Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 216 - Toby Harnden

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

Toby Harnden is an accomplished author and veteran foreign correspondent. His latest book is First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11. Toby also wrote Dead Men Risen, which won the Orwell Prize, and Bandit Country, one of the most acclaimed books about the Irish Troubles. A former foreign correspondent, he reported from 33 countries while based in London, Belfast, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Washington DC for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times of London. He was imprisoned in Zimbabwe and faced prosecution in Northern Ireland for his work, A dual U.S. and British citizen and former Royal Navy officer, he lives in McLean, Virginia.

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. You know who today's episode is brought to you by. You can just stop messing around. We all know it's brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. The makers of the best coffee on the face of the planet. Actually, don't know if that's true. I feel like it's that way. But they also make the cleared hot blend of coffee,

which I'm going to say completely biased, full disclosure, is the best blend of coffee that they make. But if you want to support a brand that is was founded by, amazing individuals that are still continuing to find ways to do things for this country and the veteran community, you need to go to black rifle coffee.com, check it what they have to offer, get involved if you want to, and don't get involved if you don't. But what I'll say is this. Couldn't be more happy that they are the sole sponsor of every episode this year. I think it's an amazing thing. I couldn't be more proud. Now, to episode 216, my guest today is Toby Hardin. He's an author,

because we discussed this, the difference between a journalist and an author, and he considers himself to be an author. Before that, though, British military grew up, as I would describe it as being a military brat, joined the military himself, found his way into traditional journalism. You know, spent a little bit of time in prison in Zimbabwe, you know, got into a little bit of a tussle with not releasing the names of classified sources throughout his journalism. career and then became an author. And we were talking about his most recent book that he sent me called First Casualty. And I've often been surprised. I spent a few years of my life overseas back and forth between Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's amazing how much I don't know about the history of the U.S. involvement and occupation of that country. Specifically, First Casualty talks about the initial CIA mission to avenge.

9-11 and the death of Mike Span and things that led to that working with the ODA. It is, I think it's a cautionary tale for a variety of reasons. We had an amazing success early on, and we fucked it right up from there. But I will let Toby talk about his journey through life and his journey to becoming an author. Episode 216 with Toby Hardin. Enjoy. Where would you like to begin? Wherever you'd like to begin.

I'm catching a little bit of an accent. I'm thinking Texas? It's kind of an English accent. If you're from England, you can maybe detect a little bit of northwest of England because I grew up mostly in Manchester. My dad was in the Navy, so we moved around a lot. But we ended up in the Manchester area. Which is a place I've actually been a couple times.

Oh, really? How come? I was actually over there repetitively. Well, I can't say repetitively. I went a few years in a row working at CrossFit seminars, the Strength and Conditioning Program. Yeah. I didn't see a whole lot of it, if I'm being honest.

I went to the gyms and definitely spent some time inside of the pubs. Okay. You didn't miss that much. I mean, I spent my childhood plotting a way to get out, you know, sort of grim industrial city. Yeah. But the accents, I mean, you know, I've lived in the U.S. for, you know, with two or three years sort of in the Middle East and one year in London in the

middle, sort of 22 years now. But I guess I don't have a musical ear or whatever, so I've never I like it. Particularly picked up the American accent. Do Americans sound like they have an accent to you? Oh, yes. Really? Oh, yeah. I just figure we're the only ones that speak correctly and everybody else is all fucked up. No, I don't have an accent. You do. Of course. Yes, of course. You spent some time in the old British military. Yes. What led you to this? So, I mean, from my earliest beginnings, really.

So I'm fourth generation military. Okay. So my father was in the Navy. His father, my grandfather, was in the British Army and joined as a, his rank was boy in the 1920s. That was a legitimate rank? Absolutely. I can tell you in 2022, that's not flying. Right.

That shit's over. And so he went all the way through World War II. And I think he retired in 1950 and he went from Boy to Major. So he went to Company Sergeant Major who was a wartime commission. And so I vividly remember him showing me his sort of wartime medals and souvenirs. I mean, there was an identity braceletly picked off a dead soldier and little bits and pieces and stuff. And so I think it was it was in me from there. Did he talk very much about his experiences in World War II?

And I asked that because I, in my experience, in the limited time that I had been around people that served in that conflict, they're often very reserved. Well, he was quite a reserved person. And so he didn't talk about it in detail. No. I mean, he'd show me the medals and things. Yeah. And he'd talk about it in general terms. And they lived in India, so he'd been based in India for most of the 1930s. But it wasn't specific.

And even to my father, my father spent a lot of time later on trying to piece it together. And I mean, apropos that, there was a great grandfather who was career military again, the sergeant in the infantry, the outbreak. of World War I, odds of survival pretty slim. He was captured in France in September 1914 and escaped from POW W camp in Germany in March 1916. I knew nothing about that until about 10 years ago. Wow. So it was just, yeah, as you say, something that people often just didn't talk about. I wish that podcasting or long-form conversations were more of a thing back then because I feel like I look at my own experience in the modern conflicts or however you

would want to describe it. And I've had this conversation quite a few times with people that I served with. And we're all pretty much of the impression that what we encountered and what they encountered is like comparing apples and bowling balls. Right. I mean, I can't, I mean, you could talk World War I War I, but I can't even fathom the concept of trench warfare, squaring off and moving by inches at a time or these ladder charges where they'd go up and over. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Right, right, right. That to me is a completely different level. And I wish there was a way to have sat down and captured those stories in their voice in real time. Yeah. It's, I don't, it's a loss. It's a loss for history, I think. I mean, I was just looking at it yesterday,

actually, my grandfather's battalion was almost wiped out. 500 of the battalion were killed. In I think 1942 in Libya, you know, never talked about it. Yeah, that's, I mean, those are numbers that, especially for people who have never been around the military or been around an environment where those numbers are generated, that's, it's unfathomable. Yeah. That's, I mean, that would be an entire seal team gone. Poof, off the face of the planet. It's rough. Right.

Yeah. So it was in your blood. Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, from my, you know, my dad spent 10 years in the Navy, then he became an architect, but so he was, I guess I was six when he left the Navy, but it was always just something I wanted to do. And then that fed into being in Manchester, this very sort of insular place, and I just wanted to get out and see the world and, you know, experience adventure. So the military is a good ticket to ride for that. Absolutely. It is, people ask me all the time about reasons to join, and there are economic reasons to join.

There are educational reasons to join. Socioeconomic reasons. I mean, for somebody to go out and get some experience beyond the world that they live in, I don't know if there could be a better option. Right. And I think just adventure, danger, testing yourself. If you're into those things, let's take it easy. Right. It's 2022.

We can't really promote that stuff. But certainly as, you know, you know, Toby little kid. in Manchester, I was drawn to all that stuff. As was I. Any resistance from your parents for the desire to join? No. So my dad, borderline pushed me, which, you know, I don't think was great. And so I think about this with my son. I have two children. My son is just 13. And he's interested in the military. But the one thing I'm not going to do, I'm telling myself not to do is to push him and certainly not push him into a particular branch. I mean, my dad was very keen on the Navy. Shocker. I think I would have been better suited to the army. And because, you know, I was in

Manchester. I had no, I didn't sail. I had no kind of affinity with the sea. Yeah. I still don't, by the way, and I was in the Navy for 17 years. I actually despised the sea in many respects. Yeah. I grew up in an ocean town doing junior lifeguards and surfing occasionally. And now it's probably the least likely thing you'll ever find me doing is voluntarily going in the ocean. Interesting. Yeah. But yeah, I, well, I guess I was taken sailing a few times when I was young. I was not sailing. I was having nothing to do with the execution of the duties on the boat. Okay. Okay. So I'm assuming you live with your son of Virginia. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And so he is considering it? Well, he's 13. So I'm divorced, shared custody with my kids. So my daughter's 14, 15 in June.

And so we're getting to that stage. I'm sure you're going through it too. I got 18 and 16 for my boys. Okay. Neither of them have any interest in the military. Okay. Which I have to say I'm completely fine with. Right.

But I also would have been fine if they had expressed interest. And I would have gone down the path that you're describing. I would have been supportive like my parents were supportive in doing so, try to educate them and then make their own choice. Yeah. The military has great options for people. And it's often shit on, I think a lot of the time. Oh, it's for people with no, you know, they have no other choice.

Or it's, oh, you couldn't pass your SATs, go join the military. Yeah, that's ridiculous. Some of the smartest people, I serve with the road scholars and also complete idiots for clarity. Yeah, yeah. So both sides of the spectrum. But holy cow. I mean, I saw people lifted out of true economic poverty. They came from some of the darkest places that I've ever heard described.

and those who kind of walked around with like a, you know, a belt full of silver spoons so they could just use one and be done. And it was pretty cool. And it certainly was not a measure of last resort for the people that I serve with. Maybe it is for some, but, man, the number of times people had to volunteer and go and continue to go through the process and screen and select. It was almost never ending. Absolutely.

And, I mean, I spent, so I did a book Dead Men Risen about the Welsh Guards in Helmand, 2009. And so I spent a lot of time with the Welsh Guards. guards and officers with the Silver Spoon guys, usually English, certainly English accents public schools and I mean, it's almost 19th century in some ways. But the enlisted were Welshmen from the valleys and the towns and the cities of Wales from some very poor backgrounds. But those were the guys who got out, a little bit like me, you know, in a small way. They wanted something different and they extended themselves. So in a way, they were self-selecting. kind of elites, the people who had the ambition and the desire to do something else.

Yeah. What, how was your, because you did 10 years, correct? I did, although three of those years were at college. So basically I did a year at Dartmouth, like the Naval Academy equivalents, but it was really just basic training, three years at university and then six and a half years afterwards. But yeah, total of 10, almost 10 years. What was your experience like? Did you enjoy it?

Was it what you thought it would be? I think it was what I thought it would be. I did enjoy it. I found it somewhat frustrating because there was no action. I mean, I went to lots of great places. I sailed around the world. I joined ships in Hong Kong twice. I went around Australia twice.

Went to the Caribbean. I went all over Europe. We had a ship visit in Karachi. Went to Diego Garcia. But the Cold War was over for most of. to, you know, well, half the period I was in. And they managed to win the Gulf War without me, even though I agitated to get out there.

And also I'd chosen a career path, which was kind of a blind alley. So I was interested in becoming a Navy JAG, a lawyer. And to do that, I had to transfer from the executive branch, so from the kind of semen warfare branch to logistics, supply and secretariat. And so you were in a support role. And I just felt what's it all for? You know, we're guarding the northern flank of Europe. Cold War's over.

And I tried to get out to be a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia. And I couldn't be spared because they wanted some supply billet filled. And so at that point, I thought, you know, I'll find my adventurer elsewhere. Yeah. What drew you did the JAG pipeline? And for people who don't know what that is, If this matches what it is in the U.S. military, they're lawyers. Yeah.

So I suppose what I was struggling with was, you know, I had a first class degree from Oxford University in history. And so... Is that the equivalent to bachelor's or master's in the U.S.? Yeah. Okay. Bachelors, yeah. Yeah, three-year undergraduate degree. Although, weirdly, they turn it into a master's automatically.

That's a great system. Yeah, I know. So I fill in forms I've got a master's. But so, you know, I was, you know, had academically, you know, very good record. And so a lot of people in the Navy would be, oh, you went to Oxford. Like, did you fail? Did you get a third class degree? Did you get kicked out?

Or why would you do? And even people in the Navy were, even some kind of senior people would be like, well, why would you choose the Navy? It was a very sort of anti-intellectual kind of atmosphere. It wasn't valued. So the whole, you know, warrior scholar thing you've had with Petraeus and McChrystal, that did not exist. You know, not that I'm suggesting I would have been like that.

And so I think that I felt that the law in the Navy would be a way of kind of satisfying both urges, sort of adventure and service and something that used my brain. But I wasn't thinking it through very much because then I realized if you become a naval barrister, you're mostly, you know, prosecuting sailors who stuck a glass in the face of another sailor or something like that. And I did, and I did, I served as like the clerk of the court at a number of courts marshal and I kind of saw that. Yeah, the door cracked open for you and you got to see what was behind it.

Yeah. Yeah, it's actually probably very fortunate that you got to have that insight. Yeah. I know a couple of lawyers. I actually, I can't think of a single lawyer that I know that has expressed me like, you know what, Andy, this job is awesome. They all say, I wish I hadn't paid so much money to go to school to have this job because I want to do something else. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's, well, and I also think that like many people who watch Top Gun or the movie Navy SEALs, the greatest documentary ever created about the SEAL teams, they think that's what they're going to join for, and it's just, it's not like that. So what would the firm perhaps would be a good law movie that people could watch and be let down quietly and softly. Yeah. Yeah. Good call on that. I think so. I mean also I think to be I mean I found it to be in a support role in the military I think that would have always been a frustration. That's very common and I people reach out to me more often than I would actually care to admit expressing exactly that. Hey I served in almost all of them are like the last 20 years I served in the military I'm embarrassed to tell people that I

deployed because I was in a support capacity. And I try to be very direct and I try to address every time that I see it because there's pros and cons to the world that I came from where, you know, when I joined the military, I would say most people in a room of 100, if you were to canvass them and say, hey, how many of you have heard of Navy SEALs? I bet you there'd be 10 hands that went up. When I publicly speak now, I go the other way. I say, who in this room has never heard of a Navy SEAL. And I've yet actually to have somebody's hand come up. They're probably, due to the fact largely, if they did to raise their hand, they'd look around and be like, oh, shit, I'm the only person with my hand up, so I'll put it down. But there's been a ton of

attention that has come from it. Not all of it great. Most of the stuff that makes the headlines in the recent few years at least has been, I would say, where members of the community that don't define or represent a community as a whole probably fell short a little bit, you know. Which is going to happen in a wartime environment and in a community that largely, I think, screens for people that are at the extremes of behavioral tolerances. Like, you're looking for a pretty precise type of person, in my opinion. Yeah. But that attention, one, I think it makes it harder to do the job.

And two, I think it could also potentially entice people that are coming for the wrong reason. Right. You know, it's tough. Yeah. Or warp their expectations as well. Yeah. Yeah, it's the with that though, to get back to what you were saying about, you know, having this feeling of, you know, serving in a support role would have been difficult. And for the people listening to this and the people who've written in that I haven't gotten back to, it would be impossible for me to have done my job absent those support people.

