The Destroyed Man | Investigation
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This episode of True Spies contains descriptions of violence, including torture, that some listeners may find distressing. Incoming transmission. Welcome. Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. That's it.

What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. While he was in prison in China, in one of these internment camps, authorities told him, we are going to hold you in this place and we are going to hold your mum and your loved ones in these places and torture them unless you agree to work and spy for us. This is True Spies. Episode 60, The Destroyed Man.

Behind closed doors, a reluctant spy is made.

He said that once he agreed to spy for them, he was allowed more freedoms than other people being held there were allowed. He would be allowed to go into the interrogation areas after the interrogations had been done. And he talked about the fact that men were often beaten with electrical cords that had been stripped of the plastic exteriors and were just bare wires. And they were whipped with these bare wires till there were blood all over the walls.

The work you will carry out brings no satisfaction, no glamour. He eventually was released from this area with a clear understanding that he would be working for the government. He was given a handler who managed him and then he was sent back to his hometown. And he talked about how over time he began to report on family members, on friends, and a number of them ended up disappearing, being taken and put in these camps.

The life that awaits him holds no promise of adventure or opportunity. The only guarantee in this hidden world is deceit, betrayal and guilt. And as he was sharing all this, you could see the guilt on his face. I could see that the fact that he had sent his friends and sometimes family to these places was eating away at him.

The world you are about to enter might very well have remained hidden were it not for the bravery of one tired, broken spy and the unflinching professionalism of the man who told his story. My name is Steve Chow. I'm an investigative journalist and filmmaker and I'm currently based somewhere in Asia. I prefer not to say exactly where, partly because of the work that I do, which is often undercover.

Steve Chow has more experience than most when it comes to exposing hidden truths. We as investigative journalists essentially take the story deeper and the topics that we choose we try to really uncover or lift the lid on areas of the world that often aren't exposed. It is this instinct to shine a light in dark corners that plunged Steve Chow into the depths of a different kind of espionage story.

There are inherent risks in telling a story like this one. But this week's true spy has never let risk stand in his way. It's just an inconvenient condition of the job he was born to do. In many ways, investigative journalism chose me, or at least that's the way I like to think of it. It really began in university as a keen...

young person eager to try and change the world. I went down in the first summer of university to Guatemala to do health work surveys. At the time, Steve Chow saw a future for himself in NGOs, or perhaps as a health worker. But that trip to Guatemala in the summer of 1993 changed everything. We were up in the highlands in the north of Guatemala when a coup took place.

During the coup, the villagers that we were working with actually hid us because what was happening was the soldiers who had taken over, they were coming into the town and claiming it as theirs. And then the next day, the rebels, those opposed to the coup, would be coming in and they saw that this town had been designated a government town or a military town. And so they began lining up.

men from the village against a wall and shooting them dead. And then subsequent days later, the military would come back and say, "Hey, wait a second. This has become a rebel town. What's going on?" And they would line up more men against the wall and shoot them dead. The violence left Steve Chow stranded in rural Guatemala for weeks, unable to do anything but watch in horror, until finally the coup fizzled out and he was able to return home.

When we finally got out of Guatemala, I remember being in the plane headed back to Canada where I'm originally from. And I picked up the Time magazine in the plane and it was several weeks old. Buried in the pages of that out-of-date magazine, a strange, unsettling report. In the section that said, this week in news...

He talked about this coup in Guatemala and called it a bloodless coup. And it was at that moment that I thought, you know what, there needs to be more people in the world, more journalists, more reporters in under-reported areas, shining a light in dark places, exposing what is actually going on. When he graduated from university a few years later, Steve Chao wasted no time in putting his money where his mouth was.

As a young, hungry broadcast journalist, his first big break came when he exposed an international ring of drug dealers smuggling teenagers from two villages in Honduras all the way to the streets of Vancouver to sell crack cocaine. I remember after reporting on that first story, I could hear in my ear my producer saying as soon as I was finished my live, "Congratulations, you're now an investigative reporter."

His next investigation began with an enigma: a rusty fishing vessel arriving onto the shores of the west coast of Canada. And we soon learned that on that vessel were hundreds of asylum seekers. Chinese asylum seekers, to be precise, from villages in the Fujian province.

