The Team House - Former Australian Diplomat Turned International Problem Solver | Malcolm Brailey | Ep. 132

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

Malcolm Brailey served in the Australian Army before becoming a diplomat, and later something of an international problem solver for his government and other parties.  Today's Sponsors: 👇 A-TAC FITNESS (Veteran owned and operated) https://www.ATACFITNESS.com Use the promo code "TEAM10" for 10% off! Selection Starts Here. Ten Thousand Apparel  https://www.TENTHOUSAND.cc Top tier training gear design and made for and by athletes. Use the promo code “TEAM” for 15% off your purchase. Thanks for supporting the companies that support the show! Want 2 bonus episodes per month and access to the bonus segments? Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media Links:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #teamhouse #specialoperations #covertopsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents,

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Special operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hi, everyone. to episode 132 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. Our guest tonight is Malcolm

Borrelli. He is a former Australian diplomat and infantrymen. He spent a long time in Southeast Asia working on counter-extremism programs and elsewhere in the world. And we're excited to have this conversation. This is a little bit offbeat from the normal stuff where we interview spies and special ops guys. But I think Malcolm, you exist in your career is kind of at this interesting intersection. And we should probably talk to diplomats a little bit more often, actually.

So thank you for coming on the show and look forward to speaking to you tonight. And Malcolm got all of his drinking out of the way before the show because he said he didn't want to propagate or perpetuate the stereotypes about Australians. Yeah, the stereotypes about Australians, yeah. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents

and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting

pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting visit child and family resource network.org today oh yeah admission i use your podcast i listen i listen to it when i'm in quarantine and i've been traveling quite a lot the last two years even during covid and uh i've spent two months of my life in hotel hotel rooms and one of the ways I survived was one hiring a treadmill so I can you know keep steps up and two listening to your show. It's fantastic and yeah. I mean your headline is about special operations, COVID operations espionage and definitely I'm not classically in that in that bucket,

but I hope that we can talk today about a lot of our experiences. It's sort of as you said at the intersection of that world. Yeah. And really, really sort of show how that sort of civil military corporation happens, but also just from the perspective of an Australian who's progressed through the military and diplomacy and now in the public sector. So in the private sector. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it, boys.

We're putting that endorsement on all of our promotional literature now. Team House podcast, good for quarantine. You're actually not the first Australian man. Malcolm to tell us that, you know, they listen to the show while they're in quarantine because the Australians have been pretty hardcore about when you come back into the country, you're like two weeks in the hotel room. And then it tests you if you're good to go and then you get to go to your family and everything, as it were.

Yep, two weeks at a time. That rule has since lapsed. I believe even the last few days, the Australian government has reassessed that once again. and it's free for all travelers and certainly for citizens to come and go. But yeah, it's been a big part of the effort to travel during this time. And we can talk about it a bit later in the interview if you want. But travel has been hard. It's involved sacrifices.

But I believe that those who were able to get out, and I was privileged to be able to get out the door, had some great benefit for doing so. So, Malcolm, tell us a little bit about your origin story. I'd like to hear a little bit about how you came up and kind of the pathway that took you into diplomacy. I mean, I think you said you spent 12 years in the Aussie military beforehand, right? That's right. That's right. Another admission to make up front, your phrase origin story, I now use that in work interviews I do with people.

I say, tell me your origin story. And I think it's a good icebreaker. It allows people to sort of tell their narrative and where they've come from. But look, for me, I grew up in that term just so you know. You're free to use it. Dave came up with it. We invented nobody's ever used that. Trademark.

Yeah, look, I grew up in Sydney on the east coast of Australia. I was lucky to live on. Sydney's a reasonably big city. I don't know how it might compare to the U.S., but it's like, you know, three to five million people. I lived on the sort of urban outskirts where I was able to sort of roam pretty free in what we call the bush and uh and uh you know had a pretty pretty solid uh opportunity as a young fellow to sort of um learn and grow in the in the outdoors so to speak

definitely not a country lad um you know uh you know out there shooting and farming but um had an opportunity sort of uh be in the outdoors you know for example as a young 14 15 year old you chuck on the rucksack and get on the train for a couple hours and go up to go up to an area near Sydney called the Blue Mountains, which is just fantastic place to go hiking as a young guy and you're away for three, four days, and your parents never hear from me. I don't know what I'd think about that as a parent now,

but that's where I was. I wanted to join the military from very young age. A lot of influence from my grandfather, who served in Second World War. He was actually in one of our command arrangements, one of our antecedent special operations units in World War II. and he'd served from 1939 all the way through to 1945. And actually, a little bit of a sidetrack in Australian military history in World War I and World War II

and all the way through to Vietnam, Australia was an all-volunteer force, even for the two World Wars. And in his case, in the Second World War, you got a number when you joined up, right? Same as today, but it was sequential when you joined up. My surname is Braley. He had the same surname. And his number was 503. And up to 500 was reserved for officers.

So he was literally the third guy to enlist in the Australian Imperial Forces in the Second World War. So that had a big influence on me. And, you know, I always wanted to join the military. And I, I suppose, pretty classically finished school, just turned 18. And I was lucky enough to be selected to go to our military academy. in Canberra. We have a little bit of a different system to you guys. It's a tri-service academy for the first three years.

And then you go off into a single-service war fighting college for the final year. So I did that, did four years, four years training, which seems like a long time. But I think importantly it gives a young, a young sort of wannabe officer time to grow up a bit. and I was wondering if I should go back in time and tell any stories from that time, but I think they can be classified these days in an old-fashioned phrase called hijinks, and we'll just leave it at that. But, you know, a fantastic foundation for the rest of your career, and honestly, there's a number of people who I trained with back then

who are still, you know, you're rock-solid mates all the way through to today. Yeah, you're right, Jack. I then spent the next sort of decade as an infantry officer, pretty pretty sort of classical career up to that point. The Australian Army, and this is early to mid-90s, the Australian Army was not particularly operational experienced since the end of the Vietnam War. The particular battalion that I ended up with and the regiment that I ended up with was the first battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment. and that unit had actually deployed to Somalia in the early 90s. You might recall some of the early deployments there. So they had a very, very good grounding in that sort of not a regular warfare, but that sort of non-traditional warfare.

And whilst I myself didn't deploy on that mission, I like to think that even at that very, very early stage in the early 90s, inherited some of that thinking and some of that mindset about non-traditional operations. Very quick tour to force on what I did after that. I actually ended up whilst the most of the Australian Army at that time was doing tours of East Timor, you might remember the Timor intervention. Yeah. Very, very, a lot of my colleagues and peers had deployed there.

I didn't get to do that, but I was sent to the Balkans actually on an attachment. to the British Army for a year and I had a fantastic time there and in a way sort of changed my mindset in my career and once I got back from that we can we can dive into that a bit later but once I got back from that I was determined to learn more about what was this conflict what the hell happened there why how you know what was what was what was ethnic warfare what what was state disintegration all about and more importantly as a soldier at the time Who are these other people in the battle space? Who are these characters called diplomats and peacekeepers,

even policemen and other aid workers? Who are these other actors in that battle space and how did they contribute? And at that time, I resigned from the military of my own volition and went back to grad school in Australia to do what we call a master's degree, I suppose. I'm not quite sure what your graduate pathways are. over there. I did a master's degree in international diplomacy, international relations,

and really set my sights on joining the federal government, what we call the Commonwealth government. And it took me a little while. I did a bit of a sidetrack in Singapore as a quasi-academic, but I got back in initially in the Department of Defense as a political policy officer, defense policy officer, and then later as a diplomat where I serve all up 14,000. been using government service just on 10 years as a diplomat. And there's a whole bunch of stuff we can dig into there, fellas, in terms of postings and missions and operations all around the world from Africa, Middle East, Afghanistan a couple of times, and then finishing off in Southeast Asia.

And then the final sort of tour to force just to give you a sense of my career. After almost 30 years in government, I punched out and transitioned to the private sector, where I did a couple of things concurrently, but was lucky enough to find myself mostly back in Southeast Asia running counterterrorism and counterviling extremism operations. Much the same as what I had done in government, but with a whole lot more freedom and responsibility

and more sort of grassroots approach to it. And to cap it off at the very back end of that, last year or so, I made another sort of segue or transition to work for a company that's involved in global green energy creation and looking for renewable energy projects worldwide. So that's me in 30, 32 or years, and in a nutshell, and that's my sort of origin story. And you're welcome to dig into that and kick off. Yeah, I definitely want to go and ask you a bit about Bosnia. But Dave, could you give a quick plug for our sponsor?

Yes. So our first sponsor for this evening, our friends at ATAG. fitness for those of you who are preparing for some sort of selection or just preparing for life trying to stay fit um a tech uh fitness sells uh these great packs of swimmer gear um they's uh they come with these really rigid uh rubber fins they're jetted open heel design really nice fins really good for working out um uh tread and water uh make a distance um they come with circles helps you practice one actually helps you practice your your breath control build your lung capacity gets you used to you know having something over your face if you're not to if you are preparing for selection um they sell a couple different types of masks they have these low profile masks if you're

just looking to get in shape and swim if you're looking to more practice the types of things that you would do in some sort of selection um uh then they also have the full volume masks which are just the big round the old-fashioned style round ones that you probably have when you're a kid if you're older um where you can you know do your purging exercise with them and then they also come with uh a nice you know little lines and everything so you can practice your knots underwater and whatever else that's a really sloppy bowling but anyway so you can practice all that but uh atac fitness that atac fitness dot com promo code team 10 for 10 percent off that's Team 10 for 10% off.

Selection starts here. Awesome. Those guys do programming as well or just the gear? They have partnerships, I believe, or they kind of promote people who actually do some of the training and programs and stuff like that. It's interesting with the dive here in the swim gear because I know one of the, yeah, both personal reflection and also some of the guys who go through our special arts training is don't underestimate the water. Get some swim training. get some swim training in, you know. I think that's why most services use it in some form or another as part of their selection

because the water will challenge you. Mm-hmm. You know. So Malcolm, back to you. I was wondering if we could kind of backtrack to, you know, as you said, back in those days when you were in the Aussie military, there wasn't a lot of operational deployments, but you had this opportunity to go to Bosnia with the Brits. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, sure. It was very interesting at that stage. I was a captain, so I'd progressed through, between commander and regimental time. I've been an instructor at our infantry center. I'd been an adjutant of a what we call a reserve unit. So I thought I was reasonably experienced, British Army, long, long history and almost continuous sort of sense of operations.

