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

Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsintehtyjä artesaanitua teita myyvän jaujialahjakaupan perustaja. Valitsin Shopify, koska alustoja testatessani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helpokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittavat työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu ovat kätevästi dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu Shopify piste komsi vustolla. [musiikkia] Joby-Work, it is always great to have you back here, my friend. You're one of the OG's from literally in my parents' house back in episode 134. Back in the day, they couldn't look for tomorrow. It's always great to be back here, so thank you for having me. Well, thank you for always doing it, and we obviously got you at a time. I've had to keep my mouth shut about this for two and a half years, but the book is now coming out. The jackal will be talking about that today. Obviously, I'm excited to read this. I know exactly who the person you're writing on is, though, in the access you got. And that's, I just want to hear all about that today. But, you know, you've also been down, basically, as far as I know, hunkered in writing this, especially over the last couple of years, where you've also been the guy that's been for 30, 35 years covering a lot of national security around the world. And being on the scenes in so many of these places, we've done a lot of past episodes where you were literally returning from places in the Middle East and having covered it on the ground. So while I know you haven't been as directly like on the ground with sources, so to speak, over the last couple of years, there's no doubt that you've been watching what's going on. And there are some things that you've called, and I do have to say before we get into it, I've always appreciated just how balanced you are, how calm and like just almost like lecture education about it. You are rather than injecting always like a bunch of opinions into it, because these are hard topics, obviously, the Middle East, where you spend a lot of time. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. But I knew you before I knew John Kiriaku, and then when I got to know him, he was a huge fan of your work as well, which I think was pretty cool. But, you know, it's amazing how you've had sources in Arab intelligence. U.S. intelligence is really intelligence, European intelligence over the years and have been able to cover all of it. So, actually before I haven't asked you about the Iran War, have you ever thought about like how wild the last 30 years your life has been? You know, it's so funny, because so much of it, everything is in a way accidental. You can have the best plan and then life throws things at you. And I was an investigative reporter working on national security, well, not national security subjects, but health and environmental subjects, nuclear safety and all kinds of food safety. And then 9/11 happened. And it completely changed my world, and pretty much everybody around me at the time, everybody has to be covering this profound event that happened to America. And we all had a piece of that. And I got into the subjects and I felt like it was pretty good at trying to explain. And that's for journalists, it's not just the reporting, but sometimes can you help people understand what's going on in a way that really makes sense? And then can you develop the sources people really know what's going on, who can get deeply into the subjects and interpret? And it was the most fascinating subject I've ever covered. And before I know it, I'm covered in the CIA. I got a diplomatic reporter and roaming around the Middle East and then books come out of it. And it was transformative and I must say it all kind of started 9/11 for me. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge help. Thank you. Yeah, there's so many people I talk to from all different realms of lines of work around the world, who, you know, I'm thinking especially journalists and military. Who are all in different places, doing different things, sometimes within those two sectors at that time. And that's always like the crux. That's the turning point day where like their career was doing this. And then it did that, so it's always wild to hear that. The day the world changed. Now you were here back in, I believe episode 261 with me. That was the last time. So that would have been December 2024. I think Syria had just fallen. Yeah. We were all just in total astonishment by that. Yeah. Yeah. Now we can talk about that today too and where that's all that. But one of the things we did talk about in there and we talked about it before was a run. And that whole, like, it always just kind of felt like a brewing kettle, like something was going to happen and lo and behold, about six months after you were here, seven months after you were here, there was the first operation midnight hammer, 12-day war. And then you get to obviously the war going on this year. So first question. Did you see this coming with the idea that we could be talking about boots on the ground there? I did not, because one reason I didn't is because I've been, you know, deep in this world for long enough that I understood the reluctance of American military officials, particularly, but also intelligence. So the idea of trying to become militarily involved in regime change in Iran was so fraught, it's so complicated, so many things could go wrong. It was just not a good idea to go there. And so it was only really just in this current Trump administration where there was, it seems to be a consensus was formed that, well, we're just going to do the drastic. We're going to eliminate the regime through military force and we're going to sort of decapitate the state. And everything's going to be great in the Middle East for the first time, all the terrorism will stop. And it's almost like George Shelby Bush, like in the sense that we're going to invade Iraq and everything's going to be wonderful after that. We're going to transform the world because of this bold action. And, you know, people who've been following this for a long time just could see, you know, this sort of negative things in advance and there's certainly been a lot. It would have been great if they pulled it off if they'd managed to kind of put a democracy in Tehran, but the chances that that was going to happen, given the players there, given how deeply entrenched they are and how committed they are to governing the place, it just is not going to end well. And I, it's hard to predict where things will go, but I just feel like we're in a mess for a long time. This is not going to be easily resolved. When you say a mess for a long time, are you more leaning towards, we're going to have to feel like we're still forced to be there and involved in the war for a long time or because we've already done so much damage. It may wind down here at some point, but that damage is going to take years to be undone. Yeah, I think there's some of both, but I do feel like I feel like we, we, you know, I think the administration has decided that it can't put boots on the ground. It's just politically untenable. And so the options that you're left with are pretty bad, but basically what you put in place is a, you know, a terrible stalemate that, that we just have to live with and that creates its own instability, which creates higher prices, but also to stabilize its regional governments. It's a pathway to terrorism and we can talk about that. Some, the, the Iranians are really good at sort of seeding terrorist attacks, you know, helping groups get in place and, and, and do bad things. So just feel like they're, we're at a, still at an early stage of this. And as you've kind of tried to look down the horizon, there's the opportunity for, for things to get worse instead of better. And in my view, it's more likely to head that direction. Yeah. Now, I mean, you've seen so many places in the Middle East over the years where, to some extent or to a strong extent, we tried to do the whole, we're going to bring democracy here and spread it. And then you realize a lot of them are collegiate cultures. And yeah, you'd love to see free governments and stuff. And you certainly would not like to see oppression of people from their governments. I kind of don't see a lot of data that we're very good at spreading democracy. Am I, am I a little fucked up there or? No, like Zibide, Afghanistan. I mean, huh? That was, not only were we were going to get rid of al-Qaeda, which is the reason we went in, but we were going to change the government there. We're going to create a society that, that women could thrive in. All very good ambitions. And where are we now? We've got Taliban and control things are just as bad if not worse than ever. Sanctuaries exist there for some, some pretty bad groups. So that's, that's A, but you can kind of almost go down the list. Iraq is an interesting example now because the government that exists there now is a little bit more, you know, not quite as oppressive as some of the ones that existed, you know, 10, 15 years ago. But it's still, you know, it hasn't been as success by any stretch of the imagination and said what it's been is kind of a nightmare of a drain on our government, on our military, the sort of the price of, you know, long-term healthcare, for veterans, just just going to continue to, you know, build for decades to come. It's hard if you kind of could roll back the tape and say, "Should we do this or not?" I can't think of a single argument that says, "Yeah, let's plunge in and do this." Because it never, ever works out like you think it's going to. So what, what made them think this time was going to be the charm? You know, I honestly do think that this was a case of Netanyahu whispering in Trump's ear. And I don't think there's anything particularly controversial about saying that because he, you know, Trump had his own ideas about how he was going to bring the Iranians around and didn't work out. I mean, there was a nuclear deal in 2015 that kind of bottled up Iran's nuclear program. It had its flaws and weaknesses and it was going to, you know, sort of the terms are going to expire relatively soon. laws. But it did kind of keep things quiet on the nuclear front for a while. And Trump's idea when he came in the first time was, well, we're going to scrap that. And you know, that was a terrible idea. So we're just going to get rid of it. And the outcome was it just things on the nuclear case just got much, much worse. And Iran became much closer to building a nuclear bomb. And but I think in this particular case, the so the more hawker side of the Israeli government has always believed that what needed to happen was some really aggressive U.S. Israeli operations, some military strike that was going to eliminate this Iran problem once and for all, the nuclear file, the terrorism part of it, get rid of the bad government, the IRGC, and all the other bad actors. You know, let's just do it quickly, pull the bandaid and everything's going to be great after that. And I think Trump was literally just talked into it. He thought he thought it sounded great to him. He could come out of it, looking like a hero. And who to thought that you could actually kill the supreme leader, wipe out most of his senior staff. And Iran just keeps going. And if anything, the leadership now is more entrenched and more hard line than the one that existed before. So and actually, there's the idea of an Iranian bomb, even though they've lost a lot of capability, the new guys are more sort of warmed up to the idea, much more than say that the last I told you was, he always, I was a bit afraid of kind of stepping crossing that line and becoming a nuclear state. These new guys, if they could get a nuclear weapon, they would. I'm pretty sure of it. Unfortunately, though, we've, as you're kind of laying out, we've given them an impetus to want to do it. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like this has been such a frustrating thing for me too, because I've said for years on the show with different guests, I'd love to see the Iranian people overthrow their regime. I never knew what the real numbers were in there, like how many people in the country actually support it versus not, but I always knew like it's fair to say a majority of people don't support it. And they do some awful things to their people. The problem is you can't just go invading everyone you don't like. I mean, are we going to invade China tomorrow because they've been killing the weekers for, you know, God knows how long? No. It's because we wanted to, it is the legacy play. Like you said, with Trump, and he's thinking he could be the guy that ended it, that ended it. But it's like, there's this country we've economically shut off from the world and we can go in there and kind of swing our dick and something good will happen. But it's still, even if it doesn't have China's GDP, you got a population of 93 million people give or take, you got a geographic situation that's insane. You are fighting the geography before you even fight their army. And now I don't, again, I don't know what the numbers are. But you do very much have some sort of rally around the flag thing going on, especially when there's free propaganda you're giving them, bombing schools of girls and stuff. You know, it's just very frustrating to me because it feels like a redux of everything I've already seen. I absolutely love cook and crack in the summer. Steve, is that really on the, that's on the script? No, it's grilling. Okay. All right. I love grilling in the summer. But the second you move beyond burgers and steaks, things get frustrating fast. Food sticks, vegetables disappear through the grates. Fish falls apart when you try to flip it and somehow clean up takes even longer than the actual meal, which sucks, which is why I've been using Hexclad's barbecue collection. 