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Crime Story Episode 63: Chloe Hadjimatheou

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: For more than three decades, Peter Walaschek has been on the run. In the late 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, Walaschek admitted to selling illegal chemicals to the Iranian regime. Chemicals used to make mustard gas, a thick toxic gas that poisons the air and kills people indiscriminately. But Peter Walaschek wasn't a professional weapons dealer or a career criminal. He was a pharmacist who happened to really hate his office job. In her podcast, The Gas Man, Chloe Hadjimatheou tracks the international fugitive down, only to find him hiding in plain sight. I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story.

[music fades up then out]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Chloe, welcome to the podcast.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So, the gas man. Who was the gas man?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So the gas man was a guy called Peter Walaschek, who when I found him was living in a small town called Siegburg, not far from Cologne. He was originally a pharmacist, a job he really disdained. He believed he was a great intellectual and he should have been a physicist, but his father insisted that he go into pharmacology, and he ended up opening a pharmacy in Germany. He couldn't stand it. He described how he hated the sick people who walked in there. And at some point, and I really don't know when this happened or how it came about, but he began supplying the Iranians with medicine, pharmaceuticals. And that business went very well. He closed his pharmacy and moved into wholesale medicine. And at some point, the Iranians felt that they trusted him enough to approach him again and say, well, listen, thank you so much for the medicine that you're giving us. We would love it if you could source some chemicals for us as well. And it seems the price was right, and so he began to look for a particular chemical that was available only in very few places, and particularly at a company in Baltimore, a big chemical company called Alcalak. People who work in pharmaceuticals and chemicals that were around in the 1980s would have heard of it because it was really massive. It was a really big deal back then. And Alcalak was selling a byproduct of another chemical process. This byproduct was called thiodiglycol, and it has various uses. One of the things you can do with it is use it to make the ink that you get in ballpoint pens. But another thing you can do with it is use it to make gas, poison gas; a chemical weapon with which you can kill people.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I just want to go back to -- because we saw, the world saw, what chemical mustard gas could do during this war. I don't, I'm not asking you to give us a history of that conflict. But can you give us a sense of what was happening there with the Iranians looking to retaliate?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So the Iran-Iraq war was really brutal and deadly. And it's hard to imagine this now, but back then, Saddam Hussein in Iraq was the friend of the West. America and Europe really supported him. They sold him a lot of weapons. The enemy back then was the Iranian regime, which was an Islamic theocracy. And part of its kind of raison d'être was being opposed to America and to Europe and to liberal democracies. And so, you know, Saddam Hussein was very, very well-armed in this conflict. And one of the things that he had at his disposal was chemical weapons, weapons like mustard gas and sarin. So he was ready to go as soon as the war began with these weapons. Tens of thousands of people were killed and also soldiers on the battlefield. It's important to say that Iran was recruiting very, very young people, boys to go and fight in that war. Many of them had beards because Iran was an Islamic theocracy, and it was mandatory for men to have beards. But that obviously meant that even though they had things like gas masks, they were practically useless because the beard would prevent the gas mask locking around their faces, and all the gas would seep in and poison them. So they really didn't have many defenses.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: At the beginning of the war, the sort of, the word out there was that the reason that Iran didn't have chemical weapons was that its ruler, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, had decreed that it was un-Islamic to use weapons of mass destruction, indiscriminate weapons. Other people thought that it was less a religious reason and more the simple fact that Iran hadn't got that kind of industry set up in the same way that Iraq did. They didn't have these weapons at their disposal. But they suffered so much that by the end of the war, this man who worked for the Iranian regime contacted Peter Walaschek and asked him to source this particular chemical for him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So how far did Peter get in sourcing that material?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So he approached Alcalak and he asked for this chemical, and managed to find somebody who worked at Alcalak at the time and who was in the meetings that they had when Peter Walaschek first asked for this. And he says, yes, we did think it was rather a lot. I mean, in order for a factory to make ballpoint pens, they might need a barrel of this stuff a year later. Peter Walaschek was asking for 45-odd barrels. So I mean, it was an enormous quantity that really had no legitimate industrial use. Nevertheless, Alcalak agreed to give him this. And he claimed that it was going to customers in Europe. I don't think Alcalak did any proper checks and balances to find out where it was going. In any case, Peter Walaschek managed to get at least one shipment out and to Iran. Possibly several more before he was caught. And the way he was caught was fascinating.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. I want to hear -- that was my next question. How did it all stop? How did he get on the radar of the authorities?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So Peter Walaschek was pretty unlucky, because the third time he tried to get a shipment out of Baltimore, the way in which the customs form was filled out raised alarm bells in the Baltimore Customs Office. And Peter Walaschek was pretty unlucky, because that day when those alarm bells were raised, it was the first day of a new customs officer, customs investigator, who had a history of being particularly brilliant at his job. [KATHLENN: Hmm.] This was a man called Dennis Bass. For years, he had worked investigating drugs that were coming into America. He was working undercover with some really tough and dangerous drug dealers. He described incredible sort of operations where... he told me about one where he was wired up in a car, and this really quite dangerous drug dealer got in the car with him and started taking his shirt off. And Dennis Bass said, what are you doing? And he said, I'm showing you that I don't have a wire on. I need you to do the same. And not losing his cool for a second, Dennis Bass started shouting at him, you get away from here! It's disgusting getting your clothes off near me! Get out my car! Get out my car! And caused such a fuss that this guy said, okay, okay, sorry, sorry, I'll get dressed again. And he managed to get away. Other times he talked about how he would be setting up drug deals and he'd click his fingers and a guy would come through the door and open a suitcase with a million dollars. And he'd say--

