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The “Assassination” of Arkady Babchenko
63 Plays6 years ago
This week we talk about the death and resurrection of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, a story of a conspiracy which countered a conspiracy.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison. I'm in Auckland, New Zealand.
Hosts' Locations and Current Work
00:00:14
Speaker
Dr. M. Denteth, where are you right now? Kaltru. Right, that's in Germany, yes. It is indeed in the Baden-Wutentang. And I've just said the last bit of that incorrectly. So, sounds of actually some kind of weird German-Asian film melange. But yes, I'm in Kaltru.
00:00:33
Speaker
where I'm spending the next two weeks working on a paper on fake news with the people at the debate lab here. So I am international jet-setting, conspiracy theory, secrecy and fake news expert currently resident in Deutschland or as I like to call it Germania because in my heart it's still a Roman province, except actually it never was a Roman province.
00:00:56
Speaker
Isn't it? That's just a historical stuff on my part. The Romans never had much success in taking over Germania. It's just one of those things. I never did ancient Roman when I was at university. I was I was Egypt all the way and that has served me not well at all. No, no, I imagine. I imagine in your work as a documentarian, which is actually probably not the right term to use with documentarian documentaries. You're a documentator. I'm a documentor.
00:01:25
Speaker
Documentor. Documentor sounds like the lesson name for a documentarian. So what you're saying is that even though you did ancient Egyptian history, you make Roman style documentaries. That's correct. I actually do. In Latin.
00:01:44
Speaker
Exclusively which is interesting because as far as I know you don't know latter. I know nothing of Latin whatsoever No, no, it's an adventure every day every day is an adventure when you live the kind of heady breakneck life that I lead It's true. You are hip you are done with the kids and everything you do is newsworthy. Hmm speaking of newsworthy Should we talk about news?
Myths and Investigations at North Head
00:02:06
Speaker
Yes Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news
00:02:13
Speaker
In a development near and dear to our own atrophied and vestigial hearts, stories about buried explosives under North Head have been in the news this week. Yes, long-term listeners will remember that it was urban legends of hidden tunnels and abandoned ammunition under the old fort at North Head in Auckland that led to my interest in conspiracy theories in the first place.
00:02:33
Speaker
While multiple rounds of testing over the years have completely failed to provide evidence of the secrets North Head is supposed to hide, the stories continue to persist, which have led to more testing by the Department of Conservation back in January, with further investigations planned for the future. And the war of words continues. One Captain Joe Harvey says he was responsible for removing ammunition from North Head and doesn't remember leaving anything behind.
00:03:00
Speaker
However, Naval Petty Officer Wern Ruhl claims he was there when soldiers tasked with removing the ammunition refused to do so out of fear for their own safety, which resulted in the ammunition being sealed up and those present being sworn to secrecy, a conspiracy of silence.
MH-17 Incident Responsibility
00:03:16
Speaker
Meanwhile, in a prelude to our actual content, Russia. Yes, Russia, the country we mention so often because once you're on someone's watch list, you can't help but keep going on and on about it.
00:03:28
Speaker
The Joint Investigation Team, which is investigating the downing of Flight MH-17, which we mentioned just two episodes ago, have concluded that the flight was downed by a Russian missile fired by a Russian military unit. They've not gone so far as to say the downing of MH-17 was deliberate, but the onus they claim is now on Russia to admit culpability. Russia having claimed it was Ukrainian forces who are responsible for the incident.
00:03:58
Speaker
Russia's response to the report has thus far been subdued, and there will likely be more on this in coming weeks. But first, the future.
Debunking Time Travel Claims
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, so time traveller from the future.
00:04:11
Speaker
a supposed time traveller from the future, has passed a lie detector test, thus proving conclusively and beyond a doubt that he is, in fact, from the future. This story isn't so much conspiratorial as there is no cover up here, but it's an interesting case of knowing what counts as evidence and what doesn't. You see, lie detector tests are basically worthless. You lie. Test me.