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So if you're planning on spending time behind the grill this summer, don't make it harder than it needs to be. And upgrade your backyard cooking setup with Hexclad's barbecue collection. From August 20th through September 8th, you can get up to 52% off Hexclad and upgrade your kitchen for the new season. Just head to Hexclad.com/Julian, link about the description below. That's H-E-X-C-L-A-D.com/Julian. Please support our show and tell them I say the best thing. I'm Shannon Maldonado. I'm from Artesan and I'm also from Jaui, La Jakaoban. I've been in the office for the first time in my life. I've been in the office for a while now. rates, like, what the fuck are we doing here? But on our end, I don't know, like, I understand the world's a really complicated place and, you know, shit happens and some of it is obviously far above my pay grade. But when you see Scott percent go to Davos, optics are already bad with that, just starting that statement. But you seem to go to Davos in January and laugh and brag to people about these new sanctions, he's going to put on a run that would effectively take there as he was putting it, take their currency to zero, which he then was bragging would force people to go into the streets. And he further bragged that because people would be forced to go into the streets, I'm not even getting to the fact that there were misod people within those people that went into the streets, but that's neither here nor there. When they'd go into the streets, the totalitarian regime would then be forced to put down the uprising and kill people, which would create maybe room for revolution or grounds for invasion. I don't think he used those words, but we all see where it was headed right there. And so to me, I look at that and I go, if I see one of the fent heads outside, like tweaking out down the street and I go and grab a weapon and load it with a bunch of bullets and walk outside and hand it to them and walk back inside. If he then goes and shoots a bunch of people, obviously, like, yeah, he's a fault, but I feel like I'm a fault there too, right? Yeah. I kind of empowered this. Yeah. Am I crazy? Yeah. Same situation absolutely. And I remember that moment too at Davos, so just you could almost see the eye rolling in the room among the security officials who were there from Europe in particular. Everybody understood that those are very, very simplistic predictions. We have to remember this is a regime has been under sanctions since 1979. So longer than most of our listeners have been around. And they've learned to survive. They've learned to live with them. There was a moment in the in the 2010s, when the Europeans and the Chinese and everybody kind of coalesced on a set of sanctions. It was truly international that forced the Iranians to come through table on the nuclear file and that worked for a while. But when the nuclear deal was thrown out, Iran gets the idea, we just can't trust anything the Americans say. So we're going to go back to our original MO, which is screw you. We can deal with sanctions. We can withstand that. We can be self-sufficient. The North Koreans used to say they used to tell their people, we will eat grass. We will do, we will live like animals before we'll bow down to you. It's their ability to resist, at least in terms of people in power, an enormous amount of economic pressure. They can hold out a lot longer than we can. That's wild too, because that's the people to pay for it. Yeah, it's absolutely over the case. And in the lower classes in Iran, really suffer. There's an extraordinary, extraordinarily wealthy middle class, an upper middle class in Iran who managed to do quite well normally. They're feeling it now too, but the people at the very bottom are just getting killed. Yeah, that's another thing that there's a lot of, I think, misunderstanding with just so that you can understand that not to trivialize it, but the chest pieces on the board here and everything that's going on. Iran's got a, this is not like a population, it's like a hundred percent Persian or, you know, following Chiya law. Obviously, they have multiple sections. So like, if you were educating someone who knew very little about the actual people that comprised the 93 million there, how would you break up the population? Yeah. So there's some really big divisions ethnically, as you mentioned. So they got the zaris that kind of related to the Azerbaijanis up in the north. There's balooks on the, you know, on the border with Afghanistan. People who have traditionally historically had a lot of animosity toward the regime in Tehran, even in the shaltime. There are soonies there. Some minority population, but they exist and they've had problems with repression over the years. So it's a very diverse society. One thing that they do have, which is maybe not quite as recognized as widely as it should be, this is a very educating population. And even though women are forced to, you know, wear scarves and headdresses, women are educated. They have professional jobs. It's not like Afghanistan where you're, you know, forced to live in your house and have kids, and that's it. And so there's, there's a lot of variety of opinion. There is a lot of support among the wider population for the United States in terms of our culture and our society. We're hated in a lot of the Arab world. The Iranians actually like us, at least they did until recently. And so it was like you're one of the higher, you know, popularity or, you know, favorability ratings of the United States in the world was among the Iranians toward the United States. That is eroded quite a bit as you can imagine. They, they have lots of reasons to feel betrayed by us now. But yeah, that diversity is there and that yearning for for something better, you know, they've been under a revolutionary regime now since, you know, like getting for longer than most of us have been around. And it's, it's tiresome because it's oppressive. It's restrictive and people just want to be able to live their own lives and freedom without worrying that if they're, you know, show two inches of hair around their face, if you're a female, you're going to get beaten by somebody. They'd want to get rid of that. But the, you know, the way that we've gone about it in the last few months has not helped them as it moved them and it's closer to what they wanted. Yeah. And it, and also, you know, taken out like the symbolic leader who at least some percentage of the population supports, then murderizes him. Yeah, absolutely. In a way too to where people that maybe hated him before that, at least they're like, well, I mean, died for a country. Like a few people might actually say that. It's like, logically. Yeah. And that is a good point because he's not even the government is diverse in Iran, at least it had been. So you've got your eye atola, who is kind of like a figurehead. It doesn't have, he has power, but he doesn't have ultimate power because there's sort of the council of, you know, religious leaders. There's the IRGC, which has his own power base. There's a elected representative. Actually, do you have fairly liberal elections or vote, you know, elections. So people have a chance to vote for, you know, prime minister. And so you have all these different competing power centers. That's all been consolidated now because really there's one power center and that's the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard or Revolutionary Guard, excuse me. And they, they have been whittled down because of airstrikes, but the ones that are left standing are the most intransigent, most hard line, you know, of that pretty hard line group. Now, obviously they've been under a lot of economic sanctions as you laid out for a long time now. They do sit on a lot of oil. So they're still able to trade that. Obviously there's deals with Russia. But what are the ways were they sustaining their economy? You said they had at least somewhat of a burgeoning upper middle class that existed there. Like what other businesses were there? Because I don't want my head to just go to like what we always talk about with Syria. We're just turning to black markets everywhere. But you know, is that an aspect of it too? That is a big aspect. Because IRGC, which is again, this kind of paramilitary for us, we can't basically turn sanctions into an economic opportunity. So by figuring out pipelines to get things that Iranians want into the country through smuggling through all kinds of illegal systems, they kind of rake money off the top of that. So they essentially have been empowered by the sanctions that made them stronger than ever. And that happens a lot of times when sanctions are concerned. And they've also been very creative in ingenious with ways to sell their biggest asset, which is oil. And so you could argue that blockade on the straight of our muse, more removes hurts them as well. Well, they've got all these clever tricks. You can take a tanker full of raining oil. You meet another tanker that has a neutral flag and you transfer oil from one vessel to the other. It happens all the time. Both ships turn off their transponders so they're not tracked. So they're kind of traveling in the dark. So they're very, very good at smuggling. They're the chief partner for smuggling is typically the Iraqis because the Iraqis have oil and they have tankers and they sell it. So all you need to do is meet up on the Iraqi tanker and transfer a rain in oil to an Iraqi tanker. And nobody knows the difference. They've been able to figure out how to make really small-scale refiners for refineries. So you don't need massive refineries. You need these, they call them tea pot refineries to Chinese make them they're very small. It's kind of like, you know, you can have a refiner. There's like the size of a house. It's not a big and vicious thing. But you can if you have enough of those, you can create a lot of refined petroleum products. And then you sell those. Enough oil gets out through various means, particularly to the Chinese who don't care at all about our war and wish it was happening. They're very happy to buy a rain in oil and a deep discount. And so as long as there's that market exists, somebody's going to find a way to get the oil out of the country to where the Chinese can get it. And there are various options for doing that. So they've never, they're hurting. There's no question about it. Their economy's in trouble. It's not collapsing. And they've been very good historically at finding workarounds and finding ways to survive despite the economic pressure. So there's only so much we can do really to kind of force them to change their ways. Yeah, also the Chinese relationships have always been a little odd to me because you even said it a few minutes ago that China was among the countries that supported economic sanctions in the 2010s at one point on Iran. And their allies yet China was the one that came out pretty early on through one of their foreign ministers. I think I forget the guy's name, but to call on Iran to stop bombing because they were too. That's the other thing. It's like it got so so as backwards. I was like, you know, they're returning bombs. I'm like, what do you want them to do? They're getting bomb, you know what I mean? Like, I don't want to defend them, but it's kind of crazy. So China was calling on them to stop bombing. What is the nature of that relationship? Cause they have the trade relationship and China like cozy's up with them, but it feels like it's almost like, I don't know a relationship of convenient propaganda for them. Yeah, exactly. Cause they don't particularly close to the Iranians. They don't care about the Iranians. They do like their oil and they do like getting it cheap because it's good for their economy. But what they really like is being able to use Iran to kind of screw with us. Yeah, because we're their biggest rival in the world. And even though they don't want a conflict in the Middle East cause that's bad for everybody, they've managed to insulate themselves from it. They've accumulated a lot of surplus oil, reserve oil before the war began. So they haven't really been affected that much. And in the meantime, they're happy when the United States has to squirm. And they're happy, particularly when we go on one of our big regime change operations. And they can sit back and just watch us, you know, get ourselves into a tighter and tighter news. And just, you know, say to the rest of the world, hey, do you want to have a stable partner? Somebody who's reliable and doesn't run off and do rash things come to us, do business with us. So now it's it's interesting. If you look at, again, favorability polls suggest that there's been this shift from people thinking of the Americans are, you know, this is kind of bright shining city on a hill to thinking more that, you know, the Chinese have a pretty good thing to offer. They have a, we, even the Europeans are saying, you know, we don't like competing with you on a lot of levels, but you're, you're at least a predictable, reliable partner. And that's, you know, with sanctions regimes and everything else is happening over here. It's, it's harder to say that if you're, you know, we're random country around the world. So it's really helped the Chinese a lot that we've found ourselves in the situation. Yeah, it doesn't help that at home we've had a massive wealth gap form as well and a increasingly cringier elite class be exposed on some things because it creates enormous kind of already teed up for you on, on their propaganda opportunities to be able to say, well, this could be better over here. Yeah, you know, I don't, I don't like any hard end of a spectrum at all. And I got a serious problem with things we're doing here, but I agree with you. They've opened up the floodgates to a place like China being like, hey, listen, we're not bombing people. In fact, we come in and loan money. Forget that they're loan-sharking people. They'll just, you know, they'll dress it up, how they got to dress it up in the world will