The Spy Who - The Spy Who Almost Stopped 9/11 | A US Military Interrogator on Getting Terrorists to Talk | 4

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Tony Camerino is Ali Soufan's former colleague at the Soufan Group. A combat veteran and Special Agent, Tony conducted and supervised over 1300 interrogations during the Iraq War for a Special Operations Task Force. In this eye-opening conversation, he tells Charlie Higson about the incredible headway he made with detainees working for al-Qaeda, thanks to his use of non-violent interrogation methods. And speaks candidly about the harsh brutalities of war, and its lingering traumas.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of The Spy Who ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. I'm Charlie Hickson and this is The Spy Who, an audible original. Thank you for joining us on our final episode of The Spy Who Almost Stopped 9-11. We've concluded our season on Ali Sufam, an agent active in the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Division, who was at the centre of its investigations into Al-Qaeda, both before and after 9-11.

Sufahn became a vocal critic of the CIA, both of their coercive and violent interrogation tactic, and their withholding of key intel from the FBI that could very well have prevented the most devastating act of terrorism in American history. Here with me now is someone who's worked up close with Mr. Sufan, Tony Camerino, a former combat veteran who spent 20 years in the US Air Force Reserve.

Tony later became a special agent who conducted and supervised over 1,300 interrogations for a special operations task force in Iraq. He later worked alongside Ali Sufarn at the Sufarn Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy, and wrote all about his own criticisms of violent interrogation methods under the pen name Matthew Alexander. In his book, How to Break a Terrorist, the US interrogators who used brains, not brutality,

to take down the deadliest man in Iran. So let's welcome to the show, Tony Camerino. So, Tony, I've got to say, in preparation for this interview, has become clear to me that you've had this incredible life that's pulled you down all sorts of fascinating paths. You start off in the Air Force, then you become a special agent, and then a writer. And then, of course, one of these paths led you to the man at the center of our story, Ali Sufhan.

And we'll get on to that in a minute. But before we do, I'd love for you to tell me a little bit about the beginning of your journey here. I know you initially joined the Air Force Reserve in the early 90s as a helicopter pilot. What drew you to becoming an airman? Well, I joined actually the active duty Air Force straight out of college because I was on an ROTC scholarship. So I joined the Air Force in 92, 93, and I went to pilot training in Texas. And my first assignment was flying KC-135 refueling tankers. I did that for a year.

deployed to France during the war in Bosnia in 95. And then I switched to helicopters and then flew special ops helicopters for about three years. And then you switched gears to become a special agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. So, I mean, how exactly was the offer to become a special agent presented to you? I mean, was it secretive at all or was it just a... No, it actually wasn't an offer. It was actually me asking. Okay.

Because I was working as the executive assistant to the inspector general, and I was reading all the OSI cases. And so I had been grounded from flying because of a tachycardia, a heart condition. And they told me to go find a new job. And so I was reading all these OSI cases, and I was like, this is really interesting. The problem was that I was one year too old. to enter OSI. I think he had to be a seven-year captain, and I was an eight-year captain.

So I went to the Inspector General, who was a four-star general at the time, and I said, hey, I'd really like to switch over and do OSI. And he wrote me a recommendation, and that's how I was able to transfer. Yeah, I mean, I guess a lot of our listeners aren't necessarily aware that the Air Force has its own sort of secret service, as it were.

I mean, can you talk us through what exactly the office of special investigations is, and what your role in it as an agent was? The best way to think about it is it's like FBI for the military. Really the only difference is jurisdiction. And OSI is made up of about 70% active duty and I think 30% civilian agents. So like NCIS and the Navy, there's a lot of civilian agents. And essentially we have two major missions. one is criminal investigations, felony level of criminal investigations,

and the other was counterintelligence, which sometimes is closer to counterterrorism, but in that realm. So you started as a helicopter pilot, and then you became a special agent, which it seems a very different career path. I mean, which is the safer job? Special agents, by far the safer job than you need.

