Julian Dorey Podcast - Israel's Plan, Iran FAILURE, Jared Kushner & Most Charismatic T*RRORIST | Joby Warrick • 467

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) HEXCLAD: Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at hexclad.com/JULIAN #hexcladpartner 2) TALKSPACE: Head to Talkspace.com and you’ll get $80 off of your first month with Talkspace when enter promo code SPACE80. JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Joby Warrick is a 2x Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and Middle East Expert. Since 1996, Joby has been at the Washington Post, where he currently serves as a National Security Reporter. His newest book is out NOW: The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super-Terrorist. JOBY'S LINKS - X: https://twitter.com/JobyWarrick - NEW "CARLOS THE JACKAL" BOOK: https://a.co/d/0fIq94lm FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY IG: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Joby Warrick Returns, "The Jackal" 10:37 - Iran's Leadership Is MORE Hardline Now 21:45 - Sanctions EMPOWER the IRGC 31:25 - China's Opening & Kushner's Conflicts of Interest 43:22 - Is Israel an Ally or a Burden? 54:44 - The Boy in Gaza Who Lost His Limbs 1:07:54 - The King of Jordan on Greater Israel 1:13:39 - A Terrorist Visiting the WHITE HOUSE 1:23:56 - Assad Falls, Captagon Fills the Gap 1:29:24 - Who Was Carlos the Jackal? 1:40:16 - Getting Carlos to Say YES 1:51:02 - Ninety Minutes With the Man Himself 2:00:28 - The Vienna Attack & His Wild Entrance 2:08:56 - Joby's Writing Regiment and the Physical Timer 2:21:32 - Openings, Cutting Chapters & the But/Therefore Rule 2:38:39 - Telling Vienna TWICE, and Joby's "Curse" 2:48:38 - The Criminal Narcissist Mind at Ease 2:59:55 - His Father Was PROUD, and the Swiss Benefactor 3:09:36 - Kicked Out, Then Terrorism for Hire 3:20:16 - 83 Deaths and ZERO Remorse 3:24:17 - Joby's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 467 - Joby Warrick Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joby Warwick, it is always great to have you back here, my friend. You're one of the OGs from literally in my parents' house back in episode 134. Back in the day, and I couldn't look forward to it more. It's always great to be back here. So thank you for having me. Well, thank you for always doing it. And we obviously got you at a time. I've had to keep my mouth shut about this for two and a half years.

But the book is now coming out, The Jackal. We'll be talking about that today. Obviously, I'm excited to read this. I know exactly who the person you're writing on is, though, and the access you got. And that's, I just want to hear all about that today. But, you know, you've also been down basically as far as I know, hunkered in writing this, especially over the last couple years, where you've also been the guy that's been for 30, 35 years covering a lot of national security around the world

and being on the scenes in so many of these places. We've done a lot of past episodes where you were literally returning from places in the Middle East and having covered it on the ground. So while I know you haven't been as directly like, on the ground with sources, so to speak, over the last couple years, there's no doubt that you've been watching what's going on. And there are some things that you've called. And I do have to say, before we get into it, I've always appreciated just how balanced you are, how calm and just almost like lecture education about it you are, rather than injecting always like a bunch of

opinions into it, because these are hard topics. Obviously, the Middle East where you spent a lot of time Yeah. It's pretty crazy, but I knew you before I knew John Kiriaku, and then when I got to know him, he was a huge fan of your work as well, which I think was pretty cool. But, you know, it's amazing how you've had sources in Arab intelligence, U.S. intelligence, Israeli intelligence, European intelligence over the years and have been able to cover all of it. So actually, before I even asked you about the Iran War, have you ever thought about, like, how wild the last 30 years your life has been? I you know it's so funny because so much of it everything is is they can in a way accidental you can have the best plan and then Life throws things at you and I was an investigative reporter working on national security well not national security subjects But health and environmental subjects nuclear safety and all kinds of Food safety and then 9-11 happened and it completely changed my world and pretty much everybody around me at the time Everybody has to be covering this profound event that happened

to America and we all had a piece of that. And I got into the subjects and I felt like I was pretty good at trying to explain. And that's for journalists, it's not just the reporting, but sometimes can you help people understand what's going on in a way that really makes sense? And then can you develop the sources, people who really know what's going on who can get deeply into the subjects and interpret. And it was the most fascinating subject I've ever, you know, covered. And before I know it, I'm covering the CIA.

I got a, and I'm a diplomatic reporter and roaming around the Middle East and then books come out of it. And it was transformative. And I must say, it all kind of started 9-11 for me. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. Yeah, there's so many people I talk to from all different realms of lines of work around the world who, you know, I'm thinking especially journalists and military,

who were all in different places, doing different things. sometimes within those two sectors at that time. And that's always like the crux. That's the turning point day where like their career was doing this and then it did that. So it's always wild to hear that. The day the world changed. Now, you were here back in, I believe, episode 261 with me. That was the last time.

So that would have been December 2024. I think Syria had just fallen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were all just in total astonishment by that. Yeah.

Yeah. Now we can talk about that today too. and where that's all at. But one of the things we did talk about in there, and we talked about it before, was Iran. And that whole, like, it always just kind of felt like a brewing kettle, like something was going to happen. And lo and behold, about six months after you were here, seven months after you were here, there was the first operation, Midnight Hammer, 12-day War, and then you get to, obviously, the war going on this year. So first question, did you see this coming with the idea that we could be talking about boots on the ground there? I did not, because one

reason I didn't is because I've been, you know, deep in this world for long enough that I understood the reluctance of American military officials particularly, but also intelligence. So the idea of trying to become militarily involved in regime change in Iran was so fraught, it's so complicated, so many things could go wrong. It's, it's, it's, it was just not a good idea to go there. And so it's only really just in this, the current Trump administration where there was, it seems to be a consensus was formed that, well, we're just going to do the drastic. We're going to eliminate the regime through military force, and we're going to sort of decapitate the state. And everything's going to be great in the Middle East for the first time. All the terrorism will stop. And it's almost

like George W. Bush-like in the sense that we're going to invade Iraq, and everything's going to be wonderful after that. We're going to transform the world because of this bold action. And, you know, people who've been following this for a long time just could see, you know, this sort of negative things in advance, and there's certainly been a lot. It would have been great if they pulled it off that they managed to kind of put a democracy in Tehran. But the chances that that was going to happen, given the players there, given how deeply entrenched they are and how committed they are to governing the place, it just is not going to end well. And I, it's hard to predict where things will go, but I just, I feel like we're in a mess for a long time. This is not going to be easily resolved.

When you say a mess for a long time, are you more leaning towards we're going to have to feel like we're still forced to be there and involved in the war for a long time? Or because we've already done so much damage, it may wind down here at some point, but that damage is going to take years to be undone. Yeah, I think there's some of both, but I do feel like, I feel like we've, I feel like we've, we, you know, I think the administration has decided that it can't put boots on the ground. It's just politically untenable. And so the options that you're left with are pretty bad, but basically what you put in place is a, you know, a terrible stalemate that we just have to live with and that creates its own instability, which creates higher prices, but also destabilizes regional governments. It's a pathway to terrorism, and we can talk about that. Some, the Iranians are really good

it's sort of seeding terrorist attacks, helping groups get in place and do bad things. So I just feel like we're still at an early stage of this. And as you kind of try to look down the horizon, there's opportunity for things to get worse instead of better. And in my view, it's more likely to head in that direction. Yeah. Now, I mean, you've seen so many places in the Middle East over the years where to some extent or to a strong extent.

We tried to do the whole, we're going to bring democracy here and spread it. And then you realize a lot of them are collegi cultures, and yeah, you'd love to see free governments and stuff, and you certainly would not like to see oppression of people from their governments. But I kind of don't see a lot of data that we're very good at spread in democracy.

Am I a little fucked up there? No, like Zibid A, Afghanistan. I mean, that was not only we were going to get rid of al-Qaeda, which is the reason we went in, but we were going to change the government. government there, we're going to create a society that women could thrive in, all very good ambitions. And where are we now? We've got Taliban in control. Things are just as bad, if not worse than ever. Sanctuaries exist there for some pretty bad groups. So that's A, but you can kind of almost go down the

list. Iraq is an interesting example now because the government that exists there now is a little bit more, you know, not quite as oppressive as some of the ones that existed, you know, 10, 15 years ago. But it's still, you know, it hasn't been a success by any stretch imagination. Instead, what it's been is kind of a nightmare of a drain on our government, on our military, the sort of the price of, you know, long-term health care for veterans just just going to continue to build for decades to come. It's hard if you kind of could roll back the tape and say, should we do this or not, I can't think of a single argument that says, yeah, let's plunge in and do this because it never, ever works out like you think it's going to.

So what made them think this time was going to be the charm? You know, I honestly do think that this was a case of Netanyahu whispering in Trump's here. And I don't think there's anything particularly controversial about saying that because he, you know, Trump had his own, you know, ideas about. how he was going to bring the Iranians around, and it didn't work out. I mean, there was a nuclear deal in 2015 that kind of bottled up Iran's nuclear program. It had its flaws and weaknesses, and it was going to, you know, so the terms were going to expire relatively soon, so there were flaws. But it did kind of keep things quiet on the nuclear front for a while. And Trump's idea

when he came in the first time was, well, we're going to scrap that, and, you know, that was a terrible idea, so we're just going to get rid of it. And the outcome was it just things on the nuclear case just got much, much worse, and Iran became much closer to building a nuclear bomb. But I think in this particular case, so the more hawkish side of the Israeli government has always believed that what needed to happen was some really aggressive U.S. Israeli operation, some military strike that was going to eliminate this Iran problem once and for all, the nuclear file, the terrorism part of it, get rid of the bad government, the IRGC, and all the other bad actors. you know, let's just do it quickly, pull the band-aid, and everything's going to be great after that.

And I think Trump was literally just talked into it. He thought it sounded great to him. He could come out of it looking like a hero. And who would have thought that you could actually kill the Supreme Leader, wipe out most of his senior staff. And Iran just keeps going. And if anything, the leadership now is more entrenched and more hard line than the one that existed before. So, and actually, this is the idea of an Iranian bomb, even though they've lost a lot of capability, the new guys are sort of warmed up to the idea, much more than, say, the last Ayatollah was, who always, I was a bit afraid of kind of stepping, crossing that line and becoming a nuclear state. These new guys, if they could get a nuclear weapon, they would, I'm pretty sure of it.

Unfortunately, though, we've, as you're kind of laying out, we've given them an impetus to want to do it. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like this has been such a frustrating thing for me too because I've said for years on the show with different guests, I'd love to see the Iranian people overthrow their regime. I never knew what the real numbers were in there, like how many people in the country actually support it versus not, but I always knew like it's fair to say a majority of people don't support it and they do some awful things to their people. The problem is, you can't just go invading everyone you don't like. Yeah. I mean, are we going to invade China tomorrow because they've been killing the Uighurs for, you know, God knows how long. No.

Yeah. It's because we wanted to, it is the legacy play, like you said, with Trump and he's thinking he could be the guy to end of it, the end of it. But it's like, there's this country, we've economically shut off from the world and we can go in there and kind of swing our dick and something good will happen. But it's still, even if it doesn't have China's GDP, yeah. You've got a population in 93 million people, give or take. You got a geographic situation that's insane. You are fighting the geography before you either. even fight their army. And now, I don't, again, I don't know what the numbers are, but you do very much have some sort of rally around the flag thing going on. Yeah. Especially when there's

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OnStar Tech today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops. Yeah. Part of the tragedy, just from a human standpoint, is there were people in Iran who were pretty excited when this military action kicked off. Because they thought this is going to be the moment. We're going to kick out this repressive regime, and we're going to be able to make a better life for ourselves.

Now these are kind of the most embittered people on Earth who just feel like America has betrayed them and that they've been left with something worse. The repression has gotten much, much worse. you know, the killing of demonstrators in the streets. It's, you know, they, you know, I, I know, I know, I know Iranians and a lot of people who are in exile, and I just personally witnessed their excitement as much as maybe some of them like Trump or didn't like Trump. They really were happy that something finally was happening. And now they're completely embittered and depressed. And, yeah, that's like, thanks America, you guys did this to us.

Yeah, and you have to, that's the thing. people that are directly involved with the situation i'll always empathize with that these are people who have had their family kicked out the country or they were kicked out the country themselves or people killed in their friends and family for sure so i understand that part of the calculation needs to be removing the emotion from the table though and looking at the logic of how feasible something is and to quote omar little you come at the king you best not miss yeah we missed yeah like you better be able to take that out very quickly. Instead, now you do have an embittered populace around the world who maybe wanted to see this happen because it didn't work. Yeah. And you mentioned

creating incentives for becoming a nuclear state. If you're the IRGC and you're trying to think of the best way to stay in power, you've got two cards to play now. One is the Strait of Hormuz. That's clearly become a key leverage for them and they're going to milk that as much as they can. But if you ever wanted, you know, thought about having a nuclear bomb, now you're thinking, gosh, this could be our protection against future attacks by Israel, United States. I mean, it's the way that the North Koreans approached nuclear weapons because they didn't, you know, very paranoid regime. All the Kems believe that there was a military strike by the United States or South Koreans was inevitable. The one way to stop that was from happening was to make their own bomb. And they did that.

They did that despite its enormous pressure in terms of. sanction. I mean, this is the most sanctioned regime in the world, maybe next to Iran. And, you know, all kinds of controls on exports, all the things that they needed to build nuclear weapons or enrichment plans were banned for them. And they built it anyway. And they've got an arsenal estimates between, you know, 30 and 60 bombs. And they're making more nuclear material all the time. And that for them is, this is key to our survival. And you can see the same calculation happening with the Iranians now. And you know what's so sad. Kim Jong-un looks really vindicated right now for his choice.

This is objectively awful guy. Yeah. Like I've had a North Korean in here talking about the experience there and everything. Like it is awful what they do in that country. But, you know, leaders only care about themselves in general, totalitarians especially, and they're going to do what they have to do to survive. So if you keep pushing them, you'll make things worse. You know, I just don't, I look at this.

like all the war games that must have been played out, how could they not have told them six ways to Sunday they're gonna close the Strait of Hormuz? Or at least caused massive problems there. Was there ever, was anything about that a surprise to you that they did that? You know, I don't consider myself the smartest guy in the room, but it's the first thing I thought of.

I mean, it was the first thing people would talk about. Well, if you push the Iranians too hard, they're just gonna shut off the Strait of Musa, and then they got the world by the balls, essentially. Because what I think people, people are slow to realize is that petroleum is an internationally traded commodity, just because we have a lot of it here. So the price of oil is dictated by supply and demand around the world. And so if you restrict that supply, prices are going to shoot up. Lots of countries are much more

dependent on foreign oil than we are, are really going to suffer. You're going to create a mess. And everybody would look at that sedario and say, well, we shouldn't go there. I mean, everybody knows we shouldn't do that. And I really think that the Israelis convinced Trump that it wasn't going to happen because they were just going to eliminate the regime, you know, forget about the Strait of Hermes problem because we'll take care of the politics. And that just didn't happen. In fact, it was the opposite. And now we're kind of in a deeper jam than we were before. Yeah. And like I, you know, you always have to be critical of your own country as well when they when they make mistakes and there's certainly blame to go around here.

Obviously, I'm looking at Israel and the United States. Like, what the fuck are we doing here? But on our end, I don't know. Like, I understand the world's a really complicated place and, you know, shit happens. And some of it is obviously far above my pay grade. But when you see Scott percent go to Davos, optics are already bad with that, just starting that statement. But you see him go to Davos in January and laugh. to people about these new sanctions he's going to put on Iran that would effectively take

there as he was putting it take their currency to zero which he then was bragging would force people to go into the streets and he further bragged that because people would be forced to go into the streets I'm not even getting to the fact that there were massad people within those people that went into the streets but that's neither here nor there when they'd go into the streets the totalitarian regime would then be forced to put down the uprising and kill people which would create maybe room for revolution or grounds for an invasion. I don't think he used those words, but we all see where it was headed right there. And so to me, I look at that and I go, if I see one of the fentheads outside, like

tweaking out down the street and I go and grab a weapon and load it with a bunch of bullets and walk outside and hand it to him and walk back inside, if he then goes and shoots a bunch of people, obviously like, yeah, he's at fault, but I feel like I'm at fault there too, right? Yeah, I kind of empowered this. Am I crazy? Yeah, same situation, absolutely. And I remember that moment too at Davos. You could almost see the eye-rolling in the room

among the security officials who were there from Europe in particular. Everybody understood that those are very, very simplistic predictions. We have to remember, this is a regime has been under sanctioned since 1979, so longer than most of our listeners have been around. And they've learned to survive. They learned to live with them.

There was a moment in the 2010s when the Europeans and the Chinese and everybody kind of coalesced on a set of sanctions. It was truly international that forced the Iranians to come to the table on the nuclear file. And that worked for a while. But when the nuclear deal was thrown out, you know, Iran gets the idea, we just can't trust anything the Americans say. So we're going to go back to our original MO. which is, you know, screw you, we can deal with sanctions.

We can withstand that. We can be self-sufficient. The North Koreans used to say, they used to tell their people, we will eat grass. You know, we will do, we will live like animals before we'll bow down to you. It's their ability to resist, at least in terms of people in power, an enormous amount of economic pressure. They can hold out a lot longer than we can.

That's wild, too, because then it's the people that pay for it. Yeah, it's absolutely the case. and the lower classes in Iran really suffer. Of course. There's an extraordinarily wealthy middle class, an upper middle class, in Iran who managed to do quite well normally. They're feeling it now, too. But the people at the very bottom are just getting killed.

Yeah, what is it? That's another thing that there's a lot of, I think, misunderstanding with just so that you can understand not to trivialize it, but the chess pieces on the board here and everything that's going on. Iran's got a, this is not like a population, it's like 100% Persian or, you know, following Shia law. Like, obviously, they have multiple sections.

So like, if you were educating someone who knew very little about the actual people that comprised the 93 million there, how would you break up the population? Yeah. So there's some really big divisions ethnically, as you mentioned. So you got the Azeris, kind of related to the Azerbaijadis, up in the north. There's balukes on the... the border with Afghanistan, people who have traditionally, historically had a lot of animosity toward the regime in Tehran, even in the Shah times. There are Sunnis there. It's a minority

population, but they exist, and they've had problems with repression over the years. So it's a very diverse society. One thing that they do have, which is maybe not quite as recognized as widely as it should be, this is a very educated population. And even though women are forced to, you know, wear scarves and headdresses, women are educated. They have. have professional jobs. It's not like Afghanistan where you're forced to live in your house and have kids and that's it. And so there's a lot of variety of opinion. There is a lot of support among the wider population for the United States in terms of our culture and our society. We're hated in a lot of the Arab world. The Iranians actually like us, at least they did until

recently. And so it was like one of a higher, you know, popularity or, you know, favorability ratings of the United States in the world was among the Iranians toward the United States. That has eroded quite a bit, as you can imagine. They have lots of reasons to feel betrayed by us now. But, yeah, that diversity is there. And that yearning for something better, you know, they've been under a revolutionary regime now since, you know, like again, for longer than most of us have been around.

And it's tiresome because it's oppressive. It's restrictive. And people just want to be able to live their own lives and freedom without worrying that if they're, you know, show two inches of hair around their face. If you're a female, you're going to get beaten by somebody. So they'd want to get rid of that. But the, you know, the way that we've gone about it in the last few months is not help them as it moved them an inch closer to what they wanted. Yeah.