So I'll go back to Neptune Spear. I think it's probably the best example. People may not know the name of the operation, but they realize that at some point in time Osama bin Laden was killed. Yeah. And you look at how that happened. A really small group of individuals who went to Pakistan. I wonder why we didn't tell them first that we were coming. No big deal. It's a different conversation too. And I'm sure they didn't know that bin Laden was like, what was it like a quarter of a mile from their west point? Totally accidental, I'm sure. But I digress in helicopters that got forward stage from a, you know, a location in Virginia Beach and that is a massive command that I think has a ratio of probably six, if not 10 to one of support personnel to operators. Let me tell you what the seals weren't doing. Making the fast ropes, making the night vision goggles, making the weapons and the optics that are on the weapons and the bulletproof plates that they were bullet resistant plates, I guess I should say, or refueling the aircraft, or maintenanceing the aircraft, or

making the target buildings or the target packages or the weather brief. None of those dudes that were on target that got all of the. publicity would have been able to even get to that target if it wasn't for thousands of people that enabled them to be able to do so. And to forget that is a total disservice to people who are in a support capacity. And there's a very asymmetrical relationship between the amount of attention that one of those groups, which is super small, gets in comparison to the other one, but that huge group that gets almost no attention makes that small groups. Occupational, you know, performance even possible.

Yeah, and I felt that I particularly learned that in a ship, you know, 250 people, every person has a role. And also, you have an action station's role. So, you know, so I was the captain's secretary. So I was the staff officer for the captain, who was the captain of frigate squadron. But, you know, when the shit hit the fan, I was in command of the aftersection base, you know, firefighting and plugging holes in the side. So everybody on that ship had their role from the, from the captain to the junior. the most junior steward or cook. I tried to go on British ships as often as possible for one key reason, and I think you know what it is.

Yes, alcohol. Booze. Why would you not? Why would you not? The hat was incredible. First off, Aussies, great as well. Yeah. They have a great mess.

That was incredible. The booze was so cheap. I mean, I didn't drink at sea just because I felt I drank enough on shore and it would be time to sort of dry out. And it wasn't going to help me. Yeah. But every sailor was allowed three tins of beer, like small cans of beer. Is this daily?

Yes. You sons of bitches. And it was all duty free. And so the Mestek, so the Mestek may have like, I don't know, 80 sailors in the Mestek. And they'd have a guy who was the beer boson. And he would just go 80 times three, which I think is 240. 240 tins of beer every day. Times how long we're going to be out of port.

Absolutely. And eventually, some of those mess decks, the deck would be like three foot high because it was just like cans of beer. It was incredible. I don't know whether it's still like that. I imagine it probably isn't. And Channel night, so you get to the English channel at the end of a deployment that there'd be Channel night. Everybody that wasn't on duty would be hammered. I mean.

And if something goes wrong, everyone's on duty. That's correct. I was just about to say I can see pros and cons to that situation. If everything goes as planned and the boat just goes where it's supposed to and everybody does their job, no problems. Shipboard fire, you might have some very interesting firefighting procedures occurring. Right. No, it was... Although people can sober up very, very quickly and it's happened to me a couple of times, not in the military.

Yeah. Where you can be pretty drunk and if you really need to function, you can. I find that that varies by individual. There are some people. I've been in a few of those situations myself. Some rose to the occasion and others tripped over the low barrier to entry. Could be the point. Way to say. Literally. Literally for sure. Literally for sure. What was behind your decision to get out of the military? So it's kind of what I said. It felt like it didn't have enough meaning, you know? And also, I felt as a junior naval officer, you know, I had some good job. I worked for an admiral in the Ministry of Defense, you know, and I was able to kind of work the system.

I, you know, I was able to, you know, I got on board, H. Miss Edinburgh, which was Prince Andrews' ship, but, you know, so I had a higher class of female at the cocktail parties and, you know, the social events were of a, you know, higher caliber. Yeah. So I felt that you could work the system when you were, when you were sort of junior. But I felt, I mean, sort of counterintuitive, in a way, but the higher up you get, the fewer options you have. And I also, I think I had enough self-knowledge to realize that I had a very low-bordom threshold. And so I had a problem doing sort of mundane routine tasks that had to be done. It kind of, I mean, again, I can always speak for the Navy. And even in the SEAL community, which people think is devoid of those

tasks, holy cow. I mean, we train a lot, we travel a lot, and then there's weeks of time where you're just taking care of equipment, you're taking query of your personal gear. It is a staple of military life. Right. The judicious application of mundane tasks over a long period of time. Right. And so. If you can't tolerate that or can't learn to tolerate that, perhaps the military is a visit instead of a long-term journey, which is totally fine.

Right. And so I was specifically given the, so I volunteered. I tried to get on a, I mean, looking back, it's kind of obvious what I was trying to do. You know, I was trying to get involved in special duties in Northern Ireland. Like, so, like basically undercover work in Northern Ireland. I was trying to be a UN military observer in Bosnia. And so I was trying to do all these things that weren't really to do with my sort of main specialty in the Navy. And I just kept on getting blocked because I was sort of needed elsewhere.

And so I was appointed. to a Royal Marine unit that spent half the year in, I think, Bardefos in Norway. And I would have been the logistics officer for those Royal Marines. Now, 50% of the officers in that job got court-martialed because something went badly wrong. Something got lost. And basically, I would have been with a bunch of Marines who didn't care about accounting for stuff. And I was a person that didn't really care about accounting for stuff. So I think it would have been a much higher than 50% chance of a bit going pear shape for me.

So I thought it was just time. You made the correct call. I think so. I really think you did, yes. And especially in a time of relative peace when I would think back to pre-9-11. I mean, one of the fastest ways you could get yourself in trouble would be to come back from a training evolution absent a few pieces of gear that you went with. Because if there's no enemy to fight, we will fight ourselves. Right.

And by that, I mean paper cuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've walked online a few times. I mean, I remember pre-9-11, they would do OTH or O-TB, over the horizon in zodiacs, and then, of course, you get to the beach and you swim across. We're talking to the Pacific Ocean in San Diego. Well, I was about to say the waves aren't that bad. There's been some winter swells that come there that dominate.

And occasionally we would be doing OTH, OTB, and a Zodiac would go upside down. And they would have an entire team of SEALs, like all of SEAL Team 5. And sometimes they'd get their buddies next door, walking online or swimming online, looking for a rubber shape of like an M4 or AR. Or God, oh, man, I remember one time a Dreger got flipped out because they were doing a dive. And we spent some hours looking for that stuff. And somebody probably got in substantial trouble. And then I looked post-9-11.

If it wasn't catastrophic, it's like, hey, here do the paperwork. there's another one for you. Right. Priorities shifted. Yeah. I mean, this was 90, so I left in 94. Okay. So that was exactly.

You got out in 94. I left. So I joined 85. I left at 94. So that was exactly the environment. And again, I remember walking across an air station in Yovelton in Somerset. And a guy who was with me just saying hello to a Marine and asking him how he was. And he was like, he was like, okay, could do with the war, sir.

I remember thinking. Honest answer, at least. I know, even then, you know, not very PC, but you want to do what you're trained for. You want, you know, so I think a lot of this shaped what happened after the Navy for me that I had, you know, a lot of envy in some ways for the post-9-11 generation because they were able to do the business

and I was in that era where you couldn't really. It was conceptual. I joined in 96, graduated of Buds in 97, got to my first team at the end of 97. And obviously until the end of 2001, it was all conceptual. And it was almost all, the training at least seemed to be legacy-based. I remember people were talking about, you know, where did this tactic come from? It came from Vietnam. The last time, really, a large group of seals was ever tested in the way that we would have our gear,

or even the gear that we were wearing. It was legacy. And then 9-11 kicked off. And it was a pretty, I would describe it as a pretty jarring shift, like trying to drive a manual transmission. And you barely have it in first and kind of miss the shift to third from conceptual to practical. It was, there was a lot of things that were paired away quickly. Yeah. The chisel was out on this conceptual giant of what war was going to be like. Like, that doesn't work. That doesn't work. That doesn't work. That shit's heavy. I'm not carrying that. I'm not. It was pretty impressive, actually. Yeah. I mean, I remember in, it would have been probably 1991, spending a weekend at HMS Cochran, a shore base in Scotland with a bunch of guys telling us what we had to do if the Russian spetsnats landed. And they're white striped, their white and black striped shirts. And I just remember being so pissed off. This is, this is stupid. This is never going to happen. I'm wasting my weekend. And I mean, it's a bit like, I don't know, do you know the show Dad's Army?

I do not. The Dad's Army. This sounds like a Brit show. It's about the Home Guard. Okay. And it's about the sort of the old guys or the sort of the sick and the lame. And some of them were World War veterans in World War II who were in the Home Guard, which was this, you know, this organization which was going to defend the homeland.

the Germans invaded. And, you know, it was, I mean, it was a comedy. And the whole thing was sort of just comical. And this felt like an episode of Dad's Army. And I did not want to be in an episode of Dad's Army. Yeah, I get it. What was your first job after you got out? So I probably can talk about this now.

But I sort of, there was an overlap. So I had to give, I think it was a year's notice. So then I had a year. in the Navy just serving out my time and they sort of sent me into exile to a submarine in refit in Plymouth. And I just wanted to get on with the journalism. So. Oh, so you had a desire to be a journalist prior to getting. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When did that desire come about? So when I was a kid, I mean, when I was a kid, you know, we had a career's office and I was interested in being a journalist. So it was

always something that was there and writing, you know, I studied history. And so it was It had always been a thought. And then probably, so four or five years before I got out, I started doing journalism on the side. So I did theatre reviews for the Scotsman because I had a flat in Edinburgh because I was based in Ross Ith nearby. And so I was, you know, it's about as different from the armed forces as you could imagine, like sort of going around, right, doing theatre reviews at the Edinburgh fringe for the

Scotsman newspaper. and they were getting published and it was nothing to do with the Navy so nobody said anything. And so I got the, I sort of got the bug there. I would write letters to newspapers which would get published,

you know. And so it's, you know, I was, I was angling myself more and more towards doing that. And then when I, you know, I did a night class

with lots of old ladies about how to write news stories and stuff, which was kind of amusing. But worthwhile, you know, who went, What, why, where? The five dubs. Yeah, yeah.

And so in that year, I was moonlighting. I was working for the Daily Telegraph on the diary section. So no bylines. But I had to bring in store it. To get paid, I had to, because I had offered stupidly offered to work for nothing. And the guy said, sure. But I did get paid for contribution. So if I brought in a story, then I would get paid.

How would they calculate the size of the paycheck? Was it per word? It wasn't per word, but it was they, that diary had slots. They had like A, B and C slots. So if it was the lead item, that was an A slot, and I don't know, you'd get 100 pounds for it or whatever. And if it was a C slot, you'd get 20 pounds. So it was like that. Okay.

But it was a pretty big incentive to bring in stories. So I brought, you know, I bring in stories. And so I really had the bug at that stage, and that's what I wanted to do. And that's what you transitioned to doing after getting out. Yeah, well, it's kind of, in hindsight, kind of amusing. I mean, so I was doing this moonlighting for the diary and doing quite well, I think bringing in stories. And the editor of the newspaper was Max Hastings, who's now pretty well-known historian, and was sort of famous for being the first man into Port Stanley in the Forklunds War as a journalist.

And very sort of pro-service. And so he liked the idea of having this sort of naval officer working on the newspaper. And so the editor of the diary kind of said to Max, you know, this guy should have a trial on news. And so I ended up, so I left the Navy in October 94. But for most of the month of August 94, I ended up having a trial as a news reporter on the Daily Telegraph. And, you know, I kind of was a bit of. bluffing involved. I'd done a few bits of, I'd done some news shifts at the local newspaper in Plymouth. And I, I walked into the newsroom and I said, you know, here I am. And they weren't expecting

me because the person who'd arranged it was on holiday. And they said, wherever you, you know, what have been doing? I said, I've been working on the Western Morning News. In fact, I think I'd done two shifts. But they imagined that, you know, I was a reporter at the Western Morning News and I knew what I was doing. So they said, oh, you know, go do the story. And so I was straight into doing a story. I discussed it with my boss on the submarine who was a commander, older guy, who was getting out as well. He was going to be a maths teacher. And so he was a great guy. And so this is all sounding a bit like Dad's Army. This was as far away from the sharp end as you can imagine. And so, you know, he was very sort of, you know, paternal really. And

And I told him about this opportunity to go work in the newsroom. And he's like, oh, that's good. And he says, you probably shouldn't have any bylines. You know, he probably shouldn't have any name on any stories. I said, yeah, for sure. So, yeah, that's a good idea. And probably then immediately did. So that first story on the first day, they said, you know, what bylines do you want?

Because sometimes if you work for another newspaper, like sort of, if you work for a regional newspaper, you'd be trying out for a national newspaper, but you're not really supposed to, so you'd use like a pseudonym. And in that moment, I just thought, shit, you know, this is my new career. You know, your name, your byline is everything. I said, yeah, I'd just put my name on it. And so, yes. Yes. So I had a whole month worth of bylines. And then when I got back, my boss sort of just, you know, just raised an eyebrow. And I was like, well, sorry about that, sir, but, you know, didn't really have much of a choice and he was like oh never mind you know it's fine just take the advice I give you and piss right off with that's right yeah and then when did you start writing about

war so as a relative young I was 28 I guess um journalist you know you're always I was on news general news but you're always trying to sort of bring something extra so I'd just been in the navy and I'd worked in the Ministry of Defence. I had really good contacts. And so I used them. So I was bringing in a lot of defence stories and really, really upsetting the defence correspondent because I was kind of scooping him.

And there was talk of being made the defence correspondent, which would have been a huge kind of promotion at that point. And in fact, I was interviewed for it pretty early on in about 95, so it's only like probably, less than two years out of the Navy. And I didn't get it. And it was really good that I didn't get it. Because I think it's good to broaden out.

And if you're trading on your military kind of service in a very direct way, because you have people's phone numbers and you know people that you worked for or who work for you, it's sort of uncomfortable. I mean, I think it's something obviously former military people. sort of have to navigate. Well, I think there's also a window of time where you can actually be effective as well. Yes. I mean, I've been out, I got out in 2013.

People ask me military questions, and the only honest answer I can give them at this point is, I don't know. Right. You know, they want to know about something current. I can tell you maybe historically, like a roundabout answer, but the reality is every minute that you're out, you're, you know, clock's ticking. You're dated. At some point, that person you're going to call is going to have to tell you, do you? I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you're trading directly on that, whew. Right. You better be working on some other angles. Yeah. And so what happened was, so I basically got posted to Northern Ireland. And so, which was a, I think was a much better fit because, you know, it's part of the United Kingdom. At the time there was a ceasefire.