Right. Helicopter, not just helicopters, but special ops helicopters in particular, Air Force Special Ops helicopters, MH-53s when I was flying, was quite hazardous job. And the crew members who do that job are just like courageous beyond belief because of the amount of risks. I mean, everybody that I flew with and my friends that I still talk to just have so many, you know, close call stories there. Yeah. It's almost unbelievable how many times you kind of skirt death and get away with it. And now you mentioned you were sort of recommended by a senior officer to change that career path. What age would you have been then?

I was 31 at that time. I actually came, I actually graduated, and I was supposed to graduate the week of 9-11. I wanted to get on to talking about the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Did that have a big impact? on your job? Huge impact. I was at our training academy at Andrews Air Force Base.

I remember there was a UPS driver, I think, who went by and stopped and said a plane just flew into the tower. And our instructor was like, that guy's crazy, I think he's smoking something. And I turned to him, I said, maybe we should just call in and check. And then, of course, within 30 minutes,

the base was on lockdown, and we were watching the news. And we could look out from where we were. and see smoke rising from the Pentagon at that point. And I was quite worried because I had a good friend that I'd known since all the way back in RTC who was working in the Pentagon at that time, and I was calling him trying to get a hold of him.

And luckily, his office was being renovated, so he'd been moved out during that point. Yeah, I mean, even in the UK, as a civilian, I remember that sense of, like, you know, what is going on, what is going to happen, where is this going to go? I mean, for you being that closely involved, knowing people in the Pentagon, it must have been very extreme, those emotions.

Yeah, and also, I remember I went to New York City for the first time, I think, in 1995. My father was from New York City. And my cousin took me the top of the World Trade Centers. I remember very vividly standing at the top against the glass and looking down and being like, wow, this is amazing. How did man build this? This is incredible. And on a professional level, how did it affect what the OSI was doing?

Well, at that time, I think we were all kind of in shock at first, but also because I was just about to go into OSI, I think the thought going through my mind is, wow, what a time to be going in because clearly the mission's going to change quite a bit. And it did change a lot. A lot of resources went from doing criminal investigations to counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Well, by the time 2006 rolls around, America's been at war with Iraq for three years following the terrorist attacks of September the 11th, 2001. And you're brought down, you're now a senior military interrogator, and you arrive in Iraq. What are your first impressions of getting at? What sort of jumped out at you right away? Well, a few things. You know, jumped out. It may talk about this quite a bit in my book. that. First of all, I was a criminal investigator. I was trained to interrogate like a criminal investigator. But of course, I did counterintelligence mission. So, you know, I went through the Army interrogator course, which taught us how to do intelligence interrogations versus criminal investigations. But when I got to Iraq, some of my first impressions, one, were the speed with which interrogations would take place was very different.

than what we were used to doing. You know, normally when you're interviewing a criminal subject, you usually get one shot at them, maybe one day, you know, to try to get a confession or to get, I shouldn't say a confession, to get the truth, to get information. When you're an intelligent interrogation, you can interview somebody many, many times over many days or weeks. But the other general impression I had was about the lack of cultural knowledge

in my unit specifically. And even though we did get some training at that, it was very superficial. And when I got to Iraq, some of my first interrogations that I was observing going into the room with, I just was observing interrogators violating all kinds of very common cultural norms that you would know if you were a tourist. What sort of things? You know, like putting your feet up and pointing the soul's your feet at people or just not using courtesies cursing in the same. same sentence that you're mentioning the Quran, like things that you just, you wouldn't know, like anybody who's traveled in the Middle East, spent any time at least would know not to do.

