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Episode: The Trojan Horse Affair - Part 2

Author: Serial Productions & The New York Times
Duration: 00:54:55

Episode Shownotes

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. To get full access to this

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Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_01
These first two episodes of The Trojan Horse Affair are free. But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows. And it's super easy.

00:00:15 Speaker_01
You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Times subscriber, just link your account and you're done.

00:00:25 Speaker_06
Hams and I are sitting behind two children's school desks. We're in 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.

00:00:40 Speaker_06
Tahir clearly has strong suspicions about who wrote it.

00:00:43 Speaker_03
The motive was quite an interesting one.

00:00:48 Speaker_06
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.

00:01:01 Speaker_06
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.

00:01:12 Speaker_06
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.

00:01:19 Speaker_06
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.

00:01:35 Speaker_03
But whoever wrote the letter, they knew You know, they knew me, I think.

00:01:43 Speaker_06
Or possibly more than one person.

00:01:45 Speaker_03
Were they from Birmingham? Were they involved? 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.

00:02:01 Speaker_06
Is there a reason we're playing 20 questions here, or can we just ask you who it is?

00:02:05 Speaker_03
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?

00:02:25 Speaker_03
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.

00:02:36 Speaker_06
From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Brian Reed.

00:02:40 Speaker_10
I'm Hamza Syed.

00:02:42 Speaker_06
Let's see if we can figure out who wrote the Trojan Horse letter.

00:03:02 Speaker_09
— Alright, you want to do this? — OK, so let's move these drawers. We're going to have to drag home.

00:03:07 Speaker_06
— 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.

00:03:23 Speaker_06
— Get rid of the things on the top, because they kill the vibe. Hamza's 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?

00:03:35 Speaker_06
I hope not, because we're completely rearranging their bedroom. Oh my god. Pushing the bed up against the closet, sliding the bureau into the corner, packing away Hamza's mom's jewelry at his insistence.

00:03:47 Speaker_06
You want no reminder that this is your parents' bedroom?

00:03:49 Speaker_09
Mate, I'm serious about this. It's headquarters. Do you have a toolbox? Yeah.

00:03:54 Speaker_10
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.

00:04:04 Speaker_10
He detached the TV from the wall and replaced it with white boards, a cork board, and multicolored note cards which were connected with string. I'd have the heart to tell him that Sherlock didn't really do the whole murder wall thing.

00:04:17 Speaker_06
What are you seriously going to do when your parents come?

00:04:19 Speaker_09
I'll just tell them to sleep in a different room, you know what I mean? Really? No, I mean, we'll figure that out when they come in. Shall I get the Hoover?

00:04:31 Speaker_10
HQ was ready.

00:04:34 Speaker_06
Operation Trojan Horse had been very carefully thought through and is tried and tested within Birmingham.

00:04:39 Speaker_06
Hamza sat in his parents' bed and read the letter aloud as I paced around, scribbling names and schools on the whiteboards, circling some, crossing off others. HT Springfield. Okay, keep moving.

00:04:53 Speaker_06
Tahira told us, read the letter and think about, who is it defending? That word choice seemed deliberate. Defending.

00:05:02 Speaker_06
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.

00:05:15 Speaker_06
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.

00:05:26 Speaker_06
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.

00:05:40 Speaker_06
But the author also explains what Tahir and his co-conspirators are currently up to in Birmingham.

00:05:46 Speaker_06
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.

00:05:56 Speaker_06
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.

00:06:06 Speaker_06
At another, they'd accused the headteacher of fraud. These schools and headteachers 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.

00:06:17 Speaker_06
Each of these headteachers had been in actual trouble, in real life, for doctoring test scores, facing allegations of fraud, etc. What the letter claimed, though, was that these weren't random incidents of supposed wrongdoing.

00:06:30 Speaker_06
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.

00:06:45 Speaker_06
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.

00:07:00 Speaker_06
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.

00:07:07 Speaker_06
We've narrowed it down to, we've got the head teacher at Regions Park Community School, the head teacher at Adderley, the head teacher at Salt Lake School, and the head teacher from Springfield School.

00:07:27 Speaker_06
We take a step back and stare at the board, pensively, beard-strokingly, as the cogs turn in my partner's brain.

00:07:37 Speaker_10
As my partner swallows his first meditative sip of a British cuppa.

