In Search Of Excellence - Lara Logan: The Fight of Our Lifetime | E08

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

Randall Kaplan is joined by award-winning journalist Lara Logan to discuss the crisis in Afghanistan, the importance of critical thinking, the pursuit of truth in the age of misinformation, the courage to speak your mind even when it’s unpopular, the fear of reporting from dangerous war zones in times of conflict in locations around the world, the experience of being a sexual assault and rape victim, today’s current events which she calls the “fight of our lifetime,” and much more.Topics Include:Lara’s early life growing up in apartheid South Africa.  Providing her thoughts on the presentation of opinion as fact and how it is killing American media and sowing division. Sneaking into Afghanistan and Egypt during extremely dangerous circumstances when her boss refused to “send Barbie to war.”  Experiencing a brutal attack and rape and what it taught Lara about life, death, personal choice, and integrity.  Fighting and beating breast cancer.  Making mistakes as a journalist, the importance of saying your sorry when you’re wrong, and the consequences from reporting errors regarding the Benghazi attack. Defining success in her life today.  Discussing what Lara would do if she were was the President of the United States.  And other topics...Lara Logan is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting from war zones around the world for more than twenty years. She has covered stories during times of conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Kenya, Liberia, and many other countries. She spent 16 years at CBS news serving in a variety of roles including Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and a 60 Minutes Correspondent.  Lara has been the recipient of many awards for her journalism including three Emmy Awards, two Edward R Murrow Awards, and the prestigious Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. Lara has spent more time reporting in Afghanistan during the last twenty years than all but a few reporters. She is currently the host of Lara Logan Has No Agenda for Fox Nation.Sponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

Nobody gave me any assignments. I didn't get anything. And I didn't just ask my bosses and they let me. Every single thing that you mentioned, I had to make happen. These things don't come to you. You have to fight for them. Welcome to my podcast, In Search of Excellence,

our quest for greatness, to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about planning for excellence, which requires incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings, and we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. My guest today is my friend, the incredible Lara Logan. Lara is an award-winning journalist who, for more than 20 years, has reported from war zones around the world, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Kosovo, Liberia, Mogadishu, among others. Starting in 2001, she spent 16 years in a variety of roles at CBS News, including serving as her chief foreign correspondent, chief foreign affairs correspondent, and a 60 Minutes correspondent.

She's currently the host of Laura Logan Has No Agenda for Fox Nation. She has received many awards for her outstanding journalism, including three Emmy Awards, two Edward R. Murrow Awards for reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan, an Overseas Press Club Award, and the prestigious Daniel Pearl Award for outstanding international International Investigative Reporting. Lara has spent more time in Afghanistan in the 20-year war than all but a few reporters around the world. And in 2007, she also won the Association International Broadcaster's Best International News Story Award for her report on the Taliban. She is also a rape victim survivor and a breast cancer survivor. She's lived an incredible life, and I'm very excited to learn more about it today. Laura, I'm honored to have

you as my guest. Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thank you, Randy. Thanks for having me. I always start my podcast with family. From the moment we're born, our family helps shape our personalities, our values, and the preparation for our future. You were born in Durban, South Africa. It's the country's third largest city after Johannesburg and Cape Town. Your dad was a textile importer, your mom was a sales rep, and you're one of three siblings. Can you tell us about your parents and what they were like and what kind of values they instilled in you? Well, my mother was a reluctant sales rep because she would rather have been a stay-at-home mother. She was an extraordinary woman because I didn't even realize until I look back at my life that my mother never finished high school.

I would do all these stories about people would say to me, I'm the first person in my family to go to college. And it never occurred to me that actually my mother never went to college. She didn't even finish high school because my mother was so sophisticated and taught us so much. But I didn't have to think twice about what to do with all the knives and forks and everything at the table and my table manners would be like or anything because I was raised to know how to behave in any situation. And so when I was very young, I could go off to places like Angola and at the age of 20, sit down with the defense minister and the president because in my house, we grew up yelling and screaming at each other and fighting to be heard. And, you know, we really only had a few rules. There weren't many. It was unforgivable in my

house to be unkind. And it was also unforgivable to treat people without respect. Everyone was always equal to me. My mother and father taught us to think for ourselves and to be independent and also very much to know who we were, what we stood for. I remember when I was going through a hard time in school once, my father said to me, well, the tallest trees always gather the most wind. And it was good training really, right? Because in my work, I don't mince my words. I do know who I am and I've been savaged along the way, but I've never lost sight of who I am because of my mother and father. My father really was the person who pushed us to be the best. If you said, I want to be a nurse, he would say, well, that would be wonderful.

Nurses are important and valuable. But why wouldn't you try to be a doctor if you're interested in medicine? Because you're never going to be in charge when you're the nurse. And it wasn't because he didn't think much of nursing. It was literally because my father understood that you wanted to be in the strongest possible position

to set yourself up for success. And so my parents were divorced when I was very young and I had a big eclectic family and it was not always love and roses and everything. I mean, family gatherings could be literally like a bar fight in Dublin, okay, mixed with a bit of the Sicilian mafia mixed in there. It was a bloodbath sometimes. We never had to wonder about being loved. And that's something that I've thought about often too, when I think back, is that what is it like to grow up without ever knowing that you're truly loved, that you truly matter. And, you know, a thousand years later, when I had a mother ask me about, she told me her daughter had been raped, and she asked me for some advice. And it really made me think about what would it be like to have

something like that happen to you before you, without knowing who you really are. Because that was so important to me. My parents instilling that in me is that don't be afraid to stand up and be counted. Don't be afraid to be challenged. Never be afraid to be questioned because only the truth stands up to questioning. And don't back yourself into a corner. When you're wrong, it's okay. Say it. And it took me a long time to learn how to get out of corners because I'm not a person that, I'm not very,

obviously I'm not very good at hiding what I really think and feel. And I think that has a lot to do with my parents. They were always very strong in that sense. All right, let's talk about your childhood. And I'd love to break this up into two parts, with the first one focusing on what you were like as a child, and the second one talking about what it was like growing up under apartheid. So let's talk about what you were like as a kid.

Were you popular? Were you a leader? And what did you do for fun? Well, my mother said that I was like a little fairy, that I would flit around talking to myself and absorb to my own world. And she said I was like a little ray of sunshine everywhere that I went. And it's funny because when I grew up, she said that I was her worst teenager. So I balanced that out. She also said that I was the ugliest baby she'd ever seen when I was born and that it made her love me even more because she felt so sorry for me.

But then she would say, don't worry, darling, ugly baby, pretty lady, which was an old saying. But so my childhood was, you know, I had a lot of heartache when my parents divorced, but then at the same time, we have a big, robust family and I love all my sisters and brothers. And so I'm very grateful for it now. Now that I'm older and I can look back, it's very different. And I was always adventurous. I mean, we would go on a vacation down to the wild coast where there was only dirt roads, no electricity, just gas. You might lie in bed at night hearing a thousand million cockroaches scuttling all over the place.

That wasn't because it was dirty. It was because it was Africa. What are you going to do? They just come in. There were sometimes not very robust windows and doors on the places, the very basic places we would stay. And I was a water baby. I loved the ocean. I lived in the water. And I was a diver and I did all kinds of diving, you know, speciality dive rescue and that kind of thing. And we used to love throwing a portable compressor in the back of a truck and driving down the coast and going off and diving on our own when I was at the dive club.

I was running the dive club in college. One of the people doing that. But I started working very, very, very early. And this is really the part, I think, the second part of your question, what was it like growing up under apartheid. My parents were a very important part of our education because I remember being a young girl and driving along the road and seeing a big demonstration at the side of the road. And I read one of the signs as we went past, and I couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old. And the sign said, free all detainees now. And I said to my dad, I was in the back of the car, and I said, dad, what's detainee? What is that?

I'd never heard that word. And he said, oh, well, that's someone who's in prison without being on trial. And I said, well, what's wrong with that? Didn't sound too bad to me. I said, but if you're in prison, don't you deserve to be in prison? And he said, well, not necessarily, because there's this thing called innocent until proven guilty, number one, and everybody has a right to a trial and to justice. He said, but also, these are especially political prisoners.

They're not necessarily people who've done anything bad. These are the conversations that are an awakening in your mind. My earliest memories of life are associated with the feeling of intense pain if I saw people being poorly treated. And so once in a store in South Africa, kind of like a 7-Eleven, at the weekend, my dad would give us 20 cents and you could go to the store with him and you could choose what you wanted for your 20 cents. And believe me, sometimes we took about four or five hours to decide. But when we got to the register, we were waiting in line and there was this elderly black gentleman standing there. He had a handful of pennies and he had a loaf of bread. And I can

still see it to this day. And I remember one person after another, after another would be done in front of us. And just so you know, this was an Indian store in South Africa run and owned by Indian people because South Africa has a huge Indian population. So it's not the simple narrative that people like. And when we got to the front of the line, my dad said to the shopkeeper, oh, I believe this gentleman was first. And the man looked at him and sort of gave a derisory look and said, oh, that's all right. Sort of motioned to my dad to dismiss the guy. And my father said very clearly, and there were a lot of people behind us in the line, I don't think you understand. This gentleman has been waiting a long time,

and I think you should serve him now. And it was those moments that just were seared into my heart and burned into my memories and my soul that I always knew exactly who I was. And I knew I wasn't that shopkeeper. And I'm not passing judgment or anything like that. I just knew who I wasn't and who I am. And I still am that today. And I think about all of the things that are around us right now and how important that upbringing in South Africa was. Having the ability to

see these things. There's never going to be anyone in Washington, D.C., doesn't matter who they are, on what side of the aisle, who's going to tell me what the difference is between right and wrong. I know that in my heart without any shadow of a doubt. I've known it from the day I was born. And my parents and growing up in South Africa were a big part of that. Because in South Africa, you got to see what real courage looked like. You got to see people protesting. I, as a journalist in South Africa, I did stories that would just tear my heart out.