And also, you know, taken out like the symbolic leader who at least some percentage of the population supports, then martyrizes him. Yeah, absolutely. In a way, too, to where people that maybe hated them before that at least are like, well, died for our country. Like a few people might actually say that psychologically. Yeah, and that's a good point because he's not, even the government is diverse in Iran, or at least it had been. So you've got your Ayatollah who is kind of like a figurehead.

He doesn't have, he has power, but he doesn't have ultimate power because there's sort of the council of religious leaders. There's the IRGC, which has his own power base. There's elected representatives. Actually do have fairly liberal elected. elections or vote, you know, elections so people have a chance to vote for, you know, for a, you know, prime minister. And so you have all these different competing power centers. That's all been consolidated now because really there's one power center and that's the IRGC, the Revolutionary

Guard or Public Revolutionary Guard, excuse me. And they have been whittled down because of airstrikes, but the ones that are left standing are the most intransigent, most hardline, you know, of that pretty hardline group. Now, obviously, they've been under a lot of economic sanctions as you laid out for a long time now. They do sit on a lot of oil, so they're still able to trade that. Obviously, there's deals with Russia.

But what are the ways were they sustaining their economy? You said they had at least somewhat of a burgeoning, upper middle class that existed there. Like, what other businesses were there? Because I don't want my head to just go to, like, what we always talk about was Syria, where it just turned into black markets everywhere. But, you know, is that an aspect of it too?

That is a big aspect of it. Because IRGC, which is, again, this kind of paramilitary force, basically turned sanctions into an economic opportunity. So by figuring out pipelines to get things that Iranians want into the country through smuggling, through all kinds of illegal systems, they kind of rake money off the top of that. So they essentially have been empowered by sanctions, that it made them stronger than ever.

And that happens a lot of times when sanctions are concerned. And they also have been very creative and ingenious with ways to sell their biggest asset, which is oil. And so you could argue that, you know, a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz hurts them as well. Well, they've got all these clever tricks. You can take a tanker full of Iranian oil. You meet another tanker that has a neutral flag, and you transfer oil from one vessel to the other. It happens all the time. Both ships turn off their transponders, so they're not tracked, so they're kind of traveling in the dark.

So they're very, very good at smuggling. Their chief partner for smuggling is typically the Iraqis, because the Iraqis have oil, and they have tankers, and they sell it. So all you need to do is meet up on the Iraqi tanker and transfer Iranian oil to an Iraqi tanker, and nobody knows a difference. They've been able to figure out how to make really small-scale refineries, so you don't need massive refineries.

You need these, they call them teapot refineries. The Chinese make them. They're very small. It's kind of like, you know, you can have a refinery that's like the size of a house. It's not a big, ambitious thing, but if you have enough of those, you can create a lot of refined petroleum products. And then you sell those. Enough oil gets out through various means, particularly to the Chinese, who don't care at all about our war and wish it wasn't happening. They're very happy to buy Iranian oil at a deep discount. And so as long as there's, that market

exists, somebody's going to find a way to get the oil out of the country to where the Chinese can get it. And there are various options for doing that. So they've been very important. So they've never, they're hurting. There's no question about it. Their economy's in trouble. It's not collapsing and they've been very good historically at finding workarounds and finding ways to survive despite the economic pressure. So there's only so much we can do really to kind of force them to change their ways. Yeah, also the Chinese relationships always been a little odd to me because you even said it a few minutes ago that China was among the countries that supported economic sanctions in the 2010s at one point on Iran and their allies yet China was the

one that came out pretty early on through one of their foreign ministers I think I forget the guy's name but to call on Iran to stop bombing because they were returned as the other thing it's like it got so ass backwards I was like you know they're returning bombs I'm like what do you want them to do they're getting bombed you know what I mean like I don't want to defend them but it's kind of crazy so China was calling on them to stop bombing. What is the nature of that relationship? Because they have the trade relationship and China like cozies up with them, but it feels like it's almost like, I don't know,

a relationship of convenient propaganda for them. Yeah, exactly. Because they aren't particularly close to the Iranians. They don't care about the Iranians. They do like their oil and they do like getting it cheap because it's good for their economy. But what they really like is being able to use Iran to kind of screw with us. Yeah. Because we're their biggest rival in the world.

even though they don't want a conflict in the Middle East because that's bad for everybody, they've managed to insulate themselves from it. They've accumulated a lot of surplus oil, reserve oil, before the war began, so they haven't really been affected that much. And in the meantime, they're happy when the United States has to squirm. And they're happy particularly when we go on one of our big regime change operations, and they can sit back and just watch us get ourselves into a tighter and tighter news and just say to the rest of the world,

hey, do you want to have a stable partner or somebody who's reliable and doesn't run off and do rash things? Come to us, do business with us. So now it's interesting, if you look at, again, favorability polls suggest that there's been this shift

from people thinking of the Americans or this kind of bright, shining city on a hill to thinking more that, you know, the Chinese have a pretty good thing to offer. They have, we, even the Europeans are saying, you know, we don't like competing with you

on a lot of levels, but you're at least a predictable, reliable partner. And that's, you know, with the sanctions regimes and everything else is happening over here, it's harder to say that if you're, you know, random country around the world. So it's really helped the Chinese a lot that we've found ourselves in this situation. Yeah, it doesn't help that at home. We've had a massive wealth gap form as well. And an increasingly cringier elite class be exposed on some things because it creates enormous kind of already teed up for you on on their propaganda opportunities to be able to say well this

could be better over here yeah you know i don't i don't like any hard end of a spectrum at all and i got a serious problem with things we're doing here but i agree with you they've opened up the floodgates to a place like china being like hey listen yeah we're not bombing people in fact we come in and loan money forget that they're loan sharking people they'll just you know they'll dress it up how they got to dress it up and the world will start to be like well maybe maybe they're on to something yeah that's concerning And if you let us in, we'll build you a new airport. Or we'll build you a support facilities.

And so there's always some freebies that come with it if you're China. And that's interesting. One thing is we've stopped doing the way we used to is foreign aid. And that's always kind of an issue that a lot of Americans look at it. Why do we spend money helping other countries? We need the money here at home. But sometimes a little investment creates a lot of goodwill. And if you want to see a practical example of how that works

and why a country that doesn't have our democratic values believes in foreign aid look at China because they've created alliances around the world and particularly in Africa, but also some in South America and places they can go to now and have favorable relationships because they come in, they give things. They give hospitals, they give medical aid.

I watched during COVID with just astonishment. All the countries that received, you know, Chinese, like legions of Chinese doctors would come with tents and medical aid. facilities and be kind of first-line responders to some of these countries that really struggling with COVID back in the day. And they got a ton of goodwill for it. And I went to Belgrade to Serbia in a reporting trip a couple years ago, right after COVID. And they were like ads and newspapers, thanking the Chinese billboards, you know, with what the Chinese, with Xi, that the Chinese leaders

picture on it, because they're completely grateful to the Chinese for helping them out of a jam. And that's just really smart for our policy from the Chinese point. And that's also a practical way that you're laying out of the Chinese doing it. Like we saw what got exposed with USA. They started funding like trans surgeries in fucking Puerto Rico. And they were basically like the, okay, you want to set up something to where you can have goodwill and spread democracy around the world. Cool.

They were using it as a like on our end. There were people that got in there kind of like cockroaches and used it as a back end like mercenary as a back end system to funnel money from C's. CIA towards fucking insane causes. And then taxpayers started to see what this was. And they're like, well, shut that down. Talkspace is the number one rated online therapy. Bringing you professional support from licensed therapists and psychiatrists that you can access anytime, anywhere. Talkspace is here to help you take control of your mental health. The world may feel uncertain and out of control at times, but one thing you do have in your control is taking care of your mental health. Talk space makes it easy to start. Just like your physical body needs exercise, your mental health needs maintenance and attention.

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I've talked a lot in the past about how therapy has helped me out during really difficult times in my life. And I'm sure, like many of you, I've also had a lot of friends who dealt with some serious issues and were lucky enough to have therapists there to help them out. It's great to have a resource like TalkSpace that can connect you with someone who can help. As a listener of my podcast, you're going to be able to get $80 off your first month of TalkSpace. When you go to Talkspace.com, that link is in my description below, and use promo code Space 80. That's S-P-A-C-E-80. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com, link by my description below, and enter promo code Space 80. I agree with you that like if you're going to do foreign diplomacy and there's a way to be able to help other places that are in need, do it.

Feed them. Yeah. You know, give them medical supplies for things that matter and stuff like that. Mosquito deaths for malaria. How you do it matters. Yeah. And we, something has gone really rotten to where we don't, we've just let bad people run those things. And I understand why so many people are like, yeah, fuck that.

Yeah. especially when we have so many problems at home that we don't take care of. And yet here we are doing more wars, debt officially crossed 40 trillion the other day. I don't even know what that means. Yeah, that's an insane number. It's almost like Medicaid bandits, doctors who exploit Medicaid, and they can prescribe all kinds of remedies that people don't need and surgeries and things like that just because they can rake in profit.

And people have exploited aid, foreign aid the same way. But the sort of the core mission, which is supposed to be, you know, helping poor people, you know, and legit who have legitimate needs, but also kind of building goodwill. This is much more effective than spending money on military if you've got a close ally because they depend on you or they see you as a good partner and good faith. That's right. So that's the part that I feel that's, you really lost something when that goes away. Yeah. Now have you, you know, have you had a chance to talk to some of your people who are wired in somewhat close to that? Iranian situation over the past few months. I know you've been heads down finishing this,

but have you had some conversations? Yeah, somewhat. Yeah, people in the region who are, particularly some of the neighbors, and they're the ones who are kind of caught in the crossfire on this because they've actually had incoming. They've had to, you know, sometimes cases, some cases arraining missiles coming into their aerospace and sometimes debris from interceptors too come falling down and, you know, causing damage. So they've, it's been such a nightmare for those countries because they got initially excited by the idea that Iran, the regime might fall. And what they've been left with instead is a much more unstable region. You know, the typical sources of income like tourism drying up because people don't want to go to, you don't want to go to Abu Dhabi if there's missiles falling on the airport.

So it's been, that's been the most. sort of the most alarmed voices that I hear are people who are there sort of experiencing the collateral damage from this fight. And it's pretty intense on the front line. What about like the UAE in places like that that have a lot of Western money involved? Obviously, they've put a lot of money into the West as well. Now they're just getting bases blown up there. Yeah. You always think of those Gulf countries, the UAE and the Saudis and some of the other scutteries as being just having unbelievable wealth because they clearly have pretty wealthy from their from their oil and gas. But some of them are really having some

cash problems. They're, you know, some of the, sort of the typical just subsistence programs in these countries are not being funded in the way they should be. And more than that, they're just, they're just pissed. They're just really mad at the U.S. for starting this and not being able to produce an outcome that's good for them. So our relationship with UAE and others, I mean, they don't want to cozy up necessarily to Russia or to Iran, certainly, but there's a lot of strain. And you get these folks gone in a private conversation,

and they really vent because they've been hurt by this, and they just feel like we've kind of knuckle-headed our way into some really bad situations for them. And what the hell is going on with Saudi, too? The reason I ask is because you and I have talked a lot before about the whole, I think over all our episodes about the proxy war over the years between Saudi and the Iranians. A lot of it happened in Yemen and all that. But like then there was a period of, I don't want to call it like peace, but a period of they were moving away from each other and had come to an understanding. And yet we got reports early on in this war that Muhammad bin Salman was calling up Trump and telling him to keep hitting. them over and over. So what is it here? Yeah. I think you hear those messages particularly in the beginning that kind of just step on the gas, you know, this, this is going to be terrible until it's over, but please just finish the job no matter what you have to

do. And then you see that the Saudis begin to take a more practical stance because they have to live next door to the Iranians. And so then they kind of reach out and they try to broker an agreement or, you know, open trade. The UAE has been kind of the same way. They've just in the recent days, suspended trade with Iranians because of some, they got hit by some missiles and they were upset about that. But we'll see that go back. They'll still, they have to trade with the Iranians. They're neighbors. They're deeply invested in the Iranian economy. And so I think that's part of the problem is because even though they dislike the regime, they're distrustful of it, they're worried about sort of the revolution being exported,

like she, the population in their country is rising up in some way. But at the same time, they're businessmen. They want to do business. They want to have relationships that help them and create wealth. And so it's always kind of this very complicated, say something publicly and do something else behind the scenes. And that's just the reality of the relationships there. Yeah, it's bizarre to me too,

because there's a lot of evidence to suggest that Muhammad bin Salman, I don't want to say still exist. That's a strong way to put it. but is able to wield the international power that he still does because of Donald Trump. And specifically, I'm thinking of the famous quote where Trump was like, I saved his ass related to the Jamal Khashoggi thing. Yeah. You know, so when I hear him like trying to lobby the president's stuff, it makes me think like, what? You know, this is the one guy.

You should be like, if he calls you, maybe take his fucking call. You know what I mean? Like it's not, it felt the other way around. I don't know if I'm reading into that too much, though. Yeah. These, what I do know about those relationships, it's, it's, they're dealing with, the Saudis are dealing with us and our administration on many different levels. And you have these sort of unofficial emissaries to the region like Kushner and, um,

Whitkoff and others who are, you know, they, they're, they are creating opportunities for themselves, through these relationships, you know, mutually. Jared Kushner has obviously gotten a ton of money from the Saudis in particular. 2.1. Yeah, very, very cozy relationships, and that seems to exist almost independent of what American policy is.

And that's kind of unfortunate when you have people trying to game a foreign relationship for personal reasons or personal gain instead of, you know, what's best for the U.S. Absolutely. And that's why I don't understand. Why do we have two unelected guys, including one that's like the president's son-in-law,

negotiating on our behalf? Yeah, no conflict there, you know. Like, I don't get, they announced, Jared and Ivanka announced at the end of Trump's first administration that they were stepping away from politics, didn't want to be involved. Then they go get $2.1 billion from the Saudis and start making other deals around the world and stuff like that. Then dad gets back in four years later and suddenly he's just a volunteer in these situations. And then they fail miserable.

They're negotiators that were sent to negotiate not getting into a war. Then we got into a war. That's already a failure. Then they keep negotiating. It keeps failing. Like, why are we still running with this? Yeah, it's incredible. And it's, you know, people knock the bureaucracy, and there's certainly lots of things

about a bureaucracy that doesn't work. It's inefficient. But there is kind of a process for diplomacy and kind of protocols and ways things are handled and professionals, people who spend their entire careers in the region, developing relationships and sort of understanding the rules. And then you just, like, people who have no experience kind of parachuting in, and you expect them to solve this problem, and they have barely any kind of understanding of the history and the cultures.

And it's just not going to, it's not going to work. You'd have to be extraordinarily lucky for it to work, but it's not just a matter of will showing up. You really just have to, you have to approach it with sophisticated. I feel that's missing. It felt like for four years with the Biden administration, we had a bunch of people in charge who would leave the water running and leave the house for a week. And with this administration, we have a bunch of people in charge who basically break the pipes

and let the water blow out. Like they're both horrible. Oh, I'm going to write that down. That's pretty good. Yeah. But like, that's what it feels like. Yeah. There's your choice, ladies and gentlemen.

Right? Like to me, all corruption is bad. it's just, it's like different flavors of it. Yeah, and you can't make a partisan thing out of it because both sides can screw it up pretty badly for different reasons. But, you know, we just have a history of kind of wrecking situations around the world

just because we just blunder into things and we sometimes have this grand vision of what we can accomplish and we just always overshoot or just underprepure. Yep. Now, I remember you and I were in here in March 2024, the second time, we recorded for episode 198 and I we had a really interesting conversation in the third hour there

where this was about whatever five months after October 7th and we were talking about how there there were some issues with that relationship with Israel obviously this is something you've literally seen up close for a long time have a lot of thoughts on the matter but you could see that the sentiment in America was really in a way unprecedented even at that time moving away from supporting them taking actions all over the place and killing people and obviously what was going on in Gaza. I think it has gotten markedly worse since then, not just the sentiment, but the actions too. We had in the span of one day the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of State, and then I'll say implicitly the President of the United States all separately admit that we got

into the war because Israel was going to go bomb them. So we were pulled into the war by them then they came out trump didn't come out and deny it but the other two had said it explicitly so they come out and deny it even though we can run the tape yeah but then the white house releases the official whatever it is memorandum i don't know what it was called on the operation epic fury and says this explicitly in the text we've put it on the show before a million times but people can go find it out there i won't have d'if pulled it up again where they're like yeah we went in because our ally israel was going to bomb them so we had to we had to we had to to go protect them. And you see this, you see the funding that goes through APAC and other organizations

that funnel money and buy politicians and then the politicians they don't like, they vote out. And all the while, they're now continuing to push us to put boots on the ground while saying openly, their leadership going, yeah, we're not going to join you while they're ethnically cleansing Lebanon, while the Gaza ceasefire ain't too much of a ceasefire and they openly have people from our country, like Jared Kushner talking about saying, you know, we're going to remodel the whole place. Yeah. I'm a little bit exhausted. And I don't, at this point, it is impossible for me to not see that there is some sort of not very holy alliance that seems to go on between our government and Israel. Why, at this point, even with all the sentiment where it is, is that still the case?

It's puzzling to me, and it's if you care about the existence of an Israeli democracy in the Middle East, and I always feel like that's an important objective, there should be, they've been traditionally a good ally in the past. You support the right of the Israelis to have a representative democracy and a healthy economy. But so much damage has been done to Israel internationally because of this conflict. And we've enabled it in a way because we've been kind of lockstep with them and what has been a very aggressive plan to reshape the Middle East that just wasn't realistic. So it's the American population that's kind of soured on the idea of supporting Israel. And you can see it in all the polls.

It's certainly the case in Europe and the countries I go to that just they are exasperated by the policy of this, you know, very hard right Israeli government, and by what's, you have the things that go on every day in the occupied territories, the sort of settler violence against, against Palestinians, there's just, just this drumbeat daily that just created so much ill will. I don't know if you're an Israeli politician how you begin to change that and kind of bring some, you know, move Israel back from being what is what is now kind of become almost a pariah state in some places. in the world. How do you begin to fix that? I think that's a generational problem now. And it's just bad for Israel's self-interest to have this kind of really strong will.

And if I could pivot to book just for a second, it's the same kind of, you know, in the era of Carlos the Jackal, this is in the late 60s and 70s, it became a kind of an internationally cool thing to support the Palestinian cause because people saw the Israelis after 1967 and their victories over the West, West Bank and East Jerusalem as being aggressors, as being, you know, perpetrating a, you know, a policy that made people, that created homelessness and that strampled on existing cultures in the region. And so a guy like Carlos, who would have nothing to do with Palestine, moves himself to the Middle East to become part of the fight against it. It became a very kind of trendy thing on the left in those days. But you also,

You see now, I think, the same kind of sentiment that's very deep and very widespread on, among large parts of the U.S. population in Europe as well. And it's kind of an echo of what happened back then. It's not good for Israel's interest, for sure. Yeah. And that's the thing I keep coming back to. It's like when you look throughout the history, because actually, someone like my understanding of that is directly attributable to the first podcast, you and I did.

there was there was a point there couple hours in this was back in january 2023 where you we were talking about something and i said like out of hand i look at this and i'm like how to hell does this guy nettingyahu like he just left power and he was like on trial or something and two years later he's a year later whatever is he's back in and the guy's essentially been like in charge of the government for 25, 30 years. Like, how is this different from a, let's just say, an optic standpoint than like a Putin? Yeah, yeah. And the worrisome thing right now is that the government, so the coalition that he's assembled. I mentioned Netanyahu and I'm like, he's kind of like the Putin of the Middle East in some ways. And you said something like, yeah, no, you can make that argument. And for the next minute,

I had a thought in my head while you were talking. It was the one time the whole podcast, I wasn't listening to you, where I said, wait a minute. Did I just say that because it sounded right versus like if I needed to go into a court right now and prove that opinion, which I now could by the way. But, you know, could I go do that right now? And I was like, no, I think I kind of talked out of my ass there. So unbeknownst to me, what was going to happen? I spent 2023, like throughout that year, my little side quest study was the Middle East and particularly the relationship of Israel and the history and all that. And then October 7th happened.

