The Team House - Former “Diplomat” on Iraq, Gaza, and Espionage | Chris Merritt

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Starting point is 00:01:16 We'll have some links down in the description for you. The book comes out June 9th, and I hope you all let me know what you think of it. Hey, everyone. This is The Team House. My name is Jack Murphy and we are here with today's tonight's guest or this morning's guest depending on when this is recorded. Chris Merritt. Chris Merritt is a former member of the British Foreign Office who served in places like

Starting point is 00:01:53 Iraq and Gaza and he is also the author of some spy novels. One of them is Committed, which that's the title of the book, Committed. It's out in the United States and the UK right now. And he has a new book coming out just. in a couple weeks called Octagon. That'll be out in the UK and hopefully we'll see it hit American shores sometime thereafter. But you'll be able to find it on the UK Amazon website, regardless of where you're at. So Chris, thank you. Welcome to the show, man. Thanks very much, Jack. Pleasure to be here. So I like to start with, at the beginning,

Starting point is 00:02:31 with our guests. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing and how it kind of took you towards governmental service. Sure, yeah. Well, I grew up in a kind of small town, not too far from London, and it's a fairly ordinary upbringing, I would say, not particularly wealthy, not particularly poor. But one significant thing was that my parents

Starting point is 00:02:56 were both languages teachers. So there were always foreign languages being spoken in the house. And especially when we went on holiday to places like France and Spain, and I would see my parents talking to people in their own language and just kind of seeing the effect that had and their ability to kind of make friends and make things happen abroad. It was pretty inspiring. So I was always interested in, I would say, travel languages. And then it kind of took off really when I was at university and I was

Starting point is 00:03:34 studying geography. So I hadn't gone down the languages route that way, but I was very interested in kind of anything to do with how people were living in foreign countries, different cultures, and of course one of the biggest global events that happened while I was at university was 9-11. And so that got me very kind of interested in, I would say, in international security issues. I studied a little bit some of those issues around globalization, migration, down into kind of quite specific stuff like kind of transnational terrorist networks, terrorist financing, things like that. I was able to actually study that university. And from there, it kind of took me. Someone suggested to me that maybe I should apply to the Foreign Office because then I could actually work on some of these issues.

Starting point is 00:04:33 and I had a very formative experience whilst at university when I was doing some research in Ghana in West Africa and I just kind of pitched up there not knowing anybody just with an idea that I was going to study something to do with kind of the way that people were using or exploiting in the case may be rainforest resources and I found myself literally in the middle of the rainforests in Ghana with no support network. And all of a sudden I was just kind of in at the deep end and needed to just kind of find my way through, make some contacts, learn about how this place worked, this very, very different culture.

Starting point is 00:05:19 And I think that kind of stood me in quite good stead for then doing that kind of thing for a living, but also just really inspired me to want to work overseas, work with different cultures, learn other languages and just kind of really go deep into the politics of the geopolitics, you know, of how places worked and how they fitted in the international context. And then with that 9-11 influence, it kind of particularly went down a security route. And which languages did you learn when you were in college and high school, I suppose?

Starting point is 00:06:01 Yeah, well, I'd always been speaking some French at home, in particular. My mom was really a French specialist. My dad, more of a Spanish specialist. And French was the one that I kind of went for. And so that was always kind of there. And once I joined the foreign office, I was able to actually take more classes and really build that up. And again, following that interest in the kind of geopolitics,

Starting point is 00:06:31 of the Middle East, I was able to use the languages center at university to make a start with Arabic. And I just remember actually this very kind of very impactful moment where it was actually an American diplomat who was appearing on Al Jazeera and he was just speaking, you know, it's just a middle-aged white American diplomat and he was just speaking fluent Arabic. And I remember just being blown away by it because it's such a different language to the kind of European languages that we would hear, you know, just kind of going on holiday, places like France, Spain, Italy, wherever. And I just thought, especially with everything that was going on in the world at the time, I thought this is a language that's going to, that really inspires me.

Starting point is 00:07:16 And I'm going to, I'm going to get stuck into this and try and learn it. So I did that. I did it for, end up doing it for about eight years or so in the end. I'm sure we'll circle back around on that, but when you apply to the foreign office after you graduate from university, I mean, what's sort of the admission process like? Yeah, so you, you see if I can remember now. So it was you you fill out the application form, you send that in. And then if that's, if they kind of like the look of you, you'll be. you're coming, you know, for an interview. And if you get through that stage, there's something called an assessment centre

Starting point is 00:08:06 where they basically chuck you into a variety of situations that are designed to replicate the kind of work you do. So you might have, you might just get given a stack of paper, like literally a foot high, all about a particular country. And you've got one hour to produce a single sheet of paper. a briefing for somebody on that. So you just have to smash through that information and distill it down into a page. You've got role play exercises where you have to, everyone's got a different task, or everyone has a different role, excuse me, you're representing a different part of

Starting point is 00:08:44 government and you have incompatible aims. So the idea is to negotiate, advocate for your position, give a little ground, try and get a little from others. And it's kind of interesting that I think in that situation, they don't want someone who comes in and kind of dominates the situation. They want someone who can kind of see different sides to it. You've got one-to-one role plays where you're kind of engaging in sort of like diplomatic situations. And one of those, I remember, is the other person is clearly very pissed off about. something and you have to just kind of placate them and mollify them in a in a professional way without giving away too much of your own, you know, your own position and your own interests.

Starting point is 00:09:39 And that's quite stressful because you're not expecting it. Yeah, a whole bunch of things like that, aptitude tests. It's a couple of days long and you're exhausted by by the end of it. So I came through that and then you have a final, what they call a final board. And that is a final board. And is just a sort of open-ended session where, you know, three people will sit there and align and just fire questions at you. And I remember being asked about, you know, my position on the, on the Iraq War, my understanding of other kind of geopolitical situations, ethical issues, all kinds of stuff. They just want to probe and probe and put you under pressure, see what your reaction is to being under pressure, but just kind of ultimately satisfy themselves

Starting point is 00:10:25 that you're the sort of person who could do this job and be put in front of, you know, officials and other people overseas to represent the UK without kind of getting into an enormous argument with someone or saying something incredibly offensive. Yeah, they're looking for people who can influence. I think that's a part of it. And so for me, actually, interestingly, this was kind of, even though I didn't necessarily appreciate it at the time. This was the beginning of my interest in psychology. And I'd started out. I'd come into that world very much from the perspective of geopolitics, security issues,

Starting point is 00:11:12 kind of big sort of global scale, international stuff that was interesting to me. But I ended up increasingly focusing down on, if you like, the individual, psychology, the way that individuals kind of think, feel, behave. And that took me in another direction. It kind of evolved out of that work for the foreign office. So we can talk about that more later, perhaps. Yeah, sure. And so when you get there, after you finish, I mean, where do you get assigned? So most of the time, very occasionally people will get posted straight off a training course overseas. But most people will go into a desk job in head office. And that's really so you can kind of learn the ropes about how the organisation works

Starting point is 00:12:01 and just get a feel for how policy functions, how policy is formulated, how you gather information about the situation overseas, analyze it, process it and use it to try and make decisions and present it to politicians who have to make the big decisions. about the way that your country engages overseas. So I was doing that. What I actually found, funnily enough, was it was very kind of,

Starting point is 00:12:35 it was kind of dry. I mean, I was working on sort of European Union security issues. And there was some interesting elements to it, but it was a lot of emails, there was a lot of sitting at desks, there wasn't a lot of getting out there and doing stuff. And part of me actually thought, at one point I was considering, do I, you know, I'm 23, do I need to just kind of actually take some time out, go and do something that is more kind of active and action based, as it were. Maybe join the military, maybe join one of the armed forces, do a few years there. Because there are a number of people who come into the Foreign Service having been in, usually the military, sometimes other branches that aren't.