They had been brought onto these ships by smugglers known as snakeheads and each had paid 38,000 US dollars for this journey from China across the Pacific into Canada with a promise that they were going to arrive in the promised land and have guaranteed jobs, etc., etc.

the reality of their voyage was quite different. In that investigation, we learned a lot of horrors. The fact that many people died on that journey, that they were living in abject conditions on those boats. But what happened was when this first boat arrived, Canadian authorities allowed these asylum seekers to claim refugee status and set them free in Vancouver. As Steve embedded himself in this community of freshly arrived refugees,

he began to notice something strange. One by one, they began disappearing from Vancouver and they weren't showing up for the refugee hearings. When he scratched a little deeper, Steve uncovered a grim truth.

We soon learned that because the snakeheads charged them 38,000 US dollars, these people couldn't afford to pay that, so they owed that debt to the snakeheads. And the snakeheads were essentially selling them as indentured slaves for seven years to restaurant owners, to massage parlors, to supermarkets, all through North America. In his efforts to track down those enslaved refugees, Steve had his first encounter with undercover work.

We spent a lot of time in massage parlors, in restaurants posing as prospective customers, posing as restauranteurs if you will, checking out the triads and the snakeheads that were running a lot of these places and trying to match the faces with the people I had met on that rusty vessel over the last several weeks and months. Eventually he was able to uncover the snakeheads entire network

And in the process, he learned some of the fundamentals that would provide the basis for his career in journalism.

What I learned from those initial investigations is that you need to be really, really passionate as a journalist to get into investigative work. These aren't stories that you stick onto for a day or a few days or a few weeks. You're often working months or years at it. And to really keep at it, you need to be passionate, you need to be determined. But passion and determination can only get you so far.

If this line of work interests you, you'll also need a keen eye for detail. Take the snakehead investigation. The entire thing hinged on Steve's knack for joining the dots.

The breaks that you get come in the details. You know, it might be just a few words that an informant tells you or mentions to you and you click in your head and go, "Okay, that little piece of information actually relates to this other informant's information where he told me this was happening." You know, this meeting happened in one hotel.

And then there was another meeting in that same hotel. Wait a second, who owns that hotel? Let's find out more. Oh, it's the San Yon. Now I got it. The San Yon are the snakeheads. They're the ones with the maritime fishing vessels. And then you start chasing that lead. And, you know, then you realize those fishing vessels are the ones being bought in Hong Kong and Taiwan. And then you start chasing the registration of these vessels. And then from there, you're like, ah, okay, so there's buy-in actually from governments.

Undercover work, criminal rings, murky state sponsorship. It's safe to say that there's some overlap between Steve Chow's world and that of more conventional espionage. And as such, the toolkit that he depends on is much the same as a spy's. Except that in the dramatically underfunded world of journalism, Steve is often taking on work that would occupy an entire team of agents.

So another of the features I believe an investigative journalist needs to have is the ability to multitask and be able to do everything across several different fields, whether it's the technical, understanding how to operate hidden cameras, understanding how to protect yourselves from deep surveillance on your phones, on your computers, how to do counter surveillance, how to know when you're being followed.

to the straight gumshoe journalism, knowing how to ask questions, knowing how to interview informants, how to get their trust, to the storytelling part, knowing how to make sure the hidden camera is filming beautifully so you get that shot when you're talking to a criminal. So that explains the mechanics of a job like this.

But it does little to illuminate exactly why someone would carve out a niche in this small, under-resourced world. I'm sure all of us have stories in our youth that sort of pinged in ourselves and we had a desire to make the world better. In my case, you know, it was watching my mom being abused by my father and then seeing court and legal system at the time that was more skewed towards males.

more patriarchal, if you will. I can definitely say that justice is a big part of what drives me as an investigative journalist. Over the years, that desire for justice has guided Steve Chow through countless explosive stories. He has exposed international wildlife traffickers, criminal organizations, corrupt businesses. He has reported from the streets of Cairo during the violence and turmoil of the Arab Spring.

And for the past two decades, he has spent much of his professional life reporting on one of the world's foremost emerging superpowers.

