Behind the Bastards - Part One: Jack Idema: The War On Terror's Dumbest Grifter

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

Robert is joined by Danl Goodman to discuss Jack Idema, the greatest conman of The Afghan War.Footnotes: Operation Desert Fraud Bad company: 'Jack' Idema and the bounty hunters of Kabul Vigilante Torturer Dies in Mexico Osama-Hunter Only the Latest Terror-Fightin' Wannabe Man Who Hunted Bin Laden With a Sword Now Jailed on a Gun Charge The Man Who Believed Himself The Shadow Warrior: Jack Idema Freelance Terrorist Hunter Tin Soldier Convicted Torturer, Vigilante in Mexican Stand-Off Jack Idema Jack Idema, jailed for torturing Afghans, reportedly dies in Mexico Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Robert Evans podcast. I don't have any time for an introduction. I have had a thought, a critical thought that I think must be analyzed before this episode. And it relates to Africa by Toto. Because in the opening strains of the song, the singer notes that it's going to take a lot to get whoever he's singing the song about away from him, and that there's nothing that 100 men

or more could do. But with social isolation in place, I think we have to assume that whoever is singing the song, Africa by Toto, like whatever character that is, is in fact isolated from the person that they said they could never be separated from, which leads the question, how many men more than 100 is the COVID-19 epidemic powerful then? This is critical to analyze. Nothing else matters. We're canceling the rest of the episode until we figure this out, Sophie. It's more than 100 men. Clearly. Yeah. Yeah. We're not canceling the episode. This is an episode with DJ Daniel. I'm not canceling that joy. I'm going to keep running the numbers on this. But while I do that, Dan, you're a fan of a lot of things, right? You're big into fandoms,

all sorts of stuff that you're a fan of. Are you a fan of the war in Afghanistan? Rhyming. Are you in Afghanistan? Get it? Oh my God. That was so good. I'm so proud. Okay. Thank you. I take it back. Nice job, Dan. Okay. Well, I mean, I'm a fan of no wars, but I have a feeling by the end of this, I will be even less a fan of this one. Well, the war in Afghanistan is a real... I think people... It's been going on for so long that now we all just think about it as this endless, slightly draining and expensive, but mostly forgotten disaster that we just can't seem to escape from. And I think we've forgotten... What a fucking crazy time the beginning of the war in Afghanistan was. It was one of the dumbest

times and places that has ever collided together as a result of what I can only call army grifters. This was a huge part of the early war... It still is, but now the grifting is done by giant corporations. But in the early days, when US troops were first into the country, there were a ton of just random assholes who would roll into Afghanistan with whatever weapons they could manage to smuggle across international borders and just try to do some shit. We don't talk about them anymore, but it's one of the funnest things that ever happened. And I want to tell you about a couple of these guys before we get to the main subject of our episode. The first one of these beautiful bastards I want to talk about was Gary Brooks Faulkner.

Now, Gary was a Greeley Colorado native who traveled by boat and a series of overland routes to try to make his way into Afghanistan and single-handedly capture Osama bin Laden. Now, he had to travel on a boat and via smuggling himself across borders because he was trying to get into Afghanistan with a pistol, a knife, night vision goggles, Christian evangelical literature, and a samurai sword that he all brought from home. What? That's his bin Laden kit was a pistol and knife, night vision goggles. Like, okay, so pistol, yeah, you're going to want you gun of some sort, right? A knife, practical, you're in the mountains, you're always going to want a knife, night vision goggles. Sure, Christian

evangelical literature. Okay, that doesn't seem practical, but go off. And then samurai sword, which really I think keys you into what Gary imagined he'd be doing. She just wanted that slung over his shoulder, striding across the back so that when, you know, the sun was beating down on him and you just saw the silhouette of a weirdo cosplayer coming into this town in Afghanistan, he would be have that sword in the silhouette off to the side. Yeah, you know, he imagined like getting into a duel with a couple of Taliban guys. And yeah, he had such dreams Gary did. But unfortunately, Gary never quite made it to Torah Bora to samurai fight the Taliban. Instead, he was arrested almost immediately in Pakistan,

because yeah. So the good news is that obviously, once the media heard that some guy with a samurai sword had been arrested in Afghanistan after leaving fucking Greeley, Colorado to go cat kidnap the world's greatest terrorist. It was it made the news. So he was sent back home by Pakistan, and he got kind of famous and he did appearances on the view and the late show with David Letterman. For real? Yeah. He was described as the Rocky Mountain Rambo, even though he saw no action of any kind and was in fact on dialysis the entire time. Oh my God. I feel comfortable saying if the police in Pakistan hadn't arrested him, he would have almost certainly died even without the Taliban's help. And with and with not a word to the world about his presence or actions, just disappearing

off of this earth. Yeah, his kidneys would have just given out as he was trying to hike up the fucking Khyber Pass with a samurai god damn katana. Like oh man. You'll love to hear about it. But he obviously like all that matters is that he got famous for trying to take on bin Laden with a samurai sword in a time when America was maybe the least rational we've ever been. So everyone loved fucking Gary Faulkner. They were fans. Okay, okay. Yeah. In the time of Willenium, we were okay with the guy with the samurai sword going into kick bin Laden ass. That was that. Now during the media tour he did after his arrest, Faulkner revealed that he was an ex-con who'd spent 12 years in jail on a number of larceny and burglary charges. And he kind of

brilliantly pivoted off of this to claim that as a skilled thief, he had precisely the kind of talent necessary to track down a terrorist mastermind. Bro, yo. That is the way you sell that shit to Hollywood. I mean, most certainly, especially in all these interviews you're doing, it's just like there I was. But oh my gosh. The only thing that's missing is a wife who wouldn't give him custody, like an ex-wife who wouldn't, like you add that in and you've got fucking 90 minutes solid. Yes, I love that. Oh my god. Fucking early 2000s, Nicholas Cage would have been the right dude to play this character. Definitely. I could see a hand flick somewhere and they're just like dismissing somebody. Yeah. Faulkner's a fun one. He even told, so during his interview with Letterman,