00:07:45 Speaker_06
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.

00:07:53 Speaker_10
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.

00:08:02 Speaker_10
He reminded me I was new to journalism, and he insisted we should start by idolizing 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 war.

00:08:16 Speaker_06
Sorry for the trouble, Dr. and Mrs. Sayan.

00:08:18 Speaker_10
It's not really that sophisticated. If you read the Trojan Horse letter, sure the author goes on about a grand citywide plot, but there's one school that the author seems to be obsessed with. Adderley Primary School.

00:08:32 Speaker_10
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.

00:08:42 Speaker_10
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.

00:08:55 Speaker_10
But Adderley, Adderley gets paragraphs stuffed with particulars that at the time were not public, including a bunch of different characters and events.

00:09:05 Speaker_10
We're gonna wait to read this part of the letter to you because it's so in the weeds, it's gonna make a lot better sense once you know more.

00:09:11 Speaker_10
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.

00:09:23 Speaker_10
More than a year after the Trojan Horse letter was made public, this employment dispute went in front of a judge.

00:09:28 Speaker_10
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. What are your thoughts regarding that quote?

00:09:41 Speaker_10
In our first interview, I actually read to hear 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 Adelie.

00:09:51 Speaker_03
The quote is very insightful and very accurate. Okay. I think the judge there has made a good observation.

00:10:03 Speaker_06
So, okay. 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?

00:10:17 Speaker_06
Well, let us tell you the perplexing story of what happened at that school.

00:10:22 Speaker_06
It begins not too differently from the story of Parkview, with a troubled school in East Birmingham and an ambitious new leader who comes in, determined to turn the school around.

00:10:32 Speaker_06
Adderley Primary School is about a mile from Parkview, on an industrial edge of the same neighborhood, Alum Rock. It's a red-brick Victorian building inside a spiky blue fence.

00:10:42 Speaker_06
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.

00:10:52 Speaker_06
In seven years, it had been through nine headteachers, which wasn't good for the students. Ofsted, the agency that inspects Britain's schools, had labeled Adderley inadequate, failing.

00:11:03 Speaker_06
In 2008, the Birmingham City Council turned to, among others, to hear for help. By then, Tahir had a reputation for revitalizing schools, and the council asked him to apply the Parkview formula at Adderley.

00:11:15 Speaker_06
He joined the Adderley Governing Body, which went searching for a new headteacher for the primary school.

00:11:20 Speaker_06
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 Dar.

00:11:35 Speaker_06
Tahir says she was a standout candidate.

00:11:38 Speaker_03
She was very ambitious. She was very passionate as a person. She came across as being very child-centric as well.

00:11:44 Speaker_03
In other words, children's interest comes first rather than let's keep some teachers happy and let's 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 interest first.

00:11:57 Speaker_03
That came across very strongly to me.

00:11:59 Speaker_06
You won't be hearing from Rizvana Dar. She's declined to talk to us.

00:12:03 Speaker_06
But we're able to tell you what went down between Mrs. Dar and the teaching assistants, because they ultimately ended up in a knock-down, 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.

00:12:22 Speaker_06
The people we have spoken to who know or have worked with Rizvana Dar, nearly every one of them says she was super impressive. She, you know, has a genius mind. There's no question about it."

00:12:34 Speaker_06
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.

00:12:43 Speaker_06
Razwan worked under Rizwan Adar at Adderley as an assistant head before they had a falling out and Razwan moved on to another school. He and Rizwan Adar were close.

00:12:52 Speaker_08
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.

00:13:03 Speaker_08
She was really good at assessing curriculum development. I've learned more from her in the career of teaching than anybody else.

00:13:12 Speaker_06
Rizvanidar, Riz, as lots of people call her, was a big part of the reason Rizwan took a position at Adderley. She was exciting to work for. She was tireless. Rizwan says sometimes she'd show up at 5 or 5.30 in the morning and leave at 10 at night.

00:13:26 Speaker_06
And she implemented many of the same kinds of changes that Tahir's recruits had at Parkview. High academic standards, inspiring lackadaisical staff, getting parents involved, making religious accommodations. And it was working.

00:13:39 Speaker_06
Within just a few years, Ofsted, 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.

00:13:53 Speaker_06
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.

00:14:08 Speaker_06
One day in December 2012, about a year before the letter surfaced, Mrs. Darr calls a teaching assistant named Hillary Owens into her office.