And one thing we can talk about a little bit is the sort of cultural, fit there with Australians. It's interesting. We talk the same language as the British Army. Our cultures and traditions look and feel the same. But when you meet them up close, they're fantastic people, don't be wrong. I love them to this day,

but there's a little bit of culture clash there when you rub up against the British Army. I'll give you a quick, quick, funny side story before we get into the operational side of it. So myself and one other fella, the battalion that we were linked to, they were called the Royal Green Jackets. interesting regiment. They're now called the rifles, part of an amalgamation of the UK Army's

sort of light infantry units. And that had been my background too, light infantry. Anyway, they were based in Germany. And so it was a long flight for us, all away from Australia, blah, blah, we get picked up by the British team and taken to this barracks, which I want to go out in a limb here and say it was like some old vermucked barracks or something like that, that the British had taken over at the end of the Second World War and were still inside. And we were going to be living in the officers mess as young officers. And I don't know if you guys have ever been inside a British regimental sort of officers' mess, but it's like walking into some ultra-posh country club type scenario.

There's loungers and old oil paintings and the silverware and all that. Look, the Australian Army has that too, but it's more like walking into a shed with a few chairs and old beer cans in our army, but this is much more fancy. Anyway, myself and this guy, I think we might have arrived at about 3pm in the afternoon at this barracks. And we dumped our gear and were led downstairs

by a particular job title in the British Army called a Batman, which is like, you know, the person who looks after all the gear of the offices and works in the mess. Anyway, so we get in there, we go down, we sit on the lounge chair and they said oh look the rest of the regimental officers are working

till four or something or 430 uh are you guys okay just to chill here for a minute we're like yeah yeah sure so and they go do you want the thing and me and this other fellow were like well sure can we have a beer and i think this is like january so it's like cold but we're like it's warm by the fire so we thought yeah we'll have a beer so this guy starts bringing beers out to us and unlike a normal mess where you actually stand at a bar and pay your money, this just sort of barman mysteriously walks away and comes back with your drinks on a tray. So we're sitting there having a few beers in the British Army mess.

Sure enough, the other officers do finish work at four and they all come in and they're a bit standoff. They're like, oh, hello and how are you two sort of thing? And we're like, well, let's, do you want to have a beer fellas? And then out of the corner of our eye, this waiter pushing a trolley comes out. And of course, they have tea and cakes at 4 p.m. not, not beers. So we're sitting there holding our cans going, okay, this is a good first day in the British Army, you know. I think that, I think that shows, though, why beer is free in the British Army and not in the

Australian Army. It's a high commodity. A friend told me that Australians live much more like in the moment and are much more kind of freewheeling than the British are. That's true, but I think at heart it has to do with the... Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today.

Class-based nature and hierarchical nature of our society. You know, as an Australian Army officer, we had rank and position, but you know, you might have gone to the same school and come from the same suburb as your soldiers. Do you know what I mean? There's really no difference. In the British Army, and I don't want to go too far here, because obviously each person is different,

bring something different to the table, but you can still feel that sort of socioeconomic, economic differences that, you know, the officer class was a bit different. And these guys that I was with were not like the guards. And, you know, if you're a, if you're from the Scots guards or the Irish guards, you, that's a, you know, you used to have to have your own income to come into it to be able to afford all the gear. These guys weren't like that.

But, but they were, they were. So there was little cultural differences like that, Jack, which, which stood out. And that, that changed how you interacted with each other. It changed how you interacted with soldiers. But overall, after a few, funny sort of teething problems like this, we got into it. And anyway, the battalion was based in Germany, deployed to the Balkans. They'd been there before.

They'd done it tora Kosovo. They knew what they were doing. They were very, very good. And myself and the other Aussie, they were not going to give us command of troops. So we were not given a unit as such. So it's like, okay, what jobs can we do? And there was two that stood out. One which my mate did was Simic, right?

And the other one, which the commanding officer asked me to do, was called Factions Liaison Officer. And I was like, oh, right, factions layer. What sort of faction we were talking about? Oh, the Serbian Army faction. I'm like, well, aren't they sort of the enemy? Well, not really, it's peacekeeping, but yes, they're the bad guy. So, okay, so I'm a liaison officer to the enemy.

Yeah, roughly speaking. Okay, cool. So I thought that was like that was going to be a great job and it was and you know the bulk of the the infantry battalion and this is what the Brits did do amazingly well. They deployed a full armored infantry battle group from Germany to the Balkans. I'm talking Challenger main battle tanks, full arm and engineer squadron, warrior armored vehicles, everything. So they sort of had their their function and their play but the I thought the real. really interesting work was what we were doing out there in the community basically. In my case, daily interaction with Serbian Army, with a couple of different angles.

One being sort of enforcement of the Dayton Peace Accords and making sure, for example, that they weren't stashing the trigger mechanisms to the anti-aircraft weapons somewhere, you know. there was sort of reconnaissance and surveillance aspect to it in terms of overwatch covertly and overtly about their training activities and movements so we had teams sort of hiding in the hills doing that sort of stuff there were weapons inspections and seizures and then there was true sort of liaison in terms of human interaction and getting to know these people and maybe it was because I was an Aussie some of these Serbian people of course had relatives in Australia oh yes I have brother in Sydney you know something like that so or maybe it was because we culturally were a bit different to the Canadians, Americans,

Brits and Dutch and all the other NATO forces they'd been used to. So, you know, I'd like to think I had had a bit of success in that field. In fact, at the end of that tour, just jumping to the finish, there's a lot that happened in the interim. This Serbian colonel asked me if I wanted a commission in the Bosnian Serb army. He goes, I make you major. He goes, well, I said, well, I'm, he said, that's a promotion. You're only a captain.

I said, oh, that's a nice offer, Colonel, but I think I'll just, I think I'll go home and make a captain in the Australian Army. But look, it was a very, very serious job. A couple of little anecdotes for you. That was 2001, time that September 11 happened, and I was there in the Balkans when that happened. and the Serb networks that we had created, both in the community and the military, were quick to call me and say, oh, you must want to know where the jihadist training camps are.

I'm talking three days, two days after the attack. And we're like, okay, yeah, yeah, jihadist training camps. Please tell us where they are. You didn't tell me about this last week or the month before. No, we didn't think important, but now it's important. Okay, please tell me where. Grid reference, you know, pattern the life, all that. And then they ask, and we can help you go get them.

And we're like, we'll take it from here, fellas. You know, I think you've done enough in terms of the inter-ethnic warfare. So there was an interesting year to be there. It was the year after the bombing of, where was that, where was the Serbian embassy bombed? Or there was it in Belgrade. there was some NATO mission where they'd actually bombed Belgrade in 2009. And there was quite a lot of anti-NATO, anti-European sentiment at that time.

I will highlight what I learned, and I learned a lot from the commanding officer of the regiment at that time. If you want to look him up, he's sadly passed away. But his name was Henry Worsley. And he was an incredible officer. So he was the CEO of this regular light infantry battalion, but he had spent a large portion of his career in the British Special Operations community, both in 22SAS.

And I might get this wrong if you looked on his, some further background on him online, but I'm pretty sure he'd been part of the specialist int debt that used to do sort of undercover and COVID ops in Northern Ireland. So he... 14th intelligence. company. 14, 14 Inc Company, that's right. I think that's exactly what it's called. And he later passed away as a result of a polar exploration. He was one of those guys that, oh wow, he would walk

across Antarctica. Do you know what I mean? Like that's that's what he did. And unfortunately it led to his death. He contracted infection, I believe, on one of his trips and it was emergency evacuated to somewhere in South America, but unfortunately passed away. But in later times, I went into him in Afghanistan. And what an incredible experience that was to meet a guy like that, five, ten years down the track and reconnect in a different place and different time. But at that moment, you know, he had not just that, I suppose, quality of special operations leadership,

but, you know, he wanted to impart in me and others how to work in this environment. You know, how do you understand the drivers of conflict? Like how do we create our own situational awareness and intelligence networks? How do we how do we build that through our op tempo and op posture? So I learned a hell of a lot from from Colonel Henry. And I was a real, real sad moment in my professional career where I heard that he'd gone. But that was an important part. But the NATO commander at the time of the multinational division was a guy called Canadian officer called Rick Hillier.

I think he went on to become like their chief of defense. But at that time he was a he was a two-star. And one of the stories I'll say of what we did. So I worked with him very closely in terms of the peace enforcement mission and liaison with. with the Serbian command. And yet one mission which was outside of the NATO mandate, and this will interest some of your listeners and perhaps even some of them were part of it,

was the Special Operations task to track down and capture the Serbian war criminals that were under arrest warrants from the Hague was a national command mission. So that was a direct command mission from, I imagine 22 SAS. And we knew they were there, we had a bit to do of them, but it was a silent war between the NATO mission and then the sort of war-criminal hunting mission.

And sometimes that didn't always go to plan. And I remember there's one particular occasion with General Hillier and he and I were at a Serbian army encampment of some sort. We had a meeting set up with this particular guy. And as it happened on that day, the 22SAS guys executed their, you know, their capture mission to get this guy. He had a warrant out against him. Everyone knew that. And so we were literally in a car park getting out walking towards this building to get this guy and in, fly the choppers and the black vans and dudes jump out.

And they nab this guy literally right in front of us. And then X-Phil. And me and the general are standing and they're going. And of course, everyone thought we were the decoy, right. We were the lure. And I don't know. General might have known about it, but I certainly didn't. And he didn't certainly give on that he knew about it.

And that was a surprise morning. And it was an example of even many, many years after the sort of rump conflict had finished, just how seriously we were going after the war criminals. And, you know, I think those of you who follow Bosnia and I continue to follow it to this day. you know Raccoe Mladic and Slobod and Milosevic they took decades to track down and hunt and capture but we got them you know

and I think that's you know holding those people to account and I know that the US Special Operations Community was deeply involved in that task for a long long time and you know I would posit that going after those sort of guys and we sort of lost at least in the public domain lost sort of track of that after 9-11 and our hunt for global global terrorist networks.

