Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Due to the graphic nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of war crimes, sexual assault, and criminal activity. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. If you've listened to this show long, you've heard many theories surrounding cover-ups, hidden documents, and government secrets. Today, we'll be covering those usual suspects, but this time, it's all real.
The cover-up, the hidden documents, the government secrets, all confirmed fact. All thanks to a man who believed the truth was being kept in the shadows and went up against the US government to prove it.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
This week, we're covering Julian Assange, a man who helped uncover real-life conspiracies. An activist and expert hacker, Assange founded the website Wikileaks in early 2006. In 2010, he garnered worldwide attention for several massive information drops that exposed some of the darkest aspects of U.S. foreign relations.
His work forced the world to contend with the line between a government's right to have secrets and the public's right to transparency.
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- Bocas del Toro, Panama.
Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple. Survive. I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Before we begin, amongst the many sources we used, we found "The Most Dangerous Man in the World" by Andrew Fowler extremely helpful for our research.
By 16 years old, Julian Assange was a computer hacker. By 19, he'd broken into the Australian National University's sophisticated computer system, along with a like-minded trio of computer aficionados that called themselves the International Subversives. By 20, he'd hacked the Lonsdale Telephone Exchange, one of Australia's most powerful computer systems.
Once inside, Assange made thousands of telephones ring all at once. His next project had to be even bigger, like hacking into top secret US military installations.
Using programs Assange had written, the international subversives hacked into the US Air Force, the aerospace company Lockheed Martin, and the US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. These missions probably started out as little more than a chance for Assange to flex his hacking skills, maybe pull another prank, but they were destined to be more.
Because what Assange found behind the screens deeply disturbed him. The US military had its own network of hackers. Assange saw this as an affront to his cause. Hackers were supposed to disrupt the system, not enforce it. He'd never trusted authority and this made him even wearier. Before he could decide what to do with the revelation, his world turned upside down again.
In 1991, his girlfriend left him and took their baby son with her. Assange fought for custody and lost. The way he saw it, the courts didn't want men to have custody. That was unfair and injustice. But why be surprised? The system was never meant to be fair unless he stepped up and overturned it. He wouldn't be able to get more time with his son
But perhaps his hacking talents could help bring justice and transparency to other parts of the world. Soon, Assange connected with more like-minded computer programmers online. This new group dubbed themselves the Cypherpunks, a club of hackers, mathematicians, non-conformists, and activists who stood for a free and open internet.
The cypherpunks introduced Julian Assange to someone who would become a key figure in his life and in WikiLeaks formation, John Young. In the late 90s, Young had established a website called Cryptome, a platform dedicated to freedom of speech, exposing government impropriety, and hosting leaked government documents
Young told Wired Magazine, "We like to put up original documents so people can make up their own minds. We see it as a librarian service." Assange was fascinated with Cryptome. It seemed like the perfect way to promote free speech and a more open government, but it was a bit dry. It got zero publicity and basically no one was reading it.
Perhaps there was a better way to do things. One with more of the drama and pizzazz Assange learned as a young hacker making a thousand telephones ring all at once. Assange registered the site leaks.org in 1999, but it would be six years before he figured out how to make it work, or what to call it.
One day, Assange was scribbling furiously on a whiteboard, ranting to his girlfriend about his latest version of the website. This would be a whistleblowing site where anyone in the world could post documents anonymously through a complex system of impenetrable safeguards. Even he wouldn't know who'd pass documents to the site. But unlike Cryptome, his site wouldn't just quietly post the documents on an obscure corner of the internet.
He'd make sure they made it to the people by sharing tips to the mainstream media and giving it a name that would become a buzzword. Across the whiteboard, Assange wrote "Wikileaks." Assange reached out to John Young of Cryptome and asked him to be a silent partner. Young agreed and helped Assange register Wikileaks.org in California.
From there, Assange worked tirelessly, gathering support among like-minded anarchists, setting up safeguards for anyone who wanted to pass information to the site. Still, by late 2006, Assange had yet to post anything to Wikileaks, because he didn't have any good leaks. He needed something really interesting, something newsworthy, splashy. So he waited and waited,
and furiously reviewed every submission he received until it came. A plan to assassinate Somali government officials. Not a revelation of government corruption, but still a matter of grave importance. Leaking the document prematurely, however, posed risks. Assange and his team of anarchist techies weren't confident in the accuracy of their translations of the Somalian document.