And I lived it. What you have in the United States of America, that freedom that you have, the constitution, those principles, I saw people fighting and dying for that. It would be like being alive when the constitution was written and drafted and passed, right? Would have been like being alive in that time. That's the time that I was alive, growing up in South Africa. And so I saw what these things meant in the most profound terms, clear. And so they are,

these are the things that nobody can take from you. They're the things that belong to you and you alone. And I'm so grateful because in South Africa, I saw everything. I saw extreme violence and I saw extreme honor and integrity and character and love. And all the good things I saw was so much greater than the bad. That's why I've carried that good in me everywhere ever since. How old were you when you actually noticed it? My first memory, I was two and a half years old. I fell off of a chair. I knew where I was in the kitchen. But at some point, you grow up

seeing something. It's normal until someone tells you it's not normal. At what point did your parents say, hey, this is not how life should be, South Africa was always a very integrated society in many respects, which seems counterintuitive because apartheid, apartheid keeping people apart, white and black separated, you would think that it was the opposite. And because the laws kept people apart in certain respects. But in your daily life, when you're around 5 million white people and, I don't know, 25, 30 million black people, your daily life is completely integrated.

And so in our house, that was the standard that was set for me for how people were supposed to be treated. So it was never a case that when I went out in the world, I thought everything was normal. And then when I came home, I was taught that it was different. It was the opposite. It was that I was always aware that the world around me wasn't right because I knew that the world that I lived in at home, where people were treated with respect, where no one cared about the color of your skin, where everybody was equal. That's why, honestly, I've never been any different. I don't care if you're the Queen

of England, the President of the United States, or some street kid. I don't treat you differently when I sit down with you, or I try to tell you a story, or I talk to you. That's, to me, what it means when you say that people are equal. They're truly equal to me. And what I say to my children is, we're not all the same, right? We're all different as human beings, but we're equally entitled to protection under the law. We're equally deserving of respect until we give up that right. We're equally deserving of kindness. And we're very much taught personal responsibility is everything. You don't get, I don't care if your brother has smashed you in the face, you're pretty much, you're going to have to take responsibility for your actions regardless. Let's talk about education and its incredible importance in all of our lives. You attended high school at Durban Girls College, moved to Paris to work as an au pair, which you hated, went to New York on vacation and stayed for nearly a year,

then moved back to South Africa to go to college at the University of Natal. You graduated with a degree in commerce and also earned a diploma in French language, culture, and history from Alliance Francais University in Paris. Is education the first cornerstone to our success, and do we need it? We desperately need it. I think, you know, when I look back at my education, one of the most valuable things I ever learned, probably the most valuable of all, was critical thinking. When I studied English literature and you had to assess and analyze and think critically, I think those skills have really helped me, especially today. For many years now, people have asked me over and over again, where do we get our news? Like,

where do you go to get your news? People, they don't want opinion all the time. They want to know when they sit down and watch a certain show, okay, I'm going to get someone's opinion. But the rest of the time, I find my experience is that most people in this country are just so frustrated that they can't just get the news. And when you look at most of the newspapers today, you see these headlines and you read these articles that are infused with opinion presented as fact. That's the part that really bothers people because trying to sift opinion from fact all the time is just an endlessly frustrating and impossible task,

especially if you're working other jobs and you're not immersed in the world of information. So you don't have good reference points. You don't know how to discern what is real and what is not real. And so what I realized not that long ago, actually, was that it's really the art of critical thinking that helps you discern fact from fiction. Even when you don't know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever the topic happens to be, you can tell when people are trying to pass something off as if it's, for example, when they say, let's say Donald Trump being impeached at the trial for Ukraine, you would have all the TV stations and the newspapers

leading with the kind of headline that says, you know, it's devastating testimony at the impeachment trial for Donald Trump. But that was only the opinion of the people who saw it that way. Because for millions of other people who didn't see it that way, it was another dark day of lies and framing, framing someone who they thought was not guilty. So you're looking at it very, very differently depending on your perspective. So that tells you how much opinion is infused into these headlines and these stories. And really, what you have is you could have a situation where those in favor of impeaching Donald Trump argued that it was that they had felt that they had a huge victory in the trial today, whereas those people across the country, you know, saw this as yet another knife in the president's back, whatever. But you

can see how if you're really going to balance it out, now that would take opinion. And instead of it being presented as fact, it would be very clear to people, well, here I'm getting this side of the story and here I'm getting that side of the story. Maybe that would drive people to say, okay, well, what did he actually, what it was actually said? And then you make up your own mind. And so that was, I think to me, obviously without education, you have none of the building blocks that you really need. And that can be a self education. It can be a combination of experiencing the world and also learning. And it can also be obviously a much more formalized education. I mean, I'm a fan of the combination, obviously,

because I believe in the school of hard knocks, otherwise known as life. But at the same time, education is a pathway for people who don't have money and they don't have connections and they feel like there's no way out. Education dangles in front of all of us like a lifeline because there's no doubt when you know how to do something, when you've learned how to become a paramedic or you've learned how to become even a welder or a plumber. We are so judgmental in our view of education. And yet, learning is really education. I'm a big believer in formal education. I don't want anyone to think that I'm not. But at the same time, I also am not a believer in indoctrination factories that teach our children only to think one way.

I don't care what way that is. It doesn't matter if it's to the left or to the right to me. I don't want my children going to a place where they never test what they believe and they don't challenge those ideas. I learned in college a lot about John Stuart Mill and the Ode to Liberty, where the basic premise was only the truth stands up to questioning. And therefore, if you're telling the truth, you should welcome being questioned and challenged because you want everyone to see that truth stand on its own. And my mother used to say a lie has no legs. And she was so right about that. Because what happens when you start to question someone who's lying? The lie, what? It collapses.

It falls apart. And so, you know, what I love about these things is that in a way, the most powerful education I ever got was the education that was passed down to me orally from generation to generation, because it captured those principles that never change. Thou shalt not kill. pretty much a good one, right? From the beginning of time till now. And for people, not everybody gets that. Not everybody has a parent or a loving home where they can learn these things.

So to me, Shakespeare is an example of that. The reason Shakespeare is relevant today, as relevant as it was when he wrote it, it's about the principles of life, human, okay? It isn't. It's because people want the truth. We don't always know the truth. I've made mistakes. I'm sure I continue to make mistakes. I've also not even been aware of how little I really know about something. You know, I look back now at some of the things I reported on earlier in my career, and I think, wow, I should have gone to jail for talking about that, given how little I really understood. But you go into that situation, and you do your very best with what you have. And when you're young, you just don't know how much you don't know. My mother used to say,

the older I get, the less I know. And there again, that's one of those things you can take with you to the grave. You started your career in high school. You had a family friend named Liz Clark who worked at the Sunday Tribune in Durban, and you began lobbying her when you were 12 years old. When you turned 17, she finally gave you a job. That's a lot of determination, and I don't know many 12-year-olds who are looking for a job in journalism. What was behind all that?

Did you always know what you wanted to do and why? Yes. I always wanted to be a veterinarian because I loved animals. But also when I was 12, my mother got me a holiday job with a vet. In my first week, the vet let me help her with spading a cat. And she shaved off the fur and she gave me that scalpel and she put it in my hand and she showed me where to cut. And I was like, okay, so I'm never going to be a vet. We're clear on that. And so I think, although we have lots of things that we want to be, and maybe we have things that we're passionate about, what I was passionate about was understanding the world around me. So I was raised with a great regard for books and for literature and the art. And my father collected National Geographic magazines, which we were not allowed to touch.

And no one can really understand that today because we have the internet, we have information at our fingertips. But having National Geographic at home was like having your own library of Congress, right? I mean, it was everything. It was just extraordinary. We were to treat books, you know, they were revered objects in our house, and you couldn't deface them. You were not allowed to cut them up for projects. All those pictures in National Geographic that would have made the perfect backdrop for your assignment? No, unfortunately not. And that was really instilled in us a real love and understanding and respect for that. But I was born with a writer's bone. I mean, that was just, it was always in my DNA. And as soon as

I could, I wanted to write and to read. And my father pushed us to read above our grade all the time. And so those were very much the building blocks. When I had an English teacher say to us once in a classroom, and I remember this distinctly, she said, write about what you know, the things you've experienced. She said, it's always more powerful and meaningful than people who are making up stuff that they don't know anything about. And then I realized, wow, I don't actually know anything. I know nothing. And so I thought, how do I actually learn? I have to understand and learn. And that drove me. I mean, I was a child when I was thinking about these things. It's kind of weird, right? When I think

back at it now, it's never even seemed strange to me. But now, really, for the first time, I guess I see that that's not what your average 10, 11, 12-year-old is really doing. But that's just how I was. It served you well because you kept going. During college, you worked at the Daily News, the sister paper of the Sunday Tribune. And after graduating, you worked at Reuters Television in Johannesburg for five years, mostly as a senior producer. Breaking into journalism is very difficult. You apply to a lot of jobs. You get a lot of rejection, both of which are occurrences on our path to greatness. How did the Reuters position come about and how many jobs were you rejected for as you were coming up in your career and how did you deal with that rejection?

Well, you know what's funny? I got my first job when I was 14. I had to lie because you were supposed to be 16 and I would spend my weekend scooping ice cream. That was my first job. But I also did a little bit of modeling. People write about it. They say that I was a model and became a journalist. And I always feel a little bit of modeling. You know, people write about it. Like they say that I was a model and became a journalist. And I always feel a little bit ashamed and guilty because I really wasn't a model. I did a little bit of modeling, but that didn't make me a model. And, you know, when you see what professional models do, it really is not fair to them to put me in that category because I was not even close.

