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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
People find it very difficult to lie to people who are being nice to
them. You should never rely on your intuition. It's always, how much extra
data can I get? Human intelligence is less important
in the world that you live in now, or not? No, I think
it's become more important because getting the good human
intelligence becomes both harder but also more
valuable because documents and the public record will only
take you so far. Welcome to the
Intelligence Advantage podcast, where I, Gary Miller, get to
talk to the movers and shapers in the investigation and intelligence
industry and find out exactly how they got to where they
are today. I'm delighted to be joined
today by a campaigner who has been
around almost as long as I have, but not quite Andrew
Wordsworth from Radus. He's got a little bit of history as well
that we'll talk about, but delighted, Andrew, that you found time
to join me today. Thank you very much. Good day. An absolute pleasure.
It's always interesting to talk about the history of which we know
so much. Absolutely. So the first question is, having
done a little bit of scratching around about Andrew, because we've
come across each other over the years, but I think it's
fair to say I've never thought about the origins of
names and family and stuff like that. And of course, couldn't
resist when I asked the office research
people to do a little bit of digging on my good friend Andrew, that I
found that your allegedly your middle name is Gardino.
Guardino. Guardino. Guardino. So Sicilian
origins. Would you be of the Roman. Roman.
Excellent. Yeah. And of course, if you believe
ChatGPT or the equivalent, it does actually have
guarding, protection kind of resonance to it. So
I think you found the right profession. Yeah, maybe.
I never thought of it like that.
Anyway, you've got Italian
ancestry somewhere along the. Along
the line. And I know because
we've dealt with each other in previous
incarnations. But very briefly, tell me if I've got the,
as it were, the chronology correct. You started off
in investigations. I know you were with
AHL and the MAN group, but when you started investigating
proper armor, stroke,
dsl, which I have very long
and distant memories of, then Crawl, then gpw,
then Rados. Is. Is that the. The full pack of cards? That's
my investigation trajectory all going toward the peak
of. Of Radus. Excellent. Excellent. Yes,
indeed. So what I'm interested in is. And I.
Am I right in saying that armour was probably more in the physical
protection side of things. What were you doing in armour?
They had been. They decided to take over a Number of investigations
companies. It was a roll up. So they had a man
guarding of all the British embassies and quite a lot of foreign embassies around the
world. And when they had two or three
investigations companies, they merged together. There's a pattern
slightly in the industry, but you get times when there's a lot of private
equity money floating around and people suddenly say we're going to roll up lots
of investigations companies. And it's a pattern.
Yes. And of course, roll the tape forward. I'm going to come
back to the ye olden days in a minute but
role of take forward X number of years and of course the
private equity gobbling up or putting together what
they think are mutually compatible businesses is really
now in another kind of heyday position.
It seems to be the flavor of the month for private equity to get involved
in your businesses. It does. I mean it's primarily being led by
expert witness companies which have all raised a lot of money from private equity. Some
forensic accounting firms and they always say, oh let's built on the
investigations bit at the side and sometimes it goes very well and
sometimes it goes less well. So what are the. Just before
we get into the personal point, the personal history
a little bit. Why doesn't it go well? When it doesn't
go well, what are the main elements of where it doesn't mix?
Investigations is quite a specialist business. It's quite hard
to. To do it and do it
well is particularly difficult and people have different styles and different
ways of doing it and people
tend to treasure and value their clients a great deal and they find it
hard to let them go. And the barriers
to entry. If you're dissatisfied at one of the big companies,
if you feel you've got the client base, it's always quite logical to say, well,
why wouldn't I just set up on my own? The second you're asked to
fill in the time sheets with an American company which doesn't understand
that there are different time zones around the world and things of that kind, which
are pretty common patterns, it has to be said.
Having observed it from outside, I can see why it wouldn't go well.
So personality billing, is
there a serious mismatch between, for
example, different cultures as to the way
they like or they want investigators to
monetize their time. Does everyone use a timesheet in the investigation
business or not so much anymore. We all do
now. People didn't. I mean certainly back at Armor Group we didn't. We
worked primarily on fixed fees and just sticking your finger in the air and
saying, oh, we'll have to bill you another 20,000. But
we moved over to. Everyone's moved over to timesheet primarily because
lawyers have become the primary client or general counsel at
firms and they're just used to it and
they get, yeah, people always say they want
alternative billing mechanisms, as you know. And then you say, well this is what it's
going to cost to buy an alternative bidding. And they go, oh, it hasn't saved
me any money and let's just have ours. It's easier
to understand. Yes. And then whatever it is they do,
they say, well just tell me what you did and where you were. So I
know the feeling. You and I, I know you were, you were
professionally born as a lawyer, if that's the right term
to use and indeed a New York qualified
lawyer. Is that right? I have to say very carefully, I have to say New
York qualified because I've never actually taken the final oath to do it.
I did everything. So I got every other stage.
I've never actually qualified. I did a law degree and actually you're
one of the people to responsible for me not going into the law.
I went off and talked to a number of people. I remember going to see
you on a nice walk up office in Holborn. Oh my
God, you're going back in in the to the day. You are.