And it was like, whoa, I'd been looking at that. this the whole year. And I did have obviously some issues with Netanyahu, but I think it got exacerbated in the aftermath of that. And my problem is they've always been listed as an ally, but there are so many actions that have been taken over the years to where they curry favor with us that is not gotten through, it's gotten through ill-gotten means like spying, which every nation spies on each other. I understand that. They happen to be at the top of that list. And, you know, they pull us into things again and again and again that like even your friend the King of Jordan would have been able to tell you we're a bad idea that then cost us socially,

culturally, economically, politically the whole bit at home and have reverberating generational effects. And like at some point you have to ask yourself, you know, the friend that makes you keep on getting into a bar fight because he gets too drunk, like, is he still a friend? Yeah. That's a really good observation. I think there's been this historic sense that the American government and the Israeli government

are so close that we're just allies, we're just kind of have the same interest. But the reality is, and if you talk to intelligence people who've spent a lot of time in the region, the Israelis have their own interests. And they also were very good at manipulating us, and they know this.

And there's, I think, Nanyahu said something like it's the easiest thing in the world to do is to kind of move them. the Americans because they've got the levers and for the longest time it was like you know whether you're pro or anti-Israel was was a political thing if you if you suggested in your politics that you were anti-Israel then that's a terrible for you politically in this country because we were so supportive of the of Israel but it's it's a very complicated relationship and in the Israelis are as

they I guess arguably should be they're there for their own interest and to the extent that our interest happened to align, it's, well, that's great, but it's not always the case. And they have, you know, they've been very skillful kind of pushing us into doing things that they want. And, you know, it does, is not necessarily a two-way street. It's really, it's really about their own survival and their own policy interests. And what about the intelligence they get? That's one thing Joe Kent talks about. He's like, they give intelligence and then our leaders listen to it when we have better intelligence that says that's not what it is. But they're doing that to try to force our hand.

May have just happened again with a, quote, assassination attempt. Right. You know? True. Yeah. At case in point, too, just to the decision to go to war, that was just, to me, it was just a case of their skill and manipulation that caused our leaders to ignore the advice they were getting from their own intelligence community, which said pretty strong, even, you know, Radcliffe,

the CIA director, who was, you know, Trump, upon. point E said, you know, the idea that there's going to be, you know, successful regime change and that's just going to topple the IRGC and it's all going to be over, he pushed back on that. So, well, that's, that's unlikely. That's not going to happen. APEC, John, pushed back on that? Believe it or not. So they essentially was one of the dissenters to this idea that we need to kind of do this.

And yet, President, listened to the NAN Yahoo argument, discounting the advice of his own people. So that shows you kind of the power of the influence that's there. And if you're Israel, you're a country of, what is it, 7, 8 million now? I think it's nine. Okay, so it's gone up. They live in a bad neighborhood, and they do have a lot of people that want to eliminate them. So it's a dangerous, rough territory. So they had to develop the skills of strong military, you know, all kinds of other assets to survive.

And the other thing they've had to have is a strong U.S. relationship. And that almost as a survival skill, they've become very good at kind of making us or persuading us to do something that's in their interest. It's good for them. And why does that work so well, though, when you have a nation of 9 million people that can't even touch our GDP, moving a nation of 350 million people that's the quote-unquote leader of the free world? It's an uncomfortable question. Yeah, it is. But there's a lot of things that go into that. I am living in a 2026 world now where we've seen three million of the Epstein files.

You know, he didn't have cameras in the pens just because he enjoyed it. He was a sick guy. But like, you know, there's hard drives of this shit somewhere. Yeah. And I suspect a lot of it's not in America. I think the CIA had some guilt there for sure. But like there were other places. He was friends with certain prime ministers.

You know, you look at that and it's very, very hard to unsee it because then there's even an email with him and Steve Bannon of all people. back in 2018 or 2019 where he says if Trump is cornered like a rat he'll just bomb Iran kind of wag the dog changed the subject that's interesting yeah is this something that in the past you think it's scary to talk about it's it is scary to talk about in the sense that it's almost like when you and you kind of touch on certain political issues that the controversy is not worth the trouble. And it's, so it's better to kind of just, just be a little quiet about your judgment. And I feel like for a lot of American politicians now, they're at a point where they're, the discomfort is starting to kind of take a backseat to what now is becoming, you know,

a strong majority view within the constituency. And so people are beginning to change their, change what they're willing to say. And, you know, and often, I think, you know, there's a wide range of opinions on this. But it's the consistent thing that I hear is that it's not, it's not anti-Israel. It's anti-policy of the Netanyahu government. It's reacting to the extreme views of some members of the far right in the Israeli cabinet who are saying things are just beyond the pale. And also just witnessing, is it the terrible things, shocking things that happen in the West Bank.

every day. And if you're just as a human being, it's painful to see that stuff go on. It's just nothing, it's no way to kind of make it okay. It's just horrible behavior. And you've studied terrorism more than almost anyone over the past 25 years especially. And it's like, I'm never going to condone terrorism. I'm always going to judge it radically awfully, you know. But what I do try to do now because I've lived through enough is when I look at a situation, try to ask myself, okay, this person was a baby. They were a kid at one point. Then they turn into a terrorist. That's very bad. How did they get there? Because if I can understand how they got there, maybe we can start trying to solve some pieces so fewer of them get there in the future. And I got to tell you, man,

when I see some 18, 19, 20-year-olds in 8 to 10 years blown up grocery stores in Western countries. And they're from Gaza. They're from Lebanon. They lost their mom, their dad, their brother. Yeah. I'm not going to like it, but I'm going to fully understand how they got there.

And understanding is important. And that's kind of part of my whole study of terrorism that you can just look at as just horrible behavior, which it is. But if you don't try to understand it, you're not going to have any prayer of stopping. But if you listen to the voices of people who've been, I had this one doctor, he's a doctor in Gaza,

he had three children. They were all killed in an Israeli strike. And after it was over, this was a literate man, an educated man, said basically my life has changed. The rest of my life, I'm dedicating to punching back. And if you're a father and you'd lost three kids, no matter where you're from or who you are, that's probably your reaction.

But if you want to know what kind of fuels, what's the gasoline that propels terrorist movements, it's that kind of rage. And you certainly find it in Gaza right now, you find it in the West Bank, and people just are kind of waiting for a moment when somebody drops a match and then the whole place kind of touches off.

Yeah, obviously there's all kinds of, you have cameras everywhere in every war zone now, and you've got AI, and you always have to question what's real, what's not? but I've always just even said from any side and any of these conflicts, I'll just assume half of it's fake. Let's look at the other half. Yeah. I got plenty of work with on the other half, unfortunately.

Yeah. And, you know, when you see some of these videos of children crying about their parents being killed and their siblings being killed, or parents crying about their children being killed, you know, there is a guttural sound in real grief that cannot be faked even. by the best actors and you know it's real. Yeah. And you wonder, did all these people have to die? So one bad guy, you know, had to die. It's kind of crazy. Today what really kind of makes it real,

one of the most profound, like, moving experiences I've had in recent couple of years is meeting a Jordan or a Palestinian kid from Gaza, maybe, probably nine or ten years old. And when I met him in a hotel, he had lost, both legs, one arm, and some digits on his other arm. And it happened, he was living in an apartment building in Gaza. One day they heard planes overhead. He was outside with a friend.

Bombs are dropped, and he's buried under rubble, and they were able to pull him out, but he basically has no limbs. His father, if I'm calling this correct, was killed. Other members of the family were killed. And this kid who had dreamed of being a computer programmer, he's just obviously very young. But all those ambitions are gone. The rest of his life, he's maimed.

And you can, even though he's so young, and you could appreciate sort of the courage of a kid to kind of even be willing to talk to a reporter like me and to show off the prosthetic limb that he got because of some aid organization of Jordan, that's the reason I got to meet him. But when he talks about that, that day, you could just see the bitterness, because this was a moment that he and his family

had nothing to do with. They weren't to blame for it. Just happened to be in a place where bombs fell. And his life is, you know, what kind of life is he going to have? And what you could imagine the kid being 18 and involuntary to do something, you know, to blow up something because, you know, he has no hope. He has no, has no family, has no way to make a living. What else is you're going to do i don't know and you know we're lucky to come from a country where the you know we obviously had a horrible terrorist attack in 2001 and anyone who was there and witnessed that obviously is traumatized for life but these are these are the types of things that they don't happen yeah here we're not living under rocket fire and stuff every day buildings coming down in highly

populous cities i how do you you've been doing this for a long time like when you're talking with a kid like that or in any of these war torn places you know, do you ever put yourself there? Like, imagine that. Like, this could be my kid or whatever if I lived in a different place. As a father, I do that all the time. And it's hard not to because you have to have,

if you have any empathy at all, you have to understand and appreciate this kid's pain. And, you know, also have talked to people who are victims of the terrorist attack on Israel in October. And I, it just makes you think the one thing that comes back to me over and over again is there has to be a better way than violence.

And that's true for the terrorist organizations, who, as they've ultimately discovered, violence doesn't really achieve their ends. It just creates more victims. But it's also true when you're dropping bombs instead of the messy work of diplomacy or using other levers to try to change conditions on the ground. Because once those bombs drop, you're creating conditions you can't control. And there are always shockwaves and repercussions and things. that come back to you in ways that you can't anticipate.

I mean, we invested in the 1980s in helping the Mohjahadi, the sort of the Islamic freedom fighters defeat a communist government in Afghanistan and thinking we were going to give them stingerm missiles and they're going to fight the communists there. Then we could just wash our hands of it. And what was the result? We got Al-Qaeda and we got 9-11 because of because we empowered those groups at the time.

So it's, you know, it's just the thing I just say, again, it's never the right way. It's never the easiest. It's much more important to kind of use those clunky, but effective tools of diplomacy and, you know, just trying to change things peacefully on the ground. How do we do diplomacy if you don't allow one side

to have their own government and their own state and whatever regions you're going to end up doing it like they they haven't allowed you have all the hardliners that have really existed across the spectrum in israel over the years who for the most part yatek Rabin obviously got killed for considering this but like for the most part have said there can't be a state which means they can't have a military they can't have a centralized government which means yeah it's a predisposed like you know what's going to happen of course black market groups terrorists are going to take advantage of the situation so how do you fix it different diplomatically if you don't at least start there. Yeah. And the Israelis complained that the Palestinians

are not good partners, they're not reliable, but if you don't allow some kind of self-expression, then that pen-up anger finds a way to express itself. And I was naive enough just because I cover these issues and was a diplomatic reporter for a while and watched kind of peace talks and the negotiation process between Israelis and Palestinians. And as grim as it seemed and hopeless and kind of of stuck in, you know, endless Meyer, as it seemed at times. There was always a sense that eventually we're moving this way. That eventually is going to be a day when there's going to be a handshake and there's going to be, you know, a way for Palestinians to have some kind of control over their lives and their government. Now there's just, there's not even any discussion of it.

It feels like that's completely withered on the vine. You know, the Saudis kind of use it as leverage every now and then and say there's going to be a kind of a peace settlement, the region that has to be in our Palestinian state. But the Israelis, the Israelis, are making no effort now. And even among the population, it's lost support. But you just can't ignore the fact that you've got, what, three or four million Palestinians, many of them living within your border, they're not going away. So you have to find some way to accommodate them and to kind of give them sort of the apparatus of a state so they can function as a normal society. Otherwise, you know, you're just stuck with an apartheid state that's just an unstable

and is volatile. It's eventually going to blow up on you. Yeah. Well, you've written, in the past before the one we're going to talk about today, you've written a couple books, including a Pulitzer winner, Black Flags, which is in our 10 recommended books on the newsletter, by the way, link in description down below. But I always recommend this to everyone because it's such an amazing book. These two books, though, happen to have the line of you getting a really interesting high-place source, which is the King of Jordan, who I mentioned a little bit ago, where, you know, this guy's obviously lived an interesting life. You and I have talked about him in the past.

But as I said, he's been someone who demonstrably over the past 25 years has almost been like a nostridamus. Every time there is a major thing that's about to happen in the Middle East, he's kind of over the target with how things are going to go. It was no different in the days after October 7th, which we've talked about a bunch on the podcast before, you know, to where he was like, this is going to be an ethnic cleansing and everything. So have you had a chance to talk to him? Yeah, I do stay in touch with him and his people too. What's he thinking? So here's a guy, and I don't want to put words in his mouth and sort of suggest that I know everything he's thinking. But what's been conveyed to me very powerfully is the anguish that he feels over what's happened in his neighborhood.

And he's a, you know, he was a military guy by training. And he's done a lot of, he's kind of personally involved in doing sort of aid drops to Gaza. So he does a lot of overflights. He goes on the planes and kind of sits in the back where the pallets go out the back door and get parachuted down to Gaza. He's dumping the palace. Yeah, he's been, he's dumping him. Yeah, he's badass that way. Remember he bombed the dude who burned, the guys who burned his pilot?

Yep. He flew the actual plane. He is, like he said, he's, and his father was the same way. His father was like a helicopter pilot, an airplane pilot. They're all kind of daredevils in their own way. Interesting. He can be getting very emotional about it. But one of the most powerful stories that has been shared with me,

and I don't like to talk about specifics of conversations and sourcing. But the experience of flying over Gaza is like flying over Dresden after World War II and just seeing that miles and miles of just, well, it's not a big place, but just endless devastation. And his sentiment about that is that when the rest of the world see what really happened, when reporters are finally laid in to take pictures on the ground, they won't believe it. He had tremendous problems with Hamas. They were evil and a terrorist organization should not ever been allowed to control politically

Gaza, and they were absolutely to blame for what happened on October 23rd. but he, you know, having witnessed the destruction that followed, he just emotionally just devastated by it. And he's, you know, one of the ones who kind of has to be responsible putting the pieces back together. And initially, that's kind of the signals from Washington is, well, we're just going to dump all this on your lap. We're going to see if we can force Jordan to accept, you know, all these Palestinian refugees as being citizens of your country. And you can imagine that if somebody said, well, U.S., you have to take the population of Haiti because they're destitute. They don't have a functioning government. So we're just going to append those millions of citizens to the United States.

No country would accept that. Remember what he said, too, at the beat before they were even doing that when they said, will you take them in? And he said, this was like October 20th or something like that. It was in the weeks after October 7th. I'll never forget this. But he said, if I do that, I will give the hardliners of the Israeli government exactly what they want. They will ethnically cleanse the place because you think they're going to let them back? The hard right in the cabinet make no bones about the fact that they see a greater Israel project that includes Israel completely, you know, taking control of all those occupied territories.

And Jordan, by the way. Yeah, and probably too. I mean, that's on the map for some of them. But at least West Bank and Jerusalem. And they feel like they've been sort of divinely appointed to have that dominion, to have to be able to control those territories. And so they don't, they're not thinking about any kind of future for the Palestinian people because they don't care about it.

They don't see it as legitimate. And they're absolutely explicit about that. And to see those comments by people who are supposed to be responsible leaders in government, in charge of ministries, saying something so terrible. It's just, it's shocking to hear. But yeah, our friend, the king, has his hands full at the moment. Plus, he's in one of the countries, you know, like the Gulf Arabs, and sometimes, some cases, even worse, his country has really struggled because of this ongoing conflict.

Economically and everything. I mean, terrorism, tourism is dried up. You know, it's hard to move goods internationally. So commerce has really been hit hard. So this is a country that has few resources. They don't have oil. They've got a very educated society. They've got really great natural resources.

They've got in some sense, they've got a wonder of the world, which is Petro, which is the most incredible place I've ever seen in my life physically. So they've got a lot to offer. But if people aren't going there, if they can't sell their goods, you know, the economy begins to crumble. And they also have the burden of millions of very, refugees from Syria, from the Syrian fighting who are still there. They're even Iraqi refugees from a war 20 years ago. Yeah. And they all kind of come to Jordan because it's safe and stay and don't

leave. And that becomes more mouths to feed more drains on a on a country that doesn't have enough water for its own people. And they have really no place to turn to for it. They don't have rivers to speak of. And so their problems just kind of build and build and build and just wonder how sustainable it is. Does he have a leg to stand on when it comes to like, I don't know, coming to the U.S. and being like, what the fuck? Yeah. You know, he does in a sense that he's he's got a lot of respect. I don't, from the White House, it kind of depends on the day. You know, they see him as being a useful ally. We've got military bases there, so they're important to us. But they get disrespected a lot, I think. On the hill, it's remarkable. Republicans and

Democrats. When he comes to town, people want to sit down with them and listen to him because he really has a read on what's happening in the region. He has, in a very sophisticated view, because he's of the Arab world, but he's kind of Western educated. He speaks, some people would say better English than Arabic. He understands us. And as you've said, historically, he's had a pretty good sense of what is about to happen and kind of warns us when we're about to fall into a cliff. And so when he does come over, people sit down with him. I just feel like he's, he feels that in important ways he's not being listened to and

his country's suffering because of it. When you talk to him in the first book you wrote, the Triple Agent about El Bellowy, who was the guy who, he was a Jordanian doctor who ended up becoming an al-Qaeda terrorist and blew up Coast, was that the base? Yeah, CIA base. There's a CIA base in the Middle East where, you know, a lot of CIA people and some military people were killed. You then set out to write this book to understand what the hell happened here, which is where you came across the king. And obviously it was embarrassing for him that someone from his country had done this.

But, you know, maybe for people out there who haven't heard some of our previous podcast in the past, can you just explain who you learned how Bellowy was? and then I'd love for you to give what the king's perspective was on him becoming who he was. Yeah. So Balaoui was one of these accidental terrorists. Somebody who was, I should say, he was a doctor. He's a Jordanian physician, a pediatrician. So he was Western educated. He went to school in Turkey, spoke good English,

but also had a great deal of sympathy for what was happening to Palestinians, because these are his people too. So he'd watch the kind of fighting in Gaza, this is like 2008 time period, and become really inflamed by it in his outlet, the way this middle-aged, you know, middle-class doctor with two children was able to vent his rage was to basically create a podcast channel

sort of amounted to that. He had his own little, you know, blog of commentary, pictures, things he would post about fighting going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he was doing it secretly, under fake name, so nobody really knew it was him. And then one day the Jordanians discovered that this really incendiary blog was coming from a doctor living right under their noses. So they arrested him, threatened him with jail, got him to flip, and basically talked him into becoming an informant.

And as an informant, he decided that he would actually volunteer for a foreign assignment. He told them that I'm willing to go to Pakistan and become an agent for you, find out what Al-Qaeda is doing, find out what the Taliban is doing. So they send him off to Pakistan to be kind of this undercover agent as a doctor. He gets there and he actually turns out his sympathy for al-Qaeda is never left. And he becomes a suicide bomber, convinces the CIA that he's got important information. about al-Qaeda's leadership, sets up a meeting with CIA officers in a base in Afghanistan, walks into this meeting with Americans with a bomb under his vest, and blows himself up and kills seven Americans and a Jordanian intelligence officers there, too.