In the early 2000s, I was working for a Canadian network, CTV, and I was sent to Beijing as the Asia bureau chief. While he was stationed in Beijing, Steve grew acquainted with the limitations around where he could report freely and where was out of bounds. While China at the time, and even now, allows for international journalists to be based there,

They really do have careful areas where they try to control the message as much as possible. And that level of sophistication, that level of control is not seen in much other parts of the world. So how did that sophistication announce itself to the young, ambitious journalist covering stories there?

I lived in a diplomatic compound right in the heart of the city and it's where a lot of journalists actually lived. And you know the government would make it clear if they were unhappy with you. Sometimes we would run an expose on say tenants being evicted ahead of the Olympics and if they were very unhappy with you they would let it be known that they would start following you. So as soon as you left the compound there would be two or three people that would stay say

20 meters away from you or they would be sitting in a car and they follow your every move and they would jot down and note anyone you'd spoken to. That was the very overt message from the Chinese government. In his time reporting in China, Steve began to get used to the constant background hum of surveillance. You would know that your phones would be bugged because you hear the click, click, click, click of the fact that they were routing your calls.

But then there was also a lot of the more covert ways that they would follow you everywhere you went. I remember cases of, you know, going to another city and all of a sudden going, hey, wait a second, I recognize that person in the restaurant. I saw him or her in the previous city where I was at. Or, wow, this cab driver that just picked me up, he looks very much like somebody else that I had just seen in the previous city. That makes life very difficult for investigative reporters like Steve.

though he's never let it stand between him and a story that needs to be told. And in his years covering China, one story has demanded Steve's attention time and time again. One of the most memorable investigations included the look at the treatment of Uyghurs in the western part of China. If you followed the news in recent years, you'll have heard more and more about China's Muslim Uyghur population.

Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic minority group in China. They've been around for centuries. There's about 12 million in terms of population in this special region known as Xinjiang. And what we saw from 2004 when I was based in Beijing onward from there was this increasing control, if you will, by the Chinese state

over the Uighur population. It might be international news only recently, but the tension between the Chinese state and Xinjiang's Uighur population goes back decades. In the 90s, things threatened to boil over.

The Uyghurs were getting increasingly upset because their area, Xinjiang, was being flooded with Han Chinese, ethnically Mandarin Chinese, you know, people from other parts of China. And it was the ethnic Chinese that were getting a lot of the opportunities when it came to business ownership, when it came to work with the government.

And the Uyghurs were being pushed further and further to the recesses of society in terms of opportunities. So there was a growing anger. And the way the government interpreted that, we understand, is they started seeing them as a threat. And remember, this is in the late 90s, before one event stoked the fire of anti-Islamic rhetoric the world over.

And then 2001 happened and we saw the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and it was an Islamic-backed attack by Al-Qaeda. And so the Chinese then began seeing this Turkic ethnic group, the Uyghurs, as a terrorist threat because they were Islamic. And the truth is, some members of the Uyghur community had become radicalized.

There was a splinter group known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, ETIM, that really had been fighting for independence in that area. From 2010 to 2014, yes, we saw a growing level of attacks from these groups.

The response to these attacks has been the subject of intense speculation by the world's media. What we saw happen in the last several years is this huge ramping up by the Chinese government of control in Xinjiang.

Over the last several years, according to a lot of the analysts, this has been well documented, the government has set up 380 what's been called as internment camps for Uyghurs. And these camps are barbed wired. There are security towers installed.

These are locked facilities. Essentially, in the words of some of the Uyghurs we spoke to, these are prisons. The government denies this, saying that they are simply vocational training centers where Uyghurs are allowed to learn new skills and they're there willingly. More than one million Uyghurs are believed to be detained. Over the past few years, journalists like Steve have attempted to expose the conditions inside these facilities.

We've seen the US government, the Canadian government and others come out to describe what's happening in Xinjiang as genocide. And what we've seen in our investigations is that there is a large degree of that. You know, that according to the witnesses, many of the women being held in these centers are being forced to be sterilized. We understand by the census that came out recently

that the population in Xinjiang has, in terms of growth, has actually plummeted. It's negative, negative growth. And so, you know, when you look at the UN markers for genocide, a lot of what is happening in Xinjiang hit those markers. So that's the bigger picture. But for Steve Chao, understanding the scale of this phenomenon is only part of his work.

