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

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Robert is joined again by Danl Goodman to continue to discuss Jack Idema. 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. We're 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. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where the host has spent the previous seven hours drunk and staring at a box of 5.56 tracer ammunition and wondering if he could get away with starting a fire in his front yard with it, and then deciding that no, he lives around too many people. But I can't get the thought out of

my, Daniel, how are you doing today? I'm great. I'm especially great thinking about that moment, just especially in the dark watching those rounds fling through the air. Oh, it would be great. It would be great. And I make everyone in my neighborhood would enjoy it, but fucking cops, man. Yeah, those are loud rounds. That's a joke. So, Daniel. Yes, sir. Sophie. Robert. This is an episode about Jack Adema, part two. Now, when we laughed our friend off, he had he'd had a pretty winding path, and it's kind of hard for me to summarize just because there's so much that's weird about this guy. Why isn't Scams out the wazoo? Out the wazoo, every now and then, just enough credibility to some of them to where it's like, what's going on?

Is there something I've missing? Very hard to say. That will continue, but the Scams get a lot bolder from here on out. It's like he snuck in the back door of so many war scenes, and then people turned around and were like, what the fuck are you doing here? And I was like, let's just shoot people. Yeah, yeah. Like he really traded on the fact that he was technically a green beret, because people are like, well, I guess he knows how to train cops. He was a green beret. I guess he knows how to run a counterterrorism school. He was a green beret. I guess he can lead us into Afghanistan. He was a green beret. And nobody did the work to realize like, oh, all you did as a green beret was like pack parachutes. Anyway, it's cool. So the history

of the modern US Special Forces began on June 19, 1952 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with the establishment of the 10th Special Forces Airborne Group. Now, obviously, elite military operators had existed since the dawn of time. Like the story of the Trojan horse is kind of like the story of a special ops raid, basically. That's true. Yeah, it's kind of, yeah, more or less. And elite German airborne units in World War II, the Falschworm Jäger pioneered many of what we would consider like modern Special Forces strategies. But it was not until the Vietnam War that special operators in the modern sense of the word really burst onto the modern stage. So suddenly in Vietnam you have, and you know, these guys are actually doing shit, but they're also like showing up in

the media, these elite heavily armed badasses with special skills carrying out these unbelievable death defying missions. So like the movies we get on the like Rambo and Commando and fucking Predator, like these are all right when America like kind of in the wake of Vietnam America started to really fall in love with the idea of Special Forces guys, because it seems really romantic, like it's a job that's very fit to make movies about. I actually had an uncle who was a Green Beret in Vietnam, and his job was basically to be alone in the jungle trying to lead groups of NBA patrols into ambushes. And it's like fucked him up for the rest of his life. And it's not a cool story. But it made for good media stuff. And so journalists obviously as soon as stories

about Green Berets and Navy SEALs start like hitting the world like journalists to embed with soldiers start wanting to try and embed these guys, which was not an easy thing to do. US Special Forces from the beginning have had a very adversarial relationship with the media. They build themselves as quiet professionals who were as exceptional in their discretion as they were in their fighting ability. And that's all died out now because the assassination of Osama bin Laden meant that you could make millions of dollars if you were like a Special Forces guy who wrote a book afterwards. Yeah. But back in the day, you weren't supposed to talk about the shit you did in Special Forces. And so journalists really couldn't get an angle on these guys. And back in 2001, Special Forces

dudes were still quiet professionals. And the idea that any of them would speak directly to the media was nearly unthinkable. There was only one journalist who actually had a shot at getting that kind of story. He was the only US journalist who ever had a real in-depth embed with US Special Forces, Robin Moore. Now, Moore was the author of the book The Green Berets, which that John Wayne movie that Jack Adema had loved as a kid was based on. And in order to write The Green Berets, Moore had to do something no civilian journalist had ever done. He went through Special Forces training and qualification and like qualified as a Green Beret. And because of his skills, he was allowed to travel with The Green Berets and report on what they did. And it's kind of

debatable as to what he did, as to whether or not what he did was even really journalism, because he took part in firefights and killed a shitload of people. A lot of journalists will say you shouldn't do what Robin Moore did. But it's fair to say that he was a legend. We're going to talk more about him later. What matters right now is that the importance of Special Forces ramped up hugely during the start of the war on terror. These guys were the bulk of the early effort in Afghanistan and journalists were starving for information about what spec ops guys were doing and seeing. As Ed Artis of Knightsbridge International told the Columbia Journalism Review, quote, the media were in a frenzy. They were interviewing each other about what they'd interview

someone else about if they had someone to interview. So they're just like desperate to talk to any of these guys and none of them will talk. And Jack Adema seized this feeding frenzy and knew he'd found the perfect grift. Because after all, he'd technically been in Special Forces and he was currently in Afghanistan. So why shouldn't he present himself as an expert on what US Special Forces were doing in Afghanistan? So within a matter of weeks of the invasion, Adema has managed to establish himself as the mainstream media's leading expert on Special Forces and as one of its leading experts in Afghanistan. The Columbia Journalism Review later noted, quote, he was treated as an expert on all three networks, was a terrorist hunter on Don Imus's radio show, a Northern