start to be like, well, maybe they're on to something. Yeah, that's concerning. And if you let us in, we'll build you a new airport or we'll build you support facilities. And so there's always some freebies that come with it if you're China. And, and that's interesting. One thing is we've stopped doing the way we used to is foreign aid. And that's always kind of an issue that a lot of Americans look at it. Why do we spend money helping other countries we need the money here at home? But sometimes a little investment creates a lot of goodwill. And if you wanna see a practical example of how that works and why a country that doesn't have our democratic values believes in foreign aid, look at China because they've created alliances around the world, and particularly in Africa, but also some in South America. And places they can go to now and have favorable relationships because they come in, they give things. They give hospitals, they give medical aid. I watched during COVID with just astonishment. All the countries that received Chinese, like legions of Chinese doctors would come with tents and medical facilities and be kind of first line responders to some of these countries that really struggled with COVID back in the day. And they got a ton of goodwill for it. And I went to Belgrade to Serbia with a reporting trip a couple of years ago right after COVID. And there were like ads and newspapers thanking the Chinese billboards, you know, with the Chinese with jean that the Chinese leaders picture on it because they're completely grateful to the Chinese for helping them out of a jam. And that's just really smart for our policy from the Chinese point of view. - And that's also a practical way that you're laying out of the Chinese doing it. Like we saw what got exposed with USA. They started funding like trans surgeries and fucking Puerto Rico. - Yeah. - And they were basically like, the, okay, you want to set up something to where you can have goodwill and spread democracy around the world. Cool. They were using it as a like on our end. There were people that got in there kind of like cockroaches and used it as a backend like mercenary. As a backend system of funnel money from CIA towards fucking insane causes. And then taxpayers started to see what this was and they're like, well shut that down. - Talk space is the number one rated online therapy. Bringing you professional support from licensed therapists and psychiatrists that you can access. Anytime, anywhere. Talk space is here to help you take control of your mental health. The world may feel uncertain and out of control at times, but one thing you do have in your control is taking care of your mental health. Talk space makes it easy to start. Just like your physical body needs exercise, your mental health needs maintenance and attention. Better your mental health, the better your physical health and vice versa. Talk space therapists not only listen to you, they provide valuable techniques to manage stress or conflict in your life, helping improve your coping skills and self-awareness. Life is all about how we interact with one another and communication is key. Talk space can help you identify obstacles and create new meaningful connections. They really make getting the help you need easy, accessible and affordable. Plus, most insured members have a zero dollar copay. I've talked a lot in the past about how therapy has helped me out there in really difficult times in my life. And I'm sure like many of you, I've also had a lot of friends who dealt with some serious issues and were lucky enough to have therapists there to help them out. It's great to have a resource like Talk space that can connect you with someone who can help. As a listener of my podcast, you're gonna be able to get $80 off your first month of Talk space. When you go to Talkspace.com, that link is in my description below and use promo code space80. That's S-P-A-C-E-A-Zero. To match with the licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com, link in my description below and enter promo code space80. I agree with you that like if you're going to do foreign diplomacy and there's a way to be able to help other places that are in need, do it, feed them, you know? Give them medical supplies for things that matter and stuff like that. How you do it matters. And we, something is going really rotten to where we don't, we've just let bad people run those things and I understand why so many people are like, yeah, fuck that, especially when we have so many problems at home that we don't take care of. And yet here we are doing more wars, dead officially cross 40 trillion the other day. I don't even know what that means. That's insane number. It's almost like Medicaid bandits, people who, doctors who exploit Medicaid and they can prescribe all kinds of remedies that people don't need and surgeries and the other, just because they can wreak in profit. And people have exploited aid foreign aid the same way. But the core mission, which is supposed to be, you know, helping poor people and the legitimate needs, but also kind of building goodwill. That's much more effective than spending money on military. If you've got a close ally because they depend on you or they see you as a good partner in good faith. That's right. So that's the part that I feel that we really lost something when that goes away. Yeah. Now have you, you know, have you had a chance to talk to some of your people who are wired in somewhat close to that Iranian situation over the past few months? I know you've been heads down finishing this, but have you had some conversations? Yeah, somewhat. Yeah, people in the region who are particularly some of the neighbors, and they're the ones who have kind of caught in the crossfire on this because they've actually had incoming. They've had to, you know, sometimes cases, some cases arena and missiles coming into their aerospace. And sometimes debris from interceptors to come falling down and, you know, causing damage. So they've, it's been such a nightmare for those countries because they got initially excited by the idea that Iran, the regime might fall. And what they've been left with instead is a much more unstable region. You know, the typical sources of income, like tourism, drying up because people don't want to go to, you don't want to go to Abu Dhabi if there's missiles falling on the airport. So it's been, that's been the most, sort of the most alarmed voices that I hear are people who are there sort of experiencing the collateral damage from this fight. And it's, it's pretty intense on the front line. What about like the UAE in places like that that have a lot of Western money involved? And obviously they put a lot of money into the West as well now they're just getting bases blown up there. Yeah, you always think of those, those Gulf countries, the UAE and the Saudis and some of the other scotteries as being just having unbelievable wealth because they, they clearly are pretty wealthy from there, from their oil and gas. But some of them are really having some cash problems. They're, you know, some of the, that's sort of the typical just subsistence programs and these countries are not being funded in the way they, they should be, and, and more than that, they're just, they're just pissed. They're, they're, there's really mad at the US for starting this and not being able to produce an outcome that's, that's good for them. So our relationship with UAE and others, I mean, they don't want, don't want to cause up necessarily to Russia or to Ron certainly, but there's a lot of strain. And you get these folks gone in a private conversation, they really met because they've been hurt by this, so they just feel like we've cut a knuckle headed our way into some really bad situations for them. And what the hell is going on with Saudi, too? The reason I ask is because you and I have talked a lot before about the whole, I think over all our episodes about the proxy war over the years between Saudi and the Iranians, a lot of it happened in Yemen and all that. But like, then there was a period of, I don't want to call it like peace, but a period of they were moving away from each other and had come to an understanding. And yet we got reports early on in this war that Muhammad bin Salman was calling up Trump and telling him to keep hitting him over and over. So what is it here? Yeah, you hear those messages prickling with the getting that kind of just step on the gas. You know, this is going to be terrible until it's over, but please just finish the job no matter what you have to do. And then you see that this, this, this out is beginning to take a more practical stance because they have to live next door to the Iranians. And so then they kind of reach out and they try to broker out an agreement or, you know, open trade. The UAE has been kind of the same way. They've just in the recent days suspended trade with the Iranians because because of some, they got hit by some missiles and they were upset about that. But we'll see that go back. They'll still they have to trade with the Iranians there. Their neighbors, they're deeply invested in the Iranian economy. And so it, I think that's part of the problem is because even though they dislike the regime, they're distrustful of it. They, they're worried about sort of the revolution being exported like she, the population in their countries rising up in some way. But at the same time, their businessmen, they want to do business. They want to have relationships that help them and create wealth. And so it's always kind of just very complicated, you know, say something publicly and do something else behind the scenes. And that's, that's just the reality of the relationships there. Yeah, it's bizarre to me too because there's a lot of evidence to suggest that Muhammad bin Salman, I don't want to say still exists. That's a strong way to put it. But is able to wield the international power that he still does because of Donald Trump. And specifically, I'm thinking of the famous quote where Trump was like I saved his ass, yeah, related to the Jamal Khashoggi thing. You know, so when I hear him like trying to lobby the president's stuff, it makes me think like what, you know, this is the one guy you should be like, if he calls you, maybe take his fucking call, you know what I mean? It's not, it felt the other way around. I don't know if I'm reading into that too much though. Yeah, these, what I do know about those relationships, it's, it's, they're dealing with the Saudis are dealing with us and our administration on many different levels. And you have these sort of unofficial emissaries to the region like, like, like, Kushner and, um, would call often others who are, you know, they're creating opportunities for themselves through these relationships, you know, mutually, you know, Jared Kushner is obviously got a ton of money from the Saudis in particular. And so, yeah, very, very cozy relationships. And that seems to exist almost independent of what American policy is. And that's, that's kind of unfortunate when you have people trying to game a foreign relationship for personal reasons or personal gain as if, you know, what's best for the US? Absolutely. And that's why I don't understand. Why do we have two unelected guys, including one that's like the president's son-in-law negotiating on our behalf? Yeah. No conflict there, you know? Like, I don't, I don't, they, they announced, Jared and Ivanka announced that the end of Trump's first administration, they were stepping away from politics didn't want to be involved. Then they go get 2.1 billion from the Saudis and start making other deals around the world and stuff like that. And dad gets back in four years later. And suddenly he's just a volunteer in these situations. And then they fail miserably. They're negotiators that were sent to negotiate not getting into a war. Then we got into a war. That's already a failure. Yeah. Then they keep negotiating, it keeps failing. Like, why are we still running with this? Yeah, it's incredible. And it's, you know, people knock the bureaucracy. And there's certainly lots of things about a bureaucracy that doesn't work as inefficient. But there is kind of a process for diplomacy and kind of protocols and ways things are handled and professionals, people who spend their entire careers in the region developing relationships and understanding the rules. And then you just, like, these people who have no experience kind of parachuting in and you expect them to solve this problem. And they'd have barely any kind of understanding of the history and the cultures. And it's just not going to, it's not going to work. You have to be extraordinary lucky for it to work. But it's not just a matter of will showing up. You really have to, you have to approach it with sophistication and feel that's missing. It felt like for four years with the Biden administration, we had a bunch of people in charge who would leave the water running and leave the house for a week. And with this administration, we have a bunch of people in charge who basically break the pipes and let the water go out. Like they're both horrible. Oh, I'm going to write that down. That's pretty good. Yeah. But like, yeah, there's, there's your choice, ladies and gentlemen, right? Like, to me, all corruption is bad. It's just, it's like different flavors of it. Yeah. And you can't make a partisan thing out of it because both sides can screw it up pretty badly for different reasons, but, you know, we just have a history of kind of wrecking situations around the world just because we just blunder into things and we sometimes have this grand vision of what we get accomplished. And we just always overshoot or just under prepare. Yeah. Now, I remember you and I were in here in March, 2024, the second time we recorded for episode 198. And I, we had a really interesting conversation in the third hour there where this was whatever five months after October 7th. And we were talking about how there were some issues with that