Starting point is 00:13:23 on forces. And they've kind of, in a way, they've sort of got that out of their systems. And now, then they're ready to do the slightly more kind of, let's say, like formal or analytical type of work. They've been out there in the field. And I kind of felt like I wanted to do that. I was seriously thinking about it. But then one day after I'd been in for about 18, I've been in the service for about 18 months, I then got a call from our HR department. basically saying there was a job in Iraq. I mean, they were trying to sell it to me, but the bottom line was no one else wanted to do it.

Starting point is 00:14:00 There was no one else available to do it. They'd pretty much gone through everyone who was willing to go to Iraq had been there and done a, because the tours there are typically a year, sometimes six months, but typically a year. And it takes quite a toll on people, especially the older diplomats who would have, had families and it's more disruptive for them. But basically it came to me and I was, by this point it's 24,

Starting point is 00:14:30 and I just kind of just jumped, jumped at the chance, basically. So it was a posting in Basra, and that kind of took me on to the next stage. Yeah. What year was that that you got to Basra? 2005. Okay, okay. Things are heating up. Yeah, so it's a cut.

Starting point is 00:14:50 Yeah, exactly, yeah. So basically you had the invasion in 2000. three, Saddam had been deposed. There was this kind of honeymoon period, especially in the South, where Saddam had not been popular, predominantly Shia Muslim parts of southern Iraq. And initially the British in the South were met with warmth and approval from a lot of Iraqis for getting rid of Saddam. But by 2005, a lot of Iraqis were thinking, why are you still? here. Are you trying to steal our oil? What's going on? Are you trying to control our government?

Starting point is 00:15:29 You know, and an insurgency started supported by Iran, which was, you know, as I'm sure you were, got pretty violent pretty quickly. You know, not to reenact your board when you applied for the foreign office, but I'm going to shoot this one to you. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the British presence in Basra. If I recall correctly, like all the way back to the maybe 1800s, the Brits had a railroad from Basra all the way up into Turkey, I believe. Yeah, I mean, Iraq had a lot of historical, well, there was a big historical British presence in Iraq.

Starting point is 00:16:13 And, yeah, it sort of, it kind of really went up a notch. I mean, you had the kind of, you know, British support to a lot of indigenous groups in that area during the First World War when you had, you know, Lawrence of Arabia. And that was kind of supporting, in a sense, kind of supporting Arab autonomy in that region. But when those places sort of broke away from the Islamic Empire and broke away from Turkish, control. The Brits and the French and others essentially just installed their favorite people who'd cooperated with them, you know, over the previous decades. And that was the case in Iraq. And then, of course, later in it, so at that time, that was pretty kind of pro-British, but then was ultimately that monarch was overthrown by

Starting point is 00:17:17 by the Ba'ath Party and then eventually Saddam Hussein took control of the Ba'ath Party. And with it, you know, it was a kind of, with the context of the sort of Ba'ath Party being Arab socialism and therefore more allied to the USSR at the time, Soviet Union, kind of became the enemies of the UK. and, you know, the British were viewed with extreme suspicion there. Similarly to in Iran, where we'd been great supporters of the Shah, who'd been overthrown in the Islamic Revolution. And the British was sort of always there in the background, kind of interfering, pulling strings, the kind of malevolent puppet masters.

Starting point is 00:18:08 So there was, there was, there's a good, degree of hostility, that's fair to say, and historical complexity. Hey guys, today I want to tell you about Van Man's tallow and Honeybaum. Think Dr. Squatch is some small wholesome company, Bert's Bees, native. Think again, they've all been bought out by mega corporations and private equity firms who hijack these beloved brands and fill them with the same corporate slop as everyone else. But one company is doing things differently, the Van Man Company. They started the tallow trend a few years back with their grass-fed tallow moisturizers, and they've been crushing it ever since with hit after hit of clean, nearly edible

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Starting point is 00:21:33 So by the time you get there in 2005, I mean, this was an American-led war, but there's this British presence in Basra even done through the 2000s. Yeah, absolutely. So the British were in charge of what was known as MND Southeast. That was the four southern provinces of Iraq. Basra being the biggest, but also Mithana, Dekar and Mesaan province that borders Iraq. on the east side of southern Iraq. And there was a bit of support there from some other countries, too. The Italians were there, the Japanese were there in a limited capacity, the Australians.

Starting point is 00:22:16 And the American presence was obviously focused more around the kind of center and the west of Iraq. And things were kind of much smaller scale in the south of Iraq. I remember going up to Baghdad and visiting the green zone there, and the size of it was mind-boggling. The amount of activity there and the number of people was huge, whereas down in the south, there wasn't really a green zone. There was basically just a base. There were several bases that the British were running in Basra,

Starting point is 00:22:57 in the province of Basra, in the city and surrounding area. But the main one, one where the one where, I was based was Basra Palace, which was in the city of Basra. So, you know, we were right there in the action. And when I got there, we were still travelling by road in kind of, you know, convoys of armoured vehicles with close protection and countermeasures and so on. But pretty soon that the IED threat got to be so big from roadside bombs that were getting increasingly sophisticated with Iranian support to the local militias that we ended up just only moving by air or occasionally by boat on the river. So the situation deteriorated pretty quickly. And what was your job when you

Starting point is 00:23:46 got there? Well, I was at a junior diplomatic role. So really, if you're a diplomat, you've got to do two things. You've got to kind of, in a sense, gather information about what's going on in the place where you are that goes back to the team in London who, responsible for that region of the world, the UK policy in that region of the world. And the information you send to them from the ground informs the policy. So you're kind of an on the ground expert. The other thing you do is you represent the UK at any kind of event that requires an official presence. So, you know, if you're in a nice kind of European capital or somewhere where there isn't a war going on,

Starting point is 00:24:29 you're going up to diplomatic events and other sort of official. duties like that. You may be giving speeches at particular organizations that have a connection to your country, whatever it might be. In Iraq, there's nothing like that, basically. So we just tried to get out as much as we can, you know, as much as we could to understand what was going on on the ground. And really, there were two main ways of doing that. I think, you know, we used to sort of speculate in a kind of very gallows, humor, dark sort of way. how long you might survive if you just walked or drove out of the front gate of the palace compound. And the estimates always were never more than a few minutes because the local militias would have people watching the gates.

Starting point is 00:25:21 They would send their young recruits out with a pistol and a scooter. And basically the orders were just attack at anyone, just fire at anyone who comes out, who drives out of there. So we couldn't do it that way, but we could go to other parts of southern Iraq where the security wasn't quite as extreme. The threat wasn't as high. It wasn't like we were going around on the ground, but we would invite people who were responsible, so it might be tribal leaders, it might be local politicians, whoever it might be, to come into the military bases and then speak to us.