So this was a remarkable story. It was the single biggest sort of worst casualty rate, or the biggest highest death toll for the CIA since the 80s, since the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut back in 1983, seven Americans killed at once. It just doesn't happen. And the King's involvement became pretty important because, for one, the one Jordanian officer who was killed happened to be his cousin, so it was kind of very personal to him.

And his government had been involved, his intelligence agency had been involved in setting up this agent as somebody who would help the Americans find al-Qaeda leaders. So he felt very deeply affected by this whole thing. But the Jordanians have a good story to tell in this because they essentially tried to get the Americans to be cautious in who they believe. You've got a source who's giving you good information, but do you really trust them?

Especially he haven't met him, which the Americans hadn't. And the red teaming that went on, that should have gone on that might have identified the fact they had a double agent. working with them was ignored. And so it became a big tragedy for the Americans and for the Jordanians too. Obviously, he didn't like the guy

and didn't at all appreciate what he did for all the reasons you just laid out. But did you ever get to have a conversation with him that either went on the record or maybe didn't make the book that you can talk about where he looked at it and wondered about the greater problem of maybe even some people from his country thinking the same way because of other things that happen in the region?

Yeah. I think his consistent message and his consistent warning to the Americans has been that you can't kind of blunder your way into these things like the Iraq invasion and not expecting there to be blowback. And he actually personally warned President Bush before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that this is going to be opening a Pandora's box. You may think you can succeed militarily and defeat the Iraqi army, and you probably can, but don't think it's going to be that easy when you're done.

And I think his frustration with American policy is it's driven by these grand ideas and sometimes a very naive concepts of how we can, you know, change the region and make it more suitable to us. And often we just don't know what we're doing. We don't know what we're getting into. And then guys like him, the king of Jordan and his sort of other countries in the region, end up holding the bag. They end up paying the cost that sometimes we walk away from things and go on with our business. And they're stuck with these problems for decades.

Yeah. How do places like that feel about what they see in Syria right now? Because obviously previous leadership wasn't very good. I think that's very fair to say. But you have, what's his name, Al Jalani? Is that you say? That's how it used to be called. That was Al-Sharap.

Right. But used to be called that in his old days as a terrorist. It's like you have a guy that sitting on stage with Petraeus going, yeah, I hunted you 10 years ago. Nice to see you. Nice visiting the White House. Like, what would that, again, am I crazy to think that's a little nuts or a little suspicious? And they might be upset about that over there in other countries? This is a head snapping kind of moment.

I still I still can't take it all in because you're right I mean I did a lot of research on on this guy when he was known as Jolani and when he was a member of Al-Qaeda and he was sent by what we now know was ISIS

into Syria to kind of create an army the jihadi army to fight to fight the regime there and then send to go on beyond that was he in this book? He is in the book I took yeah he is in the second part and

And it was crazy. And I can remember the moment in 2012 when he emerges as the leader of this Al-Qaeda-aligned force in Syria. It's a moment when we really knew we had a problem because Syria started as kind of a civil war with protesters fighting the government and the government trying to repress them. Very quickly, you get all these other outside groups coming in becoming part of the fight. And Giuliani was the scariest of all because he was true Al-Qa-Skiris. Al Qaeda, and he was coming in to create a jihadi army.

And, you know, thinking of al-Qaeda having a kind of a failed state in which they can operate and build an army and amass weapons and then, you know, proceed to kind of carry out their agenda, however they want to do it. That's what Jalani represented. And what was interesting is Baghdaddy, the leader of ISIS, decided that he wasn't moving fast enough, and so they created a separate thing which became ISIS within Syria. within Syria. But Jelani was

hardcore. And to think that now he's the kind of leader of Syria and someone that we consider a friend and we invite to the White House and give him special, you know, give him special, you know, recognition.

It just kind of boggles the mind. And I have to say, he's been, everything he's done up to now has been surprising. He's been, you know, a tolerant leader. He's no Democrat, but he's allowed, in the sense, he's allowed religious diversity. Really?

Yeah. I mean, there's instances where, you know, he's still surrounded by some of his old friends in the old days. But at least he says the right things. Some Christians in Aleppo say he's been, you know, allowed to put up Christmas decorations after he came in and things they haven't been able to do for years. So he at least is very good at playing the game of seeming moderate. Maybe he's just very pragmatic and in his,

realize that if he wants to succeed, he needs to stop alienating everybody else around him, the way that ISIS certainly always did. But, you know, kind of, you know, every time I see him speak, I keep thinking, this guy was a serious terrorist. He was on the most wanted list. He was, you know, we considered him the worst, the worst. And now he's a leader of a country, which is just crazy. Yeah, playing basketball. Yeah. So it's nuts. It's one of these things that I, I didn't think, honestly, I didn't think that the Assad regime was going to ever be driven out. You didn't. I didn't. I didn't. It seemed like around 2013, 2014, when it just seemed when the Iranians and the Russians both decided they were all in and keeping Assad in power, there just didn't seem to be an exit.

There wasn't any way for him to be driven out. The Americans and other neighbors weren't willing to invest in. enough in the opposition to kind of drive him out. So it's just going to be this permanent bad situation in a kind of a military stalemate with parts of Syria still run by opposition groups, particularly by Jolani's organization, which was an al-Qaeda-related group. But they also had hundreds of like subgroups duking it out like it was Mad Max Fury Road in Syria this whole time,

which that was the one part that never made sense to me because that was going on for so many years. I'm like, what does, how much, how much does Assad even get to control? Yeah. You know? It's like, is he collecting taxes from people from the Kurds in the south?

I feel like those checks are going to bounce if he gets them at all. Yeah, he had some of the cities in the art land and the coast. And big chunks of the rest of the country were not under Syria control. And ISIS was heavily, you know, involved in the eastern part of the country.

These al-Qaeda-related groups are in the north, backed by Turkey in some cases. And like, you're right, on a hundred other, literally hundreds of subgroups and local militias, some of them with their own kind of funding from Gulf Arab countries. And it was just lawless kind of madmax kind of place. And the one thing that Jolani slash al-Shara has done is is mostly consolidated control. So it's, you know, it's a unified government for the most part. But it's, it seems very, very precarious to me. When you say consolidated control.

That is right. He is, like I said, he's no Democrat. He's an autocratic leader. That's good enough. But he's kind of like the dictator. Right. But he knows that he looks good in his suit. He knows how to say the right things at a conference, shake hands with diplomats.

So he's been surprising. But, yeah, I'm not completely convinced that he's a different guy than he used to be. I would pay to be a fly on the wall in those conversations once they go in the rooms after doing the cameras where someone says listen up motherfucker yeah yeah yeah all right you killed 10 of your secretaries all right fine you do this shit yeah like it's got to be some sort of business agreement there for sure so and they're and i must say in that region they're they're used to kind of these complexities and you kind of working out as businessmen and you don't cross certain lines otherwise you get whacked it's it's very mafia like that's another argument though

when you look at that country and, you know, the outcome's still kind of up in the air with what it'll be. Maybe there's a couple okay signs right now. But that was a country ravaged by sanctions again that turned into that crazy war zone, arguably, because the sanctions pushed them there. I mean, you were reporting on literally witnessing all the trucks coming across with, what was it, crank or? Yeah, it was, it was Captagon. Captagon. This is weird, slightly, I guess, a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of. like meth. It's a strange synthetic drug that, yeah, sanctions dried up sources of income for the,

for the Syrian regime. And so they essentially turned to Capagon to create revenue for themselves. And so it became basically the world's biggest narco state. And massive amounts of drug manufacturing with shipments of, you know, millions and millions of these Captingon tablets heading out all of the world, particularly in the Middle East. But it was just just, that was, you can't say it's a direct result of sanctions, but it was certainly a side effect. Yes. And that begs the question. It's like, how much of the whole, like, sanction strategy is just trying to big dick people

you maybe righteously don't like, by the way, when you can take a bad situation and technically make it way worse by doing that? How else do you solve it other than, like, invading the country? Sanctions became kind of like the easy fix for us because it didn't require any real effort. send troops anywhere. We can just say, well, we're going to sanction this country. And then we create a sanctions regime that stays in effect for decades. It loses its effectiveness. People find ways to get around it. And then it just becomes kind of a shell of a policy, kind of a way to make us feel good about things without doing anything good and sometimes doing things kind of bad.

For sure. Like creating a drug economy that didn't exist. Yeah, that's unfortunate, but we'll see how it shakes out, I guess. That said, I've been waiting on this book. It's time to get to it a little bit. Okay. So I had to keep my mouth shut on this, like I said, for about two and a half years. You told me about this, like I'm working on this thing.

And little did I know, you and I recorded, it was like that Friday in March, 2024. It was like the 22nd or something like that. And I guess you got on a plane a day or two later for Paris and went and visited Carlos the Jackal in prison. Is that correct? That's right. It's March 2025. Okay. Who was Carlos de Jackal? Let's start there for people who don't know, because this is a very important story that, as you said, ties into very modern day issues right now. It's a symbolic time

for it to come out. So if we can roll back the clock a little bit. So most of us basically grew up in the 9-11 generation. So we think of terrorism. We think of Al-Qaeda and 9-11. There was a whole other generation, and I'm old enough that I remember it. But back in the 60s and 7, there was this terror wave that involved hijackings of planes, hostage-taking, murder of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympic Games. It was an awful period, and any air travel involved the risk of hijacking or worse. And of that generation of terrorists, the one that became internationally famous

was this guy who became known as Carlos the Jackal, who became so the most famous of the Palestinian militants, even though he wasn't Palestinian at all. He was from Venezuela. Some crazy kid who moved himself to the Middle East and thought he'd become a, you know, a guerrilla freedom fighter and ends up becoming a sleeper agent for the Palestinians and then goes on to do one outrageous terrorist attack after another

and then eludes capture for 20 years. Essentially becomes famous in part because he was so good at getting away with it and just living like a rock star. living in fabulous hotels and meeting amazing women and drinking the best liquor and just had this almost fable-like existence. And this is the guy that, you know, was really the international face of terrorism throughout the last century, in the 70s and 80s to the night. Before Bin Laden, before Bin Laden basically changed how we think of terrorism.

This was the guy. Bin Laden happened and we kind of forgot about him because he was by that time sitting in a prison in France and living not too badly if you're not. if you go to be in a prison. French prisons are nice? French, they're not so bad. The one that I saw before I visited him, it was actually originally a convent.

And it was built in the Middle Ages. Convent turned prison. It is maybe not too big of a stretch. But he was captured in the 90s in a really dramatic fashion that we can talk about if you want. But he's not allowed to speak very much because he murdered

a lot of French people. A lot of his terrorist attacks were in France. And the French don't like him getting the microphone. They don't like him being able to talk about his, you know, glorify his past. And so it took a very long time to get permission to get to talk to him. But once I did, it was just this moment that I'll never forget, kind of sitting in this prison and in comes this man. It was when I was a kid, the most famous terrorist in the world. And now he was 75 years old and kind of an old man, but still kind of scary in his own way. First of all, when did you first hatch the idea that you wanted to write a book on him, and how soon after that did you think in your head, damn, I wonder if I could talk to him?

So it's crazy how these ideas start sometimes. And for me, you know, the jackal was a name I remembered, you know, almost like maybe kids who grew up in the 9-11 generation have the sense of bin Laden being this boogeyman. And then there was an international search for him and they found him and killed him and so on. So Carlos, to me, was kind of like that. I remembered some of the stories about it when I was young. And then when I was a reporter working as a terrorist in the Middle East, I kept running into his trail in weird ways.

And, you know, as you know, I spent a lot of time in Jordan, but I would talk to Jordanian intelligence guys and he said, oh, yeah, you know, Carlos Jackal was here for a while. He kind of smuggled himself into our country. We didn't know he was here. And once we discovered it, we cultivated a relationship with him. We used to talk to one guy who his job was to bring liquor over. to Carlos the Jackal in his little villa where he stayed in Amman and try to figure him out to what is he doing here?

What is he what is he up to? Is he planning a terrorist attack? And they tried to befriend him. Really? Yeah. Rather than arrest him. And that becomes kind of a contentious point in the book because the Jordanians should have told their American friends

about this, their secret guest, and that eventually happened, but it didn't happen right away. But in the meantime, they essentially got this amazing brief with Carlos because they would sit down with him, get him super drunk, and just get him to talk about the shit that he did. And so the guys that I would talk to, these are just regular sources, had the most amazing stories about Carlos the Jackal that I'd never heard before. I never knew anything about this part of his life.

Did they like him? The thing is you can't, that's a hard thing to sit like him, but it's, he's a very charming guy. And you, and the people that would describe to me, their meetings with them. After they overcame their initial fear, and this one guy is literally, there's this scene in the book where this Jordanian who meets Carlos the first time, he's in an office and he's got his pistol out under the desk because he's so afraid this guy's going to come out and just gun him down. But after they figured out that he was pretty much harmless,

he wasn't going to do anything to them, they were just fascinated to hear his stories and just kind of, because it's said he has the wildest stories in the world. He's lived the life of rock star and being a slash terrorist and internationally wanted fugitive. And to get to spend time with them, it was fascinating for them. Now, this is a guy, though, like you said, who's born in Venezuela. His father's a communist attorney in pre-communist Venezuela. It was not a communist country at the time. And he names as three kids after each part of, was it Lenin's name? Lenin's name. The founder of the Soviet Union's real name was Vladimir Iliuch, sorry, Iliuch-Ullianov. So he named his three sons, Lenin, Vladimir, and then Iliuch.

And so he kind of had all parts of the name covered. And that just a testament to the guy, to the father's devotion to communism. He literally considered Lenin the most important figure in all of human history. And so his kids' names were an homage to his communist hero. And Carlos got the middle name. He got the middle name, even though he was the oldest kid. and kind of grew up with that legacy and was influenced by that,

but also by kind of revolutionary fervor in Latin America at the time, because this was 60s, so time of, you know, there's communist uprisings throughout Latin America. There are communist, you know, militants in the jungle. This very famous character at the time named Che Guevara, who was like a swash-buckling, you know, Latin American revolutionary.

And you can see movies about him, you see his face on on on t-shirts he was a very photogenic good-looking guy and he was Carlos's real hero he wanted to be this you know adventurer revolutionary you know larger than life character beautiful women surrounding him that was his goal in life was to become that guy young carlos though who's looking up to che Guevara was it really because of the things che Guevara emoted that you just laid out and the lifestyle he had or just did he actually look into, say, the policies that he backed and the politics that he had? Yeah.

And vibe with that. So Carlos would always say the right things. Like, I'm for the common man. I'm a Marxist revolutionary. Reality was Carlos didn't really give a crap about any of you that. Carlos wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be a Che Guevara. He wanted to have his picture on T-shirts.

If he'd been living today, he'd have an interesting. Instagram account, he'd be all over TikTok, he'd be promoting himself and his own brand. Back then, you couldn't do that, but he just wanted to build an image and ended up getting a sexy nickname that he didn't plan on having. But once he was called Carlos the Jackal, then suddenly there's a whole, you know, mystique that comes with that. Oh, yeah. And you can't get laid with that name. I can't help you. Yeah, you can't, well, if you can't get laid as Elyich, because that's just kind of a strange name. But if you're Carlos the Jackal, man, yeah, you could you could have films made about him.

And you actually, of course, that went on to happen. The Born Identity series, that was initially a novel series by Robert Ludlum, he based his bad guy, his bad character, was Carlos the Jackal. He created the entire persona of this villain in all three of his novels based on Carlos. Yeah, he had massive charisma. Absolutely. And you could still see it, I must say, even as an old man, he kind of walking. in a room and you can see there's some there's there's a charm but there's kind of a

presence and God knows I didn't admire him and he said lots of things you know in our meeting that reinforced the fact that he is he's essentially a criminal narcissist that's he has that kind of brain doesn't regret any of the the terrible things that he did it feels like he's a hero in his own mind but he is he is a charming bad guy and that's you know even the Jordanians who are trying to debrief him in the in the 90s They could certainly see that, that he's, you know, as though as one guy who became a senior official in the Jordanian intelligence agency said, you can't help but like him. You know, I just liked him.

And it was almost sorry to see him go. So you're talking with your guys and they're whispering about this and telling you the stories in the 2010s while you're working on other things. And then you end up finishing redlined the book on Syria. and was it pretty much right after that, where you're like, I gotta go look at this again? There was another reason, too. So I have, what you'll see in all my books is I have kind of a writing style that's,

it's narrative nonfiction. And it's usually very character-driven. So the best book for me is one that tells a larger story, but so there's a central character that propels the narrative. And the story I wanted to tell is another origin story. Black Flag was kind of an origin story of ISIS and where it came from. The Jackwell story allows me to tell, sort of explain how we got international terrorism, how that arose in the Middle East in the 60s and 70s, and who were the important characters and why it was able to

flourish, and eventually why it failed, because these groups always overreach, their violence always turns people off and they end up kind of becoming the reason for their own demise. But Carlos, luckily for me, is in all the right places, at all the right times. And he allows me to kind of string together a bigger story about this important development in our modern history with a singular figure in the middle of it who's, you can't take your eyes off of him because he's just always doing something outrageous. This is also a guy, though, that is still living when you're writing about him. And obviously we're going to talk about you going to talk with him and everything. But is there a difference in the approach for you from like a storytelling and writing perspective when you are dealing with someone who's still alive, especially when you know you may be having a conversation?

That's really appealing because there are parts of the Carlos story that had remained a mystery for a long time. And because people had kind of forgotten about him after 9-11, there was a lot of new material that had come out. archival material from the East Europe, for example, used to be kind of a pet. So the communist governments of Eastern Europe in the 90s and 80s kept him almost like their little dirty secret. We've got Carlos de Jekyll living with us.

And we could stop if we wanted to, but we don't. We'd let them go out and bomb things in France and just live a crazy life in our own countries. And a lot of the files from that time only started coming out in the late 90s in the early 2000s, you know, some of his former henchmen and closest associates are still around so they can be debriefed. But Carlos himself obviously knows a lot. And I felt there was just finally a critical mass of material to kind of take a new look at the life of this guy who was once

on, you know, top of mind. People, you know, he was a household name. And to reconstruct, you know, how he came to be, how Carlos the Jackal came to exist. into light of all this new contextual material just seemed very attractive. And I just felt that people used to care a lot about Carlos, and if they reread his story in the context of how we got to where we are with terrorism and these other national threats,

it'd be a story worth telling. And it was a lot of fun to report, I must say. It was just endlessly fascinating. How did you get to talk to him? So the hard part, well, let's start with the easy part. The easy part was getting Carlos to say yes, And it was a matter of, I contact his lawyer, explained who I am, talked about my books,

and I said, I'd love to meet your guy. And Carlos has a lawyer. Carlos's lawyer passed along the message. Carlos writes back, said, sure, Washington Post guy, I'll meet with you. He does not publicity shy. He's the opposite. He likes attention.

He loves the idea of getting an interview. But the problem, as I mentioned, was the French did not want to let me talk to him. They don't want to let anybody talk to them, I accept under very restrictive conditions. So I had to agree, there's no recording equipment, there's no camera taken into prison. I only had a pencil and a notebook.

