, literally true.

It worked.

In a final extravagant act, one with big consequences for everybody involved, lawyers defending Mrs. Darr and the school used the Trojan horse letter to sway the judge in their favor.

The judge, Rohan Pirani, and his fellow panel members, ruled that the three Muslim TAs were involved in deception to remove Mrs. Darr from the school, that they'd each intended to make her believe they had quit by arranging to have resignation letters submitted with their forged signatures on them,

and then pretending to know nothing about it.

In other words, Judge Pirani adopted the Trojan horse version of events at Adderley --

well, mostly.

When it came to the, quote unquote, "English" face, Hilary Owens, the judging panel ruled that she had been wrongly dismissed from her job --

she hadn't been part of a deception -- and ordered the school to pay her damages.

Here's how that racially split decision came to be.

The Council and Rizvana Darr did not present any direct evidence that the TAs had concocted their resignations.

But the Council's lawyers used the Trojan Horse letter to undermine the Muslim TAs' credibility.

They turned the case from a straightforward unfair dismissal claim into a fight about religion, specifically Salafism, the ultraconservative interpretation of Islam.

Just to explain how Salafism became relevant to this case, remember, the Trojan Horse letter purported to be plans for a Salafi plot.

It was explicit about that distinction.

From reading the case files, along with comprehensive notes taken by one of the TAs' lawyers--

there's no transcript -- and talking to people who were there, we know that is what the case turned on, whether the TAs were Salafi.

Council lawyers pressed the teaching assistants on this in the hearing--

were they Salafis?

Hilary Owens offered the tribunal a statement from her Reverend, TW Pilkington, vouching for her regular attendance at church, but it didn't go so easy for the Muslim TAs.

In one of the most pivotal exchanges in the hearing, one of the TAs, Rehena Khanom, was asked to explain the difference between a Salafi and a Sunni Muslim, and she said she didn't know.

Daniel Zakis, is a solicitor who represented Hilary Owens, was there when it happened.

He told us that, in response, Birmingham City Council's lawyers --

DANIEL ZAKIS

-- started questioning her about, well, hang on, where does your husband work?

BRIAN REED

And what was the answer to that?

DANIEL ZAKIS

Salafi school.

It doesn't help you.

HAMZA SYED

The other two Muslim TAs gave similarly evasive answers on the stand.

Zakis said his sense was that the women kind of panicked.

Probably figured, if they acknowledged any link to Salafi Islam, they were going to lose.

Not only was Salafism a third rail in this case, it's kind of become a third rail generally because some terrorists have come from a Salafi background.

Also that question, what's the difference between a Salafi and a Sunni, it's a tricky one to answer, because Salafis are Sunnis.

They're just more originalist in their interpretation.

For what it's worth, Zakis said he found everything else the TAs said throughout the case -- about what happened, about not resigning -- consistent and credible.

But that one Salafi thing--

HAMZA SYED

How damaging was that answer?

DANIEL ZAKIS

Yeah, I think that destroyed their credibility.

HAMZA SYED

Could you feel it in that room?

Could you feel--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

DANIEL ZAKIS

I think there was a--

yeah, you can tell from the judge's reaction.

It just sort of hung there.

[MUSIC]

As Judge Pirani wrote in his decision, "we find the first three claimants wholly incredible on this issue."

So that's how it happened.

Because of the Salafism stumble and a few other reasons, including the fact that the TAs' sister, Furzana Bibi, did not testify, the judge and the panel found that the Muslim TAs had schemed against the head teacher.

Hilary Owens, on the other hand, they found that her resignation letter had also been forged, just not by her.

As for who was responsible for that forgery, the judge never explained.

HAMZA SYED

I just feel it's increasingly likely that it's the Trojan Horse letter.

In which case, if it is just, you've just -- this --

[EXHALES SHARPLY]

BRIAN REED

This whole situation was so exasperating it was hard to finish our sentences.

The Birmingham City Council, these are the same people who talk about the Trojan Horse letter this way.

SPEAKER

It's probably a hoax.

It's probably a fake.

I'm not claiming the letter is true.

There's never been a plot.

The way it was presented, some of the inaccuracies in it, and just the sheer convenience of it, leads me to believe that it was a fake.

BRIAN REED

Yet their own lawyers argued, in front of a judge, successfully, that the letter was proof of a real plot.

They embraced a fake letter while rejecting their own fact-based audit report.

[MUSIC]

Hamza and I had started with what we thought was such a basic question -- what evidence did they have that we didn't?

And now we felt as if we'd wandered fully through the looking glass into a land where Mrs. Darr had somehow gotten the Trojan Horse letter to be treated as real and not the double-speaky, "it's fake but could still be pointing at actual issues" real, really real.

BRIAN REED

There's no other evidence here.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, we can say that as a fact, as a fact --

BRIAN REED

There's no other evidence here.

HAMZA SYED

Nothing new came to light.

BRIAN REED

Eh, after the break, we eat our words.

[MUSIC]

HAMZA SYED

One day, Brian and I were on the phone.

We're going through the audit report together for the umpteenth time.

And we notice something that we'd never clocked before.

BRIAN REED

In the audit, when you read the auditor's summary, she mentions nothing about the school claiming that there were witnesses who saw Mrs. Darr open the envelopes and resignation letters come out.

That is not in the audit report.

HAMZA SYED

Here's what Brian was talking about.

Remember the sequence of events detective Andrew Bannister laid out for us?

The sister of the TAs, Furzana Bibi, was recorded, on CCTV, walking into Adderley with a stack of envelopes.

She handed them to the receptionist, who placed them in Rizvana Darr's mail tray.

And then, as Detective Bannister told us --

ANDREW BANNISTER

Those envelopes were collected by Rizvana whilst going immediately into a staff meeting, and that those envelopes were opened.

They were opened in the presence of the senior leadership team of the school.

HAMZA SYED

Detective Bannister had said that Mrs. Darr opened those envelopes in front of the school's leadership team, specifically two deputy head teachers named Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf.

Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf told police they had been in the office with Mrs. Darr when she opened the envelopes left by Furzana Bibi, and had personally seen Mrs. Darr pull resignation letters from inside them.

This detail was also an important element of Adderley's defense at the employment tribunal.

Because of course, two eyewitnesses, without them, the school could only prove that envelopes had been delivered, which, again, the Muslim TAs didn't dispute.

It was only by having eyewitnesses that the school could back up Mrs. Darr's account that, when she opened the sealed envelopes, she'd found resignations.

Mark and Anila's presence at the envelope opening was foundational to the case, unquestioned by either side.

The judge took it as a given, and so had we, until this very moment when Brian realized it was not mentioned in the audit report.

BRIAN REED

Which means that either the auditor left it out, egregiously, or it wasn't in the document she was reviewing where the school was laying out its defense.

HAMZA SYED

Adderley had laid out its version of what happened the day the letters came in in a legal filing with the employment tribunal, the school's formal defense.

It submitted this early on, long before the Trojan Horse letter, before the police investigated.

So Brian dug up that record.

And the deputies witnessing the envelope opening, it wasn't in there either.

BRIAN REED

There is no mention in the school's defense that there were witnesses inside the room when resignation letters came out of the envelopes.

HAMZA SYED

Well, that was something.

The school had made sure to mention the point of CCTV footage, but no witnesses to the envelope opening.

BRIAN REED

Why?

Why would that not be part of their official defense that they're submitting to the tribunal?

Why would they leave that out?

BRIAN REED

I kept flipping through our binders of paperwork, through the earliest records we have, from back when the resignation letters were first refuted in late 2012 and early 2013.

And I saw nothing about the deputy head teachers having watched Mrs. Darr opened the envelopes.

Then Hamza and I looked back one more time at records from the police investigation into Adderley, which happened much later.

We reread that report, that was written by Detective Andrew Bannister, in which he talks about what the cops learned on their visit to Adderley.

And there it was.

HAMZA SYED

The senior leadership team had witnessed the envelopes being opened.

He lists that as, like, a new fact.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, so that has been confusing us.

Because we're like, why is that new information?

Why is it new information?

But maybe it was new information.

HAMZA SYED

[LAUGHS]

BRIAN REED

Maybe it was one of the first times the school was saying this.