And at first I was like, oh, wow, is this like some type of deliberate strategy? Like, is this part of a pride and ego down approach? And then I just came to realize, no, this is just willful ignorance because it isn't like the material isn't available to learn because we have, one, we have. interpreters sitting next to us who are experts on the culture, but it's some type of cultural problem within the unit. It's this common kind of prejudice against culture aspects or Muslims in the Middle East that's influencing the way people are questioning these detainees. And I saw that as a real problem that was affecting our ability to get information out of people. So what, so,

sort of information are you after at this point? What are your superiors wanting you to get? So our number one mission for our unit was to find and kill Abu Masabla-Sarkawi, the leader of al-Qaeda, now considered to be the father of ISIS, who at that point had been at large for over three years since the start of Iraq War. He was our sole focus, really, and a big part of our mission ended up also being stopping suicide bombing attacks, which were happening at that point almost every day, an unraveling. the suicide bombing network, but Zarqawi was our main focus. So how would these, what do you call them, detainees,

how would they be found, selected, brought in, who's doing that, and how can you tell whether they're going to be able to give you any useful information? So the detainees, essentially we would interrogate detainees and get information that would result in targets being developed. And then there were special ops units that would go out and attack the. those targets and killer capture the people and bring them back. And then, of course, we would interrogate them again and then produce more targets. And so you're interviewing captured combatants?

Yeah, at all levels. Like, you know, we would interrogate anybody from your foot soldier who, you know, dug a hole in the ground and buried a bomb for $50 to senior ranking members of Al Qaeda. that in fact, myself or my team personally interrogated two guys who would later become the number two and three guys in ISIS. And so you quite quickly saw that these techniques that they had been using were not going to work were ineffective and they were wrong. I mean, how vocal were you dissenting about the investigation tactics at that time?

Well, early on, so within a few weeks of arriving, I went from being just an interrogator to leading a team, being in charge of one of two teams. And so I just told my team right away, like zero tolerance policy for any types of abuse or anything that violates UCMJ or Geneva Convention, so we're just not going to go that route. I also wanted them to focus on building rapport

and getting to know individuals, doing interrogations with a little bit of knowledge of the culture, and trying to understand the people you're interrogating versus just making assumptions or using stereotypes. And I had very good interrogators on my team. Some of them were very young, you know, 20, 21-year-old Army enlisted personnel. Some had never been outside the United States before. Immense amount of talent, but it had to be, they needed to be led.

They needed to be shown how to do interrogations, how to build rapport, how to take that and turn it into cooperation. And they had the ability to do it. they just needed to be given the example of how to do it. Some of the Army approaches were not very productive, like Pride and Ego Down, that people were kind of defaulting to, and we switched over to rapport building approaches. The successes just started coming, like, very quickly, and we rolled over, I think there was seven major players in Al-Qaeda in a row

that we rolled over and got to cooperate, including most of the members of this infamous, group of five that we captured, who were the group that eventually led us to Zarqawi. And did you get much pushback at first from the military authorities, or were you listened to straight away? I think at times I was laughed at. I remember one time suggesting that we use love of family approach on a senior al-Qaeda commander in the north, and people literally laughed at me and said, when these guys joined al-Qaeda, they write off their families. I don't care. about their families. They care about al-Qaeda. I said, well, that kind of goes against my experience,

even just here in Iraq, but all experience. Nobody writes off their family just because they join a terrorist organization. In fact, a lot of them, that's why they join, is because they think it's to protect their family or to earn money for their family or to defend their family. However misguided, that might be, their beliefs, those motivations don't go away just because you decide to become a terrorist. And then it turns out in that particular case, it was love of family that broke the detainee when we got his son into our prison. And he decided to cooperate. And he provided us very good intelligence because of the love of family approach. And so that resistance within a core group of people that was there was based on a lot of ignorance and stereotypes about terrorism, just like really

misinformed about terrorists and why people become terrorists and the socioeconomic factors involved. And that was a real impediment to getting cooperation. And when you're witness to an extreme kind of brutality and violence, is it hard to shape all that from your mind? Are there long-term effects or ramifications for some other kind of extreme things you had to contend with while you were there? Absolutely. I think so.