00:04:37
Speaker
Well, you've got me. Yes, the thing about lie detector tests is that they're both easy to trick. And if you sincerely believe what you're saying, even if you're factually wrong, you can pass a lie detector test with ease. So no, the fact someone who claims to be from the future passed a lie detector test doesn't tell us whether or not he's a time traveller.
00:04:54
Speaker
especially since the version of the future he comes from sounds so mundane and so uninspired that if that is the future, Josh and I will be travelling forward in time to destroy it. Watch out future humans, we're coming to getcha. Oh, what's this? It's... it's a letter. A letter from the future.
00:05:21
Speaker
From one of your children, Josh. It just says, stop. Please stop. You are embarrassing us. Oh, I'll embarrass them. I'll embarrass them all the way up to their 21st. Any other news? No, not this week. Things have been a little light on the conspiratorial front. That might be in part because I've been travelling and talking fake news with real Germans.
00:05:45
Speaker
So how about instead we settle in for a little lighthearted chat about assassinations?
Anecdote on Russian-Ukrainian Relations
00:05:52
Speaker
Here's it.
00:05:55
Speaker
So I'm gonna start today's story with a little bit of an anecdote, which is going to sound like it's the setup for a joke, because literally about a week and a bit ago, I was having lunch with a Russian and a Ukrainian. And we were talking about current events and the Russian, who also happens to be American, said, oh, I'm a little bit sad because my friend's just been assassinated.
00:06:21
Speaker
And the Ukrainian said, oh, do you mean Arkady Barchenko? You know him. And the Russian said, yes, I've just found out that he's been murdered and it looks like Russia was responsible. And the Ukrainian nodded his head very sagely. And then a few hours later, the Russian, who I should point out is also American,
00:06:42
Speaker
then sent me a Facebook message and said, no, no, it's fine. My friend isn't dead. And I was going, what do you mean he's not dead? I'm seeing news reports on Twitter about his assassination right now. And she said, no, it all appears to have been some kind of weird hoax. So this story I find to be quite fascinating because I didn't find out about it via the news or via social media like I normally did. I found out about it over lunch. Goodness me, that's practically
00:07:13
Speaker
what, secondhand, thirdhand information? You might as well have been there on the spot. I now feel I was. I feel as though I was in the room when this occurred. You're basically inextricably tied to this interesting event. And I assume our listeners know what we're talking about because it has been fairly big in the news. But just in case you managed to miss it, it was even on John Oliver this week, I think. So if you watch him, you'll have seen all about it.
Babchenko's Fake Death Unveiled
00:07:42
Speaker
Yes, this fellow Arkady Babchenko, he was a journalist who was not beloved of the Russian administration. And then sure enough, the news came out as it happens from time to time with Russian dissidents that this guy had been found murdered. And obviously it's sad and tragic, but not entirely 100% unexpected. But what was unexpected was, was it even a day later? Possibly, yeah, just a day later,
00:08:11
Speaker
A press conference was called, and he showed up again, alive as anything, putting even that slacker Jesus to bed by saying, you know, three days. I can do it in one. Of course, actually, he wasn't really resurrected by the power of our Lord God. Your Lord God? He faked his death. Everyone's Lord God, who actually not even mind. No, I don't know.
00:08:40
Speaker
That's not even the proper term anyway, if I was a proper Christian, I would have known it, but I'm not. So there we go. Yes, no, no matter a divine resurrection here, it was in fact a faked death. And the details of which, as they've come out, have been kind of interesting and obviously
00:08:56
Speaker
for our purposes, quite conspiratorial. Essentially there appears to have been a conspiracy, which then itself was thwarted by another conspiracy. Yes, so it's probably useful at this particular point in time to say a little bit about Babchenko. So Babchenko is a Russian who currently is living in exile in the Ukraine. Well, I was about to say, was living in exile in the Ukraine, was murdered, is once again living in exile in the Ukraine, post murder.
00:09:24
Speaker
He's kind of famous for his criticism of the Kremlin, particularly with respect to the wars in the Ukraine and Syria. There have been nationalistic campaigns of intimidation against him, which caused him to leave Russia. And he quite famously actually aroused fury when he had a Facebook post claiming he didn't really
00:09:46
Speaker
I'll actually give the quote here, didn't give a damn, because apparently he's from Gone with the Wind, about the deaths of 92 people, most of them Russian singers, doctors and musicians, who died in a plane crash en route to Syria to perform.