We felt that we needed to get deeper into the story of what was happening. We wanted to ensure that we were getting an accurate, accurate picture and we wanted to hear from the other side. We want to understand more clearly from the Chinese side, if you will, in terms of what was being ordered, what they were essentially carrying out. But getting a detailed account of what was happening proved to be nearly impossible.

The potential for collateral damage

was too great. So we decided that, you know, we needed to find people who had left China to speak to. This was truly a global search and we had to be very, very careful because we also knew and were told by many Uyghurs that the Chinese government had spies throughout the community. These whispers of espionage within the Uyghur community troubled Steve deeply.

They meant that even outside of China, his inquiries could send shockwaves rippling through the Xinjiang province. So we tried to keep it very hush-hush. We began our exploration in North America. Then we ended up in Geneva meeting other contacts. And we were asking, who perhaps has worked for the Chinese government as a spy? Who in the community can we speak to?

And that was the question we asked a lot of our informants and the people that we had met. Eventually, everyone kept saying to us, go to Turkey. You'll find your answer in Turkey. At that time, Turkey had an open-door policy to displace Uyghurs, who share an ethnic lineage with the nation. It's there that many who had fled Xinjiang ended up settling.

We ended up going to Istanbul and starting to tap into the Uyghur population. And through some very helpful contacts that we had made in North America and in Europe, we heard of this young gentleman by the name of Yusuf Ahmad.

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And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, socializing,

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. Enter into the picture Yusuf Amat. He was hiding in a city and I can't tell you which one.

And we understood from the informants that he had worked for the Chinese government spying on the Uyghur community. Of course, no matter how trusted your sources, there's always a mutual wariness between a journalist and an informant. As such, Steve Chow had to tread carefully. It took us several weeks through the informant that we were working with to convince Yusuf to meet with us.

And we agreed on a neutral city in Turkey to meet, one that was very far away from where he was living. There's a protocol when it comes to these kinds of meetings, where tensions run high and no one can be sure who to trust.

We arranged to meet in a hotel lobby. And of course, there's always nerves when you arrange for these kind of meetings because you just don't know how it's going to go. You always look for exits and you always look for safeties. We had an extra producer sitting somewhere else to inform our network in case things went south. After weeks negotiating the terms of their rendezvous, Steve had built a picture of the man who would soon walk through the hotel's revolving doors.

I was seeing in my head someone who was much more street savvy, perhaps even sly.

You know, this was supposed to be somebody that had worked for years for the Chinese government, spying on Uyghurs. So I expected a shiftier character and perhaps a tougher character. I even sort of imagined that he might be tattooed. But the character who approached Steve from across the hotel lobby didn't match that profile at all. I saw this guy walk through the door at the time that we had arranged and I'm like, huh.

"Is that the guy?" And he definitely looked Uyghur. But, you know, he was in these workman overalls and he was such a quiet figure. And he eventually saw me and our informant and a few others and he came over and he said, "Hello, I'm Yusuf." He was so soft-spoken. And I thought, "Is this the spy working for the Chinese government?" In this game, trust is a dangerous thing to throw around.

I didn't know whether he was still a Chinese spy and what kind of risks we were facing. And despite his gentle demeanor, there was something unsettling about Youssef Ahmad. I could see he was trying to read me as well in his eyes. He may be quiet, but he was taking everything in. And so begins a tightly choreographed dance. We went to the restaurant, sat down, and we just sort of spent the first half hour to one hour just feeling each other out.

Steve has to determine, first and foremost, whether he believes Youssef's story. And Youssef, for his part, must decide whether to place his trust in the man claiming to be an international journalist. He didn't know whether we were working for another state, working for the Chinese government. There is no science, no methodology to a conversation like this one. Each man must be guided by his own intuition.

By the end of the hour, I think there was a level of trust between us. I believed his story and I think he believed that we were people he could trust to share his story with. Steve Chow and Yousef Ahmad agreed to meet again on another day for the interview.

And of course, you know, you almost always want to do the interview right away, in a sense, because you don't want to give people too much time to think about it and then change their mind. But in this case, we agreed to give ourselves that space. It's always nerve wracking to wait, but he showed up a few days later for the interview. It was during that interview that Yusuf laid out the long pathway that had brought him into hiding in Turkey, thousands of miles from his home.

