The Spy Who - The Spy Who Rode with Warlords | David Tyson: the CIA's Unlikely Fighter | 4

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Mere weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, CIA linguist David Tyson found himself on the ground in Afghanistan. He and his colleague Mike Spann were part of Team Alpha, a CIA team sent in to help overthrow the Taliban and gather intelligence from suspected al-Qaeda fighters. But when the captured fighters rise up, things take a fatal turn. In this gripping interview, David Tyson tells host Charlie Higson walks us through his experiences in Afghanistan. As well his current efforts as part of the non-profit ‘Badger Six’ to provide aid to Afghan allies who were left behind.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. A note to listeners, this episode contains strong language. 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 rode with warlords. We've concluded our season on former CIA case officer David Tyson, one of the first Americans to head into Afghanistan just weeks after the devastating 9-11 terrorist attacks in New York City.

He's a linguist, an interpreter and part of Team Alpha, an eight-person CIA team, dropped into hostile territory to support the Northern Alliance forces against the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies. But after they helped the alliance capture the city of Mazar E. Sharif, David begins interrogating the hundreds of suspected Al-Qaeda prisoners, only to find himself in the line of fire after his team alpha colleague Mike Span is killed in an uprising by the captured fighters. And with us now is the man at the center of this harrowing story of loss and survival. So would you please welcome to the show,

David Tyson. David, thank you so much for joining us on The Spy Who. Thank you very much. I have to say we're absolutely delighted to have you on because by this point our audience will have heard all about your role in Team Alpha and the Battle of Kala Yi-Jang-hee and so to have you here with all your first-hand experience will be absolutely fascinating for our audience, I'm sure. But before we get on to that,

I think it's worth backing up to give everyone an idea of what life looked like for you before you joined the CIA because, and I hope I have this right, you weren't really all that familiar with the CIA, were you? That's correct. Yeah, I grew up in Pennsylvania, and I had no idea about the agency's existence. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and I didn't watch James Bond movies or anything like that. I, you know, was focused on being a kid, I guess, but no, the agency was not part of my upbringing at all. When you're at school, at university, what were you studying?

Well, I went into the Army after high school. I wasn't doing anything elite in the Army. I was a field artilleryman. I got out of the Army and then I was suddenly faced with again going back to my hometown and being in the same situation. So I chose to go to college, not knowing what to do at all, just as another means to get out of, you know, working for a living, so to speak. And I started there and they told me I had to take foreign language. And I had never told me I had to take foreign language. And I had never told. taken a foreign language before. So I chose Russian just because it was exotic and the alphabet was strange and I had a great professor. And I was obsessed with learning Russian for the next four years. I studied Russian in international affairs at a small state school in Pennsylvania. But then you moved on to other Central Asian languages. Yes, I got the bugs, so to speak, and I went on to study in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and went on to graduate. And I went on to graduate. school and focused on Russian again and then became aware of Central Asia, namely Uzbekistan,

and started taking Uzbek language courses in graduate school. So sort of unwittingly you had in many ways a sort of perfect training to become a spy. I agree, yes. I was doing research on Islamic practices and so forth in Uzbekistan. and obviously learn how to deal with the local people there, the local population, and to get answers to your questions. And that's more or less on a basic level what a CIA officer does or intelligence officer does. But so how did you then transition from learning the languages

and learning the local culture to actually joining the CIA? It was my decision after being spoken to by a person in the agency, I thought I was going to be an academic, meaning I would continue on the path of becoming a professor, but, you know, that's a hard road as well. And by that time, I had two kids and we needed things like health insurance and so forth and a real job. I learned of the agency via a person who was in the agency who just said, hey, you should join some time or try to, you know, apply and that's what I did after I was accepted I started out as a translator interpreter. You assumed it would be a sort of backroom job. You weren't going to be sent on dangerous missions.

Yes, yes, certainly. Yeah, and that's the way it started. I started translating newspapers and documents and every once in a while doing, you know, interpreting jobs with people. But yeah, there was no inkling of what would come later on. And six years later, the world, watches the devastation of the 9-11 attacks unfold. And I think it's important to establish that in the years leading up to 2001, you were quite active in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, working alongside military commander Ahmed Shamasud, who, of course, was a leading figure of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

Can you tell me how you first began working with him and why? Yes, in the late 1990s I was sent into Central Asia. to live there with my family, which turned out to be for a four-year tour, 1998, 2002. And, you know, 1998, that was a period when Afghanistan became important again, or had become important again to the United States, because Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had set up shop in Afghanistan, so to speak, after terrorist bombings and other places, namely in Africa, or two U.S. embassies were hit.