relationship with Israel. Obviously, this is something you've literally seen up close for a long time. Have a lot of thoughts on the matter, but you could see that the sentiment in America was really in a way unprecedented, even at that time, moving away from supporting them, taking actions all over the place and killing people. And obviously, what was going on in Gaza, I think it has gotten markedly worse since then, not just the sentiment, but the actions too. We had in the span of one day, the speaker of the house, the secretary of state, and then I'll say implicitly, the president of the United States, all separately admit that we got into the war because Israel was going to go bomb them. So we were pulled into the war by them. Then they came out, Trump didn't come out and deny it, but the other two had said it explicitly. So they come out and deny it, even though we can run the tape. But then the White House releases the official, whatever it is, memorandum. I don't know what it was called on the Operation Epic Fury and says this explicitly in the text. We've put it on the show before a million times, but people can go find it out there. I won't have to even pull it up again. Where they're like, yeah, we went in because our ally Israel was going to bomb them. So we had to go protect them. And you see this, you see the funding that goes through APAC and other organizations, the funnel money and buy politicians, and then the politicians they don't like, they vote out. And all the while they're now continuing to push us to put boots on the ground while saying openly, their leadership going, yeah, we're not going to join you while they're ethnically cleansing Lebanon, while the Gaza cease fire and too much of a ceasefire, and they openly have people from our country, like Jared Kushner talking about saying, you know, we're going to remodel the whole place. I'm a little bit exhausted. And I don't, at this point, it is impossible for me to not see that there is some sort of not very holy alliance that seems to go on between our government and Israel. Why at this point, even with all the sentiment where it is, is that still the case? It's puzzling to me. And it's, if you care about the existence of an Israeli democracy in the Middle East, and I always feel like that's an important objective. There should be, they've been traditionally a good ally in the past. You support the right of the Israelis to have a representative democracy and a healthy economy. But so much damage has been done to Israel internationally because of this conflict. And we've enabled it in a way because we've been kind of locked step with them in what has been a very aggressive plan to reshape the Middle East that just wasn't realistic. So we've, it's the American population that's kind of soured on the idea of supporting Israel. And you can see it in all the polls. Certainly the case in Europe and the countries I go to that just, they are exasperated by the policy of this, you know, very hard right, Israeli government. And by, you know, the things that go on every day in the occupied territories, the sort of settler violence against Palestinians, there's just this drumbeat daily that just created so much ill will. I don't know if you're an Israeli politician how you begin to change that and kind of bring some, you know, move Israel back from being what is, what is now kind of become almost a pariah state in some places in the world. How do you, how do you begin to fix that? I think that's that's a generational problem now. And it's just bad for for Israel's self interest to have this this kind of Really strong will and if I could pivot to book it for a second. It's the same kind of You know, and the sort of the in the era of Carlos the jackal. This is in the late 60s and 70s It became a kind of an internationally cool thing to support the Palestinian cause because people saw the Israelis after 1967 and their victories over the most West Bank in East Jerusalem as being aggressors as being You know perpetrating out, you know a you know, it's sort of a policy that made people that created homelessness and that It's trampled on on existing cultures in the region and so guy a guy like Carlos who would have nothing to do a Palestine moves himself to the Middle East to become part of the fight against it It became a very kind of trendy thing on the left in those days But you also you see now. I think the same kind of Cinnamon that's very deep and very widespread on you know, in the large parts of the US population in Europe as well And it's kind of an echo of what happened back then. It's not good for Israel's interest for sure Yeah, and that's that's the thing I keep coming back to it's like When you look throughout the history Because actually some of like my Understanding and that is directly attributable to the first podcast you and I did There was there was a point there a couple hours in This is back in January 2023 where you we were talking about something and I said like out of hand I look at this and I'm like how to hell This is guy in that Nyahu like he just left power and he was like on trial or something two years later He's a year later whatever is he's back in and the guy's essentially been like in charge of the government for Twenty five thirty years like how is this different from a let's just say an optics standpoint then like a Putin Yeah, yeah, and and the worry is something right now is that the government this is a coalition that he's assembled I mentioned Netanyahu and I'm like he's kind of like the Putin in the Middle East in some ways and you said something like Yeah, no you can make that argument and for the next minute I had a thought in my head while you were talking it was the one time the whole podcast I wasn't listening to you where I said wait a minute. Did I just say that because it sounded right Versus like if I needed to go into a court right now and prove that opinion, which I now could by the way But you know could I go do that right now and I was like no I think I kind of talked out of my ass there so unbeknownst to me what was gonna happen I spent 2023 like throughout that year my little side Quest study was the Middle East and particularly the relationship of Israel and the history and all that and Then October 7th happen and it was like whoa. I've been looking at this the whole year and I did have Obviously some issues with Netanyahu, but I think it got exacerbated in the aftermath of that and my my problem is They've always been listed as an ally But there are so many actions that have been taken over the years to where they curry favor with us that is not gotten through It's gotten through ill-gotten means like spying which every nation spies on each other I understand that they happen to be at the top of that list and You know they pull us into things again and again and again that like even your friend the King of Jordan would have been able to tell you We're a bad idea that then cost us socially, culturally, economically Politically the whole bit at home and have reverberating generational effects and like at some point you have to ask yourself You know the friend that makes you keep on getting into a bar fight because he gets too drunk like Yeah, she's still a friend. Yeah, that's that's a really good observation. I think there's There's been this historic sense that the the American government and the Israeli government are so close that we're just Just allies were just to kind of have the same interest But the reality is and if you talk to you know age Intelligence people who've spent a lot of time in the region The Israelis have their own interest and they also were very good at manipulating us and they know this and there's it's I think it nothing y'all who said something like it's the easiest thing the world to do is to kind of move move the Americans because they They've got the levers and for the longest time it was like you know whether you're pro or anti-Israel was was a political thing if You if you suggested in your politics, it's your anti-Israel, then that's a terrible for you politically in this country because we were so supportive of the of Israel But it's it's a very complicated relationship and in the Israelis are As they I guess arguably should be they they're for their own interest and to the extent that our interest happened to align it's Well, that's great, but it's not always the case right and they have you know They've been very skillful kind of pushing us into doing things that they want and You know, it does is not necessarily a two-way street. It's it's really it's really about their own survival and their own policy interest And what about the intelligence they get that's one thing Joe Kent talks about he's like they give intelligence and then our leaders listen to it when we have better intelligence Yeah, that's not what it is. Yeah, but they're doing that to try to force our hand may have just happened again with a quote assassination attempt, right? You know up true. Yeah, and case in point two just to the decision to to go to war I That that was just To me, it was just a case of Their skill and manipulation that caused our leaders to ignore the advice they were getting from their own intelligence community Which said pretty strong or even you know Radcliffe the CIA director who's rep up, you know, Trump appointee Said you know the idea that there's gonna be you know successful regime change and that's just gonna topple the IRGC And it's all gonna be over he pushed back on that so what's that's that's unlikely? That's not a hack John push back on that believe or not so they could essentially was was one of the Decenters to this idea that we need to kind of wow do this you and and and yet President listen to the to the Nenya who argument discounting the advice of his own people So that shows you kind of the the power of the influence that's there and it's and in a few a few Israel your country of what is it? 7 8 million now. I think it's nine. Okay, so it's gone up They they live in a bad neighborhood and they they do have a lot of people that that want to eliminate them So it's it's a dangerous rough territory. So they'd be kind to develop the skills You know of you know a strong military you know all kinds of other assets to survive and the other thing they've had to have is a strong US relationship and that Almost as a as a survival skill. They've become very good at kind of making us are persuading us to do Something that's in their interest. It's good for them. Why does that work so well though when you have a nation of nine million people that can't even touch our GDP Moving a nation of 350 million people. That's the quote unquote leader of the free world. It's it it's an uncomfortable question. Yeah, it is But there's a lot of things that go into that and I am living in a 2026 world now where we've seen three million of the Epstein files You know, he didn't have cameras in the pen. It's just just because he enjoyed it. It was a sick guy, but like You know, there's hard drives that a shit somewhere. Yeah, and I suspect a lot of it's not in America I think the CIA had some guilt there for sure But like there were there were other places. He was friends with certain prime ministers You know, you look at that and it's very very hard to unsee it because then there's even an email with him and Steve Bannon of all people back in 2018 or 2019 where he says if Trump is cornered like a rat. He'll just bomb around Cut a wag the dog change the subject that's interesting. Yeah Is this something that in the past you think was scary to talk about? It's It is scary to talk about in the sense that It's almost like when you and you kind of touch on certain political issues that The controversy is not worth the trouble and and it's so it's it's better to kind of Just just be a little quiet about your judgment And I feel like for a lot of American politicians now they're at a point where they're The discomfort is starting to kind of take a backseat to what now is becoming You know a strong majority view within the constituency So people are beginning to change their change what they're willing to say and um and you know and often and I think you know, there's sort of wide range of opinions on this But it's the consistent thing that I hear is that It's it's not it's not anti-Israel. It's it's anti Policy the net and young government right it's it's reacting to the extreme views of Some members of the far right it's in the Israeli cabinet who are saying things are just saying yeah beyond the pale and and also just witnessing Is it the terrible things shocking things that happen in the West Bank every day and if you're just as as a human being It's painful to see that stuff go on. It's just nothing It's no way to kind of Make it okay. It's it's a starable behavior And you've studied terrorism one Almost anyone over the past 25 years especially and it's like I'm never going condone terrorism. I'm always going to judge it Radically awfully you know But what I do try to do now because I've lived through enough is when I look at a situation Try to ask myself, okay, this person was a baby. They were a kid at one point. Yeah, then they turn into a terrorist Täällä on tosi hyvä, että se on todella hyvä. Täällä on todella hyvä, että se on todella hyvä, että se on todella hyvä, että se on todella hyvä. Työkaluut, kuten varaston suunnittelu ovat kätävästi dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu shopifaipiste komsi vustolla. Täällä on todella hyvä. you know, to where he was like, this is going to be an ethic cleansing and everything. So have you had a chance to talk to him? Yeah. I do stay in touch with him and his people too. What are you thinking? So here's a guy, and I don't want to put words in his mouth and sort of suggest that I know everything he's thinking. But what's been conveyed to me very powerfully is the anguish that he feels over what's happened in his neighborhood. And he's a, you know, he was a military guy by training and he's done a lot of, he's kind of personally