Gary Faulkner told that he didn't need to worry about whatever bodyguards Osama bin Laden had because, quote, I'm a thief, which is bulletproof logic. That's it. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Now, the unfortunate code out of the story of Gary Faulkner is that as a felon, he was not able to legally possess a firearm, which became a problem for him when he was arrested for shooting a man in self-defense back home in Colorado. So that things didn't work out great in the end for Gary Faulkner. Now, another beautiful Afghan war grifter was the Syrian born Matt Meason, a naturalized US citizen who also attempted to kill Osama bin Laden. In 2005, he got on a plane from Detroit to Syria. Apparently, there just used to be a direct like Detroit to Damascus route. The two big Ds.

And he was stopped by authorities when they realized he was traveling with $13,000 in cash, a taser, bullets, pepper spray, body armor, and three Geiger counters. I love the bullets because he's like, I'm going to be able to find, with all this cash, I'll be able to buy a gun when I hit Syria, but I better bring my own ammo. Yeah. And I better bring three Geiger counters. Now, he had a reason for that. I mean, okay, fair. Oh my gosh. Yeah. He claimed that his cover was that he was a private investigator studying the illegal uranium trade, and he was going to use the Geiger counters to help him lure in illegal uranium buyers or something like that. It never really made much sense. This is truly, this is, I mean, yeah. All these guys are heroes.

Yeah. Speaking of heroes, former British special air service soldier Colin Berry was the smartest of all these grifters, except for the guy we're about to talk about. He traveled to Afghanistan under the cover of working on housing projects for an engineering firm. And this seems to have been as a way to hide his activities trying to provide intel for MI6, who he claims approached him for aid and may in fact have done so. In any case, Berry's time as a secret agent in Afghanistan came to an end when he shot two random Afghan citizens to death in a hotel bar in Kabul. He was jailed for murder. Now, that little bit about the story where it's like this guy, with no evidence claims he was working for MI6 and maybe he was, all of these guys make claims

to having worked for like MI6 or the CIA or the Defense Department or something like that. And almost all of them actually did to some extent. Because here's the thing about the start of the war in Afghanistan. So number one, by the time like we invaded in Afghanistan, the State Department had about $340 million in bounties out for the top 30 terrorism suspects worldwide. So there were tens of millions of dollars out for dudes who could capture al-Qaeda motherfuckers or Taliban motherfuckers. Tens of millions of these bounties were paid off. So there was that kind of money going out. But there was also the militaries of multiple nations who were active in Afghanistan. And none of them knew a goddamn thing about Afghanistan.

So anyone who could come in and make a good pitch about how they could gather useful intel or do something else that was necessary had a real good chance of making tens of millions of dollars. Because again, the coalition was just shitting cash into the open mouths of anyone who could credibly claim to be fighting terrorism. And no one knew anything. It was a wild west at that point, right, in terms of the counter-terrorism industry. So you could just roll in the country and if you looked right and talked right, you could suddenly have fucking CIA dollars like flowing down your fucking mouth. It was a fun time. It sounds like a fun time. Yeah. So for a few years, Afghanistan was a grifter paradise. And no one exploited it more

entertainingly than Jack Edema. Jonathan Keith Edema was born in 1956 in Paukeepsie, New York. His parents were upper middle class and doting. And Jonathan was their only son. His father was a former Marine and a veteran of the Second World War. Jonathan grew up beloved and worshiped and surrounded by the sort of comfort and care that few children are fortunate enough to enjoy. When he was 12 years old, he watched the John Wayne classic, The Green Berets. Have you seen that movie, Daniel? I actually have not seen the Green Berets. But tell me about it. Side note, can I put in a request to the fans, if anybody wants to remixed Gangster's Paradise by Coolio and do grifters paradise, please. There we go. On Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. Make it happen.

Also shout out the city of Paukeepsie. I've heard of Paukeepsie, but Paukeepsie, I don't, Daniel. Paukeepsie is a little more familiar with, shout out. It's okay, Daniel. You missed him yesterday called Beyonce Beyoncé. That was the highlight of my day yesterday. Honestly, I'm always a fan. When the fans came after you for Agape as well, that was really funny. I love that. I mean, it's just so great. I immediately text Jamie Loftus in the middle of recording and said, guess what? Guess what happened? That's fantastic. I love it. And we've been laughing about it for two days. It's wonderful. I am so angry right now. Mostly, mostly, I am angry at the way the state of New York names towns. That is completely fair. Yeah. It's wrong. And I don't

think we should lean into that anymore. Agreed. Agreed. You're on, you're on Blast, New York. More, more, more mainland names. So the movie, The Green Berets was kind of the first movie about special forces. Like now there's like a fucking ton of those movies. It's like in every action movie heroes going to have some sort of special forces background. But like this was the first time like special forces were kind of new in Vietnam, like the idea that you would have these dudes and The Green Berets was a movie about them. And it was a very, a big hit. And it became John Adema's very favorite movie as a little boy. And seeing this film convinced him to give up his earlier dreams of being a veterinarian and instead joined the military and become a Green Beret