But I did that because I needed, you know, to earn money. I had to buy my own car and pay my own way, which I was happy to do. And to get that job at the Daily News, well, that was quite something really. We had a woman come and speak to us about extra-parliamentary political activity for women, which was really about the Black Sash movement in South Africa and an extraordinary woman named Helen Joseph. And she created this movement of women who were fighting against apartheid and the racial injustice in South Africa. And these women would wear white dresses and they would wear a black sash and they were known as the black sash movement. And I was always very engaged with

all of this from a very young age because I wasn't okay with the world around me and I wanted to figure out what was my role in how to change that and make it better, fix it. And I wanted the suffering and the injustice to stop and make it right for all of us because I couldn't be at peace and live in that world when it was like that. And I spoke to this journalist about journalism afterwards, after her talk. And she said, come and see my boss. And I walked in there and it was one of those old newsrooms. You could hardly breathe for all the smoke.

The news editor had a cigarette stub of a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth and pockmarked acne skin. And yeah, everyone would yell and scream. And there were newspapers everywhere. And I thought on my first day that I was just going to be like making tea and running around. And someone thrust a few rolls of film into my hand and told me to go down to the car and give this to Duffy. He was the photographer. And when I got down to Duffy, he said, well, where are you going? Get in. And I was like, well, okay then. I just got in the

car. I didn't know where I was going. I just had a couple rolls of film in my hand. And there's this guy in the back of the car and the photographer said, well, start your interview. And I said, excuse me, what did you say? He said, start your interview. This is the guy I was telling you about. And earlier in the day, I'd been looking through the papers to find stories and get read up. And this old man had come and talked to me about some things that he was doing. And I listened and nodded politely and everything, but didn't really think too much about it. Well, it turned out this guy was Ivan Lendl, the tennis champion lookalike. And Wimbledon was about to be held. And we had an Ivan Lendl lookalike right there in South Africa. And Wimbledon was about to be held. And we had an Ivan Lindel lookalike right there in South Africa. And Wimbledon was huge.

Everyone in South Africa loved that tournament, tennis tournament. And so I did my first story. I had to say to the photographer, look, I don't have a pen or any paper. I don't have a notebook. I got nothing. And I remember he was so annoyed. And he pulled the car over and he went out to the trunk and he got out this cigarette box. And it was the he got out this cigarette box.

And it was the Peter Stuyvesant box. I'll never forget it. Do you remember those old ones when they were hard on the bottom, those flat ones? And he said, here, and he found a pencil stub in the bottom of his bag. It was just this tiny little end of a pencil. And so I did my first interview on the back of a cigarette box, in the back of a car, going to a tennis court to take pictures of this guy in poses like Ivan Lendl. And you know, the story was huge because Wimbledon was huge

and they loved the story and I literally never looked back. Well, after Reuters, you branched out into freelance journalism. You got assignments as a reporter, editor, and producer with ITN, Fox Sky, CBS, ABC, NBC, and the European Broadcast Union. You also worked at CNN reporting on the United States embassy bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania, many conflicts on the coast of a war. Where did your interest in traveling to the most dangerous regions in the world come from? And did you also say to yourself, the first time, the second time, this could be life-threatening and I could even get shot and killed?

Well, people were getting shot and killed in South Africa every day. And I didn't have to see it every day unless I put myself in that situation, but other people didn't have that choice. So it was really important to me. I wanted people to know the truth. Actually, I'm glad you reminded me of this because it's sort of like now. You'd go into the townships. It might be a complete bloodbath. And people are living without constant electricity and water. And there's been a rally and police shootings. And there's no real street names because they haven't poured any money into

the infrastructure. And so they've given the streets their own names. It was Moscow and little Cuba, of course, because the South African, the resistance they didn't see was very closely allied to the communists. And you have all of this, and then you go home and nobody even knows it's happening. And home is 10 minutes up the road. And that's the world that we're still living in right now when I think about it. Because we're watching press conferences. The White House is saying, oh, we're getting people out. We won't leave anyone behind enemy lines. And then you're 24-7 on the phone with Afghanistan and on FaceTime and watching this unfold.

And it's absolute bedlam and chaos and terror and trouble and desperation, unlike anything that we've ever experienced in our lifetimes. And those two realities are so far from each other. It's truly unbelievable that the people lying about this, who know everything that I know and more, much more, that they go out and do that. Of course, people lie all the time. Politicians lie all the time. Donald Trump lied. Obama lied. Clinton lied. Bush lied. They all lie. But this is literally happening in real time. I've got people screaming and begging for their lives on the phone, begging American soldiers to open the gate. And I'm watching a press conference

where they're saying, anybody who needs to get inside can get inside. And at the same time, my iPad, my phone, my computer, everything is going nuts with messages from people saying, we've got four American citizens at the gate. This is the third day this mother's been there. She's been shot at. Her children almost drowned in the river and they still won't let her in. She's holding her. Here's photographs of the blue passports, photos of the blue passports. I mean, do you know that one woman actually made it inside the gate because decent, good Americans pulled everything they could to call people in JSOC and in Fort Bragg down in North Carolina and in the Pentagon and in the White House and in the State Department and wherever. And they begged and begged and begged. Congressman Michael Waltz and Mike McCall and Tom Cotton.

I wish I was saying names on both sides of the aisle because this isn't a partisan issue, but those are the ones that I know have been most engaged. They're calling, and none of it matters. To these people, none of it matters because what did they do? That flight was closed, and they said? That flight was closed and they said she can't come. And they opened the gate, forced her back out into the Taliban, into enemy lines, into enemy lines. Outside of the airport, it's all enemy lines. And actually now, when all the gates and all the perimeter and parts of the airport itself have been handed

over to the Taliban already, and most of the U.S. military is gone, even that is enemy lines. I stopped advising or guiding anyone that I knew to go to the airport two days ago because I'm worried that they'll be left on the tarmac and just slaughtered when the Taliban takes over completely. It's a death sentence, right? Somebody said to me, all of those people inside the airport right now are on death row. It's a truly horrible situation. We're going to talk more about it later in the podcast, Somebody said to me, all of those people inside the airport right now are on death row. It's a truly horrible situation. We're going to talk more about it later in the podcast, but I want to go through more things in your career. 2000 rolls around, you go to Afghanistan for the first time.

You're hired by a network called GMTV Breakfast Television in the UK as a correspondent. And you're also working with CBS News as a freelance radio correspondent. Then 9-11 happens, and days after al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, you asked the clerk at the Russian embassy in London to give you a visa to travel to Afghanistan. You knew a war was coming, and you asked your bosses to let you cover it, and they said yes. So you fly to Afghanistan and ultimately made your way to Kabul, where you rent an apartment, hired your own driver and bodyguard, and began chasing war stories. Incredibly dangerous. You're a Western woman in an Islamic country during a war. And in November 2001, when the Taliban's grip on the Capitol gets loosened, you were the only CBS reporter in Kabul.

So a few questions here. Why did you go and rush into danger? Where does the desire to achieve excellence fit into that equation? And what was it like there for the first time? Listening to that, what I think is important for people to understand is that nobody gave me any assignments. I didn't get anything. And I didn't just ask my bosses and they let me. Every single thing that you mentioned, I had to make happen. So whether it was going to the newspaper and saying, you don't have anyone my age, hire me. Showing up at someone's door and saying, I can do this.

Going into telling British Broadcasting that I was living in Jerusalem when the second Antifada broke out. And actually not living in Jerusalem, getting a ticket, flying there and sleeping on a friend's couch and reporting from there, right? These things don't come to you. You have to fight for them. ticket flying there and sleeping on a friend's couch and reporting from there, right? These things don't come to you. You have to fight for them. I think it's a really important thing for people to understand is that even today, I'm still fighting. It's no different. Even at 60 Minutes, nobody said, here's an amazing story, go and do it. Do you know how Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace used to, the things that they would do to each other, they would steal each other's stories. And it's a knife fight and a gun fight and a death

fight and a boxing match all the way to the end. That's what real journalism is. And so when Kabul happened, I was begging my bosses to let me go. I had to find out, I used the delay because I knew they'd eventually come around. They were thinking like a war in Afghanistan. We're not sending this. We're not sending Barbie to war, right? We couldn't possibly do that. Nevermind that I'd been in the war in Angola and in Mozambique and in South Africa and in Burundi. And I'd driven, flown into a coup without any air clearance and landed a plane and all kinds of things I'd done at that point. So I used the pause to find out from all the other fabulous journalists and satellite engineers and

other people involved in the business, how do you get into Afghanistan when it's controlled by the Taliban? They own 95% of the country. And strangely enough, there's always a kind of system and a way into these places, always a good way, but there's a way that you can get there. And that was one of the most extraordinary trips in that I've ever made. You engineer whatever you can along the way. And why, you know, to answer your question about why was I drawn to that place that most people were leaving and I was heading there. It's kind of like when a number of times in my life, a bomb has gone off and as everyone is

fleeing the bomb, I wait for the second bomb because it's often a secondary, but otherwise, I'm pretty much running to the scene. And I think it's because I'm not driven by fear. It doesn't mean I don't experience fear. People say, oh, she's fearless. No, I'm not driven by fear. It doesn't mean I don't experience fear. People say, oh, she's fearless. I'm not fearless. It's really not true. I learned the true meaning of fear when I was in situations where I was almost dying. It's more that I'm driven by other things. My desire to understand and to witness it and to share that knowledge in a way that means something is built into my DNA. I'm just programmed to not go the other way. And I think there are lots of people who are programmed like that. They just choose different paths. Many of us, including me, have a lot of

fears in our career, but it's a fear of failure. You try something and it doesn't work and it's the fear of failure. You try something and it doesn't work and it's disappointing, embarrassing. You're not motivated by fear, fear of dying, it sounds like, but what about the fear of failure? Has that motivated you in your career to be the best you can be? Yes and no. I remember as a young girl thinking that I didn't want to fail. So I think that failure is sort of a younger person's fear in a way, because you haven't had a chance to prove to people what you can do. And you don't want to fail before you have a chance to do that, because then you might never get the opportunity to show what you're made of. So to me, I think that that's the kind of fear that I had as a younger person starting out. I was never motivated by fear.