involved in doing sort of aid drops to Gaza. So he does a lot of overflies. He goes on the planes and kind of, you know, sits in the back with the pallets, go out the back door and get parachuteed down to Gaza. He's dumping the pallets. Yeah, he's been, he's dumping. Yeah, he's, he's bad-ass that one. Remember he bombed the dude who burnt, that guy's just guys burned his pilot. Yep. He is, like he said, he's, he's, and his father was the same way. His father was like a helicopter pilot, a airplane pilot, and they're all kind of daredevils in their own way. Interesting. He can be very emotional about it, but then one of the most powerful stories that has been shared with me, and I don't like talk about specifics of conversations and sourcing, but the experience of flying over Gaza is like flying over Dresden after World War II, and just seeing the miles and miles of just, well, it's not a big place, but just, just endless devastation. And his sentiment about that is that when the rest of the world can see what really happened, when reporters are finally let in to take pictures on the ground, they won't believe it. He had tremendous problems with Hamas, they were evil and, and, you know, a terrorist organization did not, should not have ever been allowed to control politically Gaza, and they were absolutely to blame for what happened on October 23rd. But he, you know, having witnessed the destruction that followed, he just emotionally just devastated by it, and, and he's, you know, one of the ones who kind of has to be responsible putting the pieces back together, and initially that's kind of a signal from Washington is, well, we're just going to dump all this on your lap. We're going to see if we can force Jordan to accept, you know, all these Palestinian refugees as being citizens of, of your country. And to get imagine that if somebody said, well, you, you ask you have to take the population of Haiti because they're, they're destined to, they've, you know, they don't have a functioning government. So we're just going to append, you know, those millions of citizens to, to the United States. No country would accept that. Remember what he said, too, at the beginning, before they were even doing that, when they said, will you take them in? And he said, this was like October 20th or something like that. It was, it was in the weeks after October 7th, I'll never forget this. But he said, if I do that, I will give the hardliners of the Israeli government exactly what they want. They will ethnically cleanse the place because you think they're going to let them back. It's been, this, the hard right in the cabinet, make no bones about the fact that they see, you know, a greater Israel project that includes Israel completely, you know, taking control of all those, those occupied territories and essentially, yeah, and probably too. I mean, that's, that's on the map for some of them. But at least West Bank and, and Jerusalem and they feel like they've been sort of divinely appointed to have that dominion, to have to be able to control those territories. And so they don't, they're, they're, they're not thinking about any kind of future for Palestinian people because they don't care about it. They don't see it as legitimate. And they're absolutely explicit about that and, and to, to see those comments by people who are supposed to be responsible leaders in government and in charge of ministries saying something so terrible, it's just, it's, it's shocking to hear. But yeah, yeah, our, our friend, the king, has his hands full at the moment. Plus, he's one of the countries, you know, like the Gulf Arabs in some times, some cases even worse, his, his country is really struggled because of this ongoing conflict. Economic, economically, I mean, terrorism, it's tourism is, is dried up, you know, it's, it's hard to move goods internationally. So commerce has really been hit hard. So this is a country that had, has few resources, they don't have oil. I've got a very educated, um, society, uh, they've got really great natural resources. And in sense, they've got a wonder of the world, which is Petra, which is the most incredible place I've ever seen in my life physically. So they've got a lot to offer. But if people aren't going there, if they can't sell their goods, you know, the, the economy against the crumble, and they also have the burden of millions of refugees from Syria, from the Syrian fighting, or still there, they're even Iraqi refugees from, from a war 20 years ago. Yeah. And they all kind of come to Jordan because it's safe and, and stay and don't leave. And that becomes more mouths to feed more drains on, um, on a country that has, doesn't have enough water for its own people, and they have really no place to turn too for it. They don't have rivers to speak of, uh, and, and so we just, their problems just kind of build and build and build and just wonder how sustainable it is. Does he have a leg to stand on when it comes to like, I don't know, come into the US and be in like, what the fuck? Yeah. You know, he, he doesn't sense that he's, he's got a lot of respect. Uh, I don't, uh, from the White House, it kind of depends on the day, you know, if they see him as being a useful ally, we've got military bases there, so they're important to us. But they get disrespected a lot, I think, uh, on the hill, it's remarkable. Republicans didn't have any regrets when he comes to town. People want to sit down with them and listen to him because he really has a, has a read on what's happening in the region. Uh, and, and a very sophisticated view because he's, uh, of the Arab world, but he's sort of Western educated. He speaks, some people would say better English than, than Arabic. He understands us, um, he has, and as you've said, historically, he's had a pretty good sense of what is about to happen and kind of warns this one when we're about to fall into a cliff. Uh, and so when he does come over, people, people sit down with him. I just feel like he's, he feels that in, in, in, in important ways he's not being listened to in his country suffering because of it. When you talked to him in the first book, you wrote the triple agent about El Bellowy, who was the guy who, he was a Jordanian doctor, who ended up becoming an al-Qaeda terrorist and blew up coast, was that the base? Yeah. C.I. It's in, in the Middle East where, you know, a lot of C.I.A. people and some military people were killed. You then set out to write this book to understand what the hell happened here, which is where you came across the king and obviously it, it was embarrassing for him that someone from his country had done this, but, you know, maybe for people out there who haven't heard some of our previous podcasts in the past, can you just explain who you learned El Bellowy was and then I'd love for you to give what the king's perspective was on him becoming who he was. Yeah. So, Bellowy was one of these accidental terrorists, somebody who was, I should say, he was a doctor, he's a Jordanian physician, a pediatrician. So he was Western educated, went to school in Turkey, spoke good English, but also had a great deal of sympathy for what was happening in de-Palestinian's because these are his people too. So he'd watched the kind of fighting in Gaza, this is like a 2008 time period, and become really inflamed by it and is outlet the way this, you know, middle-aged, you know, middle-class doctor with two children was able to invent his rage, was to basically create a podcast channel, sort of amounted to that. He had his own little, you know, blog of commentary, pictures, things he would post about fighting going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was doing it secretly on our fake names, so nobody really knew it was him. And then one day the Jordanians discovered that this really incendiary blog was coming from a doctor living right in their noses. So they arrested him, threatened him with jail, got him to flip, and basically talked him into becoming an informant. And as an informant, he decided that he would actually volunteer for a foreign assignment, he told them that I'm willing to go to Pakistan and become an agent for you, find out what al-Qaeda is doing, find out what the Taliban is doing, so they sent him off to Pakistan to be a kind of this undercover agent as a doctor. He gets there and he actually turns out his sympathy for al-Qaeda is never left. And he becomes a suicide bomber, convinces the CIA that he's got important information about al-Qaeda's leadership, sets up a meeting with CIA officers in a base in Afghanistan, walks into this meeting with Americans with a bomb under his vest and blows himself up and kills seven Americans and a Jordanian intelligence officers there too. So this was a remarkable story, it was the single biggest sort of worst casualty rate, or the highest death toll for the CIA since the 80s, since the bombing of the U.S. embassy and Beirut back in 1983, seven Americans killed at once, it just doesn't happen. And the king's involvement became pretty important because for one, the one Jordanian officer who was killed happened to be his cousin, so it was kind of very personal to me. him. And his government had been involved. His intelligence agency had been involved in setting up this agent as somebody who would help the Americans find out KIDA leaders. So he felt very deeply affected by this whole thing. But, you know, the Jordanians have a good story to tell in this because they've essentially tried to get the Americans to be cautious in who they believe. You know, you've got a source who's giving you good information, but do you really trust them, especially if you haven't met him, which the Americans hadn't. And, you know, there's sort of the red teaming that went on, that should have gone on, that might have identified the fact they had a double agent working, working with them, was ignored. And so it became a big tragedy for the Americans and for the Jordanians too. Obviously, he didn't like the guy and didn't it all appreciate what he did for all the reasons you just laid out. But did you ever get to have a conversation with him that either went on the record or, you know, maybe didn't make the book that you can talk about where he looked at it and wondered about the greater problem of maybe even some people from his country thinking the same way because of other things that happened in the region. Yeah. I think his consistent message, it is consistent warning to the Americans has been that you can't kind of blunder your way into these things like the Iraq invasion, right, and not expecting that there to be blowback. And he actually personally warned President Bush before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that this, this is going to be opening a Pandora's box. You may think you can succeed militarily and defeat the Iraqi army and you probably can, but don't think it's going to be that easy when you're done. And I think his his frustration with American policy is there's it's driven by these, it's the grand ideas and it's sometimes a very naive concept of how we can, you know, change the region and make it more suitable to us. And often we just don't know what we're doing. We don't know what we're getting into. And then guys like him, the king of Jordan and his, his sort of other countries in the region end up holding the bag. They end up paying the cost that sometimes we walk away from things and go on with our our business and their stuck with these problems for decades. Yeah. How did places like that feel about what they see in Syria right now? Because like it obviously previous leadership was very good. I think that's very fair to say, but you have what's his name? Al-Jalani? That's how it used to be called. That is Al-Sharat. Al-Sharat, right. But it used to be called that in his old days as a terrorist. It's like you have a guy that sitting on stage with Patreas going, yeah, I hunted you 10 years ago. Nice to see you. Nice to see the White House. Like what would that, again, am I crazy to think that's a little nuts or a little suspicious? And they might be upset about that over there in other countries? This is a head snapping kind of moment. I still can't take it all in because you're right. I mean, did a lot of research on this guy when he was known as Jalani and when he was a member of Al-Kaeda and he was sent by what we now know as ISIS in this area that kind of created an army, the Jihadi army to fight the regime there and then send a go on beyond that. Was he in this book? He is in the book. I took yeah, yes, in the second part. And it was crazy. And I'm actually to remember the moment in 2012 when he he emerges as the leader of this Al-Kaeda alliance force in Syria. It's a moment when we really knew we had a problem because Syria started as kind of a civil war with protesters fighting the government and the government trying to repress them very quickly. You get all these other outside groups coming in becoming part of the fight. And Jalani was the scariest of all because he was true Al-Kaeda and he was coming into create a Jihadi army and you know thinking of Al-Kaeda having a kind of a failed state in which they can operate and build an army and a mass weapons and then you know proceed to kind of carry out their agenda however they want to do it. That's what Jalani represented. And what was interesting is Baghdaddi the leader of ISIS decided that he wasn't moving fast enough and so they created a separate thing which became ISIS. within Syria. But Jalani was hardcore and to think that now he's a kind of leader of Syria and in someone that we consider a friend and we invite to the White House and you know give him special you know recognition. It just just just kind of boggles the mind. And I have to say he's been everything he's done up to now has been surprising. He's been you know a tolerant leader. He's no Democrat but he's allowed in the sense he's allowed religious diversity. He's just yeah I mean there's there's incidences where you know he's still surrounded by some