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Wow.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: --[inaudible], just to let you know, I've got the cash here. And close the suitcase and leave again. Obviously, that would be some poor customs officer who would have to run back to the bank and give all the cash back to the bank.

[Kathleen laughs]

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: But he was incredibly successful. And at some point he'd done quite a few years of this quite taxing job. And somebody suggested to him, you know, there is a job going in the office that looks at exports. Why don't you have a go at that? And he thought, well, could be different, could be interesting. Better hours, quieter. And so it was his first day in this new office. And Peter Walaschek's custom docket ended up on his desk. Somebody said, look, this looks a bit funny. Do you want to look into it? And when Dennis Bass started looking at the customs docket, he realized that actually there'd been a red flag about this company Alcalak in the past. Somebody had called in with an anonymous tip saying, we think Alcalak is up to no good. They'd investigated the company, but they hadn't been able to find anything. But that red flag was there. And so, Dennis Bass went down to the harbour in Baltimore to where this huge shipping container with all of these barrels of this liquid chemical were, and he... he said he took a turkey baster actually and took a little sample out of one of the barrels and had it analyzed. And they said to him it's thiodiglycol, something that's used to make chemical weapons.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Imagine, you know, this is his first week in the job, and he says to his boss, look, if we seize this shipment now, all we've got is a kind of customs violation. We haven't really got anything. What I'd like to do is a switch. I'd like to get all the barrels off and put in a fake shipment and then watch it and see where it goes. And his boss kind of reluctantly agrees to this, this really quite big operation. So in the middle of the night, Dennis Bass gets the local fire department to come down to Baltimore Harbor. They get all these barrels off the shipping container and replace them with identical barrels full of water, which is where the fire department came in. They filled all these barrels. And then they sat back and waited. And, you know, back then in the '80s, there weren't the kind of tracking devices we have today. And so he waits, and he waits months. I mean, this shipment takes a very long time. It gets to Pakistan, and then he sees it go off again, and it ends up in Iran. And now he knows that this is definitely a shipment that was going to a very, very illicit country. A country at war.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And so they go down and they raid the offices of Alcalak, and they find all these documents showing who had ordered this shipment. And they also find a young woman who has been promoted way out of her comfort zone. And she was so keen to do well and to please the customer, that when Peter Walaschek asked her to fudge the shipping document and sort of not really say what the chemical was and not really say what the destination was, I think they'd written something like 'the Far East' on the destination. So she was very, very nervous when the customs office raided her company, and she was prepared to bend over backwards to help. And so Dennis Bass said to her, you're going to help me get this German guy to America. You're going to call him up and you're going to tell him that he could be an Alcalak representative in Germany, and that you'll pay for his flight and his hotel if he comes to America. Now, Peter Walaschek was no fan of America, but actually the idea of a freebie that would get him to Baltimore and, you know, he could do a little day trip to New York City and see the sights, he couldn't quite resist. So he got on the plane despite his better judgment, he later says. And when he landed at Baltimore Airport, he was immediately arrested by Dennis Bass's people.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And charged with what?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So initially, he was charged with violating sanctions laws, I think, by trying to get this illicit chemical to a country at war. He told Dennis Bass when he was questioned that, yes, he had sourced this chemical for Iran, but that he didn't realize that it was illegal and that he didn't know what it was going to be used for. And he stuck by that story, but he also agreed to help Dennis Bass. And at this point, Dennis Bass was so ambitious, this wasn't enough for him. He wanted to catch the Iranian guy who had first requested the shipment. And so he was going to use Peter Walaschek to try and do another sting operation to get the Iranian handler to America and arrest him. But the courts were now looking favorably on Peter Walaschek. He pled guilty. He was cooperating with the police. And so they allowed him to be released to a halfway house. And there weren't any halfway houses in Baltimore that had any room, and so the judge allowed him to go to a halfway house in Washington, D.C. And at this point in the story, there's this really quite bizarre sidebar, which I couldn't, I couldn't quite get my head around.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: As Peter Walaschek is telling me this story, he says to me, they let me leave the halfway house to work in a zoo.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER WALASCHEK: You can go in a zoo, you can make something with old people. I said, no, old people not... no.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And how long did you work in the zoo?