Starting point is 00:26:00 then we would kind of really just initiate a dialogue with them about what was going on and try and get some ground truth about what was happening in detail, especially about the kind of security situation and about the political situation in the build-up to the first ever democratic elections that they had in Iraq in 2006. And the other thing we would do is we would contact by telephone people who we kind of trusted on the ground. That was particularly in Basro, where it was, dangerous for us to go out and and just get information from them and it might be as simple as you know what's the price of a loaf of bread what's the price of you know a gallon of petrol these kinds of

Starting point is 00:26:42 things that that are affecting people's everyday lives through to you know what are some of the what are the militias and there was a very big issue where the militias were taking control of the police so you know the the coalition forces at that time were trying to reform the police forces and the military and get rid of, as it were, the old Saddam loyalists. But in their place came a lot of people who were loyal to some of these, particularly the Iranian-backed militias. And that presented its own very significant security challenges where some of these guys were using, at least in military units like their own private armies. Trying to understand all those dynamics, really. Were you ever able to untangle that security situation in Basra?

Starting point is 00:27:30 you know, as far as like the force protection aspect of it? Well, it was, of course, yeah, that was one of the things that was, you know, uppermost in our mind was that if we can really understand these situations, we're going to contribute to protecting UK personnel, U.S. personnel, of course, they're Americans in Basra as well. You know, and, and of course these new Iraqi recruits that were trying to build up into the new security forces there. But it was really kind of shifting sands. It was very difficult to get good intelligence, if you like, about what was going on there. And there was always this kind of murky picture. There was always a degree of Iranian influence. We were never sure if we were

Starting point is 00:28:21 overestimating that or underestimating it. There'd be attacks. There would be IEDs. You know, we never really got on top of it. And sometimes the attacks. extremely significant. I can remember one day traveling in a in a helicopter was actually traveling from Basra to Kuwait, military helicopter. We arrived and I took out my phone. It's one of those old Nokia type phones and switched it on again after the flight. And I had a text of my mom saying, are you okay? And basically unbeknownst to me while we're in the air, a helicopter had taken off from Basra and being shot down by a surface to a missile over the city. everyone on board died and you know British military helicopter and you know that was a capability that

Starting point is 00:29:11 I don't think we even realized those insurgents had at the time so yeah I hate to say we never we never got on top of it and in fact it wasn't just that we were trying to counter the Iranian influence with increasingly kind of sophisticated weaponry that was being supplied and increasing domestic capability to manufacture, especially those shape charge IEDs that were really lethal against armored vehicles, roadside bombs. So it wasn't just that element. It was also that we just kind of were trying to counter various conspiracy theories that like you alluded to earlier will go back more than 100 years about British interference. And one of the craziest of all that you might have heard

Starting point is 00:30:03 was that at one point while we were there, there was an outbreak of some kind of animal virus linked to badgers. And basically the story took hold in Basra that the British were dropping infected badgers out of aircraft in order to, you know, attack the local population. It sounds absolutely crazy, but people genuinely believe this. So you're trying to counter, I mean, it's kind of a losing battle in a way. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:39 Well, they used to say when I was over there with special forces and Ranger Battalion, the kind of rumor was that we weren't really Americans that were Israeli commandos. Yeah. And then news broke this week that allegedly the Israelis set up a secret, you know, some sort of refueling resupply depot in the deserts of Iraq outside Najaf. And it's like, oh my God, this is like every conspiracy theory they believed come to life. Yeah. Yeah. There's often, I mean, there's often a drop of truth. Yeah, yeah, exactly. These theories. But yeah, it's pretty crazy. But yeah. But yeah, what? What was really interesting to see, obviously, was the kind of the interaction that we had with our military counterparts. And we had, you know, both in terms of being based right there with the British Army in the same compound and attending their meetings and speaking to them every day, forming good

Starting point is 00:31:40 relationships with them, and seeing the challenges that they face right from the sort of top command level of general, you know, down to the sort of the private soldiers, teenage guys who were just being sent out on the streets to patrol. But then also the more kind of specialist people who were there too, as you alluded to yourself, you know, the kind of special forces. We also had the, in our close protection units, we had a lot of former special forces guys. And it was interesting to hear about some of their, you know,

Starting point is 00:32:18 experiences and, you know, Yeah, they were basically in charge of keeping us alive at any time we went anywhere. I was going to say, this is like a particularly, you know, it sounds like an oxymoron, but a particularly aggressive form of diplomacy that you're out there in a war zone, trying to conduct diplomacy before the war is over, really. And what was that like for you? And what was it like, you know, interfacing as a diplomat with the British military or other militaries? Yeah, I mean, I mean, in some ways, you're like, in some ways very frustrating because there was, you know, there are obviously a lot of things we wanted to do.

Starting point is 00:33:04 There are a lot of things the Army wanted to do that were just not possible because you're kind of firefighting with the security situation there. But also, you know, fascinating to see how such a big deployment was managed. you know, I think we had at some point we had about 8,000 British troops in southern Iraq. I mean, nothing really compared to the American presence, but very significant for a UK overseas operation. And just the way that the army was able to mobilize logistically, and not just the UK, but, you know, when we would go to places where we'd actually end up being kind of supported by U.S. troops as well to be able to go out and do what we needed to do. The ability of the Army to just kind of get stuff done is really impressive.

Starting point is 00:33:59 And I developed huge respect for not only the way that it works under extremely difficult circumstances, but also just the kind of resolve of individuals who had to put themselves in harm's way every day. As a diplomat, you're just, essentially, essentially wrapped in cotton wool and you're told you know if anything kicks off just get on the deck and you know don't move and you know as a last resort maybe if everybody else has been shot dead maybe here's here's a pistol that you might be able to you know use if you're not too much of a muppet um to protect yourself but absolutely is the last resort use it to shoot yourself at that point yeah yeah probably the best option hey guys

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Starting point is 00:36:06 Quince.com slash house. Thanks for supporting the show, everyone. How did things evolve in Bostra from the time you got there to the time you left? What was the situation sort of like as your tour was winding down? Yes, I think there was, well, there was an Iraqi government in place by the time I left, which was very much a kind of Shia dominated government because the Sunnis had boycotted the elections in large part. And I think what we were finding, what we're finding then was that the, the,

Starting point is 00:36:49 We, the security situation was obviously pretty bad still. We were on the fire every single day in our compound rockets and mortars. Some of them, you know, old munitions that were wonderfully inaccurate and would miss the base by like a kilometre and others that would land on the building next to you and in the middle of the night when you're sleeping. And, you know, there were definitely casualties. of those incidents too. I remember one night actually just hearing gunfire

Starting point is 00:37:27 and there was so much of it. Some of the military guys were actually had actually gone up onto the ruse of the building to see what was going on. And literally the sky was just kind of lit up with tracer rounds going in all directions. I mean like constant gunfire. And we thought this is like end of days.

Starting point is 00:37:48 You know, they're going to have to they're going to have to like airlift everyone all of us out here get us to Kuwait or somewhere but then and we kind of we we messaged some of our contacts in the city and just said you know what what's going on and and they came back pretty quickly and said actually Iraq just beat Syria at football but yeah we thought literally it was this was the final the final battle basically so the the security situation got progressively worse and then and then I think it was it was only and you know there were some intelligence-led operations to detain some of the key figures in that insurgency but ultimately as I say it was it was like firefighting and really the only thing that was going to stop it was

Starting point is 00:38:40 leaving which is what we did ultimately a few years later but I remember I remember finishing finishing that tour and thinking, I'm not quite sure what we achieved there. It was definitely worse when I left than when I arrived, sad to say. You know, I think our listeners would love it if I can ask you if you had any interaction with the SAS guys. Yeah. Yeah, I did. I mean, I mean, for starters, there was.