But, you know, finishing that mission and successfully prosecuting those kind of people was very, very important. And I think, you know, personally speaking, the brutality of that war and the sheer, the sort of brazenness of the murder of your fellow neighbour who, you know, previously had lived next to all to you, It was something that really deeply affected me, not in a fear way or a sort of a shocking way, but in a way that I wanted to understand it. And I suppose it was in part, in part, one of the triggers for me to look at trying to understand that conflict a bit better. Yeah. And it's interesting too because it's something that always happens someplace else.

But when you're in the middle of it, you wonder, well, what would it take for it to happen at home? or in some place more civilized or that we think we consider more civilized. Sure, sure. And I've got to be careful that you're self-aware of your own sort of intercultural prejudices there, that you know, do we accept violence in Rwanda? You know, do we understand it in Rwanda? But we don't understand it when we see it in contemporary Europe. Right.

Yeah, I'm sure there's similar feelings in Ukraine and other places at the moment. But you're right, you're right, Dave. It was a, it was a, a visceral thing that these were, by all accounts, you know, modern, sophisticated people. The country of Yugoslavia was, had its problems, but it was, it was, it was, it was, it was a recognizable country, yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And then something happened which triggered that, that change. And I suppose, you know, that we could, the history of the war there has its own. explanations, but as does the criticism of the international community and what they did there,

you know, that was the start of your president's, what was the phrase, something about humanitarian intervention, you know, like this idea that we needed to intervene on humanitarian grounds, not just arguably today, it's far more grounded in geostrategic issues. but at that time and so I think a lot of that I think a lot of that was codified by

Samantha Power and the right to protect yep yep I don't want to call it strategy but doctrine I suppose that's not any book she wrote too hey and

about her experiences Sam Power and where is she now she's like the head of USAID or something is that? Oh I don't know she was in the Obama administration I'm not sure where she is

after that. She was Obama's ambassador to the United Nations. Yeah. I'm not mistaken. And you're right. She had her start of her career initially as a journalist in the Balkans, I believe. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. Because she's an Irish

citizen. Yes, that's right. She was an Irish immigrant to the great book. I forget the title of it, but I recently picked it up in quarantine and and flick through it. But yeah, some some parallels there to her own personal reflections about what had happened in the Balkans and

where she took her career and the doctrine that she came up with and later implemented as a sort of policy leader in Obama administration. Yeah, so as a young Australian, a young Australian infantry officer, I found that an absolutely incredible experience to be doing, not because I was in command of troops in battle or anything like that but I would argue a far more sort of complex um you know situation and then there were there were the conflict was still very real at that time um one example uh the the government or the perhaps it was the UN or NATO decided to reopen the mosque in the center of the city of called Banyaluka, which is the capital of the Serb Republic of Bozia.

And I think they underestimated the reaction to the local Serbian population, and there was huge riots and turnout. In fact, it was tried on two occasions to relay the foundation stone of the mosque. I forget the Islamic word for it, but there's a, one of the first things they do is lay the foundation stone. And in the early 90s, the Serbs that of course raised it, there was nothing left of the mosque. and tens of thousands of people came out in protest with some degree of violence

and in fact on one of the occasions we were in the thick of it the US ambassador and many other dignitaries who were there were sort of I don't know what the phrase for it is Jack they were isolated from their route of escape by 10 to 20,000 Serbs in this building and it took some time to extricate them

And I suppose that was an indication of the flashpoints. For me, another interesting part was, again, harking back to the Islamist piece, was how the Bosnian influence still continues to this day. And, you know, if I'm not mistaken, there was, you know, much like the Chechens, there were Bosnians in ISIS. And that sort of flicker continued for many, many, many years. So that was an important tour, I suppose, for a young officer. I really appreciate you, you know, kind of sharing that experience from your perspective.

We've talked about Bosnia and, and Kosovo quite a bit on this show with past guests. I mean, H.K. Roy, Mark Giaconia, Ron Mueller. So we've heard it from... Who was one of your guests that was a CIA agent there? That was a fascinating... H.K. Roy and Ron. Muler, we're both CIA. Yeah. Yeah. And Mark was a 10th Special Forces group.

Uh-huh. So, no, it's really cool. And I enjoy, you know, here in your perspective, too, coming at it from a different angle. Malcolm, out of curiosity, you know, you mentioned briefly that you were there during 9-11. And, you know, there was still this effort to find, you know, the, you know, most of these criminals. Uh-huh. Was there any shift or noticeable shift in Western policy that also now diverted manpower to find jihadist camps? Not in an opt-tempo way, I don't believe so, no. I mean, I think one of the interesting, although we all witnessed the very rapid sort of reaction and deployment of U.S. forces in particular and some early Australian forces to Afghanistan by the end of O-1,

other than very small reconnaissance and intelligence efforts in the Balkans, no, I didn't discern. It didn't result in a change to the ISAF mission, for example. Right, right. But, you know, we looked at it. It was taken very serious at the time. I'm not aware of any disruption action or anything else that happened.

In fact, I think if we looked back, we'd find that the classification of these safe zones or whatever they were, were really a collection of former people who'd been in Afghanistan in the early days and had come back. They may not have even been Bosnian. And they'd married and set up

sort of little remote villages and that sort of stuff. That's my understanding of what we found. I imagine that it also becomes very like politically delicate to go after Islamic radicals in that area where Serbians are viewing all the Muslims is radicals. and now you're kind of highlighting that or almost validating their belief, right?

Absolutely. And, you know, we would almost be seen to be partisan to the sort of ethnic nature of that conflict. It'd be interesting to backtrack and look at how later years of the NATO deployment panned out in that regard and how those sort of national special operations and intelligence efforts sort of reacted to that. Right. Now, you're right.

I would 100% concur with that with that observation. Now, you said that this was about the time, or at least this had an influence in your decision to leave the military and go into diplomacy. Were there some formative moments while you're in Bosnia that sort of led to that? Not specifically. As I said to you, I was exposed to the nature of my job to a whole range of different types of actors in the battle space. And people that I hadn't really thought about or been exposed to before. You know, as a young infantry officer, don't really think about who's an ambassador. What does that mean?

What is an aid worker? What's a UN inspector? You know, you don't hear about that. You don't think about it. So I suppose it was a moment of, no trigger point there, but it was a fascinating conflict to be involved in from the perspective of the diversity of how the different agencies and actors were seeking to have an influence to solve it.

And the military was only one part of that. And, you know, I would argue the challenger main battle tanks by that time, I mean, obviously, earlier in the conflict, the sort of hard element was more important. But in later times, they were purely a show of force compared to the real efforts behind the scenes on the peace process. I want to jump into talking about your diplomatic career. I just want to give a quick shout out first to our other sponsor for the show tonight. it's 10,000 clothing. And I'll tell you viewers out there a little bit about my own experience. I work out two, three times a week normally.

A lot of kettlebell exercises, high intensity training and intervals, things that require a lot of movement and full motion, full range of motion. And our sponsor, 10,000 clothing provided us with some stuff to try out. And I've been working out wearing their shorts and T-shirt. Actually, Dave is wearing one of their shirts today. Their gear is really nice. Yeah, it's really the nicest workout clothing that I've ever used. The shorts are super comfortable, have everything on it that I kind of need it to have,

and while also staying out of the way when you need it to be out of the way. Yeah. And they're better in public than Ranger Panties. Or those old Ranger panties with a scroll kind of. Yeah, maybe Mothball, some of those old PTs that are falling apart. and get something from 10,000 clothing. Like I said, I've been using them for weeks now, really enjoying them, and I recommend you guys go and take a look at it. The website for them is 10,000.cc, and the promo code you can use is team.

It'll get you 15% off your first order. So 10,000 clothing.c, and use the promo code team to get 15% off. And check out their website. They have a wide range. I mean, they don't just have like one kind of short. They have shorts for running that are specifically designed. Shorts for lifting when they know you've got to do like your squats and stuff. Yeah, they're very into like the CrossFit and, you know, all the different modalities of full, full body exercises.

So check them out. They've got some really good gear. So, Malcolm, if you can, lay on us, you know, how you then found yourself as an Australian diplomat. I think we refer to them normally what foreign service officers. That's right. What's the term in Australia? Yeah, foreign service officer would be common. Diplomat would encompass sort of, well, traditionally there were two types of people

at an embassy. There were consular staff and diplomatic staff. That actually related to the accreditation you actually got, you got a different type of passport. Now we just sort of clump that together. And if you're a diplomat, you're on a diplomat. diplomatic passport. But yeah, our foreign ministry is called D-FAT, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Some years ago, it was amalgamated with our aid agency. You guys still have a separate development agency, USAID. We're amalgamated. So it's a holistic trade, foreign policy and aid agency. Extremely competitive to get into, as you could imagine. And I'm sure the US system is

is the same. I was a bit different as someone who's a bit older with a different career. I was called a lateral recruit, someone who sort of comes across at a different level. Most people still go through what we call the graduate training program. And it's, it's at that time when I joined, which was just after my first tour of Afghanistan and some work there. The core political staff, like if you take out the people working in the passports office and the IT section and the property section,

it was probably only about 500 people, including people posted overseas and working at the headquarters. Our structure and resourcing, is a little bit different to the US in that we spend most of our time in the headquarters trying to get out, whereas my experiences with US diplomats is they're sort of on the posting roundabout, and for them to get back to Washington is like a coup. We're the exact reverse.

And it's been a long-standing criticism of the level of resourcing that the Australian diplomatic effort has attracted, actually. That it's out of whack with the amount we spend on our defence and border security. and, you know, to make a budgetary argument for that is hard. What does diplomacy do? How does it benefit the nation compared to, you know, buying a submarine, which even if it's not been used operationally, still has a deterrence effect, you know, and it has an industrial effect, too, you're going to build it at home. You know, it's jobs created to do it.

People think diplomats are just at, you know, cocktail parties and the sort of, the perception is it's a way. of money. Of course the reality is the exact opposite of that. And I want it in. I definitely wanted to do it. I was sort of convinced to do it during my first tour of Afghanistan by the then ambassador guy called Brett Hackett. Australia had just put back in an embassy and he and a small number of people were running a pretty small shop and I was there in a political advisor role with the military and I was able to help him out in terms of acting as a quasi additional set of hands for him at the embassy. And he said to me, you should really do this full time.