And I remember you were rather sniffy of
late, late entries coming into it. And I talked to a. Wasn't just
you. A lot of other people said it's a tough business and if you're already
quite good at being an investigator, why are you going to change
and move over? So it's helpful understanding the legal
background a bit. But one's got to be very careful with it because there's nothing
more annoying for the lawyer client than the
investigator who says let me just explain to you what the correct strategy
is on this matter. I mean it's particularly when you don't know
people well. It's kind of do what you're good
at and do what you're being tasked to do, which is,
I mean it's really fair enough. You're the people who are bearing the professional liability
insurance and you're the people who have to stand up in court and
justify what's being done. So,
you know, I think it's important we understand our specialities and
stay within them. Certainly there's no doubt in my mind that
working with investigators that have legal degrees and
understand different legal concepts is like, you know, it's Difference
between chalk and cheese. But one of the things, just talking
about monetizing value, one of the things that I always
believed I would see more of, but I haven't, and it may be just that
I live a more closeted life, is the
contingency fee related work in the investigation
business. Because it's always been a bugbear of mine that the
legal profession is light years behind reality in
terms of skin in the game, et cetera. And you probably know better
than me the limits and the pain that you have to go through to do
any kind of DBA or
contingency style. But is a contingency arrangement
something that is often thought about in the investigative game?
And we as a firm generally have a policy
we will work on the same kind of
contingency as the lawyer involved. One has to be careful
about it. People sometimes say, oh, we'll give you a percentage of the assets you
identify, which we recover. And you have to say, well, it doesn't
really work like that because you find this asset and that enables you to
go to the person on the other side and say, we
could go after your beautiful house in Marbella, but we'd like not to, so why
don't you make us a settlement? And there
have been a couple of cases, one involving an
investigations company which ended up being taken over by a
litigation funder. But at the end of the matter, it all went to
court and was quite a sizable battle, I bet it
was not my story to tell, but I see it's definitely.
It can become problematic. There was a couple of things going on
at the moment in the high court with a certain Israeli
firm who've got a quite standard policy of saying they'll
take 2% of the recovery at the end, which I always admire.
But getting it paid is always the tougher bit of it. So
we'd rather work just in parallel with the law. If a law firm is working
on a contingency and feels it's worth doing
it, then we're happy to shadow that arrangement.
But of course, you work worldwide, Andrew. So in the US
contingencies are to a penny. So you have much
legal in New York, they're straightforwardly illegal for
investigators. It's a criminal law. Sorry, that's investigators. Funny enough, they're
legal for lawyers, but not for investigators. Right,
exactly. It's thought that it will motivate the investigator wrongly.
But I mean, it's a state by state thing, but generally
that's the case. That's. How does one start a matter? And it Ends up with
a bit of it being in the U.S. whether it's a 1782 order, some
kind of disclosure order, you want to serve in the US because it's a better
place for doing service. Very often, you know, and what you
don't want to find is, oh, we've made our entire matter, you know,
breach in breach of New York laws. Even if it's going to fail and you
can save a seat of the investigation is elsewhere, it's a problem you have to
be aware of and thinking of as it's happening. And
it's kind of ironic when you mention the, you know,
the so called incentive to be, or to be
conflicted, have a conflict of interest if you're getting a, a chunk
of the outcome. Whereas in the UK the,
the cultural approaches, we'd rather not incentivize
lawyers to go above and beyond. And in the States it's like, oh
no, you don't need to worry. Lawyers are really, you know, we've got no doubts
about their ethics. Ethics. They can take percentages left, right and center. It's
investigators you need to worry about. I think that's hilarious.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of respect one
gets in the US for being an attorney and they take the officer of the
court matter very seriously. And
lawyers in the US have gone to jail for
failing to make full disclosure and things like that. So
it's a tougher legal system and it forces the lawyer to work
harder and tougher, which is better. We
love working for all of them, you know. Okay, well,
this isn't a, a sales spiel, but
I'm going to invite you to tell me obviously without naming
names, is there a particular occasion when you've worked with
American lawyers or British lawyers and you found a
particularly a particular cultural approach to
doing or not doing something that, that has hampered
recovery. So where does culture come into this picture?
The US is very strict on what they call
pretexting of
pretending to be someone. In the UK you clearly can't do the thing
which I think both of us are old enough to remember, used to be
quite commonplace of, oh yes, we'll get a bank account or two. All of that's
completely impossible and can't be done has become totally
illegal. But it's reached a point where
the business of phoning someone up and allowing them to
assume you're calling them for some reason has become, in the
US has become very unacceptable. Really, you're supposed
to declare, I am conducting an investigation on this topic for this
individual. So as the person cannot be under any
misapprehension as to why you're making the
call and one works within it. But
it's a different attitude. I think it comes from George Washington and
cutting down the apple tree and not being able to tell a lie. There's a
different attitude about it. While in the UK it was regarded as slightly,
you know, oh, wonderful. You found the person who knows where the assets
are, you've engaged them in conversation and they've
talked away to you. That's regarded in the uk, it's
regarded as being fair game. In the us it's much more ticklish and
difficult to deal with. And does that mean human intelligence is less
important in the world that you live in now or not?