So there was a renewed focus on Afghanistan, and in Central Asia, obviously Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and so forth, you're proximate to Afghanistan, and we, meaning the agency, began working or trying to get back into Afghanistan, so to speak, and meet the leaders who were fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And Ahmed Shah-Masud was at the time, the single most important person who was doing that in Afghanistan. About 98% of the country was controlled by Taliban and al-Qaeda,

and Ahmed Shah-Masud was sort of the only game in town, if you will. Well, let's jump ahead now to the attacks on September 11th when everything changed. Are you able to tell us where you were at the time? Yes, I was actually flying in the air. I was on a flight from Central Asia to Great Britain to take part in a conference, so to speak, or a meeting about Stinger missiles, that we had given the Afghans during the war against the Soviet Union.

And by the 1990s, we were trying to get those missiles back from the Afghans, because obviously these are dangerous weapons. And we had to get them back. And we were, you know, coming up with plans to do so. So at the time, yeah, when 9-11 happened, I landed in my life. London and learned that this had happened. So I basically got on the next flight back to Uzbekistan, knowing that there was going to be something big taking place in regards to our posture in Afghanistan. And how long after that did you learn that Al-Qaeda suicide bombers

had assassinated Massoud? Well, Massoud was actually killed on 9 September, 2001. So we learned of his death essentially on 9 and 10 September. You know, we had no inkling, obviously, that 11 September would bring the attacks on the United States. But yeah, that was a wake-up call for us. Massoud was a big deal, as we spoke about, and it shook us in a big way. And how significant was his assassination in terms of what happened next in Afghanistan? Well, when 9-11 happened, we were going into Afghanistan no matter what. The problem was, who would we go with? How would we do this? Our biggest friend, so to speak, or contact in Afghanistan was now gone, but his people were still there. The place was still there. The Panshir Valley where Massoud had his base of support and so forth. It was still there, and we still had many contacts. And what did your family make of your decision to go into Afghanistan? Since I'd been to Afghanistan before and I'd been on so-called trips before, you know, related to missile retrieval and so forth.

I don't want to say it was another routine mission, so to speak, but for me, as compared with the other guys on Team Alpha, this was more routine than not. And that was probably a little bit, I was naive in that regard because I just told my wife, it's another trip to Afghanistan. But obviously it was going to be bigger than that because 9-11 hadn't happened. So we didn't have much discussion about it. Was there any part of you that thought this might be the last time I see my family? I mean, it sounds not that you weren't thinking of it in those terms. I thought that way only after I left them and we went to a staging area for a few days.

And that's when the rest of the men from Team Alpha arrived. And we started to think about only one thing, you know, our mission into Afghanistan. And they started asking me questions, for example, about my will and things like that. And they were, I think, I don't want to say much more realistic, but they were very, the clarity for them was better about what this was about. And that's when I had my first inklings that this may not be just a routine. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. Our latest series tells the story of college counselor Rick Singer, who thought he'd found a way to rig the admissions process for his wealthy clients

until an unrelated FBI investigation inadvertently exposed the largest college admission scandal in American history. Listen to American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcast. podcasts. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of business wars from Audible Originals. In our new season, fan duel and draft kings turned a legal loophole into a $167 billion industry. Now they're facing off against new competitors, angry regulators, and a growing backlash from the fans and athletes caught in the crossfire. Listen to Business Wars on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. So David, as our listeners who've followed this story know, you're deployed to Afghanistan as part to this eight-person squad called Team Alpha.

And on that team, you work alongside a gentleman named Mike Span. So when you were deployed to Afghanistan, what was Team Alpha's main objective? And what was your main objective within the team? Our mission was to link up with an Afghan warlord. His name was Abdul Rashid Dostom, an ethnic Uzbek warlord, who after Masoud was arguably the only other warlord in the thick of things, so to speak.