Starting point is 00:39:19 a, you know, there was a private security company which was responsible for all the diplomats security called Control Risk Group. And there had a number of former SAS personnel serving there who would kind of see on a daily basis. And, you know, we'd go, there was a lot of downtime in Iraq as well, you know, especially as a civilian. even actually the military guys who were kind of actively deploying on the streets every day, they would have a lot of downtime. So with our downtime, often we go with the closed protection, we go down to the ranges, we do some firearms drills, we do some driving drills in the armored vehicles. There was definitely some fun stuff there too.

Starting point is 00:40:12 We'd mess around with some of the kit that we had, night vision, things like that. just ultimately with the purpose of being kind of familiar with it, but along the way, you know, you're seeing some of these guys in action and it's really impressive. I mean, the professionalism, the speed and the accuracy with their weapons drills. And I'd done a little bit, I'd spent a little bit of time at Hereford actually previously, which was a kind of a short training course that was. was designed it sort of helping you be in a conflict environment, be in a military environment.

Starting point is 00:40:51 And that was run by the guys from Hereford. So, yeah, there was a lot of contact there and various drills. One that I remember was we were, it was a situational awareness drill. And the idea was you kind of drive around this course and various things happen that you have to react to. And I won't give any spoilers about that. But essentially the situations ramp up to the point where you cannot escape and a bunch of guys are basically attacking you in your car. And they've got weapons and they're pointing them at you and they're smashing the windows of the car and they're wearing balaclavas. you're kind of, you know, you're sort of like frozen with fear, basically.

Starting point is 00:41:50 And I remember getting dragged out of the window. And the guy who I was doing this with, who was also from the foreign office, also a diplomat who was going to be going off somewhere on the more dangerous side, he decided for some unknown reason to try fighting back. And how'd that work out? Not too well. He basically, so he had an AK-47 pointing in his face, and he decided to grab the barrel of it with both hands.

Starting point is 00:42:31 And I think the Hereford operator who was holding this weapon was so kind of shocked by that. He sort of almost took him a moment to process why this diplomat was attempting to take the weapon. of him. And his response in the end was to essentially swing it round and just crack this diplomat in the head with the butt of the AK, leading to quite a large kind of wound on the guy's face that needed some medical treatment later. And then what they did is they picked him up, they popped the trunk of the car, the boot, they slung him in the back, they told me to get in the

Starting point is 00:43:12 front. I was shaking so much. I couldn't drive. They had to reach in and kind of start the car for me. Anyway, we drove off and this other diplomat had he actually had a false eye. He'd lost an eye earlier in his life. So we got to the end of the, we got to the end of this course and there's a medic there who's ready to check everyone over. And by this point, he's recovered his composure. So he gets out of the car kind of holding his eye and he staggers over to the medic and he just pops his eye out in front of the medic. He pretty much has a heart attack until he realized exactly what was going on. So there was... His glass eye. That's great.

Starting point is 00:43:59 Yeah, exactly. But yeah, very impressive seeing those guys in action. And I mean, these sorts of scenarios, I mean, you can see. why they put people like you through them because of the kind of sketchy situations that you find yourself in. I mean, we had, you know, our ambassador to Libya killed about 10 years ago, unfortunately. I know there's that famous incident. Were they MI5 guys in Northern Ireland? Where they got, there was a funeral. Yeah, exactly. And there was also, there was a kid, there was a kidnap incident in Libya to, which I was involved at the London end. I was

Starting point is 00:44:41 involved in some of the negotiations for the release of those guys. That was some special forces operators and a guy from the Foreign Service. And yeah, these things can happen kind of kind of all too easily. It's all sort of quiet and then suddenly something like that can happen. So any training I guess you've had that might prepare you for those kinds of situations, whether it's driving, whether it's using a weapon, whether it's just being in captivity and recognizing that you have no control over it, anything like that's going to be helpful. And where did you go after Basra? What was sort of the next stop for you?

Starting point is 00:45:29 Yeah, well, I pretty much took some leave and I did some traveling in Africa just to kind of decompress a bit and and then I and then I got myself ready I went into what we call the pre-posting phase where you're getting it you're getting everything ready you're getting your visas your accommodation reading in on subject matter and I and I went off to Jerusalem after that so in Jerusalem I was responsible for every the way the UK divides the work is that basically the embassy the British embassy in Tel Aviv deals with that with is Israeli counterparts and the British consulate in Jerusalem deals predominantly with Palestinian contacts. So I was working on that side and that meant I spent quite a lot of time

Starting point is 00:46:17 in the West Bank and in Gaza as well. So funnily enough, I mean, we think of Gaza has been a war zone for the last couple of years. It was on and off a war zone while I was there. But by comparison to Iraq, it was like a really normal posting where you could actually go out and meet. people and be a diplomat. And again, if we're to look back at the history, what was in the past called the entire area, I guess, or most of it was called Palestine. That was a British colony, essentially. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:54 After the First World War, there was a kind of, you know, Britain, what they call the British mandate, where the UK took over responsibility for, for that area of Palestine. And that kind of went through essentially until the Second World War. But the Brits were at that time facing their own insurgency, funny enough from, or ironically enough, from Jewish groups at the time like Hagan and Irgun, who were wanting to establish themselves in that territory as well

Starting point is 00:47:34 and had a very small presence at the time. but also used, you know, armed kind of insurgent tactics. And then after the Second World War, of course, when the UN mandates set up the Israel and the Palestinian territories, but then with that succession of conflicts in, you know, the 48 war and then 67, and then again 73, and gradually, the political map changed and Israel took territory and the Palestinians ended up kind of, kind of separated. I think the initial plan was pretty crazy to think that would work out.

Starting point is 00:48:21 But that was obviously some of our forebears who didn't really appreciate the tensions on the ground, I think. And you ended up with these two quite distinct territories of West Bank and Gaza that then kind of brought their own security issues and extremely high levels of, you know, Palestinian terrorism in the 70s and the 80s. And then through to, yeah, what we're called the interfaiders, these sort of Palestinian kind of mass insurgencies,

Starting point is 00:48:58 if you like, that involved a lot of violent acts and terrorist acts. in the early 2000s suicide bombings as well by Hamas. And when I got to Jerusalem at the beginning, I first went out there at the end of 06 and really started the posting at the beginning 2007, the security situation was actually fairly calm there. And it flared up over the time that I was there.

Starting point is 00:49:28 But it wasn't like active, it wasn't like in the second Intifada with, suicide bombings in, you know, bus stations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and that kind of thing. But there were, there was an ongoing kind of level of security, security issues kind of bubbling away. And I take it, it's what, 2007 or eight by the time you get there? Yeah, early 2007. started that posting. And the main issue then was that Hamas had won the elections. So they've been democratically elected as the majority party in the Palestinian parliament,

Starting point is 00:50:18 but were then boycotted by Israel, by the US, by the European Union, by most, many countries internationally that made it almost impossible for them to run the Palestinian government that's very dependent on foreign aid. And then at some point while I was there, kind of precipitated this essentially a kind of small-scale civil war where Fata that was the kind of... I was about to say, yeah. Yeah, the other side, if you like, the kind of more secular kind of socialist background Arafat's old party.