himself. He enlisted as soon as he was able to do so in 1975. But tragically, he was too late to fight and maybe die in Vietnam. But he did well enough on his entrance test that he qualified for the special forces. He was helped in this by the fact that the post Vietnam special forces had endured a serious manpower shortage since new recruits had been scared off from joining for some inexplicable reason. Jonathan was accepted even though he had bad eyesight. He did a three year active duty term as a radio operator and a weapons specialist and then spent some time in the reserves reaching the rank of Staff Sergeant before being discharged in 1984. One of the difficulties here is that even among credible sources, descriptions of Jack Adema's time in

the military very widely. This paragraph from a Rolling Stone article on The Man is probably as close to accurate as you're going to get in a story about this con man's military career. Though Adema's military record reflects qualification as a pistol expert and badges awarded for scuba and parachute training, there are no indications that he ever heard a shot fired in anger while he was in the military. Moreover, a 1994 North Carolina probation report quotes a military evaluator describing Adema as the most unmotivated, unprofessional, immature, enlisted man I have ever known. In a letter of reprimand cited Adema's gross immaturity characterized by irrationality and a tendency towards violence, the reprimand came

after Adema attempted to attack a senior commanding officer. So Jack Adema is in the special forces but you would not call him like he's not he's not good at it. I mean if he's attacking his officer you can't come on man. There were very few rules right after Vietnam. There were like nobody wanted to be in the military. It was a real shit show. Well there you go. Now while he was still in the reserves, Jonathan, which is the name he still went by at the time, spent several aimless years wandering around the small town in New York he lived in who pronounces the name of their town wrong because they're jerks. You know just kind of trying to figure out what to do with his life. See all John had ever wanted to do was fight in a foreign war but the accursed years

of relative peace after Vietnam made that almost an impossible impossibility. Eventually Jonathan settled on a way to still do cool looking army type stuff without actually serving in the military. He founded a counter-terrorism training school in the town of Red Hook. Now John had no real qualifications to do this other than the fact that he'd been very bad at being in the special forces. The exact extent of his work is unclear but journalists eventually confirmed that he trained guards to protect U.S. government facilities in Haiti and did some amount of like vaguely described work for the Thai military. The president's son Ron Reagan Jr. used his facilities at some point and we don't really have a clear idea as to why. And training people in vague counter-terrorism

techniques was not John's only activity during this period. He was also breaking the law constantly. In 1982 he was arrested for possession stolen property. In 1986 he was charged with resisting arrest and assault with attempt to physically harm. He received a 1988 arrest for disorderly conduct and a 1990 arrest for assault involving discharging a firearm. He was never convicted for any of these crimes and we don't really know what happened but you couldn't stop this dude from getting arrested. So you kind of go off go off just you know live your truth get arrested. This is clearly going to end in some fantastical manner so every move is just like I'm supporting it all the way up and down. Yeah I mean it ends in Mexico which I think we all know in our hearts

but great. I can't say if Jonathan was good or not at actually training people in counter-terrorism but he was terrible at running such a business legally. His camp generated numerous noise complaints and was eventually shut down over a zoning violation. Adima moved next to Fayetteville North Carolina a location he picked for its proximity to Special Forces headquarters near Fort Bragg. Now rather than selling terrorism training this time he instead set up a store dedicated to selling non-lethal military equipment and a side business running a series of special operations trade shows. It proved good at getting different manufacturers on board and filling big rooms with fancy military equipment and people who wanted to look at it. Now some of these people

were actually Special Forces veterans or members of the Defense Department but most of the people who showed up to these trade shows were soldier or fortune readers. They're guys who just wanted to like look at guns and stuff. Yeah great episode. So great episode. Thank you thank you and great magazine. Fully unproblematic magazine. Let me tell you something. When I had to battle that seal underwater I used my knife fighting techniques that I learned in the underwater knife fighting technique section of soldier or fortune. That seal came after me and I needed to defend myself. For the listeners I'm absolutely kidding. I have never hermed a single animal in my life ever I promise. Dan'll you we don't need to lie seals are a threat and the only way

to deal with them is underwater knife fighting. I am I focus always on practical prepping and so like you want to have some extra food you want to know how to deal with like a bleeding wound how to like staunch blood flow and you need to know how to beat a seal in a knife fight. Those are those are basic practical steps we can all take. Love it. So speaking of practical steps so the reality of the situation is that John Adema used his connections that he'd built in his counterterrorism training school to like fill up convention rooms with cool military gear and people would pay to go gawk at it and you know it was it was a decent business. That's the reality of what happened. Now John Adema would go on however to speak about this somewhat differently.

He would claim in the future that after leaving the army he worked as a U.S. military advisor in El Salvador and Honduras. There's no evidence for this. He claimed he worked as part of a special mission mission unit and refused to ever elaborate as to what that job entailed. No records support any of this. No records support that he did anything but failed to run a training center and then lead a bunch of nerds through a fucking convention center. And when confronted with the fact that there was no evidence of him doing all this badass special op stuff he would tell journalists that the records of his actual military service were secret records which he described as the ones that they don't want to give anyone which is really

really handy. So the trade shows that John ran generated enough interest from legitimate experts that Adema eventually met up with a subcontractor who was able to get him a real job training real cops in the former Soviet Republic of Lithuania who we all knew know is like the king of doing a good background check on a guy. That's what I hear. 1991 Lithuania. Yeah. What? You know what I'll say here? I hear the trade shows are great places to get products. I can't I can't tell what you're possibly trying to lead me into here. Dan, do they also have possibly services? If one of those services is enlisting in weird you know armies and potential terrorist organizations. I don't know what either of you were trying to do but on an unrelated note it is time for an ad plug.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French. In our newest show we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we