And our mission was to link up with him. We had not met him prior to going in, being inserted into Afghanistan. So we had to obviously make sure he was on the up and up and assist him and have him assist us in prosecuting the war against Taliban and al-Qaeda. and our mission was to move north from the mountains to a place called Mazzari Sharif, a large city in the north, while at the same time gathering intelligence on al-Qaeda. And, I mean, is the thrust there trying to find out information

about the actual 9-11 attacks and who's behind it and who was involved in that, or is it looking for, is there going to be another big attack and we need to try and stop it? Yeah, I think the American and I think the Western intelligence communities were all focused on the next attacks and what Al Qaeda was about. And after being inserted, after going into Afghanistan, that did remain a focus. But another focus was, I don't want to be too dramatic, was to stay alive and to make sure that we can do our first mission, so to speak, and work with this. indigenous force and move to our objective in the north and liberate the main city in the north

and help them defeat al-Qaeda forces on the battlefield and Taliban forces as well. So that's sort of the paramilitary part. And then we had this intelligence function that was going to be facilitated by sources of information that would provide information on al-Qaeda, where they were located, what they were up to, and so forth. We didn't know what to expect on that side of things. Again, we were going to a place we'd never been before that was surrounded by al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And so initially, our intelligence gatherings focused on our own security

and making sure we didn't get killed, essentially, and making sure that our Afghan partners were indeed Afghan partners and not somebody else. And most of Team Alpha were, I think, brought together as a team for the first time just before going into Afghanistan. But you had met Mike Spann before. Could you tell us a little bit about him and how you first met? Yeah, I'll just, I'd like to stress that the agency, you know, this is Team Alpha. And it gives the impression perhaps that we're this cohesive team of people that knew each other and trained together. But that, as you mentioned, was not the case.

that was thrown together at headquarters, and I joined the team when it came to Central Asia. So we got to know each other very, very quickly, and we each had a set of skills that complemented each other in mission. And Mike was one of those paramilitary officers. He was, like many officers on the team, a first-tour officer, meaning young and someone who did not have a great deal of agency experience.

I think he joined the agency in 1998 or something like that. So we were all, most of us, except for the leadership of our team, were youngest in terms of the agency experience. Mike had been a Marine officer and became a paramilitary officer. And he had been to Central Asia in the recent past prior to 9-11, helping us train local indigenous Central Asian special. operations teams to help us in Afghanistan should something happen there. And so I knew him a little bit and before his arrival. And what kind of a guy was he? Oh, he's a very straightforward guy, unambiguous about his patriotism, about his perceptions

of the world, very black and white. And he always reminded us on a daily basis of what we're there for in Afghanistan. He was very skilled at paramilitary aspects of the craft and very vocal about completing the mission and doing the mission. Can you tell us a little bit about your first impressions when you went in there, what that was like and what the first things you did were? Well, I tell the story. As soon as the helicopters, we were inserted by two Black Hawk helicopters,

and as soon as they left, it was totally quiet. You know, we had this travel over an hour in the helicopters, very loud and noisy and so forth. The helicopters take off. It's quiet. And the Afghans, we had never met before, there in the darkness. And we come together and shake hands. And the guy I shook hands with, instead of saying hello and so forth, he grabbed my hand and yelled at his guys. And he yelled at them and said, this guy here has soft, excuse my language, he said, soft fucking hands.

And that was the first impression that I made on our Afghan partners. And that was not the impression we had, or I had hoped to make, having soft hands. It was immediately clear to these Afghan fighters. And these were cavalry fighters. They're cavalrymen, right? These are guys who had spent their youth and adulthood fighting on horseback for years, if not decades. And these are extremely tough, tough men. Many of them weren't really literate,

and they had no real understanding of the West. They had no exposure to it. And so we were dealing with a group of people that were very different from us. I'll just put it that way. Did it feel very different to when you'd been going there to talk to Masood? Yes.

Oh, very different. Masood was very cultured, and all his men were cultured and exposed. to, you know, at least the basics of the West and so forth. And we, we stayed in houses with a reasonable amount of, you know, comforts. But out here in these mountains, all we had were these horses and there was no, there were few buildings and so forth and no roads. And it was much more primitive, if you will. So this was, it wasn't a shock to us, but it was certainly something that we had to deal with on a daily basis, you know, those basic issues of food and shelter

and transport. And what were your first mission objectives? And are there any sort of images or stories from that time that really stick with you? Yeah, our team leader had to very quickly and the rest of us had to figure out if we were safe. Because Dostom, this commander, was somebody we hadn't met before. And he had a terrible... reputation for brutality and switching sides and betrayal. And I think it was fairly quickly established by us with Dostom that he was going to work out well for us. But in the first days, we didn't know.

