Into The Dirt is a fascinating study of a corporate spy — podcast review

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One summer in the mid-2000s, Rob Moore was on a beach in Cornwall when a chance meeting changed his life. Moore, who in the 1990s had worked as a producer on Chris Morris’s TV series Brass Eye, a media satire that pranked credulous celebrities, had hit a wall in his career. “I basically know how to wire up a room and make something stupid happen in the middle of it, and that is a non-transferable skill,” he reflects. But then he ran into an old colleague from the TV industry who was now director of a large detective agency. The friend said his business could do with people like Moore. And so, improbably, he reinvented himself as a corporate spy.

Into The Dirt, the latest podcast from Tortoise Media, shines a light on the murky world of corporate espionage, in which private agencies are hired to investigate companies or organisations and their employees. Many of them are staffed by former spies and army and police officers. The disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein hired a private Israeli intelligence firm to obtain personal information on the women who accused him of sexual misconduct, and, during the 2016 presidential race, retired MI6 officer Christopher Steele was hired on behalf of Hillary Clinton to investigate Donald Trump’s connections to Russia.

Three years in the making, and hosted by Ceri Thomas, Tortoise editor and former editor of the BBC’s Today and Panorama programmes, Into The Dirt is built around Moore and his work for K2 Intelligence. This New York “global risk advisory” company paid him to go undercover as a filmmaker trying to make a documentary about the campaign to ban asbestos. His task was to find out whether US law firms were funding campaign groups in order to generate new business. Only Moore, who was later unmasked, turned double-agent — or so he claims.

Due to some early narrative meandering, I spent the first 10 or so minutes thinking this was a show about skulduggery in the asbestos industry. In fact, Into The Dirt’s themes are far bigger and more compelling. It is about truth, perception and the stories people tell themselves to justify their actions. It is, above all, a fascinating study of a man with a remarkable capacity for self-delusion.

It is significant that it was Moore who approached Tortoise with this story, rather than the other way around. But his commitment to telling that story wavers, leading him to try to pull the plug. Early on, Thomas quizzes him about his desire for control. “Obviously the need to be in control of things is one of the things that causes suffering, because when you feel out of control, it’s terrible,” he replies. The show is three episodes in, and, for now, the mystery of Moore and his motivations remains just that. The point here is not just to get to know Moore, but to find out whether he will ever know himself.

tortoisemedia.com/listen/intothedirt