So there was a ceasefire in like August 94, which broke down in February 96. And it broke down with a massive bomb in South Key, in London's Docklands, and the telegraph's offices was about, like, less than a mile away. And the building shook. And we sort of, the elevators were out and we ran down and, you know, did our reporting. But in the, in, before that bomb went off, I'd been appointed the Northern Ireland correspondent. I think there was a sort of a sense that it was over. There was a ceasefire.

It was going to become politics. And they needed somebody over. there but it wasn't like a sort of front rank job. But I'd already been over there to fill in for my predecessor and I thought this this isn't over. I mean the IRA was still operating. They were killing a lot of drug dealers. There was a lot of stuff happening. There was very little sort of political progress. So I think I nearly got unsent, you know, because I think when that bomb went off, it suddenly became a huge story and I think I remember being nervous about them saying, actually, you know, Toby doesn't have any news experience.

He hasn't done a journalism course. He hasn't worked for a regional newspaper. But anyway, I went. And that really was the making of me. And it was just a fantastic story because you had the military, British Army there, terrorism, but you also had politics

because there were peace talks going on. And it was a very small patch of land. So if, you know, whenever anything went bang, I would just go to it. You know, further story away. I mean, I covered the whole of Ireland. But it increasingly became sort of Northern Ireland focused. And, you know, the furthest anything would be away would be, you know, 90 minutes or so.

Did you find that working in that environment filled more of that, I don't want to say void, but that draw of what you thought you were looking for in the military? I actually think it was a void. And I think it did fill it. It just gave me that sort of excitement, you know, all the things we talked about, like excitement, sort of danger, you know, I mean, going to going into sort of, IRA controlled territory meeting people who'd killed people, you know, knowing intelligence officers who are, you know, who are working against IRA sniper teams and going into parts

of Belfast that were controlled by, you know, loyalist paramilitaries or the IRA. I mean, it was, it was certainly exciting. And I feel there was a lot of kind of laziness. I mean, there was some great journalists out there. But overall, I think there was a lot of laziness. And because, you know, when bombs go off and people get murdered and stuff, stories are kind of easy to write. They just sort of fall on your lap.

And it takes something extra to go out and find stories. It's, you know, it's somewhere on the spectrum between dangerous and uncomfortable. And I just had at that point for good. and for bad, mostly for good, I think. I just had one speed, which was just like... Pedal to the floor. Yeah, exactly. Not the door down, go straight in and, you know,

and I had no, you know, it was a guy in his 20s. I thought I was going to live forever. It's just going to say, it's called being in your 20s. Right. And so I embraced all that, and, you know, I was single. I just completely immersed myself in that story, and it was wonderful. random question but as you're talking about journalism i it's impossible for me to not think about the state of journalism in the united states right now what what are your thoughts on what people are calling

journalism today because i've had this conversation with my dad he's you know the closest metric i have to somebody who's seen a vast amount of change and the time period he's been alive and we both land on the same place and by i'm by no stretch an expert but it almost seems like it's not journalism it's editorialism it's not not this is what happened and you can make up your mind with just the facts. It's this is what happened and this is what you should think about. Oh yeah, or advocacy or yeah. So, yeah, it's depressing.

I'm glad I'm out of it. And so I, you know, I guess technically I'm as, I don't know, people call me a journalist. What would you call yourself? A writer? Yeah, author. Yeah. But I guess I call author and journalist. But, you know.

I think they're different things. Yes. I mean, well, you could author something that would go down the, traditional journalism pipeline, right? You could be published in one of the, I'll use CNN and Foxes two opposites of the spectrum, even though, of course, there's many other in between. So you could be authoring things that are being published that way. But what I think you're talking about is completely different. Yeah. I mean, so we talked about who when, what, why, where. Yeah. And so I grew up in the telegraph, you know, it's a long time ago now, 94,

what's that, 27, 28 years ago. And it felt a little bit like the end of the end of the, an era. And people were saying to me, you know, it's not like it used to be. And now I think back to the good old days and it's those days. And this was print, you know, it was pre-internet. But the Telegraph was an editorially conservative paper. But the news was sort of renowned for being sort of straight down the line. A lot of the reporters were left wing. Some people were probably would have been on the conservative side and some people just would have been cantankerous, you know, sort of

you know, contrarian sort of people. But everybody wrote the news straight. Now there was a telegraph story, you know, so the telegraph would do more military stories than the Guardian, the Guardian would do more environmental stories. Yep. But across the board

we were sort of a bit like the military. We're all of one company. So if we were all out on story. There'd be the Guardian person and the Daily Mirror person, which is sort of the left wing tabloid, the Sun, which is the right wing tabloid. That'd be the telegraph, to be the independent, which is sort of left wing, the Daily Mail, which is a sort of conservative, middle England sort of paper. But we'd all be the same sort of people. And often people move from newspaper to newspaper. And sometimes, depending on what the story was, the Guardian guy could get something

because they were guardian-type people who we were writing about. Other times, the telegraph guy might be able to, or woman might be able to get it. So we would sort of work together and there was a sort of a respect. And we were, you know, on telegraph, certainly I was, you know, the news was reported straight. And that's what I did, you know, right up to, you know, when I left the Sunday Times in, I think, 2018. But since then, I mean, it was always there. But it's just become more and more tendentious. And as you say, you're told what to think.

it's almost weaponized yeah I mean the the links between and again I can only speak from a complete novice perspective in this in media in this country because I'd be curious if you feel the same thing is happening across the pond

but there's almost direct ties it seems to politicians at this point as well too and direct ties to huge money and I'm not I'm not sure how that helps educate and inform the general populace.

It seems to have a very hard time to include myself sometimes separating the wheat from the chaff. Right. I mean, I find, as a former journalist, I'm always, I always look at a story and I think, okay, so this was who it was written by, this is the journalist, this is the outlet, this is the general kind of conventional wisdom about this. This is where the Democrats are on it.

This is where the Republicans are. Now I'm ready to sort of read the story. Yeah. I don't think a lot of people view their media like that. Right. And but you shouldn't, you know, I think people have lost a lot of trust in journalism. I think maybe rightfully so. Yes, I agree.

And, you know, and I think, you know, Donald Trump sort of and that era turned everybody crazy on both sides. I think he was a he was a symptom as well as a cause and perhaps more of a symptom of the problem with sort of establishment and media and all that stuff. But I'm it's very hard for me to see, you know, when journalists turned into two camps, you know, the largest camp being it's our sort of moral duty to take this guy down. Yeah. Do whatever it takes. And then another group who sort of reacted and said, well, our, our job. job is to defend him, how we get back from that. That was going to be my next question is how once a system draws their line in the

sands like that, or the line in the sand like that, how do you reverse it? It's really hard. I mean, so for instance, the word lie. So I remember this with Tony Blair and the Iraq war. Blair lied and people died and then WMD lies and the word lie was used a lot. Well, you know, the intelligence was wrong. Yeah. Which for people listening happens more often than you might think.

So there's a difference. I mean, a lie is a very big word. You know, it's... It carries a heavy connotation with it. Right. And so now the word lie is used just with abandon. Well, you can't even define truth either. Right.

You know, fake news. Right. Yeah, it's a fuck show out there. That's the technical term that I would use to describe it. Yeah. But when people realize that and they have distrust in that system, where do they educate themselves or even seek out information that is absent of those two camps, two major camps? I'm sure they're more than that, but there seems to be two very major in the U.S. Really controlling a lot of the narrative.

And it's shocking to me to look at an issue and pick a left, obviously left-leaning news source and an obviously right-leaning news source and have them talk about the exact same thing. Holy shit. Sometimes you can land at the place of, are you guys actually talking about the same thing? Right. And if you're supposed to be educated and informing, I'm sure they wouldn't say their job is to educate, but let's take that out and say just informing. If you're supposed to be informing the people who are on the receiving end of this, and a lot of what you're saying is opinion-based instead of fact-based, how are we supposed to figure all this out? Yeah. It's insane.

Yeah. I mean but this brings us to podcast don't you think because I think one of the great things about listen I'm not saying that podcasts are going to replace news

or anything but what I find with podcasts and I've done a lot over the last year and it's been incredible is how deep they go yeah isn't that I think that's the best part

yeah and how it's the exact opposite of Twitter when I use Twitter a bit I've used it a lot in the past I hate it it's awful people are just their worst

iterations. No. And a lot of people on there aren't actually people. Right. That as well. The number of fake accounts on there that will interact with you. And of course they're not interacting you with the way like, Toby, you're so awesome. They're basically like, fuck you and all your beliefs, trying to stir, you know, dissent on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas a podcast, you can come onto a podcast for an hour or two or whatever it is.

It meanders, it goes into different, you know, it's a conversation. it's exchanging ideas and information. And I think one of the reasons why podcasts have taken off is because of the problems with journalism and social media. And people actually do have a yearning to go deeper. I also think it's because, like you described, there's a system that realized, hey, we have to, we're going to take this individual down.

And then another portion of that system that said, hey, we're going to prop this individual up. Both sides of that system, at least where I'm landing on this now, have consistently and constantly told people that what they're hearing and what they're seeing is not true. So people are constantly being told, no, what you're actually seeing what you think it is is incorrect. You're lying eyes. Yeah, you're lying eyes.

And then you're lying ears. And I think for most people, they realize that they can only tolerate. It's very off-putting to them. I mean, I don't claim to be an intelligent person by any stretch. But if somebody were to tell me that, like, this is not a book. You know, this is, what this is is a cup of coffee. I would look at that person like, okay, I'm not going to listen to you anymore. If you're going to tell me that this is a cup of coffee where I can touch it, see it, feel it, read through it.

And you're going to tell me that what I'm seeing with my own eyes is a lie. I'm going to go somewhere else. Yeah. So I think there, I don't know. I have no ability to say whether or not the traditional media. media sources are in their death throws, but I would say I think they're digging their own grave. Yeah. And the more that they tell people what they can see with their own eyes is false and what they hear is not correct, I think they're going to have just another shovel and throwing it back in there.

Yeah. And I mean, I don't watch, I haven't watched cable news for more than two years now. I can't. And I don't miss it. Yeah. In fact, I think my life is better. If you were to try to fit, well, actually, before I get to that, is the press. in the UK? Is it kind of falling into the same type of issues or are they doing a better job of

navigating? I think it's very similar. I mean, Brexit's been Trump here. Brexit's been the big kind of dividing line over there. And usually what happens in the US happens a little bit further down the line. I've noticed that from time to time. If you if you had the opportunity to make sweeping changes and your goal was to recover what we'll call news or media used to be in whatever the golden era would be. To put it back towards the five Ws, what would you change? That's a very hard question. I'm not sure it's possible. God damn it. I really, I mean. So you're saying what we need is a flamethrower. I mean, I do think. But that also that That could be an important point for people to realize as well.

Maybe the situation is no longer tenable. Maybe they're so completely tied that they're now a propaganda arm for whatever team flag that they hold up in the air. And I'm actually not against that as long as we're very clear about that. And people can understand that because then they can make an educated choice as opposed to being fed bullshit from both sides and not realizing that their choice is based more off of selective information. as opposed to the whole pie in front of you. Yeah. I mean, I think there's also a broader cultural thing going on, which is this is an incredible amount of information out there online.

Yeah. So, you know, as a kid and starting out in journalism, no internet. So when I was researching a story as a junior news reporter, I go upstairs to the library and say, I'm writing about this subject. and they would go and find a paper file with literally cuttings about, you know, I don't know, this type of murder or whatever it was. And each day there will be a team of people cutting out stories from the newspaper and labeling them and putting them in these files. And probably archiving those things in ledgers or whatever time, a manual storage system they were using. But you know what? We kind of knew more. We found out more.

And, you know, as a kid, encyclopedias. You know, I remember one time we... I've still got some. We didn't have the complete... The complete... You're missing like S? Set of... Yes.

So you had to sort of improvise and work around that, you know? Like, so you couldn't do anything from, you know, yeah, S to W. Yep. So you had to think of different words that might give you the same information. Can't use C-Monkey today. Yep, you got to think of something else. So I don't want to sound. like just some massive old fart, but a lot of people don't go past, even though all this

information is out there, and this is kind of the thing with, I guess, millennials or kids, they just look at the first page of Google. They won't even go on to, you know, page two of Google or page three or whatever. So all this stuff is out there, yet there isn't this desire to find out. And you see it in the news where it's just, it's so much repetition. And reporters seem to have a great reluctance to step away from the herd. And even to the kind of finding out something different. I mean, really, every new story, you should be including something that most people didn't know, that you've managed to find out.

It's tough to step away from the herd when you're worried about getting trampled by them. Right. I mean, I get that. Or shout it out on Twitter or canceled or all that. So, you know, it's a problem and an issue that's bigger than the media. I mean, someone like me, I find there are sort of advantages because I'm really glad that I grew up without the internet. Same, actually. Because it means I can operate without it, so I can drive around with a map, you know.

I can... Really dating yourself. Right, exactly. You know, that I'm not going to sort of drive off the end of the cliff following a GPS or sort of... Which has happened to more than one person. Yes. Or kind of just completely melt because my battery runs out. Yeah.

And it means that I think that I have ability to use the internet to find stuff out. It's incredible what you can find out. It is, but it also relies on batteries. And it's one thing that I always felt distrustful of in my old job. I mean, the number of spare batteries that I would carry. on me would shock you because I hate having my life depend on something that requires batteries. What you're talking about growing up pre-internet, and first off, the internet's an amazing tool. Holy shit, how has it changed our world?

Or even connectivity or the way that you and I connected, right? It was over email. Yeah. Perfect example. But developing a skill set to survive without it and then taking that skill set into the world. So not only are you completely capable without it, but now you have this other great enhancing tool. That's awesome if you have both. It sucks if you're completely.

reliant upon one. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I mean, these are the kinds of things we try and teach our kids, you know. What an awesome television show to take 50, 20-year-olds to New York and have like a navigational challenge, and first thing you do is you take their phones away. Have you seen the videos? God, and I'm not trying to piss on the younger generation by any stretch, because they're some of the most amazing people I've ever met. But I will watch YouTube videos where they give the old rotary phones to kids and say, hey, we'll give you a hundred bucks if you can figure how to use this and dial this number, and they can't. And I'm sure that there's plenty they can, but of course, that's edited out because I die laughing at the ones who literally

can't figure out a road. Right. Remember we used to remember phone numbers? Yes. And some kid, kids sort of identity at school, but he could remember all these numbers. I'm proper fucked right now if my phone goes down and my contacts. I would, I know, I know, I know like four phone numbers. Five. I know 911. I don't know my girlfriend's number. Dating for nearly five years. But you know where her contact is and how to click on the picture.