I would say that that's really the thing. When I sat down in the camera or go into a situation, when I would be forcing my way to the tip of the spear, as they say on the battlefield, it was never driven by a desire to be famous or to win an award, or I wasn't thinking, oh, this is going to look great on camera. In fact, I always knew it was time to leave the battlefield when someone in New York had a comment about my hair. When you're in that moment where they're so happy that you're actually there reporting, because almost not many people are, and sometimes no one is, or they're just so happy that you're still alive, they don't care what you look like.

That's my favorite place to be. This was the story of your career at that point. Your career took off. Your later CBS offered you a full-fledged correspondence position. Then for most of the next four years, you're reporting from battlefields, including Afghanistan, and you're often living with the U.S. Armed Forces. And in 2006, you're promoted again to Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondence. And then you really started at that point a 15-year career for 60 minutes covering some of the world's biggest stories for them. When we think about excellence, we think about planning for it, identifying your goals, and then making a plan to achieve those goals. We think about persistence and overcoming obstacles to get there.

Let's go back to when you're a rookie at CBS News. You're 31 years old. You're in a hotel in Jordan. You've been assigned to cover the then biggest story on earth, the invasion of Iraq, whose two main purposes were to destroy their weapons of mass destruction, which they never had, and to end the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein. You've been forced to leave Baghdad days before the invasion was to begin, and you were not too happy about that. But your boss at CBS said no, because of the imminent danger that was coming, the US shock and awe campaign. The US dropped 3,000 bombs and missiles in a span of 100 hours. I think most people would have probably said, all right, I'm not too fond of thousands of

bombs raining over me, so I'll wait. But you didn't do that. You heard about a convoy of French reporters making the trek to Baghdad. You called one of them up. You begged to her to go with the group. She said, no, it was too dangerous. You spoke French. You begged in French. At this point, you worked incredibly hard to get where you were. You'd spent several months in Kabul during the invasion, and you'd thrown yourself into danger many, many times. Days later, as those thousands of bombs were raining down, the French reporter you had

begged to go is standing in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, and she sees you, and she's shocked because you're standing next to her. And you say, look, I made it. 14 months before, you're the only CBS reporter in Kabul, and now you're the only major TV staff broadcaster in Baghdad when the war began. So here you are on your way to greatness, another huge catalyst to your career. You become a 60-minute correspondent two years after that. So let's talk about persistence and creativity and resourcefulness. How did you get across the border to Baghdad? And once again,

were you afraid you might die on that one? There's 3,000 bombs raining on top of you. And did you need to do this to become the best foreign journalist in the world? Was that your goal? Well, I'm a really bad example. If the advice you give your listeners is planning and all of that, then I am the exact opposite. I'm like the nuclear bomb of your strategy. You tell us what you think is the right. This is one method that a lot of people believe is right. What's your method? Do we need to plan? But I still want to know about your resourcefulness and how you got there. Okay. So I think people are different and they go into different careers. And depending on the type of career that you want,

some kind of planning is probably good. The extent of my planning was, I know I've got to get a degree because without a degree, I'm going to limit myself. And I've always believed in not limiting myself wherever possible. So how can I set myself up? I guess, you know, in a way, the planning that I did was in high school thinking, well, how am I going to get a job as a journalist? I wanted to graduate from college with three years, four years of journalism experience.

And that's what I did. But when it came to the rest of it, I guess it was easy in a sense because you knew what the biggest stories in the world were. And I followed those because they were fascinating to me. But I didn't follow them because I wanted to me, but I didn't follow them because I wanted to be famous. I didn't follow them because I thought this is going to make my career. I followed them because I am a journalist. That's who I am. That's what I do. I don't want to be an editor. I don't want to be an anchor. I don't want to be the host of a podcast. I mean, I might do it, but that's not my dream. I've always wanted to just be a journalist. I am really, really good at telling other people's stories grabbing a couple sound bites and throwing their story on the air because

it's quick and it's easy and everybody's going to love that. It was never about that for me. My hair and makeup were the last thing that I was doing. Oh, well, actually, as you saw today, once again, the last thing that I'm doing. Because what was really important to me was to experience it firsthand so that I could understand it, so that I could begin to have something meaningful, a way to explain it all to someone else. To me, your reporting means nothing if it's superficial. It doesn't endure. It doesn't live past the next five seconds. So when I made the decision during the last few months of the

Saddam Hussein regime, we could all see, I was in Afghanistan, we could see the writing was on the wall, they were going to war in Iraq. I knew I wanted to be there. There was no doubt in my mind. And I had to work very hard as a young correspondent at CBS to be the one that they said, okay, it can be you, sort of thing. But as these networks do, they always send in a bunch of people, and they have freelance and they have some this and they have some that, and they like to play you off against each other so that you never really know where you stand. But I'm not good with gray area.

I mean, I'm good with it in some respects, but I'm not going into that kind of situation. And I've got the added stress of not knowing if you're going to mess me around. And I don't know who's reporting for the evening news, who's reporting for it. And so I forced the London bureau chief actually to make a decision. He was trying to do that thing that they do. And I was like, you'll all just get along. And I'm like, no, no, that's not actually how it's going to work because the evening news is going to call and they're going to say, we want a story from so-and-so. And I want to know if that's going to be me or not. And if it's not, that's fine. I was the person, you know, I was told early on in my career that I, as a young woman, if I wanted to get a job, I better

learn how to work with everybody else. It's always funny to me when I see all the headlines about such a diva and everything, because things have been written like that. And I think like, wow, I spent 35 years trying to figure people out so that I can work with them and accommodate them and accommodate every producer and treat everybody decently. And that's what you write about me? I mean, the only two things that I've been a complete pain in the butt about, okay, three, would be that I do long interviews because I really want to understand and not because I don't know what the story is. One of my producers said to me once, man, I got no life. It's really hard working with you. And I said, why? And he said, because nobody can outwork you. I said, okay, I'm not apologizing for that. Get out. Get out of my

room. I think we're in a hotel in Baghdad. And I said, behold my field of, for those of you who know how that saying goes, I got zero, right, for that. And then the only other thing that I did is that I'm always late. And it's not because I don't want, I mean, not because I don't respect anyone because I'm not trying to be, but it's just, I'm trying to do a lot of things at the same time. And I spend a lot of time trying to understand all of the aspects of a story. I don't just focus on one thing because even if you're honest and everything you write is accurate, it can be very misleading when you don't tell people the whole truth. Like when you only tell the story, the humanitarian story on the border over and over and over again. It's still a valid, real important story. But if you never tell the rest of the story about all the national security issues and the cartels and

everything, you really are creating a distorted picture of the southern border. And you're not giving people the ability to make up their own minds and to make good decisions and to vote based on good decisions. So I've always tried to understand the whole context. And that for me was when I went into Baghdad, there wasn't just a convoy that was going. It was, I had to fight to put that convoy together. Zencom, they actually sent a person there to tell journalists if they went down that road, they were going to die. And that writing press or TV on the roof of your car didn't help. I didn't just dismiss that. I was never reckless. I actually spent a lot of time and effort in figuring out, well,

is that really true? Is it a smart idea to do that? Is it not? And you know what really made my decision to cross the border was funny because we had this new thing at the time, which was security. Journalists before that didn't have security everywhere they went. And now we're all used to it, you know, and nobody remembers the time before that, but I'm old enough. I do remember. And I started to realize, because I was watching things that were happening and I had my producer in France watching what the French journalists were doing, that we were being lied to by the CBS security and the CBS main Jordanian staffer, who were pretending that it was so dangerous nobody could go down that road. But then they were handing out money to drivers who were driving up the road

and delivering it to the Iraqi staff in Baghdad. And there were other journalists, German and French, and other journalists going up and down that road. So that's when I made the decision. There was a bunch of other journalists, one from Nick from Sky News and a few others, and we made a decent plan. We vetted it as much as we could. But before I did anything, I planted some false information into the information loop.

Because what I realized is that the security guys, they're retired British special operations, competent without a doubt. And some of them, the best guys you've ever met in your life, but no access to real-time battlefield intelligence in the middle of a US invasion. So I fed some false information and sure as hell, it came back to me through these guys. I realized that all they were doing was talking to each other. So I was like, okay. So now I know that the big threat that they're talking about, certain death, I don't believe it. I don't believe it's that dangerous. But when I had that, when I did cross the border, finally, we had a very good plan. We left with enough time to get all the way from Amman, Jordan, to the border, and then over the border, and then into Baghdad.

These things are not haphazard. When you want to stay alive, you put a lot of time and effort in. And then, of course, you cross your fingers and pray and hope you get lucky. And that's the combo. That's all it takes. But when we crossed that border, I had to call the vice president of CBS News. And then I had to call my family. And I had to say to my husband at the time,

I don't know what's down that road. And I don't know if I'm ever coming back, but I love you. And he said, I love you too. And I said, call my sister, tell her please, tell my family. And then I got in a car with an Iraqi Mokhabarat agent and my Iraqi brother, for us, Ibrahim al-Samourai. And we put Van Morrison, this is how quickly things are changing. We had a cassette tape. Anyone remember what that is? Van Morrison. And we put that in because I knew that even if we were hit from a jet in the sky, they fire from so far away, you won't hear or see anything. You'll just be obliterated. So there's nothing to look out for. We had the Iraqi guy in the back who, if he was going to pop us, it was going to be in the back of the head and there'd be nothing we

could do about it. And I said, for us, they gave him to us on the Iraqi border checkpoint. We had no choice. I said, what are our chances? And he said, well, inshallah, we'll see, right? That's in Arabic, God willing, God willing, we make it. And they were bombing the road. And there was a lot that happened on that road. We never made it into Baghdad from the south. We had to go around Baghdad and they ended up to Tikrit where Saddam was born. And because there was so much heavy fighting in Ramadi and a lot of panic on the road, a lot of military, we were stopped and, of course, guns shoved in our faces and everything, but we made it up to Tikrit and then down. The most extraordinary thing I'll never forget seeing,

some of you may remember that the Iraqis were lighting tires filled with oil around Baghdad to create a smoke screen to make it more difficult for the American bombers to target. And there was all this black smoke rising over Baghdad. And it was this enormous pool of smoke. And in the middle of this, you know, you had the F-16s and the F-15s, the stealth bombers, the B-2s flying over and dropping their bombs. And so, I mean, it's enormous explosions. And there's this mass, this seething mass of humanity just flooding out of Baghdad. The roads are filled with people running for their lives, and they've got their possessions and their children and whatever. And then this incredible

thing, the Iraqi army on the march, artillery pieces and all these things going by us. And of course, the road into Baghdad was just us, empty, which should have been a sign, right? But I'll never forget because we'd left at like one or two in the morning from Amman during the night before. And the following day, early in the evening, just as the sun was setting, we drove through those fires and into Baghdad and to the Palestine Hotel. And the first thing I did was call Marcy McGinnis, the vice president of CBS News at the time. And I never forget, she'll remember, my words to her were, I am the happiest human being on the face of the planet right now. We're glad you made it. At this point, your career has taken off like a rocket ship and you're a world famous rockstar for news correspondents at the top of your field.