BRIAN REED

We called Detective Bannister.

BRIAN REED

The visit to the school, was that the first time that the police learned that the deputies had been in the room when Mrs. Darr opened the envelopes?

ANDREW BANNISTER

I can't state categorically, but I believe that's the case.

BRIAN REED

Because that would explain why you guys would change your view.

ANDREW BANNISTER

Which is why I was trying to say before.

BRIAN REED

We had not gotten the message.

We also called Hilary Owen's solicitor in the tribunal case, Daniel Zakis.

BRIAN REED

When did this become their defense, the fact that there were people in the room --

DANIEL ZAKIS

It was never in their first defense that they filed.

They just referred to the CCTV.

BRIAN REED

Daniel Zakis told us -- and this is corroborated by records from the employment tribunal --

that the first time Adderley mentioned that the deputies had been in the room with Mrs. Darr as she opened the envelopes and pulled out resignations was in November 2013, which means the deputies, Rizvana Darr, the school, no one, to our knowledge,

told outside authorities about this for nearly a year, not when Birmingham City Council cut off legal support to Adderley, not when the Council mounted an audit investigation and asked repeatedly for Adderley to provide evidence and testimony,

not when the school had to file a formal defense when the TAs were taking Adderley to the tribunal.

Through all that, they never mentioned these crucial eyewitnesses.

BRIAN REED

Did that strike you guys -- and if so --

DANIEL ZAKIS

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

It did?

DANIEL ZAKIS

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

So why withhold that for so long?

DANIEL ZAKIS

Well, it's --

yeah.

BRIAN REED

[LAUGHS]

DANIEL ZAKIS

That's a good question.

HAMZA SYED

November 2013.

That immediately struck Brian and me as an interesting time for these two eyewitnesses to have emerged.

Because that's the same month that the Trojan Horse letter emerged.

November 2013 is when the Trojan horse letter arrived at Birmingham City Council.

And that wasn't the only evidence to suddenly appear bolstering Adderley's case.

A few months later, Adderley's lawyers wrote a letter to the parties in the employment tribunal, saying that there was another document they wanted to introduce in the hearing.

At this point, lawyers for the school had already submitted loads of evidence and records.

But they were determined to get in this late submission.

It was, they said, an investigative report that the deputies, Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf, had put together in the days right after the supposed resignations.

And in it, the deputies note that the two of them saw Mrs. Darr opening the envelopes.

This investigative report, by the way, consists primarily of Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf fact-checking each other by asking each other what each other saw.

It's the only record we've seen that purports to be contemporaneous evidence, from December 2012, of Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf witnessing the envelope opening.

Yet as Adderley's lawyers explained to the tribunal, for some unknown reason, the school had forgotten to enter this document alongside the reams of submissions that already filed.

The judge allowed it.

And by the time he's hearing the case, these witnesses seemed like an early established fact, one that the judge relied on in making his decision.

BRIAN REED

Can we apologize for something?

BRIAN REED

After we pieced together this timeline, we met up again with former Council officer Peter Hay, author of the Hay Letter, in which he wrote about how royally the Council had botched their audit report.

We told Peter Hay we were sorry we hadn't realized, before we pressed him on this question for a couple hours, that there was essential information missing from the audit report, that deputy head teachers Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf had been in the office with Mrs. Darr

as she opened the Muslim TAs' envelopes.

BRIAN REED

This is the one we were mistaken about.

PETER HAY

That everyone was present.

BRIAN REED

That everyone was present.

PETER HAY

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

Do you remember -- does that ring a bell?

PETER HAY

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

Peter Hay remembered it immediately, that it was one of the main things Adderley brought up as they were threatening to take the Council to court.

BRIAN REED

So the school was saying, your audit report is so messed up because you couldn't talk to us.

And so we weren't able to tell you that there were two witnesses in the room.

PETER HAY

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

And they were making a big point of that.

PETER HAY

I specifically remember the gentleman who went to Australia, Mark Walters --

I think, yeah-- because that stands out in my head --

being clear about not having been interviewed and having things to say.

That's part of their reason for wanting to meet us, was to say, come on a minute, you haven't heard the whole story.

BRIAN REED

The two witnesses to the envelope opening, Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf, we'd heard about them in our reporting.

They'd both work with Mrs. Darr at a previous primary school.

And when she got the head teacher job at Adderley, they followed her there.

HAMZA SYED

People who knew these deputy head teachers had a lot to say about Mark Walters especially.

They told us that he and Mrs. Darr were very close, like "attached at the hip" close.

They're both incredibly talented teachers, but that Mrs. Darr was a leader, and Mark Walters, much more of a follower.

We've heard a number of anecdotes from different people about how devoted an acolyte Mark was to Mrs. Darr.

People also told us that Mark Walters had done something surprising, which obviously had stuck with Peter Hay.

After he'd submitted a witness statement to the tribunal saying he'd seen Mrs. Darr open the envelopes, he abruptly left his job at Adderley, in the middle of the school year, and moved far away to Perth, Australia.

He didn't end up testifying at the hearing.

As Brian put it rather succinctly, when he first had this epiphany about the deputies --

BRIAN REED

It raises the question, were they in the room?

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

Figuring this out, the late timing of these witnesses coming forward, it helped explain so much.

Throughout our investigation, there had been these fleeting moments when we would get a peek into what officials were really saying about Rizvana Darr and Adderley behind the scenes.

Take this with Detective Andrew Banister, who, in the middle of our interview, without us even asking, said --

ANDREW BANNISTER

There were suggestions -- and you may well be party to this -- that Rizvana Darr is the author of the Trojan Horse letter.

BRIAN REED

Where did you pick that up?

ANDREW BANNISTER

It was one of the hypotheses that was bandied around at the time.

BRIAN REED

By whom?

HAMZA SYED

By police?

Or the Council?

Who?

ANDREW BANNISTER

By I think everybody, including the media.

I think it's something I'd probably consider.

BRIAN REED

It was a relief to hear Bannister say something so logical.

But when we asked Detective Bannister, OK, so what did you all do to look into that hypothesis, Bannister told us, not much of anything.

He said, as far as he remembered, the cops did not search responders computers or any computers at Adderley at all.

Instead, we know they went and arrested the teaching assistants, searched their electronics for the Trojan Horse letter, and used the letter to interrogate the TAs.

For years, we'd been staring at these contortions of logic by officials and couldn't understand them.

Now they make more sense.

Officials clearly were suspicious of Mrs. Darr.

Some of them entertained the thought that she could have written the Trojan Horse letter.

But here's our best analysis of why everybody dropped it.

When the eyewitnesses spoke up, vouching for Mrs. Darr, saying she did receive resignation letters, suddenly the authorities got rattled.

They thought they missed something huge, testimony that transformed their whole understanding of the resignation dispute.

And that perceived blunder, along with mounting national concern about possible extremism in their city schools, seemed to inspire, in Birmingham officials, an overall loss of confidence about their assessments of the Trojan Horse letter.

Maybe that letter they thought was bogus wasn't so bogus after all.

Maybe it had some other truths in it that they'd overlooked.

So this seemingly tiny question, were Mark and Anila really in the room, it's fundamental.

Because their statements propped up the resignation letters, which propped up the Trojan Horse letter, which propped up the national panic.

These two deputies, their account underpinned the Trojan Horse affair.

Maybe this was the thing you had to go after to dismantle the social fact of Operation Trojan Horse.

[MUSIC]

When we approached Anila Ashraf about this, she came to her front door, looked at us coolly, said, "no comment," and shut the door.

Then she got Birmingham City Council to send our lawyers a threatening letter claiming that Hamza and I had returned to her house a number of times to harass her and her family members, which is absolutely untrue.

When we showed up at Adderley Primary School in hopes of talking with Rizvana Darr about all this, the front office staff insisted she was offsite.

We said we were happy to wait, which we did, until school got out, at which point Mrs. Darr had a staff member come out to the schoolyard to tell us, actually, she was in the building, but she would not be seeing us.

And then there was the gentleman who went to Australia, now former deputy head of Adderley Primary School Mark Walters.

I tried to reach him at the new school he worked at in a suburb of Perth, but he was ignoring my calls, ignoring my emails.

And maybe we would have left it at that if we hadn't met a South African dentist who'd had a good relationship with Mark Walters before the Trojan Horse affair came between them.