Starting point is 00:51:04 that had come into, you know, with the peace, the Oslo Peace Accords in the 90s, come into government and were responsible for areas of Palestinian territories. And we're doing business with Israelis and negotiating with them and so forth. They ended up fighting Hamas, you know, sometimes open battles on the streets of their armed wings. and it's kind of split in the end to Hamas controlling Gaza, which was the situation that has continued until just very recently. And then Fata or Palestinian Authority, but really with Fata focused security forces running the West Bank

Starting point is 00:51:50 around kind of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, those kinds of areas. And when you arrived, what was sort of your job And what was the British foreign policy position towards these Palestinian territories? Yeah, it was, well, so my job was, it was that same real general concept of kind of gathering information from the place and also representing the UK. But the difference with Iraq was that in Jerusalem, I was actually able to represent the UK. I could go along to meetings of international organizations, whatever it might be, United Nations, diplomatic gatherings, European Union. I could meet Palestinian politicians easily.

Starting point is 00:52:39 I could go to their offices, or we might go to a restaurant, something like that. And there wasn't a security threat in that sense. And I was able to talk to people about politics and try and understand what's going on there. I was still learning Arabic at the time as well. So I was taking Arabic classes in Jerusalem too and trying to put that into practice every day as best I could. But it was pretty challenging because our policy was we supported a two-state solution,

Starting point is 00:53:15 which means we felt that there should be a state of Israel, but also a Palestinian state. and that anything we could do to support that outcome was in British interests and we believe in wider interest for the region, regional stability. But we also had a policy whereby we couldn't speak to Hamas. So one of my jobs was to kind of find people who understood Hamas as a movement and really understand where that. they were trying to understand where they were coming from, but without being able to actually

Starting point is 00:53:57 speak to them, which was quite a challenge diplomatically, as you can imagine. Yeah, yeah, it's going to say. So you have to find, like, people who have business with Hamas and try to, like, work it that way because you're not able to speak to them directly. Exactly. So it may be that you have people who are kind of, you might have people who are operating in the kind of academic space or a charity space, who just have a good understanding of it. And so you're getting information secondhand, essentially, but you're operating within your own government's rules, essentially. And I know the Brits have their own way of conducting back channels.

Starting point is 00:54:43 Like there's actually a position in Parliament called the backbenchers, right? The backbenchers, right? And they're able to go and talk to people that actual members of parliament can't talk to, right? Well, yeah, I think the general principle is basically the less senior you are, the more you're able to kind of conduct that type of business. If you're an ambassador, you're pretty much on show all the time, 24-7, everything you say, anything you say could end up in a newspaper. Even you go and have your hair.

Starting point is 00:55:20 cut, you know, you've got to watch what you say to the barber or you've got to be, you're kind of on show, basically. Right, right. And you get grilled everywhere you go. I remember, envy him at all. He was constantly getting grilled every single thing he did. But, yeah, the, the, I wouldn't, you know, I've got to be careful, obviously what I, what I say in that, that area with, with back channels.

Starting point is 00:55:49 But certainly when there is a significant situation, I think what Britain does very well is it finds people who can mediate between us and between the people we need to speak to, whether that's a kidnap situation or to do with other kinds of hostilities, whatever it might be. And I remember there was one situation in Gaza where we travel down there with the ambassador because there was a BBC journalist called Alan Johnson. who'd been kidnapped by, not by Hamas, not by Palestinian Islamic Jihad or any other group, but actually by a kind of, by a criminal clan, essentially a kind of crime family in Gaza. And, you know, he'd kind of gone a little bit off the beaten track and someone had kidnapped him. And we went down there to kind of find people who could, you know, advocate, mediate for his release. And fortunately, he was released in the end. he actually wrote a book about being in captivity in Gaza that's called Kidnapped,

Starting point is 00:56:54 which is a short book, very impactful. And I'd recommend that to anyone who wanted to kind of go deeper into that story. But yeah, you always had the scent down in Gaza that it was, things were never far away from kicking off. It's a very poor place. People have kind of nothing to lose. there's a real culture of martyrdom. You see these huge posters and murals of people who've died one way or another fighting these Israelis all been put in prison.

Starting point is 00:57:28 And these guys are for the Israelis, for a lot of people, they're terrorists in Gaza, they're heroes and their families receive money and status. And you can see how that kind of keeps going to the next generation. I'd like to probe a little bit deeper your impressions of Gaza in the West Bank. And as a British diplomat, did you have any sense that these problems were just intractable? That they had no solution, or at least there's no solution that we as Westerners could really bring to them. I know that sounds hopeless, but I think we have to talk about it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:13 I mean, I mean, I think there is a certain, there's a certain, there's a certain, arrogance that we can have, I think, especially Britain with our colonial past and the influence that we kind of had, especially in that region in the 20th century, that we can just turn up and sort situations out. And, you know, I think the more time I spent there, the more I came to appreciate the complexity of that situation, the more you come to appreciate that that people on both sides have legitimate claims to what they want and they have a legitimate kind of problem with the other side. And that applies both within the Palestinian side of the internal Palestinian conflict

Starting point is 00:59:04 and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as well. And you can see even in a wider context, the kind of regional conflict between Israel and others that is in the news right now. So when I went out there, I'd say I was pretty optimistic and enthusiastic that this was going to be fixed by the time I finished my posting. But I think by the end of it, it was the divisions were deeper, both internally on the Palestinian side and between Palestinians and Israelis.

Starting point is 00:59:39 There was a real moment of hope, though, when George Bush, George, you know, George W. Bush launched his kind of what he called the roadmap for peace. And Condoleez-Rice was the, you know, Secretary of State at the time. And there was a real push there on kind of for both sides. But ultimately, I think it could only go so far when the Palestinians had their own internal conflict that was playing out. And, you know, it's from a personal point of view, you could kind of imagine a situation a bit like we had in Northern Ireland where you had a split between, you've got the IRA, but then the kind of the political wing sort of distances itself from the armed wing,

Starting point is 01:00:32 gives up the armed struggle, moves into politics. And I was sort of willing Hamas to do that, because that to me would have been the most obvious solution, but it didn't happen, unfortunately. And equally on the on the Israeli side, add sympathies for the Israelis that they, they said, you know, there's no one we can really do business with that is representing the Palestinians. But at the same time, the Israelis were building a lot of settlements in the West, especially in the West Bank, and kind of expanding areas that they would then deem to be part of Israel, which under international law, weren't.

Starting point is 01:01:13 And that was creating, that was sort of almost making it harder to undo if your position, which was the position of the UK at the time, was that you supported a two-state solution that seemed to be the best, the best option for a kind of lasting piece in that region, that area. But then there were other issues that were kind of at play too. So there's obviously,

Starting point is 01:01:40 something people don't talk about too much is a very big Arab population inside Israel that was growing quite fast and so you think well if if this is going to become one big territory that's just Israel it's actually going to end up with a majority Arab population and Israel has a democratic political system so they're going to end up with you know potentially a majority Arab government I mean to project ahead demographically So it's very hard to The longer I was there, the more complex I realized it was

Starting point is 01:02:16 And the more unfortunately I realized there was no quick fix to it Certainly nothing was going to happen in my time And then of course as we've seen in the last few years It's very much, this security situation, very much deteriorated Since then with the Hamas attack on Israel And then the war in Gaza and the kind of You know, the impact of that, the lasting impact Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, when you were there, they almost seem like halcy in days by comparison.

Starting point is 01:02:45 Now we're about as far as like to even talk about a two state solution today just feels so naive and impossible. We got Israel invading Lebanon, expanding that buffer between the two countries and down into Syria along the Golan Heights. And then, of course, all the carnage in Gaza. What do you see as the maybe next 20 years for that region if you were to, I know predicting the future is impossible, especially in that part of the world. But what do you think, based on your experience, where we're going here? Yeah, I mean, very hard to say. I think, sadly, I'm not optimistic about it. I mean, now we're in 2026, you know, it was 20 years ago that I was starting to read about.