And so I grabbed that by the hands and I was able to successfully get in the pipeline as a lateral recruit, which you're still quite a junior officer, but you haven't gone through that graduate training program. And you're not part of the sort of, I suppose it'd be like coming into the military, not having gone through the training college or being a platoon commander and you're coming jumping straight in as a company commander or an operations officer in their headquarters and be like who are you like where did you come from what experience are you bringing culturally though one interesting thing about the diplomatic service in

australia even though they don't uh it is very elite um once you're in they don't really care who you are or where you did before you know it's it's what you do now and you're reputation and credibility from day one. And so that was quite refreshing, actually, compared to the military where you sort of have this a cumulative career, you know, where you sort of, everything you've done even eight years ago sort of remembered and judged. And it is in diplomacy too, but you sort of start fresh, if you don't know what I mean.

No one really cares whether you're a lawyer beforehand or a soldier in my sense, in my case. So for me, it was quite a natural transition. others haven't had a successful jump. They're too structured, they're too used to the military sort of chain and command and they're not able to sort of, there's different types of people in diplomacy. You know, not everyone's into running and lifting,

you know, not everyone's into, everyone brings a very, very different take to it. In fact, I remember one pre-deployment briefing session we did and I went to our sort of mission readiness center in Sydney and military one I mean and I took up with me a very small number of diplomatic staff and it was one of those sort of briefing sessions where before you go to Afghanistan the military sort of pulls everyone together from around the country and you're in an auditorium of like 200 people and you get the cultural briefings and the safety briefings and all that stuff they're not for people who are part

of a formed unit. They're all the also people. Like if you're going to go and be the SO2 something something in the headquarters, everyone comes together at this briefing center. And the people that were with me were one young, two, one of them was a woman. And secondly, one of them was an Asian woman, if I'm not mistaken, in terms of her ethnic background. And we're sitting at the front of this auditorium. We turn around and she goes, every single other person in this room is a white Anglo-Saxon male. And it was a, a, it was a very interesting dichotomy between the types of people we get in the foreign service and the types of people we get in the military horses for courses everyone's a bit different

but just an interesting observation about the differences there so yeah it took me a while to get in uh jack but once i was in i loved it and it was a very very rewarding career and i found it um whether you were doing uh short-term missions uh long-term postings the headquarters-based work it was incredible it was a it was a treasured experience so what was your first posting like what was that that transition like for you from the military to the foreign service well i spent four years as a defense civil servant so i had that sort of a bit of a buffer so there was a bridge there okay been a been a bureaucrat if you put it that way rather than a soldier um my My foreign service career played out in two halves, five years in the headquarters and five years continuous overseas service.

But within that first five years, I was almost continuously overseas anyway on short-term missions. I started out being a team leader for our emergency response team going to Samoa after the tsunami in 2010. I led the Australia-based team that went over. another self-depreciating story about that. So a tsunami happened, like, I don't know, Australia time, like 4 a.m. or something. We take our responsibilities in the Pacific very seriously. We stood up an interdepartmental emergency task force. The Australian government decided to send assistance, and literally within hours, we'd formed a team to go.

And I was asked to lead it. I went straight home, grabbed my bag, literally got on a charter jet from camera to Brisbane, small plane, joined up with the main force. I'm talking doctors, nurses, search teams, do you know what I mean, this type of stuff that you'd take to a post-sunami environment? And myself and two or three, one diplomats

that sort of head of it. Get there, there's like, I want to say 100 people, and we're getting on a chartered jet, and we're about to fly off to Samoa. we go to walk out the customs area and I'm like, shit, I forgot my passport. I'm like the foreign ministry leader of this team and I've forgot my passport. And because it literally all happened in hours and I just gone straight home, grab what gear I thought I needed. And it was too late.

Like, there's nothing I could do. I was Brisbane from Canberra is like two and a half thousand kilometers. I'd already been in one charter flight. The Australian immigration people didn't seem to care. They're like, oh, have you got any ID? And I have my driver's license. So they sort of snapped a photo of it and registered that I'd left the country. And they said, oh, but you might have a hard time getting back in.

And I was like, all right, well, that's the future problem. Let's just go. So we get on the plane. I can't remember how far it was, maybe five, six hour flight. We land in Samoa. This is literally 10 hours after a tsunami. And I'm turning up with an emergency team. And I'm like, how are I going to?

to get in i mean it's still a foreign country so i put myself at the front of the line i walked straight up to the samoan customs officials and this is before you know instant messaging where i could have tipped off my staff in country right there's there's nothing to that and i can't even remember if they had comms working uh and i just said i my name is malcolm braley i'm the leader of the australian response team and i don't have my passport and they were like Walk straight on through, sir. So that was a lesson learned. And then I had to, eventually I had to get it shipped over.

And I got home. How hard had Samoa been hit? Yeah, pretty, pretty hard. This was around the same time as the Arce tsunami, which was far, far bigger in Indonesia. You know, hundreds of thousands of people killed. This was not quite that scale. But Samoa was hit very, very hard. and it was any of the coastal regions where there were villages down at sea level.

Some of them were, were decimated. And a lot of their major infrastructure was okay. It sort of hit the northern and northeastern sort of sector of the island. So a lot of the capital city was on the south side. There were huge ocean suck and different impacts there, but it wasn't like the center of the city was. was affected but yeah it was it was very tragic and um um it was a it was my first for a um into a sort of a humanitarian disaster uh situation if you like so that was that was that was one

to answer your question that that was probably one of the first things i did and um really that the head of mission at the time uh what we call in a commonwealth country the high commissioner was an awesome guy called Matt Anderson and he also came from a former military background interestingly he is now the head of the Australian War Memorial here in Canberra post his diplomatic service so an incredible guy and yeah we approached it like a mission he goes right now

I want you doing future operations I want you running this this this you know and so we just turned up and bang you just go into mindset and you know a hundred civilian doctors, nurses and search and rescue teams are just crying out for a bit of command and control. So in that instance, Dave, I just sort of reverted to type and lead from the front. Give clear orders and instructions, timings, coordination, admin. Boom, there you go. So that was very interesting. And then after that role, I spent another three years.

So as I said, five years at home time. My second three years was a fascinating job. I was the intelligence and special operations liaison officer for our consular division. Now, what that meant was I was the 24-7 interface with our threat warning system, our national intelligence system. We're going to high threat reporting, kidnapped for ransom, impending terrorist attacks. type of thing. And I don't know how it works in America, but I'm pretty sure it's the same, Canada, UK do it as well. You know, if we have information that's alluding to, credible information alluding to a terrorist attack or a kidnap, we're going to do something

about it. That's one of the rare cases where you actually can take sensitive national intelligence and act on it in advance in the protection of Australian interest in Australian citizens. So that was an awesome job. That also kind of. coincided with the initial years of what was later called the Arab Spring and there was a number of crisis response missions contingency planning preparations and others which we did in that in those few years so I spent you know half of the year two-thirds of the year deployed all over the place North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, all over the Middle Eastern, bits and pieces of work relating to, principally relating to,

consular contingency planning and making sure our embassies in high, were well prepared for, you know, large-scale conflict or mass evacuation, neo-operations, I suppose you'd call it in the military, that we were prepared for that, that we were well plugged in and understood the intersection of civil unrest with terrorism. And, you know, this is 2010, 11, 12, I want to say. So it wasn't like we didn't know about it.

Like, you know, Iraq was running. But this was before, you know, the sort of, well, Libya was in that time period, right? So we were starting to worry about jihadism. in sub-Saharan Africa, et cetera, et cetera. Somalia was a long-standing concern for us and our interest in Kenya, et cetera, et cetera. So a really, really interesting time.

What was the diciest situation you got into doing that job? I bet there was some experience. Okay, okay, okay, two quick stories. One serious, one funny. I did a job in Nigeria, and I took a small team of dudes, put it that way. and low key right

this particular mission was about preparing for what we call phase zero for hostage recovery operations so not in response to an actual kidnap event but what would we do if right right so how do we do a unilateral mission you know everything from where do we

get our own aircraft from what are the routes to and out of countries blah blah blah right um so we turn up in in Nigeria we have a high commission Australia has a small team there in the capital city called a busier so we get up there, get up to a

Buzha. I think we, that was the whole journey in itself. Anyway, we get there and the crew of the Australian diplomatic crew lovely, nice team, nice team. And we said, okay, what can we do tonight? Where can we go? Because there's a restaurant we can go to? And they're like, yeah, yeah, here's some recommendations.

There's a nice restaurant here. It's a little bit out of town but yeah, you should try it. Just ask for a taxi from your hotel. This is like this older lady who's like the senior, we call them the SEO, senior administrative officer of the embassy, right? Supposedly, who's over across all the security functions,

consular admin, like should have a finger on the pulse. Anyway, she's obviously just dusted off this list. I don't know when, I don't know when they'd given last restaurant recommendation in a Buzha, but me and these couple of likely sellers where you say, we're good, let's go.

we get in this taxi, he's taking us out of town. We're like up this hill. There's like suburbs. It's dark. We're like, there's no one up here, man. What is this? And we eventually find this address.

There's nothing there. And maybe there was like an old sign, tin sign hanging on the roadbox. A tumbleweed blowing. Tumbleweed's right. And then there's like, of course, of course, like shooting breaks out. And I'm like, what the thing is that? And look, I'm not going to turn into something at war. And it was just guards having a shoot out in the street of some break-in maybe.

I don't know. But our taxi driver was like, damn it, he was going to bug out. We were going nowhere. So we jumped out of the car. Bullets flying not towards us, but like in that vicinity. And we self-extract on foot. And we were like 10Ks out maybe from the hotel, like on the outskirts of town. And we sort of do this nighttime.

extraction back to the hotel and order room service and a beer. And then the next day, ring this woman and go, what the hell were you telling us about it? To go to this restaurant that doesn't exist. Yeah, take that. So those guys who are with me on that mission, they'll remember it. It was hilarious.

But then led astray by our own team. But look, really interesting job we did, Dave, on the serious side was look at national evacuation operations for South Sudan. and at that time we had, I want to say, 10, 20, 30 military people in the mission, the UN mission there. And we also had a strong citizen presence. So probably people who had been a refugee to Australia in the previous years, they were Somali. Sorry, South Sudanese, South Sudan's created as a country, they've gone back to contribute, work in their government. Nonetheless, they're still an Aussie citizen, so we count them in our numbers and have.

we get them out and so we did a small mission uh kicked off out of kenya went to south sedan hired a car and proceeded to try and map out how we would do a self-extraction you know if we had to if we had to get a team out how would we do it and it was south through this sort of uh so the main conflict's north obviously you don't go that way so we punched south to uganda and um not a huge distance I think it took us two, three days or something, cross into Uganda, which itself has its own challenges. But that was an interesting example of one of the jobs we did. Cross border, Neo, low profile, how do we plan it?