And he urged us, don't give up on Mark, that Mark might, with some effort, give us some answers.

And the dentist had his own reasons for wanting to see Mark.

And so, in the final installment of The Trojan Horse Affair, we all three, a doctor, a dentist, and I, set off for one of the most remote cities in the world to chase a remote confession.

SPEAKER

I'm just going knock.

There's no point just hanging around.

You came all the way from the UK to meet this man.

So let's go meet him.

That's next in An Appointment in Perth.

HAMZA SYED

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Brian Reed and me, along with Rebecca Laks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass and by contributing editor Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phalen.

Original score by Thomas Moller with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.

Sound design, mixing, ad music supervision by Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Ndeye Thioubou.

Executive assistant is Alberto De Leon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.

BRIAN REED

Special thanks to my high school journalism teacher, Debbie Stellavato, along with Krista Stellavato and Gilles Stroobant; also Jane and Felix Posen, Rebecca Levi, and Tchesmeni Leonard.

HAMZA SYED

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.

[MUSIC]
Part 8

An Appointment in Perth

A man banned from working in education in the aftermath of the Trojan Horse letter inspires Brian and Hamza to track down one last witness with him — in Australia. And all three travelers find their faith tested.
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The Trojan Horse Affair

Part 8

Transcript

HAMZA SYED

Since I pitched this story as my student project, I've always felt that if it was to make any difference what you need is proof.

Incontrovertible, unassailable, beyond a doubt proof of who authored the Trojan Horse letter, and we didn't have it.

Brian and I had a lot of compelling circumstantial evidence of who might have written the letter, and a sound theory of why it might have been written, but that wasn't going to be enough.

The Trojan Horse Affair means something to powerful people in my country, to its political and media class, to our decision makers and mood sayers.

When they're looking to justify policies or generate political support, it's part of the infrastructure that allows them to shorthand that Muslims are dangerous.

When others have pushed back against a Trojan horse narrative they've done it by calling out the Islamophobia and racism that drove the affair, focused on the damage it's done to Muslims in Birmingham and Britain.

But none of that's really worked.

And I think it's because that approach requires people to care about Islamophobia, to care about Muslims.

And we're a long way from that.

That's why I'd focused on the letter.

I believed exposing the author of Operation Trojan Horse would give us an agnostic fact, would sidestep the need for people to care, and would force everyone to acknowledge what really happened here, even if it's through gritted teeth.

And it's also why we're headed to Perth, Australia, our next and final stop in this investigation.

And it wasn't just Brian and me going.

We're taking with us to Perth, stay with me now, this is a very multicultural moment, a South African dentist we met in a windswept town on the coast of Wales named Achmad DaCosta.

We didn't plan to travel to Australia with Achmad.

The adventure we'd end up on together, it started with a visit to his tiny flat in the town of Cardigan.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Hello.

HAMZA SYED

Hi.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Nice to meet you.

So you are from America.

BRIAN REED

I'm from America.

It's my first time to Wales.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Oh my.

BRIAN REED

We'd driven to Wales to see Ahmed, because we wanted to ask him about Rizvana Darr.

Ahmed had moved with his family from South Africa to Birmingham some years back, where he began volunteering as a governor in schools.

We'd heard that he and Rizvana Darr had been close once.

Before she went to Adderley, Mrs. Darr worked at the school where Achmad was chair of governors, Oldknow Primary School.

Achmad stayed friends with Mrs. Darr after she moved on from Oldknow, would go visit her at Adderley, where his wife was also a governor.

And then the Trojan Horse Affair happened.

Because of the scandal, Achmad was banned from education, labeled an extremist in the newspapers, and ended up shutting down his old dental practice in Birmingham and taking a position here in Cardigan.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

This used to be the mosque before.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, really?

BRIAN REED

Right in this room?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

This you see on the floor?

You see the lines that are behind you?

They used to pray in this room.

BRIAN REED

As we stepped inside his place, Achmad pointed out the faint lines in his carpet, which showed people were to stand for prayer back when his apartment used to be a mosque.

Now, the mosque is downstairs in a little storefront space, The Cardigan Islamic Cultural Center.

Achmad could live anywhere in town.

He makes a fine living as a dentist.

But he told us he likes the convenience and familiarity of this place.

Easy to pray, easy to get halal takeout at Abdul's Curry Shop next door.

Hamza and I were hoping, because Achmad knew Mrs. Darr, he might have some useful information for us about the Adderley dispute or even the Trojan Horse Letter.

But Achmad made it clear pretty quickly, he wasn't interested in discussing Rizvana Darr.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

So I can't speak bad about what happened with the teaching assistants, I don't know.

I wasn't there.

What happened with the Trojan Horse Letter, I know many of my colleagues say that she wrote it.

I don't know.

But what I do know is, my relationship with her was extremely good.

She was an outstanding teacher.

I only love Riz.

I only have good to say.

BRIAN REED

Achmad told us he didn't have much interest in the Trojan horse letter or its origins at all.

Still, we ended up staying at Achmad's the whole day.

Because being with him, it was like recognizing a far flung relation, someone seemingly as preoccupied as we were with straightening out what had happened during this whole affair.

There was plenty Achmad did want to talk about, Adderley aside.

What he was prepared to discuss, and when I say prepared, in the middle of the room he had a tripod set up with a projector on it.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

But let me just -- is this thing, I'm sorry, it's not one.

BRIAN REED

Was the legal case he was building against the government for what they'd done at Oldknow Primary School during the Trojan Horse Affair.

It was pretty similar to what happened at Parkview, a school that was rated outstanding until the Trojan Horse letter broke.

This is how we'd spend the next few hours, taking in an exhaustive presentation of volumes of files Achmad saved from Oldknow, which he projected from his laptop on the wall above his bed.

BRIAN REED

This is like a spreadsheet full of text messages?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yeah, so this is word for word, literally day by day, text.

BRIAN REED

Also emails, meeting minutes, school paperwork.

HAMZA SYED

Did you create this timeline yourself?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I did.

BRIAN REED

Achmad is hoping he can convince The Solicitor to build a case out of this material to hold the officials involved accountable.

That was Achmad's main reason for talking to us.

He was very clear.

He doesn't have a high opinion of journalism, but he thought possibly our story could catch the interest of a lawyer willing to help him pro-bono.

All this effort Achmad was putting in, it wasn't even to exonerate himself.

He was trying to help another person the Department for Education banned, the former head teacher at Oldknow.

The guy had only gotten the job a couple of months before the Trojan Horse letter went public.

Achmad says any Islamising that the government was concerned about at the school, this new head teacher had little to do with.

He'd just taken charge.

If anything, Achmad says the changes at Oldknow are on him as chair of Governors.

Achmad felt responsible for the head teacher losing his career, still feels responsible.

At one point, Achmad got up to stir something delicious smelling on the stove, a South African rice dish.

I looked around and I realized it almost seemed like he was camping out.

The drafty flat, the twin bed he was apparently stuffing himself into each night.

Achmad is a big guy, well over six feet tall.

The space heater, the ironing board doubling as a side table.

There was no artwork or photos or anything personal in there, apart from piles of red and blue and green document boxes filled with hard copies of Trojan Horse records, which Achmad told me he lugs around every time he moves house.

I asked him, where's your family, by the way?

Your wife?

Kids?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Currently, they're in South Africa, yes.

BRIAN REED

Permanently?

And then you're just here?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Permanently, yes.

But I can't leave until this justice, this Trojan horse.

BRIAN REED

Oh, that's why you're here?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yes.

BRIAN REED

Solely because you want to try and get justice for this whole Trojan Horse thing?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yeah, I can't go back permanently until he has at least some form of recourse or justice.

Just because I know at some point we're going to go to court, isn't it?

Someone will come along.

If not you, if your story, someone, somewhere, the truth always come out.

And on the side of truth is time.

HAMZA SYED

Something about Achmad became apparent as the day went on.

He was driven to talk at length about the Trojan Horse scandal, and the lies he was sure the whole thing was based on.

But when Brian and I would try to bring up the place where it seemed like the whole thing started, Adderley and the Trojan Horse letter, he would pull back.