PETER WALASCHEK: For four months.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And I was thinking, a zoo? What on earth is he talking about? What it ends up is that in Washington, D.C., under the Customs House was an aquarium, this really quite impressive aquarium sitting under a government building. [KATHLEEN: Crazy.] When I ask Dennis Bass about it, he says, oh, you know, these government buildings, they have these weird little features sometimes.

SOUNDCLIP

DENNIS BASS: He worked in the basement of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the agency whose laws he violated in the aquarium. He was like a volunteer there.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Why do they have an aquarium?

DENNIS BASS: It's the U.S. government. They do a lot of strange things.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And of course, for him, it was a really useful way to be out of the halfway house during the day, nobody checking up on him or what he's doing, at which point he could go to a phone box and call his friends in Iran. And they arranged a fake passport for him. And one day he left the halfway house, took this passport, went to the airport and just got on a plane to Germany. And he was gone.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I was going to say, he ends up back in Germany, and that's where you get to talk to him. And this to me was like the moment that I couldn't get enough of, was meeting him at his place. Because that man, I mean, I didn't like him. [laughs] I'll say it right there. Tell me about meeting him and what he was like. Like, how did that happen?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Well, it was really strange, actually. I contacted him, and, you know, I was really pleased to find his contact details in the first place. And then secondly, I just thought I would contact him and he would tell me where to stuff it, really. But when I spoke to him, I said, wow. Mr. Peter Walaschek, you've had such an interesting life. You've done so many things, you've travelled. And he said, yeah, many people tell me I should write a book. And I said, well, maybe you could just tell me your life story instead. And he said, yeah, that's a nice idea. And so he agreed for me to come to Siegburg and meet him at his home and interview him. And so we went to this small picturesque town of Siegburg, and we were greeted by this old man. He's got large glasses and he had white, short cropped hair. And he invited us into his office, which is just above his garage next to his home. And we went through the door of his office. And the first thing I noticed was this massive -- and when I say massive, it's probably two metres by two metres -- painting, portrait, of Joseph Stalin.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Incredible.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And I was like, what is this? And then I get up the top of the stairs and just outside the room, his actual office, was another enormous painting of Chairman Mao, with like little communists below him, sort of exalting him. And then we get in the office, and it's just covered... It's so hard to describe because it was just so-- there was so much stuff in it. It was just like a massive cross between a dusty old museum with no curator, and a kind of storage facility. It was just full of stuff. But all along the windows and along many of the surfaces were busts and statues of dictators from around the world. Actually, everybody that you can think of was there, apart from Hitler. That was the only guy who was missing from the dictators' club that he had in his office.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you have any sense of where that came from? He was in Germany originally, right?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So, yes. But actually -- and here's a little fact that didn't make it into the podcast. Peter Walaschek was actually born in the Czech Republic. His father and family were German, and they were Nazis stationed in the Czech Republic in the Second World War. His father was an unrepentant Nazi. Peter Walaschek, I don't know how or why, probably in reaction to his father, considered himself a very passionate communist, which is why he exalted Stalin and Mao. I think he had no love for Hitler, but his sort of predominant feeling was of anti-Westernism, anti-imperialism. So any enemy of the West really was his friend.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: One of the more interesting parts was obviously he admits to the things that he does, he continues to say that he didn't know. But then you ask him about his conscience. And I found that interesting. You had to look up how to say conscience in German.