Pencil and a notebook. That's it. Oh, really old school. You were writing things down as fast as I could. Like transcribing? And then after it's over, going back to my hotel, just trying to do on a Julian Dory and trying to photographically remember everything that happened

in every nuance and every wrinkle in his brow, you know, tried to kind of recreate every bit of that. But even with that, I mean, one of the restrictions I had to agree to was this was not going to result in a Q&A interview because they didn't. The French did not want me to have this verbatim, you know, conversation with Carlos that would allow Carlos to reinterpret history. So it had to be, you know, I was able to use little snippets, but I couldn't quote him extensively. But that's not even work. That seems really subjective to, you know. Yeah.

And it's frustrating for sure. But on the other hand, my whole purpose in meeting him was I had some things I wanted to ask. But even with those things, I didn't think I would trust anything Carlos said. He's going to exaggerate. He's not going to tell me the truth. So it was more to kind of get him to kind of fill in color a little bit of the blank spaces that I had in my own narrative of what happened. But also just to kind of get a measure of the man. And that was very important mentally in getting my head around the project and writing about

him in his life is to see him as a 75-year-old man. And then you'll see in the book, I mentioned kind of briefly this encounter that I had with him in the prologue. And then at the end of the book, it's, it's, you know, the bad days are over. He's been in prison for a long time. And here I am face-to-face with the man for the first time. And so there's, it's, you know, people have read this part of the book, say it's kind of a very profound moment where, where after you've read the story of his life, you're sitting there looking at the guy eyeball to eyeball. I like how you did that. Yeah.

So it was a, it was a great way to end up, you know, after telling a story, it kind of like, what did it amount to? What was it, how did it matter? And you get a sense of that when you sit down and look at the guy face to face. Well, I'm really curious about this process, though, to even get there with the French. So it's easy on his end. He's like, fuck it, I'll do it. But had he really talked to anyone except that one French journalist?

that this one French journalist had most of the interviews that have existed over the past few years, decades really, have been secretive. So they weren't, nobody got permission to talk to him, but managed to find ways to do it. The one case was a French journalist who basically kind of came at him as just, well, I'm a member of the public that wants to meet. You know, I've got my own personal reasons for wanting to meet him. And because she was an, you know, attractive woman, Carlos is a obsessive womanizer. So you just, you know, put a pretty face in front of them. He was very happy to talk to you. And she managed to kind of have many, many visits with them.

This was like back in the 2010s. That went past French Intel. Yeah, yeah. So she just showed up like she was like just like a fan or a member of his, you know, support group or something. But she didn't do it as a journalist, but she ended up writing a book based in French, based on her experiences with him. What was her name? Her name is Sophie Bonnet. B-O-N-E-T.

Sophie-B-N-E-T. She's a good at look at Sophie. Yeah, so she's a documentary filmmaker slash book writer. I've talked to her. She's a very interesting lady. This is, she's older now, but she did it, you know, or later in her career. Okay. But then later on, in fact, I benefited from this one interview that happened.

There's an Israeli journalist who really wanted to talk to Carlos, and he wasn't allowed to. So we managed to talk of one of Carlos' attorneys. We had a couple, this one, he married, actually. He married his attorney. He had kind of a prison ceremony. Oh, Carlos married his attorney? Yes. Is he still married to her now? She died about a year ago. But they were married for a long time. But he was able to, this journalist was able to talk the attorney into basically bringing, you know, she had a cell phone. She was allowed to bring into the prison meetings with Carlos. She'd bring her phone in. she'd ring this journalist up and basically relay questions like Carlos what do you think of this or that and he would reply into the phone and the phone call

was being recorded on the other end so this Israeli journalists very kind of trickily got got a pretty long interview out of them they're not like that at all no I don't so I I wanted to go through the front door but this journalist the Israeli journalist ended up doing a documentary film based on the guy's name is your own Y-A-R-O-N-E-R-N Niske, N-I-S-K-I. And his documentary, actually, it was released on Fox Nation earlier this summer.

It was Carlos in his own words, but it wasn't Carlos, you know, face-to-face. It was essentially kind of a bootleg interview with a guy. But I ended up making friends with the journalists. We found out about each other's work, and so we collaborated. I was on his documentary, as

featured in a number of times, and he shared all his transcripts of all the conversations. So I had things that I could relate because of my conversation with Carlos, but also had the benefit of many hours, I guess maybe more than 10 hours of telephone conversations that he had. And what that all amounts to is you see a lot of things through Carlos's lens, and you realize about half or more is just crap,

but there are parts that, oh, he actually told the truth about this. So it's kind of a fact check. Because you could verify. Yeah, you could say certain things you could, or certain things that, he wouldn't have a reason to lie about because they're not flattering for him. And I ended up because of those interviews,

including Sophie's, I had a pretty remarkable book, and in my own encounter and my own research in talking to CIA people and others were involved in capturing him, a ton of material. And then it was just a matter of what makes the best story. This is the thing about narrative nonfiction is you end up with a lot of stuff,

but then almost like a filmmaker, What is the most interesting story I can tell based on the facts that I know? Right. And then you construct the story out of it. It's all real facts, but then you have to kind of be the painter with a paintbrush and that's right. Paint the picture. This process to get to talk to them, though, where they came up with all of these stipulations,

who are you talking to do that? Like, are you talking with French intelligence? Started actually with the prison ministry. So there was a, you know, write to the people who run this one prison. What's the person? It's called the Poissis. It's the Masson-Central de Posse. But it's a little town outside Paris, about 20 miles to the west of Paris.

And other fascinating thing about the prison, it had this past as a convent, but after when the Nazis took over the country, it became like a Gestapo headquarters. They killed and tortured members of the French freedom movement there. So it had this really crazy history, but that's... Living with the ghosts when you're in there. So I wrote to them and they said, well, they said, well, they said, well, you'd need to send us all this information and all these forms. You need to complete. I did that and I waited and waited.

What year did your write to? This was 20. The first year was 2024 when I first reached out. And then there'd be like radio silence for months. And I would send reminders, or are you going to let me see him or not? And they would just be no reply. So I started kind of working through other angles, you know, trying the French embassy in Washington.

Can they help me? And they were somewhat sympathetic. my second book, Black Flags, came out in French and actually was well received in France. I did a lot of interviews, so I'm somewhat known there. And they were helpful. But then it was like, then there's just layers and layers of bureaucracy. There's the French Justice Ministry, which ultimately had to sign off. It just took pressure on so many pressure points until finally I got a yes.

And once I got the yes, I went right away to France because it was so very full. they're going to change their mind. And even to the moment I walked into that prison to have the interview, I was so afraid that somebody was going to back out. Carlos is going to be sick or was going to change his mind. The French were going to decide they don't want me to talk to him after all. So part of the suspense was, am I actually going to get to have this moment? You're in the story.

That's what's cool. It's like you've written all these stories where you're reporting on it after the fact and going and visiting the places and living with the ghosts and trying to understand what happened there, which is what you do here. But then the culmination of it is you get to go. go directly to the source and it's like you are now the first person walking into your own book. Yeah. And it's the first time I've done that because I've always had this distance in my other books. I'm kind of writing and from a dispassionate, you know, third person voice. This is the first

time I said in a book, I was there. I saw him. I was sitting there and Carlos walks in. And so describing that moment was, becomes personal because I'm part of the story. Was it just one day with him in there? Yeah. I was hoping. How many hours did you have? like an hour and a half that's all they would give me so it was very compressed and it was frustrating because carlos even though he's he looks robust you can see he's starting to fade yeah he's good 76 now and he's as he would lose a thread in the conversation he would repeat himself and the other problem i mentioned he has obsessive interest in women there was a woman in the room and she happened to be a french minister justice ministry official they're kind of as a mind

minder to make sure I didn't do anything, break any of my promises. She was 27, as I recall, he could not take his eyes off of her. And I would be talking to him. I'd ask him a question. He would ignore me. He's kind of facing the woman and saying things like, are you a real blonde? Still got that dog in him. Just incorrigible. But, you know, the French biographer, the woman I mentioned, Sophie Bonnet, said in her book, she described it as almost that he is constantly on the hunt, that any female within his sight in his range of vision was a potential target. And no matter how old, how young, just whatever the circumstances, he's just obsessed and he has to figure out, does he have a chance with her? Is it somebody that's going to like him? And you can see him even as an old man

working it and trying to kind of impress this this young woman and very very annoyed by the fact that I was also in the room and just creating an obstacle to him potentially getting to meet this woman so it was it was wild to see them see him kind of operate that way that's crazy you only got an hour and a half I mean that's an hour and a half more and pretty much anyone has ever gotten but my publisher or editor of who's who worked with me through the publisher when we were talking about this and about possibility of the interview, he kept saying,

if you can get Carlos to grunt at you, then that's a victory. We just, we just, it just is important to have some personal connection with them. And I got a lot more than that. It was not what I had hoped to get. I hoped to be able to maybe meet him several times over many hours and record a conversation.

So it was much less than that, but it was gratifying to succeed in at least making the meeting happen. Looking at his life, like just as, estimating it, I'd need four full podcasts. Oh, yeah, you absolutely would. Yeah, I would need four, three-hour podcasts with them. It would need to be about 12 hours to really get down and dirty on the details from a storytelling, step-by-step, psychological profile, like culmination of it all.

And then you'd need a whole other episode at the end to say, well, after my research, this was crap, this was bullshit. That's right. He made this up. This didn't really happen. Because that's the way it is with Carlos. He's not a reliable witness to his own life's events. Right. You're plugging and playing, like you said,

as far as things you already know, what information he can corroborate or where you know he's going to lie about something because you already have the other source. And asking about how he was captured, for example, that becomes, in Carlos' mind, all about acts of betrayal. People who, one of the memorable lines that I was able to use

was his big regret in his life. was he didn't kill more people and he should have killed those bastards who got him at the end and just was too slow on the draw yeah one of those guys like another i used a line from the wire earlier but another famous line where he's like the game ain't in me no more feels like this is dude the game is going to be in him until the day he drops which which i must say i'm hearing recently that he's he's in further decline that his health is waning. And so it could be that by the time, as you're still talking about the book, he might be not have him with us anymore, which is a real possibility just because he's of that age. He's 76. He's been in prison for a long time. Now, you knew you

were going to maybe have like 90-ish minutes or something like that. Yeah. So obviously, very different approach to what I do here or we're just talking all day and we see where it goes. You had to be very prepared, right? I had annotated notes. I had all these things I wanted to try out on him. And like your conversations, it actually becomes, once you start with them, sometimes the notes just get disregarded because he goes down a trail and then he think, well, okay, well, asking about this. Or I could tell this line of questioning is not going to be fruitful. He's not going to have anything to say.

Or else he'll shut down. This was also the frustration. I would start to talk about an incident that, you know, I know a lot about. And he would just say, I don't remember. And that would be it. and there's no point in asking him anything else because he would just kind of clam up. He doesn't like to admit to things

that he hasn't been convicted of. And there are certain things like, if you read the book, you'll see that he, one of his big attacks in his historical career was bombing Radio Free Europe in Munich in 1981. He set up this elaborate bombing. It doesn't go off quite like he intended, but he succeeded in bombing this U.S.

built U.S. run international broadcaster and creating a lot of damage. But he has never acknowledged having anything to do with it and he denies it, you know, fusedively because he's never been convicted of it. And he doesn't want to have, you know, be on record as saying that he attacked this American facility because it could have consequences. I have all kinds of evidence that it was him that he did it. And, but he just wasn't going to talk about it in that interview. A lot, if you talk to like or listen to a lot of great actors, talk about roles where they play a villain or other your fellow great authors where they talk about writing about people who were objectively evil. Many of them will often go through how the approach

when they're going through it is to not judge the person, kind of suspend that so that in the actor's case, they can actually feel and be in their bones and let out that performance. And in the author's case, they can actually do the same thing to be able to write about it factually, and then they'll say afterwards, then they can kind of judge it. Yeah, yeah. What was your approach with him from that perspective? Kind of the same dopey approach that I take to most of my interviews, which is, I just want to know. I'm not going to, I certainly can judge you, Carlos, because you've been a terrible human being,

but I'm walking to this meeting as a very curious, interested person who just, wants to know what happened. I want to give you the chance to tell me your story. And I find that people really respond to that, even if they may be resistant in most cases to speaking to the press or to talk to an author. But if you come at it, you're not prejudging them and that you, it's not about your ego, because I feel like that should not be in the way of a conversation, that it should be about trying to get information, and just say, I am personally on honestly curious to know what happened here. What really happened in 1975, Carlos, when you, as a 26-year-old man, walked into the headquarters of OPEC, the international oil cartel, and proceeded

to take the whole thing hostage? What were you thinking about? And who put you up to it? And I could get him to ramble on about that because he's kind of proud of it. That's the one thing he's probably most known for, one of the most audacious terrorist attacks I've ever heard about. That's what he was wearing, right? That's what he was wearing. That's that day. He was wearing a funky beret because that was, again, like his hero Che Guevara, wore a black beret. That was his uniform.

He looked like Pedro Pascal right there. He does a little bit. And in this one, he's playing cosplay, trying to be Che Guevara and walking into a big office building in downtown Vienna, Austria, 1975, with five henchmen with guns and took the place hostage. and ran off with dozens of hostages out into the North African desert and ransomed them for millions of dollars. So, crazy story.

We'll come back to that. Okay. When you first walk in there and you're like, oh, shit, it's happening. Yeah. First of all, were you meeting with them in like a holding room or something like that? Yeah. So you think of a visitor's room in prison, and it wasn't like that. Because you imagine, you've seen those enough films where you know,

kind of there's all these chairs and maybe police people congregate. It was, if viewers have a sense of the size of this studio, It was smaller than this, by about half. It's about 14.5. By 18. So, yeah, maybe that. Enough room for a table and four chairs around it. I was in one chair.

Carlos gets ushered in, and he sits right next to me. So we're like two feet away. And the guy, you know, it's not scary because it's, you know, under very controlled conditions. And he's been a prisoner and he's an old man for a long time. but kind of the moment of kind of like this is this is my research subject and it's like you've been trying to discover some new species and suddenly this is this animal is that you've been spending years studying is is right there in front of you're at Jurassic Park yeah you're looking at this you know T-Rex or whatever it is a velociraptor and and thinking man I can't believe

I am two feet away from this guy that I've been obsessively researching for the last couple of years and here he is. So it's pretty wild. How do you walk in? Like, what was the vibe walking in? And how's his English too? So his English is great. And that's one of the things, he's a smart guy and he speaks five languages at least. And including Russia, because he was lived in Russia as a kid, of course Spanish, English, French, Arabic. And so you hear him, I'm there first. So I'm kind of camped out in this little room just kind of waiting for him to show up. And you can hear him coming down the hall because there's a commotion. and everybody in prison knows

Carlos the Jackal and they call him Carlos and so you hear the French, the guards saying oh, Monsieur Carlos, bonjour, how are you? And then he kind of knows them so he's ragging him and I described this scene where he's kind of shadow boxing with one of them and kind of, you know, pretend like he's beating the crap out of him. So he's very playful in that way with him.

They don't treat him like he's some, you know, arch-murderer, but just like he's some famous guy who happens to live in the same place where they work. So then he kind of walks in And you think he's gonna walk in and like in a prison jumpsuit But no, I don't know if it's because he's this is how he dresses to meet visitors Or if it's how he dresses every day But he's all natty

He's got like nice pants on and it has a nice brown leather bomber This is late winter so it's kind of cold In prison? Yeah, and he's got like a little leather cap on like a little cap on like that would have thrown me off It looks like you might you might have met him at Target or something So it doesn't feel like you're in prison at all. He's a little bit, you know, scruffy. He apologized, actually, for not shaving. He hadn't shaved that for a couple of days. He had a little bit of stubble.

Takes off his hat, sits down, kind of gives me a very bemused smile. And then almost like, what's their subject today? What do you want to talk about? Who are you again? And and I'm saying, gee, Mr. Carlos, you know, I'm not like a schoolboy, but I'm trying real hard not to be kind of overwhelmed by the moment. And then I just explain again who I am. I'm a journalist of the Washington Post, and I'm an author, and I'm working on this book, and I want to understand the kind of early history of these terrorist movements, and you were right at the middle of all that, and I just would appreciate having some of your memories. And then I just went through my list, and the areas where he was okay with talking, that became a longer

conversation. And then others just kind of got exed off my question list as, okay, that's That's not going to be very productive, but that's just kind of how it went. So, Dief is a script writer and a writer and a novel writer as well. I'm seeing the script here, dude. Joey Warwick running into the prison. Oh, my God, it's happening. It's raining a little bit outside. He's covering himself.

He gets in there, bonjour. And they walk through. It's like all tense. He sits down. He's waiting. And then we just see like a dude coming through in a bomber jacket. We don't see his face yet, but he's like shadow boxing with the prisoners along the side. and you're looking, he's not revealed.

Then he walks in, saunteres in with a little gate, sits down, you're staring at him, like, shaking. Yeah. And then he goes, so. What's going on? And then the movie goes to Venezuela. Yeah. Something like that. That's a great scene.

Yeah. Okay. And then it ends. Can we copyright that? Yeah. Yeah. No, I might need to write this now. I see the movie getting adapted.

Dibs. Dibs on that, Dief. We got that. That's wild, though. Like, I'm getting chills thinking about, like, him walking in and just kind of. the other interesting moment in the beginning was him figuring out what language you were going to use said can we can we speak in english because even though he's been in a french prison for 30 years english is his most comfortable language i really and so there was kind of oh good we can talk in

english and that was kind of relief to me too because i wasn't sure so i knew speak french no i fair like 15 words so it wasn't it wasn't going to be much of conversation if we had to speak in french and i had been so afraid i knew that historically he spoke pretty good english because he's on the record, many of his crimes, announcing himself in English and having conversations in English and writing letters. But I just, he'd been in jail in France for so long. Does he still speak it? I just didn't know. And so it was a relief to me when he said, oh, great, let's talk English. That'll be, that'll be better for me. And so, okay, Carlos, what will we talk about? And it was more kind of his curiosity, what did I want to know? And him being not reticent, but almost kind of like,

oh, yeah, so do you want to talk about that? I can, I can fill you in on. on Vienna in 1975. Let's chat with that. So that's kind of how it evolved. Did you start with his childhood? I think, no. So I talked with, because this very key moment for me

is how he parachuted into the Middle East as a young man and why and what were the circumstances. So I asked him, and because that was about, that was the heart of this effort to try to reconstruct this period of history

of, you know, of sort of early, terrorism, why did you go there? And what, you know, what were the circumstances? What did you hope to achieve? So I went right to this really pivotal moment early in his life when he became, made the step from being what had been a college student in the Soviet Union got kicked out of school, as it turns out. You got kicked out? Got a girl pregnant, had all these problems. Yeah, I got kicked out of school because he was such a partier. There's this great scene where he actually, you know, sort of the Soviet minders

come into the university dorm to kind of, because there's been a party and they're trying to figure out what and on, they go into Carlos' room, there's liquor bottles all over the place, and then this drunk prostitute stumbles out of a closet. And so Carlos is out of, he's got money because his dad had money and he's, he has foreign currency.