What he shared was incredible. He talked about the fact that he, as a young 19-year-old, was actually so upset at the Chinese government that he decided to join the armed militant group known as ETIM, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. Yusuf had been seduced by the notion of standing up for his people, but fate had other plans. He was caught at the airport.

And he was sent to prison for wanting to do this. You've already heard some of Yusuf's story. He claims he was held, along with his innocent mother, the pair of them threatened with indefinite imprisonment, torture, if he did not agree to inform on his fellow Uyghurs. He talked about women, young women being brought in and then leaving with their clothes torn, leaving bloody and disheveled.

In short, he provided Steve Chow with first-hand accounts of what was happening deep in Xinjiang province. But he also helped piece together what life looked like for Uyghur people and all the seemingly benign activities that could land someone in trouble with the authorities. How many times a day they prayed, whether they read the Koran, whether they had religious sayings on their phones, the handler asked him to report on everything and he did.

Before long, Yusuf's friends and members of his extended family began disappearing from sight. He saw no way forward but to cooperate. Eventually the government sent him to try to get into Afghanistan to try to infiltrate the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. And he tried and he spent a few months down there but he didn't get very far and eventually they had their being very upset at him and told him to come out.

asked him to spy on Uyghur populations in Pakistan. It was then that something snapped in Yusuf Ahmad. He got fed up, he says, cut off contact and ended up in Turkey. Which is how he found himself sitting across the table from Steve Chow, a voice recorder between them, in the comforting anonymity of a busy Turkish city. It was only now that Steve began to understand the forces that had driven Yusuf Ahmad to this moment of unburdening.

In his eyes, you could see that he was the destroyed man. He had done so much wrong to others that no matter what happened, he felt he really needed to make it right. Yousef Ahmad had arrived at a dangerous state of being. Cut off from his home, his family, his people. He was a man with nothing left to lose. I think we came to him at a point where he needed to unload, needed to confess, needed to do something for his Uighur people.

The interview left Steve Chow in no doubt that Youssef Ahmad was telling the truth. But he still had to go through the painstaking process of corroborating Youssef's harrowing account, which was no mean feat given the circumstances.

It's not like we could go to his hometown in China, in Xinjiang province, and basically confirm through friends or family. At the time, the Chinese government had enforced, in parts, internet blackouts. People in Xinjiang had apps put on their phones that monitored their every movement. If they went out the back door as opposed to the front door of their house, it would alert authorities and they would have to go report at the police station.

This truly is a police state to a level that we've never seen before in human history. So how do we corroborate his story? Well, we worked through other informants to confirm his hometown, and we did that.

We also really grilled him on the details of places where he had been to. We looked at Afghanistan and his description of where he had gone. And then I talked to my US military contacts, my NATO intelligence contacts, to confirm whether that area where he said he was, was a place where Etem was believed to be hiding out in. And bingo, that all checked out.

And then we tried to look at his testimonies of what happened inside these camps and whether those incidences were shared by other Uyghurs. And they were. So after all these checks, we believed that we had enough to go on to run with his story. But before he could do that, he wanted to give Youssef one last opportunity to change his mind. When it comes to investigations and interviews like this,

I always try to be very frank and open with the interviewee about the risks. And when we learned that he had a wife and a child back in China, we told him, "Hey, you know, are you sure you really want to publish this? We're not covering your face. You know, you are sharing your story to the world and to the Chinese government who you worked for. And there are definite repercussions for this."

not only on yourself, but also on your wife and young child. And he said, you know, I understand. The other essential skill for a journalist of Steve Chow's ilk: becoming intimately familiar with the devastating realities of collateral damage. I've had interviewees disappear. I've had producers killed, assassinated in places like Afghanistan.

And I am keenly aware that sharing, uncovering, exposing things, especially against a state, have big repercussions. It's part of Steve Chow's job to make a source like Youssef understand those repercussions. We laid it bare with Youssef Ahmed about that, and he was very clear that he was willing to go ahead.

With Youssef's blessing, Steve forged ahead with preparations for airing the piece.