00:10:02
Speaker
So he's not particularly popular with certain people back in Russia and certainly his journalistic endeavors showing issues with the way that Russia goes around say annexing places like the Crimea have caused him to be
00:10:22
Speaker
on a watch list, a watch list which appears to have inspired certain people within the Russian apparatus to at least want to have him murdered, or at least that's the claim. As we'll get into later on in this broadcast,
Motives Behind Babchenko's Fake Assassination
00:10:38
Speaker
there's, there are reasons, not necessarily good reasons to think this could be part of a massive disinformation campaign against Russia itself. But yeah, starting at the start, so
00:10:51
Speaker
He was found that there is a photo, you've probably seen it. I assume newspapers generally aren't fond of putting up crime scene photos of dead human beings. But in this case, as it turned out, he wasn't dead after all. The photo's been bandied around a bit more. Of this man lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, I believe it turned out to be pig's blood. It was indeed pig's blood. But yes.
00:11:18
Speaker
So found supposedly having sustained multiple gunshot wounds was found by his wife. He was bundled into an ambulance, taken off supposedly, went on to die of his gunshot wounds, his quote unquote body, was taken to a morgue where he was pronounced dead and so on and so forth. So it was all, I mean, it wasn't just a case of
00:11:42
Speaker
you know, letting a gun off while other people were in another room and saying, oh, Bayek, I've been shot and then sort of running for it. This was this was quite an elaborate scheme with the full corporate cooperation of the authorities. But then, then
00:11:57
Speaker
It all turned out to be. I believe there's a little bit of disagreement as to whether or not the wife was in on it. Initially, people were like, oh my God, he put his wife through that. But then other reports I've heard say she did actually know what was going on. Yeah, it's a little bit confusing here because there's different news reports say the wife knew and didn't know.
00:12:16
Speaker
Babchenko himself said at the press conference, first of all, I'd like to apologize that all of you had to live through this, because I know the horrible feeling when you have to bury your colleagues. Separately, I want to apologize to my wife, a lecture, for all the hell she had to go through. Now, people are still suspicious as to whether she knew or didn't know, because Babchenko has been rather cop sure.
00:12:43
Speaker
since the attempted assassination on his life he's been making claims that he will live to the right age of 96 and will be dancing on Putin's grave and has been making several inflammatory statements which is you know one has what to do when one survives an assassination attempt and maybe the claim is
00:13:04
Speaker
that he's making people think that no one other than himself and the Ukrainian security services knew about it to make it seem bigger and more impressive and other people are going no it does seem the wife did actually know and she had to be in on that particular plot and one has one does have to assume this is the point that John Oliver made if she didn't know
00:13:30
Speaker
that relationship is presumably ever so slightly strained now because even if you are relieved that your partner hasn't been assassinated having to find your partner apparently dying on the floor and then being told by a doctor your partner is dead and then to find out that was an elaborate hoax you would never let in on
00:13:54
Speaker
It's going to be hard to deal with next Valentine's Day. Yes, I mean, things seem to work out in the true-to-life historical documentary, The Dark Knight, when Commissioner Gordon pulled a similar stunt. So maybe they'll be OK. But yes, it's a little bit unclear. I mean, you could do it the other way and say that perhaps he's trying to, should there
00:14:18
Speaker
attempt to be any sort of revenge for this deception by making sure that not to implicate other people in the plot, he might be trying to keep them safe. But no, he doesn't. Cockshaw is probably the right word. He possibly seems to be under the opinion that Putin's only allowed to try to assassinate you once and that if he doesn't, then you've got your get out of assassination free card now or something. I don't think that's how it works.
00:14:45
Speaker
I could be wrong. Maybe he had no more than I would. It's true. He is a journalist who specializes in reporting about Russia. Maybe Putin does have a one attempt only policy. And if you survive, you get to live to the right age, the ripe ache, the ripe ache, the ripe age of 96. Exactly 96. Very specific. It does make us wonder, it does make me wonder if he knows something that we don't.