Yeah. Same thing. I'm in the same boat. Yeah, it's a wild one out there. I'm very, I was very exhausted by the 2020 election cycle. And I'm not even remotely looking forward to the 24 one, even though I'm know it's getting ready to kick up. And I think what exhausts me the most about it is just the, it's like a mini gun of just just constant information that almost becomes hard to ignore it sometimes.

So I'll be curious to see how journalism and however you want to describe that attacks the 2024 race. Yeah. It, I think one of the biggest threats to the U.S. right now is faith and credibility in the election process. And if it can't, I think it, I don't think it was destroyed in 2020, but I think there was some, there's some cracks in the mirror at this point. You can swing it around too if you want to. Yeah, it's solely mobile. I think there's some cracks at this point, and if those cracks aren't addressed, then I'm concerned if that continues to go forward.

But again, how much information or misinformation was there around that? There are still people, and people can believe whatever they want to, but there are still people who are diehard in the trenches trying to put Trump back into office. Yeah. And a lot of that, I think, is based off of the information source, whether they realize it or not, that they have channelized themselves to receive. I have had to cut a few people out of my life because I have no problem with people having differing opinions. But if you are going to consume 99.9% of your information from sources that are quite obviously cuckoo, I'm going to have to at least manage my social distance to you. Yeah. Oh, I do a lot of muting and stuff on social media, even friends sometimes. Because I'm not interested in what you think about Trump.

I mean, to me, what someone thinks about Donald Trump is usually the least interesting thing about them. You know, I don't care. I really don't care. It's not a subject I want to discuss. There's so many other things. So, yeah. Yeah, interesting times. I was reading on the back of the book, which at some point I'm sure we'll get into,

even though I'm fascinated by your journalistic background. You got put in jail for a little bit for not giving up your sources. Actually, no. So I did get put in jail. I got prosecuted for not giving up sources. So give me the backstory here. So the first one, so they're not giving up sources. That was Northern Ireland. So there was an incident called, known as Bloody Sunday when I think there were 12 Catholics who was shot dead by the British Army in 1972. Notorious incident. It was the parachute regiment. And on the nationalist side, the Irish nationalist side, it was, you know, a core celebror for decades, understandably.

And so around, so just about the time I was leaving Northern Ireland, so 98 or 99, there was a tribunal called Bloody Sunday Tribunal to look into the events of 1972 again. And members of the Parachute Regiment, so British Army veterans who'd served. were being subpoenaed and made to testify. And they were saying, well, we'll testify, but we need to be anonymous. And there'd actually been a previous inquiry in the 1970s, and they were all given letters like soldier A, B, C, D, etc. And that's pretty standard. And at this, but at that point, they were being told they had to testify under their true names.

And so I did a story and I interviewed two of them. And they said, well, if we, if we aren't granted anonymity, we won't testify honestly, you know, because we'll be, you know, we'll be in danger. To themselves. Right. Be hunted down and all this to it. And so, so I wrote this story and almost immediately the, I mean, I knew it would cause a stir. And obviously, I knew the identities of the soldiers, but I didn't use them.

And that was my sort of guarantee to them. that I would never reveal their names. But the tribunal and its lawyers were sort of onto me. And basically I was pursued by the courts for, I think it was about, I think it ended in 2004 for about six years where they were finding, they were threatening to find me in contempt of court.

And if I'd been convicted of being in contempt of court, I could have been sent to jail. And so that was all that. And so I never gave up the names, even within journalism, because, I mean, the parachute,

Regiment soldiers on Bloody Sunday were pretty unpopular people. Yeah. Certainly, you know, not just amongst Irish nationalists, but much broader than that. Certainly within the sort of journalism community. I mean, it is interesting how sometimes the principles, you know, if it's a principle that works for the benefit of somebody who's unpopular, like a member of the parachute regiment in in 1972, then the principle will be sort of cast aside. So I was under a lot of pressure from all sorts of quarters to just give up those names.

And actually, the tribunal knew the names of all the soldiers that were there on Bloody Sunday, and they knew the names of the soldiers who'd opened fire. And one of the ones I'd interviewed had said that he'd opened fire. So they had other ways of finding out or at least having a pretty educated guess as to who these people were. So eventually it was dropped, but it took six years. How'd you end up in jail for that? So, no, I ended up in jail for something else. Oh, sweet.

What did you do? So that was in Zimbabwe. Okay. So that was, you know, the Mugabe regime, a sort of repressive, anti-Western regime, you know, sort of massacring its people and starving its people and, you know, horrendous regime. And so that was 2005. So I was there as a reporter for the Sunday Telegraph and we were covering the parliamentary elections. And there was a law there called.

IPA, access to information and protection of privacy act, AIPPA. And that law stated that you had to have a permit to be a journalist. So, you know, obviously the opposite of sort of free speech and First Amendment. So you had to have a government permit. And so as a British journalist, we could have applied. So the photographer and I went, Julian Simmons, who's a good friend of mine, which was, it's good that he's a good friend because we were chained together for nearly two weeks.

It helps. Yes. Not that I've ever been chained anybody for two weeks, but I imagine it would help. Right. That relationship could have gone either way. Yep. But, you know, we talked about it

and we talked about it with the editors. We could apply for a permit. We probably wouldn't have got one because Mugabe hated Tony Blair and the UK. And even if we'd applied, if we'd got a permit, we would have been followed around by state goons. the whole time. And if we applied and we didn't get one, then that would make it very difficult

to do what we did and sort of sneak into the country and pretend to be tourists. And so we just went in as tourists. And unfortunately, we were there for two weeks. And I mean, maybe, you know, again, a little bit of self-examination. I guess I like to push the envelope and certainly as a journalist, I like to push the envelope and sort of go to places where other people hadn't been and were afraid to go to, etc. And so there was a sort of a tradition really from British journalists of covering white farmers in Zimbabwe because, I mean, I think part of it was because, you know, Zimbabwe was formerly Rhodesia. it was a British colony. And I think there was probably a perception that readers identified more with white people than black people, as simple as that. Yeah.

But there was also, there was a practical element to it, which I think we overlooked, which was we were white. And if you're going with a white candidate, white opposition candidate, then he or she, is going to have white relatives, white campaign workers, whereas if you go with a black candidate, that's going to be less likely. But I was adamant. I remember saying like, no, we just, let's do something different.

Let's go with a black opposition candidate. Let's not just do one of these white candidates that everyone knows about. So we went with a woman who was a black MDC candidate. And, you know, we were getting pretty comfortable. in the country for two weeks. And also we, this is the odd thing. Perception of danger and risk is always, I think, very relative. And both of us have spent a lot of time in Iraq. And this is 2005. So we've been in Iraq, you know, worrying daily about, you know, getting kidnapped, put in an orange

jumpsuit, having our heads chopped off on video. And it was very legitimate concern. Yes. It really was. And so being in Zimbabwe felt like, ah, this is okay. You know, it's not a pleasant, regime, but we're not going to get our heads chopped off. And so we went with this candidate, and sure enough, you know, we're the only white guys for what felt like, you know, 20 miles around. And also, we should have done our homework probably a little bit better. So we went into, she was going into a Zanu PF area, so a government stronghold. And so we, so we went with her, and, you know, it was pretty hot, it was hostile.

hostile towards her and hostile towards us. And we were in a polling station, which was at a school, like a primary school. And I'd actually done all my interviews and stuff. And I was sort of ready to move on. We had a rental car outside. Julian was taking photos. And, you know, photographers are a lot more sort of obvious, you know. For sure.

Yes. Depending on their type of equipment, definitely. You know, the mat's a big long lens. 72 foot long lens. Like, I'm just here taking pictures of the swallows. Yeah. And we were, you know, and because we were white and, you know, obviously foreign as well probably because of the, you know, we weren't blend. We weren't blending.

As you tell this story, there are a few red flags that are going up for me. Right. And so it's easy in hindsight, isn't it? And so, so there was a guy there who was sort of like the election supervisor for Zanup, P.F or whatever. who started, you know, sort of pushing Julian around asking what he was doing. And so, you know, we thought, we tried to talk our way out of it. And so, you know, at one point I remember saying to Julian, right, okay,

this isn't working. Like, we're not getting anywhere here. And the problem is the next thing is the police could come and, you know, we haven't got a permit and that could be a problem. So what, so we agreed that what we should do is we should just walk really quickly to the exit jump in the high car and drive out. And just hope that

if they froze for five, ten seconds, that would be enough. But if we thought if we ran, that was too much of a, too provocative, too much of a commotion. Anyway, we tried it and then Julian got grabbed. And then a few minutes later

the police arrived, he was in handcuffs and then I was in handcuffs and we were driven to the police station. And so Yeah, then we were under arrest. And so we were being, you know, questioned by these, I guess, you know, there was, you know, domestic FBI types from Zimbabwe. And it just kind of went from there.

We sort of kept on thinking, oh, we're going to get, we'll just get deported. Because this had happened to other people and they've been deported. And we ended up getting, we stayed in the police cells overnight. And then it turned, I think it might have been the Easter weekend, but it was like a long weekend. We end up saying three nights in police cells, which were pretty bad. They were pretty grim. And it's like, you know, just shit everywhere, a hole in the floor in the corner, and just sleep on the floor with like a flea-ridden blanket.

And then we thought, well, we'll get, you know, they'll deport us after this weekend. And we had a lawyer, so I can't remember how, I think I texted the news desk. And so this lawyer called Beatrice and Tepwa turned up who was this like, you know, actually quite famous lawyer now, sort of human rights lawyer who was defending and who would defend people who were prosecuted under IPA. So, you know, we were in good hands. And but anyway, we thought we were going to get deported at the end of the weekend and no, they took us off to prison. Fuck, I know. And that was our reaction. Yeah.

Because, you know, in the police cells, it'd been just us. And I think there was one drunk guy that came in and like pissed everywhere, like one night. As they do. Yes. And, you know, but it was sort of we were in control. Also, we had, I mean, for the first couple of nights, we had phones. And then batteries went. And so we were texting, you know, we were texting people.

Yeah. But then we got carted off to this prison. So it was the Ramand, Harari Remand prison. and that was pretty frightening because I just remember the sound of all these people like thousands of people in this in this prison and we you know we were driven it and of course you worry about getting beaten up raped all that stuff and so you just don't know what the what the vibe's going to be like in the jail is it going to be just complete free for all or is it going to be well organized other guards in control all these sort of things go through your mind

and so we were taken in and um i think at this point we've been put in prison uniform so we had these like green canvas like like a t-shirt and a shorts and flip-flops um these like multicolor flip-flops i've still got my flip-flops from jail and we had to put a we had to put a prison number with using matchsticks. We had a prison number and we had to put like Pierce the flip-flop to put a number on the Really? Yeah, on the flip-flops. But I remember we were taken into the governor's office and it was this like palatial office

with sort of leather armchairs and oil paintings and stuff. And we had to sit on the floor at his feet. And he was and he was wearing a military uniform like with loads of medals. Of course. He looked like sort of idiomene. Yeah. And... Or Sasha Barra Cohen.

Yes. And I just remember like, wow, you know. And but just, you know, I mean, there were leather armchairs there and we were sitting on the floor at this guy's feet. It's called a power move. Yes. And actually, during our whole time there, whenever a guard would like hiss or click his fingers, we'd have to go and we'd have to sit at his feet. it's like quite it's quite an experience

but anyway so then we're in the jail and now we were also we were tried at the same time so every day we would go some days we didn't but but most days we would be put in a prison

like truck and they'd drive to the women's jail and they pick up some and it'd be basically a truckload of prisoners going to be to different court And we were tried for, we were accused of practicing journalism without accreditation. And so that's what we do.

But the prison itself was well organized. And so almost immediately. So I'd covered and actually been into prisons in Northern Ireland where they were essentially run by the prisoners. So like paramilitary prisons with an officer commanding and, you know, a full rank structure and sort of negotiations with, you know, it's sort of like a. prison by consent kind of thing. Yep. This was like that. There was an officer commanding in the cell.

He had his like... And you're not talking about prison guard staff. You're talking about prisoners. No, no, no. These are prisoners. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So the cell, it was a cell that I think originally being built for about 20 people because we could see the marks where the bunks have been on the wall. And the bunks have just been ripped out. And there were 100, just over 100 sleeping in that cell. And we slept on the floor with just blankets. But there was a guy who was in command of that cell. He had his like lieutenants. We were assigned people to sort of protect us.

Now we, you know, these people had nothing. I mean, these were people who, they were mostly criminals, but there were political prisoners in there as well. But mostly people accused of like murder and armed robbery and stuff. And some of the been in there for years, some of they've been in there for five years on remand. so they'd never been tried. And so, you know, we were white Westerners.

The currency there was soap and cigarettes. We were having lawyers coming every day who would bring us in soap and cigarettes. And so we gave them, so we gave the commanding officer, the soap and the cigarettes, and that was the payment for the protection. And so nobody messed with us. And so that was a good feeling.

And how'd you get out? So, well, I mean, the other thing about it is, as well, I mean, rape was a big fear. And so, you know, listen, people can do whatever they're like in their private lives. And I'm in favor of gay marriage and all the rest of it. But I was not unhappy that there was a strongly homophobic atmosphere in that prison when we go in. We're like, okay, we're not going to have, I don't think we're going to have to worry about that. And so, yeah, it was weird. We were acquitted.

So we were on trial. So we'd done a few things right. So Julian had taken out the SD card from his camera when we were in the polling station, and we'd hidden it under a blackboard duster. We'd subsequently tried to retrieve it, but it had gone. So he had no pictures on his camera. Ooh, that's going to help. I had a camera and we'd been on a safari.

And we'd kind of pissed off the foreign desk by saying, we need to create a tourist cover here, we need to go on a safari. And so they were, oh, really? Yeah, we're going to expense it. So I had lots of pictures of hippos and lions and giraffiris and stuff on my cameras. Safari shit. Tourist, yeah.