BRIAN REED

Do you remember, can you remember when you first heard about the Trojan Horse letter?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Oh my word, I can't remember that.

BRIAN REED

Do you remember when you first read it?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I don't think I ever did it.

HAMZA SYED

You've never read the Trojan Horse letter?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

No.

HAMZA SYED

This is the letter that started it all.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I know.

HAMZA SYED

This guy, who is living thousands of miles away from his family to seek justice for the Trojan Horse Affair, had never read the Trojan Horse letter.

It beggared belief.

We tried to get him to read our copy now.

BRIAN REED

Five or 10 minutes and just read that, and let us know what you think.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Why would you want me to read it?

BRIAN REED

Because you've never read it, and we want to talk to you about it in detail.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yeah, but I don't read like you read, you see.

I like to read with a pen and a highlighter.

Do you see on there, the back, there's colored pencils

HAMZA SYED

Do all of that.

While you do that, I'll make a cup of tea.

HAMZA SYED

He barely looked at it.

But later, as Achmad was doing the dishes and plating up a New York style cheesecake he'd bought especially for Brian --

ACHMAD DACOSTA

There's some cheesecake in the fridge.

HAMZA SYED

-- his avoidance of Adderley and the letter started to relent.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

But the whole Trojan was, I don't know, it's very -- who have you spoken to of Adderley leadership team?

BRIAN REED

Who have you spoken to from the Adderley leadership team, Achmad asked us.

We told him we weren't having much success with that one.

Nobody.

And that's when Achmad started talking about Mark Walters.

Mark Walters, the former deputy head teacher of Adderley Primary School, who had offered that curiously late testimony, saying he was inside the room with Rizvana Darr as she opened the envelopes from the Muslim teaching assistants and pulled out resignation letters.

It turned out Achmad knew Mark too, because Mrs. Darr, Mark had also worked at Oldknow.

And after Mrs. Darr took the job at Adderley, Mark joined her.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I liked Mark, because he was a very good teacher.

He was a gentleman, nice man.

BRIAN REED

Mark had taught Achmad's kids.

He'd given special attention to his older son, who'd been having a hard time academically.

Achmad and his wife credit Mark with turning their son's whole school career around.

Mark had been to Achmad's house.

Achmad wrote references for him.

He and Mark and Mrs. Darr would see each other at a local tutoring center on Saturdays.

They even talked about going to South Africa together to do work in schools there.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

However, when Trojan Horse happened, Park View was in the front in the newspapers.

But I said, look, Oldknow is going to be next.

So then I contacted Riz, there is an email there, and I said, the inspector said they're coming to Oldknow.

Can you write me, can your email me something that I can present to these people because you were in the school, that there is no extremism in Oldknow.

I didn't hear a word from her.

I heard nothing from her.

BRIAN REED

You've never heard from her since?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Not a word since then.

She was like my sister, almost.

Our relationship was very good.

I was shocked.

For me, that was the biggest shock.

BRIAN REED

Achmad also wrote to Mark Walters asking for the same support.

Mark ignored him too.

And then, he'd up and moved to Australia without Achmad ever seeing him again.

Achmad told us he was sure Mark had firsthand knowledge about the TA resignations at Adderley, and maybe about the Trojan Horse letter too.

He said if we were interested in nailing down who wrote the letter, Mark was definitely someone worth pursuing.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

But if he's pressured, he will speak.

BRIAN REED

You really, you think if he was pressured, he would speak?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

If he was --

I don't doubt.

BRIAN REED

Because we've contacted him.

We've written him and called.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yeah, he will speak.

In fact, on my Facebook I put in Mark Walters a million times to try and find him.

BRIAN REED

Really?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

The weakness I can tell you is Mark Walters.

HAMZA SYED

About a week after our visit to Wales I got a message from Achmad.

Salaam, Hamza, can you text me Mark Walters phone number, school and home address, please?

Thanks.

[PHONE RINGING] We gave Achmad the call.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

And we could tell Mark had been on his mind since we left.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I can't believe that he would let us all be accused falsely for so long.

HAMZA SYED

We told Achmad we're thinking of flying to Australia to try to speak to Mark.

We knew it was a little crazy.

It's a long way to go for an interview with someone who might or might not help us crack open this mystery, but we're kind of desperate.

Over the course of the call, we realized --

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I would have liked to have looked him in the eye to talk to him.

HAMZA SYED

Achmad was considering a trip too.

We all decided it made some sort of weird sense for us to go together.

BRIAN REED

Can you even go to Australia?

I don't even know, don't you have a dental practice?

HAMZA SYED

As a friendly intermediary, Achmad thought he could help us get our meeting with Mark.

But also, Achmad could use a trip to try and get something he wanted, which is personal.

He wanted Mark to simply say to him I know you're not an extremist.

I know you're not some dangerous plotting Muslim.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I want him to say it to my face.

HAMZA SYED

And so, we were off to see Mark Walters in Australia, on a glimmer of hope that he could help us put this letter and the affair it started to bed.

From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm Hamza Syed.

BRIAN REED

I'm Brian Reed.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I'm Achmad Dacosta.

HAMZA SYED

This is the Trojan Horse Affair.

[MUSIC]

We arrived at our hotel near Perth, me from Birmingham, Achmad from Wales Brian from New York, a little worse for wear.

Achmad had delayed a foot surgery to accommodate our trip, and being all cramped up on a long haul flight had not been friendly to him.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

So my feet were really giving me --

were really sore.

I bought new trainers last week and my feet have been killing me.

My feet was killing me.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, no.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

You see the top of my -- you can see.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, yeah.

HAMZA SYED

His foot did look bad, but there's nothing I could do for him.

All good, Achmad said.

He put his trainers back on.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

The truth has to come out somehow, isn't it?

HAMZA SYED

Those were his actual words as he did up his shoes.

Swollen feet be damned, Achmad was on a mission.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Because we don't solve --

HAMZA SYED

We turned up to Australia with the following information.

We knew that Mark Walters was a deputy principal in a suburb of Perth.

We'd called and emailed him several times over the previous year, but never heard back from him.

We'd also found a home address for an M Walters right nearby his school.

That's where we decided to approach Mark, at his home rather than at work.

Brian and I would knock by ourselves first, without Achmad and no recorders.

We figured that would be a little less scary for him.

BRIAN REED

All right, man, you ready?

HAMZA SYED

Nervous.

BRIAN REED

We're walking over.

You're nervous?

HAMZA SYED

A little bit.

Around 6:30, we headed to Mark's condo complex.

It had just gotten dark.

BRIAN REED

OK, I feel good.

I feel, I'm going to crack jokes.

Or I'm just going to be self-aware and say that I know this is surprising.

HAMZA SYED

Just, yeah, just.

BRIAN REED

Let's be there for each other.

Let's both be involved, OK?

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, yeah, of course.

BRIAN REED

All right.

I'm turning this off.

Ready?

HAMZA SYED

All right.

[MUSIC]

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN REED

We don't know if it was him showering.

BRIAN REED

We'd walked up to Mark's condo, and as I was about to knock on the door I heard a shower going through the window beside us.

HAMZA SYED

I mean, it probably is him showering.

BRIAN REED

We decided to wait in the car for a roughly shower length amount of time, then headed back to the condo to try again.

HAMZA SYED

I don't like seeing you nervous, because then you make me nervous.

BRIAN REED

I wasn't nervous.

HAMZA SYED

Just mellow out.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

And chill, and then I'll be chilled.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, I'm not nervous.

HAMZA SYED

All right.

BRIAN REED

Fuck, oh, mate.

Fuck.

HAMZA SYED

This way.

BRIAN REED

Wrong address.

The unit was home to a Frenchman blasting club music with his friend and a case of booze.

He said he didn't know if a Mark Walters used to live there or not.

Our best shot had evaporated like that.

It was Friday night, which meant we had two days to try and find Mark at home.

HAMZA SYED

Were you asleep?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

No, no, no, I'm just relaxing.

HAMZA SYED

I'm recording, by the way.

BRIAN REED

Back at the hotel, we debriefed Achmad.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

You successful in anything?

BRIAN REED

I wouldn't use the word "successful," no.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Oh, that doesn't sound good.

BRIAN REED

Wrong address.

Some French guy.