00:14:17 Speaker_06
We've heard some people involved in schools describe teaching assistants as, quite frankly, a nuisance, resistant to reforms and a drain on resources.

00:14:25 Speaker_06
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 Hillary Owens was on another level. In a witness statement, Mrs. Darr describes Ms.

00:14:37 Speaker_06
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 a table when she didn't get her way.

00:14:49 Speaker_06
One big disagreement between Mrs. Darr and Hillary Owens was over the classroom Ms. Owens had been assigned to.

00:14:55 Speaker_06
There were specific grades in teachers Hillary 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 Ms.

00:15:06 Speaker_06
Owens' 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.

00:15:19 Speaker_06
Hillary 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 Hillary Owens, tendering her resignation. Yeah, Ms. Owens is still coming to work like everything's normal.

00:15:33 Speaker_06
So Mrs. Darr calls Ms. Owens into her office. Hillary 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.

00:15:45 Speaker_06
To which Hillary 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.

00:16:02 Speaker_06
Yes, the police would eventually get involved.

00:16:04 Speaker_12
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.

00:16:13 Speaker_06
Garden leave is administrative leave, basically, when you're on your way out from a job.

00:16:17 Speaker_12
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.

00:16:30 Speaker_12
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.

00:16:48 Speaker_06
And with that, Ms. Owen says, Mrs. Darr got up and stood by the door.

00:16:54 Speaker_10
It's pretty strange, isn't it? Get this though.

00:16:57 Speaker_10
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 Adley Primary School.

00:17:09 Speaker_10
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.

00:17:21 Speaker_10
They too had been fighting with the headteacher for many months and by this time in December 2012 were all on paid leave due to work-related stress.

00:17:30 Speaker_10
When Mrs Dar received resignation letters from these three TAs, she quickly wrote back to them at their home saying, I'm accepting your resignation. Best of luck with your future. Each of the three TAs replied, what are you talking about?

00:17:42 Speaker_10
We haven't resigned. 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 Rahina Khanum, Shanaz Bibi, and Yasmin Akhtar.

00:17:58 Speaker_10
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.

00:18:07 Speaker_10
When they learned they were all on a similar predicament, their boss claiming they'd resigned, they started coordinating.

00:18:13 Speaker_10
The TAs asked for a copy of the resignation letters they were supposed to have sent, and when Mrs Dar provided them, they said someone had fabricated these letters and forged their signatures.

00:18:23 Speaker_10
Ms Owens is forensic about this in her interview with the police. A cop shows her the letters supposedly signed by her.

00:18:29 Speaker_12
That was not my signature. First thing I said, that's not my signature.

00:18:33 Speaker_10
Is it similar to your signature?

00:18:34 Speaker_04
No.

00:18:35 Speaker_12
Not at all. The H is wrong, the C is wrong, the O is wrong, the S is completely wrong. And the N is wrong. It's not even close. I don't understand.

00:18:48 Speaker_10
So, four of Rizwan and Dar's employees were insisting someone had forged their resignation letters. But Mrs. Da, as she later explained in a witness statement, still believed the letters were authentic, despite what her employers were saying.

00:19:02 Speaker_10
She refused to let them come back to work. At which point, the TAs came to the conclusion that Mrs. Da must have been behind this. What did you make of that story?

00:19:13 Speaker_11
Well, I mean, 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.

00:19:25 Speaker_10
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.

00:19:38 Speaker_11
She was just so adamant over and over again. Riz Dar has lied. She has treated us very, very badly. We did not write those letters.

00:19:50 Speaker_11
And the head teacher 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.

00:20:07 Speaker_11
And I thought that was quite plausible because that's, you know, does happen, doesn't it? But how about faking resignation letters?

00:20:14 Speaker_06
Well, that is less plausible. That is just the bit that is completely bizarre. Have you come up with an explanation for the bizarrity?

00:20:26 Speaker_11
It strikes me, Riz likes to write the script for everybody. 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.

00:20:50 Speaker_10
Some of the same people who told us that Mrs. Darn was brilliant, who awed at what she'd accomplished, lifting Adelaide out of its academic abyss. They also saw a flip side to her ambition. His former assistant head, Razwan Faraz, again.

00:21:03 Speaker_08
Every single classroom had to look the same. The boards had to look the same. Every single book had to look the same. You know, there was a level of control down to that detail.