How do we do it? What resources do we need? And let's wreck it. Let's actually do it for real. So if it's called upon, we know how to do it. So that was a fun couple of years, included some trips to crazy places like Yemen. I was in Sarnar with our ambassador for counterterrorism, probably, look, this is just before President Saleh fell.

There'd been a bunch of incidents there, including the British Deputy Ambassador's car had been attacked with an RPG or some sort of rocket attack. And again, the interest in Yemen was not purely on terrorist organizations, but there was an Australian connection. There were Australian people there who had traveled to join jihadist groups. Most notoriously, there was a few women who were a part of that, and they married people legitimately and been sort of seduced into this world and had found themselves stuck in Yemen. So that was an interesting and a really cool period of my life and working very closely with a whole bunch of agencies, as I mentioned.

you know, some big wins, a lot of pain. We didn't always get it right, but in terms of our protection of Australian interests and Australian citizens offshore, you know, I think that we did a good job and that was done through national level resources and some quite unorthodox cooperation between agencies on the ground,

which was cool to be a part of. I don't know much about our own foreign service. And you actually might know because you interacted with them. But these types of operations don't seem like they would fall within the purview of one of our diplomats or foreign surface officers. It seems like it would be more on the television military side. You guys have a very strong State Department security service. who may look after that. I don't know how State Department does their consular operations.

Like how do they structure and plan and deploy for that sort of stuff? Like how would a U.S. Embassy be evacuated? I think a lot of times that's more a military neo type of thing. I mean, I know in the past at least that we've definitely had like SF guys go and do that. Yeah. But as somebody of as a member of the Foreign Service, you are actually going to these places with these teams. And again, any kind of phase zero planning is going to be military.

Yeah. So I wonder if our services don't do it. I don't know they don't, but I've never heard of that. Do you think it's more because your diplomatic corps is so much smaller, your intelligence service is so much smaller, your military is smaller. And so it's more people just Roger up and it's more integrated? Two comments on that. one, the cooperation with the military and the diplomatic service is enshrined in a bit of doctrine.

Like, we're talking the deployment of, you know, augmentation teams, defense liaison teams, situational awareness teams, this sort of stuff, right? It's enshrined in doctrine and in both sides of the fence, right? And I'll be surprised if it wasn't for you too. Australia, like America, Jack, I might be getting this wrong, but you have a very strong what they call country team approach. So what that means is the American ambassador for any situation, crisis situation or other one,

there's a single point of command and responsibility that rests with that person, particularly where it's this type of crisis response or organ. And we have the same mindset. So, you know, if we deploy a military assistance team to give you a good example. I wasn't part of this, but there was a, you know, the civil unrest in Beirut, mass evacuation. operations their embassy is reinforced with a defense supplementation team and so there's an

operational focus to that but there's also planning and preparatory versions of that in the background that what we call contingency planning so uh that that's and what happened during the middle east uh crisis the arab spring as well as the sort of ripple effect of that across the whole MENA region was there was a large number of incidents that caused us to really look sharply at how we look after our citizens. Right. It seems like a lot of planning because if Australians are anything like Americans, the State Department can tell them all day long, you need to get out of this country. And people like, yeah, whatever, we're fine, we're good. You're right, man, whether people come or not is another question.

Right. Although sometimes they come to the party and they go, oh, here's an Australian passport. We've never heard of you before. No, one funny one was the Arab Spring was, we did a, like a sponsored civil aviation evacuation out of Cairo. So Egypt never really went south, but it was serious enough that people wanted to get out.

And we organized with our national airline called Qantas to do this flight. And I think we packed maybe two or three hundred people on it. and our secretary at the time as a guy called Dennis Richardson amazing guy was the head of our intelligence services AZO Australian ambassador in Washington very very experienced senior diplomat someone managed to send him a message

I don't know how asking if they could claim their frequent flyer points for Cazivac Operation out of Cairo and he would tell this story like as if he was flabbergasted someone would actually write to you like imagine someone writing not the secretary of state but the secretary of the department

i don't know what you guys call it like the head of the the bureaucratic head of the state so that was a funny that's a funny one man that's incredible after that after that five years i then was posted back to cabal so this time australia had a stronger embassy presence uh full bore embassy and i went back for my second second um bite at the cherry i had worked in afghano-five-o-o-6 and then for a year in 2007, and I went back for a second stint as a diplomat in 2013. And what was that like and what was Australia's posture towards Afghanistan, the security situation there at the time?

It's, look, our original commitment back in, you know, O-1 and through that sort of period was definitely in the context of our alliance commitments to the U.S., you know. Same same for what later we came into Iraq, you know. There were national strategic interests in play in terms of global terrorism, etc. But principally, my personal view, was that alliance, credibility, if you like, played a key role in that. And certainly that flavoured the nature of our original deployments in terms of those stacked to be special operations. I mean, they were the guys that had the best interoperability, had the most op experience and who were most quickly able to adapt. like every other nation in Afghanistan guys we morphed we changed we got into

provincial reconstruction then we got into you know the training game you know with the Afghan army etc etc and it was a bit of a quagmire I mean you're welcome you're welcome to talk about that and debated if you want but I came in second time round so 567 was in that lead-up and then in 2013 I was posted to the embassy as a political officer in charge of our broadly speaking, if I can put it this way, outreach and reconciliation efforts with the Taliban. And the context for that at the time was that in 2013,

Australia had won a seat on the UN Security Council, which you guys are a P5 member. That's half of the course for you. But for Australia, that's a big moment. And that gave us a big step up in our diplomatic efforts in Afghanistan. and worldwide. And we, at that time, we were the chair of what's called the Al-Qaeda and Taliban committee, which, if I'm not mistaken, was a Security Council Resolution 1267.

So there was a very strong interest in the monitoring enforcement of those sanctions, but also at the time, you'd recall 2013 was the very first time we saw Taliban move to Doha. and want to set up an office to actually talk to the world. And so I got involved in that work, both through the lens of the Security Council and but also through the lens of our in-country reconciliation and rehabilitation programs, which were, I don't know if you guys ever had anything to do with that

in Afghanistan, but they were pretty small scale, but they did exist. I worked, very closely with and I'll name them today because I know they've escaped there out of Afghanistan with the Afghan what was called the High Peace Council you might remember the chair of that was a guy called Rabani he was assassinated and the deputy chair took over a guy called Massum Stanixai and part of my job was to work very closely with him and the High Peace Council to look at how the Afghan government did its own peace process and

outreach Taliban movement and reintegration We worked very closely with a number of what you might call reformed Taliban leaders from both political and military spectrum, although that classification's pretty loose. Right. But they weren't like active commanders. They were, they were, in some cases, people who had officially reconciled, I think was the term with President Karzai at the time. and were allowed to perform certain functions. Others were a bit more in the margins. And, yeah, it was awesome. Like, you know, the job of the diplomat is to, my children often ask me, what does a diplomat do?

You know? And one of the ways I explain it is to say, we're a bit like a journalist for Australia. You know what I mean? You don't know when you need the networks. You don't know when you need the information. So you've got to be out there on the street, building relationships, network, credibility, stories that help you get to the kernel of the problem

and understand the place. And there's an additional part to it, which is the job to impart and influence, right, in part our interests and monitor those. But there's the understanding part, which is more the networking and the journalism part. So there was a lot of that. And it was a incredible year to be doing that. That coincided with the closure of our provincial reconstruction team in Tarancott. I don't know if you guys ever went to Tarancott in Orisghan Province down south.

Mad place. And that closed in 2013. And that was the sort of, you know, I suppose my work in Afghanistan bookended it. I wasn't there in 01 or 2 early on, but I was able to see the creation of this mission and the closure of it, which was a

I suppose in hindsight a tragic privilege but one which at the time I felt very passionate about and privileged to be involved in and have stayed tried to stay very close shout out

to an American colleague I worked very closely there guy called Chris Calenda is DC based now Chris this wants for you man cheers Chris he was a He was a former army officer turned, through his early experiences on the eastern border

with his regiment. And I'm going to get this exactly wrong, Chris. I'm sorry about this, but he had sort of not on his own volition, but he had implemented an outreach program to local commanders and he tried to sort of cross the boundary, so to speak, as a regular military officer. He was then called back later as a civilian advisor and he was working very close. closely with Comisaf, who was an American general, and that was where I worked with him on the Taliban outreach-style movements. He's now retired. He later did a PhD in London,

and he's a great guy, fascinating guy, and running some of his own businesses and advisory stuff at the moment in state side. Malcolm, what were the significant differences that you noticed between the 2005-7 timeframe in 2013 when you went back? the main one was though even though i was not involved in comet operations myself was the sheer op tempo and reactions of the insurgency you know back in o five uh we were driving around tarrancott i mean it was in a humvee but it was pretty straightforward right little fob uspr t oda and just go out the gate and go and talk to people right

what happened over time and we can debate how our own force posture and greater presence sort of provoked or reacted a greater insurgent response right the old hornet's nest analogy you know you go up a you go up a valley and someone should say you said well okay we went up that valley we never got to shut up there before well we never went up there before now it becomes an insurgent hot spot blah blah blah and that was definitely a change I mean you saw over those inciting years through 910 1112 you know significant combat operations at scale that just had not appeared in the early days um so that was an obvious difference um another one was the the nature of the campaign well the mission changed at least for australia

to be much more on training assistance of the Afghan National Army. You know, there was a pullback, I think, from reconstruction efforts. I mean, there was localized versions of that to do development programs and stuff like that, but not like what the original intent of the PRT was, the old ink spot sort of counterinsurgency strategy you might remember from the very first PRTs, which went out there. Then there was the clumping in of counter-incergenital narcotics. operations and all that sort of stuff too.

You know, the early days we very much avoided that. Later, there was a recognition that this was a fueler of the insurgency, you know, was contributing to significant fundraising for the Taliban movement, et cetera, et cetera. And they later became legitimate target and a whole bunch of, you know, combined operations with civilian agencies, et cetera, et cetera, getting after narcotics in Afghanistan. Malcolm, can you tell us then how you went from Afghanistan? stand to getting involved with Indonesia? Sure.