of his old friends in the old days but at least he says the right thing is him some you know Christians in Aleppo say he's been you know loud and put up Christmas decorations when after he came in and things they haven't been able to do for years. So he at least is very good at playing the game of a seeming moderate. Maybe it's just very pragmatic and and it is realized that if you want to succeed he needs to stop alienating everybody else around him the way that ISIS certainly always did. But you know kind of you know every time I see him speak I can't think of this guy was was this serious terrorist. He was on the most wanted list. He was you know we considered him at the worst the worst and now he's a leader of a country which is playing basketball. Yeah playing basketball. So it's nuts it's it's one of these things that I I didn't think for honestly I didn't think that the Assad regime was was gonna ever be driven out. I just thought I didn't I didn't I didn't it seemed like around 2013 2014 when it just it seemed when the when the Iranians and the Russians both decided they were all in and keeping Assad in power. There just didn't seem to be an exit. There wasn't any way for him to be driven out the Americans and the other neighbors weren't willing to invest enough of in the opposition to kind of drive them out. So it's just going to be this permanent bad situation and a kind of a military stalemate with parts of Syria still run by opposition groups particularly by Jolani's organization which was kind of a kind of related group. But they also had hundreds of like subgroups duking it out like it was Mad Max Fury Road in Syria this whole time which that was the one part that never made sense to me because I was going on for so many years. I'm like what does how much does Assad even get to control? Yeah you know it's like as you collect in taxes from people and from the Kurds and the South I feel like those checks are going to bounce if he gets them at all. Yeah he had had some of the cities in the art land and the coast and big chunks of the rest of the country were not under Syria control and ISIS was heavily you know involved in the eastern part of the country. These al-Qaeda-related groups are in the north backed by Turkey in some cases and like you're right 100 other literally hundreds of subgroups and local militias of some of them with their own kind of funding from Gulf Arab countries. And it was just lawless kind of Mad Max kind of place and the one thing that Jolani/Al-Sharah has done is is mostly consolidated control so it's you know it's a unified government for the most part but it's it seems very very precarious to me. And you say consolidated control? That it's right. He is like I said he's no Democrat he's an autocratic leader but he's kind of like the dictate. But he knows that he looks good in his suit. He knows how to say the right things at a conference shake hands with diplomats. So he's been surprising but yeah I just I'm not completely convinced that he's a different guy than he used to be. I would pay to be a fly on the wall in those conversations once they go in the rooms after doing the cameras where someone says listen up mother fucker. Yeah. Yeah. All right all right you killed 10 of your secretaries. All right fine. Do this shit. Yeah like it's got to be some sort of business agreement there for sure. And they're in I must say in that region they're used to kind of these complexities and kind of working out as businessmen and you don't cross certain lines otherwise you get whacked it's it's very mafia like. That's another argument though. When you look at that country and you know the outcome still kind of up in the air with what it'll be maybe there's a couple okay signs right now but that was a country ravaged by sanctions again that turned into that crazy war zone arguably yeah because the sanctions pushed them there. I mean you were reporting on literally witnessing all the trucks coming across with what was it cranker. Yeah it was yeah it was so it's kept to go on it's kept to go. This is weird kind of slightly I guess a bit like meth it's it's a strange synthetic drug that yeah sanctions dried up sources of income for the for the Syrian regime and so they potentially turned to CAPTAGON to create revenue for themselves and so became basically the world's biggest narco state and it massive amounts of drug manufacturing with shipments of you know millions and millions of these CAPTAGON tablets heading out all over the world. Yeah particularly in the Middle East but it was just that was you can't say it's it's a direct result of of sanctions but it was certainly a side effect. Yes and it's and that's that begs the question, it's like, how much of the whole like sanctioned strategy is just trying to big dick people? You maybe righteously don't like by the way, when you can take a bad situation and technically make it way worse by doing that, how else do you solve it other than like invading the country? Sanctus became kind of like the easy fix for us because it didn't require any real effort. We don't have to send troops anywhere. We can just say, wow, we're going to sanction this country. And and then we create a sanctions regime that stays in effect for decades. It loses its effectiveness. People find ways to get around it. And then it just becomes kind of a shell of a policy kind of a way to make us feel good about things without doing anything good and sometimes doing things kind of bad like creating a drug, a drug economy that didn't exist. Yeah, that's unfortunate, but we'll see how it shakes out. I guess that said, been waiting on this book. It's time to get to it a little bit. Okay, so I had to keep my mouth shut on this. Like I said, for about two and a half years, you told me about this, like I'm working on this thing. And little did I know, you and I recorded it was like that Friday in March, 2024, it was like the 22nd or something like that. And I guess you got on a plane a day or two later, yep, for Paris. And when it visited Carlos, the jackal in prison, is that correct? Right. So March 2025. Okay. Who was Carlos, the jackal? Let's start there for people who don't know, because this is a very important story that, as you said, ties into very modern day issues right now, it's a symbolic time for it to come out. So if we can roll back the clock a little bit, so most of us basically grew up in the 9/11 generation. So we think of terrorism, we think of al-Qaeda and 9/11. There was a whole other generation and I'm old enough that I remember it. But back in the 60s and 70s, there was this terror wave that involved hijackings of planes, hostage taking murder of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympic Games. This is an awful period. And any any air travel involved the risk of a hijacking or worse. And of that generation of terrorists, the one that became internationally famous, was this guy who became known as Carlos, the jackal, who became so the most famous of the Palestinian militants, even though he wasn't Palestinian at all, he was from Venezuela, some crazy kid who moved himself to the Middle East and thought he'd become a, you know, a gorilla freedom fighter ends up becoming a sleeper agent for the Palestinians. And then goes on to do one outrageous terrorist attack after another. And then eludes a capture for 20 years, essentially becomes famous in part because he was so good at getting away with it and just living like a rock star, living in fabulous hotels and meeting amazing women and drinking the best liquor and just had this almost fable like existence. And this is the guy that, you know, was really the international face of terrorism throughout the in the last century, the 70s and 80s, before Ben Laden, before Ben Laden basically changed how we think of terrorism. This was the guy. Ben Laden happened, we kind of forgot about him because he was by that time sitting in a prison in France and living not too badly, if you're, if you go to be in a prison. But French prisons are nice French, they're not so bad. The one that I saw before I visited him, used to, it was actually originally a convent. And it was built in the Middle Ages, you know, kind of, convent turned prison, it's not maybe not too big of a stretch, but he, he was captured in the 90s in a really dramatic fashion that we can talk about it if you want. But he's not a lot to speak very much because he murdered a lot of French people, a lot of his terrorist attacks were in France. And the French don't like him getting the microphone. They don't like him being able to talk about his, you know, glorify his past. And so it took a very long time to get permission to get to talk to him. But once I did, it was just this moment that I'll never forget kind of sitting in this prison and incomes as man. It was when I was a kid, the most famous terrorist in the world. And now he's 75 years old and kind of an old man, but still kind of scary in his own way. How, first of all, when did you first hatch the idea that you wanted to write a book on him? And how soon after that did you think in your head, damn, I wonder if I could talk to him? So it's crazy how these ideas start sometimes. And for me, you know, the jackal was a name I remembered, you know, almost like maybe kids who grew up in the 9/11 generation have the sense of of bin Laden being this boogie man. And then there was an international search from and they found him and killed him and so on. So Carlos, to me, was kind of like that. I remembered some of the stories about him when I was young. And then when I was, you know, a reporter working as a terrorist in the Middle East, I kept running into his trail in weird ways. And you know, as you know, I spent a lot of time in Jordan, but I would talk to Jordan intelligence guys and he said, Oh, yeah, you know, Carlos jackal is here for a while. He kind of smuggled himself into our country. We didn't know he was here. And once we discovered it, we cultivated a relationship with him. We used to talk to one guy who his job was to bring liquor over to Carlos the jackal and his little villa where he stayed in a man and try to figure him out. What is he doing here? What is he, what is he up to? Is he planning a terrorist attack? And they tried to befriend him? Really? Yeah. And send the rest to the Red River Rustam and that becomes kind of a contentious point in the book because the Jordanians should have told their American friends about this their secret guest and that eventually happened, but it didn't happen right away. But in meantime, they actually sent you got this amazing debrief with Carlos because they would sit down with them, get him super drunk, and just get him to talk about the shit that he did. And so the guys that I would talk to, these are just regular sources had the most amazing stories about Carlos the jackal that I'd never heard before. I never knew anything about is this part of his life. They like them. They, the thing is you can't. That's a hard thing to sit like him. But it's he's a very charming guy. And you and the people that would describe to me their meetings with them after they overcame their initial fear. And there's one guy's literally there's this scene in the book where this Jordanian who meets Carlos the first time. He's in an office and he's got his pistol out under the desk because he's so afraid this guy's going to come out and just gun him down. But after they figured out that he was, he was pretty much harmless. He wasn't going to do anything to them. They were just fascinated to hear stories and just kind of. Because it's that he has the wildest stories in the world. He's lived the life of rock star and being a slash terrorist and and internationally wanted fugitive. And to get to spend time with them. It was fascinating for them. Now, this is a guy, though, like you said, who's born in Venezuela. His father's a communist attorney in pre-communist Venezuela is not a communist country at the time. Any names as three kids after each part of was it Lenin's name? Lenin's name. So Lenin's, the founder of the Soviet Union's real name was Vladimir Ilyich, sorry, Ilyich Yuleianov. So he named his three sons, Lenin, Vladimir and then Ilyich. And so we kind of had all that all parts of the name covered. And that just a testament to the guy to the father's devotion to communism. He considered literally considered Lenin the most important figure in all human history. And so his kids names were an homage to his communist hero. And Carlos got the middle name. He got the middle name, even though he was the oldest kid and kind of grew up with that legacy and was influenced by that, but also by kind of revolutionary fervor in Latin America at the time. Because this was 60s, so time of, you know, there's communist uprisings throughout Latin America. There are communist, you know, militants in the jungle. This very famous character, the time named Shay Guevara, who was like a swashbuckling, you know, Latin American revolutionary. And you can see movies about him. You see his face on on on T-shirts. He was very photogenic, good looking guy. And he was Carlos's real hero. He wanted to be this, you know, adventurer, revolutionary, you know, larger than life character, beautiful women surrounding him. That was his goal in life was to become that guy. Young Carlos, though, who's looking up to Shay Guevara, was it really because of the things Shay Guevara emoted that you just laid out in a lifestyle he had, or did he actually look into, say, the policies that he backed and the politics that he had. Yeah. And vibe with that. So Carlos would always say the right things like I'm for the common man. I'm a Marxist revolutionary reality was Carlos didn't really give a crap about any of that. Carlos wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be a Shay Guevara. He wanted to have his picture on on T-shirts. If you'd been living today, you'd have an Instagram account. You'd be all over TikTok. He'd be promoting himself in his own brand. Back then you couldn't do that, but