Communists had money. Yeah, he did, which is interesting because of this communist who was actually very rich. But, funny how that happens. So a prostitute, someone's out of the closet and the Soviet authority is kind of, what are you doing here? Her reply is,

I feel sympathy for the oppressed. So she was trying to relieve their repression or something like that with whatever favors. But so that was his life. And because he was such a washout and he got kicked out of school, he had nowhere else to go. So he moved himself to the Middle East,

partly because he was just out of options. He didn't want to get trouble with his family. And he wanted to become a guerrilla fighter. So he went to the Middle East and became one. And so I wanted to try to get him to recreate that feeling and why he did it back then. That's actually a really good spot to spawn in. Yeah, to start in. And then you kind of, the rest of his career proceeds from there.

All right, real quick. I just got to go to the bathroom. Sure. We'll come back and pick it up. Gotcha. All right. I could do the same. All right, we're back.

We were actually just starting to talk off camera. I want to make sure we got on camera having this discussion because we were going back and forth about like the creative process and all that. And as a two-time Pulitzer winner, I always. You know, I think when I have a guy like you in here, I love to know what that looks like. But the thing I was just going to tell you about that I said to save it for camera was whenever you're going to do anything, whether it's music or writing or, you know, drawing, whatever it might be creatively. I always love the Ed Sheerin idea of it where he talks about the faucet. So he shows on one side you picture a faucet that the water coming out is all brown and dirty and everything.

And then on the other side you see a faucet and the water coming out is crystal clear. And it always talks about how in order to be creative and make great shit, every session you do in some way, some longer than others, has to start with the dirty faucet just to get it out and start working it out. And then you work your way of the clean faucet and create great stuff. Do you agree with that? It is such an important lesson to learn because you think you're going to sit down at a keyboard and just write some opus. that the thing is no matter what your talent is

it's all that muddy crap comes out first it's not refined and you kind of sometimes just have to get it out kind of almost like free write and then once you're looking at at some words on a page then you can begin to kind of impose some order on it and do that filtering and purifying

and also the hard part from me is because writing is such a personal thing is to get other people to kind of weigh in, to get very smart editors to kind of look at what you've done and say, you know what, as a outside observer, I have to say this doesn't work or you should do more of this.

And yeah, there's a lot of filtering before you come up with a product that looks like it's where you want it to be. Now, when you were writing stories for many years that are news stories, you generally, correct me, if I'm wrong, always have some sort of word number idea on it going into it, right?

Okay, and then you're also writing things pretty often. So you're going through stories, you're getting sources. And it starts to become the kind of thing where you have your voice, you have your style. But I'd imagine you get a good feel for what you got to do to put out the similar here's what's going on. Everyone else make your judgment. Whereas when you're writing your books, you're sitting with research for months and years at a time. You're organizing your thoughts based on all these different sources you're talking to and then trying to bring it back as you. you brilliantly do to like a narrative driven story. What's your order there? Like how are you getting

all the sources first or are you already outlining what you want before you talk to anyone? How do you go about it? Yeah. So the other number, there's the number that word count you'd mentioned in your head. The other number that is factors in as a journalist but also as a nonfiction writer is the is deadline. And if you're a journalist working for a daily newspaper or a wire service, as I've done, you have to be creative in a very constricted part of the amount of time. You have to kind of write the story. Sometimes you go walk in the newsroom in the morning.

You don't realize that by the end of the day, you have to produce 1,500 words or 2,000 words on this subject that you may not know very much about. So you kind of do all this research and reporting, and then you have to kind of write quickly, which is not easy to do, especially for, I struggle with that. And with this the same, if I didn't have a calendar deadline with an editor saying, we need this manuscript delivered by this date, I would probably research

forever. There'd be no, because often there's like an infinite amount of information you could acquire, but you're forced at some point to shut off the research picket and just start writing. And so for me, I usually just have, just allow myself to just run free with the research in the beginning and just try to learn as much as I can. How many books are available on this subject? and can I absorb them all? How many articles have been written?

You know, what are the interviews? What are the original sources? Just absorb all this data. And then at a certain point, you start to think, what is this story going to look like? And how am I going to structure it? And for me, that process is massive white walls. I have a basement that's just filled with just blank white walls.

Whiteboard? Whiteboards? Let's go. There are many ways you can do it. You can have whiteboard paint, which doesn't work very well. as I've discovered, you can buy big rolls of it and just wallpaper your place with just rolls. Your wife lets you do this?

Only in the basement, which she doesn't allow me to base, doesn't essentially walk into my space because it's just, it's so messy and so cluttered, it'll just kind of make you make your head explode. How many square feet we work on with down there? So this is like, it's basically the size of my house. Let's go. But you know what else it is? It's all my workout area. And I find that if I'm struggling with like how to structure a story or how to start a story,

I'll work out. And then suddenly as I'm doing something physical, it comes to me. And then I'll start writing it down on these ridiculous-looking whiteboards where it's, sometimes it's drawn out. Like how story starts here, the scene or the kind of the moment where Carlos is walking into the guest room in the prison. And then how do I structure from there? And what's that almost novel-like? What's the climatic moment? When does, where's the point where there's the ultimate suspense?

And you kind of create those moments because you want it to be, you want the reader to get to an end of the chapter and they just can't wait to see what happens next. But that has to kind of be planned out. Like you have to kind of put those dots on a matrix and figure out. This is the rising action. This is kind of the resolution. This is kind of the cliffhanger moment. This is how I'm going to weave in this very complicated dramatic thread.

And to me, it all becomes like written, scrolled out on big boards of lots of post-it notes stuck here and there. And it looks like the product of a disease mind when you're kind of put it wrong. You're Charlie and always sunny. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. And I don't think unnecessarily. a visual thinker in that way, but I found that just as a process of creating something like that,

I can't create a book without that, that kind of this gathering information, let it kind of ferment a little bit, and then start to kind of visually structure it and create on a whiteboard what those scenes are going to be and how they're all going to string together. But that's all, it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, that's coming together while you're also still in the midst of flying to see people and meet with people and talk with sources on the phone and stuff like that. Because one thing that you discover is when you start to try to write, you realize how much you don't know. Right.

You've gathered a lot of information, but like, I'm writing the scene, but I don't really know the details that well. Where else am I going to get it? So it turns out that you're still reporting up to the moment you turn in your manuscript because there's things, holes that you didn't realize you needed to fill in until you're that far along. And then it's, gosh, I got to find somebody who knows this. act and how am I going to find this person? Who could it possibly be? And there's a lot of kind of

desperation reporting at the end. Because you do have that tick, tick, tick of a deadline that's always in the back of your mind that I got to turn this thing in. And so there's never enough time to kind of do it as well as you think you should be doing it. But it's still a different kind, again, you're not dealing with the daily kind of deadline or the weekly deadline with writing the story. You know that you have a year or two to do something like this and you can get all enthralled in it. And also, we forgot to say this, but I know in the past when you've gone to write a book, they have, they've let you take some time away to go do that full time as opposed to like writing your stories all the time for the Washington Post. But now over the past year and a half, you've stepped back from being full time national security reporter for the first time. And now you're doing, you're more like part time with them.

Yes. I've got a contributing writer basically for them. But I don't have the staff position anymore. By my own choice, they took a buyout. So I was able to get, I did it so I could get some space. That's where I can do some more creative work. Because I feel like because I've been able to do this successfully, it is much more fulfilling to be in control of a story from start to finish

and to have something when you're all done that, you know, this is not disposable daily journalism. This is something that hopefully stands. And it's more of an achievement. It feels like it's something that has kind of a legacy value in a way. Real quick, can you just take the phone off the cord right there? I just don't want to interfere with the audio. We're all good.

It's like very finicky. Like sometimes our chords down here, I'll step on it and I'll change the frequency. I still don't understand some of that stuff with audio. It's crazy. But what is, so when you write, though, again, it's a different emotion when you're sitting down writing a book and writing chapters. that you're living with than when you're writing a story at the desk at the Washington Post. But when you sit down and you're starting to write the book, I imagine you're doing it in your basement where all these boards are.

But do you have like a set process, you know, that you hear from so many writers where it's like, I write from 8 to 12 a.m. or from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. I don't have any internet access. I'm sitting in the same place. Or are you more free-willing? It has to be structured and discipline. And I'm not. naturally very good at that. I'm a real procrastinator. And that's the problem with a two-year deadline because you feel like, oh, I got plenty of time.

And I could take off and I can paint the living room or do something else, and you can find a million ways to fill your time. So I have to say, all right, every day this week, I'm going to block out this amount of time in the morning. I'm not going to take any calls. I'm going to shut off all the alerts on my phone

have to do that. And the other thing that's my own little personal trick is it's a physical hourglass, like an egg timer kind of thing. I've got a 30-minute hourglass. And it's just a cheap plastic one filled with blue sand, and I'll put it on my desk and I go, boom, turn it upside down. That starts 30 minutes. I'm not going to look up until the last grade of sand is gone.

And that is like free write time. I'm going to do this and nothing else. Or if it's a research day, I have to find out the certain fact. I'll time myself. and if I force myself to just not do anything else for 30 minutes, that doesn't seem like a lot of time. Oh, no. But if it's focused time,

that you can write the start of a chapter in 30 minutes. You can at least have a, you know, you're trying to do some research. You can at least have in your hands in 30 minutes a pretty good, you know, estimation of all the sources that you need to write this particular chapter. You can do a lot in 30 minutes if it's absolutely focused time and the way for me to physically do it is to have an hour have the hourglass in front of me.

I also have an hourglass app. So if I don't have from somewhere else, I'm at the library at a coffee shop, I actually have an hourglass app that all it is is a picture of an hourglass with sand going zero. That's so cool. And you could set the time on it and I'll put the phone at an angle where I can see it. And then until that little chime goes off that the hourglass is done with that a lot of amount of time, I'm not allowed to do anything but this one task that I have. for me. So that's my own little cheat. I love that. That's great. Yeah, I have a little.

It's over there somewhere. I have a little round timer thing. Okay. Just kind of turn and I'll put it. I have to use it more than I do. But I'll do that for like 30 or 60 minute intervals when it's really shit that I don't want to be doing and like try to time myself to get it done or even creatively restrict something. Yeah. Like I make for every episode we ever do on the main channel we're doing three a week, I make all the thumbnails.

We end up testing three of them. usually 15 to 25 that people don't see. But like in that process, each of those mornings, I put out episodes usually like Tuesdays Friday, Saturday, or Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. You know, I'll try to like, especially with a bigger episode that I know people are really looking for and want, I'll try to restrict myself to like an hour

to come up with all the ideas. So that even if I end up working past it, I get so much done in that hour that the best ideas have somehow been creatively flubes. out because your mind is working against that. This needs to be done by 10.30 instead of actually 12. Yeah. That I don't know, it forces you to do something good, I find.

I feel like these days, to get anything done, you need something like that because the distractions with these phones, if something's unpleasant, if it's even slightly, you know, like writing a, you know, opening sentence to a chapter is just really hard. to do. And if you're struggling with it, it's uncomfortable, then all of a sudden, what's, you know, what's my friend Julian doing? Or what's this message you just sent me? Or what's going on in Iran and the news today? There's a million things that your mind wants to kind of shut off and turn to. And if you allow yourself to wander like that, you're never going to get that first sentence written. So for me, at least, I need to have a physical reminder that right now

I'm going to focus and I'm not going to do anything else until this, until that sand finishes leaving the hourglass. What goes into writing a brilliant opening sentence? Because you described your writing style earlier and I totally agree. Like you, your nonfiction books read like beautiful fictional thrillers. Like you're engrossed in the story. You feel like you're there. You're not just reporting on facts.

There's a time in place for that. And some people do a great job with that. But your style is like, I mean, you're not. I mean, I can see the movie playing out before my eyes. I love, I'm drawn to storytelling. Yes. And for me, it becomes figuring out the most appealing way to create a scene, to get people in the moment.

That's very conscious with me. I want people to be there at that moment with me. And so in order to create that scene, I kind of have to be there myself. And I spend a lot of time, like in my little workout area, or sometimes I'll take a walk, and I'll just to kind of, I'll be in that scene myself. And then I have to have to figure out how do I,

how do I bring people along with me? What's that, what's that image that I want them to see that I see? And, and sometimes the first time you try it doesn't work, so you just rewrite it and rewrite it until you come over the way that does. But that's always, the scene creation is, and I'm sorry, I'm jumping around here with this, but no, it's good. It's great. with nonfiction is a different exercise because if fiction you're just kind of imagining this you're

creating something in your head if with nonfiction you're putting yourself in a historical moment you're trying to make yourself see what it was like to be Carlos the jackal on this day where he did this certain thing and and how am i going to kind of paint that picture for people who are going to read the book and it's it's really is a fun exercise for me and when it comes across when it succeeds It's just thrilling to myself. I just, wow, that really worked. You know it when it's there, right? Yeah, and I may take a long time to get there,

but once I feel like I've nailed it, it's exhilarating. I've created this scene that I've had in my head, now it's on paper, and it kind of works. So the first chapter after the prologue of Black Flags, I remember this. This is the opening paragraph you wrote, and this is like, you want to talk about putting yourself there. The most notorious of Jordan's prisons is the old fortress of Al Jaffer, known for decades as the place where

troublesome men went to be forgotten. It lies outside a Bedouin village of the same name on a road that marks the outer boundary of human habitation in the country's fierce southeastern desert. Beyond the prison, the terrain flattens into a basin of baked mud that stretches to the horizon without a hill or rock or stubble of grass. The ancient sea that once stood here evaporated eons ago. leaving an emptiness like a missing limb, a void so unnatural that it stirs feelings of dread among the few travelers who pause for a look. There's a terrible loneliness,

wrote filmmaker David Lean, who shot parts of Lawrence of Arabia in the same mudflats in 1962, and pronounced the place, quote, more deserted than any desert I've ever seen, unquote. His picture editor Howard Kent would describe Al Jaffer as simply, quote, a warning of what hell is like, unquote.

You did like, 10 different things there in probably like seven or eight sentences that literally put people smelling the lack of grass. Yeah. Yeah. I, having been in these places myself, you have a visual impression and you know what it smells like it feels like and feels like. And I put so much time and thought into trying to create that moment, that feeling and what it smells like and feels like.

And I'm flattered that you, when you read it, you kind of put yourself there too. And then when you have that moment, that opening moment, when you're in this wild desert, and then you're superimposed on that, this prison where these hopeless, rejected inmates are kind of squandering their lives. And in that environment is this guy named Sarkawi, who ends up being the founder of ISIS. And that you can sort of understand his story when you kind of imagine him there in this very desolate place, in this harsh prison. And from that, he creates his cadre of radical followers. who become ISIS later on in their history. It's reminiscent of like you combining the spirit of like inception, the matrix, and

Ebenezer Scrooge, a Christmas story. Because in a weird way, it's a funny combination, but like you're spawning in like it's the matrix to where you can see this. You're creating the world and it's all coming together in front of you like DiCaprio when he's walking through the different cities and everything comes together. And then you're also seeing people in real places and real things. things who can't see you back, but they were hearing it happen. Yeah, that's true. Like Scrooge did.

Yeah. And that's, that does it. And the thing is that makes it challenging as a nonfiction writer is every element of that, everything I had to construct in that opening paragraph had to be absolutely real and authentic. I mean, I had to find those quotes from those filmmakers who were there in the same spot where the prison happened to be, which was a real find, which is a great discovery when I, when I found that. But, you know, to be able to describe.

those conditions and the fact that it used to be a sea there, but now it dried up. And it's like when a sea is gone, it leaves kind of an impression, like an empty limb. Every moment of every bit of that has to be real and authentic. And so you have to know all that before you can begin to describe it. And that's just an extra hurdle for somebody who does what I do. It's amazing. And that's what leaves a first impression to, especially the first one in the first chapter. That is true.

Yeah. Get you a little Pulitzer, by the way, apparently. Yeah, the Pulitzer board likes that kind of. that. Kind of scene. That's what did it. That's the first one right there. But when you sit down for that half hour and you're watching the hourglass and everything,

it sounds like it's not so much. You're like, I need a certain number of words or a certain percentage of a chapter. You're more just like locked in. And if you write, and correct me from wrong here, if you write, end up writing 200 really important great words or for 2000 very well written out

outlines of what's going to end up being a bigger part of the chapter. either one is acceptable to you. Yeah, exactly. So it's not, you have an objective, which is to create this evocative moment for the reader in the beginning of the book, to get them kind of in a place to force, transport them there. But you also have to be economical with the words, because if you overdo it, if it begins to feel, you know, tiresome, there's kind of a line there. You start to lose people because they don't want to be that invested in time-wise into kind

of being in a particular place. So you have to do it in this case in a paragraph and that's to be the best paragraph you ever wrote But you can't you can't let it go on too long because then then you start to kind of air the other way and people are just kind of tired of your You know it's too much of a process How do you how do you balance that? How do it? Because you said you know once you have it yeah But on the way there I'm sure there's a lot of times with a paragraph like that where you're like Oh, I feel really good about this but why do I feel like it's not finished. Yeah, or what if I feel like I've, it's too long. Yeah. And that's often

you'll, if you see early drafts of that page, for example, there'll be, you know, something else I tried to do there, a whole other image I tried to kind of layer on that felt excessive to me. And so I'm very aggressive in the cutting after I'm, after I've finished the first try, then I realize that, okay, I like where this is going, but it's too much. And I have to, I have to chop it by a third. And that's my own kind of a voice in my head saying, don't lose the reader here. You know, get them hooked on this spot,

but don't give them too much. Just give them enough to kind of transport them there and then move on to the next thing you're trying to do in the scene. I imagine it varies scene to scene like when you are chopping away. But do you find patterns sometimes maybe of, there's too many prepositional phrases of description. here or, you know, I'm given extra quotes where I don't need them. Is there a usual kind of where the fat gets trimmed?

It's, I like to think that it's my own self-editing and it is trying to be just fierce about chopping out those extra prepositions and adjectives. And it's aspiring to an economy of words that is exactly what you need, but no more. And sometimes I'll succeed at that and sometimes it'll be an editor will come and look at it and say it's a great scene a little too long, can you cut it some?

What I found, the struggle with Carlos' book was that there was, I ended up cutting whole chapters because I would write something and I try to insert some historical context because I think it's important and I realize when I'm finished that it was interesting to me but probably not really interesting to most people

and I'm going to lose people in this detail if I don't just cut that out and get right to the next interesting scene with Carlos's life. And that's a hard thing to do because you'll spend a lot of time on that chapter and then you realize I'm going to just have to cut it.

It's going to be gone. And then you just, I realize I just wasted weeks because it took a lot of time for the research and also the writing and then just to discover in rereading it that it was just excessive. You just have to let it go. So that's one of the painful parts.

How has your writing or has your writing changed and adjusted over the years based on people shortening attention spans? Yeah. It is always top of mind with me because I know that people struggle to read and that every page you have to be thinking, people who read this are going to have an option to keep going or they can say, this is too much of investment. I'm going to go back to TikTok or something like that. So every page has to be approached with a discipline of like, I have to make this interesting enough to make you want to read the next page and to give some value.

Used to be like in longer news stories, I mean sometimes talk about leaving little jewels in a long story. You don't want to have just facts. You want to leave the reader with little surprises, little things they might not have expected, little quotes that kind of make something feel real and interesting. and sprinkle those throughout a long story so that it becomes their little rewards for the reader when he gets to the next chapter. And I feel like I need to do that in my books too. Have you ever seen Matt Stone and Trey Parker

from South Park talk about storytelling? I know that I've seen a little of that. But you'll be able to tell it better than me, but I know they have a real interesting discipline about it. Yeah, I want to find the clip. Okay, because I think with art and storytelling, telling is one of the most prime things in any kind of art. There's different ways to get there. There's not a straight formula. Like, I've always take an issue with people talking about the

formula of like a hit song. Yeah, there's sometimes where that can work, but then you'll see a lot of great art, a lot of great songs made, yep, that's it. We'll get that in a second, but a lot of great songs made that challenged brand new boundaries where they didn't write it with the, let me get this at the top of Z-100. They wrote it as, like, like, I feel this. This is me. And then suddenly, guess what? People feel that because it's genuine.