And then you suffer a series of three major setbacks. And for all of us who strive and ultimately achieve excellence, we all have challenges and setbacks along the way. And if we're going to achieve excellence, we need to push forward and overcome them. And with a tremendous amount of work, you've done that with your challenges. Let's talk about the first setback and go to early 2011 in the Arab Spring, which was a series of pro-democracy uprisings in Muslim countries around the world that had very entrenched authoritarian regimes, including Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Beirut, and Egypt. You're in Egypt covering the revolution. Millions of protesters are demanding the overthrow of president and longtime dictator

Hosni Mubarak. He's trying to hold on to power, and he's cracking down on the press who are helping to fuel those protests. Anderson Cooper had reported on CNN about being attacked by a mob. An ABC News crew was hijacked and threatened with beheading. You were warned not to leave your hotel after curfew on February 3rd. You did, and you were detained by Egyptian security forces. Your crew was blindfolded, handcuffed at gunpoint. Your Egyptian driver was badly beaten. The next day, your producer, Max McClellan, left the country. But here you were once again, like a great reporter.

What happened? What happened was Max and Don and I, Don Lee was the cameraman and Max MacLennan, the producer, for 60 Minutes. We were sent into Egypt during the Arab Spring, as you said, when everyone was watching all the uprisings in Tahrir Square. And the CBS News correspondents never liked it when I showed up because as a 60 Minutes correspondent, I was more senior, even though many of them were older than me. And many of the shows would want me first. So that always caused some friction. And actually what happened was they wanted to palm me off as fast as they could. So I was sent up to Alexandria outside of Cairo. And Alexandria is really interesting because it's the home of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And it's where the rendition ships that the Egyptians used to run for the CIA in the US are stationed off the coast there. So I didn't mind. I just was happy to be on the story. And I knew the drill at that point. But what happened is we'd been up reporting from Alexandria and a decision was made that the story was kind of going on. And so they were going to wind down the scale of the coverage and I was wanted for a 60 minutes story. So they said, okay, news, we can go do our thing without you and you concentrate on 60 Minutes. And so for my 60 Minutes piece, I had to travel from Alexandria to Cairo. But it was dangerous in Cairo at the time. It was dangerous everywhere I went.

It being dangerous was not a reason not to go. And if I was going to go to these places and just stay in a hotel, then I would not have done any of the reporting that I have done. I was not a hotel warrior, right? There's a book written about the kind of journalists that go to a war zone and stay in a hotel and then come back and tell everyone their war stories. I was never one of those. That's another thing people should really understand is even there where you're challenging what some people would prefer you to do because it's safer for the bosses,

it's safer for the security, it's safer for all the other correspondents because they don't have to do what you do and so on and so on, right? So every day is a battle. You just have to gravitate towards the other producers and the other journalists and cameramen who share that DNA and are not doing it for glory and are not doing it because they are war junkies. They're doing it because they believe in what you're actually doing, believe in real journalism. So what happened was that when we were coming back into Cairo that night, we were stopped on the outskirts and we were apprehended.

And they kept us for hours and hours and hours, and eventually came with a van in the night with masked men all in black with zip ties and blindfolds and dragged us off to the Munkhabarat intelligence headquarters. I mean, I was put into a van. We didn't ever know where we were going. I asked to go to the bathroom at one point. And I remember I called 60 minutes from the toilet in this apartment building of someone's apartment. I just knocked on the door and said, can I go to the bathroom? And the toilet was one of those Turkish kind of hole in the ground things. And I always remember waiting to pee before I whispered into the phone so that I could try to mask my voice. I don't think it

probably didn't work very well, but being an Arab country, they weren't going to come into the bathroom with me. Ended up spending a night in Egyptian prison being interrogated. I was very sick from dehydration. So I was vomiting and they were sometimes shoving pills down my throat. I didn't know what they were. I got put on a drip and passed out. My cameraman was made to sign a confession in Arabic. He still doesn't know what he signed. And my producer, Max McClellan, you know, Max was so cool. Max is like the State Department guy, he always wore a blue blazer and he had one little green bag. That's all he took. Didn't matter if we were going for two days or two months and where we

were going. And it has his initials on the side, MCM. One of the guys looked at Max during his interrogation and was like, so man, you've done this before? And Max is like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? He's like, you're too cool. Like, too cool. And Max is like, no man, seen too many movies. Which I just think if you knew Max, that story would be even funnier because he is the nicest guy ever. Everyone at 60 Minutes loved him because he was so nice and polite. He even let them, they ran out of blindfolds. And so he suggested to the cover-up agent arresting him that he could use his sweater

if he wanted. So they tied him up with his sweater. So when a week later, we went back into Egypt for the fall of Mubarak. Because in the morning, when we were finally released from the prison, Max wanted to go back into Cairo, but Don and I were okay to leave. My baby girl was 10 months old and my son was one. So I went back a week later, and that's when the big attack happened in Tahrir Square. We went straight to the square because right after we landed, Hosni Mubarak had stepped down.

And I knew that that story would change the world that we knew, that everything in the Middle East would be different after Mubarak and the end of the Mubarak regime and the Arab Spring. So I wanted to be there for that. And Max did too. And we were always as smart as we could be. And that narrative about we were warned, that was a nonsense narrative that one of the CBS bosses came up with to cover his butt. But he was very quickly told to shut his mouth because it was a false narrative. And really what happened was we were on the road because none of the CBS people wanted to let us sleep on the floor of their

hotel. So while all those journalists were being attacked and beaten, and we asked, can you help us have a room to stay in, or can we sleep on your floor? They said no. Okay. They said no. I just wanted you to think about that. In a million years, I wouldn't say no to anyone. But that aside, what I can tell you is when I came back and we went to Tahrir Square, we were greeted by a Super Bowl type of atmosphere. People were celebrating. We stopped at the side of the road for all the celebrations. People were, you know, like when they win a soccer match in Egypt, right? People go crazy and they were saying, thank you, Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you,

Facebook. Thank you, Google. Sure, that narrative has changed at this point. But they felt like this was the people's revolution and it was their revolution. And unfortunately, I was naive enough not to consider that when you have a regime that is ending after so many years and they're losing everything, they'll do things that I hadn't thought about. I know they shoot people. I know they put you in prison. They do lots of things, but I didn't think that they would use rape as a weapon to deter journalists from being there. And it makes perfect sense from their point of view. It doesn't take much to incite a mob. And they're very well trained in these tactics. They use them all the

time. And so it was a moment when we were in that square when my cameraman, Richard Butler's light went on and he went down to fix it, change the battery. And that was when they started, let's take her pants off. Let's do this. Let's do that. Of course, I don't know because it's in Arabic that it's happening. And then it went really fast after that. Really fast in one sense, but in another sense, every disgusting detail of what they're doing to you is you're living it out almost in slow motion. So I guess you have different parts of your brain that are functioning because on the one hand, you're experiencing what rape is really like. That was so consuming for me in a sense that I didn't even

really notice being beaten, but I had one security person with me, Ray Jackson, extraordinary man. And Ray kept describing for me what was happening. He would say, Laura, they're beating us now. Laura, they have flagpoles. They're beating us with flagpoles. Of course, I was being raped with a flagpole. So I knew what it was because Ray was explaining it to me. Because at a certain point, I had to stop fighting the sexual violence and being sodomized over and

over. There's nothing I could do about that. It was as painful as it was, I realized that I was wasting my energy and my strength because I was dying. I couldn't breathe anymore. And I was being crushed by the mob and my body was being ripped in different directions. And I needed to fight for my life, not my dignity, because my dignity was long gone. And we didn't exist anymore. When I lost Ray, because I was holding onto him, he kept saying to me, Lara, don't let go. Don't let go. If you let go, you're going to die. If you go down, you're good. Get up. Every time I went down, because I had so many of them on me, he would say, get up, stay on your feet.

If you stay down, you're going to die. And when they took Ray from me, that was really the moment when I lost everything. I lost everything in that moment. I lost the will to fight. The adrenaline just drained from my body. I lost my physical strength. I lost everything in that moment. I lost the will to fight. The adrenaline just drained from my body. I lost my physical strength. I lost everything in that moment. And I surrendered. Maybe this is why I know I say it today. Surrender is really the only victory that cannot be taken. It has to be given. You have to break your will to fight. And I had that moment when I lost all that strength in my body where I thought, this is it, right? It's over because I can do nothing. I mean, at this point, I know that I'm dying. And then I had this instant, it's almost like slow motion, but fast.