he just wanted to build an image. And ended up getting a sexy nickname that he didn't plan on having. But once he was called Carlos, the jackal, then suddenly there's a whole, you know, mystique that comes with that. Oh, yeah. And you can't get laid with that name. Yeah, you can't, well, if you can't get laid as Eliatch, because that's just kind of a strange name. But if you're Carlos, the jackal, man, yeah, you could, you could have films made about him. And you actually, of course, that went on to happen. The born identity series that was initially a novel series by Robert Lundheim. He based his bad guy, his bad character was, was Carlos the Jackal created the entire persona of this villain in all three of his novels based on Carlos. Yeah, he had a massive charisma. Absolutely. And you could still see it. I must say, even as an old man, he kind of walks in a room and you can see there's some, there's a charm, but there's kind of a presence. And God knows I didn't admire him and he said lots of things, you know, in our meeting that reinforce the fact that he is essentially a criminal narcissist. He has that kind of brain, doesn't regret any of the terrible things that he did. It feels like he's a hero in his own mind, but he is, he is a charming bad guy. And that's, you know, even the Jordanians who are trying to debrief him in the, in the 90s, they could certainly see that, that he's, you know, as though as one guy who became a senior official in the Jordanian intelligence agency said, you can't help but like, you know, I just liked him and, um, and was almost sorry to see him go. So you're talking with your guys and they're whispering about this and telling you the stories in the 2010s while you're working on other things. And then you end up finishing Red Line, the book on, on Syria and was it pretty much right after that where you're like, I gotta go look at this again. Yeah. There was another reason too. What you'll see in all my books is I have us, kind of a writing style that's, it's narrative nonfiction. Oh, brilliant. And it's usually a very character driven. So it, the best book for me is one that tells a larger story, but so there's a central character that propels the narrative. And the story I wanted to tell is, is another origin story. Black flag is kind of an origin story of ISIS and where it came from. The Jackal story allows me to tell, sort of explain how we got international terrorism, how that arose in the Middle East in the 60s and 70s and who were the important characters and why it was able to flourish and eventually why it failed because these groups always overreach their violence, always turns people off and they end up kind of becoming the reason for their own demise. But Carlos, luckily for me is in all the right places at all the right times and he allows me to kind of string together a, you know, a bigger story about this important development in our, in our modern history with a singular figure in the, in the middle of it who was, you can't take your eyes off of it because he's just always doing something outrageous. This, this is also a guy though that is still living when you're writing about him and obviously we're going to talk about you going to talk with him and everything, but is there a difference in the approach for you from like a storytelling and writing perspective when you are dealing with someone who's still alive, especially when you know you may be having a conversation? That's really appealing because there are parts of the Carlos story that had remained a mystery for a long time and because people had kind of forgotten about him after 9/11, there's a lot of new material that had come out of, you know, archival material from the East Europe, for example, used to be kind of a pet, the communist government of Eastern Europe in the 90s and 80s, kept him almost like their, their little, their little dirty secret because we've got Carlos to jackal living with us and we, we could stop if we wanted to, but we don't. We'd let him go out and bomb things in France and just live a crazy life in our own countries. And a lot of the, so the, the files from that time only started coming out in the late 90s and in the early 2000s, you know, some of his former henchmen and closest associates are still around so they can be debriefed. But Carlos himself obviously knows a lot and I felt there was just a, finally a critical mass of material to kind of take a new look at the life of this guy who was once on, you know, top of mind, people, you know, he was a household name and to reconstruct, you know, how he came to be, how Carlos the jackal came to exist in the light of all this new contextual material just seemed very attractive. And I just felt that people used to care a lot about Carlos and if they reread his story in, in the, in the context of how we got to where we are with terrorism and these other national threats, it'd be worth a story worth telling. And it was a lot of fun to report. I must say it was just endlessly fascinating. How did you get to talk to him? So the hard part that, well, unless you'd start with the easy part, the easy part was getting Carlos to say yes. And it was a matter of, like, contact his lawyer, explained who I am, talked about my books and I said, I'd love to meet your guy. And, and Carlos as a lawyer, Carlos's lawyer passed along the message. Carlos writes back, said, sure, Washington post guy, I'll meet with you. He does not publicity shi. He's the opposite. He likes, he likes attention. He loves the idea of getting an interview. But the problem as I mentioned was the French did not want to let me talk to him. They don't want to let anybody talk to him. I accept under very restrictive conditions. So I had degree, there's no recording equipment. There's no camera taken into prison. I only had a pencil on a notebook, pencil on a notebook. That's it. All really old screaming and writing things down as fast as I like transcribing. And then after it's over, going back to my hotel, just trying to do on a Julian Dory and trying to quickly remember everything that happened and every nuance and every wrinkle in his brow, you know, tried to kind of recreate every bit of that. But even with that, I mean, one of the restrictions I had to agree to was this was not going to result in a Q&A interview because they didn't the French did not want me to have this verbatim, you know, conversation with Carlos that would allow Carlos to reinterpret history. So it had to be, you know, I was able to use little snippets, but I couldn't quote him extensively. But that's not even work. That seems really subjective to, you know, yeah. And it's frustrating for sure. But on the other hand, my whole purpose in meeting him was I had some things I wanted to ask. But even with those things, I didn't think I would trust anything Carlos said. He's going to exaggerate. He's not going to tell me the truth. So it was more to kind of get, get him to kind of fill in to color a little bit of the blank spaces that I had it in my own narrative of what happened, but also just to kind of get a measure of the man. And that was very important mentally and getting my head around the project and writing about him in his life is to see him as a 75-year-old man. And then you'll see in the book, I mentioned kind of briefly this encounter that I had with him in the prologue. And then at the end of the book, it's, you know, the bad days are over. He's been in prison for a long time. And here I am face to face with the man for the first time. And so there's, it's, you know, people have read this part of the book, say it's kind of a very profound moment where after you've read the story of his life, you're sitting there looking at the guy eyeball to eyeball. I like how you did that. Yeah. So it was a great way to end up, you know, after telling a story to kind of like, what did him, what did it amount to? How did it matter? And you get a sense of that when you sit down and look at the guy face to face. Well, I'm really curious about this process, though, to even get there with the French. So it's easy on his and he's like, fuck it, I'll do it. But had he really talked to anyone except that one French journalist? This one French journalist had most of the interviews that have existed over the past few years, decades, really, have been secretive. So they weren't, nobody got permission to talk to them. But managed to find ways to do it. One case was a French journalist who basically kind of came at him as just, while I'm a member of the public that wants to meet, you know, I've got my own personal reasons for wanting to meet him. And because she was a, you know, attractive woman, Carlos is a obsessive womanizer. So you just, you know, put a pretty face in front of them, Mary's very happy to talk to you. And she managed to kind of have many, many visits with them. This was like back in the 2010s. That went past French. Yeah. Yeah. So she just showed up like she was, like, she was like just like a fan or a member of his, you know, support group or something. But she, she didn't do it as a journalist, but she ended up writing a book based in French based on her experiences with him. What was her name? Her name was Sophie Bonnet Bonet. Sophie Bonnet. B-O-N. You look Sophie. Yeah. So she's a documentary filmmaker/book writer. I've talked to her. She's a very interesting lady. This is, she's older now. But she did it, you know, later in her career. Okay. But then later on, in fact, I benefited from this one, one interview that happened. There's an Israeli journalist who really wanted to talk to Carlos. And he wasn't allowed to. So he managed to talk of one of Carlos' attorneys. He had a couple in this one. He married, actually. We married this, this attorney had a kind of a prison ceremony and- Oh, Carlos married this attorney? Yes. As you still married through or now? She died about a year ago, but they were married for a long time. But he was able to, this journalist was able to talk the attorney into basically bringing, you know, she had a cell phone she was allowed to bring into the prison meetings with Carlos. She'd bring her phone in. She'd ring this journalist up and basically relay questions like, Carlos, what do you think of this or that? And he would reply into the phone and the phone call was being recorded on the other end. So this Israeli journalist very kind of trickily got a pretty long interview out of him. They're not like that at all. No, not at all. So I wanted to go through the front door, but this journalist, this Israeli journalist ended up doing a documentary film based on this guy's name. What's the guy's name? Yaron Y.A. R.O.N. Niskey and I.S.K.I. And his documentary, actually, it was released on Fox nation earlier this summer. It was Carlos and his own world. But it wasn't Carlos you know face-to-face. It was essentially a kind of a bootleg interview with a guy But I ended up Making friends with the journals we we found out about each other's work And so we collaborated I was on his his documentary of featured in a number of times and he shared all his transcript So all the conversations so I had Things that I could relate because of my conversation with with Carlos But also had the benefit of many hours I guess maybe ten more than ten hours of telephone conversations that he had And what that all amounts to is You see a lot of things through Carlos's lens and you realize about half or more is just crap But there are parts that oh he actually told the truth about this So it's kind of a fact check on there. Yeah, you can say it's certain things you could or certain things that He wouldn't have a reason to lie about because they're not flattering for him And I ended up because of those interviews including Sophie's I had a pretty remarkable book and my own encounter and my own research and And talking to CIA people and others who are involved in capturing capturing him That's a ton of material and then it was just a matter of what What makes the best Story what of those this is the thing about narrative nonfiction is you got You end up with a lot of stuff But then you then almost like a filmmaker what is the most interesting story I could tell based on the facts that I know right and then you construct The story out of it's all real facts, but then you you have to kind of be the painter with a paintbrush and that's right paint the picture This process to get to talk to him now where they came up with all of these stipulations who are you talking to to do that? Like and are you talking with French intelligence started started actually with the prison ministry. So there is a You know right to the people who run this one prison Which I know it's called the posse. It's it's it's the Massonne central the posse, but it's a little town outside Paris about 20 miles to the west of Paris and Another fascinating thing about the prison. It had this past as a convent but after when the Nazis took over the country It became like a Gestapo headquarters So they they killed and tortured members of the French freedom movement there So it had this really crazy history, but that's what happened with the ghost yeah in there Yeah, so I wrote to them and they said well you need to send us all this information and all these forms you need to complete I did that and I waited and waited what year this is 20 first year was 2024 when I just early 2024 when I first reached out and Then there'd be like radio silence for months and I would send reminders Well, are you gonna let me see him or not and they would just be no reply So I started kind of working through other you know angles Trying the French embassy in Washington can they help me and they were somewhat sympathetic my second book black flags came out in French and they had Actually was well received in France. I did a lot of interviews so I'm I'm somewhat known there and they They they were helpful But then it was like then there's just layers and layers of bureaucracy. There's the French Justice Ministry which ultimately had to sign off It it just