More importantly, because the leaker was anonymous, even to Assange, they couldn't be certain the document was authentic. Allegedly, the document was from someone in the Chinese government, though it was written by Somali rebel leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Awais. There was also the issue of where to publish the document.
Assange considered sharing it with mainstream publications, but in the end, he decided to publish it in full and in order to avoid any possible censorship exclusively on WikiLeaks. He was determined that the public alone should be the judge and jury. So in December 2006, WikiLeaks published its first documents and in its haste failed to notify one of its first supporters.
John Young. Young was furious. He hadn't been consulted about the Somalian documents at all. He'd been left out of a crucial stage of WikiLeaks development. Is that what silent partner was supposed to mean? To make matters worse, Young did receive an email from Assange asking for money.
Assange was soliciting $5 million to fund the next six months of the site's operations. Young spiraled. He was convinced he'd either been scammed or was being willfully ignored, so he retaliated. He published a list of hundreds of WikiLeaks contacts, both employees and supporters, on Cryptome. WikiLeaks had successfully launched,
But in the process, Assange alienated his first supporter and damaged all of his current contacts. If he wanted to pursue his mission, Julian Assange needed new allies, and fast. Luckily, he was able to strike a partnership with UK newspaper The Guardian. It was a good deal. The Guardian would get top-secret intel, and Wikileaks got access to the newspaper's audience.
Together, they published a 2007 exposé revealing that former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi had siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars of government funds. The article noted that Moi had gone on to acquire multiple lavish properties in London, New York and South Africa. The reporting established a critical working relationship between Wikileaks and The Guardian.
But not all of the relationships Assange forged were as amicable. His release of highly classified information earned him a slew of enemies. Not long after, Wikileaks obtained evidence from a Cayman Islands accountant that the Julius Baer Bank and its clients were committing tax evasion.
When the evidence was published, the bank's lawyers demanded that Assange remove the documents from the internet. When Assange refused, the bank took him to court. And in February 2008, Judge Jeffrey White ruled that publishing the documents violated the bank's client's right to privacy. He issued an injunction, which forced Wikileaks' domain registrar to shut down the site.
But Assange was unfazed by the injunction. He'd already bought more than half a dozen domain names. He'd simply switch to a new one and direct it to the exact same site. He didn't respect the tax evaders. He didn't respect the court. And he'd keep fighting for transparency and truth, whatever the consequences. And surprisingly, this actually gained him new fans and allies.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press all fervently insisted that the court's ruling violated the First Amendment right to free speech. These groups gathered supporters from nearly all of the major newspaper publishers in the U.S. and demanded the WikiLeaks domain be reinstated.
They insisted that the privacy and commercial interests of Julius Baer Bank were not enough to merit the obstruction of the First Amendment. Wikileaks may only be a website, not a news publication, but they were essentially doing what journalists do every day, digging up the truth and bringing it to public attention. If this ruling stood, the entire free press would be in jeopardy.
In early 2008, Julian Assange's rights as a journalist were up against Taxevator's right to privacy. When Judge White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued an injunction against Assange and WikiLeaks, it created a media firestorm. And under massive pressure, Judge White reversed his decision within two weeks.
Wikileaks and Assange were free to keep informing the public of whatever secret documents they got their hands on. And they didn't even have to change domain names. For now. But media organizations and civil liberty groups weren't the only ones watching Assange. It caught the eye of the US military. In March 2008,
The U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Center issued a special report focused entirely on WikiLeaks, which, ironically enough, Assange got a hold of and leaked two years later. According to the report, WikiLeaks posed an information security threat. Who knew how far Assange would go, how many secrets he would share, and who his revelations might hurt?
After all, there were new leaks all the time. Some documents came from the Church of Scientology, detailing the organization's instructions for dealing with negative press, including blackmail. Others came from US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. She'd been accused of using her private email account for official government matters.