Alliance advisor on Fox News, and a key source for Marely Mapes and Dan Rather in 60 Minutes 2. The fact that he is calling in from Afghanistan on the phone and had once been in Special Forces is all the backup anybody does. And they're like, yeah, fucking listen to whatever he has to say. Yeah. He was in Special Forces. I mean, he was there. In January of 2002, US Special Forces, corner Osama bin Laden, for what they were absolutely sure was the last time. Spoilers, they were took about another decade. Jack Adema began shopping around a set of tapes at the same time that held seven hours worth of videotaped al-Qaeda training sessions. You've seen pieces of these tapes. There's like a lot of like the guys going on jungle gyms and running around with

rifles and stuff. He first sold stills from several of these tapes to a number of media organizations. And a lot of them are like scary images of terrorist commandos doing armed drills. Now, once the stills had wedded everyone's appetite, Adema contracted the William Morris PR Agency to auction off what he claimed was the first ever US broadcast rights of like terrorist training videos from al-Qaeda that would like reveal what al-Qaeda was planning to do in the United States. So he delivered letters to all of the, or his PR agency, delivered letters to all the major networks, setting a minimum price of $150,000 in demanding that Jack Adema be credited when the tapes were aired. Surprisingly, Fox said no. And so did NBC. They were put off by the,

yeah, they thought it was too expensive. And there was also, there was no supporting evidence that these tapes actually showed an al-Qaeda training base. There were just guys with guns running around. Running around. No shit. I love it. Yeah. An NBC producer later recalled, there was no way to verify them. It was either you trust Keith Adema or you don't. CNN backed out too after their national security analyst did a cursory amount of Googling and discovered Keith Adema's criminal record in history of suing everyone he's ever talked to. They were the only network to blacklist him as a source, as well as turn down his offer. Now, some of the distrust of Adema and his tapes came from the fact that he seemed to have a different story about where

they came from for every news agency that asked. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he'd bought the tapes from an intelligence asset after several back alley meetings at midnight. He told NBC's Today Show that he got them after he filmed a group of Northern Alliance fighters taking over a compound where the video was filmed. Adema then claimed to have tracked down the camp's commander at home and hunted down other al-Qaeda recruits to find more footage. These obvious lies fooled no one. No one that is. Besides Dan Rather. Yeah, Dan Rather and 60 Minutes fall immediately and hard for Jack Adema's tapes. And in fact, Rather flies immediately to Afghanistan to interview Keith Adema and visit the compound

where the videos had been filmed. Yeah, it's it. He just is immediately on board with this shit. Oh, I am so down. The journalism school building at the college that I went to, but didn't go to journalism school at, was the Dan Rather School of Journalism. And maybe not the guy to take super detailed. I'm going to quote from the Columbia Journalism Review talking about this particular grift. At a time when workers were still sifting through the gnarled wreckage of the World Trade Center, the story reinforced the prevailing sense of panic. Men in camouflage tunics and ski masks were shown storming buildings, staging drive-by shootings, and laying siege to golf courses. Sometimes the

men laughed as they rehearsed maneuvers, which rather interpreted as evidence that they approached their grim mission with glee. The footage also contained numerous exchanges in English, a sign, rather told viewers, that they want to take scenes like this to the west. Now, the reality is that these tapes were absolutely a forgery made by Jack Adema, which is why people were speaking in English. Yeah, no. Oh, gosh. Goodness gracious. Dan, nobody. Yeah, that's really, that's really, that's real bad. That's real bad. And you got to do better. Yeah. Well, he did spoilers for Dan Rather's career. He would not. He would not. He would not. Exactly. He would not. He would go on to fall for more fake bullshit.

Oh, hell yeah. Analysts, obviously, I say they're obviously a forgery. It is impossible to state that with a perfect degree of confidence one way or the other. And you can, in fact, find a couple of different interpretations of these videos. But it is worth noting that the tactics shown in the tapes were not the sort actually used by Al-Qaeda fighters. The video depicted armed raids similar to the kind of attacks ISIS would carry out years later in Europe. But these are completely different from the sort of bombings that Al-Qaeda actually engaged in at the time. Put simply, Al-Qaeda never did anything even vaguely like what was shown in these tapes. Like, it's just not the sort of shit that they pulled off. And yeah, there were other reasons to doubt the province of the tapes.

The place that Keith Adema said that he had raided to capture them, the compound where these tapes were filmed, Mir Bacha Kot, was under coalition control during the time that the tapes were actually filmed, and had been thoroughly searched at the time when Jack claims to have conducted the raid. Now, again, the reality of the situation was never conclusively determined one way or the other. And Dan Rather's career didn't explode for this particular fuck up. But the almost certain reality is that the videos were staged by Jack. He likely found an old compound that had already been liberated by the coalition and then hired a bunch of locals to pretend to be terrorists. The Columbia Journalism Review talked to a special or retired special operations officer

with knowledge of the CIA's investigation into the tapes. And this guy claims they did a voice analysis and a technical analysis. Not only were they staged, but you could single Adema's voice out directly. So the CIA for its part disputes having done any kind of analysis, but the CIA is the CIA. So I really don't give a shit what they say happened ever. They are the CIA. Now, it seems pretty safe to conclude that these were bogus from the Giga, whether or not Jack Adema himself actually filmed them. But at the time, this took off like gangbusters among a terrified American public. And Dan Rather's big scoop helped to solidify Jack Adema's reputation, who was someone who was not a shameful fraud. And for a few months, he was the talk of the Kabul media set.