00:15:14
Speaker
Anyway, so this was all this was all revealed at a press conference the day after he attended the press conference with Ukraine secret service chief and the prosecutor general so once again you know that this was with the full
00:15:28
Speaker
knowledge and assistance of the authorities and quite high up in the authorities. Although there is a question here as to whether the Prime Minister knew because the Prime Minister was, I believe, actually in New York at the UN at the time when the announcement of Babchenko's death was first announced. Just use the word announced there twice, that's terrible.
00:15:52
Speaker
and his statement at the time either reads as someone going well I don't know the full details of what's going on so it's terrible or is the statement of someone who knows exactly what's going on and doesn't want to reveal anymore so the question is to
00:16:11
Speaker
how far up the chain this information went within the Ukrainian administration. But yes, definitely the Chief of the Secret Service and the Prosecuted General knew exactly what was going on. This was a trap. But a trap for whom? Well, yes. So Babchenko claims that he knew a month in advance that there was a plot to assassinate him. He
00:16:38
Speaker
thought that the Ukrainian secret services knew about two months in advance. And his version of the story is that the Ukrainian security services came to him, told him that there was a hit out on him, and said that the only way to reveal the plotters was to fake his assassination. And that's exactly what they did. Makeup artists, pigs blood, pulled out all the stops.
00:17:06
Speaker
To be honest, I don't quite understand the mechanics of the whole thing. I mean, they wanted the organizers of the plot to sort of be lulled into a false sense of security, think that got away with it so that they could gather evidence on them and spring them. But I'm not quite sure about the timing of it all, because surely if these people had, as they suggested, paid, where was it, $40,000 to someone to assassinate Mr. Babchenko, and then he showed
00:17:33
Speaker
goes up dead on the news would not the assassin then say um actually that that wasn't me but had they already picked him up at the time i'm still i'm a little bit flaky on the details to be honest let me walk you through what happened please do so yes an alleged russian came to the ukraine with 40 000 us dollars to order a hit on babchenko
00:17:56
Speaker
Now from the sound of it, the Russian agent actually kept 10,000 of that for himself. So only 30,000 US dollars was going to be spent on this hit. He contacts a Ukrainian national who's been involved in various bits and pieces. So the contract killer was a veteran of the separatist conflict in the Eastern Ukraine.
00:18:23
Speaker
This contract killer goes to the Ukrainian secret services after getting a down payment of 15,000 US dollars and says, I've been commissioned
00:18:41
Speaker
to put a hit out on Arkady Babchenko. So the contract killer becomes an agent for Ukrainian secret services. That makes more sense. He then goes through the assassination, as we know the assassination never occurs, but he claims to kill him. They stage the scene. He then gets the rest of the money, the other 15,000,
00:19:06
Speaker
at which point after he takes the money, the Ukrainian secret services, the SBU, then arrest the organizer. Although some news reports say they actually arrest two people. And all we know about the plot's organizer is he's described as a portly man in a white shirt and is known only as Mr. G. Now correct me if I'm wrong, Joshua.
00:19:35
Speaker
Mr. G is a character from House of the Dead, isn't he? And also I believe how how the Sacha Baron Cohen character L.E.G is referred to in more formal contexts. So quite frankly, there's a wealth of possible suspects here. Yes, exactly two. A wealth of two. One of which is a polygonal model found only in a computer game found in arcades. The other of whom is the fictional alter ego of a British comedian.
00:20:05
Speaker
who starred in a movie where Charles Dance wore a miniskirt. No, Charles Dance. Well, he does in that film. Anyway.
00:20:13
Speaker
I'm starting to think we might be getting sidetracked here. So the mechanics is the assassin was working for the Ukrainian secret services. Now, of course, the operative question here is, why didn't they just arrest the organizer once the down payment is made?
Russia-Ukraine Tensions and Conspiracies
00:20:34
Speaker
Why did they have to go through the hoaxed assassination?
00:20:38
Speaker
Well, yes, that's kind of the bit I don't really understand. They claim it was all about, where are we, again, the false sense of security. They wanted to gather more evidence and they wanted to link this plot specifically to Russian secret services, because obviously it's all well and good picking up the one guy who was the one who paid the money to the assassin.