00:21:14 Speaker_10
Control freak. Slave driver. These are some of the words people who know Rizwan Adar have used to describe her to us. Rizwan says she would monitor the most menial of her employees' tasks. The way workbooks needed to be color-coded by subject.

00:21:28 Speaker_10
The margin size staff was supposed to be printing with.

00:21:30 Speaker_08
She would say, pencils need to be all together. They cannot be mixed with pens.

00:21:36 Speaker_06
This is a real example.

00:21:37 Speaker_08
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It would be very, very dictatorial.

00:21:43 Speaker_10
How would she even be aware of this, like as a headteacher? Oh, she would scrutinize. And she would like march around the school and inspect these little sneaky things.

00:21:50 Speaker_08
Yeah, and expect the leadership team to do the same.

00:21:54 Speaker_04
You go into some headteachers' offices and you can tell they belong to a particular headteacher, but they're obviously places of work.

00:22:03 Speaker_10
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 Parkview with the Hare.

00:22:14 Speaker_10
Dave's also married to Jackie Hughes, who's sitting next to him, eyeglasses hanging around her neck, nodding her head.

00:22:20 Speaker_04
There might be a family photograph or something, but you 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.

00:22:34 Speaker_04
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. Yeah.

00:22:44 Speaker_11
No, I'd endorse that.

00:22:45 Speaker_04
Do you think that's right? I'm not exaggerating.

00:22:47 Speaker_11
Exactly right, yeah.

00:22:48 Speaker_04
Which is why I think she could be capable of doing whatever's necessary to protect that fiefdom.

00:22:59 Speaker_06
Mrs. Dar 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.

00:23:10 Speaker_06
Rizvana Dar also started getting a lot of grief from parents about how she was running the school. In particular, more orthodox parents. People Mrs. Dar referred to in the litigation as Salafi Muslims. Salafism is a conservative interpretation of Islam.

00:23:25 Speaker_06
Groups of parents started sending in complaints or showing up at school to raise a stink. Efforts to which Mrs. Dar seemed coordinated.

00:23:34 Speaker_06
She knew the Muslim TAs had connections in the nearby Salafi community and thought they were riling up these parents on purpose.

00:23:40 Speaker_06
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. Dar writes about this in her witness statements.

00:23:52 Speaker_06
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.

00:24:02 Speaker_06
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.

00:24:18 Speaker_06
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.

00:24:29 Speaker_06
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.

00:24:41 Speaker_06
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.

00:24:53 Speaker_06
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.

00:25:05 Speaker_06
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.

00:25:21 Speaker_06
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.

00:25:32 Speaker_06
They asked for advice around the neighborhood.

00:25:33 Speaker_07
— They said they wanted their job back, they wanted to stay at Adderley, they didn't want to leave, and they were forced to resign.

00:25:38 Speaker_06
— Sajjad 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.

00:25:46 Speaker_07
Were they upset? Were they mad? 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 were losing their job.

00:25:56 Speaker_07
So I said, the best advice I can give you is go and sit here.

00:26:01 Speaker_06
Tahir was the guy you went to when there was a problem with a school in East Birmingham. Plus, he'd help recruit Rizwan Adar to Adderley. — I said, look, speak to Tahir.

00:26:09 Speaker_07
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.

00:26:16 Speaker_07
But I said, look, if anybody's got some influence over Rizwan, it would be Tahir, because they respect him.

00:26:20 Speaker_06
— The women approached 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.

00:26:32 Speaker_06
But he says he doesn't recall it going any further than that. One organization did intervene for the TAs. Their union.

00:26:40 Speaker_06
Their rep was firing off emails to Birmingham City Council, which is Rizvana Dar's employer, saying that Mrs. Dar 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 Dar.

00:26:56 Speaker_06
Until finally, the Birmingham City Council stepped in and instructed Mrs. Darr that she should not terminate the TA's employment.

00:27:04 Speaker_06
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.

00:27:13 Speaker_06
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.

00:27:27 Speaker_06
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.

00:27:36 Speaker_06
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.

00:27:51 Speaker_06
Daniel Zakas, a solicitor who represented one of the TAs, Hilary Owens, remembers when he read Adderley's argument.

00:27:58 Speaker_05
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 head teacher, and that their resignations were part of a plot.