According to New York Magazine, he boasted to war correspondents about the many al-Qaeda suspects he had apprehended and embroidered his banter with tales of special forces daring in Central America. And it was more than just his speech that was growing too colorful for its own good. One heated argument over war coverage at a party ended with Adema's firing a pistol at a Dallas Morning News correspondent, Todd Robertson, and barely missing his left arm. Many reporters began to regard Adema as a fraud and a menace. Still, he was quoted in many major newspapers as a special forces operative or a green beret. On a representation from the photo agency Polaris, Adema sold the footage to 60 Minutes 2 for an undisclosed fee. And the rest of the press

corps, including NBC's Dateline and The Today Show, scooped up the sensational footage in the network's wake. So that's great. Now, in December of 2002, you remember that guy Robin Moore, who literally became a green beret and killed people with the green berets and then wrote a book about him, that journalist? Well, he shows up in Afghanistan in December of 2002. Now, he was no longer the young fit warrior who'd battled alongside U.S. forces in Vietnam. Moore was in his 70s, racked with Parkinson's disease and reliant upon a cane to get around. So he's not not in great shape. Still, clearly, whatever else you can say about him, a frightening badass to like go wander around alone in Afghanistan in your 70s in 2002 is a tough guy. That's pretty

hard. I mean, that's pretty hard. Yeah, that's pretty hard. Now, he had a goal of publishing the first on the ground memoir from the war in Afghanistan, and it would be a book about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. When Jack first heard that the author of the book that had become his favorite movie was in Afghanistan, he knew he had to find him. And tracking down Moore was not difficult. There were not a whole lot of old white dudes wandering around the country in the wake of U.S. special forces. Once there, Jack played Moore with the same story he'd successfully used on many journalists already, putting himself forward as an ideal source for Moore's next book. This line of bullshit worked because Jack just seems to have had some sort of ability to like not

all or even most journalists, but there were there are these guys like Skirka before him and now Robin Moore that just like fall in love with a line of shit that Jack is pushing. And soon the two men were collaborating collaborating together on a book titled The Hunt for Bin Laden. Now, crucially, while they were in Afghanistan, Moore and Adima spent almost no time together. And this is because Moore was still widely respected by U.S. special forces dudes and they gave him real access. And for obvious reasons, Jack Adima did not want to get anywhere clear near U.S. special forces in Afghanistan. Not a good idea. So they didn't really start to collaborate until they got home to the United States in later that year. Jack had to head back after his mother died. And this is

where he and Robin Moore would go on to have the bulk of their contact. So Moore was back in his states by the end of that year, trying to bang out his notes and interviews from Afghanistan into a book that people would want to read. Adima offered himself up for additional background information. And soon Moore was listening with bated breath while Jack Adima just lied to him. This random paragraph from the book they wrote together gives you an idea of what sort of stuff Jack was telling him. And again, this is one paragraph. Oh, yes. In January, Jack uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to kill President Clinton. In March, standing in the middle of a Kabul street armed with a Russian assault rifle and 600 rounds of ammunition, Jack held off Islamic

fundamentalists for four hours as they tried to take 18 foreign citizens hostage, keeping them at bay until engineer Ali and the Northern Alliance arrived to back him up. By the end of March... Engineer Ali. Oh yeah, that's a character right there. By the end of March, Jack was in a Northern Alliance helicopter on his way to the Nachman earthquake with the Associated Press photograph the lone American rescuing a little girl. She wasn't the first child he would save or the last. I'm gonna tell you right now, Jack Adima never saved a goddamn kid. He definitely posed with some sick and injured children. But I think he saved them in the same way he saved his friend with the leg injury. Yeah, no. Now, for his part, Robin Moore said that Jack's stories checked out

very well when he tried to verify them. And this is almost certainly a lie. As Marianne Strong, Moore's agent at the time, claims that Robin Moore's actual experiences in Afghanistan were just too dull to make a good book. Basically, he was too old to find anything cool. So he came back home, like kind of bummed out with like a few interviews that were not that exciting and no stories of actual daring do because he's 70 and had Parkinson's. So Jack comes along and is like, I can spice up this fucking book for you, man. Oh yeah, for sure. Strong layer claim. He's like, let me add some con to that shit also. Yeah. Moore's agent later claimed Jack came along and rewrote the entire thing. He came up with terribly exciting, excellent copy. Now she claims

that Moore himself only wrote a few pages of the book in the end. And the resulting product was one of the most ridiculous pieces of faux journalism in the entire history of the war on terror, which is a fucking achievement. The cover of the book features a shirtless Jack Adima wielding an AK-47. Yeah, baby. Now, New York magazine goes into more detail about precisely how bad this book was. It asserts outright that Adima was the only Green Beret gathering intelligence on the ground. And Adima routinely storms the center of the book's action to perform heroic feats of bravery. It is as though given the chance to influence a Robin Moore book, Adima had to cast himself in a 21st century sequel to the Green Berets. So he basically finds the author of the

book that became his favorite movie and turns himself into a character in that book. It's clearly in the hope that a movie will get made about him, which honestly kind of rules a little bit. I mean, yeah, I want to see this movie. It'll undoubtedly have like Danny McBride or like... Danny McBride would be the right guy to play Jack Adima. Holy shit. Yeah, exactly. A completely overly confident with just everybody looking around. It would almost be like a Tommy boy thing where, you know, you have the Chris Farley character and then David Spade trying to clean up the mess that's following him. Oh, wonderful. I think actually the right way to play this is to just have Danny McBride do his character from eastbound and down. This guy who just has this