00:21:04
Speaker
if they want to link this back to an actual directive that came from higher up in the Russian administration.
00:21:11
Speaker
then they're going to need a little bit more evidence. Now, I suppose what you might be looking for is once the hit is made, you want to make sure that the organizer then sends back a confirmation message to their superiors back in Moscow. So maybe that's the, we have to fake the debts so that we get the confirmation message sent back. Because otherwise all you have is
00:21:37
Speaker
Russian national comes to the Ukraine and wants to kill a Russian in exile. That could be a private concern. But once you get confirmation of the death, and that confirmation goes back to the Kremlin, then you go, Oh, no, that's a state sanction killing by that point. Yes, a single person you could
00:21:57
Speaker
You could write off as a misguided patriot who thought he was doing the Russian administration a favor but acting independently, yes, but that's sort of a Russian Jack Ruby. Exactly.
00:22:11
Speaker
What happened to Jack Ruby? He died of cancer, didn't he? He did, yes. He shot Oswald and then died of cancer, yes. Not immediately, though. I should point out that that correlation, not causation. Yes, yes. Two things, Lee Harvey Oswald doesn't cause cancer. As far as we know. I believe he wasn't smoking, which causes cancer. Yes, I mean, obviously, it almost goes without saying that there is a lot of politics involved here. Russia and Ukraine are not on the best of terms at the moment.
00:22:39
Speaker
The shooting down of MH17 that we've just talked about is but one of numerous points of contention about what's going on there. Babchenko is a journalist in the exile. It would be fair to say in Ukraine. So I can certainly see why you'd want for political purposes to
00:23:01
Speaker
tie this back to Russia, and I suppose for simply the security of your own country. If people are running around the commissioning assassinations, you're going to want to know exactly what's going on. So again, back to the conspiracy angle. So the Ukraine is definitely alleging a conspiracy to murder Mr. Babchenko.
00:23:24
Speaker
I think it would be fairly fair to say that the counteraction against him was also a conspiracy, wasn't it? It was an action. It was. There was a cover-up where they faked someone's death to essentially do what secret services and the police do all the time, which is to lower people into a sense of false security about a crime they've committed so they can then spring the trap upon them.
00:23:50
Speaker
So there was a cover-up, there was a plot and involved multiple people operating in secret. There definitely was a conspiracy against the Secret of Assassination attempt against Arkady Babchenko. So a conspiracy to counter a conspiracy. It's just conspiracy theories all the way down. Yes, well, it should be. Now, I understand at the time he was obviously very pleased with himself for cheating.
00:24:17
Speaker
Other people have not been so happy with the whole stunt. Babchenko's wife, possibly among them, depending on whether or not she was in it. But I believe other sort of journalistic organisations have not been happy that this kind of stunt
Ethical Concerns from Journalists
00:24:31
Speaker
occurred. No. Reporters Without Borders called the day's development pathetic and regrettable and dangerous for any government to manipulate facts. The Committee to Protect Journalists called
00:24:47
Speaker
well actually asked why extreme measures such as staging Babchenko's murder was necessary and Moscow-based journalists have gone look this is actually undermined the credibility of journalists and the media. Babchenko, one of them, Andrei Solatov,
00:25:06
Speaker
He said, is a journalist not a policeman for Christ's sake? And part of our job is trust whatever Trump imputes and say about fake news. So some journalists have gone, look,
00:25:18
Speaker
What has happened here is that Russia can quite plausibly say this is just fake news about Russia. This was a hoaxed assassination and they're claiming that they had to hoax the assassination to root out Russian spies. But, you know, it just looks like the Ukrainian secret services have faked murdering someone to tar Russia for a crime that Russia did not commit. Yes, it does. It does seem to have an element of propaganda about it, doesn't it? It's
00:25:48
Speaker
the news conference, the flashy way it was staged, you could imagine them having been more subtle about it. I mean, I suppose if it really was true that faking his murder was the only way to get it done, then that probably you couldn't have done that without it making the news. So maybe there was no way around it, but it does seem like it was done at least part of the motivation behind the way it was done.