00:28:09 Speaker_06
These four people, including Hilary, were part of a plot to undermine Rizwan Adar?

00:28:14 Speaker_05
Yeah. To convert the school to one based on strict Muslim Salafi teachings.

00:28:19 Speaker_06
Salafi being that more conservative interpretation of Islam, the interpretation Mrs. Dar said the parents whom the TAs were whipping up against her subscribed to.

00:28:28 Speaker_06
Daniel Zakas thought, that's an odd accusation to make about classroom aides at a primary school, and especially about his client, Hillary, who attended Anglican Church every Sunday.

00:28:38 Speaker_06
Adderley's defense filing doesn't use the word plot, but that is what it describes.

00:28:44 Speaker_06
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.

00:28:55 Speaker_06
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.

00:29:03 Speaker_05
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 greatest plot.

00:29:16 Speaker_10
Bear in mind, everything we've been talking about up to this point, this whole resignation dispute, it all happened before the Trojan horse had existed.

00:29:25 Speaker_10
So when Adelie's legal team filed his defense in spring 2013, this was the first Hilary Owen solicitor was hearing about an Islamic plot in a Birmingham school to undermine a headteacher.

00:29:38 Speaker_10
As the hearing day approached, a handwriting expert was brought in to analyse the signatures on the disputed resignation letters. And the expert concluded that the TA's signatures were, in fact, not authentic. They had been forged.

00:29:53 Speaker_10
By the month of the hearing, November 2013, Adelie's defence was looking pretty strained. Mrs Dahl was facing the real prospect of the school losing the case.

00:30:03 Speaker_10
And it was that month that someone, claiming to be an anonymous whistleblower, forwarded the Trojan Horse letter to the Birmingham City Council.

00:30:12 Speaker_10
A letter apparently written from one shadowy conspirator to another, describing a plot to oust headteachers and majority Muslim schools. The letter outlined the process of taking down a headteacher in five steps.

00:30:25 Speaker_10
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.

00:30:40 Speaker_10
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.

00:30:48 Speaker_10
If you can get them to be very vocal in the playground, as they drop off or pick up their children, that will stir up other parents." End quote. Step 3. Put your own governor on the governing body. Step 4.

00:31:01 Speaker_10
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.

00:31:18 Speaker_10
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.

00:31:32 Speaker_10
It means a white person, because according to the letter, this person can give cover to the fact that Muslim TAs are part of a religious conspiracy. And finally, step five.

00:31:44 Speaker_10
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.

00:31:57 Speaker_10
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.

00:32:07 Speaker_10
The author includes it as one of the main examples of how the plotters are manoeuvring against headteachers. Listen to how closely it mirrors Adélie's defence in the case.

00:32:18 Speaker_10
Mrs. Dar, 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.

00:32:32 Speaker_10
Three of our Muslim sisters and a governor have been disrupting the school and causing issues for Mrs. Dar since she took over the school. These sisters are a great example of what can be achieved by only three people.

00:32:44 Speaker_10
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.

00:32:55 Speaker_10
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 arranged to have them delivered.

00:33:05 Speaker_10
This account lines up exactly with the claims made in the employment case. It ends with an explanation of Hilary Owen's unique role in the Salafi plot.

00:33:14 Speaker_10
Quote, As the Englishwoman dropped her letter off in the headstaff box, it adds another angle of fraud against the head, and because she's English, it'll take the focus off the other Muslim sisters. If all goes wrong, everyone is briefed.

00:33:27 Speaker_10
I will blame the Englishwoman for planning and implementing the whole campaign to cause disruption amongst the Muslim staff and the Muslim headteacher. That's how the Trojan Horse letter describes what was going on at Addis.

00:33:42 Speaker_10
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 Rizwan Adar.

00:33:57 Speaker_10
It's incredible, really. The Trojan horse letter was just the evidence Rizwan Adar needed to support her version of the resignations.

00:34:05 Speaker_10
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.

00:34:17 Speaker_10
One of the conspirators had conveniently written it all down. Incredible. Rizwan Adar was accused of fabricating letters. And another letter materialized to come to her rescue.

00:34:32 Speaker_06
And rescue her it did. Rizwan Adar 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.

00:34:45 Speaker_06
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 T.A. 's case against Adderley for years.

00:34:58 Speaker_06
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 T.A. 's had conspired to unseat Mrs. Darr.