just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling

apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match

isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're on the internet and now we're going to talk about motherfucking Jack Adema some more. So he manages to like kind of leverage his various experiences into a job training cops in the former Soviet Republic of Lithuania. So he rolls there in 1991 right after the USSR ends. And the reality seems to be that he spent a brief period of time teaching cops in a very poor nation dealing with the collapse of its previous government. The reality for John Adema though is that he stumbled immediately

upon a multi-million dollar black market and backpack nuclear weapons. These devices known as special atomic demolitions munitions did exist in government stockpiles and there were constant rumors after the end of the Cold War that a number of them had escaped the fall of the USSR. But there's no evidence anywhere that such a device wound up on any nation's black market. The general incompetence of authorities worldwide and the fact that no one ever, no terrorist group ever got such a weapon is evidence that these were nothing more than rumors. But John Adema knew that the story of Russian suitcase nukes was a good one. So he started reaching out to senior Pentagon officials while he was still in Lithuania and telling them that he'd

stumbled upon the secret nuke market. Now, the secret nuke market. Yeah. And I don't know if you know this, Daniel, but if you start talking to defense department officials about the fact that you know where a bunch of nuclear weapons are being sold for cash, you will probably wind up having conversations with the FBI. That's just a shocker. Yeah. That's just how that's going to go. I feel like strange. Yeah. I feel like the easiest way to get a conversation with the FBI is to like make them believe you might know about stolen nuclear warheads. That's a they're going to be interested in that one. So the bureau demanded to sit down with Jack Adema and then demanded that he tell them who his sources were, which is a pretty reasonable

demand given the fact that he's talking about backpack nukes. But Adema refused to give them any concrete information because in his words, he believed the FBI had been penetrated by Russian agents. Now, here's how Rolling Stone describes what happened next. By Adema's account, the FBI then set out to destroy him, tearing him with more than 50 counts of wire fraud that put him in federal prison for four years during the mid 90s. However, US law enforcement officials actually began investigating Adema in May 1991, more than a year before he supposedly refused to hand over his Lithuanian sources to the FBI. The ATF noted in a report filed during the course of the investigation that Adema was known to have a fictitious major's ID from the from the army and was

disbarred from army contracts in June 18 1990, after he misrepresented his business as being owned by a minority. So this is all very winding because Jack lies about everything and a lot of this is pre the internet really coming around. But what happened is Jack committed mass wire fraud in a number of different ways, both from like stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from different companies and like investments and also running fake businesses that he just used to funnel money and loans through and doing stuff like lying to the government to get army contracts to provide them with equipment by pretending his business by a minority. So he wound up getting in a lot of trouble, investigated by multiple federal agencies and convicted with

50 counts of wire fraud and going to prison for four years. And he later claimed that this is because he'd stumbled upon a nuclear weapon market in Lithuania that the FBI had not wanted him to shut down for some reason. Anyway, it's a dumb story, but that's what happens. That's where I found it. But they were like, no, no, no, it's not important. We swear. Adema, this guy's story, there's so much that's hard to understand about like what happened here because he's he's again, he's just lying constantly. I mean, yeah, I was going to say it just sounds like every everybody's take hearing the lies and saying like, okay, and then not doing anything about it. And he just keeps spinning more and more webs, a lot of spider webs. Yeah, yeah. And he goes to jail.

And in his words, it's because the FBI wanted to destroy him. And in the FBI's words, it's because he just couldn't stop committing wire fraud. So Adema spent 1994 to 97 in a series of federal prisons. He kept up his correspondence with the outside world, though, and managed to get in contact with Jim Morris, a writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine and a former Special Forces major. I think Morris believed Adema's stories of being hunted by the FBI and took up the cause of defending him in a series of editorials. These actually convinced some mainstream reporters to look into the story. And one of these reporters was Ted Kavanaugh, a former founding partner of CNN. He brought the story to the executive producer of Eye to Eye with Connie Chung on CBS, and they

sent a real journalist, Gary Skirka, to interview Adema from prison. The resulting documentary wound up focusing on arms dealing in Lithuania and had actually like almost nothing to do with John Adema. But it won Skirka an award for investigative reporters in 1995. So Skirka felt bad because like Adema, he felt that Adema had helped him get on the trail of a real story because obviously there was a lot of fucking illegal weapons training going on in former Soviet bloc nations. But he had like he got cut from the documentary because there were no fucking suitcase nukes being sold. But Skirka likes John Adema. Yeah, he had lied about that. But Skirka likes this guy and he feels bad that he got cut from the documentary. And he feels a kind of angry that

CBS executives ordered all footage of Adema cut from the final product because they realized he was a grifter. But Skirka kind of falls under this guy's spell and he stays in touch with his jailhouse source throughout Adema's sentence and promises to help him out when Jonathan gets freed. Now, Adema had other nonjournalist pen pals during this time. He started exchanging letters with a woman named Victoria Running Wolf, who was a 40-ish blonde woman from Fayetteville. And the two had first met a few months after Adema got out of prison. But they'd like been exchanging letters and she fell in love with him while he was jailed. So we know immediately that this is going to go well. You've got a grifter who falls in love with a woman in prison. Victoria later recalled, quote,

I knew right then I was going to have my hands full. I knew it from the time he said hello. Yeah. So being the sort of fellow who's constitutionally incapable of not scheming, Adema convinced Victoria Running Wolf to invest with him in the ultimate pet resort, a hotel for pets. And as far as I can tell, this might have actually been a legitimate business. And I have to emphasize the as far as I can tell part because the only only one of the sources I found talks about this in any kind of depth. And I personally suspect that this must have been some kind of a con too. But it just hasn't been unraveled. But maybe yeah. This is con city up in here. Maybe he had a pet resort. It's impossible to say. Speaking of schemes, Jonathan Adema and his journalist pal Skirka

got together once he was out of prison. And using Skirka's credibility as an award-winning journalist, they succeeded in getting an assignment with 48 hours on CBS, reporting on the story of retired Green Beret Colonel George Marichek. Now, Colonel Marichek was and still is one of the most highly decorated Special Forces soldiers in history. And he also murdered the shit out of his wife in 1991. He was convicted. Yeah, he was convicted to this murder so many times. This guy fucking Marichek gets convicted of murder the way most people like go in for fucking colorectal cancer screenings like it's yeah. So he's murdering multiple people and then getting out for the same murder being brought to this. So he kills the shit out of his wife and he gets tried for it.