Yeah, it's emotional power. So people have different ways of going about it. But this is a great clip, right? I think this is it. Well, I want the one where they talk about, it's at NYU. So that's the one. But they talk about like the but then instead of and. Exactly.

Yeah, you know the one I'm talking about for people out there. This is it. So it's only 36 seconds. Okay, let's play this real quick so people got this and then we'll talk about it. We can take these beats, which are basically the beats of your outline and if the words and then belong between those beats, you're f***ed basically. You got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you've written down is either the word therefore or but and that's why you get a show that feels like okay this to that to this to that but this here's the complication to that Just like, this happened and then this happened and this happened.

That's not a movie, you know, that's not a story. Like Trey said, it's those two, but because, therefore, that gives you the causation between each beat. And that makes that, that's a story. I love that. You can't string a bunch of facts along with hands. It has to be reasons of therefore or a butt. So people want to move on to the, to the next part or to the conclusion. What's impressive about that is you see what ordinary guys they are?

Oh, yeah. And they were kind of creating a show in their basement with like real cheap cartoon effects, almost like cut out characters. And they managed to figure out how to tell the story. And that's an impressive achievement. Then they went on to do Broadway shows. So it's just, I just pretty much in awe of those two. Yeah, they also piss off every single group and organization known to man.

Yeah. They have no chill on it. Like the whole show is making fun of, it starts with middle class white suburbia. and then it makes fun of every religion, race, group, like in stereotypes that it's uncancelable. Yeah. It's amazing what they pulled off. But like the storytelling, as your point out, is what brings it together because it's just, you think about that and then you start to think about how you talk with people and when you're

really maybe cooking on something personal and you can see people are feeling that, go back and think about most of the patterns of how you're telling the story. Yeah. there's fewer and thens yeah exactly and and the thing is about doing factual reporting is is you know a lot of facts and you're tempted to want to do and and then and then and then because you you discover these facts you think they're interesting and you just want to share them but if you don't have that structure of that therefore or that but then it just gets boring it becomes like a recitation of facts that nobody cares about do you ever have something like

that written out in a way on your whiteboard to where you have the pictures or the bullet points of a part. And then I'm not saying you use the words but or therefore, but you're like you go arrow to here's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. I do in the sense that when I'm doing my little outlines, when I'm doing my whiteboarding, I need to create those tension moments. And those tension moments come from the therefores and the butts. And you just can't have facts laid out in a linear fashion. They have to be going somewhere. You have to create that dramatic tension. And that's, as a nonfiction writer, you have to do that with the facts that you have. But if they're there, that story is there, then you just have to figure out a way to structure it.

So you have those little cliffhangers, you have those surprising moments. And every chapter has something that just you didn't expect or create tension that drives people on to the next part of the book. Besides the volume of research, like removing that for a second, do you know, going into beats of it where a chapter is going to be, one chapter is going to be 25 pages roughly versus another one might be five or six? Or does that happen naturally in the writing? It's an evolution and you change your mind a lot. But one thing, just an example from Carlos, I end up deciding to tell the story of Vienna OPEC, this dramatic moment in Carlos's life. I tell it twice. I tell it, which is unusual. It's a weird way to structure things. But it's the prologue. So you open the book and this

wild terrorist attack is happening. And so you go through it one time and you're introduced in the middle of it to this really charismatic figure named Carlos who just introduces himself to the hostages right in the middle of this hostage taking event. I'm the famous to Carlos. You know who I am. That's essentially is coming out to the world, announcing himself to the hostages and to history. I am the famous Carlos. And then the story replays itself about halfway through the book when you get to that moment organically, but the perspective changes. So now you're seeing it from perspective of six terrorists who are in a safe house in Vienna kind of getting ready for this big attack they're going to do. So it switches the vantage point, but you see them fighting with each other or are we

going to do it this way? We should, we, Carlos wants to kill a couple of people and the other guys I think it's a bad idea. And you see the plan almost falling apart. And then they get themselves together and they do it after all and succeed at it. So you're actually creating that tension twice in the book, but in a very different way. I want to come back to Carlos with that beginning in a few minutes, but going back to Black Flags and writing about Al-Zakawi. How do you determine where the start's going to be? Because with him, you start when he's in a Jordanian prison, already an adult.

You don't go to his childhood. You don't start with some flash forward to when he's pulling off some crazy bombing in Iraq after we invaded or something like that. You don't start with his death, which is a whole thing. You started at the prison. How far into the process did you know you were going to start there and why? That was, it wasn't super late, but it was well into, I'm trying to write. I'm trying to kind of put chapters together already.

And I think for me it becomes this process of trying to imagine, put myself in Carlos's place. Oh, sorry, not Carlos, but Zarqawi's place. And imagine these pivotal moments, these moments where that is sort of life-changing, transformative moments in his life. And the one that seemed to be most powerful, most impactful was his time when he had moved himself back to Jordan, and he ends up in a prison and he's there with a bunch of guys who end up becoming his his his disciples later on in his story and in just thinking about that moment and imagine what it must have been like for a guy in his late 20s to be there it seemed to make all the difference in his life story and so I wanted to come make that this moment where you you're walking in midstream in his life you're

not starting out with with Zarqawi's a baby and you're not at the end of his life where he's this international terrorist this is a moment that sort of changes him personally, makes him into who he is. And it's such a colorful place, it's such a evocative place, that if I can put readers in that moment with him, in that prison, in that desert, then you've not only kind of transported readers to a different place in time,

but it happens to be the moment that young Zarqawi is making this chef from being just a ne'er-do-well street thug to being a leader of men. That happens in prison. So I wanted to make that moment, you know, really powerful for readers. I was really lucky to just have the great H.W. brands sitting there. Oh, well. Like a month and a half ago or a couple months ago.

Great guy, obviously, he's written like 42 American History books in 39 years. And I've lost some of the books he's written. But he talked to me about the relationship, particularly in biographies that he has with the subject to where he's like, I live with this person for a year. I read everything they ever wrote, everything that was written about them. You get to know them. You start when they were a baby. You end when they're dead. And he talks about the emotions sometimes when he has to go kill them at the end because they died.

And how it's like in one case you could have a Teddy Roosevelt where he's like, oh, thank God, this guy was exhausting. Great guy, but like, holy shit. It's too much. You know, too much coffee. And then with a Ben Franklin where he's like, I'm crying because I just spent 84 years with Ben Franklin in a way. and he was an amazing man and now this giant is dead. You know, so what I wonder is when you're writing about an Alzacali in the case of someone who's now dead

or even like a Carlos de Jekyll who's still alive, with the Alzakawi one, when you open in the prison right there and you're seeing that moment where he takes the full step forward and has the disciples and says, I want to be a leader of men and start the movement, you're writing it out with beautiful prose. but do you have a moment where you're almost like in the room going

no like Matthew McConae, don't do it God damn it. Like where you're fighting and you're like shit I got a right that he's like yeah I'm going to become this guy. Yeah and that's kind of been my curse and my writing career is that I keep coming back to these bad guys and so you you want to understand them

and you want people to kind of understand their journey but they're terrible people so you don't really want them to empathize with them. I've been having this conversation actually with family I need to have a hero as a center of a book for the next one instead of these really exhausting criminals because they're very, you know, enticing stories and they're, they make great tales, but they're they're bastards, they're horrible people. And so you don't, you don't really sympathize for them, but you, but I feel they're necessary stories to tell in my, my opinion,

because they kind of help define, help explain where we are. are as a society. But yeah, it is, it is this kind of a really odd thing where you're so deeply into this personality and what makes them tick and also understanding not just their flaws, but they're just their pathology. These are really deeply sick individuals and they do terrible things. So you're writing about these bad people. Is it similar? Do you have a process like a lot of script writers will have where they'll write down tone and theme words before they ever write a word of like what is the tone of this script. This is the story I'm telling, but these are the emotions that I kind of want people to feel. Do you ever do that? I do it and sometimes with an aid of

music and this is maybe unusual, but I have a playlist that has tone attached to it. This is, this is dark music. So I'm in a dark place. I'm in a desert and I've got music to match. and I like to have like music in the background that's not kind of distracting, but it kind of helps evoke the mood that I want to create. So I really like to do that. All right. What was the music playing in the background for Black Flags? So there's some really, one playlist has a lot of Mozart, especially in this Requiem period.

There's some really kind of deeply disturbing music. that he put out. It's part of that, particularly. It's like, it's, you know, the lyrics, which people don't understand because they don't speak Latin or whatever it was written in, but it's like being consigned

to the flames of woe and, you know, all these, basically recreating hell. And it's some of the darkest music on my playlist, but if I'm getting in a really dark place, I'll put on something like that. That kind of just, it's the emotion of music

that sometimes leads to the words that create the scene. That's awesome. I love that. All right. So Carlos the Jackal right here, when I opened up Black Flags, I went to the first chapter and skipped the prologue of what you wrote on the first chapter. But I'm going to read what you wrote at the beginning,

the prologue right here to set the scene. So it's called a hostage taking in Vienna. As you said, you were writing about December 21st, 1975. There had been signs of trouble, but these were few invents. fleeting, mere apparitions that appeared and then vanished amid the blinding snow squalls that swept through old Vienna in the twilight days of late December. No one had paid attention to the olive-skin

foreigner, a lost tourist perhaps, who wandered uninvited onto the second floor of the Vienna headquarters of the world's leading oil cartel, pausing for a long moment to study the corridor and the signs pointing through the executive suites. And no one thought twice about the sallow use, with hair like greasy straw who paced out the length of the sidewalk by the building's entrance, stealing glances at the police officer posted at the doorway and the bodyguards in the limousines parked out front. That is some dark night-level opening scene shit right there. It gets crazy.

My mom, I won't give too much away, but this first scene leads with these terrorists arriving by streetcar, of all things. They show up at OPEC and an ordinary streetcar. and you see them just kind of breezing to the building, saying hello to the cop outside who doesn't search them, and then they're all carrying these duffel bags, identical sports bags, because they're on the way to some sporting event.

And you see them go into the building and climb up back stairway, and then they stop open in their bags and one of them puts a mask over their face. And that's the end of the scene. So you've got, get them up to the moment where they're just getting their guns out and getting ready to storm into the place,

and then that's where it cuts off. and then it moves on to another place. But really, it is a dark opening scene by I wanted people to be present in that very snowy, cold, everything's shut down because it's almost Christmas and this very weird place, which is Vienna in the 70s during the Cold War

where those kind of cross shows between east and west. And in the middle of that comes this just outrageous terrorist attack that had been unlike anything that ever happened in history before. It also reads like you can't see his face. You see his gate.

You see his walk. You're seeing them from behind. You're seeing chaos building like that. Little hints of something bad that's about to happen. And guys who are in the wrong place, you're doing something that had no business doing. But nobody connects the dots until much later. That something bad is about to happen. And you're also painting a picture of people very calm to create chaos.

Yeah. To walk into a place very deliberately like soldiers. and getting ready to kill people. Yeah. Now, you had said this was a story that you were going to end up telling twice because you started in the prologue from one vantage point, and then you go when it comes up in the book eventually to the part where you kind of see them build into it and actually see it from their vantage point.

But same question I asked you about Black Flaggs. How soon into researching this or writing this did you know this is the scene I got to start with because it shows who he is? There was a eureka moment, and it was in my basement working out one day when I had my little whiteboards all displayed. I said, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to open like this in Vienna because it was the most powerful moment of this criminal's life. But I'm going to tell it a second time because I've got this great detail about how it all came together. It's too much for the prologue.

But when readers are coming along on the journey of this guy's life and they've seen him as a young man and now he's like trying to be a terrorist. and then the process that leads him to his ultimate act, his most, the thing he will forever be famous for. What are people that got to go along with him as a 26? He's just so young when he did this, 26. But all the tension within the group and all the kind of uncertainty and whether this was ever going to work or not and you'd have them come along with him

as it was unfolding in real time. And the thought of doing it twice, which is I remember very vividly just thinking, this is what I got to do. This is how I'm going to tell the story. That's awesome. Yeah, I love that opening. I can't wait to read this.

It's going to be great. But you, you know, you talk about that kid that just was kicked out of school and then spawned in in the Middle East and Lebanon said, sign me up. Yet it's strange because he comes from a wealthy family that happens to be communist. So he has, and then he has Che Guevara,

as you said, is like this heroic figure. so he wants to get the fame almost that comes with that, but he puts himself, decides to put himself at what, age 19, 20, 20, 21? 20 when he moved to the Holy Star. Okay, 20 when he moves there. To an entirely new place that he's never been in Lebanon, in the middle of a lot of shit going on, danger. And he's, it's like somehow seemingly his very natural environment,

he seemed to have a real, I don't know if I'm reading into this too much, but like a lack of fear of death or danger. Yeah. If you go to chapter one after the prolog, it basically opens with that, this young man who's walking into a place he's never been. And, but as the first couple sentences indicate,

he is, he just, his one trick in life was to act as though he owned the world. He belongs here. I'm, you know, I'm fearless. I don't know Arabic at the time. He didn't speak any Arabic. He didn't know any. Never been to the Middle East before.

But his one trick is he could just put himself in a place and act as if he belonged there. That's why people didn't question when he would walk into, you know, OPEC in 1975 with guns ined in a bag and never get stopped in question because he just had this way of just seeming like, I belong here. I've kind of, you just walk the party, look the party, look like a rich guy, and nobody ever questioned him. My friend Jim DiOrio, who's Special Forces and FBI for a long time, did a lot of undercover work. He always had a phrase politeness and familiarity breeds access. That was his motto. And his other, it's a corollary to that was, look like you got money in your pocket. And nobody ever suspects a rich guy.

And so he had the kind of the tailored suits and the handcrafted shoes. You know, looked a little bit conservative, kind of had his hair parted in a, you know, in relatively short in the time when people were kind of shaggy and dirty. And but it was the look that mattered to him that if you look a certain way, nobody asks questions. And he got away with half the crap he did in his career because of that. And then he just, and there's this repetition, this kind of, this kind of language that gets repeated early in the book is that it does something horrible and then just, walks away and blends in with the crowd shoots a guy in the face in London walks out to the night blends in with the crowd where does that come from where did he get that like it it reminds me like when decaprio and the departed is talking about how my hand doesn't shake yeah right he's like around

this crazy murderer and my hands like this obviously he has that no pulse just ability to be like just did that that's where's that from that's the other trick with him and i think that's becomes that's part of the criminal narcissist's mind because he can't empathize other people he doesn't relate to he doesn't feel pain that other people feel it's all about himself and his own ego so he can look at somebody in the face from two feet away in this house in London he just walks into this rich guy's house was targeted because he was happened to be a wealthy Jewish businessman that's the only reason he was targeted walks up to his into his bathroom he's in there using the bathroom walks up to him and shoots him square in the face and then walks out and then

in the next scene, just a couple of months later, he's at a shopping mall in Paris. There's all these, it's a day before the start of school year. There's kids with parents shopping and just a very kind of ordinary scene. Nobody, you know, in the scene below him, he's standing on a balcony, has anything to do with any of his causes. There are no bad guys here, just ordinary people, takes a grenade out of his pocket. He has a suit on because, you see, again, looks the part of just a business guy, you know, doing his normal stuff.

and tosses the grenade below into the galley and kills three people, just creates mayhem. And then with his suit on, steps over glass and broken bottles and walks out into the street and vanishes. And nobody thinks twice about him. Keep this mic straight, by the way, just so people have it. But yeah, do you think he actually believed in anything or more or less believed in whatever was going to get him access to be that folk hero.

Yeah, he wanted to be important. And I think he was willing to do things that would be really hard for most people to do, not so hard for Carlos because he just didn't seem to have the emotional empathy. But he knew that he had to do aggressive, daring things to get the attention of people who he wanted to think he was important. So the Palestinian leaders who saw him as a potential asset for them, but he didn't quite trust him. So he did things like shoot a man in the face or throw this grenade into a shopping center to impress them. So they would give him bigger jobs.

And eventually he became so kind of devoted to his own image and kind of promoting his own brand. The Palestinians got sick of him and kicked him out of their organization. So from then on, everything was about Carlos, everybody, every principle that he once espoused. even if it was superficial, didn't matter anymore because his only creed was how to make Carlos rich and successful, how he was going to live the life

that he, the exotic life that he always wanted to live. And even as an old man, he would repeat the jargon saying that I'm a Marxist, I'm trying to fight for the oppressed. He didn't care about the oppressed. He never did one thing

to help Palestinian people. But he liked to think that he did, but he was really just, was trying to promote Carlos as a brand. Do you think he really actually believed he did? And clearly he didn't. But like that was a, he had lied to himself so much that he genuinely thought he helped the cause.

Yeah. I think that because that's what he says to this day. And when you say, well, what about your life or what do you regret or what, you know, what about your life was important in your point of view? And he sees himself as kind of a fighter against, you know, the colonial imperialist powers, you know a champion of Marxism even though his is his real views of those things which was quite superficial and he was very flexible in his and his ideology and who he would work for well when he did spawn into Beirut and said hey sign me up I'm here I

believe like did he go to training camp yeah like what was it like for him to be indoctrinated into actually doing some of these things now so you got this opening scene after he kind of parachutes into Lebanon and doesn't know a soul and shows up on the really shows up at the headquarters of the biggest terrorist group in Lebanon at the time. Just knocks on the door. Just knocks on the door and says he had a note from somebody, met somebody in college who knew some people. So he's just, and how he just doesn't get shot there or like, you know, just kicked out is just

remarkable. But he was such a charmer and he was so convincing to these Palestinian radicals that met him that they thought, well, we'll give him a chance. We'll see if he'll work out. Maybe you won't. So they let him go to one of their training camps, and he learns to shoot guns. It turns out he's a pretty good shot. And throughout his life, that's one thing about him, he said, he's an excellent marksman.

He should very well with left or right hand. But he was a kind of guy. Yeah, he had this attitude, though. There's one scene early on in his training camp. You know, sort of supervisors are walking to the camp to view the exercises and activities. And there's Carlos kind of kicking back on his cot, smoking a cigarette, just kind of ignoring, you know, all the training that's going on around them. And he says, it's all make-believe. None of this is important. You know, I'm here to learn how to do real things. This isn't real. And but he said it so convincingly that the Palestinians decided to promote it to give him, you know, send him to another tramp to another training camp for real terrorist operations.