And so our defense was that we were touring. And I don't know, they must have known. I mean, we were obviously, we both worked for the Sunday Telegraph. You know, they were able to Google our names. So I don't know whether they decide, someone had decided that it was a good outcome for us to be acquitted. But after two weeks, including the police cell time, we were found not guilty. And we were deported. And so that was it the thing I'd never thought about the biggest risk the biggest danger there was disease and so I mean I do sure I do remember you know do a there's some really bad sores and there's a lot of HIV positive people and I remember like I remember looking at the the whites of a guy's eyes

and they were like yellow and I remember thinking I don't know what this is but he's really ill you know for sure but and then in the in the police cell Julian had been taking the Mickey out of me because I was getting bitten by mosquitoes

all over and he wasn't getting bitten at all but then when we got into the prison he had all his whole of his stomach was was sort of bitten by these like had these little flea bites all over his stomach And I didn't have any.

So I was laughing at him, you know. Perfect. But he got scabies and typhoid. I think it was a typhoid? Typhoid and scabies, I think. But he got two quite bad diseases and I didn't get any. So, I don't know. Payback's a bitch.

You laugh at me, huh? All right. But, you know, I mean, the maximums, if we've been found guilty, we could have got four years. And so we were saying to each other, even on day one, we're like, okay, this isn't great. It's a bit annoying. but we're not going to get our heads dropped off. Worst case scenario is four years. And that's probably not going to happen.

So all along, it didn't feel like, you know, we weren't going to die. It didn't feel like the end of the world. Four years is a long stretch. Yeah. And a lot of shit can happen in four years. Now, I do remember on sort of, because the thing about 14 days in jail is, you know, it doesn't sound that long. I mean, it's quite long in an African jail.

But the thing is, on day 14, you don't know it's the last day. So I was beginning to, you know, the jug's over. I'm going to take a hard pass on that whole experience. I'm appreciative that you had it so you can tell us about it, but I'm doing a hard pass. When did you move to the U.S.? So I moved to the U.S. in 99, first moved to 99. So from Northern Ireland, so what happened with Northern Ireland was it became very political. Yeah, it was this, in news terms, this great mix of violence and politics.

And it was the biggest new story in the world for a while. And there was a peace agreement in 98. And so I built up a reputation of someone who could cover news well, but also politics. And so, I mean, I think a more natural posting for me would have been in the Middle East or somewhere, but I got sent to Washington, which was, you know, as the bureau chief, so as the senior person in Washington, having only been a journalist for, I guess at that point, about five years. So it was fantastic, but it was pure politics. Oh, I bet. And, you know, we were talking about the pre-9-11 era. So I remember, you know, I mean, writing about nuclear treaties, you know, Congress, you know, budget things.

The exciting stuff. Yeah. And, you know, it's all covering sort of, you know, mostly guys in suits on Capitol Hill and the White House. And I got into the campaign, you know, it was the Bush. Gore campaign early on. But so yeah, that's why I moved. And so for that sort of two years, so I've moved

September 99, so I was there for sort of two years before 9-11. And I got into it and I think I did a pretty good job of it, but it was a little bit you know, America's very exciting country and I ended up traveling, you know, I wrote stories

from all 50 states. But I do remember feeling like this isn't quite the, you know, It hasn't got the edge of Northern Ireland. It isn't quite the adventure. You know, you just didn't spend enough time in Florida. They're crazy down there. Well, they're out of their fucking minds.

Every time I see a crazy story in my head, I think, where in Florida is this? I know. Well, so, well, obviously we had hanging chads and all that. We had Ellie and Gonzales. We had some 16-year-old kid that flew a plane into a building. Yep. Yes, we did have some crazy stuff. I went to cover Donald Trump in 1999 in Florida with Roger Stone in Miami Beach.

Okay. We used to flirting with running for president. So I did get to Florida quite a few times. Yeah, like I said, there's some news going on down there. And I mean, you live here now. When did you come back and put roots down? It seems like semi-permanently. So, well, pretty much.

So I was there. So 99 to 2003. So I was here for 9-11. I was at Washington, D.C. on 9-11. But I was, you can imagine, having taught to me for however long it is up till now. You know, I was itching to get out to Afghanistan. I was itching to get out to Iraq. I was, you know, itching to get to where the action was.

And so 2003, I was appointed Middle East correspondent for the telegraph. And so I moved to Jerusalem. I mean, I actually felt both Iraq and Afghanistan were over, you know. And I remember when- As did many. Yes. I remember when the statute came down at the same. Saddam statue, I remember having my head in my hands out. I can't believe I've missed this, you know.

Yeah. I was in the country when that happened and a lot of people, a lot of people and by that, I mean a lot of people in the military, I think we're rushing to get it all in because they thought it was about to be over. Yes. Little did we know. Yes. So, yeah, so 2003, four, five, I ended up obviously sort of decamping from Jerusalem and spending most of my time in Iraq. Yeah. How was your time there? Uh, I mean, fascinating, exhilarating, very rewarding,

journalistically, big kind of period in my life, you know. I mean, I was in Fallujah during November 2004. Um, I got, I never got kidnapped because I probably wouldn't be sitting here if I had been. Um, but, you know, we were, I was detained, you know, by, by Shia, the Mardi army very early on, you know, for a number of hours. You know, I mean,

I, it's interesting. I was thinking about, I don't know why I was thinking about this this morning, but I'd never seen a dead body till 2003. So I was 37. And, and then all of a sudden, you know, I've seen dead bodies all the time. You know,

it was carnage. I was in Ramadi with the, with the Marines in 2004, you know, with a, I think it was a company that lost 18 Marines. I mean, just... There was no joke. Yeah, it was, I mean, it was something else. And I remember the first time I went out,

really the first time went out, which was often the most dangerous. We were going down to Najaf. And so it's me and a translator and a driver. And we drove out of the Palestine. hotel and we were driving along the river and was a Humvee in front of us. Bang. IED.

You know? And the Humvee, I don't think anyone was killed. Which is shocking because they're flat bottomed. Yeah. And, you know, so we stopped. Humvee stopped. All these soldiers got, fuck, fuck, what the fuck? You know, shooting.

And I was just thinking like, shit, okay. Guess this is just what happens here. And then we drove down to Najaf. And, you know, it was a risky trip. And then as we, I think it was Kufa was the place outside. Just before we got into Najaf, we're driving along the highway. And I'm feeling like, feeling okay, you know, here I am. This is what I wanted.

And then all of a sudden, you know, there's a bunch of guys in sort of bandanas, AK-47s coming out, stop like, and it was the Mardi Army. And then they pulled us out of the vehicle. We had flack jackets and helmets in the back. And they were holding them up. Like you military soldiers and they were like, no, no, no, you know, spa, you know. And anyway, and they dragged us into this truck. And I remember sitting in the back of the truck and looking at the ground and it was RPG rounds.

The whole thing was RPG rounds. It's actually really a safe place to storm. I know. By a doctor and that's how you're supposed to do it. They don't rattle around at all. Fuck. No one was smoking. And I remember looking at the, I remember looking at the, so, you know, this is sort of situational awareness.

I just knew to the country. I didn't, I couldn't really assess. I was, I was being too reckless. And I was, I was not assessing risk. And I was thinking things that weren't normal, were normal. And it's very, it was very, it was. It was a very dangerous period, actually. Fortunately for you, those assessments were earlier on.

You know, 03, 04, 05, no attempt to say it in a demeaning way, but they were more, they were less kinetic. Yes. Than 6, 7, 8, 9. It drastically ramped up. You might have had actually very catastrophic consequences had you repeated the same behavior actually later on. Yeah. I mean, I think there was a sense that this was sheer. and that the sunnies were always the ones

that were much more like to kill you. Yeah. But you know, you wouldn't like to say that to the bank. Anyway, we were dragged, you know, we were dragged off and then, and we were, you know, we were interrogated for hours. And I remember my mouth going completely dry

because they were, there was actually a particular moment. So they were going through my backpack and I, you know, I had all my stuff. and I was based in Jerusalem and as they were going through it and they were going through every little compartment

and asking what everything was and as they were doing that I realized that I had an Israeli press guard in a particular compartment and it was an old one and I remember I put it in there because if I forgot my current one I needed to get into the Palestinian territories

and so there was this this translator who I subsequently came pretty good friends with and now lives in Atlanta. And sitting in the truck at the beginning of this, I said to him, I said, Sal, is this okay? Because I was just trying to gauge, is this just another day in Iraq? And he looked at me and he's like, and he looked really sad. I've never seen anyone. And he was like, no, no, no, this is not fucking okay. And he was a son, you know, he was a sunny.

And these were Shia, so that was, it was even less okay for him than it was for me. Yeah, for sure. But anyway, so we're talking to these guys and it's going okay, you know, persuaded them. They believe I'm a journalist and then I realized that this Israeli press card is in there. And so I said to Sal, I said, hey, listen, don't say anything, but just, you know, just it'll be okay. but just so you know there's an Israeli I didn't laugh but I said there's an Israeli press guard in my bag

and he just looked to me and I said but don't worry we just say which is true that I need it so I can cover the plight of the Palestinian people and I have to operate I had to get through the Israeli checkpoints and so they you know there was definitely a chill in the air

when they found it and they were wavering it around me this Hebrew on it and everything but that's what we said that's what I said and it was sort of okay there's the correct thing to say in that environment and and then it was all getting lighthearted and there was a guy

with um a black and white checked kaffir and I said you know I'd then relaxed so a lot of this this was all a big learning experience like thinking about what I did and I did a lot of things that were right but I did a number of things that were wrong

and so I was relaxing and it felt like there was kind of banter. And so I said, oh, you know, you look like Yasser Arafat. Yasser Arafat is sunny. These were sheer. They, you know, it was, I was just. I think we call that one a lead balloon. I know.

And then it was like, yes, it did not land the way I was hoping it. It would. Anyway, we got through it. And then they were like, now you interview us. So I interviewed them. and then they were showing me around and stuff and it was just weird and so it felt like you know

I mean I never thought they were about to kill us but it was certainly you know future possibility and so we went from that to oh we're all friends now fuck and then the day on the job for Toby and then a few days later

there was a US a strike on that junction dozens kill so I presume they were all killed yeah because this was the siege This was the siege, you know, the siege of Najaf. So, or whatever, it became the siege of Najaf, August 2004. And so, you know, that was, you know, and then, you know, shortly afterwards I was in Saddust, you know, in Saddor City with a sheer uprising there. You know, we came under attack in a police station. We had to, I was with First Cav.

And we had to evacuate. And, you know, he was driving in a Humve. there were burning barricades. There was a guy next to me. I mean, there's RPGs coming across. We were doing U-turns. There was a guy next to me just screaming like, get some.

Come, get some. I was like... Very full metal jacket. I'm in a Vietnam war movie. And, you know, I mean, in Ramadi, you know, I went to a base and I arrived and, you know, everybody's walking around in shorts and flip-flops.

The first sergeant is doing nothing except for prey. He's just praying all the time. Fuck, you know, this is the ones they lost 18 guys. Yeah. So, you know, it was quite an experience. Did you ever get to fulfill that desire to go over to Afghanistan in wartime? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically in terms of, so I was in the Middle East until

2005. And so the jail experience, I remember sitting with Julian, who's a bit old, like, sort of 10 years older than me, I think. Maybe 8. And so he just separated from his wife. So I was 40 and I was single completely. Didn't have a girlfriend. He was, so he was older and separated. And so, you know, we're chained to each other. So sometimes by, like, guy and sometimes by handcuffs. So we spent a lot of time sitting around talking about life. And he would say, oh, God, my life's a mess. And I was like, well, at least you have a life. I have no life. You know, if it ends now, I'm 40, I'm single, I have no kids. And so I think that played into 2006. I met an American. We got married very, very quickly, who were engaged

within a few weeks and married within six months. And I then moved back to the States. And we had one kid very quickly, another kid quickly. And I was back covering US politics. And I was into the sort of family thing. But obviously, this bug had never left me. And so in that period, actually, when I was just about to get married,

I first went to Afghanistan, it started 2006. And so the... Where'd you go? To Helmut. Well, went to Kabul, Kandahar, and Helmand. So we got... It's a good tour. Yeah.

So we got like some kind of UN flight from Kabul to Kandahar. And then we drove... I mean, even at the time, it didn't feel great. I mean, we were lying on the backseat with sort of blankets over us. But we drove from Kandahar to Helmand. On Route 1? Whatever the main road is going in. Yeah.

Yeah. Balsy. Even worse. Oh, six, though. Oh, six. Yeah. So my last time over there was 2010 and probably the highest risk thing you can do, be to drive.

Yeah. It was insane. Yeah. So the Brits were just about to arrive. And so they ended up having 10,000 troops there and, you know, control, you know, well, they never controlled it, but, you know, having, you know, having, you know, you know, 10, you know, the sole coalition presence, and then the U.S. Marines came in 2009. And so, and then actually we drove all the way back from Helmand to Kabul.

That was definitely on Route 1. I know. Yeah. So, you know, what, you know, these things you do when you're young. But so then, you know, like everybody else, I sort of got the bug. And it's so much more sort of attractive, appealing and. and sort of richer than Iraq, it felt, you know. Very different, similar in many ways, but also different. I found Iraq, God, the cultural, it's so hard to describe the cultural differences.

I mean, obviously, they're stark between the Western world, but even in different areas, you know, of northern Iraq or southern or along the war of the Western Euphrates, River Valley, going towards Syria. And then Afghanistan, holy shit. I mean, I don't even know how many dialects are spoken there, but, you know, the difference between people in Kunar and Kandahar, or Zabul, the poorest province in the country, which I spent 10 months in, I mean, forget about the differences between the Western world in that country. The differences between their fucking neighbors is unbelievable.

Right. So that was very similar, but I mean, obviously the topography was very different. I think the level of fighting and the style of fighting was certainly different. But in the end, looking back on it now, I think they were defined kind of by their similarities. Yeah. Yeah. I felt there was always a sort of a grayness and a grimness in Iraq that there wasn't in Afghanistan. And maybe that's to do...

Depends on where you were. Well, yes. Maybe that's to do with dictatorship. But I felt even in Helmand to be a sort of a smile and a glint in the eye and there be a bit of color. Whereas, I don't know. But anyway, so that was my first experience of Afghanistan. and, you know, I was captivated by the place. And then, you know, I was working for a British newspaper.

So it was a big story. And then so in 2009, a friend of mine called Rupert Thornelow, who'd been a captain, an intelligence officer in Northern Ireland, who was a big source and influence for Bandit Country. So I wrote a book called Bandit Country about the IRA Heartland, the border heartland of the IRA. I wrote that in 99, just as I was leaving Northern Ireland.