No, I think it's become more important because getting the good
human intelligence becomes both harder but also more
valuable because documents and the public record will only
take you so far. And
of course, getting the wit, you know, in the
Anglo Saxon common law, confrontational, adversarial
thing, getting someone who'll be a witness in court is. Or in
arbitration is incredibly valuable and
nothing's got better value in the Anglo Saxon system and therefore
it becomes more important while the documents. Documents are
essential if you're dealing in civil law jurisdictions, that's what they want.
They don't want a witness turning up very often.
People often act like you're slightly
crazy. And in the bits of the arbitration, we do a lot of sovereign work
on icsit and you suggest having a
kind of factual witness in what these things and you get a slight
recoil goes on from the leading lights of the international
sovereign arbitration bar. And see, we work within
them. As far as we're concerned, the world is filled with
data and you want to get as much of it as possible from as many
places as somebody that doesn't dabble in the
ICSID world, why is factual intelligence
or evidence not as popular? Is it simply because it's
always, or it's almost always a question of a legal interpretation of
jurisdiction and. Or causality and stuff like that?
I think it's because on any of you're unlikely to have a panel which
is all people from the common law. You're going to have probably someone who's
from a jurisdiction close to it. If it's Latin
America or Africa, someone who comes up probably comes out of a civil law
tradition. The arbitrators, of course, are incredibly expensive, as
is everyone involved in the matter. By the time you've got half
a dozen silks from Essex Court and Four or five top
solicitors or instructing lawyers, you know,
getting everyone in one room in Paris every additional day they're there
is adding, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds to the cost. So you may
say, well, do we really need to fly in this person who's going
to confirm that a bribe was obtained to get this
matter? And the great Mishkan success you had in
overturning the judgment against Nigeria,
would it have got through all of those layers of
arbitration if there'd been a good confrontational
cross examination taking place of the various witnesses as to
what was going on? I'm not sure. Legal question
beyond my pay grade. But I come from a
world where I like looking people in the eye and
having them as witnesses. And I always feel it's a great success if you can
get someone to agree to be a witness on the
side of your client. Can be really, really helpful.
Yes, there's no doubt about that. And tell me about your built in
lie detector. You mentioned you love to
sit across, as we all do. I think every
lawyer in this space at least fancies themselves as a reasonably
good lie detector and honesty
evaluator. What's the Andrew Wordsworth
tricks of the trade that you might be prepared to share with me and
whoever is going to listen to this or watch this? How do you
do it? We've done and we've looked at all of these
mechanisms which exist. There's a very good book called Lie
Detector by a woman called Pam Myers on how you can tell
if people are lying face to face. And it's used a great deal by hedge
funds when they're looking at people doing share announcements,
when you have the chairman of the company saying things are going great, they
attempt to come up with an evaluation as to whether that is true or
false. Right. Okay. I think not. Very controversial is
con men, which is a lot of what we deal with, lie completely,
instinctively and without any tells at all. Because they tend to always
believe what they're saying at the moment they're saying it, certainly to
the extent of kind of facial tells or something of that kind.
My mechanism has always been pretty much the same. Spend a
lot of time with the person, get them to tell you
the whole of the story. So go back many
years before, work the way through so as they've told you everything and when
you look for the moment when they change
what they're saying, which you can't do in a witness box but you can do
face to face. You can, yes. Which is part of the good old
police Approach of getting you to give your statement eight different
times to 17 different people, right? Until you're relaxed
about it, you know, in turn time. There's very good work
being done, particularly by the
FBI, on how to conduct interviews and make people
confess. And a lot of it is not being hostile. It's being very
nice to them, being very amiable, making it so as they like you a great
deal. And this works. When I think of the
times when it's normally the question which is
less related to this kind of asset recovery space, but more related to the
fraud space, when you have the person opposite you and you can sit down with
the finance director and just say, just walk me through,
how did you get this job? Where did it come from? How did you qualify.
A slow, sequential process. And then the moment comes when
you reach the nub of it and suddenly they skip over it or they evade
or their manner gets different. That's what gives you the chance
of getting to it. And there's also the moment when you, because you've got this
basis of trust and you've been sympathetic to them, you can say, but that doesn't
sound really accurate. How. Why wouldn't you have checked this shipment if you say
you checked all the other shipments? I don't think there's any magic to it.
And another question is, if someone's going to go in the witness box,
it's not are they telling the truth, it's are they a convincing witness?
Well, that's an interesting question in and of itself. I'll come back in
a minute to the question of technology.
And how does. How has that improved over the years, I. E.
As you say, the. The software used to see where your. What
your head is doing, what your face is doing. But in terms of
witness preparation, one of the things that's always
interested me is how few witnesses.