And there were other political issues, so to speak, or ethnic issues that were cropping up inner rivalries within these factions and so forth that we had to figure out. After that was done, we started to make a lot of progress on the battlefield because we brought in a special forces team of Green Berets. And that team allowed us to start moving on the battlefield because of its capability to call in air strikes on the enemy. So, David, let's drop in now on what I'm sure is a chapter from your life. You'll never forget.

is the day you, alongside Mike, arrive at a fortress in Afghanistan. And when you get there, there are roughly 400 captured Al-Qaeda fighters waiting to be interrogated by you. Is that a fair summation of the situation? Yes. This is we're talking about 24 and 25 September, 2001, when much of the fighting had moved east of our objective, Mazzari Sharif, to a place called Kunduz and Mike and I were back in Masari Sharif. We were rotating in and out to do different things

and it was Mike and my turn to be in Mazar and we got word that these prisoners were surrendering or coming to Mazari Sharif from Kunduz. And it was our job to deal with them, essentially start the process of getting information from them and about them. Right. And are you then speaking through interpreters,

or are you able to speak directly to enough of them? Oh, no. Most of them spoke a language that I could speak. Many of them spoke Dari. Some spoke a Turkic language, like Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, Kyrgyz, or something like that. Others spoke broken English. So communication for me was not a huge problem.

And did you feel when you started the president, that it was going to be productive? Yes, I was immediately impressed by the, use the word diversity of this contingent of prisoners. There are representatives from, I would say, every Arab country in the world, from the Mideast to the northern Africa, the Gulf. There were Muslims from Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines,

the former Soviet Union, the Caucasus, China. We had two American citizens there. We had a couple Australians. And so Turks from Turkey, Turks from Germany. So this diversity impressed me. And it made me think, why do you have this? You know, I thought this might be one unit of Al-Qaeda personnel that were, you know, from one place. But no, they were extremely diverse and they were very, very talkative.

We had a contingent of Afghan intelligence, people there, local men who were going to help us. in this process. And our main goal was to gather their documents, their passports, or ID cards and so forth, and photograph each person and try to figure out who they were. But that process was sort of accelerated or made more interesting by the fact that they were very talkative. And they were talking about training in camps that did toxins, did dirty bomb training or preparation, meaning nuclear stuff. Some of them said they knew some of the hijackers from Saudi Arabia. So it was extremely for us exciting because this, we were going to the heart of it right now. All of them had claimed, or most of them, claimed that they had given Bayat or an oath to Osama bin Laden.

These were true Al-Qaeda personnel. And they didn't see. seem to care about hiding that fact. So there's a certain amount of bravado, a certain amount of showing off. It's like, you know, this is what we are. You can't defeat us. If you want to use that word, yes. I would say they were confident people. They knew what they were doing and they weren't trying to hide it.

And they didn't care. They were doing their thing, so to speak. And that was, that impressed us greatly. And how many days were you in Territory? before everything changed. They arrived on 24 November, and the morning of 25 November, the uprising, if you will, started. And I guess when that happens, it's a far cry from the world of a linguist and translator.

And as our listeners know, once you begin speaking to some of the captured fighters with al-Qaeda, that some of them opened fire, killing your partner might expand. And so while running away from gunshots, is there a part of you that thinks you're going to die? That was not part of my sort of mental state at the time. When the uprising began, I heard the explosions shouts, and I heard the gunfire. And I had a few seconds or milliseconds of not knowing what to do.

I took out my pistol, and I looked at that pistol and said to myself, do I remember how to use this thing? And in that process, one of our Afghan intelligence partners came running past me and stopped just enough to say get out of here, scram, so to speak. And he just kept going. And so there I was for just a few seconds, probably two to three seconds, not knowing what to do. And I heard Mike's voice yelling my name and I started running towards him. And I did so not with any sense of fear or bravery. It was just automatic.

And now I had a mission, so to speak, and now I had something to do. And I ran towards them, and that's when the fighting for me got very intense. Were you mainly drawing on your original military training or your subsequent CIA training in terms of combat and firearms? I had almost no training in the Army with a pistol. And I had just five years prior, I had basic training on the 9mm. So that training that I had received 5 years prior kicked in. I specifically remember I had to change magazines four times on that pistol,

four magazines, 15 rounds each. And as I shot out my magazines, I dropped the magazine and said to myself, and I remember this very clearly now, remember, you drop the magazine, don't pick it up, leave it on the ground, because if you go to pick it up, you could be shot or something like that. You need to pay attention. You need to put the new magazine in the weapon and continue firing. So those kind of things did come back to me. And I remember saying, wow, that's interesting that I'm thinking of that now, right? It came back to me. And I think allowed me to survive. And you then, by chance, stumble upon a German TV crew whose phone you