completely divorced from reality beliefs about himself, just rolling through Afghanistan and somehow not dying, but getting a lot of people killed. Yeah, I think we should go to an ad break because you know what won't convince an elderly ailing legend of war reporting? What? The products and services in this. None of them will trick a sick old man into writing a fake book about how you shirtlessly fought the Taliban. That is a guarantee we make. Fucking talk space, not going to do that. No sir. No sir. 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 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 are talking about Jack Edema. So it's a great book that Jack Edema cons this guy to write. And the book was a hit among an American public, hungry for stories of military glory after September 11th. Yeah, people eat this shit up. It quickly climbed to a respectable place on the New York Times bestseller list. And although it never made its way up to number one, it sold very, very well. Now, since more, the ostensible author was elderly and in poor health, the responsibility for shamelessly plugging the book landed on Jack Edema. He was only too happy to hang out in bookstores doing readings from chapters he'd written about things

he absolutely did not do. During numerous media appearances, he even gave direct advice to the Pentagon, making statements like, we in special forces have been lobbying for a lighter, faster army, but General Tommy Franks isn't listening. It's great. That's, I mean, I'm loving it. Just you should catch catch him at book soup. That's where I'm trying to see him. It's kind of ironic because like there are so many special forces grifts around the day, like today, like about a third of the people who wind up becoming special forces operators do it to like cash in on some book as soon as they get out. But the only kind of special forces grift that wouldn't work today is like what Jack Edema is doing because there's now so many of these guys in the media who would be like,

no, this dude's just lying. Like he was never, never did anything. Yeah. Yeah. Has never seen goodness. I mean, and nothing, not a thing. Yeah. Well, anyway, like any great grifter, Jack Edema succeeds during the only period in history in which he could have possibly succeeded. Yes, exactly. The hunt for bin Laden elevated Edema to a national figure just in time for him to weigh in on the most critical police political issue of the day, the invasion of Iraq. Since he had been the subject of the first memoir of the war in Afghanistan, TV news booking agents saw him as an ideal get as they discussed whether or not going to war with Iraq was a good idea. And I'm going to quote from a Rolling Stone right up here. Edema's career as a media personality

reached its peak during the final breathless weeks of the run up to the war in Iraq. Much of the information he provided during that period echoed the Bush administration's hotly contested rationale for a war. He told MSNBC that the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda was common knowledge on the ground in Afghanistan and claimed in an interview with WNYC radio's Leonard Lopate that Iraq has been involved in supporting al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with money, with equipment, with technology and with weapons of mass destruction. He told other wide-eyed journalists that there was ample evidence linking Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda into the attacks on September 11th. You know, famed allies, Iraq and Iran. For sure. If there's one thing you

can't stop Iran from doing, it is collaborating closely with Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nothing Iran loves more than working with those specific two groups. Love it. Love it. Oh boy. So Edema professed to have first-hand knowledge of nuclear weapons being smuggled from Russia and to all three members of the Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Few in the media questioned Edema's claims, much to the alarm of those who know him. The media saw this outfitted gregarious, apparently knowing guy and they didn't check him out, said Ed Artis, chairman and founder of the humanitarian organization Knightsbridge International. They ran story after story that furthered the cache of a self-serving, self-aggrandizing criminal.

And that's totally accurate. Yeah, yeah. That is accurate. Yeah. But the sales of his book were good. But reviewers did not like it. In fact, it was pretty much universally panned. And journalists who did look into it repeatedly questioned the veracity of claims like Jack Edema fought the entire Afghan war on his own. The sheer volume of doubt seems to have cracked through whatever brainwashing Edema managed to carry out on Robin Moore. Moore began to demand it from his publisher that a revised edition of the book be published with special forces officers reviewing and correcting Edema's lies. Random House, his publisher refused these changes. And when Jack Edema learned that Moore was trying to write him out of the book, he issued a press release and

filed yet another lawsuit. He started claiming that a secret cabal of special forces soldiers has assembled to take him down because they were jealous of Jack Edema. Jack also filed lawsuits against Nightbridge and Partners International, the two groups providing aid in Afghanistan, because he was certain that they were a part of all this. His main claim to having suffered damages came from the fact that Fox News dropped him as a regular commenter. True to form, Jack also sued Fox News. These suits were all tossed out of court. But yeah. Just keep suing. Just spend all your always be suing, baby. That is a huge part of being a really good grifter. Is just keep on suing everyone you can. Hell yeah. Sophie, who are we suing right now?

Cody Johnston? That sounds like a good idea. Yeah, let's throw some lawsuits out to Cody. Get them in the van. I'm getting on that. I'm getting on that. So the book sales were good in spite of the controversy. So Jack decided to form a promotional company. The hunt for bin Laden, LLC with a handful of business partners. I have to give him credit. That's easily the best name for an LLC that anyone's come up with. That's a great LLC name. I kind of want to start, if that's defunct now, I want to make that my LLC and just do something else with it. Like is there a character limit for LLCs? It's clearly not more than the number of characters in the hunt for bin Laden, LLC, which like I want to start an LLC dedicated to like

feeding the homeless, but just call it that. And that we could be like when the police shut us down, the cops are trying to stop the hunt for bin Laden, man. Have you forgotten where we all were on 9 11? There's potential in this. So Jack Adima is the hunt for bin Laden, LLC. The goal of this company was ostensibly to raise funds for a US count for US counterterrorist group which was a training camp that Jack had founded in upstate New York to quote, help the Northern Alliance and to fight al-Qaeda. This was almost certainly a grift. But as the weeks went by and Jack battled increasing questions about his legitimacy, his colleagues watched his behavior turn erratic and dangerous. According to New York magazine,