00:35:11 Speaker_06
In the end, the judge concluded that Mrs. Darr did not fabricate the resignation letters. Rizvana Darr is the head teacher of Adderley Primary School to this day. More after the break.

00:35:27 Speaker_01
This is Sarah Koenig, host of the Serial podcast. If you're hooked on this show, and I'm guessing you are, then I'm hoping my job here is pretty easy, to get you to subscribe to the New York Times so you can listen to the rest of it.

00:35:40 Speaker_01
My father was an ad man who taught me the best ads are declarative, no puffery. So here goes. Serial shows are expertly reported and inventive. Nobody makes them like we make them.

00:35:52 Speaker_01
But great serials aside, when you subscribe, you get all the Times shows. The Daily, Ezra Klein, Wirecutter has a new podcast. My advice, though, don't just get an audio subscription. Go big. Subscribe to the paper, all access, the whole magilla.

00:36:09 Speaker_01
Serial is part of the Times, so technically I work at the Times, and honestly I'm kind of cheap, but I subscribe for the news, obviously, and the games, and the cooking, and the magazine, and Serial. I think of the Times as a staple.

00:36:22 Speaker_01
Even my kids, who are not budding journalists and who don't even really listen to Serial, they both asked me for Times subscriptions. All the cool kids are doing it. So please, sign up. You can do it through Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

00:36:35 Speaker_01
Or, if you're already a Time subscriber, sign in. It's worth it.

00:36:42 Speaker_10
Once the Trojan Horse letter started floating around East Birmingham in early 2014, for people close to the schools involved, people who knew and worked with Rizwan Adar, it didn't take too many reads for their minds to wander over to the spiky blue fence and the headteacher inside.

00:36:58 Speaker_08
What I remember distinctly coming to mind was there seems to be a lot of information about Adli here.

00:37:03 Speaker_00
Who else would know this? Who else at the time would know this other than Riz Da? It was just so obvious. I just found it very strange that a lot of those things were in the letter.

00:37:22 Speaker_07
The architect of this letter was somebody clearly out there to safeguard Rizwanatar.

00:37:26 Speaker_08
It's like she's written this to cover her ass.

00:37:32 Speaker_10
We've seen no direct evidence that Rizwana Dar authored the letter, nor court has ever found that she did.

00:37:38 Speaker_10
And the Burma City Council sent us a letter in which they said any suggestions that Mrs. Dar was involved in authoring the Troja horse letter and the teaching assistants resignation letters is false.

00:37:50 Speaker_10
But the content of the Troja horse letter, its timing and the circumstances surrounding it point towards Mrs. Dar or someone who supported Mrs. Dar or maybe some combination of the two as the likely authors.

00:38:03 Speaker_10
And if it was Mrs Dar 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.

00:38:19 Speaker_10
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.

00:38:28 Speaker_10
And the cop called 911, well, 999, pretending to be a civilian, reporting that people at the prayer center were planning to kidnap and kill cops in the name of ISIS. County terror detectives looked into it, realized it was a hoax.

00:38:42 Speaker_10
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.

00:38:53 Speaker_10
Here, Mrs. Dar was up against the city council, which had abandoned her, and the employment tribunal, which is about to sit in judgment of her.

00:39:00 Speaker_10
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.

00:39:15 Speaker_10
But it's not an easy thing to accept. When a friend first suggested to Tahir that the letter probably came from Mrs. Dar, I dismissed it all.

00:39:23 Speaker_10
Not only was Rizwan Adar 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. Adar for the Adlai headteacher position.

00:39:35 Speaker_10
On top of that, he was close to Mrs. Darr's husband, a guy named Qadir Arif. It was hard for Tahir to imagine that someone close to him might have created a letter maligning him as an extremist kingpin.

00:39:46 Speaker_10
But as Tahir read and reread The Trojan Horse, he couldn't shake the impression that it did seem designed to help Rizwana Darr. And then, when the letter leaked to the press, the story started running about him being a dangerous extremist.

00:39:59 Speaker_10
Tahir waited for a call from Qadir or Rizwana.

00:40:03 Speaker_06
Because you knew them well enough for them to check in if something like that happened. Absolutely.

00:40:07 Speaker_03
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.

00:40:26 Speaker_10
Any lingering doubts Tahir had about who wrote the letter, the silence quashed them.