Immediately, this thought came into my head where I said, my children deserve better. They deserve a mother who fought for them and fought to the end. And that's what I thought I was doing. I was just fighting that when my children learned about it when they were older, because my son was, you know, one, almost two, and my daughter was 10 months old. I thought, this is the only thing that is left for me that I own. And I did that instinctively. It took me many years looking back at it, thinking about it to really understand what it meant. And to me, what it means is that even at the point of death, even when you're overwhelmed by a mob and you're being raped to death,

you have the ability not to surrender. You have that. It's your choice. I know the price is a more violent death, but I didn't care. And that's maybe the most powerful thing that keeps me grounded in this moment. We are a country that has lived in fear for years now. Everybody's afraid of what they're going to say about them on social media, afraid of losing their job. They're afraid of saying what they really think. They're afraid of being identified as Christian

or being identified as Republican or being identified as whatever it is. You don't have to be afraid of being a Democrat because that's not the time that we live in. But all of these other people, everybody else is afraid. When you think about that basket of deplorables, it wasn't really a mistake, was it? It was a list. It was a laundry list of all the people, all the things that if you were ever associated with them from that moment on, you were a worthless, horrible human being and you don't have a right to exist.

And so we have millions of people in this country and not just on the right. That's not true. Actually, there's plenty of people on the left, even Democrats, elected officials, who they don't dare stray because all the things that happen to those outside of that realm happen to them too. And it's not that I don't have any fear. It's just that I'm not built to live in fear. I'm not going to allow that. And so I learned that, I think, in the dirt, in that square. I learned without even thinking about it that when I am faced with that choice, I know the choice I'm going to make. I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to wonder. I don't have to lie awake at night thinking about it. I know the choice. I'm never

going to surrender. I'm glad you didn't die. And I know you've done a lot of good and found some positive sharing your story to other rape victim survivors and survivors of domestic abuse. So only a year later, you had another setback in a year. Following that, you had another one. You had breast cancer the following year. And then the following year, you did a well-known report for 60 Minutes about the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. You ran a report that was given to you by a British security officer that was false. And the story unraveled less than two weeks later and you were forced to give an apology on air

once you learned the truth. Talk to us about those two things and we'll go with the breast cancer first and then the story. So the breast cancer was brutal. That was brutal. I really felt fear and panic when I got my diagnosis. My doctor said that on the other end of the phone, I'm so sorry, Laura, but it's positive. You have, you do have cancer. I felt like I was falling from a building and I couldn't stop.

I didn't know where to reach. I didn't know what to hold on to. I was, I think, searching the database of all that wisdom from my mother and father and growing up and, you know, my sisters, and I have amazing sisters and all those things. And I was reaching and reaching and I found nothing, nothing. I was just in free fall. And I'd never been in free fall before, like literally. And there's no situation I'd ever been in where I just panicked. But breast cancer made me panic. It was just horrible. And then I realized how little I actually knew and understood about cancer. We hear about it all the time. It's out there and it's not news and all of that. But I just didn't realize that my real understanding of it was marginally above zero. And so that's the first

thing that really I leaned on was learning and understanding, okay, what does it mean? And figuring out where I fit into all of that and what I could do about it. Breast cancer was, it was a rough thing to go through, especially with my children being at that point one and two. And I was lucky enough that I had, I don't know, six to eight weeks of radiation. And of course I had surgery and I didn't have to have chemotherapy. I was borderline for chemotherapy. They said, you know, they were split. The medical profession was split with my case on whether I should have it or not. And I decided not to in the end, but it was an unusual thing for me because you have no control over it really. And I was under all this pressure. And I remember these, you'd meet other cancer

patients when you'd go for your radiation. And everyone would say to me, so have you given up sugar? And of course not, I live on sugar. So that was another thing, then people would say, have you got a positive attitude? Positive attitude, that's the thing, it's going to get you over the finish line. And then you'd go to the therapist and psychiatrist and they would say, oh, you've got to change everything about your life. This happened. It's a warning sign. It happened because of stress and you've got to change everything about your life because if you don't, you're going to get cancer again and you're going to die and you're going to squander this. And it's guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, because I can't change my life because I'm living the only life that I was built for. This is who I am. So yes, I can improve things. And of

course I can try to work on things that I'm, my limitations, my weaknesses, my mistakes, but I can't fundamentally alter who I am because I don't know how to live like that. And that's another form of death for me anyway. So every morning I have my Bailey's coffee. I love chocolate. I haven't worked out since I got pregnant with my first child. So what's that? 13 years now. I do try it, I guess, a little bit. I mean, to eat, at least, I mean, I like a lot of salads and vegetables. And my friend Dave Asprey from Bulletproof Coffee always says, grass-fed, grass-finished beef. So I do make an attempt like that.

But most of my life is spent trying to tell other people's stories and figure out the truth and be a good mom and sister and wife. So I don't have, like, I don't think I've seen the inside of a nail salon in several years. And it used to be when my kids were little, if my underwear wasn't safety pin together, I was having a great day. So although breast cancer was, I was lucky enough that I could get through it. I couldn't call myself a, I struggle even now to say the word survivor, because I'm not sure that it's over. I have that lingering fear, I guess. Let's talk about the report on Benghazi. I watched the report online. I watched the apology that you gave. What happened there? And one thing that you said at the beginning of the podcast,

when you're wrong, you say, I'm sorry. And I'd love to just hear your perspective on this and exactly what happened there. Well, the great part about Benghazi is that I have now at this point reached a place where I can really say that a lot of me is very glad that that happened. It was a gift in many ways, not only because it made me a better reporter, but because it was the beginning of cancel culture and targeted attacks. Of course, those had happened before, but I don't think any of us could have imagined that we were heading into a world where people were systematically destroyed for very little or next to nothing or for false reasons. And my experiencing that very early on opened my eyes to the world we were going into. It was training. I mean, in the most brutal form of training, but it was extraordinary training. And I actually,

I would love now journalism students and other journalists to study what happened there because they can learn a lot from that. First of all, most people say that our story was entirely about this one guy. No, it wasn't. Secondly, people say that everything he said was false. No, that's not true either. It was only two things that he said, two parts of his story. This was a contractor who was hired by the State Department through a British company to provide security at the perimeter of the special mission compound in Benghazi. And if you read all the accounts, he made everything up. No, actually, only two parts of his story were ever called into question. And we did so much vetting of his story. We took his account and we matched it with the State Department's ARB. That was their big report they did on Benghazi.

If he said a light over the wall on the east gate of the compound was broken for this period of time, and then they fixed it, and then this, we matched all of those details. We photographed the visas in his passport, the stamps in his passport. So we knew that he was actually in Benghazi when he said he was and that he left when he said he did. We went to the State Department and we confirmed his employment. This is a man who had a top secret security clearance. He's been vetted by the State Department. They vetted him first. He's also written his story for Simon & Schuster. He's got a publisher. He's got a ghostwriter. He's been vetted by them.

And the key part that everybody leaves out of the narrative, and they did it on purpose, is that we signed a nondisclosure agreement that covered what he said he did the night of the attack. So it didn't cover anything else. And so we vetted everything else. We went to the FBI. We went to alletted everything else. We went to the FBI. We went to all kinds of people. We went to the military. We confirmed his military record. We knew he'd been in the unit that he was in. But if you read online, you'll think he made

everything up. He wasn't who he said he was and so on and so on. The only two things that were called into question was that he lays out a very detailed picture of the relationships he formed with the State Department RSOs, those are the regional security officers, two of whom were in there in Benghazi that night during the attack, one of whom he was in contact with on the phone, who ended up being badly wounded that night. They always knew that this attack was coming and that their greatest vulnerability at the special mission compound was an attack of this nature because the perimeter guards were not armed. They were never armed. So you have a bunch

of armed guys show up at your door at the gate with the intent to attack. There's nothing you can do. So when they say the guards ran away, of course they ran away. They weren't armed. And the February 17th militia who the Obama administration had tasked with security inside, well, there's questions. Some of those guys tried to fight, some of them didn't. But in the end, the reality was that they were overwhelmed by Al-Qaeda terrorists. And we put a lot of time and effort into researching that. Ansar al-Sharia in Libya is who everyone reported was responsible at the time. But not long after our report, the Obama administration designated Ansar al-Sharia as an al-Qaeda terrorist organization. So all of those journalists who wrote all those stories from the New York

Times, David Kirkpatrick to Nancy Youssef at McClatchy saying that we put this on al-Qaeda and it wasn't, they were wrong. I think Nancy Youssef at McClatchy saying that we put this on al-Qaeda and it wasn't. They were wrong. I think Nancy Youssef was just wrong because everything she wrote was a lie. But David Kirkpatrick is just a patsy. He was being used to push the false narrative. They painted this thug Abu Qatala as the main guy responsible, and we knew he wasn't. We named in our report Sufian Benkumu, who was actually the person responsible for the attack. And he was indicted by the Obama administration just over a year after our report. We were the first to report that. We were the only ones to be ahead of it. And yet what

they did, they discredited our report by attacking the two parts of this guy's story that we were not able to take to the FBI in advance because we signed a non-disclosure agreement that was a standard CBS agreement that was signed by the CBS lawyer and it prevented us. And we actually took that seriously. So what he said was that he went over the wall. He didn't find anything or anyone. Someone recognized that he wasn't Arabic and was coming towards him. So he punched him in the face with his rifle butt and he left. And the other thing was that he said he went to the hospital and he saw Chris Stevens' body there and he had a photograph taken. I mean, we even confirmed with the metadata that that photograph was taken that night, that he did have it on his phone and that he did actually send it

to the CIA as he said he did. I mean, that's the, there's, I can tell you, Randy, there is no journalist in daily news that does that amount of work to vet a story, that amount of journalism. And then all of those journalists who wrote all those stories obviously didn't even do a scrap of journalism because they wrote things about that that wasn't true. And why that happened, it didn't fall apart. The story did not fall apart. There was an active campaign led by David Brock at Media Matters, and all of the political operatives spread out across the State Department and the Clinton campaign and in Washington. They went door to door to door with an after-action report that they said contradicted what our guy had told us. He was one of three

characters in the story. He wasn't the only one and he was the least important one. And they said it contradicted it. If that document was real, it would have been classified. But he told us he'd never seen it and he'd never written it. So what happened to us was you took something that was not even important. It wasn't central to the story. We believed that we had gone above and beyond and done everything in our power, and we had. And it was very easy. It was very easy for these people to come in and they threw, it's like blood in the water, right? The sharks come in, it's a feeding frenzy. And it's the opportunity to take down CBS in 60 minutes. And a voice like mine is really a threat because I'm independent,

because I don't belong to the left or the right. I'm not a patsy for any political party. I never will be. So that makes me uncontrollable. Because what am I really trying to do? I'm trying to find out the truth. And even when it's uncomfortable, and even when I don't like it, I'm not going to hide from it. They don't want journalists like that around. I'm not the only one. There's others who are like that. And look at where the media is gone today. I would never have had a home in media organizations that do basic hit pieces. It was obvious to me that Russia collusion was a political hit job from the start and that it was false. And that was because I read the Steele dossier. And in the first five minutes, I knew that it was false. There was just 50 red flags everywhere, starting with the fact that there

was not a single eyewitness account, not one firsthand source. So that was a dead giveaway. And so why I say that I'm glad this happened to me in the end, I mean, I would love to have stayed at 60 Minutes. I was so proud of the work that we did there. But in the end, I still get to hold on to my soul and my integrity and my conscience. And I'm much better off in that place. You've managed to overcome whatever criticism you've had there. Let's talk about what I think all of our listeners and viewers want to know. What are the elements of success as you define them? Hard work, of course, is important, but you also have to work smart. Just hard work alone isn't enough.