A successful hack, mere weeks before the 2008 election, proved these accusations. And in April 2010, Assange dove into the deep end, inviting the media to his biggest press conference yet. It was a warm, cloudy spring day in Washington, D.C. The air was light with the promise of better weather to come. Members of the media made their way into the National Press Club.
They were curious, speculating about what Julian Assange would be revealing this time. But they couldn't have anticipated the magnitude of what awaited them. Assange, armed with laptops and precious cargo, was more jittery than usual. Having just arrived from Iceland, he admitted to feeling nervous. But he passed through customs uneventfully, an indication that no one suspected the impending barrage.
Assange took the floor of the National Press Club, steadying himself as he prepared to address the media. He informed them they were about to see a very rich story. After a moment, the video screens behind him turned on and a quote from George Orwell appeared.
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." Then, the quote was replaced with text explaining what the audience was about to witness. A video called "Collateral Murder." Assange had acquired footage from 2007 airstrikes in Baghdad.
strikes that, according to the US government, had only resulted in the deaths of anti-Iraqi forces or insurgents. But that's not what the press club saw in Assange's horrifying 17-minute video. They watched a US Army Apache helicopter open fire on a group of Iraqi civilians. Among those slaughtered were two Reuters news employees.
In the background of the video, US crew members were heard praising their target skills saying, "Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards. Nice. Good shootin'." The Apache helicopter continued its siege on a van that had stopped to rescue some of the wounded men injuring two small children. Upon discovering the kids, another crew member can be heard saying, "Well, it's their fault bringing their kids to battle."
When the lights came up around Assange, members of the US military struggled to hide their embarrassment. The film sent the Pentagon into a flurry, making desperate excuses and trying to pin down who'd leaked the video. The appalling content wasn't the only cause for disturbance. It would later be reported that multiple media outlets had access to the video ahead of time and chose not to reveal its contents.
Assange alleged that they suppressed the video in the interest of receiving even better tips from the U.S. military down the line. But unlike earlier leaks, this one didn't make many headlines. Assange's supporters suggested this was because of the media's allegiance to the military. They ignored the collateral murder video just as they had the first time.
On the other hand, members of the media argued that the video made crucial cuts that obscured the US military's armed opponents on the scene of the battle. After all, Assange's 17-minute video was cut out of 39 minutes of total footage. Others argued that the video only showed a moment in time, giving a little indication of the deep complexities of fighting a war. Assange's work wasn't journalism.
It was showmanship. Even CNN, the outlet where Assange expected to receive the most coverage, refused to play the footage out of respect for the relatives. This was a distinct shift from the response to earlier whistleblowing by WikiLeaks, like the Cayman Islands tax fraud case. Now, Assange had alienated many members of the press who championed him just a few years earlier.
Still, Assange wouldn't back down. In fact, he seemed to thrive on the discomfort he'd caused. It wasn't time to stop. It was time to go bigger. So he flew back to Australia while awaiting the next big leak. Landing in Melbourne, he was tense with anticipation, aware that his status as the golden boy whistleblower was slipping, that the US government might retaliate.
He made his way through customs cautiously, expecting the worst. At immigration, the officer noted how worn Assange's passport was and mentioned that he needed a new one. Then he disappeared behind a screen. When he came back, he explained that Assange wasn't being flagged. It was a routine check. That was a lie.
Behind the screen, the immigration officer had handed Assange's passport to the Australian Federal Police. They quickly photocopied it, collecting a complete record of his travels. Julian Assange was on a watch list. But for the time being, he was free to go and free to continue his international travels. Less than two months later, on June 30th, 2010,
Assange sat in the Guardian's London offices, wiping his sweaty brow as he combed through the latest documents on his laptop. On that muggy summer day, he worked with Nick Davis, a leading investigative reporter from The Guardian, Eric Schmidt from The New York Times, and John Goetz, a reporter from Der Spiegel. This was a massive leak.
So Assange had decided to enlist international help to disseminate it as quickly and widely as possible. Collaboration with the mainstream media also offered Assange an element of protection. One, he was less likely to offend them. Two, he felt that the Pentagon would see him as a journalist and treat him accordingly, even in the face of the information he was about to share.