I don't want to promote any one particular company, but how few
witnesses and litigation firms
use the independent witness preparation
people in order to get people to understand
how not to give evidence and how not to
mumble or address your answers to the council, how not to engage
in a dispute with counsel. Am I kind of just
old school and don't come across it so often, or is it something that
you've noticed as well? Well, really notices the difference in the US
where it's a completely accepted part of the process
and the US can be far more. And
when we had all the huge Russian oligarch
disputes, I think it was very noticeable that
some of the oligarchs spent A lot of time knowing what
was in their witness statement and others turned up and were completely shocked
by what was in their witness statement. And that slightly
feels could have been prepared better put it like that.
Trouble is, often it's hard for a lawyer, and
certainly very hard for an investigator to instruct the billionaire client
is ensuring the size of your
drawdowns that year saying no, you've got to turn up and spend
two or three days actually reading through this stuff and we're going to put
you with a make sure that you remember what the details are
and make sure that you think about what your answers are and don't lose your
temper in the witness box. As you've rightly said, don't get in a fight with
the person. So what is the most sophisticated
technology? It was as simple, although it wasn't
that simple. I remember when I started my career in Hong Kong, for the
very first time I actually heard the word polygraph. Now,
polygraph's probably still used today. I've not come across them that often.
But where has the detection of lying
technology got to, in your opinion, Andrew? It's still
the polygraph. I see. The last time
we used it, we should do it again at Radus. There were a
couple of times we've got people in good American
people who do it all the time, people who do it for the CIA, FBI
and the other three letter agencies where it's a part of your vetting process
is annually or biannually being polygraphed and
asked questions. I think that's a great idea and I would like to
suggest that we do it with Radus and we get some Raiders
people, some Mishkom people and we'll give them
separate or the same story and we'll see how they come out.
How about that? Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I think it's.
Some people are. When you do it over a group of people, you discover
some people are just instinctively brilliant
liars and are completely undetectable and will happily tell you
any story they want. And the polygraph stays absolutely stable
while other people will tell you the name of their mother and it acts
like they're telling the largest lie that has ever happened. I don't have a
great deal of faith in it as a UK courts, I
think frown on it rather and certainly isn't used by UK law
enforcement. But I think it is the
thing. Good liars are brilliant, are brilliant at lying. You know, we come across
fraudsters all the time and they're wonderful at it. Have you ever
done a polygraph yourself? And I'm not suggesting that you would have been. Yeah. Okay.
And did you pass? And did you pass it, Andrew? I was
able to be reasonably convincing. It couldn't
particularly tell which which of the list of statements
with questions asked I was being. And it
varies person by person. They say you can train to do them very well.
I've heard if you do them repeatedly, you can get. So as
you just sail through it, I mean, I forget his name. The
FBI traitor who was working as a spy for the Russians. He
was being polygraphed continuously.
And I remember from my session
on this very podcast with Yossi Cohen from the
Mossad, and he said that every. I don't know whether he introduced
it, but at every level of promotion, that every level, every
year, every senior investigator, every single Mossad
operative gets polygraphed and gets interrogated every year.
So it's still in use, and I guess it still has
some kind of, you know, thinking of how the Israelis
do it. I mean, when we fly in and out of Tel
Aviv. It used to be there was a system which had been
designed by a man who used to work for Kroll called a Bendo
Avraham Shalom, the head of Shin Beth, which was the one.
Do you remember when you used to go through and they'd ask you questions and
then you'd get a number. One meant they wouldn't even look in your bag,
and six meant it was go and bend over.
I see. And this was all based on a
structured pattern of questions. For me, it was always one of the
delights of flying through Ben Guri because someone would be so interested. Where did
you go and how did you stay? Which restaurants to go to? Who did you
see and what were they like? And they've slightly moved over
to a more classic system now of scanning everyone. There were.
Yes. So what about things like
which you and I, I'm sure I've certainly come across them over the years.
How to tell the way from a witness statement. How to tell the way.
Does someone refer to something in the third person? Do
they over exaggerate? And then also in
vocal tones. You and I know that a lot of insurance companies
to this day have software operating when
people are reporting claims and they've got a certain degree of success
in detecting or at least illuminating
the tell. Signs of. Hold on a second. This doesn't sound about
right. Have you come across these techniques? Well, I think
in an insurance company, what you're trying to do is you're trying to reduce your
false claim rate by 5%. So if it does a marginal
improvement, and the marginal improvement is more than the
amount of money you'd lose, it's very different From a situation
one on one where the question
becomes being a 5% better or
3% better doesn't particularly help you on a one on one situation or with
a crucial witness. It helps you when you've got 100,000 people who are saying
I've got whiplash. Being able to knock 10% of the mass in a
productized environment, it can add a bit
of value, but also stuff like
retinal reaction and stuff like that. Have you come across
any software that does that? I think the best thing is this
facial recognition which looks at the tics, the looking up to the left or looking
up to the right, all of these various tells, you have
micro twitches. Right. There's a firm in the States
which is a group of professional poker players who claim to be very
good at telling when people, they watch
people for a sustained period of time and they savor a tells. The trouble is
the tell won't tell you is clumsy enough, but
the indicator may be an
indication that the person's bluffing or lying or it may be an
indication that they've got four kings
and until you've seen them for quite a sustained period of time, you don't
know. And when we're questioning people, when you're
taking a witness statement from someone, this is probably the
tensest and most stressful moment of their life. So are they
going to. They may just be stressed because they're sitting opposite the
feared and famous Gary Miller and they're sitting
in the offices of Mishkandaraya and it's not something they have to deal with.