I think most interrogators, they put it in a box and they seal that up and they just don't ever open it again. But it is kind of unbelievable when you come back after a while you decompress. It can take many years. It could be a decade. I know for me it was probably more than 10 years after I got back when I finally started to really think about and consider how much violence.

violence we had been exposed to in Iraq. Between all the propaganda videos, oftentimes we were watching live feeds of the raids take place and watching, you know, death happen right live before your eyes. And then, of course, I was embedded in a spec ops team up north for a month and went out on killer capture raids. And you just, every day you are seeing violence and living in the middle of. it. Even just for to interrogate oftentimes, for instance, let's say you go raid a house and they go raid a house and they're suicide bombers and they're shot and killed or they'll take pictures of them

and those afterwards and those pictures will be given to the interrogator so they can present them to the painee to identify people. And so you're just seeing these images like every single day for months on end. And you really come back and I think that you're just seeing these images. And I I think you kind of lock all that up and you try to act like it never happened. But eventually I think it's good to kind of talk to someone about it and confront it and understand the level of violence that you're exposed to. And did your experiences in any way impact your feelings about America and the war on terror and the military? Yeah, it did. Absolutely. I think I've kind of a divided opinion.

And one is I did see a lot of people who did not live up to our principles. And I think they forgot what our principles were. And I saw that result in quite catastrophic effects for many Iraqis. At the same time, I saw a lot of people refuse to do things that were unethical and who kept to their principles. And I think that was quite remarkable. the place where probably for me I think the greatest failure was a lot of people who I think otherwise would not have abandoned their principles did so because they weren't given the proper leadership and the proper example from the top to be able to say these are the standards

we don't we don't violate these standards these ethics these principles geneva conventions UCMJ the prohibition against torture inhumane treatment in any case case like zero exceptions and the lack of that leadership when it trickles down to the field level can be quite devastating for you know now you have very young immature people who are great soldiers but it's their first time in combat they're under a lot of stress and without the proper leadership inevitably they're going to cross lines if they're not they don't have the correct supervision. And, you know, I always talk about our best successes. One of my favorite stories from Iraq was this guy that we captured accidentally, who was a member of Al Qaeda, but his own

cell turned on him. They thought he was a mole for some reason working for us, and he wasn't. But they tortured him. And we got a location of cell, and we attacked it, and we ended up rescuing this guy and he came in and we treated his wounds and brought him in interrogation booth and I had this whole list of questions I was prepared to ask him and interrogation approach I was going to run on him I didn't have to do anything he said as soon as we rescued him and treated his wounds and treated him humanely he instantly realized he was on the wrong side that we were the good guys and they were the bad guys they're the ones who torture and we're the ones who didn't and so he just started naming off every person, target, place that he knew. My pen literally ran out of ink.

I was writing it out so many targets. And I think that was just the most obvious case of the benefits of distinguishing yourself morally from your enemy on the battlefield. You stepped out for your morning jog, except it's not your usual morning jog. You started listening to an epic sci-fi book on Audible. 30 chapters later you've accidentally run a half marathon. You lost track of how far you've run somewhere just past the city limits. You can't stop. You have to find out what happens next. Then it's over.

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Now, I'm guessing our listeners have an idea of how a coercive interrogation session can go, but can you walk us through your approach? I know there are a few things you're mindful of when interrogating someone, rapport building, stroking their ego, connecting through sympathy and compassion, as well as strategic presentations, and cultural understandings. I wonder, would it be possible for you to briefly give us a real example

of how you use these tactics while conducting these interrogations? Yeah, so everything starts really with getting to know somebody. I'll give you one example. There was a guy who came in that we captured who was involved in designing al-Qaeda websites. And they would take the suicide bombing videos, whatever, and give him the raw footage, and he would take them and transform them onto a website.