But anyway, we found another address that looks actually quite nearby, and also likely.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

You do know what he look like?

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

But we're going to go in the morning, at 8:30.

HAMZA SYED

Early the next day, we woke up a woman who was not Mark Walters.

Tried another address, another woman, also not Mark Walters.

Brian and I joked that Mark might have chosen the greater Perth area as a new home, not only for its remoteness and stunning weather, but also for its noticeably high concentration of M. Walters per capita.

And then suddenly, Achmad popped up.

He emailed us a file.

He'd tapped up a realtor who shared him on a database of property sales to people named Mark Walters all over Western Australia.

Over lunch, I started flicking through the attachment, and a woman's name jumped out at me.

It was Brazilian sounding.

I had a vague memory of somebody in Birmingham saying something about Mark being Brazilian or marrying a Brazilian.

I googled her name, and her Pinterest page came up with a picture of her and Mark.

HAMZA SYED

That's Mark, right?

That's Mark.

BRIAN REED

That's his wife.

HAMZA SYED

That's Mark, that's his wife.

BRIAN REED

That's their address.

HAMZA SYED

That's their address.

BRIAN REED

Achmad!

Now we're, now this is it.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, I know.

BRIAN REED

This isn't crap shoots anymore.

HAMZA SYED

I'm going to get a double espresso.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, I'm going to get a nice smoothie for the road.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

All right, texting Achmad.

We've located the right house.

Headed there now.

We'll report back later.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

He's typing.

Thumbs up and a heart.

Have you prayed today?

HAMZA SYED

I prayed this morning.

BRIAN REED

Aren't you supposed to do a prayer right now?

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, all right, man, let's not bring that in.

God, I'm on the road.

BRIAN REED

We needed all the help we could get.

HAMZA SYED

I'll pray, I'll pray before we leave this place.

BRIAN REED

You could pray on the beach.

HAMZA SYED

I can, actually.

BRIAN REED

That'd be really nice.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah.

BRIAN REED

Hamza wandered over to a grassy knoll, overlooking the Indian Ocean.

There was a breeze blowing.

He prayed.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN REED

Good prayer?

HAMZA SYED

Good prayer.

BRIAN REED

Good spot.

HAMZA SYED

Felt strong.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, really nice.

HAMZA SYED

It really, really was nice.

I should put my shoes back on.

Should we do it?

BRIAN REED

I think it'll help to articulate just to get in the right frame of mind.

Why should Mark tell us what he knows?

What if he's just like, why do you guys care about this?

HAMZA SYED

Quite honestly, it's like it's about making him realize that something that began so insignificant had such a profound impact on so many lives.

Because I'm talking about generally what was happening in those schools, the message that you don't have to strip everything that you stand for, the values that you're born with or you live by, it can all be achieved without you having to lose yourself and become something else.

It's not a binary choice.

I'm either this or I'm that.

In order for me to be successful, I have to be a certain kind of person and be a certain kind of way and believe in a certain kind of thing.

If I'm precious about my belief system, if I'm precious about my background, if I'm precious about my culture, all of these things will actually hold me back and there's no success for me, and so I have a choice.

No, that's not true.

So I don't know how we're going to put all that across on a doorstep of someone who clearly does not want us there.

It's going to be difficult.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

No, but this is helpful.

This is why.

I needed to get this back in my head because we've been so much in the minutia of the White Pages and Google Maps.

This is good.

I feel good.

HAMZA SYED

Ready?

BRIAN REED

Yeah, let's go.

HAMZA SYED

All right.

BRIAN REED

Let's go to his house.

[PHONE RINGING]

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Hello.

BRIAN REED

Hey, Achmad, it's Brian.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Hello.

BRIAN REED

OK, so it didn't go great.

BRIAN REED

We're sitting in our rental car in a strip mall parking lot about 100 yards from Mark Walters'S house.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, we knocked, he answered the door.

I said Mark Walters?

He said, who's asking?

I said I'm Brian Reed.

I'm sure this is very surprising.

And he said you need to get off the property now, and slammed the door shut.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

That's not very good, is it?

BRIAN REED

No.

And we stood out there knocking a bit saying we don't mean to cause you distress.

We're just doing our job.

We think it's really important to talk.

Please, hear us out for five minutes.

We've come all this way.

And then we -- I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but we had written a letter in which we explain that you're here, and how much you respect him and how you're hoping to speak to him.

And so anyway, right before we left I said I shouted in I'm leaving you a letter, Mark.

Please, read it.

We left the letter in the door.

And then we kind of sat on the curb across the street for a while.

No one's stirring.

And now, we're kind of just in a shopping center outside where he lives.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yeah, I will just go speak to him.

I'll go to --

I don't think he will shut the door in my face.

His first reaction is normal.

The first reaction to most journalists is where you want to shut the door in their face.

So I don't think you must be surprised about that.

BRIAN REED

So you've been on the receiving end of this, I see?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yes, I have been, unfortunately.

Normal people are just generally scared of journalists.

Journalists tend not to write the truth.

You see, so this is why people are scared.

And if you are a crook, then you also scared of journalists because they might write the truth.

So either way, the people that are honest and dishonest, don't like journalists.

You have a lot of power over people's lives, and people feel very helpless.

And especially, now for him, because this is now his new home.

You are going to bring all the bad news back to his new life and he doesn't want that.

And I think he's also a victim in all of this nonsense that went on.

I don't think he is the bad guy.

So no, I'll go speak to him.

That's not a problem.

BRIAN REED

We went back to the hotel and found Achmad in his room.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Oh, you horrible man.

You went to torture Mark.

BRIAN REED

By this point it was late.

We wanted to give Mark a chance to read the letter we left for him, lodged above the front doorknob.

We'd take Achmad over to Mark's first thing in the morning.

While we were out all day, Achmad had made friends with the taxi driver at the mosque downtown who'd offered to bring us some curry for dinner.

We sat in Achmad's hotel room while we waited.

Achmad asked if he could take a look at some of the court files from the Adderley employment case.

He hadn't seen them before.

I gave him the witness statements from Rizvana Darr and Mark Walters, and he lounged on his bed in a white t-shirt and sweatpants, reading them.

And I think he was surprised how much of their narrative struck him as odd.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

You see, part that I don't understand that makes no sense, Brian, it says here in the first few parts, parents were criticizing and making derogatory remarks about the head teacher in the playground.

BRIAN REED

There are parts in the statements about conservative Salafi parents hurling abuse at Mrs. Darr on a daily basis, which Achmad had a lot of trouble picturing.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Why would you take abuse for years?

That makes no sense.

BRIAN REED

There were protocols for dealing with angry parents at schools.

And especially knowing Mrs. Darr, how authoritative she was, Achmad couldn't imagine her just taking it.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I'm not saying that there is no unruly behavior, but it's very easy to deal with it.

So if this had been going on for years, that make no sense to me.

Because no headteacher --

BRIAN REED

Unless it was just really a unique kind of beyond situation.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

No, no, no.

BRIAN REED

Which is what they're claiming it was really bad.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

But what I'm saying is, she is a very forceful person.

Mrs. Darr is very forceful.

And she will allow the parent to abuse her day in, day out.

Does it make sense to you?

Just think logically.

Don't try and be a journalist or don't be -- just use simple minds.

BRIAN REED

Achmad had started off relaxed on the bed.

Now, reading what his old colleagues had sworn to in a tribunal, he was agitated.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

You see, this is why I don't read these things.

It just --

BRIAN REED

You asked to read it.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yeah, I know.

But I don't want to read this, Brian.

BRIAN REED

All right.

Sleep well, get some rest.

Get some rest, OK.

Let's be fresh.

Thank you for the evening.

BRIAN REED

We called it a night.

I was in my room down the hall about to get in bed when there was a knock at the door.

It was Achmad.

He said he couldn't sleep.

Could I lend him Mark Walters' witness statement for the evening, he asked.

[MUSIC]

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I read this last night, and I read it again this morning.

BRIAN REED

Hamza and Achmad and I are headed to Mark's early the next day, Sunday.

Achmad dressed up for the occasion, a pressed shirt and blazer, and he has Mark's witness statement in his hands.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

What do you understand by the term overacting?