But he succeeds in because he's this decorated soldier building up, particularly with him like the right wing media ecosystem like soldier of fortune is big on this. He gets a bunch of people to be like, no, he's innocent. He was framed. You know, he didn't do it. Like this is just like a scheme against this American hero. So he keeps getting retried. And he keeps getting reconvicted to because he obviously did it. Yeah, it's so he's out of prison now and alive. But he was convicted of murder multiple times. But a lot of people think he's innocent. It's a very strange story. Maybe we'll cover it someday. Out of prison and alive. Yeah, he's currently out of prison, although again was convicted somewhere in the U.S. If you look up fucking George Marichek,

you'll figure it out. I'm just gonna leave him alone. Yeah, don't marry him. I can tell you that much. Yeah, I don't think I don't think that's gonna. Yeah, no. So John Adima sees that this special forces Colonel has become like the center of this this like media blitz and sees that there's fucking money in it. And he shoves his journalist pal Skirka onto the story and the two get to work investigating the murder. But as soon as CBS sees what they're working on, it like drops them immediately because they've realized that neither of these guys have any sense of objectivity about the case. And we're not in any way going to report critically on what had happened. And I'm gonna quote now from the Columbia Journalism Review. Adima and Skirka had opened a free Marichek

office in Wilmington, North Carolina, where the trial was taking place. And one witness alleged that Adima had another man came to his house to harass him the night before he was slated to testify. Adima also told several associates he was detained for impersonating a police officer in an effort to get into a Detroit prison and convince a convicted serial killer to confess to the murder. So there's I want to talk as a journalist here. So many layers as a journalist. Obviously, objectivity gets gets compromised all the time. There's really no way in being perfectly objective, especially you wind up sympathizing with people all the time that you report on. However, if you are impersonating prison and breaking into a jail to trick a convicted serial killer

into confessing to a murder, your journalistic objectivity has been, I would say, compromised beyond the point of acceptability. Amen to that. We all have a different line as reporters, but I think that crosses everyone's line. I'm not a reporter myself, but yeah, I agree with you. Yeah. So Skirka and Adima, now that CBS has been like, no, we don't want any of this, form a news website of their own point blank news and start publishing an investigation there. And it might have been good work. They won a National Press Club Award for their coverage. And I have no idea what they actually wrote about. It's impossible for me to actually analyze this coverage, but they want a fucking award for it. So maybe what they did was good. I don't know. My gut is saying that

Skirka was a good reporter who just got conned by this guy, and he might have actually put up some good work about the case. But it's really fucking hard to say. And it's made harder to say because right when Skirka and Adima were working at this, Jonathan Skirka had another side hustle, which was filing hundreds of frivolous lawsuits against 60 Minutes U.S. News and World Report, and every other journalist who wrote articles about the fact that he tried to con the FBI into thinking he had suitcase nukes in Lithuania. So he just started suing people left and right for reporting on the fact that he'd been jailed for wire fraud and was lying that it's very, very, like any of these guys, he filed so many lawsuits that trying to like track down what

they were all about and what they were claiming was impossible. He also filed a plagiarism suit against DreamWorks claiming that the George Clooney, Nicole Kidman movie, The Peacemaker, had in fact been based on material they stole from a movie treatment that he had started to write. Okay. Okay. But not written. Okay. Yeah. I just want the behind bastards fans to know that there's been like a solid like 30 seconds of just me shaking my head at these foolish, frivolous actions in the lawsuit because this is just... Yeah. And he's right now like kind of, we would never have written a story about this guy if this was all he did. Because right now, it's just mostly tricking this one journalist into thinking he had something to say and filing

a bunch of bullshit lawsuits and go to jail for wire fraud. And this is kind of the state of affairs with Jonathan Adima as it existed on September 11th, 2001. Are you aware of that date, Daniel? Yes, I am, Robert. I am aware of that date. Yeah. It was several days before the release of Big Trouble, the Tim Allen film that changed America. I think we can all say that after Big Trouble came out, nothing was ever the same. I do agree. Yeah. Now, you may not be aware of this, but there was also a terrorist attack on New York that same day. And it was pretty significant too. Yeah. And John Adima was... He really was hit hard by the towers falling and by all those planes being... Yeah. As he would later say, they blew up the fucking World Trade Center and my whole life

changed. I'm a fucking New Yorker. I'm going to kill every goddamn one of them until I drop dead. Now, the VIM that he was talking about in that interview was Al Qaeda, but also less specifically any Afghan people he could possibly get his hands on. And his wife, Victoria Running Wolf, was totally supportive of this. Later telling a journalist, a lot of us put yellow ribbons on our cars or flags on our houses. My husband decided to go over to Afghanistan and hunt the bad guys, which is one way to describe what John Adima did. You know what? Bless her heart. Yeah. Bless her heart. It's weird. The only things you find about her are her being utterly supportive of him and then her disappearing completely from his life. Oh, God. And there's a story there that's