and put graphics on them. And he was doing it because he had to drop out of college. He had some relatives that were killed, I believe, and also had no money, had no job, kind of had no future. And they would pay him to do this, and he would do it. And I assigned a young interrogator to him, Maria. And she went in and she didn't even talk about terrorism with him. For the first couple sessions, she just talked to him about music,

about culture, about movies, when they smoke cigarettes. And she just built great or poor with him. And ultimately he just divulged everything that he was doing, but he wouldn't give us the name of his boss. And I was watching these interrogations and going, well, I think I know the way to convince him to go one level up is he needs to feel like he's going to get some type of, probably some type of, not exoneration,

but some type of favoritism for cooperation, I think. which is a normal thing you do in any criminal investigation. I mean, we do that, you investigate drug dealers in the United States. If you catch a low-level person, you'll offer them some type of limited amnesty in exchange for information. We do all the time in criminal investigations. And so Maria and I did this approach called a boss introduction where I came in and act like the big boss who was visiting

and I was going to give him a chance to provide information to put in a good word for him, which I can do. I can write a statement saying that he cooperated, which would help him in court. And ultimately, when we asked him to cooperate and name his boss, he looked at Maria and he just looked in her eyes and he saw a friend. He saw somebody who had listened to her, who had built rapport with him,

who listened to the reasons why he joined al-Qaeda was empathetic to them. And it convinced him to cooperate. And he told me the name of his boss, Abu Ali, who turns out was sitting in the interrogation booth next to us being interrogated, who was one of the members of the group of five and turned out to be the head of all all kind of communications Iraq. And it was just this simple rapport building,

developing trust, understanding his motivations, and having a little empathy for a situation, while you can still condemn his acts, that was able to turn him and get him to, you know, it led to the huge breakthrough because then we used that information to break Abu Ali. and he revealed the names of the al-Qaeda email accounts and passwords.

It was all from a little bit of empathy and a little bit of understanding and a little bit of rapport building. And do you think that coercive interrogation tactics ever work? I think it depends on how you define the term works. And I would say, no, they never work if you consider all the long-term ramifications. The number one I always bring up is when we use coercive. techniques, torture, abuse of detainees, it is al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group's number one recruiting tool. Because they're able to hold it up and show it to potential new members, look, America says they're this one thing, but look at how they treat detainees. They're not.

They're liars. And we saw that in Iraq. After the photos of Abu Ghraib became public, Al-Qaeda recruiting shot through the roof. There was a huge increase in the number of foreign fighters, and foreign fighters made up 90% of all the suicide bombers. So we know that's true and you can look at ourselves and say that's true. Anytime America has become aware that its prisoners have been tortured or abused and detained abuse in detention, if you look at Vietnam or any other war, of course it increased our morale and increased our recruitment and our willingness to fight. So I think when you take factors like that into account, you can definitively say that

torture never works, that in the long run it's always counterproductive. And so they're still using that technique, the rapport-based technique? I haven't worked in that area now in a while, so I can't say, I mean, to the best of my knowledge, yes, we are using rapport-based techniques now is the standard, and was the standard pre-9-11, and was the standard for the large majority of interrogators post-9-11, too. You know, the enhanced interrogation technique program, I think you, it'd be wrong to say that all interrogators were using them, obviously. That's not true. They were more widespread than I think a lot of people think they were. It wasn't just Abu Ghraib and it wasn't just Guantanamo. They were being used in many different locations besides even just CIA black sites.

And part of that was migration of people who had been to. different places and had gone to different places and said, well, we used them here. Why can't we use them in another location? And so, but I think we can confidently say the large majority of interrogators rejected the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, never used them even when they were available to them. And on the topic of America's moral standing, I'm curious to know how much you think it's changed throughout the world between then and now. I really think Abu Ghraib was a huge event in the timeline of history for the reputation of United States. I think the photos of Abu Ghraib made it very clear that what the United States was saying and what it was doing were two different things.