BRIAN REED

Overacting.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I know my wife sometimes will say, oh, what a terrible actor, or something.

They will take she's overacting.

And how do you guys understand that?

HAMZA SYED

You're exaggerating your emotions, like more than a normal person would.

BRIAN REED

Or you're not being truthful in your performance.

You're being a little hokey or fake.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

That's what I thought of the resignation.

BRIAN REED

Achmad reads Mark Walters account of the day the envelopes arrived from the three Muslim TAs.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I'll start with the first one.

"On the 6th of December, 2012, at approximately quarter past 1:00, I was in route to Mrs. Darr's office for a prearranged meeting."

I'll come back to the bits that stand out.

"As I approached the main school admin office, Mrs. Darr appeared at the doorway.

I was accompanied by the other deputy head teacher, Anila Ashraf.

I walked the few steps directly into Mrs. Darr's office.

Mrs. Darr held the door open for us and I saw she had multiple envelopes in her hand.

The three of us entered the office and sat down at a large meeting table, and I recall noting that the envelope looked thicker than usual.

As I commenced discussions --"

OK, let's stop there.

"I recall noting that the envelopes looked thicker than usual."

That is something silly to say.

That don't fit.

BRIAN REED

I was actually, when you just read that aloud I noted that too.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

That doesn't fit, because they come in all the time with envelopes and why would you say that?

Just sounds suspicious to me.

That's just added for overacting.

And the resignation letters, I'm told, are two sheets.

How does two sheets make and envelope look thick?

BRIAN REED

True.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

It just don't feel right.

It's overacting.

And then she open it up in front of them every time.

It's very convenient with all of these resignations, they're all together.

Mark is there, Anila is there, and she's there.

She's keeping the door open for them.

That's all true, but I've been in the office multiple times.

And she's not necessarily --

I just find it --

well, maybe it happened like that.

But I just find that strange.

BRIAN REED

When we first met him a couple of months earlier in Wales, Achmad was very reluctant to accept the possibility that these people he thought highly of, Rizvana Darr and Mark Walters, might have done something untoward regarding the resignation letters.

By the time he trekked to Australia, I think it's fair to say he'd concluded that something had gone awry, but he wasn't sure what precisely.

And whatever had happened, he seemed to imagine that everyone's motives had been unmalicious, a forgivable mistake.

But this morning, on our way to Mark Walters' house, Achmad had come to see Rizvana Darr and Mark Walters' response to the TAs as calculated.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I think these people were driving Riz up the wall, and she wanted to get rid of them.

That's just what my gut is telling me.

And reading this man's response don't make that disappear.

It feels choreographed.

If it was the truth, she would have had no problem to say I was in my office, I opened it up.

I saw these resignation letters.

I called in my deputies and assistant, you understand?

She would have had no issue.

But I don't believe that they were in the room when she opened it.

BRIAN REED

That's it, right?

BRIAN REED

We pulled up to Mark's.

BRIAN REED

Letter's still there.

HAMZA SYED

The letter's still there.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Where do you guys see the letter?

BRIAN REED

The envelope we'd left for him was still wedged in the front door.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Oh, the letter is still there.

It's stuck on the door.

BRIAN REED

And his car, a yellow Toyota, also appeared not to have moved since we were here yesterday.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Now, let's go knock.

There's no point us hanging around.

You came all the way from the UK to meet this man, so let's go meet him.

BRIAN REED

After the break, Achmad knocks.

BRIAN REED

All right.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I'll see you gentlemen.

BRIAN REED

All right, good luck.

HAMZA SYED

All the best.

HAMZA SYED

Sunday morning, Achmad is walking up to Mark Walters' one story house on the edge of a walled in development near Perth.

Brian and I are parked a few houses down.

HAMZA SYED

This is crazy.

BRIAN REED

All right, I'm looking through the back.

He's at the door.

HAMZA SYED

He's knocking.

BRIAN REED

He's knocking.

Nothing.

HAMZA SYED

I'm so nervous for him.

He's so brave.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, I'm nervous too.

He's kind of pacing at the door right now.

HAMZA SYED

He stepped away a bit.

Oh, he's knocking quite close to there.

BRIAN REED

He's pacing in front of the house now.

He's doing a wide pace, hands in his pockets, beige blazer, khakis.

HAMZA SYED

If you do have eyeballs on the front, and you're Mark, and you don't know DaCosta is here now you're going to be like, what fresh hell is this?

Two journalists at my door yesterday, now I have a giant ex-colleague pacing around my front lawn.

BRIAN REED

How long has it been?

HAMZA SYED

It's been about seven minutes.

BRIAN REED

It's been that long?

I thought it just felt that long.

HAMZA SYED

No, it's genuinely been long.

It's starting to become a scene, isn't it?

BRIAN REED

I'm aware of the neighbors.

HAMZA SYED

I know.

BRIAN REED

Oh, there's a dog.

He doesn't like dogs.

HAMZA SYED

No.

BRIAN REED

I thought this time would creep, but it's actually flying.

I'm so on edge.

HAMZA SYED

I think the neighbors told him to clear off.

BRIAN REED

Oh, really?

HAMZA SYED

I think so.

BRIAN REED

OK.

HAMZA SYED

And he's watching him come back to our car.

BRIAN REED

Oh, he looks a little dejected.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Well, the neighbor say why you knocking?

Because I'm knocking all the time, it's quite loud.

HAMZA SYED

Achmad got in the passenger seat.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

But there's not a word, not a whisper, nothing in the house.

BRIAN REED

Did you shout?

Did you say it's Achmad?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

All the time.

I went to the windows, by each window, and this is what must have frightened the neighbors.

I'm knocking loud and.

BRIAN REED

What did you say?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I said Dr. DaCosta, Mark, Achmad, I want to speak a few minutes.

Repeated it over and over and over like a lunatic.

The neighbors can hear me.

So surely he can hear me if he's inside.

HAMZA SYED

He can definitely hear you.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

So he must be inside.

The letter is still in the door.

We were on very good friendly terms.

I planned for him and Riz to come to South Africa to come help us with our schools there.

And it's very sad that it all ended in such disastrous fashion for everyone.

HAMZA SYED

We went for lunch and came back.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

The envelope's gone.

HAMZA SYED

Finally, some thrilling signs of action.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Since we've been here this morning, the light wasn't on.

The light is on now.

BRIAN REED

Maybe he went to stay at a family member's house or a friend's house.

HAMZA SYED

We sat there idling, unsure what to do.

BRIAN REED

Now, I'm just bored.

HAMZA SYED

I was behind the wheel.

Suddenly, Achmad and Brian noticed someone behind us.

A woman, Mark's next-door neighbor, was coming at the car aggressively with a phone out, photographing us.

BRIAN REED

This neighbor.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

There's the young lady taking a picture of the car.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, I'm going to go talk to her.

I'm going to go talk to her.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yes.

Take your things with you.

Look more like a journalist.

BRIAN REED

Hi, ma'am.

HAMZA SYED

Achmad told Brian to take his recorder with him, because he looked more like a journalist.

But in his rush to intercept the neighbor, Brian left it in the backseat, running.

HAMZA SYED

It's better he steps out.

HAMZA SYED

Brian walked up to the woman and offered her a business card to introduce himself, but she wouldn't take it from him.

She kept clutching her phone with a scowl on her face and continued taking pictures.

Then a man we assume was her husband came down the driveway.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

He don't look happy either.

Hey, Mark, you could stop all of this.

Just open the bloody door.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, Mark, you could stop all of this.

Just open the bloody door, Achmad mumbled.

Now, the woman was right outside Achmad's window, with her phone in his face.

HAMZA SYED

Ma'am, why are you taking pictures of us?

SPEAKER

Because you're harassing us and you're stalking.

HAMZA SYED

Harrassing?

SPEAKER

And we've already told the police.

We know exactly who you are.

HAMZA SYED

Harrassing you?

We've got nothing to do with you.

SPEAKER

This is our neighborhood.

This is our neighborhood.

Leave.

HAMZA SYED

But we're not coming to speak to you.

HAMZA SYED

I could still see Brian in my side mirror, gesticulating and talking to the husband.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I would like to know what Brian is saying.

He's a bit of a diplomat, isn't he?

HAMZA SYED

He's just probably trying to explain what he's doing.