00:40:35 Speaker_06
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?

00:40:49 Speaker_06
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.

00:41:00 Speaker_06
— We also talked to someone who was on the Adderley governing body with Rizwan Adar around this time, who said Mrs. Adar was really angry at the educational trust Tahir ran for poaching some of Adderley's teachers.

00:41:11 Speaker_06
In any case, as the Trojan Horse letter took off in the press, Tahir tried to push back.

00:41:16 Speaker_06
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 TA's resignation case as its likely source.

00:41:32 Speaker_06
The only outlet we've seen that picked up this line of inquiry with some seriousness was The Guardian.

00:41:37 Speaker_06
A couple 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.

00:41:48 Speaker_06
But Adderley wasn't having it. The school sent an aggressive statement to the newspaper saying the Operation Trojan Horse plot was real and suggesting Tahir was the one who should be scrutinized, not them. The school also contacted Tahir directly.

00:42:02 Speaker_03
I received a legal letter from the school's lawyers saying his insinuations that the Trojan Horse letter came from Adderley were, quote, wholly baseless and that if I made those inferences again and so on, that I would be, you know, taken to court.

00:42:21 Speaker_10
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.

00:42:28 Speaker_10
If I knew that my friends, essentially, had written a document that was threatening to ruin my life, I don't know why you made no effort to go and speak to them. There's one thing to publicly infer about something.

00:42:47 Speaker_10
There's another thing to pick up the phone, call Kadir Arif, and say, what's going on here?

00:42:52 Speaker_03
I thought about that many, many times, actually. And perhaps that's a conversation that, you know, you know, perhaps I should have had, actually. But I didn't think it was going to be unraveled by a chitchat or a cup of tea.

00:43:06 Speaker_03
Obviously, I didn't believe that. Otherwise, I would have done that. It 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, hello, hello Kadir, how are you doing?

00:43:18 Speaker_03
It's not an easy thing for me to do. You have to appreciate that. You know what I'm saying? It's not an easy thing for me to do.

00:43:27 Speaker_06
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.

00:43:35 Speaker_06
If this theory of the letter is true, if it was created by Rizwan Adar 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.

00:43:50 Speaker_06
instead of news reports starting like this.

00:43:55 Speaker_06
They would have had to begin with, Someone appears to have fabricated a plot in an attempt to defend a headteacher who is being sued for wrongful dismissal by four employees at a primary school who claim she forged resignation letters on their behalf.

00:44:15 Speaker_06
But the head teacher says the employees did submit resignation letters, but that they were pretending otherwise, as part of a plot to unseat her.

00:44:24 Speaker_06
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.

00:44:34 Speaker_06
It's not going to command the attention of Parliament, the Prime Minister, the country's ex-counterterror 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.

00:44:48 Speaker_06
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.

00:45:01 Speaker_06
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.

00:45:11 Speaker_02
I draw no conclusion about the letter.

00:45:14 Speaker_06
Apparently not. This is an education consultant and former head teacher named Ian Kershaw. He's the man the Birmingham City Council hired to conduct a thorough investigation of the Trojan Horse letter.

00:45:26 Speaker_06
His resulting report was titled, Investigation Report, Trojan Horse Letter. And yet he proudly proclaimed to Hamza and me,

00:45:34 Speaker_02
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.

00:45:42 Speaker_06
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.

00:45:52 Speaker_06
It's splattered with redaction, writing that he didn't have time to pursue that incident in any detail.

00:45:58 Speaker_06
Former counterterror chief Peter Clark, the other main investigator who looked into the Trojan horse affair for the national government, does a similar pivot.

00:46:06 Speaker_06
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.

00:46:18 Speaker_06
both investigators, Kershaw and Clark, made 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.

00:46:35 Speaker_02
Whoever wrote the letter, whatever their motive was, was not really the point. From a council's point of view, their question has got to be, is there something going on in our schools that we should know about?

00:46:45 Speaker_02
So the source of the letter, in a sense, became irrelevant.

00:46:51 Speaker_06
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.

00:47:12 Speaker_06
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.

00:47:23 Speaker_06
Parkview 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.

00:47:33 Speaker_08
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.

00:47:45 Speaker_08
As opposed to, we've heard that there's this letter. What can you tell us about it?