Instead of just being a gorilla, he was getting special training after that. because of this attitude that I'm really too good for this, you need to send me to advanced training or I'm going to leave, and he got his way. Did he, were his parents still alive at that point? They were, and they didn't know about his little caper going off to the Middle East, and so he ends up after some months there and getting involved in fighting, he gets to become as involved in real violence, goes back to London where his parents moved to, and his parents are just distraught.

you know, you've, you know, you've, what have you driven, we're all crazy with worry about you, where have you been? And his answer to his dad was, I've been in the Middle East learning how to kill Jews. Whoa. Yeah, great line. What does dad say? His dad was, saw the Israelis as being evil as far as, from his Marxist worldview. So I think they didn't particularly like that language, but they didn't, as, as, as, as, as, as, as,

as, as, as, as, as, as, he kind of liked the idea of his son being this kind of, revolutionary character. He didn't like some of the violence, but he didn't really disapprove. His mom was more traditional. She was Catholic, very conservative, and was just mostly worried that there Carlos is going to get killed. What a household, Catholic, conservative mother, a lawyer, communist father. Communist father, who was just an outrageous womanizer, had mistresses in the house. Apple don't fall too far from the tree. And Carlos would say later, he says, we were all like that, you know, in terms of the womanizing. It's just something natural about us is just who we are. And his dad was the same way. And he says they just, you know, some of the

CIA guys that tracked Carlos down later in his career would talk about his crazy charisma he had with women. By the time they caught him, this is he was in his 40s, he had this big belly, you know, jowly, not an attractive guy, but the quote from one of the agency guys who was watching him, literally watching him at the time, said women would flop on their backs for this guy. and the CIA people just could not figure it out. But he had this ability just to get really beautiful and sometimes the wives of government officials in Sudan just to fall in love with him.

And that was, he talks about it almost in a nostalgic way, you know, as an old man that, yeah, just we have something about us, some animal charisma that people, that women like, and he just milked it. I don't know if I'm oversimplifying it, but I might be a hypocrite. oversimplify it for a minute. Obviously, he had charisma. That helps. That's one step. But evolution is just written this way. Yeah. Every guy wants a good girl that only he can secretly

make bad. And every girl wants a bad guy that only they can secretly make good. And they will chase that forever. And that's the guy that they're never going to make good. But they love how bad he is. That's how most of us got here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's insane that he can't. I mean, It's not insane because you see it again and again, he can't see the duality of his life and how one doesn't really jive with what he actually thinks it was, you know, being a Marxist and all that. But really, it's just an opulent womanizer who's doing contracts after he gets kicked out of the organ.

What was that organization called again? This is a popular front for the liberation of Palestine. It was the one Palestinian group. There were two, but this was the one that was considered itself Marxist. So, you know, very different from al-Qaeda. These were not religious people at all. They were secular communist. Do they know what Karl Marx was?

Well, they admired him in their own way. Yeah. But yeah, he's a Jewish guy. It's kind of interesting. Although, you know, you see all these strange bedfellows. So later on in Carlos' career, his benefactor, and the Palestinians too, was a Swiss-Nazi, a guy who had been actually a devotee of Adolf Hitler. And after the fall of the Reich, he smuggled some of their gold out of the country.

He required rights to Joseph Goebel's writings and republished his works. What was this guy's name? Francois G-N-O-U-D-N-O-U-D. He's a Swiss-G-E-N-O-U-D. And just was such a rabid anti-Semite that he thought he sort of became in league with these Palestinian militants

because it was anti-Israel. And he helped bankroll some of their activities. He got legal help for them when they, when their members were arrested, and he later becomes, you know, a personal friend of Carlos and helps him out later on in the book. There's, Carlos is basically an exile in Syria. The Syrians are sponsoring him. They're allowing him to live there. But he's kind of a prisoner of the state. They don't let him do very much. This old Nazi comes and hangs out with them and they listen to old Nazi songs and, you know, reminisce about the good old days when, when the

Hitler almost took over the world. It's just crazy. Such strange bedfellows, too. Absolutely. I mean, there's so much going on when you hear about. On layers and layers of it. That's right. Yeah. What about his brothers?

Are they alive? Did they follow him into any part of the life at all? Yeah. So one of them went to school with him in Moscow, got kicked out with him, and kind of was in his shadow throughout his life. But then they went back to Venezuela as adults and just became business people. And for them, it's always been this strange little footnote for the family. oh yeah we have this guy Carlos it's our brother and he's living in prison in France but did you talk

with him I didn't I tried to reach out and it wasn't able to get any reaction but the mother and father died years ago but the couple brothers are still around yeah now did you get a chance before he died in 2023 to talk to Billy wall about this I regret that I didn't by the time I knew that I was working on this book he had just passed and I remember seeing the obituaries about him but he was one of the guys that caught him, right? He was. And he was kind of this, it was a strange character to be part of the CIA mission. He was a former Green Beret, just to explain who he was.

But he was, by the time he got involved in the Carlos story, he was already in his 60s. So he was an older guy. It was a savage, though. Savage. And he was, he decided to take a job for the CIA's paramilitary division working in Africa, tracking this group called Al-Qaeda that was suddenly on everybody's radar screen. Al-Qaeda had its base at the time in Khartoum in Sudan. Everybody else was there.

Hamas was there. Abu Nadal, who was like a big Palestinian terrorist at the time. Every bad organization you could think of had headquarters in Sudan. And into this environment comes Carlos de Jackal, decides he's going to basically make it his base. And CIA was there. They ended up learning, the most famous terrorists in the world is now in your town, and you've got to go find him. And Billy Waugh, this retired Green Beret, becomes one of the operatives that helped track him down. And they got so close to him, there's a scene nor the end of the book where they realized they don't even have to watch him all the time because they could predict every minute of his day.

He wasn't careful. Well, he wasn't careful at all. And there was this one scene where they follow him to a nightclub one night just to watch him. And there's Carlos on the dance floor drunk, but flirting with women, having a nice time. and the CIA guys who are there is a woman a CIA officer of the station too so they all go out to the dance floor

and they're dancing on the dance floor next to Carlos de Jekyll as close as you to me and just so they could see beads of sweat on his face at this point in this life he's a middle-aged man but he still has his natural grace

he's a good dancer he's having a great time and here's most famous outlaw in the world and these Americans who were trying to track them, inches away from each other, dancing to a song. That's nuts. Did he have what, I mean, Sudan was a hell of a place, as you said at that time. A lot of stuff going on.

I remember there's a famous story where Billy Wall had a shot at Osama bin Laden. And I forget it's been a while. I want to say, like, he was asking permission to go in. He was posing as a cameraman or something. Yeah. And he couldn't get permission in time. And then, you know, this is years before everything happened. But, you know, did we have evidence of like Carlos now as a mercenary terrorist at this point

working with any of these guys at the time and actively meeting with, you know, the early days of al-Qaeda or some of these other groups? He knew all of them. So small enough of a place, they actually got together. These groups had little conferences, you know. So they got jihadi international. And Carlos was like an unofficial. invitee he committed he converted to Islam or is he claimed to it's always been kind of a murky

story he just I think he he made the conversion because he wanted to marry another woman without divorcing the wife the woman he was married to and so he so you know bigamy is allowed and so he becomes a Muslim for that reason but because he's Muslim he's kind of grandfathered into the to the community so they all know each other but Carlos is a bit of an honest duck even back then he's he's he's he's not a jihadist you know he's a secular terrorist it he's not you know an Arab he doesn't belong to any of the other groups he's just kind of this weird guy out by himself but they all knew each other it was kind of a clubby place so he's that he's a secular terrorist but he

comes up working with you know a Palestinian organization fighting for liberation to the things they do that's an interesting way to describe him There's this moment in the middle of the OPEC hostage situation where the Viennes sent an Iraqi negotiator in to try to figure out who Carlos is and what he wants. And he tells him, we're the armed, the Arab revolution. And the Iraqi guy says, but you're not Arab. What are you doing here? And that's always been kind of the thing about his life and his career. He was working for people that he had absolutely in causes.

He had nothing to do with. And that kind of makes him stand out. There were lots of terrorists at the time. None of them were memorable to us because they have names we can't pronounce. They, you know, they were self-sacrificing, a lot of them got killed. But Carlos was this strange guy who was just not of any of those worlds, but he ends up being the face of international terrorism at the time just because he was different. He was charismatic.

He was kind of milked the publicity part of it. Just a very, very strange guy. And he got the name from British tabloid. Is that right? How did that happen? He had like a fake passport or something? So his name is Illich and he never tried to change it. But he had, you know, he said, you know, in interviews,

he had like 100 fake passports in his time. And one of them happened to be a guy named Carlos. He called himself a Peruvian businessman. And when he was arrested or when the police figured out in France that they wanted to catch him, They found one of his passports and his name in the passport was Carlos. And they thought that's really who he was. The jackal part of it became, was just an accident because one of the safe houses he stayed in in London, you know, the reporters were kind of pouring over the house and they found like caches of

weapons that he had there. They also found a copy of this novel by Frederick Forsydeck called The Day of the Jackal. It was famous novel at the time became a movie recently made into a TV series. And they just assumed that Carlos, it was his book, and he had. had read it. And the juxtaposition of the novel in his safe house and the man named Carlos, it just became the tabloids Carlos the Jackal. Genius. Yeah. He liked it. He liked it. It became a headline and it stuck. And for the rest of his career, he was known as Carlos the Jackal, even though it was just completely fake, made-up name. Now, he had gotten kicked out, as you said,

of the, I still forget the name of the group. Popter Front. He got kicked out of the popular front because he did some Hollywood shit. Yeah. Or something like that. Like he did a hostage situation and what was it? He chartered a flight and they didn't like that he took the money. What happened there? Yeah.

So this was the, again, the Vienna thing, which is most known for. The Vienna operation taking over OPEC wasn't his idea. Actually, it was something that was put on him by Moa Mark Adafi, the Libyan leader, who hated other members of OPEC because they refused to raise gas prices higher. He thought they should really shake down the Western world and get as much money as they possibly could. The Saudis and the Iranians at the time were resistant to that. So part of Gaddafi's plan was that you're going to take over, you take these guys hostage, and I want you to execute these two individuals, who would to execute the head of the Saudi

delegation and the head of the Iranian delegation, just as my own kind of personal payback. And Carlos in the end, he wanted to do it, but he never got around to killing those two people. so he disobeyed an order. And he also took money for himself, took ransom money that, you know, that was eventually offered to him. He's got to be paid for his time. Yeah, it's got to be pocketed.

Yeah, he pocketed the money for himself. It's hard work. For those two reasons, the Palestinians said, well, you're not obeying orders. You're always promoting yourself, so you become a showboat. We're not interested in that. So they kicked him out,

and they almost executed them. I was going to say, why didn't they kill them? Yeah. So that was one of the options. They actually had a little tribunal at the popular front where they were weighing options. They could have ex-they just kick him out of the organization.

They could kill him. They could imprison him. They were going to put him in a kind of a jail. That sounds nice. And eventually they decided just to kick him out. And so he was banished from the Palestinian movement. He was never allowed to return. But then he keeps doing terrorism for contracts as a mercenary.

How did they feel about that? It was freeing for him because then he could just work for himself. And they never trusted him after that. They never allowed, the Palestinians never allowed him to take part in any of their operations after that. But there was some begrudging admiration because he kept getting away with things. And he, you know, kept making the newspapers and they were all fascinated by that. But he became a free agent, basically. He decided that he would work for whoever would pay him money and that was going to be the rest of his career.

It was a mercenary terrorist. But he had guys working for him, right? It's not like he's just on his own. He had people that were on his payroll. Yeah, he had a gang. It was like an international game. There was one Palestinian who was a deputy, but the others were German. He had a German woman who was the girlfriend of his best, his number two.

Then he steals this woman and marries her for himself. Nice. Yeah, nice thing. And the guy just took it. He said, you know, we're changing living arrangements now. So the woman was living with his other guy. And then suddenly next day she's living with Carlos instead. and then she becomes a terrorist with him and they do things together.

Well, at least he was into diversity. He was in diversity. In fact, she would say about him that, you know, she was drawn to him because he promoted women's equality and kind of gave women important positions in the organization. That's right. Women, terrorism, just to, you know, even the scales. They had a baby together, and then he just abandoned her and ran off of some other woman instead. So that was kind of Carlos' style.

How many children does he have? So he has one actually from a, that I mentioned that he impregnated a woman in college. So this woman gave birth to a child and Carlos never saw her. But there's somewhere in Cuba today, there's this woman who is Carlos' daughter. Oh, she's in Cuba? She made her way from Russia to Cuba. Because the mother was an exchange student from Cuba in Russia when he met her. And so that became, that was his first love.

And then he had a daughter with this, with a German woman. kind of the woman that he stole from his deputy. And she's, she's, you know, still around. Apparently there's a relationship between this woman and Carlos.

They see each other occasionally. Wow. And that's, that's it for kids that we know of? Yeah, that we know of. There's grandkids now, so Carlos is a grandpa.

But, yeah, that it's, nobody else, as far as I could tell, ever visits Carlos in prison, but he does have this one family member who checks,

down on them and everything. That's interesting. Now he got caught because there was something wrong with his balls. Yeah. That's what happened there? Wonderful kind of a interesting karma there. But he, so he ran off, ran off of this other woman. She was a young Jordanian dental hygienist and he met her in Jordan and fell in love with her, moved in with her, and then she goes to cartoon with him. So they're together. But she wants, she's young. She wants to have kids. They're not conceiving. So Carlos decides to get medical treatment. for himself. And he had a condition that was essentially, it's like a varicose vein of the testicles, but it restricts sperm count. So this was essentially identified as the reason they couldn't have a baby.

So by the time he decided to have something done about it, the CIA is watching Carlos every day. So they're trying to come up with a way to capture him that would be subtle and they can kind of fly him out of the country. But the big break is they find out that he's going to have surgery. And when you have surgery, you're under anesthesia. So it became this perfect moment as he was recovering from this testicle surgery that they could catch him when he was completely vulnerable.

And he was snatched up, put on the back of a French airplane and flown to Paris for trial. Why France? Because it turned out that after the CIA had been watching him for all these weeks and were just waiting for the right moment, they checked back with the Justice Department and discovered there was no warrant

for Carlos' arrest in the United States. He'd never killed an American, so no paperwork existed that would cover, you know, an extradition to the United States. The French, on the other hand, had not only had warrants, but they had convicted him in absentia for a murder. And so the French very much wanted to get their hands on them. So they could CIA and the French worked together to bring him to justice. And the French basically got dibs on the body, and they were able to take him to Paris for trial. Did he wake up on the plane? Yeah.

And there's this moment. There's seen in the book where. he's, you know, he's all groggy, but he's like, he knows he's been arrested and he's on this plane, and he's trying to figure out where, who's got him and where they're taking him. Because the French don't reveal that it's them. He's listening for voices, trying to figure out, you know, getting clues about where he's heading. And he's trying to track the movements of the plane.

The plane's taking off from Sudan. He knows what direction the runway is. So at first he's going to the east, and he's thinking, oh, shit, they're going to send me to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, you know, have reasons for one. Saudis behead terrorists. Yeah, they're going to go limb by limb with him. Terrible place to end up.

Then the plane turns to the north and it's clearly heading up. So the Red Sea, I'm going to Israel. I'm going to be tortured to death. And then the plane keeps going for hours so he realizes he's not going to Israel. And then finally the moment of realization is the plane lands. It's European summer, the smell of grass and vegetation, and he hears French voices. And his reaction is, oh, thank God. It's a moment of relief because I'm in a country of laws.

So I may never get out of this. I may be in prison for the rest of my life, which it turns out he was. But at least he's in a place where he's going to be treated under international rules. He was okay with that. He said, and he's described this to me, he's, thank God, I'm in France. And I'm okay.

I'm alive. And that's- So he wanted to live. He didn't care that he was going to be in a cell for the rest of his life. As long as it wasn't being executed or maimed, he just wanted to live that's really interesting guy whose whole life was based on living free under his own yeah selfish you know ways yeah was going to be have his freedom taken away from him but he felt relief no more high living but he's uh but he could live out his

days and i don't believe yeah you don't think so no i think that's posturing yeah maybe i think that's him puffing his chest but he also thought and that's one thing that came clear came clear to me is that he would get out one day that even though the french had him he just kept thinking that the Venezuelans are going to make some prisoner swap. He really put his cards on that for a long time. There was going to be some kind of deal on that the Venezuelans are going to get him out. Or that there'd be, you know, his argument, legal argument was that he was illegally detained, legally captured and repatriated to France against his will, and that some international court

was going to overturn his conviction. He was going to get released. And he held onto that belief. for his, I think he still somehow thinks that someday he's going to get out. He does? Yeah, that this, that's going to be, he's going to be able to live the rest of his life somewhere, you know, outside prison. He's next level delusional.

Yeah. And now he's, now he's in an age where it's not going to happen. So, but I don't think it's completely sunk in, even after 30 years in jail. Did he tell you how many people he was willing to take responsibility for killing in his life? Yeah. And he said, it was almost, it made up, it made up, it made a, a point almost as a way I think of intimidating me of letting me know that he had killed 83 people with his own hand and he directed the deaths of a thousand others he said that very explicitly and without

being asked you just how early in the conversation this pretty early on and then he said something like and so you better watch what you write about me so it was kind of a threat oh he hit you with that yeah so like i've i've got sources and means but uh whoa he probably is is full of crap with his numbers uh The French tied 16 deaths to him. He certainly killed more people than that. Some of his allies and comrades, he killed himself. So he is definitely responsible for a lot of deaths, probably not 83, maybe half of that. But still a lot of people.

That's 42 more bodies than you. More than you and me, so, yeah. Unless you're hiding something over there. What's below that basement? That's right. No, Ben Franklin's shit going on, right? There's a torture chamber. Okay.

I still think Ben Franklin was. was innocent. He was just studying corpses, but it's a little weird. Yeah. A little weird. Yeah. A little weird that they found out. Now, that's, that's crazy that you get to sit with them too after you've done all the work. And I messed it up. It was March 2025 when you talked to them. So you were here in March 2024 and you were going to talk to him. I guess it still took a while. Okay. So that was, that was wrong. But, you know, as you see the time coming up and you know, he's about to have to leave, how did you decide to leave it with him? Like, what was the last things you were talking about with him?

I think it was asking about regrets and what did he, did he feel any remorse about things he did? And he had 30 years to look back at his life. What do he, what, what do you have done differently? And this is when he said to me, I wish I would have killed a few more people. And that, that was a wild line to leave it on, but that's what he had to say. That's good for a script writer, though. That is good. And that's what he said, word for word.

Word for, I wish I would have killed a few more people. Would you say to that? Interesting. What a great comment. So I was a little blown away by it, but it was. That's interesting. But I could see what he was trying to say. It wasn't like I just wish I would have been just more prolific in my murdering,

but it was basically those bastards from the CIA, those French idiots. I knew they were trying to get me. Should have killed a few more people because I got kind of screwed at the end. And he feels like he was betrayed by the Sudanese, who ended up letting the French, you know, basically have their way in exchange for a lot of money, as it turns out. But it just wished he would have settled some scores, you know, back then and might not have been the situation that he's in now. Well, I'll give him this. He was a cowboy and he's going to die a cowboy, apparently. Yeah, put his boots on.

Like he's still got that for sure. But how did you leave it? Did you shake his hand? I don't know. I just thanked him. I didn't, I don't think I ever touched him. And that's fine with me. And there's this moment I describe it.

You know, he's shuffling back to his cell and he's given the kind of the old Marxist salute to one of the guards just in passing. You're just watching that. Just watching him fade off. Fades away like a ghost. Yeah, shuffling away with his in his corduroy pants. There's the end of your movie. Yeah. Oh, I see this one.

It's good. I can't wait to read this. I know all your work's been amazing. We talk about it all the time on here. So a lot of fans are always reading your book. and now they got a brand new one to get into. We'll link that down below, the Jackal, the rise and fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist played by Pedro Pascal on the cover.

I'm just kidding. It's not. That's actually him. But Joby, thanks so much as always for coming through and going through everything. Always a great time with you. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought.

Get back to me. Peace. Hey guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge help. Thank you. Thank you.