one of Jack's business partners eventually testified during the inevitable lawsuit over the hunt for bin Laden, LLC that Jack quote, destroyed the interior of his own house with a samurai sword, that he choked his girlfriend in a fight, that he forged a letter on Fox News stationery for uses evidence and his lawsuit against the network. A lawsuit from the US Attorney's office also arrived followed by a letter from North Carolina's postal inspector charging Adima with mail fraud for using a post office box registered to the company to solicit funds for US counterterrorist group. Thompson said that after he noticed $18,000 from the company had gone missing, he drove down to Fayetteville to close the

company bank account. He says Adima followed him there and threatened to kill both him and his girlfriend. Bro. Jesus. He's awesome. When do the police step in? Almost never. They arrested, he didn't get busted earlier, but he goes right back to committing mail fraud. Totally murdering somebody. Awesome. No, that was something else. He didn't murder anybody. No, I mean he definitely murdered people, but no, he didn't go to jail for that. He went to jail for mail fraud. Oh, that's right. It was just mail fraud. That was our first military exploratory fellow or whatever. Yeah. There's so many grifts here. It is hard to keep track of the motherfuckers. Yeah. More at the same time as this was all going on, Moore learned that Adima had ordered

hundreds of copies of the hunt for bin Laden from Moore's account with Random House and then never paid them for him. He just got the books and then sold them by hand at full price. So just like this mix of these incredibly bold grifts where he's like tricking national news networks and stuff and selling thousands of books and these petty fucking bullshit. Like it's incredible. He couldn't stop himself. So Jack continued to attack Robin Moore via lawyer for months, throwing out lawsuits like rice at a wedding. He was only interrupted in his quest to destroy the lives of the people who had been his friends and colleagues due to his devotion to yet another unbelievable grift in Afghanistan. See, in 2004, Jack returned to Kabul. He rented a house telling the landlord he planned

to start a rug exporting business. I shouldn't even need to tell you that this was a lie. His real goal was to form a paramilitary unit named Task Force Sabre 7. Yeah, baby. Yes. He designed the uniforms and patches himself. Their goal was to hunt al-Qaeda. He brought along a former soldier Brent Bennett and a veteran TV cameraman named Eddie Caraballo to help him and document his adventures. They hired several Afghan fighters and started kidnapping and interrogating Afghan citizens at random. So pretty good grift, Daniel. I mean, people were really, really gullible. You could get away with anything at this period of time. It was amazing. Just being confident and speaking confidently and just doing the things you say you're going to do. People are just letting

it happen. That's just really wild. I'm impressed and horrified. It's pretty great. You know what else is great, Daniel? You know what doesn't kidnap and torture random citizens of Kabul? Do products and services not do that sometimes? Not ours, Daniel. Every product advertised on this show carries the official behind the bastards have not kidnapped and tortured any Afghan citizens seal of approval. That is the only guarantee we make of our products and services, and we do not make guarantees about other countries, but we will promise you no one in Afghanistan tortured by the sponsors of this show. 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 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. Uh, so Daniel, this story of Task Force Saber 7 is fucking difficult for me to parse out. So I say he's kidnapping random Afghan citizens and that seems to have been true a lot of the time, but it also doesn't necessarily seem to have been true all of the time because on at least three occasions, NATO troops helped Edema carry out raids and NATO went on to arrest at least one of the suspects that Task Force Saber 7 took in. And there's also some evidence that he, some of he or his men may have helped stop assassination attempts on Afghan political leaders, but also almost all

of the people that they actually handed over to NATO were later released for lack of evidence to convict them. And it is entirely possible that all of the Afghan political leaders who claimed that Edema and his men saved them or carried out, gave them intelligence that was useful, were just bribed because we're talking about the government of Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004. I mean, they're trying to, they're trying to cause disturbance as much as anybody else. So it's just like, yeah, we'll take your money and say some dumb shit to make people confused. Perfect. Yeah, it does seem fair to say that there were people within NATO and people within the Department of Defense who treated Task Force Saber 7 as a legitimate non-governmental military

contractor in country for a pretty brief period of time, but it did happen. And you can either say it's because they were actually finally doing good work. Or yeah, just because it's easy to trick the fucking government in Afghanistan of a ton of bullshit. Like there's $100 billion worth of hospitals that got built by government contractors in Afghanistan and aren't hospitals. So fucking, it's easy to get away with grips in Afghanistan. Now, while all this was going on, Knightsbridge and Partners International, these two veteran-owned charities continued to desperately tried to warn the CIA and the Defense Department and everyone that could listen, that Jack Adema was a dangerously incompetent con man. But no one listened to them until April 30th, 2004, when