00:26:18
Speaker
was to score a propaganda coup against Russia. And the reason why something like this, the death of a journalist, is guaranteed to make the news pretty much instantly is that, of course, it would be very readily believed because there's such a lot of precedent. Journalists critical of the Putin regime tend to have a bit of a check on their lifespan. How many incidents of
00:26:44
Speaker
murdered Russians and just journalists forgetting the other people like your Litvinenko's and your God, the name's completely just escaped me. The guy and his daughter who just got our scree piles, the scree piles.
00:26:56
Speaker
Simply looking at journalists, I mean, how many of them have been murdered or supposedly murdered by Russian agents? Well, since 2012, at least 10. So, you know, just over one a year. Yeah. Journalists don't seem to have a very good lifespan if they're critical of Russia in general. So I guess the other thing is with the
00:27:23
Speaker
MH17 incident, Russia's response, I believe, has been flat-out denial. And here... Oh, yes. I mean, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the operation as a masquerade done for propagandistic effect. And she added that Russia was happy that Babchenko was alive, saying, I wish it were always like that. I can imagine Putin sitting there biting his nails going,
00:27:51
Speaker
that poor journalist man who was killed in his house, I am so very sad. Ah, he's alive, hooray! My accent went through about five different Eastern European countries there, but you get the idea. Indeed, even hitting Transylvania at one point. Well done. Yes. Two Transylvanian accents. Anyway, so again, it just sort of turns into a bit of a propaganda war.
00:28:19
Speaker
And as I say, because it does seem to have been at least a partial motivation was propaganda there.
00:28:27
Speaker
that does then mean the Russians can turn that around and say, look, this was just a propaganda stunt, you're just trying to make us look bad again. Although Batchenko has replied to that. So in a Facebook post, which is posted basically the day after his miraculous resurrection, he actually ridiculed people who said this was a propaganda stunt by the Ukraine, wasn't it, by saying that
Babchenko's Defense of His Actions
00:28:50
Speaker
Those who allege that Ukrainian authorities carried out the operation just for a laugh, in the case of, oh yes, the Ukrainian authorities are all like, we're kind of bored, we have nothing to do. Let's paint Babchenko's back with blood, make his face a giant blood clot, take him to the morgue and say it was like that from the beginning.
00:29:11
Speaker
And these guys were like, hell yeah, let's do it, because we really have nothing else to do. So Babchenko has gone, look, if you think that the Ukrainian secret service is going to go to all of this effort to tower Russia with my mock assassination, you really need to think about the kind of claims you're making here. Do you find that convincing? No, not at all. I think that if you're in a situation where there's a
00:29:40
Speaker
A political dispute between one nation state and another in that political dispute has included things such as planes being shot down over your territory and people making they said they said claims about it. I.
00:29:56
Speaker
don't think it's out of the picture that the Ukrainians could have hoaxed the entire thing from the start. I think given Russia's history of extrajudicial assassination of journalists and people who are just critical of Russia's role in the world, it seems much more likely that Russia was behind this. But at the same time, there are sort of aspects to the story that go
00:30:22
Speaker
bits of the story are a bit weird so apparently they knew about the plot two months before it began and then they only eluded Babchenko one month before the assassination and yet the money passing hand and things like that occurred much later on in the story. The timeline itself
00:30:45
Speaker
does seem ever so slightly weird. The fact that they had to go through the death rather than simply arrest the organizer as soon as he paid the money through to the alleged hit person. There are aspects of the story that make you go
00:31:00
Speaker
The story is weird. But then again, almost any story about an extrajudicial assassination is going to end up being weird. These are not normal events. And when you describe the apparatus of standard spy or surveillance activity, it always ends up being you went through so much effort for what? Well, if we were to if we were to manufacture a moral
00:31:29
Speaker
that suits our own purposes from the whole episode. Would it be fair to say that this is further justification for the idea that a conspiracy theories are not inherently irrational because we can see conspiracy type events occurring all the time and that because we know such conspiracies do occur we should therefore
00:31:51
Speaker
be suspicious of any of these sorts of events when they happen? Yes, I think that's a perfectly good moral. Let me add a second moral to that, which is about the evidential stuff. So as I said earlier, there's a question here as to how many people were arrested by the Ukrainians after the event. So the standard story is we've got Mr G. Some of the stories mention there was a second person arrested.