And I never expected anything. I never expected people to do me favors. I never expected reward. I just didn't. I mean, we all like to be recognized. Goodness, we have all those ceremonies where we give ourselves awards, right? And I was very happy and very grateful to be recognized. But in the end, if you're doing something because you know that it's the right thing to do, then whether you get the recognition or the not,

it's still going to be what it is. Nobody can take it from you. So that to me is what really defines success. Of course, you have to be tenacious. You can't give up. Of course, you can't take no for an answer. You really have to work hard at it. You have to become really good at it. Hard work makes you good. I remember explaining to my son when he was really young, he associated difficulty with failure. And I had never thought about it until I saw it in him. I saw he didn't want to ride a bike because he could run. And so he would never learn how to ride a bike because running was easy. And the difficulty of riding a bike was associated in his mind with the difficulty that he experienced being dyslexic because he saw other little kids. They could do very basic things like remember what the days of the week were, and he never could. So difficulty in his head was always associated

with failure. And I realized very early on in my life that difficulty was just something to be overcome. So I used Michael Jordan as the example. I said, do you know what makes Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player ever in the history of basketball? It wasn't that he was naturally talented. Sure, that was a huge part of it. But what made him great was that he figured out what he wasn't great at. And that's what he worked on. And he never gave up. And he wanted to be great at everything. And so that's sort of a guiding kind of example for me, is that you can't let the difficulty hold you back. Of course not. But I think probably the

most important thing of all, people will come to me and say, oh, my daughter wants to be a journalist, and my nephew nephew and my cousin. And can I introduce you? And my first question is to these young kids or to anyone, who are you? It's my first question. Because along the way in your career, you're going to be tested. Randy, you know this. You've come up with people in the business who you thought starting out were great. And then they faced a moment in their career and they chose the direction. And it doesn't even mean it was a, doesn't have to be a breast cancer moment or a Benghazi moment. It can be that moment where Dr. Judy Mikevitz,

the woman in the film, Plandemic, the banned film, don't speak about her. People will say you're crazy. I don't care. She said she had a moment in her lab where someone asked her to sign something because her boss wasn't around. And they said, no, no, don't worry. It's all good. You just have to sign. And she said, I can't do that. And she looked at the papers. It was one of those things that someone was trying to slide through. And those are the moments when you're tested where you have to know who you really are, because those characteristics, that certainty of knowing who you are, is going to guide you through the real tests that are to come. Let's talk about Afghanistan.

There's a couple more things I want to cover, and we could spend days talking about this. You and I talked about this right before we started the podcast. Can we get your view in a few minutes on whether we should have been there in the first place? Should we have stayed? How should we have handled the withdrawal? And what on earth should we do now? So I find it distressing that people look at Afghanistan today and say, should we have been there in the first place? Because what should we have done after 9-11 with close to 3,000 Americans dead? It's really testament to the success of information warfare operations that have been waged by political leaders in this country that we are at the point where we don't remember.

We remember more why we should leave Afghanistan than why we went in, which means we've really forgotten 9-11, haven't we? I mean, we've really forgotten it. Because if you remembered it, Randy, you remember it. One of my partners was the first one killed that day on a plane going into the World Trade Center. Okay. So I'm going to ask you, should we have gone into Afghanistan?

I think we should have gone in there to get the terrorists to kill 4,000 people in our country. I think we should have been there. That's it. There's your answer to the first question. I'm not going to play into their hands by evaluating and this and that. When we went into Afghanistan, nobody in America was in any doubt about why we were going there. However, when it comes to the question of should we have stayed in Afghanistan and what should we have done in Afghanistan, that is a

completely different question. And over the years, I have come to agree with those who say that we could have gone to Afghanistan and done what we did. We asked the Afghans to help us. We asked the Russians to help us. We couldn't do it without help. Don't be seduced or deceived by any of the false narratives out there that make it seem like the United States goes charging in. No, we went in there and we relied on other people. We relied on the Afghans. We asked our Afghan allies, who currently are in the Panjshir Valley and other places in Bahlan province in Afghanistan today, still fighting, by the way, still fighting after we've betrayed them and abandoned them. And we asked them to help us. And they said yes. And they were the ones that went and fought on

the ground. They took that territory and they held that territory. And they suffered many casualties. You can ask any American how many of them died in the fighting, they won't be able to tell you. You can ask them how many have died today, they won't be able to tell you. So when the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, stands up today and says to reporters, you can't buy willpower, you can't buy willpower, they have fought for the United States on our behalf and sometimes in place of us for more than 20 years. More than 70,000 Afghan policemen and soldiers have died fighting. Their families have died. That's not even in the count.

And they know that we didn't do it on our own. We had planes in the sky and a few hundred covert operators and Green Berets on the ground. They weren't the ones doing the actual frontline combat. And then there are two options. You could do what we did, where we stayed, or you could have said to the Afghans, look, here's your country back. We're going to support you. We're going to give you intelligence support and this and that. Tell us what you need. Oh, and by the way, if those guys come back, we're doing this again, and next time, we're really doing it. None of you are going to be left here. Whatever the message is, something along those lines. Basically, the message is,

you make sure they don't come back. We give you what you need, and you make sure, and it's yours. That, to me, would have been a better strategy because to put US soldiers on the ground, what they would call, what military soldiers and military analysts would call loitering on the objective. You've got an objective and you're just hanging out there. You're not actually fighting the war. Why? Because the real reason you have a problem in Afghanistan is right next door. It's Pakistan. Pakistan is in control of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and Haqqani and all those terrorist forces that have safe haven and refuge on Pakistani soil right there in the tribal areas. And they control everything the Taliban does.

And they always have. The Taliban's leadership, the Quetta Shura, Peshawar Shura, the Miriam Shah Shura, where are they? They're all in Pakistan. The acting president of Afghanistan today, Amrullah Saleh, who has been a solid U.S. ally for more than three decades, he said in the wake of this bombing at the airport, oh, U.S. could find one ISIS chicken. He said the word chicken to be derogatory, but the point was the U.S. can find one ISIS guy responsible for a the word chicken to be derogatory, but the point was the US can find one ISIS guy responsible for a bomb in a few hours, but in 20 years, you couldn't find the leadership of the Taliban in Quetta, Pakistan. Think about that. It says it all. We have the ability with

Pakistan to use diplomatic power, economic sanctions. You could shut down all the visas. You could shut down the remittances. You could, I mean, there's 400,000 things you could do. Don't let people tell you, oh, we have to be nice to Pakistan because they have nuclear weapons. How about you say, Pakistan isn't going to use their nuclear weapons because they know if they do, they're going to be obliterated by our nuclear weapons. So it's a stupid threat and we don't care.

And by the way, Pakistan already gave nuclear technology to North Korea. They already did that while they were our friends. So with friends like that, who needs enemies? Instead today, we are in a situation where we're meant to believe that the United States Armed Forces, the NSA, the crown jewel of intelligence collection for the world, with all their networks on the ground and in the sky and in the satellites, the digital signatures and so on and so on, that for the months leading up to this collapse in Afghanistan, they didn't see the foreign fighters amassing in Pakistan and going over the border. They didn't see the supply lines and the logistics. They

didn't pick up any of the calls and all of that. Anyway, you could literally go through 400 things that would show you how ridiculous it is, that we're pretending they didn't know and that we're pretending Pakistan didn't know. And honestly, Randy, I can tell you this. It makes no difference whether we stayed or didn't stay in Afghanistan, whether we spent 100 years there or 200. If we didn't deal with Pakistan, nothing else mattered. We had zero chance of success. Pakistan is the key to the success because that's where the Taliban fighters live. That's where they rest in the winter. That's where they're treated in hospital.