SOUNDCLIP

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: You have no regrets.

PETER WALASCHEK: No.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So your conscience is clear. Conscience?

PETER WALASCHEK: What?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Shall I look it up?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And I feel like his true colours come out in that moment. Can you tell us about how he justified the work that he did? Whether he knew it or not, he was supplying a country that was going to use these chemical weapons to kill and destroy the lives of men, women and children. And so how did he respond to that?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So the first thing that he said was that the Iranians had taken him to the battlefield.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER WALASCHEK: I was on the border where they are fighting. I saw it. I saw this was...

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: The chemical weapons.

PETER WALASCHEK: Yes, I saw it. Because the Iranians were dead. Hundreds.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: It's really hard to pinpoint exactly when this happened. And he gave us kind of contradictory accounts about it. But my best guess is that he was taken by the Iranians to see the victims of chemical attacks, people that the Iraqis had gassed on the Iranian side, in order for Iran to justify the chemicals that they were requesting him to buy for them. I think that it's highly unlikely that a man as clever as Peter Walaschek didn't know what the chemicals were for. And I think the Iranians took him to show him, look, we need these. Look what's being done to us. We need our own weapons for our own protection. And he actually said to me... he refused to admit that he knew what they were, but he says, even if I had known, I would have got them for the Iranians because the Iranians were my friends, and they were being killed.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But he adds that he would have charged more had he had known what they were going to be used for.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Yes. He said, you know, I really didn't know. If I had known, I would have charged more. I tried to push him on it and say, you know, if you'd seen the effects that chemical weapons have on a human being, how could you want that to happen to another human being on any side? But he wouldn't be drawn on that. And when I began using the term 'human rights' is where he became very, very incensed.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER WALASCHEK: Forget these fucking human rights. I hate it. I hate-- I hate this. There is no human rights.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And he started shouting that human rights was a stupid concept.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER WALASCHEK: And human rights. When I hear this, this other stupid Western thinking. Human rights.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And this is where it gets even weirder.

SOUNDCLIP

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Okay, but what about then--

PETER WALASCHEK: My God. Please, shut up about this.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER WALASCHEK: Forget this fucking story with Iran and Iraq. Are you an agent from U.S.?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: No, I'm from London. I'm a journalist.

PETER WALASCHEK: Because nobody has asked me in the last 30 years about this. And so...

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: He explained that he doesn't need to justify his past because he lives in the present, because now he's studying to be a Buddhist monk.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That, that was crazy. I mean, you go a little bit down that road and talk to an established Buddhist monk about Peter's transition, if that's the right word to use. And he's kind of doubtful, right, that that is even happening.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: He explains that either Peter Walaschek is deliberately using Buddhism to obfuscate his own responsibility, or he has massively misunderstood the faith. In Thailand, where Peter Walaschek often goes and stays in Buddhist monasteries to receive his teaching, this Buddhist order explained to us that people are required to show that they don't have a criminal record. Buddhism doesn't hold any stigma against somebody who's committed crimes in the past, but it expects you to have paid for your crimes. And if you've committed a crime, you're supposed to do the time. Once that time is up, that's okay. But Peter Walaschek never paid for what he did. He ran away and several times he was caught by authorities in other countries over the years. And each time, he managed to slip the net and get away again. And so he is very clear. He doesn't believe he has to pay for any crime.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How were you able to find Peter if he was on the run? You said you were able to find him, but how could you find him?