Adema made the error of emailing several of his friends back in the United States an update on the progress of Task Force Saber 7. This email included pictures of Jack Adema and his men torturing civilians. At least one of the people Jack emailed had a, yeah, light torture, Daniel. Oh God. Light torture. Okay. Barely even torture under most international treaties. I'm nervous. So at least one of the people that Jack emailed had a soul and forwarded the emails to the Department of Defense. Warrants were issued for Jack's arrest in Kabul, and he was eventually busted on July 5th by Afghan police forces. New York Magazine notes, when Afghan police had arrested the trio on July 5th, they said they had a,

they said they saw a mini, a smaller scale version of the gruesome prisoner abuse photos from the Baghdad interrogation cells in Abu Ghraib. Early press photos indicated that three prisoners found in Adema's custody during the raid were blindfolded and beaten and then strapped to the ceiling by their feet. Five others were tied to chairs with rope in the small dark room down a hall that was littered with bloodied clothing. All of the prisoners in Adema's custody were subsequently released. None was shown to be connected to al-Qaeda. I mean, of course. Yeah, of course. Yes, of course. Yeah, absolutely. And like it's frustrating because you read like reporting from the time, from like when this all happened by like good journalists and good

reporters. And a lot of them will talk, will like quote people who were in the Department of Defense somewhere saying like, oh no, Adema did this or Task Force Saber 7 did that. And I can't say, again, to a point of certainty that everything they did was bullshit. But my gut is telling me that all of those people who thought they did anything useful were just taken in by the Khan because Jack Adema was a fucking con man. And it's easy to get away with cons in Afghanistan. Yeah, that's my feeling. Maybe I am wrong. No, but I'm not. Look, everybody likes to sell. Everybody, you know, even if they don't like to be taken, they like to be sold something. And he was selling them. God. Yeah. The worst. Now, at his trial in Kabul, Adema did say something

that I don't think is untrue. He stated that he had been operating with the US military's approval and consent. And it does seem that this was at least part partly true. Yeah, exactly. Because they're not good at their job. That's the fucked up part. Look, they said I could do it. And they all have to sit on their hands and be like, I mean, like, yeah, we kind of did. We did. Again, I don't want to be like slandering better reporters than me because a lot of the guys who wrote about him like back in 2004 are. But they're so confused by the fact that legitimate military people aren't uniform about whether or not this guy is a con man. And like guys, the army's bad at its job. Like the defense department's bad at its job. Look at how the war in Afghanistan is gone. We're not

they're not good at this. Yeah. No, they're not good at winning wars. They make all sorts of dumb mistakes. Ask any veteran. Ask 100% of veterans. They make shitty calls all the time. And this was one of them. One video played during the trial showed a Dima talking with officials from US General William Boykin's office about an impending attack he planned on a terrorist cell. Yeah, they probably thought he was legitimate at some period of time, or at least enough of them did that he was able to get away with it for a while. Now, what I can easily bust is Jack Adema's claim that he and Task Force Saber, Saber seven never tortured anybody, which is what he argued in Afghan court. But unfortunately, the judge who was trying their

case was somebody that Jack had abducted, arrested and tortured. And this judge actually testified at Jack's trial, which is since he was the judge, I would call it best in unorthodox legal precedent. So yeah, but also the judge was almost certainly yeah. And it's weird because like I have no trouble believing this judge was like maybe doing shit with the Taliban, maybe doing just other shady shit, because he's a political official in Afghanistan in 2004. And they were all on the fucking take. Yeah, like, yeah, there's probably he's probably a sketchy son of a bitch. But like also Jack and his guys absolutely tortured this guy. And then he winds up trying their case. Like what are you? That's like the record scratch scenario you

walk in, you're just standing at the table ready to sit down and then you see the guy's face walks in just like, oh, man, one of the dozens of guys I torture winds up being my judge. What are the odds? Shoot. So here's a Rolling Stone quote from the trial where the judge gets up and talks about his experience. The judge then stood up and mimed out how somebody acting like James Bond, Adima, of course, came into the house waving a weapon, shouting, hands up, hands up. Also taken in the custody were two of the judge's brothers, as well as four of the relatives and a family retainer. The eight prisoners who'd be discovered by Afghan authorities when they later busted Adima's jail. The judge told me the first night around midnight, I heard the screams of four

people. They then poured very cold water on me. I tried to keep myself from screaming, but couldn't. Then they played loud, strange music. Then they prevented me from going to the bathroom. A terrible situation. I was hooded for 12 days. Jesus Christ. 12 days, bro. The trial also brought up evidence that did seem somewhat exculpatory for Jack and his men. US military authorities repeatedly admitted under questioning that they had been aware of Jack's task force. And some evidence emerged that Adima and his men may have thwarted an assassination attempt against the Afghan education minister. But again, it's impossible to say what the fuck actually happened here. And this is made more complicated by the fact that the FBI

apparently took a bunch of documents and tapes from Adima's home after his arrest and then withheld them from defense lawyers. This is peculiar because the FBI should not have had any jurisdiction in an Afghan court case. And this is all complicated by the fact that it happened in fucking Afghanistan, a country with an enormous amount of government corruption and huge numbers of officials who were straight up on the take. I have read a lot of articles about this and I have no idea conclusively about what went down. But looking at the life of Jack Adima on the whole, I do think it is safe to say that Task Force Saber 7 with some sort of grift, the vast majority, if not the entirety of the people that he went after targeted and tortured, were completely

innocent. And he deserved the sentence that he received, which was 10 years in Afghan prison. Amen. So the judge that he tortured sentences him to prison. I just love that the judge whom he tortured sentences. Now, there are journalists who visited him while he was in jail and they all note kind of bemusedly that he was very popular with his guards and managed to get himself and his men into a luxury cell with carpet, satellite, television and a private bathroom, like a kitchen and all sorts of nice stuff. And they're just like, well, it's like that's what these journalists say. And the obvious answer is he bribed them. He gave them money. He has money. He paid it to them.