not great. Yeah. Isn't that the Dennis system? And just like, yeah, it's just you get really close. You connect and you just disappear entirely. That's the move right there. He disappeared to Afghanistan repeatedly. So before he went to Afghanistan, though, Jonathan Adima decided to get on TV and start establishing his bona fides as a terrorism expert. Now, nowadays, every fucking TV channel has countless terrorism experts. There's more terrorism experts in the world than there are fucking terrorists right now. But in the immediate wake of 9 11, which was again, the release of Big Trouble, the Tim Allen movie, terrorism was something that Americans suddenly cared an awful lot about, possibly because the movie Big Trouble

focused on a Russian suitcase, new getting out into the hands of some terrorists who get it on a hijacked plane. There's there's a CIA plot in the movie Big Trouble based on the Dave Barry book, Big Trouble. And people need to know about it, Daniel. Oh, Robert. So the thread is so long. It's so long. And that's how you know it's true, Lee. Mm hmm. So John. John Adima 9 11 happens. And Adima is like, All right, I got to get on TV. Terrorism is going to be like the big thing for the next forever. And I've got to establish myself early as a TV expert, because there's going to be some fucking money in that. And he is not wrong on this. And on September 12, 2001, Adima showed up as a guest on a local Los Angeles Fox News

affiliate written as a described as a counterterrorism advisor. He told audiences that he'd come across evidence that yeah, he told evidence audiences that he'd come across evidence that three Canadian airliners had also been hijacked by Al Qaeda along with a total of four American planes. Now, this was bullshit, but nobody was really fact checking it all on 9 12. So it played well in the immediate wake of fear and terror after the attacks and the release of Big Trouble. Now, while he was doing media appearances, John Adima also reached out to his old friend Skirka. He informed him that he was headed over to Afghanistan straight away, not to kill a bunch of people, but to perform vaguely defined humanitarian aid work. He told Skirka that he had set up a

deal with an NGO called Knightsbridge International, which was run by a veteran named Ed Artist and focused on like delivering aid to the most dangerous places on earth. So this was like on its surface, a good story is like this former Green Beret wants to have his journalist friend come with him to Afghanistan to help this NGO made up of veterans deliver aid to Afghanistan. Like as a fucking journalist, that's a great tale. So Skirka pitches this. Yeah. Good story. Yeah. Yeah. So Skirka pitches this to National Geographic's TV division. And he claims Skirka claims that he told them that Adima was a convicted felon and that the two were friends. And that geo decided that the story was still worth doing. Now, so they approve this and he gets

funding to do it. So they're going to fucking Afghanistan. Yeah. Now, it was not easy to get into Afghanistan in late 2001. Skirka and Adima had to charter a plane with a group of other aid workers and reporters from Tajikistan to Kabul in late 2001. And I found a really fun article on time by Kirk Spitzer, who's a veteran war correspondent and was on that flight. And here's what he has to say about John Adima's behavior during the trip over to Afghanistan. Let's get it. The plane blew a tire on takeoff from the Dushanbe airport and was not replaced until late in the day. It was agreed that rather than risk flying over the 20,000 foot Hindu Kush at night in mid winter with a dodgy pilot and a plane with no instruments, we should wait until the next day.

But among the passengers was a group of displaced Afghans frantic to get home who angrily demanded that we take off right away. Adima, who was also a passenger and was dressed in his customary paramilitary gear and dark sunglasses, poured fuel on the fire by shouting that he knew the codes at the Bagram airfield. He said that once we were over the runway, he could radio down to the control tower to get American troops to turn on the lights. This was pure fantasy, of course. There were no codes. There was no way to communicate with American troops from a broken down Russian built cargo plane. And American ground controllers certainly would not turn on the lights for an unidentified plane that happened to show up in the middle of

a war zone. If that plane took off that afternoon, everybody on board was going to die, including Adima. It wasn't until several of us dragged Adima aside and impressed on him the seriousness of the situation that he finally conceded that maybe he didn't really know any codes or radio frequencies after all. We called the flight off and everyone lived for another day, as did Adima's flights of fantasy. So every now and then you get like stories about this guy from people who weren't liars. And they're always like that. That's the best. I love that there is truly like it wouldn't happen at this point anymore because everybody's too real and takes it too seriously. And I mean, or rather, let me rephrase that. Everybody's too real and takes it too seriously.

I would hope they do. But it's like you can't have any bullshit anymore in these serious situations. But I love the genre of real bad guy that was like actual 90s villains that people were just like looking at them like, are you serious right now? Is this person, how did this person even get here? They were able to get past the one to two layers of security to get to level three when people were like, wait a minute, what? Yeah, I mean, I think the actual bad guy, they actually existed. Yeah, the explanation of how he gets into a place like this is the thing that I think a lot of people don't really get about war reporting. Like I get a lot of questions about like, how did you go to Iraq? How do you get to Ukraine, Syria? You buy a plane ticket and you

walk. There's often remarkably little in the way of people stopping you from doing anything in places like that. And yeah, that's kind of what John Adema takes advantage of. He just gets on this plane, almost gets everyone killed by being like, no, I know the codes to the airfield. He's just lying the whole time. But now he's in Afghanistan with a National Geographic documentary production team. Yeah. And he manages to link up with Ed Artist and the other aid workers at Knights Bridge in November of 2001. And once they're all together, it immediately becomes obvious to the folks from National Geographic that Ed Artist was not as on board with this documentary as Adema had led them to believe and that John Adema himself had no actual desire to report on humanitarian