used to call the CIA for backup. And so what happened after that? After I was able to get out of the southern compound area, I moved to the so-called northern compound. And there, to my great surprise, was a crew who had a camera. And as soon as I ran into this building, they started peppering me with Quest. You know, who am I, what am I doing? And I had never seen these people before. We had never had an experience with journalists or cameramen in Afghanistan prior to this moment for me. And I was totally dumbstruck. And by the same token, the adrenaline had not worn off from the fighting I had been in before. So I was not really coherent. And so I sort of tried to ignore them for a few minutes at least. It's worth noting that because of your efforts, you managed to fend off dozens of al-Qaeda fighters, call for help and save the lives of journalists and red cross workers. Did you then think that as a CIA operative,

that there was a sense that it was part of your job to help them out of their alive? To be honest, no. I did not think it was my responsibility to take care of these people. I was focusing more on myself, and I was still thinking about Mike. In retrospect, looking back on it, do you think focusing everything on to what had happened to Mike, do you think that was a sort of way of coping? Sure, I think so.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I still was trying to process that and figure out at the same time what to do next. And when he made the decision to head out and over the fortress wall to escape, how dangerous was that moment of making a break for it? Well, I thought there was a good chance that I would be killed here. My perception of that movement to the wall, to jump off of the wall into an area that I did not know about, was clouded, I think. And I thought the worst of it. But it was getting dark and there was no other option.

I did not want to stay there at night. We had no night vision. There's no electricity. and I thought for sure that the al-Qaeda guys would overrun us. So when I made that decision to go and all the other journalists and the camera team followed me, I did think that we would be shot on that area where we were exposed. And after we jumped down, I had no idea what was down there below.

Do you ever think about what would have happened to you and your mission if you hadn't escaped? No, I never thought about that. That's probably the best way. James Arthur Ray was a charismatic self-help guru who promised his followers a path to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves. But not all who followed him finished their journey.

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Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. So, David, I mean, obviously that was such an intense moment in your life and probably the most significant part of your career in the CIA. But I'm going to jump ahead in the timeline now to 2020. After 25 years with the CIA, you decide to retire. And with some distance now from that job, and from being in Afghanistan specifically, I wonder if we could talk about the long-term effects

of what can happen when you're witnessed to an extreme kind of violence. We hear a lot about people coming back from war, having to reconcile PTSD. Was that true for you as well? I assume so. I was blessed by having a strong sort of upbringing as a young person. I think my attitude was shaped from my youth to be, you know, to have confidence in faith in the future and faith in God, so to speak. And that, I think, helped me. And the fact that I had a family to take care of or be part of, that allowed me to make the right choices. Because for me, I think, to suffer is to some degree a choice. You know, I had nightmares. I still have nightmares. I have thoughts and so forth. But I always was able to make the right choices about all that stuff.

I never came from a culture of being a victim. Sure, you have to work through it. And there's always somebody worse off. I grew up with hearing stories, reading stories, watching movies about people who persevered in some of the most terrible situations, from war time to other situations. And I always know, or I'm very conscious, there's somebody worse off than you right now. And for you to sit here and cry about it, There's no sense to that.

That's a very fortunate position to be in where you can think about those things and make those kind of decisions. So for me, it's more like that than anything else. Interestingly, my father was in World War II, and he never spoke about his experiences. And I know he had difficult experiences. And I look back on that and say to myself, that's too bad, because it would have brought me closer to my father. And I didn't want that for my family. And I was encouraged to speak about it. That was one thing I was told by the psychiatrist that I did have contact with for a brief period of time.

He said, if you feel comfortable, talk about it. And so I always talked about it from almost day one. Over the years, I became more willing to talk about more things. But my willingness to talk about it, my ability to talk about it, I think relieved a lot of pressure. from a family standpoint, from a personal standpoint. Thinking back about the mission and being in Afghanistan at that time, do you feel, I don't know the best way to present, do you feel it was a success?

Do you think it was worthwhile? How do you process that? Yeah, obviously it's complicated, but no, we were extremely successful in 2001. Our team and the other teams, the agency as a whole, we completed our mission in 2001 into 2002. We assisted the Afghans to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield, and we made it possible or made it happen so that al-Qaeda was no longer capable from Afghanistan to harm the United States.