Normally I'd love to say that I was better than other people, but I've
been lied to stupendous, so stupendously by
fraudsters and criminals and
they're always very plausible. So one of my major indicators now
is how plausible is the person if the story's really good and they're sitting
with you in some posh Mayfair club and they're explaining exactly how it
wasn't their fault there's 400 million went missing. The more
plausible they are, the more I have this kind of.
They're such a good talker, they're probably, probably lying about it,
while the person who's nervous
more likely to be telling the truth. So some people. Yeah.
Can you give us an example? Because it's always. People love
war Stories on podcasts and things, and it's great fodder
for everyone is. And also an experience.
What was the. One of the most interesting cases
where you realize at some stage afterwards that you would be
being told a crook of, you know what, it's
normally the internal investigation thing. There's a
CFO fraud, this business of where someone
phones up the junior accountant on Christmas Eve
and says, I don't want to bother your boss, but I'm your CEO, you
recognise my voice. We're just finalizing a
transaction. It's going to be done on New Year's Day, but I don't want to
pull everyone back into the office and make a huge fuss and song and dance,
so I need you just to assist me. And this goes on. The person's deeply
convincing. On the end of the phone, there's an email address, which later turns
out they've hacked into the email server of the company. And
on New Year's Eve, suddenly the instruction comes,
transfer 400 million. And whoosh, the money has
disappeared. And I've sat with the person who's taken the call, because
you always want. Because there's always quite a strong, not a definite
possibility, but there always is a possibility, that this entire thing
is just a straightforward lie. And they've known full well that it's involved
and they're planning their villa in Marbella. And
I've sat with these people and been convinced they were telling the
truth and they were being fooled. And then
later on, it's become really, really clear
that what they are saying happened in terms of
they've said, oh, we received an email, but we were told to delete it straight
away. And you go into their server, you do the forensics, you pull down all
the data from and you find out there was no email.
And then you realize, because you always want to be sympathetic towards people,
because if it has happened and you've been fooled, you don't want to be the
person going, oh, I think you know, there's no way you'd have
been so stupid. And then later on, it turns out they
were. But that's why you've got to check it. That's why you should never rely
on your intuition. It's always, how much extra data can I get?
This is what I bang into the junior investigators
in the company always is get another source. If what they're saying is
true, where will be the extra bit of information which will allow us to
save at their trip? And it's not a matter of being nasty to them when
you say, well, we're just going to have to image your computer. You don't mind,
do you? Or who was with you over Christmas. Maybe they can tell
you about these calls you were taking all the time, you know.
And what about the. Using that, for example, that as
an example. Just take it a bit further. Did you get
an opportunity of the denouement, sitting down with the guy
and saying, sorry, Mick, we looked at your
computer, no evidence at all. You're lying to me, aren't you? Did you get an
opportunity to do that? We've occasionally been involved in
doing that and normally it's because they've
decided they're not going to go to the police, they're just sacking the person and
they want you to be part of the process which is going on, because very
often companies, not with 300 million, but with smaller sums of money,
very often they go, actually, this would be embarrassing. We'll treat you. It's a lesson
learned. It's been expensive for us, I know it's annoying
for both of us, but people often just don't want to follow through.
Even when we're saying, well, worldwide freezing orders and stop everything.
Very often they say, and so I've done that. I've never had any resistance,
frankly. People are very accepting of it. But then you've
always got, well, I hope I was right, because there is always that thing of
if I was totally wrong, I've made a mistake which has led to someone
losing a job they loved. And, you know,
that's why I'd always rather be with a lawyer who I can defer to and
say, and, you know, again, without
wishing for you to treat this like a
Catholic confession, but it's always interesting when
things don't go the way you and I would like
them to do. And just to. To give you an example,
I remember doing an investigation where what was clear
was that the senior finance officer involved
was never going to take the rap. Wasn't his fraud, but it was his gross
negligence and he
created. Or he, he got a scapegoat, his junior guy,
and he was sacked. And there was absolutely nothing I
could do about that. And it just made me feel
really unclean and
disgusted. But is there a scenario that you've been through in life where
somebody has been set up to take the blame,
or something has happened which is grossly unfair, but you just can't
do anything about it? There have been situations where
you're. It's particularly this thing when companies get defrauded. Very
often they look for who to blame? And the blame
falls on people who
possibly didn't have control over the structure involved. Because
why is. Who designs a banking system where
the Deputy CFO has got the power to transfer
300 million? That's the kind of guys. Where was
your internal audit team? None of this should have been possible.