aid work. Instead, he wanted to get into a gunfight as quickly as fucking possible. All right, here's these aid guys. I'm going to go fucking find some shooting. Yeah. So one of the members of the team of the documentary team, a special forces vet named Greg Long, recalled later that Adema's attitude changed 180 degrees as soon as they got into the country. So while Ed Artist and his men's tried to deliver life saving aid and the documentary team tried to film that, John Adema got to work attempting to hook up with the Northern Alliance, an insurgent group battling the Taliban. Adema ignored the work he'd come to Afghanistan to do and started tracking the movements of Northern Alliance troops and attempting to make contact with them

in hopes that he could sell them weapons. Now, that's that's that's the that's that's our man right there. That's our man right there. He stopped participating. What were they selling? But what were they selling? Oh, he didn't have anything to sell. Let's let's go to ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was

this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful

lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back from ads. And in the break, Dan all had to take an important phone call. And I found that the iron bars I ordered had finally arrived. Everyone's having a good day. I put Anderson during break. And now she's happy.

I'm going to put bars on my windows like a crazy person and just go increasingly unhinged. It's going to be nice. I think you're probably doing the right thing to be honest with you. Yeah, I am eating a banana on video chat while we're recording. Okay, all right. All right. First of all, got to keep Daniel's eating the banana speaking of bananas. I love God damn it, Dan, speaking of bananas. Let's talk about John Adema. So hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Ed Artis, who was again that veteran running Knights Bridge, the aid organization and his men delivered, yeah, life-saving aid. Adema attempted to sell weapons to a militant group in Afghanistan. He stopped participating in any sort of discussions about the actual documentary that he'd gone here

to make and stopped doing anything at all to help with the humanitarian aid that has ostensibly traveled to Afghanistan to deliver. I mean, he's attempting to sell weapons. That's, I mean, yes, literally the opposite of delivering at like a humanitarian aid. Now, the fact that Adema had changed plans completely and was now getting involved with the actual fighting, of course, endangered all of the NGO workers he was traveling with. Artis would later tell a reporter, he's the dumbest fuck I ever met. Artis also, yeah. What a great quote. Artis also recalled that immediately after arriving in country, in order to film a documentary about providing humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan,

John Adema announced his desire to, quote, kill every fucking Afghan IC. Now, I'm not an expert at providing humanitarian aid, Daniel. You know, that's not really my bag, but I think that's poor form. Yeah, that's not how really it goes down. That's not really involved. The killing part is not part of the, no. For example, when I volunteer at soup kitchens to provide food for the homeless, I don't talk about the secret item where I island, where I and other millionaires hunt homeless people for sport. We do it, but you don't talk about it when you're trying to provide humanitarian aid. It's rude. Of course, bro. No, no, yeah. Now, same. Total. Yeah, yeah. All of it. Now, yes, yes.

Now, next, according from New York Magazine, quote, Adema was more than simply obsessed with the Afghan war. He was, as other journalists on scene have recounted, absurdly keen to capture dramatic war footage, even if it meant fudging the record of events. On November 11th, Adema and his three companions, Skirka Long and the cameraman, were scouting for war footage on a hill near the Taliban front lines. Adema left the group, again hoping to find Northern Alliance troops to hang out with. In the meantime, Adema's entourage, which had met up with reporter Tim Friend, who is then with USA Today and a freelance TV journalist named Kevin Sites, started drawing fire from the Taliban. Skirka got hit with shrapnel in his right leg. As the group

helped Skirka down the hill and set about dressing his wound, Skirka's cameraman was capturing the scene on film. And this was when Adema returned, trailing clouds of camera ready military glory. Just when we finished dressing Skirka's leg, Keith runs up screaming, friend recalls. He rips off the bandages and redresses the wounds. Basically, he was acting in front of the camera. So fucking his friend gets shot in Afghanistan and like while they're dressing the wounds, he runs up from trying to befriend the Northern Alliance and sells them guns, tears off the combat dressings and reapplies them so he can be caught on camera helping his friend. Fantastic. It's awesome. It's awesome. That's the best. That's just the best.

Skirka head to head. Just a side note. I just want to throw this out there. The smartest person in this whole group that I've heard so far is Skirka's cameraman. Oh, yeah. We do not have this person's name. No, no. This person has very cleverly omitted themselves from the recounting of all of this, only in the way that they have all of the footage and none of the notoriety. It's perfect. Yeah. Welcome to the camera. There has to have been a moment where he was like, in that all, maybe when he watched his boss like have a wound ripped open by Janadima so that he could, you know what? I think I'm pulling my name from this. I don't need this one on the roll. Yeah. Skirka had to head home to recover

and horrified at the fact that he'd been traveling with a con man. Artists contacted him in National Geographic to withdraw his consent to have any of their footage used. If Janadima were in any of it. So Skirka had to cut together a documentary that cut his friend Janadima out of it entirely, which of course pissed off Janadima. He'd gone to Afghanistan to build a name for himself as a globetrotting heroic terrorism expert. And the fact that he'd been cut out of the feature entirely severely hampered his exploits. To make matters worse, now that National Geographic was out of the picture, Janadima had no one to record him. So he did what all good con men do. He pivoted. And I'm going to read again from New York magazine. He began calling himself