Assange had obtained more than 91,000 secret documents related to the war in Afghanistan. And on July 10th, 2010, he and his journalistic cohorts were going to publish them. The documents were a major bombshell, and not just because of their sheer volume. They provided never-before-seen insight into the war with Afghanistan and its ramifications.
Not unlike Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers had for the Vietnam War almost 40 years earlier, the Afghanistan documents described hundreds of unreported civilian deaths. They also described how the United States had lied to the public, covering up evidence that the Taliban had acquired deadly missiles. Assange and his colleagues worked furiously to sift through the documents, yelling out whenever they found anything of note.
But as they made their way through the pages, the issue of redaction arose. That is, removing the names of people mentioned in the documents in order to protect them. Assange's colleagues pressed him to redact the names. His WikiLeaks team reiterated the request. Even a White House spokesman who'd caught wind of the impending leak pleaded for redaction. Still, Assange seemed relatively unconcerned.
pointing out that they had to get these documents out before the US government stopped them. They'd do their best to redact, but Wikileaks was going to make sure the public knew the truth, even at a price. In the end, 15,000 of the 91,000 documents were withheld because the names couldn't be redacted in time. The rest of the documents seemed to be redacted,
But there wasn't time to make sure every name was hidden before Assange's deadline. At 10:03 p.m. on July 10, 2010, WikiLeaks and its mainstream media partners published the Afghan war logs. The news set off a bombshell. The public was shocked by the US's lies, by the civilian deaths that had been suppressed, and by the sheer size of this leak.
International headlines wasted no time tapping into the drama. Programs like Larry King Live and Dateline covered it, interviewing Assange and asking if he believed that war crimes had been committed. But while Assange was pleased to see the truth let out, trouble was afoot. The 77,000 papers published still contain the names of people of interest.
and Assange came under fire for putting their lives at risk. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, once WikiLeaks supporters, wrote to Assange condemning the careless journalism. From their viewpoint, he'd only gotten sloppier since the collateral murder video. They wrote that publishing the report represented a real problem of methodology and therefore credibility.
The news that leaked was overshadowed by the way the information was revealed. And this put the entire mission at risk. Because Assange and WikiLeaks no longer had the moral high ground. This was no Washington insider judiciously distributing a few documents he believed should be made public. This was a wholesale assault on the right of the government to have secrets. At the same time, for much of the public,
The incident clarified why those secrets were sometimes justified. Recklessly revealing the names and locations of vulnerable targets could lead to the deaths of Americans and their allies. The US government and the FBI were reeling.
The New York Times reported that Justice Department lawyers were exploring whether WikiLeaks could be charged with inducing or conspiring in violation of the Espionage Act. Technically, he was passing intel to the United States' enemies.
Whether he did it through a public forum or not didn't matter. The secrets were getting out. Complicating matters were Assange's journalistic rights, which had been established in the Cayman Islands case and which he hoped would protect him now. After all, he wasn't the individual doing the leaking. He hadn't hacked into government files himself. He was simply sharing documents that came his way.
At least, so said his supporters. But their numbers were dwindling. Only a few months later, Assange was wanted in Sweden on charges of rape and sexual assault. The story spiraled through Swedish tabloids while the Afghan war logs were still circulating the American press. Assange was more famous than ever, not as a champion of transparency, but as a criminal.
Though the rape charges were eventually thrown out, prosecutors continued to pursue Assange on lesser sex crimes. In response, he fled to the UK. But Assange wasn't going to give in to the law without fighting back. He kept posting leaked documents. First, the so-called Iraqi war logs, hundreds of thousands of classified documents about the war in the Middle East. Then, he hit even harder.
On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks, in conjunction with its mainstream media partners, published the first of almost 260,000 US diplomatic cables. They exposed calls by the Saudi King for the US to attack Iran, as well as Hillary Clinton's order for the US State Department to spy on the UN's leadership.
Assange intended for a slow release of documents. He hoped to keep the world guessing about the contents of the remaining cables, drawing out the drama of the release. But on December 3rd, the Guardian foiled his plan. In a horrible blunder, the newspaper published identifying information on all of the remaining cables. According to Assange,
They released all the metadata: the date of every cable, the subject of every cable, which embassy it was from, where it was to, subject, date, time. If it hadn't already, the US government now had what it needed to exact revenge. WikiLeaks had repeatedly put individuals at risk, threatened foreign relations, and exposed national secrets.