And so Ruper had been a big part of that. And he was on the fast track. And so in 2009, he was a battalion commander. So he was 39, commanding officer of the Welsh guards in Helmand, in the main effort battle group. And he was killed by an IED, July 1st, 2009. Now, they'd already lost,

a platoon commander, Mark Everson and a company commander, Sean Birchall. And that was the first time. So Rupert was the first battalion commander to be killed in action since the Falklands War. And it'd been the Korean War since a British battalion had lost, platoon commander, company commander and battalion commander. Were all three of them due to IED? First one, the platoon commander was shot and bled out because the helicopter didn't get him out. time. Yeah. And the company commander, yeah, it was an ID. Yeah. No, that was by 2009, that was

by far the most substantial risk. Yeah. Yeah. I was never, yeah, it was funny. And I was never worried about getting shop. I was always worried about IDs. I never, I never, well, maybe there was a point in time where I minded being in a firefight, I guess, but I always felt like I had more control. I hated the idea of having no control and being a random, if it was a foot patrol, like just a random misstep, or normal step where somebody else had buried something. I would always rather take my chances against a human being as opposed to an animate object. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, I remember in Iraq getting this sort of briefing for a long sort of transit. I can't even remember where it was from. It was back to bagged out, but it was ours. And I remember this sergeant giving this, like, sort of terrifying brief about the ID threat. I'm sure it was just like what he did every night, particularly to journalists and stuff, but I just remember, you know, I just remember getting in Humvee.

Like, this is how we die. Sitting in the back, putting my hands over my balls and going to sleep and thinking, well, there's nothing I can do about this. And hopefully I wake up and everything's still there. But, yeah, so IEDs. So 2009, so I known people from the Welsh guards in Northern Ireland, as well as Rupert, just sort of randomly in Iraq, Northern Ireland. So I had connections with that regiment. And I remember I was doing a trip. Actually, I was with Julian, the cellmate.

Yeah, photographer. Yes. And we were in, we were doing a trip down the Mississippi. We were driving, but we were doing this like online story, sort of the pulse of the country along Mississippi. It was kind of cool. We were in Iowa. I remember seeing that Rupert had been killed.

But I guess I just had this feeling of like, you know, wow, you know, I want to be out there. And so it seemed to me an obvious book. And I didn't know what I was going to find, but I basically got an agreement with the Ministry Defense, which had a very kind of rigorous sort of non-First Amendment-style process with journalists, which also led to a lot of problems, which, again, probably is part of this pushing the envelope thing with me.

But anyway, I got an agreement with the Regiment, were very keen to have me out there. and the MOD you know they made me sign a stack of you know paperwork and so I was out there

and so I was out there for several weeks at the end of their tour and the new commanding officer was there and it turned into you know

it was an incredible story I didn't know what I knew that it was carnage and these three leaders have been killed and lots of others but what I didn't realize was

I mean, you talk about IDs. It was low metal content or no metal content IDs. And they were looking. They were figuring shit out. They were looking for them with metal detectors. So you might as well have a stick or a golf club. And so there were, you know, there were 18-year-old guardsmen sort of vomiting before patrols.

Absolutely petrified and with good reason. And they didn't have the right vehicles. I mean, it was. It was terrible. I mean, there were people dying needlessly. And it was, so it became a book about what happens when you, um, you under-equip and undermine a war because they were doing way too much with way too little. And there was no coherent overall plan.

You had six-month brigade tours coming in. Yeah, there was no future and there's no history. Right. I had, uh, interviewed a guy, uh, Wesley, who wrote a book about, uh, Kunar, essentially, and the fob... Oh, yeah, yeah. The Fobbs. The hardest place.

The hardest place. And, you know, in the book, if you would ask the people who were at those fobs or the commanding officers, they maybe would be able to tell you two rotations before. But there was so much history lost and there was no strategic vision going forward. It was like this existence where they're making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Or not even, maybe it wasn't even a mistake. They were doing the best they could with what they had. Yeah.

So... Yeah, I mean, there was this sort of cycle. you know, six months is not very long because it takes you a month. It can be a real fucking long time depending on what you're doing. Right, but in terms of achieving something, it's a blink of an eye.

It takes you a month to sort of get into it. And then this sort of cycle was a month and then, you know, sort of month four or five to be a big brigade operation, declare victory and there's this, you know, mowing the grass, which was a Vietnam term. And you declare, you know, big body count, Taliban defeated.

And then you spend the last month preparing for the handover to the next unit and then the same sort of thing would happen again. I think the most accurate Afghan proverb I ever heard, and I forget where I heard this from, but it was essentially an elder talking to probably a captain, like an 03. And they were talking about, you know, whether or not the United States would be successful in Afghanistan. And the guy basically said, or specifically said, the United States has all the watches. We have all the time. Yeah. So when you view time from the lens of six months, in a society or a culture that's been fighting

for fucking six decades, you're done. Yeah. You know, if you have that type of vision, yeah, Afghanistan is a, it's a gnarly place. Yeah, I mean, I use that quotation in Dead Man Risen. And I remember there was a- It's an accurate one for Afghanistan, probably the most accurate one that I've ever heard.

And again, I wish I knew the origin of it. I didn't read that book, so it wasn't from there. Probably was not a different- From before that, yeah, I don't know either. But I remember there was a caretaker there, this outpost in Chariangir, the place was called in Helmand, and it was called Wally Muhammad,

and he was the caretaker. And he'd been the caretaker for the Russians, and he'd been the caretaker for the Taliban, and then he'd been the caretaker for the Americans. Now he's the caretaker of the British. Presumably, if he's still alive, he's the caretaker for the Taliban. Yeah.

And he was just like, well, they come and they go. God. And around that camp, actually, there was lots of American stuff, USAID. in the 50s. There's all this like, you know, paper blowing in the wind from these USAID projects when they've been irrigating. They've been irrigating Helmand, which had created the green zone and the network of canals and waterways and fields that the Taliban was using with great effect

to attack the British. Correct. Indeed. How do the stuff you saw in Afghanistan? So now, I don't even know how long we've been talking. Shit, almost an hour and a half. Let's talk about your book. So it's called first casualty. Um, and again, talking about the beauty of the internet, you reached out to me, sent me a copy. I started reading it. Um, I mean, fuck, out of all the events that happened in Afghanistan, how did you, I'll let you describe what the book is about, but how did you land on this is one that is deserving of, I mean, I can only imagine the amount of depth that you go into. And obviously with, you know, there's at the end of it, there's a syllabus and all the acknowledgments. You talk to a metric

fuck ton of people. Why this one? So, yes. Well, I do, I think everything in your life, you know, are all your influences and your contacts and your thoughts and, and in fact, I mean, funnily enough, here in Calisbell, tonight I'm going to be staying with a guy called Ed Cougla, who was a Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam, who I interviewed in 2002. No way.

Yeah. It's awesome. And, you know, I was already. very interested in snipers because of Northern Ireland and I got more interested speaking to Ed and interested in Vietnam and all I think all these things sort of all these influences somehow come together and so the book so first casualty so it's a reference to Mike Spann who was a CIA paramilitary officer who was killed November 25th 2001 he was a member of Team Alpha who were eight CIA

officers who were the first behind enemy lines after 9-11. So there was a jawbreaker team that went into the Panchea Valley, but that was Northern Alliance controlled, relatively safe zone. But Team Alpha flew in and they were with Abdul Rashid Dostom, notoriously brutal ethnic Uzbek warlord. They landed October 17, 2001, south of Masary Sharia, fought in the mountains. They were the pathfinders for the horse soldiers, ODA 595, Mark Nootch and all those guys.

Yeah. And they captured Masari Sharif in early, 2000, November, 2001, 10th of November 2001. And then there was a prisoner uproiqaeda prison uprising November 25th when Mike's band was killed. The British SBS were there. AC130s. There was Navy SEAL, Steph Bass was there with the SBS.

John Walker Lind was one of those prisoners, the so-called American Taliban, who was actually al-Qaeda. He lives by you now. I think so. They let that fucker out. I know. To be honest with you, I would love to find him because I would love to sit down and have a conversation with him. From my understanding is he still has those beliefs, if not more deeply radicalized. Yeah.

And I think it would be a fascinating conversation. I'm not against people having a completely opposite belief of my own. Right. I don't think he could do it, actually, because I believe his restrictions are no access to the internet and no traveling, so I'd have to go to him. And I don't know how I'd get a hold of him, but that would be a fascinating conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, David Tyson, who's the figure in the center on the cover of the book. So he was CIA case officer, Uzbek linguist based in Tashkent, and he was with Mike Spann the day that Mike Span was killed.

and David had served two stints in the military in the army but was not an elite warrior by any stretch and he was faced with this kill-or-be-kill situation and killed, I don't know, at least two dozen, if not twice that. Yeah, it's probably hard to say. Al-Qaeda, you know, at very close quarters in the space like 11 minutes that day. And so it's a 9-11 book. I mean, the subtitle, you know, The Untold Story of the Seattle,

mission to avenge 9-11. So for me, you know, 9-11 seminal moment in my life and my career, as with so many people of sort of our generation, although I think I'm older than you, so maybe I'll just stick to my life. 54. That's how old am. You're 54? No, I'm just totally joking. Okay. I got enough salt and pepper in my hair, though, that I think you're, yeah, you're mid-40s. 44. Okay. Yeah. I feel like 80 on the inside, though. It makes you feel any better. you were 54, you'd still be younger than me. Fuck. I'm 56 next week. All right.

So, yeah, so 9-11. So I was, you know, I was in the US in 9-11. And so the book starts with Mike Spann at CIA headquarters on 9-11. David Tyson on a flight from Tashkent to Heathrow for a Stinger missile meeting in London. And Justin Sapp, Green Beret, who ended up being on the team underwater at the Special Forces dive school in in key west so it's it's very much rooted in nine in nine eleven and so what i wanted to you know the reason why i sort of focused on this was first of all calajagange so the battle when mike spain was killed the uprising like everything was there you know northern alliance and dostom al-qaeda

american taliban john walker lynn sbs a seal ac one thirties umcats and hornets umets The only thing that wasn't there was a lot of experience. Right, that's true. I mean, it was the first rodeo for... That's what I'm saying. There was a vast level of experience when it comes to training, equipping for lack of... I mean, obviously, I'm sure they would have wanted to have some more of things, maybe less of others. But the actual boots on the ground application of their job.

Yeah. Because, and I say that reading the book, and David even, I think, talks about it, or it was in your words, you know, of course, looking back now with a, you know, a couple decades under the belt, you can recognize some mistakes, you know. Or like, I love the restraints that were put on the SBS because, you know, because of a doctrine and trying to make sure that we don't offend, you know, anybody in parliament or whatever it may be. We're only here for protective and defensive operations. We can't go back and help you guys because this is a pre-planned operation. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah.

We need all hands on death. but it I remember so he was killed November 25th correct? Yeah. I was still on the West Coast getting ready to start selection for development group on the East Coast. I didn't move until December. So I remember that death and if I had been there, I would have been in exactly the same situation. A ton of conceptual knowledge but almost no practical experience. Actually, not almost no, but zero practical experience.

Yeah. So I can see how things like that play itself out. Yeah. I mean, November 26, they wanted to end it with a 2,000 pound J-dam, and they dropped on a friendly position. Yeah, and so when I was in the military, I was a J-TAC. So I went to out to Fallon and I went through a multi-week course controlling aircraft. And when you bring up instances in the book of people being hesitant passing friendly positions up to an aircraft that is going to punch those into a bomb, there's a reason for that. Yes.

And those lessons, unfortunately, in almost every one of those. situations is learned in blood. Right. Because 2,000 pounders, that's a bitch to eat. I know. Absolutely. I mean, it flipped over a T-55 tank, killed a bunch of Afghans. Yeah. Wounded five Americans. I mean, it could have been much worse. And then with ODA 574 and CIA team Echo at Tarrin Coat, you know, I think December 5th, three Greenberry's killed. Yeah. You know, similar incident. And so I was also, I was fascinated by David Tyson. So there was footage shot by German TV, who happened to be at the north end of the fort on the 25th November. And there was footage of David in his sort of Uzbek kind of outfit running across the northern courtyard of the fort,

carrying, like clutching an AK and a pistol. and then he sort of burst into this this headquarters building and he's immediately like on camera you know confronted by this sort of melee of Afghans and Germans and Russians and he's just seen Mike's band killed

he just killed all these Al Qaeda guys he doesn't know whether he's going to live for another five minutes another five hours you know he's in a world of pain and I just remember looking at his eyes is these talk about the thousand yards there and thinking like what's that guy going through and i watched it in iraq in 2004 and i thought i just became fascinated by al-Qaeda um that al-qaeda

uprising cala-jangi and what david had been through and so i you know sort of it was 2013 i was sort of of a loose end. I was bored with, I was covering Chris Christie's re-election to New Jersey Governor. Super exciting. And he was being a giant dick to me personally. And so I wasn't very happy about it. And the phone rings and it's David Tyson. And so I'd reached out to an academic at Indiana University because David had been an academic before he was in the CIA and joined fairly late. And so I met up with David. He was still in the CIA. He was still in the CIA so he couldn't really talk very much, but he was friendly. Yeah. And we kept in touch, and I always had a sense that he wanted to tell his story.

And so, you know, I had a sort of full start 2013, 2014, on it and then shelved it. And I came back to it at the end of 2019. I thought 20th anniversary of 9-11. All these guys, Green Berets, CIA are going to be out. And there's the SBS as well. And so I just thought, this is, this is the moment. And it just became, I ended up speaking to all six surviving members of Team Alpha. And it just became this, you know, like, you know, that phrase, the best, all the best stories are true.

And it was just like that. It was incredible. Because I knew very little about what happened between landing and November 25th, but there's a whole story of them fighting in the mountains and how they ended up there in the first place. Yeah, just, yeah, from that trip for K2. the kit they had, the kit they didn't have. The pictures of them are awesome because most of them are wearing like Levi's.

I know. Which is fucking legendary. I know. So there's none of this cool guy stuff. There's no sleeve tattoos. No. There's no like, I mean, I think they had some night vision. But, you know.

Well, I remember the night vision that we had back then. And yes, you could see at night, but you couldn't see great. Right. Right. You know, they had, they had Kalashnik. and Glockes, no military, they had bloodshits, but there's no military ID or CIAID, obviously. And yeah, and they were just, they went to REI and they're kind of cupboards to get their camping gear. And they looked like dad's on a fishing trip, you know, and that photo of them in front

of the Black Hawk at K2. And, you know, and also four of them were paramilitaries. But two were case officers and one was a medic, one was a green beret. So it was probably like a SEAL team. Yeah. It was... We should probably break down what a paramilitary means in that context as well. My understanding is it's essentially a contractor for the agency. And I know that, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. And there are a variety of... Well, they're serving, well, they're usually serving officers. If you're a CIA paramilitary, you're a serving officer. But they do have contractors that work with them. Correct. The guys are Benghazi. And a lot of times I truly think that like they do the same job, but it's like a tax. You're either at W2 or 1099.