Jack and telling journalists that he was working as an advisor to Northern Alliance troops. He also described himself as a green beret and claimed he was helping special forces round up Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects. Back in New York, Ted Kavanaugh, the TV producer who had originally put Skirka onto Adima's Lithuania story, set him up with an appearance on the Barry Farber show, a syndicated conservative talk radio program. Before long, Adima was turning up regularly via satellite telephone on American television. He would occasionally call himself a green beret, clearly implying he was on active duty. And sometimes he would claim falsely to be working for Partners International, which, like Night's Bridge, had severed all ties with Adima. These

were the two groups he went there to film. Mainly, though, he mischaracterized himself in tellingly vague terms, even as he boasted about his high octane military credentials. You must be held in high regard, he told Fox News host Linda Vester via satellite phone on November 2001, because I think you're the only person ever to get an interview with a special forces qualified guy inside this country. So, you see what happens there, is he loses his access to the legitimate journalists he traveled there with, because he fucks everything up for them. And he just starts reaching out to reporters and basically saying, hey, you know how everyone who's actually doing anything is too busy to talk to journalists on the phone from the middle of

Afghanistan. I got all the time in the fucking world, baby. And I will pretend that I'm still in special forces if you will put me on TV. And that's what he fucking does. Yeah. Now, people who actually knew Jack Adima and knew that he was full of shit attempted to warn the government that there was actually a scammer in Afghanistan passing himself off as a military expert and doing God knows what to further his unclear but definitely shifty goals. Nightspreads reached out to American authorities about Adima, writing Army Special Operations Command that the rogue operator was both a threat to aid workers and to the overall mission of the United States in the coalition in Afghanistan. Partners International, who's another aid group

that Adima had fucked around with, did the same thing. But Afghanistan was a chaotic place in late 2001. The warnings went unheeded, as there were too many journalists in country during the height of the war for the warnings to spread very far. Jack also repeatedly sued Ed Artist and Nightspreads International, locking the aid worker and his charity in a series of interminable lawsuits and distracting them from actually saving lives. But Adima never got distracted. He was in Afghanistan to grift reporters and whoever else he could find. And that is exactly what he did. There are numerous stories of Adima during this period. The reporters who were savvy enough to catch on to his bullshit early started calling him by the very appropriate

nickname, Jack Shit. That's good. Good. Now, Kim Singh Puda, Paul Lashmar, and Nick Mio are journalists who were reporting in Afghanistan for the independent during this period of time. And I want to close this first episode with one of their recollections about a particularly fine Jack Adima caber. Quote, some of us first met Jack in 2001 when the Taliban had retreated from Kabul. Victorious Northern Alliance fighters were parading in the streets and US and British forces were pouring into Bagram Air Base. A dapper man in a black t-shirt and combat trousers, a Glock pistol strapped in his shoulder holster. Adima gave a graphic account of his supposed experiences as a former US Army Green Beret who trained with the SAS as an advisor to the Tajik

and Uzbek militias, how he'd helped plan the mission operation to take out the Afghan capital. The meeting took place at the Mustafa Hotel, then being built in the city center. It was another example of the seemingly endless carpet bagging opportunities then on offer. The owners were and continue to be a family of Afghans patriots from New Jersey, the hotel named after one of three brothers. Sipping whiskey, then retailing at $140 a bottle at the supermarket off Chicken Street. Adima offered to organize a convoy to Tora Bora, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda were making it was thought to be their last stand and where the Americans were confident Osama bin Laden was trapped. After making a few checks with the British military, some of us decided to

decline his offer. Those who went were robbed at gunpoint, a quarter of the way through the journey by their guards and made their way bedraggled back to Kabul. Jack professed to be outraged. He would take this matter up immediately with his good friends in the Afghan government and the bandits would be executed. None of this ever happened. He was just selling reporters to bandits and I'm sure getting a cut of what they stole from them. Yeah. So he's a fun guy. So fun. I love it. He's a good guy. How do people feel? The fun thing about John Adima is that the grifts were really just starting at this point. Like he was he was just kind of dipping his feet into the great Afghan con game.

And in part two, we're going to talk about what happened after he got his feet all the way in the water. That's not a great way to phrase this, but that's what I said. So perfect. The episode's over, Dan. Well, I mean, this is a wonderful start. As I feel about the political system these days, when is an adult going to step in and pull the strings out and just pull this person away, take the cane from the side of the stage and just yank them out of here. So I'm excited for that moment to eventually happen because this man is just going off as it were. Yeah. You can find Danil on the Internet. Where's your Twitch, Danil? What are you doing video games? Your video games? Yeah, I do the video games. But I mean, also, you know, what I mainly do is I

edit podcasts for you and for the network. So make sure that you continue to listen to Behind the Bastards and the Women's War and you listen to Worst Year Ever and you listen to it could happen here if you haven't already. Listen to all the shows in the I Heart Radio network because it's a lot of my work and I appreciate you all so much. You can follow me on Twitter at DJ underscore Danil. You can follow me on Twitch at also twitch.tv slash DJ underscore Danil. Come find me at play video. And the Danil is D-A-N-L. DJ underscore D-A-N-L. And yeah, we play lots of games. We do stuff like Jackbox. I play a lot of Rocket League. I'm really into Half-Life Alex right now, the new VR game. It's mind blowing. Anyway, come check me out there. And thank you all. Go check him out.

Yeah. Thank you, Sophie. Yes, check Danil out and check yourself out. But no one else because going outside is dangerous. Amen. Yes. Lock yourself in your rooms, listen to more podcasts, buy the products advertised by those podcasts. Yes. And together we can build a new humanity, a humanity based entirely around staying inside and listening to podcasts. You can follow this podcast at BastardsPod on Twitter and Instagram. You can follow Robert at I Write Okay. You can listen to him on all those shows. Danil just lists it, especially the Women's War, which is officially out. And you can buy merch on our T-Public store. Somebody on Twitter specifically told me that I should shout out the General Anderson shirt. It's awesome. It's so good. Yeah, baby.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after

her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.