I like that. I like that one of the things included in the description is it had carpet. Yeah. Shit, man. Prison with carpet ain't the worst prison. So Jack was released in 2007 and quite wisely decided he could never turn home to the United States. And again, he was released like seven years early, probably bribery, but it was through a pardon. Who the fuck knows? Maybe it was something that pleased the Defense Department. Either way, as soon as he gets out of Afghanistan, he knows that he absolutely cannot go home to the United States because he still has wire fraud warrants out for his arrest in North Carolina. And they were pending federal charges for all of the crimes he'd committed in Afghanistan when

he was torturing people. So instead he went to Dubai and attempted to set up a drug and arms smuggling syndicate. This failed. And so Jack Adema headed to the last refuge of all true grifters, Mexico, Mexico. Yeah, baby. Yeah. There it is. Fuck. I love how often episodes the show end in Mexico. It is always such a treat whenever we get to Mexico. So Jack bought a boat and started running a charter boat service for tourists. He called himself Captain Black Jack and patterned his personality after Captain Jack Sparrow. Yes. You might say there has been a degradation from his his time as a terrorism expert. So now he's doing booze cruises and pretending to be Jack Sparrow. He built a home in an

imitation Middle Eastern style and was said to relax there in a thob, which is like the long gown that men in parts of the Middle East wear. His ex-girlfriend claims that he would regularly go on multi-day vodka and cocaine suit soaked binges while looping either Arabic music, the apocalypse now soundtrack or just playing Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World on repeat for hours. Hell yeah. Wow. Get after it. Yeah. At some point, Daniel, Jackadima caught HIV, possibly due to the fact that he had constant casual sex with strangers and never ever used protection. What? Sometimes that happens. Yeah. This is a this is a different part of the story. Oh, buddy, we are getting into a twist in the tail. So we do not stand an unsafe sex

participants knows none of the unsafe sex with people you don't know fam. We don't know when Jackadima got HIV, but we absolutely know that getting it did not cause him to start using condoms because he gave it to his girlfriend without telling her that he was sick in the first place. She later recalled that he explained he thought he was immune to the disease because in his words, in his words, Daniel, he had super blood. One more time. He had super blood. He had super blood. I just wanted to hear you say it again. Now, again, as we're getting into this point, Jackadima has seemed like definitely a con artist. The stuff that came out about him later in his life makes me suspect that there was also

either mental illness as a result of just like he was he got sick or because of his constant drug abuse, he damaged his brain. He has it is unclear. But what happens that like, yeah, there's a lot about Jackadima. Like what this is what his girlfriend's reports revealed is there's just a lot about Jackadima we don't know. I up until I started reading her accounts of him, I thought he was just a standard grifter. And now there's a part of him that's like, he may have actually been ill outside of the HIV. It is very hard to say. Maybe so. But this is the part at which things get moderately less fun because his very last girlfriend, Penny Elisey contracted HIV from Jack. And given that she did, it's almost guaranteed that God

knows how many other people got HIV from this guy. Because again, he would throw days long cocaine and liquor orgy benders while he was in Mexico and before while he was in Afghanistan. And he probably had HIV for a large chunk of that time. So he gets so many people sick. He's this is a guy who does nothing but leave shattered lives in his wake. That's tragic. Now, that girlfriend, Penny Elisey wrote a blog post about what Jack did to her. And it's honestly heartbreaking. And I am going to read a quote from it now. A long ones, we'll have to pause a couple of times in this. I did not get HIV via drugs or being a hooker. I got it the way a lot of women get it. I was in love and stupid, period. And because of love and stupidity,

my life will never be the same, whatever is left of it. So the story is not for profit. It is for peace of mind. And so that when I meet my maker, I will know I did all I could to stop this monster. Jack Adima has a lot more sins than just giving out HIV. I am as concerned about other people being sick as I am and about dying. The other stuff will come out eventually, although I am sure it won't be around long enough to see it. So yes, I am mad, very mad, sad as well. Now, she claims that Jack started their relationship by flirting with her online while he was locked in prison in Afghanistan, which is again, you'll notice the last time he was in prison, he also exited it with a woman he had been flirting with remotely. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So he used her to take

care of business he needed done in the United States when he got out of prison because he couldn't re-enter the country. And he also relied on her to take care of his dog when he went off doing whatever the fuck Jack Adima did when he wasn't taking care of his dog. He also gave her- This man doesn't deserve a dog? I agree. Yeah, he sure doesn't. I would like to back up so big on that one. Does not deserve a dog. Does not deserve a dog. Does not deserve a dog. Yeah. So she was like the last person to know Jack well. And it is from Penny that we get some of our final big revelations about Jack Adima. Quote, Jack always told me he was a heterosexual and when I finally found out the truth it was too late. Now I also know that he was bisexual years ago. A green beret he was stationed

at Fort Bragg has come forward and told me of his meeting Jonathan Keith Adima as he called himself back then. He met him at a newsstand located on Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville, North Carolina in early 2000-2001. They would have sex in a back room. He also went to 450 Robeson Street and had sex with Jack at his apartment next to his office in that building. Two other men have also come forward. Jack was also into cross-dressing secretly then too as well as having his anus penetrated by dildos. He never used condoms then. Now he occasionally does but the damage is already there. The disease has progressed. I've also been told about his encounters with men when he was in prison in Kabul, Afghanistan. Apparently Thursday night's their war for man sex. I wish to God he had told

