Mimi Swaybe

This is a story about identity, an imbalance of power and the post-colonial legacy of the British Army in Kenya.

This is World of Secrets.

Searching for Soldier Dad.

A BBC World Service investigation.

Listen now.

Kathy grows up barely knowing anything about her father.

Sometimes she's bullied at school in Kenya.

Being mixed race, her skin is lighter, her hair is a different texture.

Her mum, Maggie, tells Kathy her dad was a soldier and had been deployed to Afghanistan.

But after searching Facebook late into the night, Kathy learns the truth, well, part of it, and discovers her father is alive.

And he was a soldier in the British Army.

Cathy doesn't know it yet, but this marks the beginning of a nine-year quest to find her father.

A quest that will unite her with lawyers and DNA detectives across the world and will reveal to her that she's far from alone in her search.

She'll discover that her story is part of a bigger pattern, one whose implications go to the very highest levels of power.

I'm Ivana Davidovic, a BBC journalist.

For the past two years, I've had exclusive access to a cutting-edge project to find absentee military fathers.

We expose a scandal that has hidden in plain sight for decades.

This is World of Secrets, Season 12.

Searching for Soldier Dad, a BBC World Service investigation.

We're following lawyers and scientists who are launching a revolutionary project that fuses DNA science with law.