There's a kind of protocol to follow with a story like this one. We're often looking to silo our computer systems and our networks to make sure that we don't face a big DDoS attack. We look at perhaps taking a vacation after we run a story and disappearing from where you normally stay just to allow things to cool off because you don't know if someone's going to show up, you know, at the office where you're working or at your home.

And that protocol extends beyond Steve's personal safety and that of his team. We are always trying to do our best with our limited resources to protect those that are brave enough to share their story. And I guess the question with Yusuf Ahmad is, what did we do? The problem is, you can only offer as much help as a source is willing to accept.

He didn't want us to do much. You know, he said he wanted to share his story and then he wanted to go to ground. And he believed that where he was staying was quiet enough. He was working in a small town in a nondescript place in Turkey. What we agreed upon with him was that after interviewing him, we would try to limit contact with him in order to not have a direct trail that led to him. In other words, they would hit and hope.

It's a curious thing. Releasing a story that has taken up months of your life, has occupied your every waking thought for so long. There's very little way of telling, you see, what impact it will have on the world at large. You never fully know what kind of reaction you'll get when you release an investigation. Sometimes a lot of things happen where you see a lot of change and other times there is a stillness, a calm and nothing.

In this case, when we released the investigation into what was happening in Xinjiang, it was already in a space and time where there were a number of reports of what was happening. You'll remember that Steve Chow and his team were not the only journalists detailing the plight of the Uyghur people. We were the only ones with Yusuf Ahmad's story, however, of somebody who had spied for the Chinese state.

It was this aspect of the story that could prove most explosive. But the Chinese government emphatically denies the allegations. We had already given the Chinese government a chance to reply and their line was very clear from the very start, not only with us but with all the publications out there that were questioning whether these were more than vocational training centres that the Chinese government alleges they are.

that these were internment camps, you know, where people were being tortured, where people are being held against their will. The official line from China didn't budge one inch. What did happen, however, was at the time, Turkey was getting a lot of pressure to not oppose

This is where Yusuf's determination to tell his story had its real felt impact on the world.

I think when we broadcast our story, many people in Turkey felt and perhaps spoke to the government saying that they really do want to keep protecting Uyghurs and allowing them to stay in the country. And we saw a movement towards that at the time. It's a heartwarming conclusion to the story. A man, driven to confession by his own guilt, helps expose the oppression that he played a part in.

In doing so, he improves the circumstances of the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey. The end. Cut to credits. But in real life, things are rarely tied up so neatly. A few months ago, I got a ping on my Twitter from an informant. And that informant said to me, "Hey, did you hear what happened to Yusuf?" And he sent me a link. And it was to a local story. And it was heartbreaking.

This is the moment that you dread as a journalist. The eventuality you do everything in your power to prevent. Yusuf Ahmet had gone to visit friends in Istanbul, in Turkey. And as he was leaving that friend's home, two men met him in the stairwell and one of them shot him. Yusuf Ahmet survived his encounter in Istanbul, barely. He remains paralyzed after the shooting.

For Steve Chao, the event served as a potent reminder of the ways his stories, his words, become tangled up with the lives of his subjects. But for Youssef, the attack was less of a shock. In the time after our interview, I said to him, "Well, what do you think will happen to you?" And he said, "Somebody's going to come after me. And if it's not the Chinese state, then it's going to be other Uyghurs who felt I betrayed them." And he goes, "Uyghurs have every right to come after me because I really betrayed my own people."

For Steve, it brings to mind a piece of advice he heard often enough as a young journalist. Many people have said to me throughout my career, you have to distance your emotions when you're doing investigative work. You have to not feel so much because there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering along the way because you're going to see people get hurt when you expose wrongdoing.

It's advice he would have good reason to subscribe to, given all that's happened over his turbulent career. I've had good friends killed. I've had people injured, harmed, beaten up, threatened. But Steve Chow sees things differently. I don't believe that we as journalists should distance our emotions. We have to stay passionate for what we're doing because...

We are ultimately trying to bring a bit of justice into this world. And if we distance our feelings, if we try to tell ourselves not to care so much, then I think that's reflected in the way we write our stories. I think that's reflected in the way we do our interviews. I think we need to feel, we need to hurt

as much as humanly possible in order to keep that passion in the story, in the investigation. I'm Vanessa Kirby. Join us next week for another Brush with True Spies.