That's where they're trained. That's where they are recruited. That's where they're funded. That's where the leadership functions. That's where they were rebuilt after they were obliterated in 2001 by the Afghan forces on the ground and our planes in the sky. And really, you could put in the least corrupt government in the world in Afghanistan. And if your enemy is up across the border in Pakistan, infiltrating from Pakistan, it's not going to matter. Do you know that the head of JAEDO, which is a Joint Special Operations Task Force, it's a counter IED task force that was set up specifically to counter bombs and IEDs. The commander of JAEDO testified more than a decade ago that 80% of the fertilizer in the

bombs that go off in Kabul, just like the bomb that you've just seen, 80% of the fertilizer in those bombs was traced and comes from two factories in Pakistan. I will put money on it that the fertilizer in those bombs had a very good chance of coming from the same factories. We've had more than a decade to shut those factories down. Nothing was done. Pakistan's defense budget relies on the United States. We could have stopped that. Nothing was done. Pakistan's defense budget relies on the United States. We could have stopped that. Nothing was done. Since 1951, more than 70 years, billions of dollars of aid. And the Pakistani president said, when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, the Taliban has been freed from the shackles of slavery. So if the United

States are slave owners, then how come you don't mind taking their money? All those Americans that are out there working hard right now, their tax money is in part going not to fund their needs, but to fund the needs of people in Pakistan. And that government says that you're like slave owners. And so it really is important for people to understand that the choices you're being presented with, stay in Afghanistan or go, are false choices. There are many other choices that could have made a difference. We could still right now use a thermal UAV that is stealth, so nobody could see it or hear it that could go and destroy every single aircraft and helicopter that the Taliban now has. All that U.S. military equipment

that is in place, the Humvees, the armored vehicles, we have stealth capability that doesn't involve a single boot on the ground that could obliterate it all. Why are we not? When I look at that with my experience, what I understand is we have made a set of political decisions. They're not military decisions. They're driven by politics that have created a certain outcome. There's consequences that have followed. If it was really true that we were bungled it or that we were incompetent or that we failed or that we missed something, you would then logically say that, okay, then the decisions that were made were

flawed because we didn't know or we made a mistake. So then we're going to correct our behavior. Where's the correction? What have you corrected? You're still leaving on the Taliban's timeline and Al-Qaeda's timeline, the Islamic terrorists responsible for 9-11, the people that killed your friend, we are about to recognize them as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. That's what this administration is going to do. That's what this is really about. That's the only reason that the Taliban is doing any kind of charade and theater where they're pretending that they're not the same people they were. They're only going through the motions so that they get what they have been promised already. What should we do now?

We should stop Pakistan immediately, overnight, like that. You tell Pakistan, order your proxy army to stop. You have military options on the table. You should, without a doubt, destroy it. If you allow that technology to stay in the hands of the Taliban, you have to know that you are giving it to China and to Russia and to Iran and anyone they want to give it to, because it is not staying over the border. And it's being given, you can be pretty sure the Taliban is going to give it to whoever they want to get what they want. So right now what they want is countries to recognize them as a legitimate government. So to the Russians and to the North, the Uzbeks and others, where the Pakistani foreign minister has been going around trying to get support, they want everyone to recognize the Taliban's Islamic emirate as legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. And this is one thing I want to tell you.

There is a lot of symbolism in the Islamic terrorist world. The historic battles that are laid out in the Quran really matter and carry weight. And in the Quran, one of the most historic holy battles and time periods are the 12 days when Soleimani went to Jerusalem. And from August 31st to September 11th is 12 days. And I have spoken to people, a number of different people who firmly believe that we are racing hell for leather to get out of Afghanistan by the 31st deadline set by Islamic terrorists so that they can declare the greatest victory ever in their war on the 20th anniversary of September 11th, when they declare the Islamic Emirate. And the Emirate, for people to understand, the Emirate is the caliphate. It's just taken a different form. It's not the violent

form of the ISIS caliphate, but it is the caliphate. And when Osama bin Laden was killed, and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, became the leader of Al-Qaeda, he did something that was very unusual in a sense, because everyone was swearing bayat or allegiance to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. That's what we're used to hearing. And to Baghdadi when he was the head of ISIS. What did Ayman al-Zawahiri do? He swore allegiance and bayat to the Islamic Emirate of the Taliban. This strategy was planned a long time ago. The Obama administration is cited by an Al-Qaeda leader in Libya as being fully supportive and backing an Islamic Emirate in

Libya. They were urging other moderate Islamic parties in Libya to make a deal in the negotiations because they said, we'll never have this level of support from a US administration again. Well, they were wrong because some of those very same people, Susan Rice and Jake Sullivan and others, they came back into power with Biden. And guess what? They have more support today than they ever had. You are going to see not only is Hezbollah and Hamas and every terrorist enemy in the world celebrating, they're mocking America. The ethos of American power that sort of protected us, the thing that might have made people hesitate before targeting Americans abroad. That's gone. And Iran, China, and all these others, they are now busy frantically acquiring the advanced military technology and capability that is in their hands.

So what we can do is we should immediately, immediately Congress should pass laws that prohibit the sale of military equipment and technical equipment to the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9-11 who are in power in Kabul today. They should recognize the legitimate government of Afghanistan that we have already recognized. Amr al-Assala is there fighting under the constitution that we helped to write, that we helped to pay for. He is the acting president. Our allies, the special operations soldiers, they should correct the false narrative that they have helped to put out there that the Afghan armed forces evaporated and surrendered.

The Afghan armed forces knew they were abandoned. We took their air support and we took the maintenance contractors that kept the Afghan air force in the skies. They told the enemy exactly when they were withdrawing and where. They allowed them to stage their forces. They allowed them to stage foreign fighters. What did one Afghan say to me? They sold us for nothing.

They sold us for nothing. And so those people on the ground, they knew they were not looking just at the Taliban. They were looking at Pakistan and China and Iran and Qatar, and they were alone. And now you've got the Afghan Special Operations Commandos, a highly specialized, highly trained mobility force that is reliant on mobility. So even if they were Delta Force, when you're outgunned and out of ammunition and surrounded, you're going to die. And that's in part what happened. So we saw some surrenders and there were surrenders,

but we never hear about these thousands of soldiers who fought their way through the mountains, some of whom died along the way, who hid for days and made it into the Panjshir, and they're still fighting now. But most important of all, what the U.S. can do, stop Pakistan, recognize the Afghan president, and get humanitarian aid and whatever they need to them, because they are America's allies, and they are part of a band of brothers who have fought and died together for 20 years. And also, most importantly, get Americans, pay attention to the fact that you are about to put an Al-Qaeda government in power and legitimize it. And it will not be the last one. There'll be an Islamic Emirate in Libya. There already is. There already are people fighting

for that. It'll be in Yemen. It'll be in Nigeria. It'll be in Mali. It'll be all over. And it'll be growing and growing and growing. And some of the answers to this lie in the bin Laden documents that we have never been allowed to read. Call on the Biden administration, call on your congressional leaders, ask them why we can't read those documents. Bin Laden's strategy, al-Qaeda's strategy is laid out in there. We don't have to take everyone else's word for it. We can actually read what he wrote and see what he thought and what he was saying, because we've had two very different narratives coming out about those documents. They've taken away from us our ability to judge the truth, and we need to ask to have that back. But most importantly, we need to recognize that this is a moment. Afghanistan was always a war of ideas. It was about the idea of

freedom and the ability to live free in the world the way we want to live, and the idea of an Islamic civilization ruled by a narrow, extremist, distorted interpretation of Islam, which most Muslims don't believe in and share. Every day, more Muslims are killed by these terrorists than anybody else. They target and kill anyone who is not like them, pretty much the same as we see happening in the U.S., where they target and kill anyone who doesn't think like them and want to be like them. It's just that one is happening very violently, and the other one is happening without the bloodshed that we see. But they are on the same team now. These people are united in a deliberate campaign to destroy America's authority and moral authority on the world stage.

That's what's unfolding around you, and it's not going to stay or end in Afghanistan. It is right here. It's terrible to see what's happening, the images, how we've left. I pray for all the Americans and all the people from around the world who need to get out. I know you're working very hard to help them. We have a couple more minutes. Before we finish today, I want to go ahead and ask some more open-ended questions. This part of the podcast I call fill in the blank. Are you ready to play? I'm ready to play.

Two cents or less. When I started my career, I wish I had known. When I started my career, I wish I'd known what I know now. I wish I had known that they will take the least important thing and they'll use that to discredit all of your hard work. So you really need to understand why every detail matters. The biggest lesson I have learned in my life is... Love many, trust few, and always paddle your own canoe. Going forward, my professional goal is... Survival. That's it.

My biggest personal goal is... To be a better mother. My biggest regret is? We're in the fight of our lives right now, and people don't realize it. Matt, we are literally in a moment where we're about to lose everything. It's like this is the end game here. It's like we're sitting at the gates of Auschwitz and we don't know it. I do everything I possibly can day and night to report in a meaningful way what I know to be true and hope that it reaches enough people that we stop living in fear and we realize that what we're fighting for, just like I fought for my dignity when I was being raped long after it was gone, we're fighting for something that's already gone. If you don't believe in this or that, you will never be accepted.

There's no place for you in the world that we're going into. You're hoping no one will notice and that you will be okay. But they already know because you can't hide. That wasn't two sentences or less, was it? That's okay. If I were elected president of the United States, the first thing I would do is? I would never be elected president of anything.

Not a snowball's chance in hell. What would I do if I was president? The first thing you would do? Oh, without a doubt, I would stop what is happening in Afghanistan. And I would let all those Americans who are on the ground, who are trying desperately to help the Afghans, I would show the world that America is not weak. I would show the world that America is not dishonest, is not morally depraved and self-serving, that we don't leave anyone behind, that we keep our word, we don't break it. I would stand by the people that stood by us. I would show that

we the people mean something. We the people isn't a bumper sticker or a slogan. It actually is the heart and soul of the American people and the American way of life. I would fight to save this country from the moral obliteration that is taking place right now. The person I admire most in the world is? Nelson Mandela. If you want a famous person, I love Nelson Mandela. He was a great man. The one question you wish I had asked you is? What about the one

question I wish you hadn't asked me? There's a lot of those. I mean, Rome is burning. Rome is burning. I've got evacuation pings. Wait, let's 98 messages from one ops room, 13 from another, 18 from another. I mean, wow. And that's one app, okay? That is one app. I've got 198 messages while we were doing this one app. Before we sign off today, do you have any other advice for those listening or watching about how we can go about achieving our dreams?

My mother used to say, there's always someone waiting to mug you. And I have often, I've often drawn on that saying. I think the thing that I've lent on time and time again, that I wrote for my daughter the other day, is that old Irish prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. You've been a great friend for so many years. I'm so grateful for you sharing your story today. Randy, I'm just grateful that you're brave enough to have me on your show. Thank you. You're phenomenal. I love your outspokenness, and you're awesome. You've had a great career. You're a role model to many.