As Hillary Clinton put it, "This disclosure is not just an attack on America, it is an attack on the international community. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people, and there is nothing brave about sabotaging peaceful relations between nations." Julian Assange had secured his place on the list of enemies of the United States.
In their quest for transparency and justice, Wikileaks and The Guardian endangered innocent government employees. And now, in late 2010, there would be consequences. Some of Wikileaks' biggest supporters vanished overnight. Amazon, which had been hosting Wikileaks, disconnected their servers.
PayPal suspended the account Wikileaks used to receive donations. Mastercard and Visa stopped payments as well. The world had turned on Assange, and his pursuers were closing in. Sweden requested Interpol issue a red alert for Assange's arrest. In his pursuit of transparency,
He had set the world ablaze. On December 8th, Assange turned himself in to UK law enforcement. They held him in prison while pending an extradition hearing and on December 20th they released him on bail.
Assange's supporters around the world, dwindling but loyal, had raised more than £240,000 to pay for his freedom. Assange was placed in house arrest at a friend's estate in the English countryside while his lawyers fought against his extradition.
He fervently worked with his collaborators to keep WikiLeaks up and running while striving to keep himself in the public eye, framing Sweden's charges as a trumped-up way to end his mission against state secrecy. But he was worried about the legal battle coming and the death penalty attached to the Espionage Act back in the US. Assange's lawyers did their best to protect him from extradition.
They took his case all the way to the UK Supreme Court. But by June 15th, 2012, the British government officially declared that they would be sending Assange to Sweden. Many of Assange's supporters expected him to go willingly. After all, they'd taken Assange at his word when he claimed that the Swedish charges were bunk and that the WikiLeaks staff could keep the site running without him. But as it turned out,
Assange was not willing to put his own claims to the test. On June 19th, Assange rented a room in a hotel under an assumed name. He used the room to disguise himself. He dyed his hair, inserted colored contact lenses, and attached clip-on earrings. He put a rock in his shoe to affect his walk, and then he rushed to the Ecuadorian embassy, where he applied for asylum.
It turned out Assange had been in talks with the Ecuadorian government for quite some time. Ecuador has a long-standing respect for political asylum requests, especially when the death penalty was possible. Perhaps more significantly, at the time, the Ecuadorian government did not get along well with the United States. They'd surely appreciate an opportunity to give the US the metaphorical middle finger. And most importantly,
Ecuador had no extradition treaties with the US, the UK, or Sweden. It was a good plan, and it seemed to work. Ecuador accepted Assange's application, but the United Kingdom had no intention of allowing it. They informed Assange that if he stayed within the Ecuadorian embassy, he'd be found in violation of his bail agreement.
The £240,000 his supporters had paid would be forfeited and a third warrant for his arrest would be written. Assange understood the costs of his asylum and that his fans would pay the price. But he was no stranger to betraying his supporters in the interest of promoting government transparency. And if he maintained his freedom, he could continue working on Wikileaks. For Assange, it was an easy choice.
He told the UK government he wouldn't consent to an arrest. Scotland Yard sent a squadron of police officers to surround the Ecuadorian embassy. They threatened to raid the building if they didn't hand Assange over. The Ecuadorians refused. If UK police entered the Ecuadorian embassy, it would be a violation of international law.
Their embassy was a sovereign territory. Tensions brewed as the police remained outside the building for days. The Ecuadorian president responded with Operation Guest, a program to install extra security within the embassy in case London detectives tried to enter the building in disguise. Eventually, the siege ended.
While the UK desperately wanted to bring Assange in, they decided it was more important to respect the treaty with Ecuador. But they made it clear that if Assange ever stepped foot on British soil again, he'd be arrested immediately. To hammer in the point, London police kept at least one officer stationed outside of the embassy at all times.
In an effort to avoid prison, Julian Assange had essentially trapped himself in a prison of his own making. While he was technically free, he was confined to one building, and within that building had use of roughly 330 square feet. But he could keep working, and so he did, for years.