Starting point is 01:03:37 read in on this region and reading, excuse me, on Israel, Palestine, especially, and I try to begin to understand that region. And the situation now is worse than it was then. 20 years from now, it's very hard to see without a real change of politicians, if you like. I think one thing that's become quite apparent is that, you know, Israel has got. on more to the right since I was there. When I was there, had a kind of center-left coalition. Netanyahu was in opposition. And what he's been able to do very effectively is form coalitions with these parties on the religious

Starting point is 01:04:26 right, these very conservative parties. And they have a hugely expanding voter base because a lot of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel are typically having quite large families. they still have a very high provision of state support. If you're engaged, certainly when I was there, and I believe the situation is the same now. If you're engaged in full-time religious study, you don't need to work.

Starting point is 01:04:50 You receive a kind of a stipend from the government. And it's in the interest of politicians like Netanyahu to ally with those groups and get them supporting him and his policies because their interests are aligned in a kind of, quite a nationalistic kind of hard hard right way you know

Starting point is 01:05:14 crazy things like Hamas's attack on Israel which I still don't understand now kind of you know two and a half years on I don't understand why Hamas made that that decision to do that maybe they didn't even really

Starting point is 01:05:29 make a decision about it just kind of it just spiraled out of control from an initial attack it's just total madness on their part and what it precipitated. But that's fueled those people on the right who say, you know, Gaza is just a security threat. The neighbours are a security threat. And it's the country becomes kind of increasingly militarized. And you don't have that will to make concessions and peace deals that will.

Starting point is 01:06:06 that we saw back in the 90s and kind of the impact that kind of lasted or had a resurgence in the early 2000, mid to late 2000s, I should say. So with those demographic trends, it's really hard to see any improvement, frankly. And when there's no prospect of improvement, then the realistic outcome is probably more conflict, I'm sad to say. I recently saw an interview with the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and this guy sat there and said he's perfectly okay if Israel wants to take over everything from the Nile to the Euphrates because it says so in the Bible. I mean, you watch this kind of thing and it's like, this is a full-blown disaster.

Starting point is 01:06:55 There's no other term you can use to describe it. Yeah, and there's that's another thing that is that. influence of a kind of the sort of religious aspect if you like and you know i think we're we're used to certainly certainly we think mostly in in the west religion not playing a particularly big part in government um and and decisions in government but increasingly it it is doing in in in that region and then when you hear yeah about kind of western western support along those lines, you think I'm not sure where this is going to end without some major changes of personalities, unfortunately.

Starting point is 01:07:44 Yeah. Yeah. And so when you left Gaza, where did the foreign office send you next? Well, after that, I went back to London and I was working on a policy team in London. So then it was my turn to kind of gather that information from our. representatives overseas and kind of process that through into policy advice. And at this point, I was doing that a slightly more senior level. I was focusing on the Gulf.

Starting point is 01:08:16 And so there were, it was a more, it was less, at that time, less of a kind of conflict management or conflict, post-conflict reconstruction type of, type of role. And it was more about kind of economic diplomacy. it was more about business interests. It was a lot to do with kind of oil and gas and energy security, those kinds of issues. And to me, that was a little bit less interesting, I think, than the conflict-related diplomacy,

Starting point is 01:08:46 although it was good to have a chance to get a bit of a breather from those environments, be able to see more friends and family back in London, of course. But what happened for me at that point was that I really started to develop an interest in psychology, And I think that had come out of being in those conflict zones and seeing the impact of conflict on people. Emotionally, cognitively, and in some cases, you know, people developing post-traumatic stress disorder, other kind of trauma symptoms. Certainly, I know when I came back from Iraq, I was definitely very jumpy.

Starting point is 01:09:28 anything that kind of went bang, I would be, you know, suddenly my heart would start beating, the adrenaline would start pumping. And it was a trigger from those days where, you know, we were being rocketed and mortared in our base. And there was a real risk to life from that. But I started kind of being a bit more interested in really the individual impact of these big-scale geopolitics. and maybe a part of that was also feeling a little bit helpless after having spent three years in Jerusalem and seeing that situation deteriorate, seeing the Iraq situation deteriorate, and thinking, well, there's maybe not so much I can do about these big-scale politics,

Starting point is 01:10:16 you know, without going into politics, which didn't really appeal to me. But I am interested in understanding more about the impact on the individual. So I actually started studying psychology part-time. And yeah, there was an old scheme which they've since scrapped, whereby if you wanted to study something that was related to your job in the Foreign Service, they would give you a little bit of time off to do it. They would pay some of the course fees. So I enrolled in a psychology course at UCL in London.

Starting point is 01:10:50 And I started kind of studying there. and just getting more interest in psychology. And at some point, it actually reached a stage where I thought, in fact, I don't think I want that lifestyle of constantly moving overseas and upending my life and leaving everyone and everything I know behind and starting from scratch, if you like, in a new place. But actually, I want to stay in the UK and see if I can switch careers into psychology. and it kind of kind of started to look seriously at that.

Starting point is 01:11:26 I mean, did you pursue that? Did you leave the foreign office to go and get another degree? I did. Yeah, I did. So it was a very difficult decision. And, you know, there were a few jobs that were coming up. And this was actually just before the Arab Spring. So it was kind of around.

Starting point is 01:11:51 that time. So there was conflict going on in Libya and there was the possibility of going there and I thought about that and thought maybe not. There was there was a possibility of going to Yemen. There was there was Damascus and I kind of thought I realized you know basically I was being I was getting kind of pigeonholed as this you know the Arabic conflict guy and and I thought to myself do I want this for the next kind of 10 plus years? and I thought to myself, actually, maybe I'm going to quit while I'm ahead. And so I did. I quit the job thinking, you know, if this doesn't work out, hopefully I can,

Starting point is 01:12:34 hopefully they'll help me back at some point. But it did start to work out. And I followed the interest in psychology. I went back to university. So I was there age, you know, 30, 2930 with all these undergrads who are kind of kind of 1819 and I was the kind of keen guy at the front taking notes. The rest of them are all on their phones like half asleep or whatever at the back of the lecture theatre.

Starting point is 01:13:00 But I was very motivated at that point because I thought this could be a new career for me. And I knew some, I had some friends who worked as clinical psychologists in our National Health Service, particularly a couple of people who were specialists in treating PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And that was very interesting to me coming from the conflict background and having experienced a few of those symptoms myself. And so I ended up kind of volunteering a bit in our health service doing some work there. And eventually went to work in the health service as a psychologist and started to specialize in working with trauma. Interesting.

Starting point is 01:13:42 So you specialized in clinical psychology yourself as well. Yeah, yeah, so I did. While I was studying, I was doing research studies as well, and a lot of that was was trauma-focused. And then, and then moving into actually working, starting to work as a therapist with people who were experiencing PTSD, which was actually fascinating because PTSD is one of those conditions that anybody could experience. I mean, you know, the next time you step out of your house, there might be some kind of road accident. You might hear something, look out at your window, and you see a violent incident unfolding on the street outside your house. And, you know, you can end up experiencing PTSD because of that.