The simple answer is I applied for posting. And, you know, while I basically went from one to the other, I was lucky enough to get a back-to-back posting, pretty rare in Australia. But I finished up in Kabul in like first quarter of 2014 sometime, came back, did some language training, and straight over to Indonesia, this time with my family, in sort of mid to late 2014. So in one sense, Jack, it was a just an accident of posting, you know,

you apply for a job, you get it, you go. I could have equally ended up in any other part of the world. Could have ended up in Geneva or Port Moresby, yeah. And again, sometimes you don't like to say that you were fortunate to land in a job at a time when global terrorism was on the rise. but I landed in Indonesia at a time when the ISIS Caliphate was in ascendancy and the resurgence of radical Islam, militant Islam and terrorism in Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly

had a massive uptick. And you guys might remember that this had first happened with Jammar Islamia. at Jemar Islamia in the early 2000s with the two Bali bombings and the Australian Embassy bombing. In fact, my own embassy was attacked by J.I. Very directly in the capital city of Indonesia. And then later in some other significant Western hotel bombings, Marriott, J.W. Marriott, etc., in Jakarta. But after that, the Indonesian police with assistance of partners from Australia and U.S. and others, had done an awesome job.

Like, they'd wrapped up. They thought they'd wrapped up, Gemma Islamia, and they thought they'd put a lid on it. I arrived 2014, and ISIS and the Caliphate is the flavour of the day. And there were certainly many, many Indonesians who decided to

travel to Syria, or attempted to travel to Syria. Not always to fight, or at least not what they thought, they were going to be doing um there was a sense of the call of the caliphate in that true sense right the end of days and that they wanted to be in in the right time the right place um different patterns to the original afghanistan training of james la meijack where you saw that was a very uh very clandestine careful network that recruited people groomed them and sent them to afghanesey

for training over a long period of time and brought them back to Southeast Asia to prepare for future operations in Southeast Asia, which is what led to Bali, bombings, etc. The ISIS phenomenon was very different. It was the lure of the caliphate that was pulling people to Syria. and I'm summarizing here, but you probably had over a two to three year period, maybe 800 people from Southeast Asia, mostly Indonesians. And so my job was in part to look at the domestic responses to that, the Australian government's responses to that.

There was an uptick in terrorist action, including attacks on the ground in Indonesia at that time, including in downtown Jakarta. there was one moment where for some reason myself and my team found out about it first not because of any intelligence warning just because one of my guys got a phone call from someone who happened to be standing in front of the attacker right in the middle of the city right and quickly phoned him and he told me so we knew about it pretty quick and it was a sort of a small team with with small arms attacking a police post spilled over into a Starbucks they had

They had suicide vests, et cetera, et cetera. So pretty low grade, but at the time it was, when that happens in the mainstream of the city, it's bad, right? Anyway, so I knew I quickly ring the ambassador, boss, this is going down. He's like, okay, kick into gear all our reactions. And then the next thing I did was ring my family, right? I rang my wife. That's what you do, right? There's an attack underway.

And she, or maybe, maybe the security team had actually issued an SMS, because they can do that pretty quick, right? So, dear all staff, stay where you are, there's an attack underway. Boom, SMS goes out to everyone. And anyway, I called her. And she, I didn't know where she was. She was in a shopping center, maybe a couple hundred meters away for this attack. And I was like, just stay there.

And she's like, no way, I'm getting out of here. I'm going to get the kids from school. so she did the exact opposite to what we were told with her. God bless her. And she got out of there in our car, attempted to go and get the kids. But on that particular day, the city went to lockdown. They thought they were chasing cells all over town, which they weren't.

And that then went on for a couple of years, guys. And my role in the embassy had sort of a couple of different functions. One was that sort of classic interagency coordination and strategy piece. And one which I really enjoyed was, which was a bit more independent, was working with Indonesian civil society people about how we could counter this momentum more directly through quiet programs within the community. And that journey, which I started in 2014, still went on through the next portion of my life. and I eventually left diplomacy after that posting

and kept working in the measure on those same type of projects. One of the things you mentioned to me was that you got involved in making films, counter-extremism films. Yeah, that was one of the partners that I worked with, that was a tool they used to open discussions with local communities, was making these documentary films. And again, I'll tell you a bit of a story about this person I worked, with who I'm still like a brother today.

And how's this? We were born in the same, not the same day, but the same week in the same month and the same year. He is born in Indonesia. I was born in Australia and later Fate borders together. And we've worked together on many, many projects and had a personal friendship since that time. His name's Norhuda Ismail.

And he's an incredible man who's very passionate about this and I'll tell you a little bit about his story quickly because it's instrumental to the nature of the approach that I believe works when we're de-radicalizing people. Nohuda had actually been a student at a religious school in Indonesia called a peasantren, which is like a boarding school for Islamic studies. Quite common in Indonesia for people to send their children to these schools. But this particular school in the city of Solo and Central Java was the school of a person called Abu Bakar Bashir. And he was the spiritual and functional commander of Jemma Islamia.

And he'd been a long time figure in Indonesia. Back in the 80s and 90s, he'd been behind some of the Afghanistan-Mujahdin movements. He and his network were well known to Indonesian government and police, but they'd really sort of left him alone. And part of that was his school that he had going. And it wasn't a military school. It was not like that. It was a religious school.

And my friend, O'Huda, was a student at that school. And later in his life, he became a journalist, Jack. He, in fact, worked for Washington Post. And so he had a secular career. He went on to university and stuff. And he was back in Indonesia on a job when Bali bombings happened. And his news agency said, get down there and report on it. figure out what happened. So he went there. And within a couple of days, maybe even sooner,

the Indonesian police released the suspect list of people involved. And he realized that one of these guys was his roommate at this school. And from that moment, he devoted his life, continues to devote his life to figuring out the why and how to pull people back. And he asked himself a lot of questions. And he, he, he, uh, he, he's sensed. He, he, uh, he, he's since challenged and supported and helped numbers of former fighters in his life and with our work together. Anyway, one of the things we did together with him, and he was the front of it, he's the creative guy, he's the director, you know, he did it all, was to make some documentary

films about people's stories and how those stories can then be used to hopefully change the course of people's radicalisation pathway. Two films I'll mention to you quickly. One called Jihad Selfie about a young guy called Akbar who was a student in Turkey and he was radicalised online to join ISIS and fortunately Nohuda and our networks were able to sort of catch him before he did that. Coincidentally we were in, he was, Norhood was in the region doing some filming anyway and met this kid and then sort of created this.

documentary about that relationship and the journey that we had with him and how he convinced him to come home to his mother and his pathway since then. And he's a, he never, he never went there. He had friends that went there, but he never went to Syria. So his was like a, the success story about how he stopped someone. Another film we made, it was called Seeking the Imam and it was about a young girl and her family, her name's Darnia again. I've worked with her for many years now.

And she had her cases well documented. I mean, she convinced her family to travel to Syria and join the Caliphate. And I talk extended family, like her father, grandmother, siblings, everyone. And when they got there, they figured out it wasn't what they wanted. And there's a number of tragic elements to that, but she was able to contact people on the outside. She was in the, she was in Rucker. And she was able to using a people smuggler get to, I think it's still, it's still operative.

It's the Alhole camp, the refugee camp out of Rucker, which at the time was like just outside ISIS control, maybe. I'm not sure. This is like 2017. And anyway, Nuhuda and a small team flew over there. They were put in touch with her. And they were able to, to be frank, rescue her from, and her family from that situation, pulled her out on the ground extraction mission.

And she was brought back to Indonesia and her father and uncle were put in prison. She wasn't. And she underwent this sort of self-process of realization about what she'd done and she wanted to give back and help people like her who'd been misled by. online radicalism. A lot of this was online research that they'd done. Anyway, we made a film about her journey, a documentary film about her experiences,

a very powerful film. There's a third film we made about, called Pangantin, which means bride in Bhasia, in Indonesia. And again, it was about these women who, who were married to jihadists

and married specifically for the purpose of conducting an attack together. and had in two cases very famously had that attack disrupted by Indonesian police. It ended up in prison. And so we were able to access them and interview them. I won't claim that in that particular case, they were on a deregicalization pathway, but we were able to sort of work with them and capture that experience in a film. It's interesting. So that's one aspect of our work together,

and there was a whole bunch of stuff we did then in later years. about helping former terrorists go back to school, get educated, start their own businesses, et cetera, et cetera. And, yeah, they're lifelong. We talk about a program. Well, a program implies that it's just some bureaucratic thing you do and spend people's money. This is more than that. This is about lifelong sort of commitment to people and helping them remain on that pathway to peace.

Years ago, I interviewed a U.S. Army Psychological Operations Soldier, and he was telling me about how he and his unit, they funded a deradicalization film in Indonesia. And it was interesting because unlike what you're describing, he said in their case, it was basically completely unknown to the filmmakers and everyone else thought there's an American hand behind it, funding it. and that actually got me wondering about some other films that have been produced in other contested parts of the world that kind of promote America's view or promote America's side in the conflict I guess you could say yeah that's true I mean you could you know that sort of is another tool of statecraft isn't I mean that that type of activity is this was more organic and we let the process happen

now I'm really I am so curious about this whole process of de-radicalization and first off are most of the people that you worked with or found success with do they tend to be people

who were sort of brought in younger and sort of that kind of cult mentality where you can open them to the wider view? That is a fantastic question. And I'll try and answer it in a couple of different ways. There is no demographic template we can apply to this, really. Okay.

If this was a sort of a political science theory lesson, we could break it apart and talk about the demographics of Jemez-Milmira versus ISIS. There were some categorizable differences in terms of age, et cetera. and in the age of ISIS and online demographics, definitely younger and faster to radicalization. From point of first contact through to conducting an attack. In the case of Jemez Lemia, those guys had spent three, four, five, sometimes seven years preparing. In the age of ISIS, it was like three, four, five months.

Wow. So that's a key difference. Definitely a bit a bit younger. In the people that were successful, so the people we tried to, work with. I'll answer it in a slight different way. Explaining radicalization and recruitment terrorism has a number of ways you can cut it, right?