00:32:19
Speaker
Now of course with any breaking news story there's a lot of information which gets put into the media some of which when it gets fact checked a few days later is going to disappear and so what makes the assassination or the mock assassination of RKD Babchenko so interesting
00:32:40
Speaker
is that because the news story broke so quickly and then we got the story of his survival one day later it turns out that we have two competing news stories the initial assassination story then the survival story and there's going to be fact checking for both
Media Coverage and Conspiracy Theories
00:32:59
Speaker
of those the initial report and then the report about his survival so you're going to get these kind of weird things such as
00:33:07
Speaker
Babchenko says the timeline looks like that. We actually have no statement from the Ukrainian secret servers as to when they found out about the plot. So Babchenko might just be wrong. Maybe the Ukrainians didn't know two months in advance. Maybe they only knew at the point that which they then went and told him about things.
00:33:27
Speaker
the story about how many people were involved is going to be due to presumably just printing everything available at any particular point in time and refining the stories things go on. And so the reason why there are going to be probably ongoing conspiracy theories about the assassination of Bebchenko
00:33:48
Speaker
is that there's a lot of information out there, and it's probably going to take quite some time before we get the official history, so to speak, of what went on here. And in that time between the initial media reports and the official story coming out, the confusing details are going to launch a thousand ships of conspiracy theories out towards Troy.
00:34:14
Speaker
I'm just going to go whole hog with that analogy there. And I think that's the fascinating part. Normally what you would have in these situations is the story about the assassination. But of course we've got two competing narratives here. The story of the initial assassination and of course the story of the survival. And trying to sort out both stories into one grand unified narrative is going to take some work.
00:34:40
Speaker
And whilst that work is going on, there are going to be a lot of competing theories to explain any supposed discrepancies in those tales. Well, there you go.
Episode Wrap-up and Future Content
00:34:51
Speaker
Well, I think we've come to the end of an episode, having wrapped up this really, really quite interesting story. We could have done it as part of a news update this week or probably even last week. But frankly, it was worth going into in a bit more detail.
00:35:05
Speaker
because if nothing else, it's really quite fascinating. And also trying to work out how to put it into a pithy new segment turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Yes, well, there you go. So it was much better to talk about it in this kind of free-flowing conversation than try to make it into one paragraph. Yes. So you are in Germany next week as well? I am indeed. I'm in Karlsruhe up until Friday of next week. Well, there we go. So we may have another dispatch from Deutschland
00:35:33
Speaker
Next, will we get a bit of a look at the work you've been doing or will they have to wait until it gets sort of published officially? There might be a bit of a discussion about some fake news next week. Well that could be useful. Oh well, you'll just have to tune in and find out. There you go, look at that, plugging future content. I should be telling them to like and subscribe. And remember, give money to our patron campaign. But I believe that'll all be covered in the handy little
00:36:02
Speaker
a pre-canned extra bit that we'll play shortly after we say goodbye, which I think is what we're about to do now. Is it what we're about to do now? Yes. Yes, right. It is. I'm about to say, wait for it, wait for it. Goodbye. And I will counter with goodbye. Goodbye. You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
00:36:28
Speaker
It is written, researched and performed by Josh Addison, aka monkeyfluids, and MRXtenteth, aka Conspiracism on Twitter. This podcast is available where all good podcasts can be found, as well as iTunes, Podbean and Stitcher.
00:36:48
Speaker
It can also be watched on YouTube. Just search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, or, if you happen to be technophobic, consult the auguries. You can support the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy via our Patreon page, as listed in the podcast description, or just by searching for us on Patreon.
00:37:11
Speaker
You can also support us via the Podbean patronage system, if that is more your style. You do you. If you want to get in contact with us, why not email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com, or find us on Facebook. And remember, it's just a step to the left.