Starting point is 01:14:34 It can happen to anyone almost any time. But it's, so it's very kind of relatable in that sense, but it's also very treatable. So the way of treating it is that you, or the main way of treating it with a kind of talking therapy is to get people to describe the experience as it happened to them and start to unpack bits of it that are particularly significant, particularly frightening for them and try to help them process those memories. So, you know, working with that in London, you've got people from all walks of life. You've got former services personnel. you've got, you know, who've been in Iraq and Afghanistan, you've got people who've been victims of terrorist attacks in London or elsewhere in the UK. You've got refugees, you've got people who fled conflict,

Starting point is 01:15:24 who've been political prisoners, victims of torture, victims of human trafficking, victims of crime, gang crime, as well as just the standard stuff like, I say, standard, you know, accidents that cause people to, you know, are like road. traffic accidents that can cause people to have traumatic experiences as well. So you're dealing with dealing with all of that. Yeah, really, really fascinating and kind of linked through to that foreign office work as well. Were you in private practice?

Starting point is 01:16:00 No, I worked in our health service. Oh, okay. So basically it was in the UK we have a national health service. so it's basically more or less depending on the situation free health care and if you if you're experiencing this you can go along and see a local doctor and they can then send you to a therapist and eventually it kind of scales up to the point where you'd see a trauma specialist and you get treatment so yeah we had people from all walks of life So we, of course, you know, talk to a lot of veterans on this podcast and a lot of them watch it as well.

Starting point is 01:16:47 Do you have any advice for somebody that is, you know, going through the process of having post-traumatic stress and they're struggling with it? What steps do you think they should take to get that treated? You know, it could be in America or Britain, whatever the case. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, I think it's worth saying that, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder and post-traumatic stress symptoms that could just be a kind of less developed version of that but still problematic and causing people, you know, issues with their kind of functioning, their mood in day-to-day life, making things difficult for them that they want

Starting point is 01:17:29 to do. It can happen. It can come on many years after the events. So, you know, we saw veterans who, who'd served a long time ago in previous conflicts, the UK had been involved in the Balkans conflicts, the Falklands or Northern Ireland and places like that. And years later, the symptoms might come up for them, depending on other triggers and situations in their lives. And they might find that they are kind of particularly jumpy, watchful, you know, what we call hypervigil

Starting point is 01:18:07 they're avoiding stuff that they would otherwise want to do because it's triggering off, you know, memories for them. And that might be something as every day as kind of driving, getting in your car and driving. And all of a sudden, when you've got oncoming traffic, suddenly these memories are coming back to you. What tends to happen is in the first instance, a lot of, especially a lot of men, a lot of veterans will try and kind of self-medicate. They're rather than seek help, you know, because they're people who've been taught to be very self-reliant, they'll often kind of go for a drink and, you know, one drink can turn into two and people can end up with a problem that ends up kind of masking the underlying issues. And I think that the main message is if you're experiencing that, then it's best to just talk to someone. These are very normal experiences. It doesn't. mean you haven't coped with the situation. You know, you're someone who's

Starting point is 01:19:13 had to cope with extraordinary situations that most members of the public would never have to deal with and not be able to deal with. And it's very understandable that with those pressures that been put on a lot of service personnel, that the effects, those psychological effects, can come home kind of many, many years later.

Starting point is 01:19:31 And there are specialist veteran services. In the UK, there's an organisation called Combat Stress. which works especially with veterans. And I'm sure there are equivalent services in the US to, and maybe we can post something in the comments here that might be places for people to look. And the main thing I would say is,

Starting point is 01:19:59 is if you notice that there's some things that you're not able to do that you want to do, and you think that experiences that happened to you in the past are the root cause of that, then talking to someone about it is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength. And it will help you to get back that life you had before in the life you want to live. And PTSD is extremely treatable, really responds to treatment. And there are people who can help.

Starting point is 01:20:29 When you talk about how it can come and hit people years later, something I've noticed and with men but presumably this can happen to women as well when men retire and suddenly their life slows down and they have time to process

Starting point is 01:20:47 all of these things it seems like they get hit really hard yeah yeah I mean big life transitions are often kind of catalysts for onset of symptoms so it could be retirement it could be divorce

Starting point is 01:21:03 break up of a relationship. It could be bereavement, grief, you know, loss of a loved one. Sometimes it could be loss of a job. Sometimes these things that change how we see ourselves in the world and our sense of kind of purpose and who we are can bring up these these these memories and and give them a new significance that perhaps we, yeah, either we didn't appreciate before or like you say you kind of, if you're working, you're not given time to process those past experiences and it's only when life slows down a bit and perhaps the meaning of your life changes a little bit that you start to think about what happened there. So, so yeah, it's those big life transitions are huge flashpoints for the onset of symptoms. Absolutely. Are you still practicing psychology?

Starting point is 01:21:59 No, not as a not as a therapist. I do still work as a psychologist, but kind of also with a, you know, my other background from Foreign Service and particularly with the kind of security issues with both hats on for a cyber security consultancy. So I analyze inside of risk and threats for them, particularly kind of espionage and state threats. and I do that alongside writing novels. So that's my life now. I was going to say with your background,

Starting point is 01:22:39 you'd be like a very good candidate, I think, for like a crisis negotiator or something like that. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess a bit of psychology, bit of diplomacy. Right, right. Yeah, the one experience I had with that talking to some Libyans, Luckily, it did kind of work out. But, yeah, huge pressure.

Starting point is 01:23:07 In fact, I was watching a very good documentary recently about some journalists who were kidnapped in Syria and on BBC. And, yeah, the hostage negotiator was brought in to deal with that and he ended up in some extremely sketchy situations in Syria. Yeah. So, as long as I could do it on the other end of the phone, So tell us how the spy novels came about.

Starting point is 01:23:40 Yeah, well, it kind of started really, I suppose, I was always a fan of thrillers, generally, crime novels. And I suppose working in our health service in London with a lot of victims of crime, and even in some cases some perpetrators of crime, I still remember the traumatized drug dealer, I had to work with who had been the victim of attempted murder and was experiencing trauma as a result of that. Hearing these stories, I kind of thought, you know, might be interesting to write something about that. And actually it was my sister who prompted me to do that.

Starting point is 01:24:25 She's a novelist. She writes historical kind of murder mystery spy thrillers set in Elizabethan times in in the UK and under the name S.J. Paris. And she encouraged me to just have a go. She said, you know, with your experience, what kind of the things you've done might, you know, you'd have an interest, you could tell some interesting stories. So I started kind of playing around with this, messing around with it. And it started out as a very cathartic experience where I'd come home from work in the health service. I've been doing, you know, therapy sessions. And, and I'd sit there and I'd write and I came to realize eventually that this writing fiction was my way of dealing with,

Starting point is 01:25:09 of processing my memories both from my time in the Foreign Service and the stress of working in the health service with people who had BTSD and other kinds of mental health conditions. And at some point, I think at the beginning it just, you know, it wasn't very good, but I was kind of enjoying it and then I practiced and improved and got some feedback from some people and eventually got to the point where I published a crime novel and that was a really a detective story. The first story I'd ever written was a kind of mash-up detective story spy thriller. And I remember this got shown to a few publishers and they kind of went, you know, no thanks. It's kind of weird, mash-up. And then a couple of years later, a book called I Am Pilgrim came

Starting point is 01:25:57 Malon. I don't know if you've come across that. It was also a kind of, it was a mash-up detective stories, spy thrill and was incredibly successful. Also, I should add, much better written than anything I had produced. But that was kind of, that was kind of inspiring. By that point, though, I'd gone down the route of writing detective stories. So I did that for a while, but it always had, there was always a character who had a kind of ex-military background. There was always a lot of psychology in there. There was somebody who was in a in a trauma treatment session with a therapist. There was always these kind of themes coming up and then eventually I I decided that I was going to kind of kind of step back from the contract I had with the publisher

Starting point is 01:26:43 at the time where they wanted me to write more psychological thrillers. This is the kind of you know small cast of characters often unreliable narrator probably being kind of gaslit by their intimate partner who's maybe also trying to kill them, like that kind of story. And I thought, I'm going to write the book I just want to write and I don't actually care whether anybody publishes it or not. And that turned into this book, which is committed. And this was set in America. I used to live in the States. And we didn't actually mention that when you, I was just describing upbringing, but I spent a year living, living in the US, relatives in the East Coast.