00:47:50 Speaker_06
And once that narrative solidified, it was insurmountable. 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.

00:48:03 Speaker_10
— I just spoke to Habib Rahman. It is a hard no from him.

00:48:10 Speaker_06
The wariness seemed especially stark among people connected to Adderley.

00:48:14 Speaker_06
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.

00:48:23 Speaker_06
And I would get these voice memos on WhatsApp from him throughout the day. Habib Rahman was a former chair of governors from Adderley, who had previously agreed to get coffee with us.

00:48:32 Speaker_10
He doesn't think there's any value in the story. 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 Freya Shafak's door again. A former finance assistant from Adderley.

00:48:46 Speaker_10
She answered, 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 on my face.

00:48:57 Speaker_10
I was even trying to bleed with her through the post box. So eventually I just felt ridiculous and I've just come back to the car not to show what else to do.

00:49:05 Speaker_06
Ah, mate. Hamza was like a tire that was slowly losing air.

00:49:11 Speaker_10
Hey, mate. So, um, here's the update of the evening. First dropped to Rahina Khanum's house.

00:49:19 Speaker_06
Rahina Khanum was one of the four teaching assistants in the resignation case?

00:49:23 Speaker_10
And her husband answered. He, um, wasn't pleased to see me there. He, um, had an issue with his foot, so he had a walking stick with him. He was hopping around. I immediately felt guilty being there, if I'm honest.

00:49:38 Speaker_10
It became quite apparent quite quickly he was not going to let me speak to her. She was upstairs supposedly busy.

00:49:45 Speaker_06
Hamza had 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, and which Muslims felt burned by the press.

00:49:56 Speaker_06
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.

00:50:05 Speaker_06
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.

00:50:26 Speaker_10
Listen, I think some people tied to the Adelie case had stuff to hide, and we'll 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.

00:50:39 Speaker_10
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 ask reporters to find Muslim stories because they sell papers.

00:50:51 Speaker_10
And when these stories were analysed, the majority were negative, with the most common theme being terrorism.

00:50:57 Speaker_10
The same press that when pleaded with by the head of a Muslim organisation 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.

00:51:14 Speaker_10
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.

00:51:21 Speaker_10
But instead, me walking around Alamroq, 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.

00:51:37 Speaker_10
I was also, apparently, an idiot. This is it. You solve this one question. The rest does not matter. The rest just kind of falls waywards anyway. Back in the beginning, I'd ramble on to Brian about our mission.

00:51:51 Speaker_10
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. turned everybody's head back to idly.

00:52:03 Speaker_10
If you could substantiate that it was indeed written by Rizwan Adar or someone close to her for that resignation case.

00:52:10 Speaker_10
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.

00:52:20 Speaker_10
For me, solving who wrote this letter is more powerful than just like this little case here in Birmingham.

00:52:26 Speaker_10
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, look what happened with this one, spiraled out of control for no reason.

00:52:38 Speaker_10
This 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. There was a problem with my premise though.

00:52:53 Speaker_10
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.

00:53:05 Speaker_10
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 the hysteria.

00:53:17 Speaker_10
And instead of taking the rational approach of just looking into the Adly case, it ended up embarking on a thoughtless adventure. I figured what I was trying to correct was an oversight. But now I know it wasn't an oversight at all.

00:53:33 Speaker_10
That's next on the Trojan Horse Affair. The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Brian Reid and me, along with Rebecca Lex. The show is edited by Sarah Koenig. Additional editing by Ira Glass and by contributing editor Aisha Manazir Siddiqi.

00:54:03 Speaker_10
Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronerly and Ben Phelan. Original score by Thomas Miller, with additional music by Matt McGinley and Stephen Jackson.

00:54:11 Speaker_10
Sound Design, Mixing and Music Supervision by Stephen Jackson and Phil Domohowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company. Julie Snyder is our Executive Editor. Neil Drumming is Managing Editor. Supervising Producers Ndeye Chubu.

00:54:23 Speaker_10
Executive Assistant is Alberto de Leon. Sam Dornick is an Assistant Managing Editor of the New York Times.

00:54:29 Speaker_06
Special thanks to Hamza's parents, Syed and Atiya Atur. Also Alvin Melleth, Aviva de Kornfeld, Rasmus Bitsch, Brum Radio, Media Dog, and Victoria McEvity.

00:54:41 Speaker_10
The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.