Coordinating with the WikiLeaks team, Assange published hundreds of thousands of leaked government documents. Still, Assange continued feeling insecure. He ran white noise machines at all hours to conceal his conversations. He had friends and co-workers order his food under aliases, and he never let them order from the same restaurant twice within the same month. This way, no one could poison him.
Assange wasn't worried about being assassinated, but he did worry about getting so sick he'd be rushed to a UK hospital where he'd be arrested. Assange's fears were valid. He was being spied on by the Ecuadorians. They logged all his visitors, their identities, purpose for visiting, country of origin, and so on. They watched the streets. They even noted Assange's sleep schedule, work habits, and daily routines.
closely tracking any changes, like his minor medical problems. Assange fractured a tooth, injured his shoulder, and had consistent pains in his feet. Yet any time he reached out for a dentist or a doctor to make a house call, British professionals refused to see him. They didn't want to become enemies of the state. Julian Assange was the poster boy for whistleblowing, and now for its consequences.
In his pursuit of radical transparency, he had elevated the truth above his own personal interests. And now he was paying the price. He'd lost his home, his ability to travel, even his access to basic medical care. And he wasn't done losing yet. In 2016, just before the Democratic National Convention,
Wikileaks published leaked emails from the DNC and Hillary Clinton staffer John Podesta. It looked like a targeted attack against the Clinton campaign. Assange also released several other leaks, including a dossier on U.S. involvement in a war in Yemen and a detailed expose on the CIA's latest technological developments in the world of hacking.
Assange was in the same place he'd been at 20, trying to expose the hackers who'd betrayed his ideals and worked inside the U.S. government. But this time, he got a lot more attention. People began to suspect that Assange was working hand-in-hand with the Russian government. Especially considering Assange's source seemed to be an allegedly Russian hacker known as Guccifer 2.0.
Now, more than ever before, the US government wanted to see Assange tried in a court of law. The sentiment spread to the Ecuadorian public as well. Over the years, Assange had become somewhat of a national nuisance. He behaved disrespectfully in the embassy, skateboarding indoors, breaking embassy property, and treating guards poorly. Then, he published leaked documents revealing corruption
In the Ecuadorian government, in the 2017 Ecuadorian presidential election, one candidate ran on an anti-Assange platform, promising to hand the national pet over to the British government should he be elected. To Assange's horror, this candidate won. On April 11th, 2019,
British police officers were invited into the Ecuadorian embassy where they cornered and handcuffed Assange. They escorted him outside where he shouted to the cameras, "We must resist! You can resist!" Julian Assange had been evicted and now he was going to prison. Charged with conspiracy and computer crimes, Assange was imprisoned in Her Majesty's Prison, Belmarsh
Though the US has repeatedly demanded his extradition, Assange's legal team fought it every step of the way. They've appealed to the UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights. As of this recording, Assange remains in Belmarsh.
His next and possibly final appeal is scheduled for late February 2024. If the appeals fail and he's extradited, Assange could face up to 175 years in prison. Whistleblowing carries severe consequences. The whistleblower enters a world of chaos. Their actions dissected and analyzed by the government, the press, the public, even their own friends and families.
The truth comes to light, but it can be overshadowed by the person sharing it and how they shared it. They're subject to personal attacks and moral scrutiny. They're forced to reconsider if they've made the right decision, if the truth was worth it. To blow the whistle is to believe the information you're revealing is more valuable than your own life.
An act that requires an immense amount of courage and perhaps a degree of hubris. You must believe you can maintain the moral high ground. Because once the whistle is blown, there's no going back. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode.
Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Send a short audio recording telling your story to conspiracystoriesatspotify.com. And be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth.
Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Natalie McKeeran and Andrew Messer, edited by Kate Gallagher and Maggie Admire, researched by Bradley Klein, fact-checked by Haley Milliken and Lori Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button.
Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson. And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. Conspiracy Theories is hosted by me, Carter Roy. This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition. When you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, providing dogs and cats in need with science-led nutrition that helps make them happy, healthy, and ready to be adopted.
It's an initiative that Hills has supported since 2002. And since then, the Food, Shelter and Love program has helped more than 14 million pets find new homes, changing their life forever so they can change yours. Science did that. Learn more at hillspet.com slash podcast.