Different color badge and stuff. For sure. Yeah, but they don't go, correct me if I'm wrong, the contractor. Like the case officers were talking, the traditional farm route that most people understand, right? The training program from the agency, whereas a lot of the contractors do not, correct? Well, the paramilitaries traditionally didn't. Okay. But around this time, some of them were so increasingly, so, to use as an example, one of the members of Team Out.

So Scott Spellmeyer. He was a former ranger. He'd been wounded in Mogadishu in 93. He then became a CIA paramilitary. But he went to the farm and he ended up doing sort of alternating. He did senior like paramilitary jobs, so essentially military jobs within the agency. But he also learned languages and would do case officer. Traditional agencies.

Yeah. And it, you know, became chief of station in carbon. and the senior CIA guy on the National Security Council. And Mike Spam was like that as well. So Mike Spam was a paramilitary. He was a former Marine, Anglico officer. But he'd gone to the farm. And actually, Andy, the only guy who's still serving,

so we don't use his last name, he'd been a special forces reservist, and he'd been to the farm. So they were starting to go to the. the farm. So the old thing used to be sort of the knuckle draggers, you know, the gun bunnies, and the, you know, the spies working at the hotel party circuit. Recruited at Harvard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're leather-bound books and somebody would just slide a phone number across them. Yeah, it even, I mean, I've worked around and with those guys for for a while and it gets super gray, the hiring process, the routes with which they go. So that's the desire to unpack that. Yeah, but so, but so, I mean, I guess a traditional old. style paramilitary was Alex Hernandez, who was the deputy chief. So the chief was J.R. Siga, who was former Ranger, 101st airborne, sort of left as a captain, but case officer, diary speaker, he'd been stationed in Islamabad and all that. He was the chief. But the deputy was Alex Hernandez, who'd been Sergeant Major, Special Forces 10th group. He was on a special mission unit towards

the end of his military career. But, you know, he'd done the full 20, 25 years in the army. and then went over CIA Paralympagy didn't go to the farm, didn't learn any languages, was never PCS overseas, but lots of, you know, TDY's. Yeah. Sorry, permanent change of station. PCS, yeah, temporary duty. Yes, TDY. So I'm using acronyms as I shouldn't. But, yeah, so Alex was the traditional, you know, he was never a spy.

He was a paramilitary within CIA. But one of the fascinating things about the team and the story was how they weren't all elite warriors. They had these different skill sets and different backgrounds. And they were generally older. I mean, Alex was, I think, 49 at the time. David was 40. The younger guys were early to mid-30s. Yeah.

I think there's a lot of benefit to having some years. under the tires and depending on the physicality or what's required it can be there can be a downside associated with that but the life experience and the decision making process and all of the things that got you to that point in your life i actually think it's probably well it depends on the situation but it can be as important as your ability on the gun as well yeah you know getting behind the sights of a rifle is very easy complex problem solving through the lens of many things that you've experienced in your life there's no real way to short-circuit that yeah i mean i I think J.R., the chief, was very, you know, very big on that.

I mean, he was, I think, 47. But he'd worked with the Mujahideen, you know, in the 80s out of Islamabad. He knew the languages. He knew the tribes. David had been an academic. He'd lived in Central Asia for, I think, about four years. Yeah. You know, he didn't possess a pair of shoes at one point.

As a student, he'd gone, he was so close to going completely native. And so they knew the country, but they had some military. experience as well. And so I think that, I mean, I think that was one of the reasons why, the other reason why I wanted to write about this was because it was successful. Yeah.

And so, you know, obviously the end was not successful. And eventually the outcome was defeat. But, you know, when you're looking at how things end, it helps to go back to the beginning. But particularly in this case, because the Taliban regime was removed, you know, in a matter of weeks with hundreds of Americans on the ground,

never mind 100,000. It was, you know, one of the things that I didn't know a lot about was the headbutting between the agency and the Department of Defense. Yeah. I didn't realize, because I wasn't paying attention to it at all, and it absolutely wasn't getting talked about, that the initial push was largely being driven by the agency. Yeah. And, you know, the Department of Defense, I want to say they were playing second fiddle,

but they were following the lead of the agency, which really graded against, it seems like, specifically Rumsfeld. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. So, yes, so basically because the CIA had teams going into the Panchia Valley and David was one of them on those teams to liaise with Ahmed Shah Masood, the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated on September 9th, 2001, the agency sort of had a plan, or at least a concept of operations of getting to Al Qaeda, you know, because obviously there been the coal in 2000, there been the embassy bombings in 98. So the agency and particularly counterterrorism, terrorism center, particularly Alex station within the counterterrorism center, which was the bin Laden unit. They were very focused on al-Qaeda and on bin Laden and to a lesser extent on Afghanistan. I mean, remarkably, Tommy Frank's general Tommy Franks had a sent com. He had no plan for Afghanistan. I thought they had a plan for everything, but no plan for Afghanistan.

Definitely don't have a plan for everything. Right. And Rumsfeld was pissed. And yeah, I mean, you know, most of the action is on the ground, but I kind of like to tie in the sort of granular stuff on the ground with the sort of the strategic context. It's to me is actually more fascinating than the things that happen on the ground. Yeah. I said it for a long time that I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in these rooms and listen to how decisions were made when it comes to, okay, we're going to commit, you know, US lives in capital and how many, you know, how many people are we willing to lose in the

course of doing this? What is this worth? And I've only been able to have, I've had finally had one person on who was at those levels from, I think he was still attached or peripheral to the agency. It was fascinating to hear about what is actually discussed because I tell you, who never got any of that information pushed down to them was me. Right. No, I mean, it was great. So Kofa Black, who was the director of the Cancerism Center, who's an incredible guy. And he's the guy who told Bush, you know, when this is over, there's going to be flies walking across that eyeballs, you know, which was exactly the mood of the nation and exactly the kind of phrase that would resonate with Bush. Yeah. And so, yeah, so he and others were able to sort of take me, you know, interview George Tenet, the CIA director as well, to take me into those meetings.

And the good thing about 20 years is it's recent enough. that people are still alive and kind of compass mentors. Yeah. But it's, it's history. I mean, there was, I mean, in the end, the agency, you know, I was scared that they were going to try and sort of put the kibosh on the project or there'd be some competing thing or, or they didn't, wouldn't like me for whatever reason. But in the end, I mean, I, after I done, after I'd done enough leg work and gone,

enough people to talk to know that there was going to be a book there, I approached them. And they help me. I mean, they arranged interviews with, you know, serving officers. And so, and my pitch to them was it's history. There's almost nothing classified there now. Obviously, I'm not going to use the true names of people who are still serving and all that stuff. But beyond that. Well, I think it's critical, too, because it shows, it shows the success that we,

and by me I mean the US now I'm now speaking for the US that we had initially with the limited resources the limited experience incredible impact and then if you throw 20 years of what has happened since then holy shit I think it's I think it's very important to go into the history books to understand where we started and the result of that because where we ended and the result of that is pretty fucking clear right right Right. And so, you know, listen, this is all complex stuff. And I'm not going to sit here in Callisbell in, you know, 20 plus years later. Just like, oh, if only, it was easy, you know, if only they'd done this, it would have all been fine. But, I mean, if you look at how limited the aims were and, I mean, and how flexible but also kind of modest the plan was, basically, you know, you have.

had eight in northern Afghanis, eight CIA officers, 12 Green Berets, you know, augmented by others as a time. But, you know, dozens. They were working alongside the indigenous Afghan resistance. The Afghans were doing the fighting. I mean, the awesome might of US air power was overhead, and that certainly changed the military equation. But it was an Afghan fight,

and the enemy was the foreign invaders, the Arabs of Al-Qaeda. But it became an American war, it became a war of occupation, yeah, occupation, nation-building, centralized democracy. And there was none of that in 2001. And, you know, it was obviously it was a victory and it was a provisional victory. And often the hard works, you know, we saw in Iraq, it's easy to knock the regime over. And dealing with what happens next is the hard bit.

but I mean, you know, I don't know whether it was arrogance, hubris, American can do, optimism, whatever you want to call it, but one of the tragedies of this is that that success, early success, led to the sense amongst policymakers of, hey, this is easy, let's go change another regime in Iraq. It'll all sort of fall into place, you know, oh, you know, let's get the State Department to sort out of the details and, you know, and then you've got, you know, big military ink, you know. So, I mean, the other element that was there in Calianger was 10th Mountain Division, to the first conventional troops. Yeah.

And then everybody wants a bit of it, you know, the, you know, the Pentagon. You know, so, you know, Rumsfeld's pissed that the CIA started, you know, was in control of the war for the first two months. So then he wants control of it. How do you control it? You send resources in. You're building bases, supply chains and, you know, and then you start pumping money into the, into the, and at the, at the,

same time complaining about corruption and you try and centralize a country and therefore you cut out the so-called warlords with the people who you fought with to defeat the Taliban in the first place, you know, yes, it all gets very complicated. Yeah, very much so. To unpack a little bit what happened to Caljangy because I think it's, again, I'd have to pull another technical term out of my back pocket. I'd say a shit show. I have some more water for you too. Oh yeah, sure. So in reading, obviously I wasn't there.

Like I said, I was just getting ready to go to a screening process. I didn't set foot in Afghanistan until October of 2002. It was for the protective detail for Carz Island. The tail end of it, post the ambush. I've seen the photos, yeah. Yeah. So correct me if I'm describing this incorrectly. So they were working, it's Dostrum, right?

It was the... Dostom, yeah. Dostom. Abdul Rashid Dostom. What would you describe him as? I was going to say, General or warlord. I call him warlord. I mean, I think, you know, so that's often,

is a derogatory term. That's how they describe themselves. Yeah. I mean, there's a book of kind of very sympathetic book called The Last Warlord, and it's a phrase that Dostom has used. I mean, you know, I mean, no one in a position of power has, you know, is without blood on their hands and Dostom certainly had blood on his hands. And so he's a sort of warlord from central casting, really. So, but he wasn't there for this, at least initially. He got there towards the tail end, but

It was largely a coordinated surrender of the al-Qaeda, correct? Yeah. Now, in reading the book, in reading what happened, so they basically decided to house them all in Caljangie, mostly in the southern compound inside of, what was the name of the building? The pink house. The pink house. But they were all fucking underground. Yes, in this cellar, yeah.

Which is insane. Let's just say they're searching procedures. Not amazing. There was a grenade suicide bomber like outside of the compound, right? The night before on the 24th, yeah. Yeah. So for anybody listening, that's what's called a red flag, you know, looking at this in hindsight. I guess my question is, do you think that they had that attack planned all along?

Or do you think it was something that occurred because the situation presented itself? I'm almost certain it was pre-planned. That's where I landed as well. Yeah. So, right, so that's an accurate. summary. So basically, the big, the last stand of the Taliban in the north is anticipated at Kunduz, so like 100 miles to the west of, to the east of Masari Sharif. And so the Northern Alliance kind of main effort, the American main effort is all focused on Kunduz.

And there's a sense that Masari Sharif, it's over. And so ODA-595, J. R. Seeger, the team alpha chief, Scott Spalmeyer, who was the lead on the Tajik's, you know, Atta Muhammad Noor, who was the sort of rival warlord, but also ally of Dostom. So, so Scots in Kunduz. And you've got kind of a skeleton crew of support people and staff people. So the battalion staff, the ODC, ODC-Fety-53 boxer. They're in Masri Shreif, but the ODC commander, the battalion commander, he's in Kunduz as well. The SBS, as you alluded to, they've been told they can't take offensive action. So they can't fire until fired upon. So they can't, they're pissed because they can't take part in Kunduz. They've had to paint their Land Rover's white to suggest that they're on some kind of humanitarian mission. And so they're sort of kicking their heels in Masary Sharif.

on a protective detail, right? Yeah, there's a Sentcom, Soxent, Admiral Callan, two-star seal. He's visiting a hospital on November 25th, and the security detail is SBS, not happy about it. But days before this, there'd been a surrender of Taliban and Al-Qaeda negotiated between Dostom and Mullah Fasel, who was the Taliban commander, Deputy Minister of Defense. he's deputy Minister of Defence again now accused by the UN with pretty good evidence of massacring

Hazaras a really bad person devious and extremely clever and so he negotiated a surrender of all the forces including the Al Qaeda forces under his command the brigade 055 people Al-Ansaar of which Lind was a member that was all negotiated with Dostom

and the CIA was there, JR was there, and Mark Nuch, the ODA-595 commander were there, but they were sort of on the fringes, and it was very much like, you know, as per the plan, this is an Afghan deal, it's an Afghan surrender, this is not perfect, it's not how we would do it, but it's their country and they're going to do it. But I think what Mollah Fasel had done was he had envisaged,

very clever, a Trojan horse strategy. So 400 al-Qaeda suddenly sort of turn up on November 24th on the east side of Masary Sharif and surrender. And they were, you know, they were supposed to surrender in Kunduz. And so the Northern Alliance, so all Dostom's A team and B team are in Kunduz and the sort of guys who, I mean, I interviewed one guy who was there at Kalajangi. He was a vegetable farmer. It was the first day he'd ever picked up a weapon. on November and he's in your guard force

and he didn't fire a shot he just ran which is what you should expect of the vegetable farmer who picks up their weapon for the first day and ends up in the middle of a shit show right

and so there was a debate about whether they go to the I think that I think Fasel expected them

and hoped they would be taken to their airfield but the airfield was much less protected than Kala Janky so Kala Jangi is this

19th fort with big sort of thick mud walls and it had a fortress yeah and it had this uh had this fortified cellar underneath the pink building the pink house but you know this surrendering negotiations sort of um drag out all november 24th and then there's this decision to let's just by dostom you know with the americans you know complicit like let's just stick them in the in the seller in in calajangi and so that's where they're taken now the reason why i'm almost certain and certainly the cia's long hell conclusion has been that it was a trojan horse sort of operation is on november 24th 25th 26th there are other movements of of Taliban forces

uh so gravitating towards masari shirif so you had uh bat this is a town of which is to the northwest of Masary Sharif, you had a force there. You had a force moving from north of Kunduz moving west towards Masary Sharif. And so when the uprising happened on November 25th, so Kurt Sontag who was ended up being a two, retiring as a two star, he was the major, the exo of the ODC. So he was in command of the Turkish school, which was the US base of Masary Sharif. He's like, holy shit, you know, we've got hardly anybody here. If, if, if they either get out of the fort and come into Masary Sharif or a force gets through, then it's, I don't know, Mogad issue again, a massacre.