I don't know what.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

The husband looked very aggressive.

I don't know if he's still.

But you see now, it's a natural instinct when you look the same.

Birds of a feather flock together.

So they will listen to him a bit more than if I to be there.

HAMZA SYED

Oh, yeah, obviously, they wouldn't give us two minutes.

But I mean, the fact that he's managed to keep him talking for this long is good enough.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yeah, I think he's a good decent diplomat.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, he's good for this stuff.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

He can speak.

HAMZA SYED

He's good for this stuff.

I would've lost my patience about 20 minutes ago.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I would just ignore them.

HAMZA SYED

I don't think that went well.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I don't think so either.

The demeanor is not very good.

They don't look happy.

Have we upset the neighbors?

The neighbors are not very happy.

BRIAN REED

We got to go.

HAMZA SYED

I can't believe this shit.

BRIAN REED

That was crazy.

That woman's like we know who you are, we know what's going on.

This isn't Birmingham.

We know the story.

We know what's happening.

HAMZA SYED

What?

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

HAMZA SYED

Birmingham?

How did they know that?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

So you must have spoken to them.

BRIAN REED

And they said he's not there.

They said he's left, he's not even here again.

I said that's fine if that's true, that's good to know.

The wife was I mean, way more upset than the husband.

They said they called the police.

I said I'm happy to speak to the police.

We're not doing anything wrong.

[BEEPING]

HAMZA SYED

Put your belt on.

BRIAN REED

They said, why are you filming his house?

I said we're not filming.

We have a microphone.

You're welcome to look at it.

We're talking to each other in the car.

We've not filmed.

He said who are the two cronies who were filming yesterday?

I said, I've been here every time.

I'm with these guys.

HAMZA SYED

Basically, the Browns, she's worried about two Browns.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

She came to the car and said get out of our neighborhood.

BRIAN REED

Yeah, no, I think there was some undertones there, for sure.

HAMZA SYED

I sensed an ethnic apprehension in her voice.

BRIAN REED

Yeah.

She just kept saying we know what the story is.

We know what it's about.

We know who you are.

We know who you are.

We know who you are.

HAMZA SYED

But how does she know the story?

That's what I'm interested in.

BRIAN REED

They seemed to know, because I said, well, it's a story about a school that he used to work in.

I'm here all the way from New York because as part of my job I need to make sure before I air it that I get a chance to talk to him and give him a chance to respond.

He said, well, he's obviously not interested.

He's obviously not interested.

I said, I understand that.

This is a situation where I still need to make sure he responds.

It's unpleasant, I'm sorry that I freaked you guys out.

He doesn't want to deal with this shit, is what he said.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

They look so angry.

Their physical demeanor looks so aggressive and so angry.

BRIAN REED

She was very upset.

She was like, you're liar, you're a liar, you're a liar.

I said I'm a journalist.

She said you're a liar.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I can understand they may be upset because they feel there's something going on that they're not sure what's going on.

HAMZA SYED

Right, so come and ask questions.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

So then yes.

HAMZA SYED

Yeah, come and ask questions.

Just don't charge out.

BRIAN REED

Well, I think he told them something.

BRIAN REED

Achmad took in what this could mean.

The way the couple was speaking to me, Mark doesn't want to deal with this shit, you're a liar, this isn't Birmingham, it seemed like not only was Mark avoiding him, but he might have said something bad about Achmad or about all of us to his neighbors.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

OK, get out of our neighborhood.

What do you mean, get out of your neighborhood?

I'm glad you experienced it a little bit.

When you said x, and she said no, you're lying.

Because that's what we experience all the time as Muslims.

HAMZA SYED

But they would have calmed down because you spoke to them, Brian.

If I had gone out of the car, I don't think they would have been very calm.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

For sure.

You OK, because you were in their neighborhood and your neighborhood.

HAMZA SYED

To be honest, it would have ended in minutes, because I would've just stepped out.

Just fucking bug the shit out of them.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Your colleague is a bit more aggressive than you, Brian?

BRIAN REED

This guy gets riled up.

This has happened before.

HAMZA SYED

I don't understand like why, honestly, I don't understand why you have to take it.

BRIAN REED

I wasn't taking it.

HAMZA SYED

No, not you, I just mean in general.

I mean, the royal you.

The royal you.

You did well, you did really well.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

For me, there's a bigger picture.

Don't let them distract you.

If you want to slowly show people the reality of Muslims, then you have to be better than them.

It don't take --

HAMZA SYED

I don't know --

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I know, I don't expect you to agree with me.

HAMZA SYED

You have to go above and beyond to be treated equally.

It's like, forget that.

Also, I feel like, all right, so if I walk on tiptoes and eggshells, you might ignore me.

But it's like you know what, you're going to think whatever you think of me anyway.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

What I'm saying is, the Brown person, you will always be seen as the aggressor.

BRIAN REED

You bummed, Achmad?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I'm just disappointed.

BRIAN REED

You seemed pretty confident that he would talk to you.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Yeah, I was.

If I could meet him in person, he would speak to me.

BRIAN REED

Well clearly, you being here hasn't helped, judging from filtered through the osmosis of his neighbors, it sounds like he didn't frame it well.

He didn't seem sympathetic to your being here or moved by your being here.

I'm sorry, Achmad.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

No, no, it's not a problem for me.

People change.

But I don't know, I think he's just scared of me.

My gut tells me that he's a pawn in all of this as well.

HAMZA SYED

We might just have to sit here and accept the fact that we are not going to get the truth.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

No, no, no, no, no, I believe that we can get the truth.

You might not be able to get the truth.

We can get the truth in a court of law.

HAMZA SYED

Right, but then, OK, rephrasing that basically means that the truth is further delayed.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

But that is this is what I've told.

For me, the goal is not the end.

My goal is just the struggle.

And if you have that vision, then you're never completely defeated.

You have to be patient.

HAMZA SYED

It was somewhere along this aimless car ride that I realized we weren't going to get an answer.

We weren't going to know for sure what happened in Rizvana Darr's office that day with the envelopes, or why Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf's testimony about it was delayed for so long.

We weren't going to find out whether Mark or Anila Ashfraf gave true accounts of what they saw.

We don't know whether they did anything wrong at all.

And most disappointingly, we weren't going to get a confession out of anyone involved in crafting the Trojan Horse letter, not the author or authors, or a firsthand witness.

Meaning, we have no ability to say for sure who wrote the letter or why.

Which is pretty much what Brian told me was going to happen the first night I met him.

Standing backstage, as I blurted out my pitch for the story, what he said to me was, it's going to be really hard to figure out who wrote the letter.

You're probably not going to prove it.

But he also told me that doesn't mean the story isn't worth doing.

Because if I was doing it right, I still make revelations along the way that could be meaningful.

What we can tell you is this.

Once upon a time, a head teacher named Rizvana Darr was in trouble because of four teaching assistants and Birmingham City Council investigators.

We can say a strange letter appeared in the nick of time, claiming the TAs and the city council were part of a Muslim plot, and that they had conspired to frame Mrs. Darr.

We can say that this letter was very useful to Mrs. Darr, that she brandished it around insisting she was a victim of conspiracy, and ultimately her name was cleared.

We can say the police knew the letter was bogus, and that was told to Michael Gove, that Sue Packer raised an alarm, that Peter Clark produced his plot, no plot, maybe plot, but I won't say plot report.

And we can tell you about two essential eyewitnesses to the envelope opening, who Adderley Primary School kept puzzlingly hidden for nearly a year.

But whether these revelations are meaningful, I doubt it.

I believe without someone saying I wrote the letter, or I have proof of who wrote the letter, the Trojan Horse Affair will rumble on and on.

At one point in the car, as Achmad was going on again about journalism being useless, Brian asked him a question, which he might as well have been asking me.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

Because people --

BRIAN REED

But wait, can I ask you this?

Why are you participating with us?

Why are you talking to us?

ACHMAD DACOSTA

I don't know.

It's a good question.

Because I trust --

HAMZA SYED

Why bother with this at all then, with journalism?

Achmad thought about it for a second.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

In Islam we are taught that when you are oppressed, you have to speak if you can't change it physically.

The only alternative is to speak.