And that comes from my experience in the interrogation booth and hearing it and overseeing or conducting 1,300 interrogations. And it wasn't just Abu Ghabrogation. grave because also the abuses that Guantanamo had become known as well. And also in all these other places where Adainees had been abused, people talk, you know. It doesn't matter if you're in some remote station in a western province in Iraq and you abuse a detainee and then they go into general population. They're going to talk to their relatives. They're going to talk to other detainees and words going to get out. But I think those photos of Abba Grabe were just symbolic. of a greater rot that kind of happened post-9-11

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to follow business wars wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of business wars early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. I said at the top of our conversation that you've had this remarkably full life that's pulled you in all sorts of directions. And so I'd love to hear about how you worked alongside Ali Sufhan, our man of the hour. Had you met at all prior to working together? No, in fact, Ali and I first crossed paths, I went to see him testify at a Senate hearing. We both provided testimony to Senate Intelligence Committee, I think it was the hearing on torture. And I think he, testified. I remember he testified behind a screen, so I never even saw his face. I'd heard of his name,

but I didn't even see him, but I heard his testimony. And I realized, oh, there's him along with some other people from the FBI and other organizations, I realized, oh, we're all, we've all been fighting the same battle. We've all been against enhanced interrogation techniques saying there's a better way to do things through rapport-based techniques. And that was the first time I became really, aware of him. I did work for the Sufong group, his organization in Qatar for a little bit, teaching counterterrorism. And that's how, that's the first time I really got to know him. And what was your impression of him when you got to know him as a person? It's incredibly knowledgeable. There's no one else who has such in-depth knowledge of all the

players within Al-Qaeda and also his knowledge of the culture. And of the, of the individuals. I mean, it's so impressive. It was like meeting 100 analysts and an FBI agent at the same time. And you mentioned the Sufand group there.

Can you just tell us what the company does and what your involvement was in it? They run an academy in Qatar that teaches basic level courses for intelligence and investigations. And so

I taught a introduction to counterterrorism, of course. So in the vein of drastic career pivots, you turned to writing in 2008 when you published your book, How to Break a Terrorist, the U.S. interrogators who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq. And what made you want to write the book? I came back from Iraq and I was listening to people have this debate about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques

and I realized I had a very important story to tell that was in favor of report-based techniques and their effectiveness, how we had found Zarqawi by using report-based techniques. So I wanted to give tribute to the people who had done that mission, the interrogators on my team who had found Zarqawi, by using report-based techniques, and let the public know, like, this is a false premise.

We don't have to choose between terrorist attacks and torture. we can stop terrorist attacks and not use torture. But also, a second part of it, my motivation, was I wanted to open the argument up to, can we improve the techniques we have? They haven't been changed since World War II. The Army Field Manual's origins are even kind of murky. And so why do we use these techniques and where do they come from? What does science say about them?

And is there a way to improve them by also incorporating more cultural knowledge and more information from other sciences like sociology or psychology, understanding human motivations, learning to ask better questions. And so I wanted to open up that debate. And then the third reason I wrote the book was I wanted to give a voice to Iraqis. Because what I was seeing in the press about what people were saying, why people were joining al-Qaeda did not match my experience.

the reasons why Iraqis were joining al-Qaeda were socioeconomic reasons and not political religious ideology reasons. And that story was not being told enough. The best way I can put it is the way one Sunni tribal leader I interrogated put it, which is Sunnis were put out of work by American policies and left without any way to defend themselves against Shia militias, which were allowed to run free post-adom. And they needed money and weapons,

and the only people who were offering them were Al-Qaeda. So it was a marriage of convenience. And I don't think the American public was hearing that enough. So as a note to anyone who might want to grab a copy, they'll find that it's not your name on the cover, but Matthew Alexander. So what happened there? When I wrote the book, I was still in the Air Force Reserves,

still working in OSI. and so I didn't want to publish under my real name because I potentially was going to go out in the field and work and I also wanted to put a little barrier there between me, my family for security precautions and so that was the reasons for using a pseudonym. But then your cover was blown. How were you found out?