And you do get people being blamed for this
stuff. And companies often say
moving more towards the kind of crisis management. When you come into the crisis,
there's a real instinct often to cover things up. And
in crisis management, as a good investigator, you're coming in and saying, no, go and
talk to the newspaper. No, don't blame your staff. Put out the policy now. Make
the announcement that nobody is going to be blamed for this. This is a
learning experience. Even if, yeah, probably you're going to get rid of the person,
but don't do it because of this. Do it because manage them out
gently a few months down. But very often
our advice isn't always taken. You give it the best you can.
And I just wanted to pick up a point that you mentioned before, which
struck a chord with me, Andrew, which is the question
of how do you get the best human intelligence,
the most accurate, the most honest reaction
to people when you're talking to them. And I can't remember which book it was.
I don't know whether it was Yossi's book Sword of Freedom, or it was
another Israeli book about the
hostages that were captured on October 7th.
But there's been some very interesting research in the
States about how using
Guantanamo as a as an example, how what a
surprise. How the more dramatic and
the more horrendous the treatment and
aggressive, the less accurate. What a surprise. The information.
And not just that, but the actual
psychological reaction when somebody is subjected to that stress
is that it genuinely diminishes the parts of their
brain that is capable of remembering.
So the whole. I say the whole thing, we love to exaggerate. I do too.
But the concept that the more you stress the
witness that you are expecting to get information out
of, the more you are debilitating them from
actually being able to tell you the truth, that's just. I don't know,
it was really enlightening. If you make people's
fight or flight reflex come to the front, people go into blind
panic. And yeah, I think
it's really very similar to the FBI stuff I was talking about
earlier. But spending time with the people in a sympathetic fashion, even
if it was a slight problem with you remember that television series we
all loved a few years ago called 24, which was always, the
nuclear bomb is going to go off and what are the hard decisions we have
to make? Do we have to torture the information out of this
person? Well, no, you're probably going to be better off to give them a cat
up cup of tea to sit them down and say,
you know, and you know, get, get chatting to them
and you're much more likely to get the accurate information out
of them. But I understand the
temptation of doing it, particularly in the more gung ho bits of
investigation and law enforcement. You know, it
happens. Yeah, I mean, I understand the temptation, but I just,
I'm unconvinced it works. Well, I mean, there've been various very
good former police, former intelligence officers
I've worked with in my career and they've all said, oh no, you sit down
really calmly with the person and you talk to them. And
they'll probably. People find it very difficult to lie
to people who are being nice to them. They find it much easier,
you know, if you make it into a, oh, I've been tortured and I want
to continue to be tortured, but the one bit of respect I can have is
not telling them. And then, and they hold on to that.
So let's just change tack a little bit
and talk about stuff that I know
because of your Russian business and, and I think you're
the head of the Russia desk and you, you've been doing Russian stuff for ages
and ages. We don't really have a Russia desk anymore. I see
you guys, it's okay whether it's
Russia or anyone else. My example is. Sorry, Andrew, my question is this.
When you on board a client who is, and I
don't know what the percentage is, but there are a lot more,
as it were, potential defendants who
tend to need investigative assistance in
cleansing or disproving or trying to
rebalance the narrative
of what is being promulgated and published about them
on anything, but particularly social media. What
kind of assessment are you guys able to do and do you
do to form a view as to the
reputational risk to Raiders and you personally out of
doing that work? How do you get through that process? Andrew,
I don't know when this will go out, but there's been a
story this week about a large PR firm representing the son of a
notorious dictator and
there's been a lot of outrage in the Guardian about
it. Well, you can talk about it if it's in the Guardian, can't you?
Yeah. Project associates took work for
Marcos's son, the president of the Philippines,
144,000amonth to improve his image. Is that his
name? Not sure. It's to
some extent our job and
your job is to represent people. Providing what we are
doing is honest work, then it's a useful
part of the legal system. Providing we're not faking
documents, we're not producing fake information, we're producing
intelligence. But having said that, I'd guess we turn away
if 50 or 60% of those matters
because we're not lawyers, we haven't got a cab
rank rule, we can't fall back on that. And
we have very moral young people who work for us,
who quite rapidly, you know,
to some extent, when I was 20, you know, my boss told me I
did what I was told. They're not like that anymore. Now they think very carefully
and ethically and they think about these things and we have to respond
to them. And I've got a daughter who runs a charity in Ukraine. So a
lot of the Russian stuff which comes to me, you know,
I go, no, not worth. If my
daughter discovered I was doing this, she wouldn't find it acceptable.
And that isn't worthwhile. It's for any sum of
money. I've got to be able to say, no, I think it's worthwhile. The ones
which are easier are when you think someone's being clearly
unfairly treated. And that happens a lot. And
then that's. Then you have to be prepared to kind of go to fight
and go to bat for them. But the ones which one's got to be very
careful. I mean, particularly in these situations when there are people on
the side of right and people on the side of wrong. You don't want to
be in the situation of. Oh, yes, I just kept
working like lots of companies did with
Nazi Germany, lots of American itt, the
telecoms company continued to have an office in Berlin the whole way through the
Second World War. World War, which I always think is pretty hard to justify.
You don't want to be in that situation, so you've got to think about it
all the time. And it's different if you're a criminal
defense barrister when you do have to take it, and
we're not criminal defense barristers and we don't have to take it and everyone's just
doing it for greed. That's a bad reason. Yes.