One of the highest forms of, I don't like to use this word because it's not understood very well, the word is jihad.

But one of the highest forms of sacrifice is to speak against the dictator or an oppressor and tell him to his face that he is an oppressor and a dictator.

HAMZA SYED

I believe in this too, the value of speaking if there's nothing else you can do to change something.

I went to journalism on that premise.

This series is what that sounds like.

But while the implication of that guidance, to me at least, and I'm no scholar, is that speaking truth will lead to change.

I don't know if the prophet, peace be upon him, actually said that, actually said where it would lead.

He just said speaking truth in the face of oppression was one of the greatest forms of jihad, forms of struggle.

And so that's where I'm left, wondering if all of this, what we've told you, is headed towards change, or if this is just another profile of the struggle.

HAMZA SYED

Can we not lose hope?

Just because I don't want to lose hope until you are on a plane.

ACHMAD DACOSTA

No, no, no, no, even if I go back to the UK, for me, this was positive.

Because I came here, I did something.

BRIAN REED

I did warn Hamza, I knew how these things normally go.

Rarely is there one big revelation that undoes years of misinformation and untruth.

Most decent journalism is an exercise in incremental understanding.

The Trojan Horse letter though, even with my tempered expectations, I was surprised by how willing people have been to let it stand unchallenged.

People are depressingly unbothered that this harmful myth about Muslims persists.

The mystery of the Trojan Horse letter could be resolved.

The person or people who sat down one day to type out that document, or perhaps others who know about it, they're almost certainly out there right now, possibly strolling down Alum Rock Road, maybe even listening to this.

But in order for that resolution to happen, government officials or the police, the British public, they would have to decide that this task, determining the perpetrator of a massive nationwide hoax, is their responsibility,

and probably should have always been so that it wasn't left to a doctor turned journalism student in search of a school project.

Which is to say, a bunch of people would have to care enough.

And Hamza's right, we may just be a far away from that.

On our last day together with Achmad in Perth, after having emailed Mark again and trying his wife a few times with no response, Hamza and I watched from the car as Achmad strolled through a primary school gate and across the parking lot,

and probably passed the CCTV camera into the school's reception area with an envelope in his hand containing a letter which Hamza and I had both witnessed him seal inside.

A final written plea for Mark Walters to simply talk to him.

Achmad would stand in that primary school reception area, just a few feet away from Mark Walters, who, as the principal let Achmad know, was sitting in his office on the other side of a door, refusing to come out.

[MUSIC]

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Hamza Syed and me, along with Rebecca Laks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig, additional editing by Ira Glass and by our contributing editor Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Fact checking and research by Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Mellor with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.

Sound design, mixing, and music supervision by Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski at the Audio Non-visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Ndeye Thioubou.

Executive assistant is Alberto de Leon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.

HAMZA SYED

Special thanks to Arun Kundnani, Nathan Brown, forensic linguists, James Fitzgerald and Rob Leondard and his team at Hofstra University.

Chris Henry, Simon Bruce, Johnny Baig, Maria Fernanda, Danielle Strolia.

BRIAN REED

Also, Solange Franklin Reed, Paula and Howard Reed, Adam and Stephanie Reed, Vera Franklin, Chris Alesevich, Abbas Hussein, Momina Shahid, Katie Fuchs, Jordan Cohen, Jonathan Heawood, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Alena Cerro, Susan Wessling, Clifford Levy.

HAMZA SYED

Legal review and counsel by Dana Green, Al-Amyn Sumar, Martin Soames, Emma Linch, Simon Procas, Gavin Millaar, Constance Pendleton, Allison Schary, Robert Stankey, Selina MacLaren.

BRIAN REED

The distribution team at the New York Times, Jeffrey Miranda, Jon McNally, Julia Simon and Lauren Jackson.

The marketing team at The Times, Lindsay Fischler and Megan Shepard.

And thanks also to Renan Borelli, Tara Godvin, Eslah Attar, Peter Rentz, John-Michael Murphy, Aleksa Brown, Sam Posner, Matthew Lewkowicz.

HAMZA SYED

The brand identity team with the New York Times, Kelly Doe, Jason Fujikuni, Hanah Ho, and Anisha Muni, Lucy Jones, Katherine Roach, Nina Lassam, Matthew Lloyd-Thomas, Stephanie Preiss, Taylor Gandossy, Morgan Jones, and Krystal Plomatos.

BRIAN REED

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and the New York Times.

About the Hosts

Brian Reed is the host and co-creator of the podcast S-Town, a production of Serial and This American Life, which won a Peabody Award for being “a pioneering classic of the form.” Brian was also a senior producer at This American Life, where he edited, produced, and reported some of the program’s most ambitious stories. He has received the Dart Award for Reporting on Trauma, the Overseas Press Club Award, an Education Writers Association Award, and two Peabodies.
Hamza Syed joined Serial Productions in 2018 to report The Trojan Horse Affair. Hamza earned a master’s degree in investigative journalism from De Montfort University in Leicester, England, in 2019, where he was awarded the Channel 4 Prize for Investigative Journalism. Before becoming a reporter, Hamza was a medical doctor.

About the Music

Thomas Mellor is a composer and producer based in Walsall, England, best known for his work on productions by some of the UK’s top Grime artists earning him 2 BPI certified awards and has landed music in hit TV shows such as ‘POWER’ and ‘Top Boy’ on Netflix. In recent years, Thomas has also composed music for advertisements and has dedicated more time towards finding work composing for TV and Film.
Matt McGinley is a New York based musician, known for his work with the band Gym Class Heroes and as a contributing music producer for This American Life. Matt has composed music for many Serial Productions shows, including Serial podcast, S-Town, and Nice White Parents.

Additional Credits

Executive Producers

Brian Reed and Hamza Syed
Producer

Rebecca Laks
Editor

Sarah Koenig
Additional Editing

Ira Glass and by our Contributing Editor, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
Fact Checking and Research

Marika Cronnolly and Ben Phelan
Original Scoring and additional music

Thomas Mellor and Matt McGinley
Sound design, mixing and additional music

Steven Jackson and Phil Dmochowski
Operations Team

Alena Cerro and Elizabeth Davis-Moorer
Executive Editor

Julie Snyder
Managing Editor

Neil Drumming
Supervising Producer

Ndeye Thioubou
Executive Assistant

Alberto De Leon
Digital Design and Development

Peter Rentz and John-Michael Murphy
Director of Audio

Paula Szuchman
Assistant Managing Editor

Sam Dolnick
Special Thanks

Jordan Cohen, Katie Fuchs, Jonathan Heawood, Susan Wessling, Clifford Levy, Dana Green, Al-Amyn Sumar, Martin Soames, Simone Procas, Jeffrey Miranda, Jon McNally, Julia Simon, Lauren Jackson, Renan Borelli, Tara Godvin, Eslah Attar, Peter Rentz, John-Michael Murphy, Lindsay Fischler, Kathryn Roach, Megan Shepherd, Aleksa Brown, Sam Posner, Matthew Lewkowicz, Kelly Doe, Jason Fujikuni, Hanah Ho, Anisha Muni, Nina Lassam, Matthew Lloyd-Thomas, Stephanie Preiss, Taylor Gandossy, Morgan Jones, Krystal Plomatos, Cassie Howley, Frances Swanson, Seth Lind, Matt Tierney, Stowe Nelson, Christopher Swetala, Julie Whitaker

An unlikely duo chases down the origins of a mysterious letter that caused a national scandal.

The TrojanHorse Affair

Listen and follow The Trojan Horse Affair:

Trailer

Listen to “The Trojan Horse Affair” Trailer

Part 1

The Letter in the Brown Paper Envelope

Part 2

The Case of the Four Resignations

Part 3

Sir Albert and the Missing “H”

Part 4

The Meeting and the Mole

Part 5

A Study in Scarlett

Part 6

Cucumbers and Cooker Bombs

Part 7

The Detail of the Deputies

Part 8

An Appointment in Perth

About the Hosts

About the Music

Further Reading From The Times

Who Gets to be British in 2022? Feb. 3, 2022

Seven Takeaways From ‘The Trojan Horse Affair’ March 11, 2022

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S-Town

Nice White Parents

The Improvement Association

Additional Credits

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The Trojan
Horse Affair