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: So actually, what happened was that I looked him up on the internet, as you would, and I was very, very lucky that a local newspaper in Siegburg had done a feature on this 80-something-year-old man becoming a Buddhist monk. But the journalist working for this local paper was really young. She was starting out; was her first job. And I called her up and I said, listen, you've wrote this article about this 80-something-year-old man, you know, becoming a Buddhist monk at his age. And I said to her, did you go to his home? And she said, yes, yes. I went to his home to interview him. And I said, did you see the portraits of Stalin and Mao and all the busts? And she said, yes, I did. I thought it was really strange. [Kathleen laughs] And I said, did you know about his history about selling chemicals to Iran and being on the run? And she said, yes, I did hear about that. And I said, I hate to tell you this, but that's the story. Not the Buddhism thing. [laughter] But, you know, when you're a new journalist, your editor says, can you go out and get this light story, and you just want to do what your editor tells you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Of course, of course. What a great story.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And she put me in touch with Peter Walaschek. So that's [KATHLEEN: Good.] how I first called.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That's how you got him.

[music]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How is he able to live in Germany so easily? I'm assuming the German authorities know who he is and what he's done.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: That was my first question as well. And it turns out that Germany has no extradition treaty with America. And because he didn't break any German laws, it's very hard for the German state to hold him accountable. And so they can't really charge him with the crimes that he did in the '80s, and they won't extradite him because they simply don't have that kind of agreement with America. So he is on safe stuff in Germany. And in fact, he knew that. So when he landed in Germany, he actually called up Dennis Bass. And he called him up several times over the years, basically to gloat about the fact that he got away. But then also to say, can't you just make this go away if I pay a little fine or something? I mean, it was clearly cramping his style because he was afraid to travel, because other countries do have various extradition agreements with America. And he was afraid that he might be extradited by other countries.

SOUNDCLIP

DENNIS BASS: He's looked over his shoulder since the day he fled the United States. I think there's nights that it bothered him. He was a real high roller, he used to travel all over, and suddenly he'd go to places and the police would lock him up in those places. And I hope, you know, someday he pays the price, whether Buddha does it for him or somebody else.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Dennis Bass was very clear: You pled guilty. This will never go away. You need to come back here and do your time like a man, in his words.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. I mean, the two men that you have in this podcast, Bass and Walaschek, are so interesting. But I feel like the real winner was Peter, and sadly, Bass is sort of left unhappily sort of protesting but red-faced and doesn't really have anything he can do about it.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: It's really frustrating for him because he did his job excellently. [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] But then unfortunately, the authorities around him, and I think possibly the courts, didn't really, I think, get the gravity of who Peter Walaschek was and what he'd done.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: And that's kind of the point of the podcast, really, is to talk about these middlemen. Because we see these wars and we often hold the leaders of the countries at war accountable for war crimes, and what we rarely talk about is how those weapons got in their hands. And particularly the private individuals who are doing business deals in the back room, sitting quietly behind desks, who contribute to these wars and to human suffering. And Peter Walaschek was certainly somebody who was prepared to do that by selling these chemicals to Iran.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay. Well, Chloe, thank you. Your work is incredible. Your journalism is so top notch. And this is such a well-told story. I appreciate you coming on.

CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU: Thank you so much for having me.

[Music: Series closing theme]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We release a new episode every Monday, so please remember to follow the show in your podcast app. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts' YouTube channel, or by subscribing to CBC Podcasts' True Crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to early access, subscribers to our True Crime channel also listen ad-free. Crime Story is hosted by me, Kathleen Goldhar. Our producers are Nikky Manfredi and Mitchell Stuart. Sound design by Julian Uzielli and Mitchell Stuart. Audio sourced from The Gas Man, a podcast by Tortoise Media. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard and our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is the senior manager of CBC Podcasts and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 63

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