So let's sort of turn to
technology from the way in which it's developed since
you and I started paddling in these waters. There
was no email. I don't know about you. There Was in fact, when I
started my first career in Hong Kong, there was only
a telex machine, there was not a fax, there was no,
obviously no email. So over the years you and I
have seen Internet, we've seen
crypto, we've seen social
media and now AI. So
give me a kind of Andrew Wordsworth
360 degree view of how
has that and how does it now impact your ability to
investigate and also maybe the
risks of investigating. I think AI is the first
one of those which changes the world in the end. The move from the
telex to the fax to email made things easier. Means you don't have
couriers running around the streets carrying documents anymore, all
of those things. But didn't make that much of a difference getting the
Internet, getting it. So I think, I suspect when
you first started with mishcons, there was a law library with a machine called
a Nexus Lexus terminal which printed out. You do a
sort search for caselord. Now all of that happens completely automatically on your
desk and you don't need a bevy of legal
librarians to run the searches for you anymore. But. And that's
happened the whole way through investigations. The databases we
have access to would have been completely impossible when I started
30 years ago and certainly 10 years. 10 years ago.
Things have improved enormously in terms of the amount of information
you can get. But that's mostly just. It's not a change
in the essence of the thing. Crypto is
just another way of moving money, which is you follow electronically. You need to know
how to follow it electronically, but
there's no magic behind it. There may be deep
philosophy and alternative currencies and all of those
things, but that's a different question. In terms of doing asset searches quite often it
makes it quite a lot easier because it's all recorded on a
computer, while what people used to do was take bags of cash which are much
harder to follow. Agreed. But don't you find. Let me just challenge that
a teeny bit and maybe you can teach an old dog some
new tricks. That the fact
that finding where the exchange is, that is holding the
wallet or a wallet and the movement and
the degree of control over it by an exchange over who
operates the accounts and the intermixing of
crypto together with stable coins, et cetera, that
if you know what you're doing, you can magic away
billions of dollars worth of crypto or stablecoins
and even a brilliant Andrew will never be able to find it.
Oh undoubtedly. But I'd say people who do that
are professional fraudsters. And professional fraudsters
knew how to move the money. When it was a matter of them receiving
£10,000 in an amusement arcade in Soho, they could.
They've always been very good at concealing them out and they've always been the hardest
people to go after because this is what they do professionally. And one
shouldn't assume that they're stupid or
vulnerable. Most of the time with crypto,
the people have moved it through two exchanges and they think it's somehow invulnerable.
They've swapped it from one thing to another, but then they've left it sitting
in Coinbase, which is susceptible to, or one of the
Singapore based exchanges or Dubai based, all of which are
completely susceptible to you getting a court order against them very quickly and
very effectively. You know, if you're dealing with a big exchange,
particularly now that they want to get properly regulated, they're like
lightning. They'll preemptively freeze
wallets, you know, virtually at the drop of a phone call. You know, I've heard
of people find the right lawyer in San Francisco to
phone up a Coinbase or someone and Coinbase will say, you get the court order
in the morning, don't worry, it's not going to move. We're putting
an anti money laundering warning on it now and so it can't move
at all. You've got a day to go to a courtroom and get the court
order, but it's not going to happen until then. And
they're really good about it. And much better, I
think, than the kind of non professional fraudster or non professional
money thief believes. AI changes lots of things,
changes every day. We're seeing
new products and technology coming out. Claude's
legal thing, Claude's accounting thing.
I plugged a load of corporate accounts
and used a skill relating to forensic accountants and it
gave me two days ago. I plugged it all in. It
gave me results as good, I think,
as something we would have got from a junior forensic
accountant. So that was my next question. Is it going to
make investigators redundant? Is it
going to have an impact on your business? The crucial bit
is the judgment bit. And the crucial bit is
being able to look at the information which came back from the AI in
the same way as you or I would look at something which came back from
a junior forensic accountant and saying, you're being
distracted. That's all wood. This is the tree which we need to look
at, which is this payment going out to this one
contractor, which just feels too large and there's
too Regular, this payment, I suspect this is where the
kickback is taking place. And maybe the AI is going to do it,
but I don't think it will. I think the judgment bit of it, just
because there isn't enough data, there aren't enough people until
they take us and slice our brains and scan them, which
maybe was going to happen, but until they do that, they can't
replicate that bit of expertise. They can replicate
writing a legal pleading. I mean, I'm sure you're getting the thing of the
client saying, oh, you talked about getting this court order. Well,
I've had ChatGPT draft it, and
frankly, sometimes it's not as bad as you think it's going to be.
Sometimes it's really helpful, and it's got things you wouldn't have thought of and all
the rest of it. But the judgment of being able to tell is this good
or is this bad? Is our crucial
skill set. And that's what we've got to be training me, the young
investigators, you, the young lawyers, to have that bit of nous.