Starting point is 01:27:28 And I went to live there and went to school for a year in the US. And I spent a lot of time when I was there in rural Pennsylvania, which is a really interesting area because you've got a lot of people from those kind of very traditional backgrounds who live in that big space between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. and so I had an idea for a book that was a kind of a conspiracy thriller, it was a terrorism thriller, and I thought I'm going to write that and set it in Pennsylvania. And I had a lot of fun writing that, trying to write in the American voice as well.

Starting point is 01:28:11 And according to a couple of American friends who read it, it's more or less okay in terms of vernacular, vocabulary, that kind of. thing. But I drew on a lot of those experiences and that was a kind of first foray into something that was or a second foray if you like into more of the spy genre and then I really took the plunge

Starting point is 01:28:35 on writing a kind of spy action thriller with oxygen which is it's coming out in the UK in a couple of weeks and this this is a

Starting point is 01:28:48 as I say it's a spy action thriller. So it's about a former intelligence officer from MI6, some secret intelligence service, who teams up with her ex-lover, ex-boyfriend, on and off, who's a former SAS operator. They met in Iraq, something which may or may not have been based on some real-life scenarios. And they head off on a journey across Europe to track down this kind of unknown enemy that's plotted. a mass casualty terror attack and try and untangle this mystery around it and stop that attack before it takes place with huge kind of loss of human life. So it's very international. It's kind of pacey. It's got the espionage elements. It's got the military elements. And circling back a little

Starting point is 01:29:44 bit, Jack, to the earlier part of our conversation, I was able to draw on the knowledge of some of my friends and contacts who've worked in those agencies and really try and get the details as accurate as possible without obviously breaking the official secret act. So I hope it's authentic and it's definitely past muster with a few people, Ilana Berry, Isis Berry, Jack Carr, Charles Beaumont, James Wolfe and Julian Fisher and some of these people have given it their endorsements. So hopefully it is authentic. All right. Three of whom have been on this show before.

Starting point is 01:30:27 So there's that. You know, I'd like to ask you. And I mean, I write action also. And I think a big part of what I'm trying to do is show you. the action when I write the book. But I wanted to ask from your perspective if there's something that you wanted to say, like I recently read a point of view that Ian Fleming's James Bond was a kind of comment about the relevancy of the British in the aftermath of empire, essentially. You know, what Britain's sort of like relevancy around the world during the Cold War era.

Starting point is 01:31:06 what do you see as maybe the role, if not your own work of espionage thrillers today? Yeah, great, great question, actually, because I think they have had a bit of a resurgence. There are new authors coming through in the genre, some fantastic writers on your side of the pond. Dave McCloskey, as well as Alana Berry and others, and over here too. and I think it's no accident that as we've seen, you know, conflicts involving Russia kind of escalating the last few years, we've come to recognize some of the extent of the threat that may be posed by China. And then of course, what we've seen with Iran in the recent months. I think it shows that these kind of geopolitical issues are of interested people

Starting point is 01:32:11 and they want to be able to understand them, but they also want to kind of, in a way, know that the situations are going to be okay. So they want this, perhaps this mash-up between the reality of a geopolitical threat, a state threat, you know, where you might have a country that is. planning that is sponsoring an act of terrorism or you might have a foreign intelligence service that's planning to assassinate somebody in your country. They want the realism of that, but they also want the escapism of kind of knowing that there's a hero who can make it all okay at the end.

Starting point is 01:32:51 But that that hero perhaps isn't necessarily the kind of bulletproof character of decades gone past, but somebody who is a bit more rounded, maybe a bit more violent, maybe a bit more vulnerable, maybe has some relatable kind of psychological challenges as well. And so I think when you put those things together and you add the catalyst of writers, particularly in the UK, like Mick Heron, who've kind of re-energized that spy genre after the death of, you know, John LeCarray with with humor and satire. So we can also kind of, in difficult economic and confusing political times, we can also poke fun at the people in power and kind of see how ridiculous some of them are

Starting point is 01:33:44 and some of their decisions. You put all that together. I think it's quite a good basis for spy fiction, for the interest in spy fiction and that it can be those things to readers. And so committed is out now. Octagon is coming out in a couple weeks. What's the publication date in the UK? Octagon, the publication date is the 28th of May.

Starting point is 01:34:14 So, yeah, if you're watching this in the US, hopefully you'd be able to order it off a UK website if you were interested to read or maybe download, you know, the e-book version. There'll be an audio version of it too coming around that time. And, yeah, U.S. publication, hopefully, at some point after that. And we'll have some links down the description for our viewers who want to find the books. Chris, is there anything else that you'd like to talk about, anything you'd like to touch upon in this interview before we get going?

Starting point is 01:34:58 Well, I think the way that we've covered the issues, kind of chronological. has been really interesting, I hope, interesting for listeners to kind of go on that, hopefully go on that journey with me over the last kind of 20, 20, 25 years or so through those geopolitical issues and kind of see the thread of how that's evolved in terms of my interests and where that's kind of taken me today. I don't think there's anything that I can think of particularly that we haven't covered or that I really want to add in at this point. But yeah, mainly to thank people for listening. I hope it's been interesting.

Starting point is 01:35:50 I hope it's been useful. And I hope it kind of also shows people that you can follow your interests as they evolve over time and find a sense of meaning in what you're doing and a sense of. inspiration to, yeah, to follow your interests. Where can people find you on the internet? Do you have a website or anywhere else, social media, anything? Yeah, I have a website, which is Cjmerit.com.uk. So Cj M-E-R-I-T-T-C-O-D-U-K. I'm on X as Dr. C.J. Merritt and I'm on Instagram as well as Chris J. Merritt.

Starting point is 01:36:45 So there's, I don't put, I don't post too much on there, but certainly the website, I would say, is an interesting place to look if you want to find out about maybe some of those past, past books and a bit more about my background. or to get in touch with me. Great. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for joining us. Really appreciate it. And thank you everyone who joined us on the show tonight. And we'll see all of you next time. And say hi to Julian and Charles to me for me when you meet.

Starting point is 01:37:20 Yeah, we'll do. Be sure to do that. Cheers, Jack. Hey, guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally. Totally free. And what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the team house, on our geopolitics podcast, eyes on, things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the high side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have coming on the show. And also, you know, filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out, We send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys.

Starting point is 01:38:08 It's just a kind of roll up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can find our newsletter at teamhousepodcast.kitt.com slash join. Again, the website for that is teamhousepodcast. Dot kit.com slash join. So we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.

The Team House - Former “Diplomat” on Iraq, Gaza, and Espionage | Chris Merritt

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