Sure. You can take a psychological approach that there's some sort of psychological flaw, pardon me. So, and they're sort of predisposed to this one, X, Y, Z. The approach we took, and this was a little bit empirical,

but also a little bit intuitive, was, this was based on the attraction of the group. This was a social process. Sure. And one of the characteristics, one of the phrases we use, and in fact my friend Nohuda, who I was talking about before,

he did his PhD on this in Monash University, is about the problem of toxic masculinity. And you can apply that mindset to a whole range of in-group behaviors, whether it's a game, obviously criminal gang but even sports teams and even in our own forces you know look at the look at the sort of way that a special operations unit creates itself and recruits to itself there is a degree of social aspiration and then social cementing of those behaviors and and those

bonds and my observation and experiences that that holds for terrorist groups as well it's not absolute. There's a bunch of other reasons. You know, other people argue it's about socioeconomics, etc. or the psychological challenges, but we would argue it's about social challenge. And so our approach which

we sort of developed over many years was designed to reverse that process date. And we call it the heart, hands, heads approach. And so whilst most de-recognisation programs around the world, you might

familiar with start with ideology you know you're in prison they send in an imam and they just talk about the hadith and they try and tell you that your understanding of islam's wrong or even now with um far right people maybe they're trying to bring in priests tell them they're reading in the bible's wrong i don't know um we we took the reverse approach and we looked at their their heart first in other words their social connections their sense of identity as a husband son wife whatever but most importantly the social connections so the first task is to pull them across to something new the hands are important that's where our sort of um uh programs to give people practical not just skills but purpose and livelihood alternative livelihoods is the phrase you know you

might use in uh it was used in afghanistan too right you give people another purpose they'll forget about the insurgency uh and then the heads part of it is a recognition that um We do want to challenge their use of violence in this case. You know, they may still be a Salafi in terms of ideology, but they're not a Salafi jihadist, that they recognize and act on that understanding that the use of violence is wrong. And so that was our sort of threshold perspective for how to take people through that process. That's interesting, because I was curious if you guys approached it from sort of,

of a theological viewpoint showed them sort of a non-abrication you know a non-fundamental way the way most moderates interpret you know the Quran as as we we look we're cognizant of that process but we I would argue that that is a later stage discussion to have with someone not a not a front-up stage so and in any event is can be shot with holes anyway. I mean, what's our interpretation of the Quran and hadiths any more than what the Bible says?

You know, who's one person versus another? Right. Well, I mean, that's, yeah, that's the whole Salafia argument, though, right? Is whether abrogation is, is valid or not in the Quran. And what, what,

did what Muhammad say earlier match or equal what he said later or did what he say later totally? Yeah, look, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a case to be made there for what you might call credible voices. Right. And how you bring in credible voices of reason. Right. And maybe there's a, there's other people out there doing that. And I think it's an important part of the process.

But just to say that the work we've done and thought about and put into action was to the left-hand edge of that. No, that's, that's amazing. I mean, it really is. And I think that, you know, any time when. no matter what sort of radical element a person belongs to, if you can introduce them to the humanity of the other side, right? If you can open up to the other side, they're human beings. 100% my friend.

And there's two mantra that I try and live by there. One is exactly to repeat what you said, which is talk to the other side. There's a Latin phrase, audiator et paris or something. It originally came from like the Roman Senate, which it meant literally talk to your opposition. But in a modern sense, I believe it's a maximum to hold close. Talk to the other side.

Who are they? What do they want? Right. They understand it. Right. And the other mantra is that everyone deserves a second chance. Yeah. Now that's a hard pill to swallow

for some people. That's hard. Like if you're dealing with a person who's actually conducted murder like a terrorist attack. Right. But you can take that approach for any criminal, right, who's conducted some heinous crime. And look, there's going to be, I recognize there's moral, ethical and legal limits to that viewpoint. You're not saying just, just forgive, they're off scot-free now.

No, no. But what does deserve a second chance mean? It means in the context of can we take people who have crossed the. that divide and who are committed to attack our very purpose and very soul of living, can they be brought back? And what do we do with them once they're back? So that's, that's my rationale for that, if you like. Of course, there's going to be people who remain evil and deserve to be dealt with accordingly. But those, those aren't the people who are blowing themselves up in markets, right? The people that are

evil aren't the ones who are actually, you know, committing these acts per se. They're the ones who are, you know, the Charles Manson's of these groups, you know. And look, it's what makes the field of counterviolent extremism sort of contested because what are your longitudinal data points? You know, the committed terrorist dies. the, you know, the people you bring back never really crossed that divide. Right. So what are the factors that led to radicalization recruitment and or deradicalization? It's very difficult to have, what academics call it, control points or something.

You know what I mean? So it's a control group. Yeah. It's a, yeah, there's no control group here. Right. So I am a pragmatist in that sense. What can be seen to have. an impact in a social sense or an individual and what doesn't and you discard what doesn't

and you keep using what does you know and it's not absolute and it's not going to work in every situation but i i sort of but but you know that's someone who's been deep involved in this for a long time right i appreciate i appreciate that is a contested some people don't believe in countervillard extremism at all you know it's as a as a field of yeah well it it also doesn't help that we have like think tanks here in America who bring in these de-radicalized terrorists who are like not de-radicalized at all and kind of like put them

out as these like show ponies like oh look this guy came back from the abyss back from oblivion and you give him a platform listen that's an interesting observation though too is that are people ever truly off that path

and I'll say I don't think it happens over the course of six months or a year. I think it takes a little bit longer than that. You go through the prison program, right? You put your hand up and say, yay, you're going to play with the bag. It's not going to happen. I think somebody could get off that path in a moment if they became aware, if they could lose the blinders that they had been wearing.

If you could open up their hearts, if you can open them up to see. Right. What you're doing is very unhealthy. Like if you believe in this cause, there are ways beyond violence to, if you, you know, if you believe that the caliphate is, you know, is destined to happen. Right. Then you don't do that by killing people.

You do that by proselytizing. So there's emotional levers you can use there. I'll give you example. The young guy Akbar, we mentioned to the film Jihad selfie. you know one of the levers we used with him was the the fact that he had never asked his mother permission to join us or something and there were there were some details there about what that was meant theoretically but it was also an emotional ploy to say to him you're a son your mother cares about you right you know and and that really had nothing to do with his commitment to violence or the caliphate

it was a much more raw emotional lever but that was a lever that you could use right and and that won't work for everyone i suppose but yeah no i think that's picking up on the point you're making no but but you're right in the sense that you know i i think that any group that that recruits people to do things that that they would never even think of doing on their own you know it's taking advantage of that that human the existential angst that all that all humans have you know buddha called the duca right that this this sense of missing something and wanting to belong to something yeah when you give them a purpose then i you know uh especially a heavenly purpose you know a purpose for which they'll be rewarded for eternity for um it it it can be

very appealing to people who feel lost no matter what no matter what the the cause is i I mean, it can be, you know what I mean? It can be a benevolent. Absolutely. Absolutely. And look, one of the harder things to explain is, I mean, put it this way, the original people recruited to go to Afghanistan with Jemez-Az-Lamia, as I said earlier, were carefully selected over a long period of time,

clandestinely and sort of groomed for it. And by the time they were sort of hit up to do it, they sort of were very much committed to the cause. um um the the modern version of that you're online how does one jump to that next step so fast i personally don't have a rational explanation for that um in part it's the power of social media in part it's the uh displacement of of social real social networks with online social networks uh in part like what you alluded to mate it's this idea that you're lost and you're looking for something and there's appeal in it for some reason. Look, there are some very real feelings

in the Muslim world that we don't quite get. For example, how motive Palestine is and the play on that. That can be used. But in most cases, in most cases in my experience, there was a social aspect to it. People wanted to be part of the group. It was very masculine, involves weapons and getting out in the jungle and, you know, right. Same reason we want to join the recon platoon in the battalion. You know, it's just the same. It's a, it's a similar mindset. Right.

No, I know that even, you know, because I spent a little bit of time in Gitmo in the first part of, you know, Afghanistan. And, you know, a lot of the guys, there were some hardcore. There were some true believers. But a lot of those guys were just guys who were poor, you know, not that bright, not educated at all. We're never going to be able to afford the dowry to a wife or whatever for a wife. And, you know, at their mosque, you know, somebody can say,

if you come to Afghanistan, we'll give you a wife. And, you know, and you'll have work. And that's all these guys wanted. So then they go, they get their passports taken. And then maybe some of them slowly become believers. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

Yeah. Just to bring this a little bit of a humorous aside, and I'm sure this guy wouldn't mind me telling this story. One of the people I've worked with and remained good friends with is a guy called Nazir Abbas. He's Malaysian, actually, but he was the commander of Jemma Islamiyah's what they call Mantiki, which is like a regional command, Manikiki 3, so Philippines. and anyway, he will tell the story of his recruitment to Jemma Islamia in the late 80s,

and he later was an instructor at their training camp in Afghanistan for many years. But he tells the story to him and a small number of others were first flown or first went into Afghanistan. I want to guess maybe, I don't know, 87 maybe. I'm sure they flew from Malaysia to Pakistan, something like that, to like Karachi. And they flew on like aeroplot, the Russian airline. And he says he and his mates get on this Russian commercial flight. And they were just giggling to themselves going, we're on a Russian commercial flight.

We're about to go to Afghanistan to fight Russians. To fight Russians. And that was their, that was their input way. Yeah, that is funny. But they weren't nervous at all, huh? Not in the sense of being caught, no. Yeah. Malcolm, can you talk to us then about kind of the next phase of your life

was going to work for the United States government? In a de facto sense, yes. Yeah. So I'd finished in Indonesia. I was back in Australia. You know, classic. You've had an operationally focused, intense, posting experience and you're back home and you're like, what am I going to do next?

And let's just say an opportunity came along, but it wasn't quite by accident. So one of the sort of ways of working I had as a diplomat was to never say no to a meeting request. Part of the role of a diplomat is to help other nations, other people understand what Australia thinks. and in this case it was about my understanding of terrorism, right? We could have, we were busy, man. We could have very easily said no to every meeting. You know, I'm talking, let's say the Finnish embassy wants to know about what's happening. They're not tracking it.

There's like two people in the Finnish embassy. They just want to meet someone and talk for an hour and get a solid answer. So I had a rule that I'd never say no to a meeting to do that because I thought it was important that whoever it was had the opportunity to listen. to Australia's point of view. Our government, and I'm a, I'm a, I'm a mouthpiece for the government at that point in time. And I got a call from a friend of mine, the British embassy, and, um, who did a lot of work there, but not quite the scale that Australia did. And he's like, look, I've got a person in town, a British guy.