We'd have called it that bit of judgment, the business of going. For us,
it's when a source report comes back, someone says, I've gone and talked to this
politician in India, being able to look at their report,
okay, now, he just didn't tell you this. He wouldn't have told
you a random supposed
journalist asking him these questions. He wouldn't have said this. And that's our
skill, is that ability to make that judgment. And
I'm relaxed about it for the moment. So as we're getting towards the
witching hour, I've got to ask you the question that I ask
almost every guest, if I get to remember it, is what's the most
dangerous situation you found yourself in
in the cause of representing clients?
It was serving an individual up a mountaintop
in Costa Rica.
And we served him, and then he said, come up
for a settlement discussion. And
we drove up this mountaintop about 25km on an
unmade road. And when we got there and got out of the
car to look for the individual, 12 very
scared Costa Rican policemen jumped out from
behind various bales of hay and garage walls they'd
been hiding in, screaming, put your hands in the air. Which
me and the client's representative did. And he'd told them that we were
international assassins come to kill him. And we could kill with one
blow. And then driving down the mountain
with two men holding shotguns, pointing at my head
on this very bouncy dirt track and thinking I really.
Safety catches are working. That was
by far my scariest experience. And,
yeah, not one I. You've got to finish that story. You've
now got to tell us, did the guy get away and did you end up
not in a Costa Rican prison? No. I mean,
you know, it was a bit of Jersey litigation.
It was. We received a very satisfactory settlement at
the end of the matter. But as always with
these things, not as satisfactory as we'd have liked it to be. It was
one of your members of your association came onto the other
side in Jersey and started to
provide very good opposition. And, of course, that's what good
and hopefully honest lawyers and
investigators are supposed to do before
the clock runs down completely. Tell me a
bit about surveillance and counter surveillance. They always.
I'm always fascinated by them. How often, for
example, do you get a client that invites you
or you say, guys, you really need a protective
counter surveillance exercise here, because I fear
something is happening. You can recommend it to a client as
much as you like, but they don't necessarily want to do
it. We do
training courses and get training from the top people in various
places as to how to do counter surveillance. All of the tricks of
jumping on and off Tube trains, all of those things you see in the spy
movies, all of which work driving around the roundabout
twice to see what's going on, none of which will work against a big
government team, because they'll already have someone on the platform of the Tube
or on it. But most of the time in the private sector, we're working with
two, three or four people, while a big government
team doing it seriously will have 14 or 15 people. And if
it's taking place, if you're in a hostile environment, if you're in
a government which watches these things, and there are
some which are famous for it, they can just follow you on the cameras now.
I mean, there's a story in the Telegraph this week about
surveillance in mainland China. And it's kind of
facial recognition means that they can follow you everywhere you go. And
I'm slightly blase about it and think, well, they can do the same thing on
Oxford Street. And it's a question of are they watching you and if they're watching
you, I think we've slightly gone beyond the world where we can say we're
really concerned about our privacy at all times. Whether for better or for
worse, we have to accept the government and our telephone and everything we
have can monitor us all of the time. Scary,
scary thought. In one sense, I guess it's an Equal amount of.
Do you think it's protective? Do you think it's actually being stored
anywhere? You and I know the classic, oh, yes, there is a CCTV
camera, but none of the cameras are actually working. I had
a client in Moscow before the war, and he was attacked on a
street corner. And we were able, with a local
person, to get, within two hours, the videotape of the
entire thing taking place. We were able to see the person who'd
attacked him. We were able to identify the person's car which the
person had got out of to do the attack. We were able to work
out who the car belonged to. This was working in conjunction with them,
and to be fair, the people on the
other side of it were locked up in a matter of hours.
This is in Moscow. There are many, many faults with the Russian system, but
when they want to pull their finger out on this kind of thing, they really
can do. And, you know,
and in that particular instance, it seemed brilliant. I've
had other cases in the west, shall we
say, where we've not been anywhere near as effective. When the phone
call comes saying, I've lost. Lost a
£50,000 emerald. Emerald
necklace. I have to go. We can go
along if you like to, you know, Hampstead Police Station and make a
report, but they'll say it's street crime and it'll be hard to. Hard to
track. Yeah. And
coming to the. Literally the last few seconds,
tell me, who has been the most
influential person in your career? The
one I was talking about. Abe Bendor. Avraham Shalom. The former head
of Shin Bet. Right. Because he had this one. Because
whatever you asked him, whenever you presented him with data, he looked at
it and went, why? Why?
And he forced you to challenge every assumption
you'd made. Everything you thought was the situation you had
to go back and look at. And it was.
Tiny had fought in the War of Independence.
He'd been head of Shin Bet.
He ran the Rabban investigation, the assassination
investigation. He was perpetually
curious, perpetually driven to find out information,
perpetually testing of assumptions. He hated
all lazy assumptions. And lazy assumptions are what
kills one in investigations. What you have to be is perpet.
Skeptical of your own beliefs, skeptical of what the client's telling you,
skeptical of every bit of it, because only then can you produce stuff which
you can guarantee is as close to true as we can
get in this life. Excellent. On that
note, I'm going to thank you for your patience and
your stories and bring this
wonderful little chapter and end. Thank
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