It was a long process, but we teamed up with the Afghans, and the Afghans themselves helped. helped us do the job. So it was extremely successful in those early years. And I would argue that the agency did an excellent job throughout at doing something that nobody else could really do. Although, of course, as we now know 25 years on, Afghanistan is back under the Taliban's control. What do you think stopped the democratic vision Afghanistan had for itself from coming to past. I'm not sure the vision Afghanistan had matched ours. I think we got too involved with nation building and democratic processes and other things that the Afghans were not necessarily

thinking about or most Afghans. So how did it feel watching the U.S. withdraw and the Taliban regain control? Well, that was for me and I think for many Americans and many others, very difficult. period and shameful in a way. The way that that played out was not the way that it should have happened and it didn't have to happen that way. And it was a choice. It was a political choice made. I don't think I can add much, except our feelings were hurt, so to speak. So before we close, I'd love to talk to you about an initiative that you and other members of Team Alpha spearheaded in 2022 on behalf of your allies in Afghanistan. This is the nonprofit called Badger Six.

Can you share with our listeners how you landed on the name Badger Six? Badger Six was a call sign, a radio call sign that was used by Mike Span during the mission in Afghanistan. And it's based on the idea that we needed to help our Afghan partners after the fall of Afghanistan in 2021. Shannon Span, Mike's widow and I and a couple other people related to the, the effort in 2001, got together and created this nonprofit organization with the idea that we would assist our Afghan partners from that period, a very limited number of partners, about 35 families, and try to get them safe or give them the means to be safe and help perhaps create a pathway to safety outside of Afghanistan, to the United States, to Europe or other countries.

Now, I think we can all guess why, but just to really spell it out for people, why is this work important to him? Well, number one, you know, our partners in 2001 joined us, us eight guys, as you mentioned. We're just eight guys on the ground, and they took a tremendous risk because obviously we brought a lot with us, but at the time when we arrived, we had nothing. And they chose to fight with us, and they chose to fight with us. chose to be the first Afghans during the war to shed blood on our behalf and to shed their own blood for us. I think we're paying a debt or repaying a debt to a degree that was incurred in 2001. When they protected us and in many cases saved our lives, numerous occasions.

And is there a way people listening at home can help or contribute to the court? Well, there's a website badger six.org that anybody can look up on the internet and if they'd like to donate, we'd welcome it. All the monies go to the Afghans. We're not paid at all. The overhead we have is very, very minimal. And we just assist the Afghans with things they need. Fantastic. Well, David, we're just about to wrap here. But I just wanted to thank you sincerely for making the time to talk to us. It is extraordinary hearing firsthand account of being in a situation like that. Something that is very difficult for the rest of us to imagine.

It's been wonderful to speak to you about this. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's good to talk to you and it's good to let others know how things are. Yes, indeed. Thank you. Next time we open the file on the original Femphatal, the spy who was Matahari, A famous dancer turned World War I secret agent.

She stood accused of seducing allied officers to uncover their plans. But was she a temptress or a scapegoat for French failures? Follow the Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Was Matahari, 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 at Audible.com. The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Hickson, produced by Audible with Yellow Ant. This episode was written and produced by Liam Gero, and researched by Louise Byrne. The sound designer was done. Joshua Morales. For Yellow Ant, the executive producer was Tristan Donovan. For Audible, the executive producers

were Estelle Doyle and Theodora Laudis. Head of Production, Audible Europe, Chris Jones. Senior Director of Originals, Lisa Higginson. Head of Audible Originals International, Orelie Detroit. Sound recording Copyright, 2026 by Audible Limited. By the early 2000s, college admissions in America were more competitive than ever. For students and their parents, it was an ordeal to be endured. But for college counselor Rick Singer, it was a chance to get rich. Exploiting the desperation of his clients, he invented what he called the side door, a new way into elite schools for those wealthy enough to pay the entry fee. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history, presidential lies, environmental disasters,

corporate fraud. In our latest series, a college counselor mounts an audacious scheme to get his wealthy clients into the universities of their choice. He thinks he's found a way to rig the system until an unrelated FBI investigation inadvertently exposes the largest college admissions fraud in American history. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. On January 1, 1892, a young Irish immigrant named Annie Moore became the first person processed at the new immigration station on Ellis Island. For the millions who followed her, this small island in New York Harbor would become the place where their American dream would either begin or end.

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, we trace the history of Ellis Island. For more than three decades, it served as the gateway through which millions of hopeful immigrants entered the United States. But as the nation struggled to decide who belonged, some would find the gates shut to them. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.