It's a good fire maneuver. If they could pin everybody down at the Kalajengi and then have a maneuver force outside of there, that's the classic like hammer and anvil. Yeah. I mean, I think the problem from their point of view was they couldn't coordinate all this. So I think the uprising happened too soon. I mean, the other thing is, so you mentioned the suicide grenade which is a key moment on the evening of November 24th so this Arab al Qaeda guy blows himself up kills two of Dostom's commanders including one who looked really like Dostom and I think he thought he was killing Dostom it targeted yeah that led to the green so that led to Task Force dagger saying that Green Berets not to go into the so they saw

the red flag not to go into the fall the next day which was one of the factors, not the only factor, but one of the factors that led to it only being, the CIA being the only Americans going in. But, you know, if they'd, so there was a journalist wounded, there's a British reporter who got shrapnel in a knee. I mean, they could have staged the uprising then.

They were out in the opening, opened. So they hadn't been searched, partly because of Afghan custom. You know, Afghan rules are you just go home. These weren't Afghans. And also the Northern. Alliance were terrified of these foreign fighters. So they had, they had, you know, machine guns, rifles, pistols, grenades, all sorts of stuff hidden. And so they, when they went into that cellar,

they had an arsenal with them. Also, there were containers full of weapons, mortars and stuff stored at Kalakjangy because it was a fortress and where do you put your weapons. Yeah, and they also had, once they were underground, they had the ability to communicate. because it's my understanding, you know, let's say they were either trucked in or we're going to get walked into Kalajangi. Tough to really put together a coordinated plan, but you get everybody down in a basement.

And then you get into it in the book, too. They started pulling people out one at a time and they would search them. And that was given guys like Mike Spann the opportunity to sit down and at least do an initial interrogation. It's like a sift, yeah. But what did there end up being in the courtyard?

200 plus before it kicked off? More like 350. That's what I'm saying. So it gave them the opportunity to plan and actually execute on a tactical level that was much better due to that ability to have that coordination down below. Yeah, yeah. That's what led me to believe that it was. And I think a mistake that people often make is thinking that their enemy is stupid, which is a classic error. What would the United States do? If we had a limited number of people and we had limited exposure to, you know, if you just flip the, if you just flip the tables, it's like, well, This is early on, but if there is a large collection of us, I guarantee you we're going to at least have some touch points with the enemy that we are fighting, that we can have them come to us as opposed to them, you know, go in the other direction. So it was actually relatively smart.

Yeah. From a tactical and operational perspective. And that's why I wanted to ask, because to me, when I was reading, I was like, man, that seems to me more than just random happenstance. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, these were not stupid people, and it could have worked. It was pretty close. I mean, the other.

Without the air power, I think it would have worked. Yeah. Well, the AC130s, that sort of ended it, really, on the night of the 26th. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I remember speaking to one of the center operators in a cracker barrel in Alabama. Yeah, I think Alabama.

and using sort of sachets of milk and sugar to say I remember this and you know talking about like mowing people down yeah um but yeah I mean the the other thing the other thing about this is of course at the time and it still sort of persists as a bit of a sort of like oh what were these stupid CIA guys thinking just wandering into the fort with no protection well they were trying to stop a second fucking 9-11 from happening exactly and also Every single day, I mean, this wasn't just another day, but every single day in country since October of the 17th. So that was 40 days earlier,

was sort of fraught with risk and putting your lives in the hands of the Northern Alliance. And so it's very easy with hindsight afterwards to say, well, Dostom didn't have his best people. They didn't know that at the time. There wasn't, there's not time to wait for the perfect situation. And there was this imperative to get

in there and question these guys. I mean, John Walker Lind had met Bin Laden. John Walker Lind had known in the summer of 2001 that was an attack planned on America. And I mean, I'm sure you do. I mean, I vividly remember the sense

after 9-11 of, is it going to happen next week or next month or tomorrow? We need to get in there and stop it. So there wasn't this sense from David or Mike or Hank Crumpton, who was the guy running the war day-to-day from CIA headquarters. No one was saying, let's just

pause here. I mean, of course, looking back, maybe you could have done. They were doing the best they could. Yeah. Sometimes you end up on the other side of your enemy's strategy. Right. And you do you best you can, which sounds like to go back to David, I mean, the fact that he was actually able to get out of there alive is shocking in some ways to me. I mean, I've spoken to him for many, many house about this. And I don't know what his percentage chance of survival would be. I don't know, 5%, 10%? Anybody's chance of survival. I mean, just incredible. Yeah. And the fact that he, I mean, in some senses, I mean, you'll probably maybe have a more of view on this than me, but military sort of acumen and,

and skill is maybe not so much of a factor when it's such close quarters. You don't have to aim as much. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Legitimately. I mean, he had people literally flinging themselves and headbussing him because they had their arm still tied and he's shooting them in the head over his shoulder.

I support that. Yeah. I mean, when you contact shoot somebody, you don't really need to line up your sights. You just press it against their flesh and pull the trigger. Right. Can you do that rapidly? Yes, but if you have to do that rapidly, that means that shit has gone so horrendously wrong, because people are literally mobbing you. Yeah.

I mean, he had grenades bouncing off him that didn't explode. I mean, at- Fuck that. I know. At any point, somebody could have just, you know, lights out, walked up behind him, shot him in the head, and that would have been it. So it was sort of incredible. But I also think it shows sort of the core of someone's sort of character and the sort of fiber of their being that you've, can we talk about being tested the ultimate test you know what he had in his favor and i think this

is is the difference in a lot of these situations where they are not explainable like why did the grenades got not go off who knows unless you could go back and be like oh that guy didn't pull the pin yeah um the difference is the will to fight and the will to live yeah um which is not a magic key that opens all locks but it's the difference i mean shit you could probably put that to people who were going to potentially be kidnapped or sexual assault survivors that were able to fend it off, that will to fight, it makes a difference. Yeah. And sometimes it's all the difference in the world because what David never did was stop

fighting. Yeah. He never gave up regardless of the people headbutting him or being surrounded. I mean, I can't even be, imagine being surrounded by multiple hundred people. I think he had 75 pistol rounds. Yeah. In a pistol he had never shot. Yeah.

And he didn't he, did he pick up Mike's? Yeah, he picked on Mike's AK, yeah. Yeah. Because he didn't have a rifle with him. Correct. Very cowboy. Very cowboy-ish. But again, you do the best you can.

But I don't think he got any more magazines for Mike's rifle. So, I mean, there are people, and it's happened on the battlefield who will just get to a spot and they cower and they get fucking knocked out by the tsunami. Yeah. That will to live cannot be overstated. Yeah. And what's interesting, I've thought about this a lot. you never you can never be sure

how you or someone else will perform in that situation so the guy that looks apart has had all the training talks to talk has the mole and lobby sticker on his truck of fucking sleeve tattoos and the in the beard

legendary beard right they can he can be the guy sort of you know weeping and pissing his pants in the corner while the you know the supply clerk is you know I don't know getting after it

Yeah, exactly. In talking to the people who, so again, we're talking in 2001. It's 2022 right now, which is crazy to say, January of 2022. Did you notice a shift in how they thought about the war in 2001 and how they think about the war now? I mean, well, you were probably talking to them in probably 18, 19, 20. Yeah. But nearly two decades later, did you notice a shift in how they thought about their war or

their time spent over there? Oh, yeah. I mean, I mean, I think these guys, none of them have sort of lost that spirit of 9-11. And actually, I went to an event at the Freedom Tower on the World Trade Center site. And there was a senior CIA paramilitary officer who was on the ground in 2001. And he, I mean, I had, you know, like hairs on the back of my neck's standing up because he talked about, you know, we're the people who bear a grudge, you know, and we still bear that grudge. And we put our boot on the neck of the enemy and we've not taken it off since. And there was just this, I mean, there were people from, you know, FDNY and New York cops there.

We're on the side of Grand Zero. Which is a humbling place to go. Yeah. I go there every time I'm near, near. York and yeah fuck me yeah and the horse soldiers morning was just nearby and there was team alpha members there and everything and a part of me it it made me think sort of it's it's still for these guys it's it's it's still 9-11 and and rightly so because you know we haven't had an attack in the last 20 years and so I think they've never lost that but I do think um you know like everybody I mean

I remember the way I felt after 9-11, and it's different now. For sure. Because, you know, it's been a sobering sort of couple of decades. And a lot of the assumptions that we made or I made or remember about, you know, why we were going into Iraq and, you know. Oh, I'm right there with you. Yeah. You know. I used to argue with my dad over it.

Like, you don't understand, dad. This is what the intelligence shows. My dad was like, this is bullshit. Like something isn't right here. he served in Vietnam. I remember, yes, very similar. I remember saying, you know, to somebody in, you know, before the invasion, listen, you know, war with them in the Gulf War in 1991. You think they don't know where the WEMD are.

Every inch of that country must be covered by surveillance. I mean, obviously I was completely wrong. And so, I mean, I think we've all been in different ways. a little bit humbled by what's happened over the last 20 years. But, you know, there was a sense from these guys that, you know, if we'd stuck with these fairly modest, limited principles, we applied at the beginning, then, you know, we could have been successful.

So just because the outcome was defeat doesn't mean it was inevitable. And certainly there's a lot of strong feeling about the pullout and abandoning Afghan allies and all that. Yeah, that's rough. Well, that's why I think the book is so important because it tells, it talks about what can be done with so little. Yeah. And I just, I mean, I was in the military for 17 years. I'm not a military historian by any stretch.

But it seems, from my perspective, as if we're very capable, willing, and ready to repeat mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. And that's not one that I would want to see repeated because I don't want my kids or your kids to have Afghan dust on their boots. Right. Right. But we abandoned Afghanistan after the Russians left in 89. And so we sort of, you know, we can't unilaterally end war.

Sometimes wars come to us. And so we ignore Afghanistan at our peril. And I think certainly, I mean, my view and I think the view of most of the people who are on Team Alpha is that we could have left some kind of residual force there. And we swing, the pendulum swings from this sort of 100,000 troops to nothing. Yeah. You know, and American politics swings, you know, Barack Obama to Donald Trump. You know, it's a sort of American wave. But sometimes there's a little, there's a bit of a middle ground.

I would hope so. Yeah. I would hope so. That pendulum swing is just knocking people the fuck over. I know. I know. It's very disoriented. I mean, one thing I do think, though, is it's easy to be depressed at the moment about all sorts of things.

But since the publication of the book, because the book was published in September and obviously the Afghan government collapsed in August, I've seen, and I had a small part in helping getting these Afghans out. And so Shannon Spann, Mike Spans, Widow, David Tyson, Scott Spelmeyer, Justice Sapp, they are all working on getting Afghans out and succeeding. That's awesome. And so it's sort of a bit, you know, I don't want to be too cheesy about it, but it's a bit, a bit like the spirit of 9-11, where it's just people cutting through the bureaucracy and the rules and just getting, how are we going to find a solution here? How are we going to work things out? And, you know, as individual Americans and as a country, we can do incredible things. And we did do, we did after 9-11. And we still can do.

And, you know, even though it's, you know, feels pretty gloomy at the moment, I think one of the things the book does show is what individuals and what America as a country can do when it matters. What are you going to write about next? I don't know. I have an idea that starts in an incident that starts in Vietnam and involves Green Berets and CIA and that comes right up to the

present day. But I mean one of the problems I've had in the past is I've done three books and been 10 years between the first and second and the second and third. I can't leave another 10 years. I mean I need to pay the bills.

Plus, you know, I'm going to be 65. in 10 years. So I want to get on with it quickly. But, you know, there's a couple of ghosting projects, you know, I'm looking at. But yeah, I have another idea and, you know, don't want to drink it by talking too much about it. That's fair. Dude, I've been chewing your ear off for almost three hours. Is that how long it's been? Yeah. Where can people, A, find the book and then you to best support you. So the book hopefully anywhere, you know, Amazon, any book shop, although I'm one of those authors that now goes into random Barnes and Nobles and gets very agitated and, you know, confronts the manager about why the book isn't there or it's not in the right place. Because I'm

sure it's that manager's decision. Yeah, I know. And I'm sure no other authors ever done that. But the book should be everywhere. My website is toby harnden.com so everything you need to know about the book should be there um i've got quite into as i've moved away from twitter although i am on twitter as at toby harden um i've got quite into instagram and i'm finding that as a good um kind of medium for sort of supplementary materials because i have like thousands of pictures from this period probably the best medium for pictures yeah yeah and so i do you know books you know pictures that weren't in the book um uh with little extracts from the book just to sort of, you know, as a sort of a place where people can find out

about it and get a sort of a little bit more if they have read the book. So that I'm Toby Harden one, number one, on Instagram. Did somebody else have Toby Hardened? I guess they must have done. Yeah, some enemy or something. Yeah. Somebody had Andy Stumpf. So I had to put two and two and two on the end of my name. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, and I live in McLean, Virginia. So I'm, you know, I'm around. And, you know, when you've got a book out, um, And you're in this business. You try not to be hard to track down. Yeah, fair.

Closing thoughts by Toby. I'll let you close it out. Well, I mean, we've talked a lot. And I think the spirit of 9-11, the spirit of what we can do. I also, you know, we talked early on about the media. And, you know, I was kind of a. you know, depressing picture in a way. Because it's a depressing situation.

Yes. But I mean, it's been incredibly gratifying to me to find the number of people who, you know, when you deal with them sort of straightforwardly and transparently, who will talk about, you know, extremely important and kind of sensitive and intimate parts. of their life. You know, Shannon Spann and David Tyson, the things they've been through then and now. And so I think, you know, again, maybe it's connected to sort of podcasts and as a sort of an antidote to or sort of reaction to this sort of cheap, you know, Twitter, cancellation, you know, owning. the libs or the MAGA hat people or whatever it is that you know there's you know i hope i've

contributed to it i believe i have you know there's a lot of great stuff out there to read and and it means you don't have to watch cable tv or or just look at your screen all day couldn't put it any better thank you for taking the time to make the trip out here and uh look forward to your next book man thank you very much Awesome.