There's a right-wing blogger who published my real identity. He was quite distasteful, actually, what he did because he would put these interviews I think he had something wrong psychologically. He would put an interview of me with, say, for instance, on Countdown with Keith Oberman, and he'd say, I'm going to reveal his real name because Keith Oberman at one minute, 30 seconds in his interview uses his real name,

and you can watch the video that he posted, and that doesn't happen. And so the revealing of my real name was really just to think about retribution for speaking out against torture. How did it affect your life? Was it a possibility that you had planned for and thought might happen? I knew it was a possibility. I kind of look at it the way you look at counterterrorism or force protection,

which is you put up the barriers that you can, but there's always a chance that some of those barriers are going to fail. And presumably you're happy now that your name is out there because it must be a book that you're very proud to have written. I am very proud of that book. I mean, I was kind of surprised at how many people, like, enjoyed it, not just for its content, but for the quality of it. the read and it really is a page turner you know so many people have told me that it's it's just a

lightning read it in one or two sessions and it's like a psychological thriller you know they can't put it down they want to see how it ends and so you know some of the credit goes to my co-author john bruning but yeah i'm very proud of that book thank you so much for being a guest it's been really fascinating talking to you you're welcome Well, my takeaway from talking to Tony is he very much feels like one of the good guys. Someone who is committed to maintaining moral standards, moral authority, and committed to the idea that if you behave in an appalling manner, you are no better than the enemy.

And it's interesting that even though he was in a world where he was surrounded by violence, and that violence on both sides, that he was able to keep this. clear straight path through it, mainly by treating the people who is interrogating as human beings. It doesn't help to dehumanize your enemy because you will never understand them if you do. But if you think, well, what they're doing is exactly what we're doing. They are protecting their families, their lifestyle, their country against what they see as foreign aggressors. And Tony had amazing results from sticking to that. and through making sure that that idea spread through the people that he was training in Iraq

and the people that he was supervising in Iraq. And he obviously had a huge effect on what was going on out there. Next time, we open the file on David Tyson, the spy who rode with warlords. In the wake of 9-11, he joins Team Alpha, an elite CIA squad that will be the first Americans sent in terms. to Afghanistan. Its mission is to coordinate the fractious anti-Taliban forces ahead of the US-led invasion and secure the first victories in the war. But when he's caught in an al-Qaeda uprising, his mission becomes one of survival. Follow the Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who rode with warlords early and ad-free

on Audible. Follow the Spy Who on the Audible app or wherever you. get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of The Spy Who add free by joining Audible. You have been listening to The Spy Who, an audible original. Have you got a spy story you'd like us to tell? Email your ideas to the spy who ataudible.com. The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson, produced by Audible with Yellow Ant. This episode was written and produced by Liam Garrow and researched by by Louise Byrne. The sound designer was Joshua Morales.

For Yellow Ant, the executive producer was Tristan Donovan. For Audible, the executive producers were Estelle Doyle and Theodora Luludis. Head of Production, Audible Europe, Chris Jones. Senior Director of Originals, Lisa Higginson. Head of Audible Originals, International, Orale de Troye. Sound recording, copyright 2026 by Audible Limited. In 1969, when police tried to shut down a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, they expected little resistance. Instead, patrons rose up in a series of demonstrations that would

ignite a movement. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, the police raid on the Stonewall Inn marked a turning point in the fight for LGBTQ rights. But activists had already been hard at work pushing for gay rights for decades, and their battle is still being fought today. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts.

Audible subscribers convince all episodes of American history tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. Imagine you're reading Pride and Prejudice, except you're not reading it. Harris Dickinson and Marissa Abella are reading it to you, on Audible. Her barb sting you. His coldness sends a shiver up your spine. Your heart aches,

your ears burn. You yearn for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to profess their undying love for one another. You can't bear it any longer. Well, maybe a chapter longer. Performance is so good, you'll give love a second chance. Audible. Stories that speak to you.