Can you come and meet him for coffees? Doing some research. I think it might have been government-funded research by the UK government, but he needs a handy. It doesn't have any leads here. Can you just meet him and give him your insights? I said, sure. Yeah, no problem. So we meet up. I get his number. We meet up for a restaurant somewhere in Jakarta and I struck up a conversation with this guy for a couple of hours and gave him all my leads to. I said, okay, what do you want to do? You want to meet terrorist prisoners? Okay, speak to this person. You need an insight, Indonesian police. Okay, speak to this person. And I laid it all out. This is not, you know, secret networks or nothing. This is just, you just need to get pointed in the right direction. So I did this for this guy. His name's Alastair Harris.

Again, another instrumental fellow in my life and friend to this day, if he's listening. And he was running a company, as it turns out, private company called, there was a few parts to it, but if you look it up today, it's called ARC, ARK, ARC International. And he, like me, was a former British diplomat. He'd spent time in the Balkans as well and ended up in Syria and Iraq. and he'd sort of built a small company on post-conflict stabilization programs. And somehow he'd come across this opportunity to take some U.S. government funding from a U.S. government agency and do some work in South East Station.

And he rang me up. He goes, could you do it? Would you want to do it with me? And I said, and I was just one of those points in your life where I've worked for the federal government by a long time. and I was like, this is awesome. So I said, yes. And he actually flew to Australia to meet up with me. God bless him.

Like, as you do old school business, right, you go and network someone when you want to recruit them. And we sat down and we concocted this bid, I suppose you might call it, a proposal. It included my friend Norhuda, who I've been speaking about before. And we threw it in. And we got it. And so from that moment, I was a, I think private contract is probably a crude way to put it. But I was a two-step removed program manager for a very, very quiet operation in Southeast Asia for the US government,

where we weren't trying to be clandestine, but we were definitely. not trying to telegraph anyone's involvement, if I can put it that way. And I ran that for the next two years. It was awesome. Like it had some elements in southern Philippines, but mostly in Indonesia. And it was a chance to sort of imagine that you'd had your trade, the structured component of it, right? You'd trade in ODAs or whatever.

And then you got out and someone said, right, right we want you to do pretty much exactly the same thing um but you don't need to be writing briefings you don't need to be writing cables you just need to get out there and do good so that's what we did and um with our leadership um and connections to the u.s um we we we we got about it over the next couple of years and this was a counter violent extremist programs yeah that's right that's right um countervally extreme which is different to sort of other programming looking at um religious tolerance for example um you know this this was sharp end stuff uh how do we target people for recruitment and and disrupt that through online engagement and how do we jump that to real world

offline engagement in a in a real sense right um in a very personal way so we trained and recruited mentors who were a mix of activists and former terrorists. We put them back into the field. They built their own sub-networks. They got out there and brought people back from the edge using our methodology. That sounds pretty aggressive for like a preemptive program, right? I mean, we don't usually think that far ahead. That's true, and that's why it was sort of fun.

It was a very unorthodox way to do it. We were given a lot of responsibility and leeway. It was sanctioned. Like, you know, people knew what we were doing. Sure. But it was effective. And the only real reason it dried up was two reasons. COVID and the increasing focus on peer competitors.

Right. New peers in Southeast Asia. Yeah. And look, the U.S. government's huge. There's always resources and people looking at terrorism. It wasn't like, I was just one tiny bit of it, right? But yeah, Al Harris and myself and Nohuda sort of did this work at, you know, using your taxpayer money, I suppose. And we took it very seriously and we had some really

good programs. Malcolm, you mentioned something really interesting sort of the disruption. because as somebody who has worked this topic from multiple angles and as a compassionate human being, ideally you never have to get to the de-radicalization, right? You can stop it somewhere in there. How do you, what is your opinion on how government should deal with, like places like Finnsbury Mosque or or places where known radicalism and radicalization is known to happen. But when we live in a free society, we have to respect the rights of people. Sure. I mean, I think what you're the crux of that question is what can and should state intervention look like into what are inherently private social processes. Yeah, that's great.

That's better than I could have ever said it. So thank you. think that there is a case for the state to have functions there because of the threat and you know um there will be covert mechanisms there will be there will be overt mechanisms and there'll be stuff that's gray in between and i suppose my take on this and i'm a i've been a what you call a very silent player in this stuff like you don't see me often in the front seat of this work um that's because my methodology to answer your question is to go with and through local partners and local civil society. You know, I think that does community policing have a function in this, for example? Yes, it does.

And a uniformed police officer has a role in terms of community protection and relationships. Do law enforcement, intelligence agencies from a national perspective and international perspective, have a function as well? Yes, they do. but who do we actually get to use that's going to take some action and take ownership and responsibility for this stuff well it comes from within those in groups within those communities and so the trick is how do you identify train develop capacity i suppose of of these people and organizations then it's a careful balance because you need to you need they need to be credible to start with that they're going to have attraction to the the the the the

radicalized community whether that be a right-wing group or an Islamist group is in most of my experience they need to be credible they need to fully believe in your aims and objectives as well and and see the benefit for their community at the same time and that's a that's a very balanced act and i would argue that that gray zone work is different to either uniformed law enforcement or covert intelligence. It's sort of, it's a hybrid of, of, of, of that. But it can play a place. It can also have a lot of blowback, you know, if you don't do it well.

Right. And for example, if you try and mask the fact that you are a tool of the government, you risk that. You're essentially, if you do that, you're trying to run a COVID operation, right? Right. And if that's not what you're doing, not what you're trained to do and authorized to do, then it's going to come unstuck. So it's this sort of relationship-based work where you develop trust that people know exactly who you are and what you're doing and why. You equip them with the tools and methodology and funding and motivation to counteract that.

Malcolm. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, no. and then you get after it is always going to say you try it it's a challenging is i think it's a challenging situation in our modern era especially you know in western countries where personal liberty is supposed to be very important to us um and you know separation of church and state and respecting people's religions and things like that um it gets very complicated a line you got to draw as a as an actor is

violence. So where are people espousing violence or planning for violence? I believe in my heart, that's the crossover for some sort of action. And arguably, if it's a threat to the state, then the state has a responsibility and obligation to its citizens to look at that very closely. I'd like to ask you to stay for the bonus segment, Malcolm. And for those of you out there who don't know or aren't subscribed already. We have a Patreon that you find down in the description and you can get access to two bonus episodes a month and also bonus segments with many of our guests. You're like our peeps when you're on our Patreon. Our Patreon pays the rent, pays the lights and keeps us in the Freud. And you know, make sure that you subscribe to the channel.

If you haven't already, hit the bell icon, like and share the video. Take to the street. let people know about the team house. So Malcolm, before we wrap up here, could you tell us where you're at today in the kind of work that you're doing today? I think you mentioned that it's energy related. Yeah, yeah, sure. So my current job is,

look, I think you described me on your lead-in as a problem-solver, international problem-solver. And, you know, I hadn't used that before as a description of myself, but it's a really good one. And the problem I'm trying to solve right this moment is climate change. And I work for a company in Australian company, but it's now a global green energy company called Fortescue Future Industries.

And, you know, we believe that the planet is cooking, you know. And we are a business that is trying to become a global green energy company, and we're committed to producing, you know, zero carbon hydrogen from 100% renewable energy. sources. And I suppose we believe that from a commercial perspective, that hydrogen is a zero carbon fuel that's going to revolutionize the way we fuel our planet. And that's not going to happen by accident. We need to identify and secure renewable sources of energy at industrial scale. We need to decarbonize whole economies and industries. And, you know, Ford of SCUFitcher Industries,

who I work for has the resources, the best brains and the determination to make an impact. And so it's been an interesting transition for me from trying to have an impact in the world of conflict, I suppose you could put it, from negotiating with Taliban and reforming terrorists or tracking down war criminals to wanting to address one of the, or arguably the huge. challenge of our age and it's been a privilege to do so and I've approached that job with the same passion and thought and leadership and people-based sort of viewpoint that I have every other position of I've done. Might look and seem a bit different for someone from national security background to be doing

this in a commercial space but on reflection having been at it for a while now. It's, it's been a, it's, has felt a very natural transition and I've enjoyed it every single moment. Well, Malcolm, this has been a fair dinkum, as they say. I don't think you use that right. You don't think that's, no, no, no, that is a good use to praise. It's been a fair dink of discussion. It's a fair, fair dingum discussion. Where can people find you if they want to find your consultancy services or whatever, uh, They might be interested in having an international problem solver tackle. Where can they find you at?

The best place is LinkedIn, I think. Okay. I'm a fan of LinkedIn. It's a very transparent way of doing business. People can see your entire history and background. You can make yourself available to others or not. And I post on there from time to time and follow mostly now in green industry, green renewable industry industry for Fortiskew.

but that's the best place to find me, yes. Okay, folks, next Friday, we are going to have a Chilean special operations soldier on the show. It's going to be spicy. It's going to be interesting, and we don't often get to hear it because it's Chilean. Ha, ha, ha, yeah, that's wonderful thing. I kill.

I feel like I'm a broken man right now. Well, look, it's a southern hemisphere connection to me, right? just across the Pacific Ocean. Oh, right, right. Yeah, you guys don't spice your foods, though. What's up with that? I honestly don't know. We're multicultural in Australia, man.

We take it all. I honestly don't know that Chileans do either, but Chile. Anyway, it's dumb. Chile. Oh, but really, I know I'm glad to have one of our partnered countries represented on the show. We don't do it often enough. So he'll be here telling us about, you know, his country's special operations forces and actually some operations that he was involved in.

So thank you guys for joining us tonight. Thank you so much, Malcolm, for sharing your experiences with us here tonight. Thank you, Malcolm. We really appreciate it. And thank you, everybody. Please like and subscribe. Yeah, please like and subscribe. And thanks, Mel.

Tell your mom, tell your pets, tell your wife. And look, if you're going to join a radical organization, join our Patreon. Well, I've got to have the FBI call me by Monday. know it it's bad enough like facebook is banning me all the time you should stop posting nude i should start stop posting the ludes yeah the ludes they shut down his only fan because they were too lewd so all right thanks everyone just to just to say thanks it's been a pleasure i really enjoyed talking about it and my stories and um you have a fantastic program there's been some incredible guests on the show and I'm actually pretty humbled to be invited so thank you very much.

All right. So yeah, thank you, ma'am. We'll talk to you for the bonus segment.