me this himself when I first met him. So I don't know how true that is. But Jack definitely had HIV which progressed to full-blown AIDS and it definitely seems credible that he was just fucking a bunch of people his entire life and never taking any care about the fact that he was spreading diseases to them. I think that it's possible Penny has some weird homophobia stuff although it's kind of unclear from her writing. But it also seems really credible that this guy Jack Adima was just fucking people and spreading diseases his entire life without a goddamn care in the world. So that's cool. That's a cool story. Jack was accused of rape at least once in 2010 by a young woman who visited his home. He temporarily fled to Belize to escape justice but returned to Mexico

and was unmolested by the law until his death in January 2012 as a result of AIDS. So that's how this story ends. Robert Young Pelton, a somewhat legendary war correspondent, is probably the reporter who wrote most about Jack Adima without falling for his bullshit. And I found an article written after Jack's death in McClatchy by Pelton or that quotes both Pelton and Penny Alisi and it provides some final explanations for how Jack got away with his schemes for so long. He would meet somebody that he needed or wanted to be like like the author Robin Moore and then he would absorb all their mannerisms, words, and the way they dressed Pelton said. It worked in part because he was highly intelligent. Few con artists could worm their way into helping more.

The author of the Green Berets write a book and few could come up with such strong legal arguments for so many spurious causes, he said. Indeed, Alisi, his former girlfriend said, Adima wrote nearly all of the legal filings he was involved with over the years. I know because I sat there and watched him, she said. Then the lawyers would just sign off on them. So at the end of this, I don't know what to fucking make of this, dude. Other than that, he was a monster and a grifter. But it is very hard for me to tell how much of this was like a coldly calculated piece of shit and how much of this was like just a damaged ill man compulsively, possibly based on the fact that he actually had delusions, like fucking shit out. Like,

I really don't know where to land on this guy other than that he's a monster. Right. But that's the story of Jack Adima. Sounds like a piece of garbage, a lying war obsessed piece of trash who did not participate in safe sex and has ruined the lives of probably hundreds of people at this point. Oh God, yeah, there are so many like poor young men. And if we're honest, probably kids who I am fucking certain got sick because Jack Adima, you know, contracted their services as sex workers and then just rolled on with his life. It's like, it's actually, if you imagine that this guy is,

as it seems likely he was just spreading HIV around Afghanistan's sex worker population for a couple of years, like there's no telling how many people got sick as a result of him. Undoubtedly way too many. Yeah. Damn. So that's cool. That's a cool story. Another bastard in the bag. Yep. Another bastard in the bank.

So, Dan. Yes, Robert. How are you feeling? Uh, you know, I don't know. Not great. Not great. No, I'm good. Would you feel better to know that prior to the 2001 invasion, Afghanistan had one of the lowest rates of HIV infections in the world and that after the war they had a skyrocketing AIDS crisis?

No. No. That doesn't make you feel good? Oh, oh, of course it doesn't, because it's unspeakably terrible. Cool. Well. Robert, you are an incredible, incredible person. Thank you.

I will tell you what. What? Well, Dan. Yes, Robert. Where can people find you on the internet if they want to give you the internet equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease, which is fandom? Yes. I don't really know where I'm going with this.

Well, if you want to bother me on the internet. I don't know where you're going with it either. It's okay. I have a hat. They're all imaginary friends. Uh, I have a, you can follow me on Twitter at dj underscore danl, d-a-n-l. You can follow me on Twitch at twitch.tv slash dj underscore danl. Come watch me play video games and we'll hang out and tell stories. And I can tell you behind the scenes stuff about Robert, like when he gave me a knife

and I have it right here. It sounds like that. You heard it open just now. You're damn right it does. Yay, come look at my knife on Twitch. That is not what I meant. Okay, come look at Dan's knife on Twitch and send him pictures of your own knife, whatever knife means to you personally.

You know, we all get to define the word knife for ourselves. You did this to yourself, Dan. And for the record, the knife that I'm talking about fits the Twitch standards and practices. I'm talking about an actual flip blade by a Sierra KT, TKT. All right, I'm done. I need to cut all this. Cut none of this. Cut none of this.

Cut nothing yourself listeners as you go out into the world. And by go out into the world, I mean stay in your homes for the love of God. I'm Robert Evans. I have a podcast called the women's war and you can find it, presumably. Just Google it. It'll come up. Google it in the word podcast if you need to. You'll fucking find it.

Like, you know, we all know how to use the internet. Like, you know the title. That's all you fucking need. What are you doing? What are you doing? Demanding I give you more information. I've given you enough. Or you can go to Twitter and I post links to episodes because I'm a nice person and Robert is a hack.

I'm sorry. I'm just abusing the audience to make them love me more, which is the kind of thing that I'm certain. Jack Adima did a lot over the course of his life. Don't compare yourself to that nightmare, Robert. You're a good boy. No, no, you don't know what I got up to in Afghanistan, Sophie. I'll give you one hint.

There was never an Osama bin Laden. That shit's fake news. Anyway, Robert Evans here taking credit for September 11th, the movie big trouble, and signing off. You can follow him on Twitter at I write okay. You can follow us on Twitter at Instagram at bastards pod. You can find the sources for our episodes under part one of this episode, under the episode description.

Do we have a two public store? Don't listen Robert, I'm a worst year ever. That's the episode. Wash your hands. Or not. If you're in a home, it doesn't matter. You can be as filthy as you want. Wash your hands.

Don't listen to this asshole. Live like a monster. Be a gorilla. It's fine. Bye. Don't fuck it up for society. Bye. 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 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 and 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. 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.