took pressure on so many pressure points until finally I got a yes And once I got the yes, I went right away to France because I was so afraid they're gonna change their mind and even to the moment I walked into that prison to have the interview. I was so afraid that somebody was gonna back out Carlos is gonna be sick Or was gonna change his mind the French are gonna decide they don't want don't mean to talk to them after all So part of the suspense was am I actually gonna get to have this you're in the story and that that's what's cool. It's like You've written all these stories where you're reporting on it after the fact and going and visiting the places and Living with the ghosts and trying to understand what happened there, which is what you do here But then the culmination of it is you get to go directly to the source and it's like you are now the first person walking into your own book Yeah, and it's the first time I've done that because I've always had this distance in my other books I'm kind of writing and from a dispassion of you know third person voice This is the first time I said in a book I I was there I saw him I was sitting there in Carlos walks in and so describing that moment was Becomes personal because I'm part of the story was it just one day with him in there. Yeah, I was hoping hours Did you have I got like an hour and a half and that's all they would give me so it was very compressed and it was frustrating because Carlos Even though he's looks robust You can see his starting to fade Yeah, he's good 76 now and he's As he would lose a thread and the conversation he would repeat himself and The other problem I mentioned he has a obsessive interest in women. There was a woman in the room and she happened to be a French minister Justice ministry official They were kind of as a minder to make sure I didn't do anything break any of my my promises He she was 27 as I recall He could not take his eyes off of her and I would be talking to him. I'd ask him a question. He would ignore me He's kind of facing the woman and saying things like are you a real blonde? Still we have that dog in just decordable ship, but you know that the the French biographer the woman I mentioned Sophie Bonnet said in the her book She described it as almost that he is constantly on the hunt that any female within his view his Site in his range of vision was a potential target and no matter how old how young just whatever the circumstances He's just obsessed and he has to figure out does he have a chance with her? Is it somebody that's that's gonna like him? And and you can see him even as an old man working it and trying to kind of impress this this young woman and Very very annoyed by the fact that I was also in the room and just getting an obstacle Potentially getting to meet this woman. So it was it was wild to see them see him kind of operate that way That's crazy. You only got an hour and a half. I mean that's an hour and a half more than pretty much anyone's ever gotten it But my publisher or editor of who's who work with me through the publisher When we were talking about this and about possibility the interview. He kept saying If you can get Carlos to grunt at you then that's that's a victory We just we just it just is important to have some Personal connection with them and I got a lot more than that It was not what I would hope to get. I hope to be able to maybe some medium several times over many hours and record a conversation so it was much less than that, but it was gratifying to succeed and at least making the meeting happen Looking at his life like just estimating it. I'd need four full podcasts. Oh, yeah, yeah Yeah, I would need four three hour podcasts with the moon need to be about 12 hours to really yeah get down and dirty on the details from a storytelling step-by-step Psychological profile like Culmination of it all and then you need a whole other episode at the end to say well and after my research This was crap. This was right that he did he made this up. This didn't really happen Because that's the way it is with Carlos. He's he's He's not a reliable witness to his own Life events right and you're plugging in playing like you said as far as like things you already know what information He can corroborate or where you know he's going to lie about some because you already have the other source and asking about his How he's captured for example that becomes in Carlos's mind All about this acts of betrayal Yeah, who one of the memorable lines that I was able to use was His big regret in his life as he didn't kill more people and he should have killed those bastards who got him at the end And just was too slow on the draw. Yeah, one of those guys like Another I used a line from the wire earlier, but another famous line where he's like the gaming in me no more Feels like this is dude the game is going to be in him till the day he drops. Yeah, which I must say I'm hearing recently that he's in further decline that is he's it's health is is Waning and so it could be that by the time as you're still talking about the book he might may not have him with us anymore, which is A real possibility just because he's of that age. He's 76. Now you knew you were going to maybe have like 90ish minutes or something like that Yeah, so obviously very different approach to what I do here. We're just talking all day and we see where it goes I had yet to be very prepared, right? I had annotated notes. I had all these things. I wanted to try out on them And like your conversations it actually it becomes once you start with them Sometimes the notes just get disregarded because he goes down a trail and then you think well Okay, well asking about this or I could tell with this line of questioning is not going to be fruitful He's not going to have anything to say or also shut down This was also the frustration. I would start to talk about an incident that you know, I know a lot about And he would just say I don't remember and that would be it and that I just no point in asking anything else because he would just kind of climb up he Doesn't like to admit to things that he hasn't Been convicted of and there are certain things like you'll if you read the book you'll see that he one of his big Attacks in his historical career was bombing radio for Europe and Munich in 1981 and he set up this elaborate bombing It doesn't go off quite like he intended, but he succeeded in bombing this US Built US run international broadcaster and creating a lot of damage But he has never acknowledged having anything to do with it. He denies it, you know, fugitively because he's never been convicted of it Uh, and he doesn't want to have the you know beyond record is saying that he attacked this American facility because it could have consequences I have all kinds of evidence that it was him that he did it and uh, but he just wasn't going to talk about it in that interview A lot if if If you talk to, like, or listen to a lot of great actors talk about roles where they play a villain or other, you're fellow great authors where they talk about writing about people who were objectively evil, many of them will often go through how the approach when they're going through it is to not judge the person kind of suspend that so that in the actor's case they can actually feel and be in their bones and let out that performance and in the author's case they can actually do the same thing to be able to write about it factually, and then they'll say afterwards then they can kind of judge it. Yeah. Yeah. What was your approach with him from that perspective? I kind of the same dopey approach that I take to most my interviews, which is I just want to know. I'm not going to -- I certainly can judge you, Carlos, because you've been a terrible human being, but I'm walking into this meeting as a very curious, interested person who just wants to know what happened. I want to give you the chance to tell me your story. I find that people really respond to that, even if they may be resistant in most cases to speaking to the press or to stalk into an author, but if you come at it as you're not prejudging them and that it's not about your ego because I feel like that should not be in the way of a conversation that should be about trying to get information and just say, "I am personally, honestly, curious to know what happened here." What really happened in 1975, Carlos, when you as a 26-year-old man walked into the headquarters of OPEC, the International Oil Cartel, and proceeded to take the whole thing hostage. What were you thinking about? And who put you up to it? And I could get him to ramble on about that because he's kind of proud of it. That's the one thing he's probably most known for, one of the most audacious terrorist attacks I've ever heard about. That's what he was wearing, right? That's what he was wearing. That's that day. He was wearing a funky beret because that was, again, like his hero, Che Guevara wore a black beret. That was his uniform. It looked like Pedro Pascar right there. He does a little bit. And in this one, he's playing cosplay trying to be Che Guevara and walking into a big office building in downtown Vienna, Austria, in 1975 with five henchmen with guns and took the place hostage. And ran off with the dozens of hostages out to the North African desert and ransomed them for millions of dollars. So crazy story. We'll come back to that. When you first walk in there and you're like, oh shit, it's happening. Yeah. First of all, were you meeting with them in like a holding room or something like that? Yeah. So you think of a visitor's room in prison and it wasn't like that because you imagine you've seen those enough films where you know, kind of, there's all these chairs and maybe police people congregate. It was, if viewers have a sense the size of this studio, it was smaller than this, but about, by about half. It's about 14 and a half by 18. So yeah, maybe that, the enough room for a table and four chairs around it, I was in one chair. Carlos gets ushered in and he sits right next to me. So we're like two feet away. And, um, and the guy, you know, it's not scary. Because it's, uh, you know, under very controlled conditions and he's been a prisoner. He's an old man for a long time. But to kind of the moment of kind of like this is, this is my research subject. And it's like you've been trying to discover some new species. And suddenly this, this animal is, is that you've been spending a, you know, years studying is, is right there front of Jurassic Park. Yeah. You're looking at this, uh, you know, T-Rex or whatever it is, a velociraptor and, and they can, man, I can't believe I am two feet away from this guy that I've been obsessively researching for the last couple of years. And here he is. So it's pretty wild. How do you walk in? Like, what was the vibe? Walking in. How is English too? So his English is great. And that's one of the things he's, he's a smart guy and he speaks five languages at least. And, um, including Russia, because he was lived in Russia as a kid, of course, Spanish, French, Arabic. And, um, so you hear him, I'm, I'm there for us. So I'm kind of camped out in this little room, just kind of waiting for him to show up. And you can hear him coming down the hall because there's a commotion. And everybody in prison knows Carlos, the jackal, and they call him Carlos. And so you hear the French, the guards saying, Oh, Monsieur Carlos, Bonjour. How are you? And, and then he kind of knows them. So he's ragging him and I describe this scene where he's kind of shadow boxing with one of them. Kind of, you know, pretend like he's beating the crap out of him. So he's very playful in that way with him. They, they don't treat him like he's some, you know, arch murder, but just like he's, some famous guy who happens to live in the same place where they work. So, um, then he kind of walks in and you think he's going to walk in and we're like in a prison jumpsuit. But no, I don't know if it's because he's, this is how he dresses to meet visitors or if it's how he dresses every day. But he's so mad. He's got like nice pants on. It has a nice brown leather bomber, this is, you know, late winter. So it's kind of cold. In prison? Yeah. And he's got like a little cat leather cap on like a look at what it's thrown me off. It, it looks like you, you might, you might have met him at Target or something, so it doesn't feel like you're in prison at all. And he's, he's a little bit, you know, scruffy now as he apologizes actually for not shaving. You hadn't shaved that for a couple of days, he had a little bit of stubble, um, takes off his hat, sits down, kind of gives me a very bemused smile. And then almost like, um, what's their subject today? What do you want to talk about? Who are you again? And, and I'm saying, gee, Mr. Carlos, you know, I'm not like a school boy, but I'm, I'm trying real hard not to be kind of overwhelmed by the moment. And, and then I just explain again who I am. I'm a journalist with Washington Post and I'm an author and I'm working on this book and I want to understand the kind of early history of these terrorist movements and you were right at the middle of all that and I just would appreciate having some of your memories. And then I just went through my list and, and the areas where he was okay with talking, that became a longer conversation. And then others just kind of got Xed off my question list is, okay, that's, that's not going to be very productive, but that's just kind of how it went. So deep is a script writer, okay, and a writer and a writer as well, I'm seeing the script here, dude. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a lot of work running into the prison, oh my god, it's happening, it's raining a little bit outside. Yeah, covering himself. Yeah. He gets in there. Bunch on, and they walk through. It's like all tense. He sits down. He's waiting. And then we just see like a dude coming through in a bomber jacket. We don't see his face yet, but he's like, yeah, shadow boxing with the prisoners along the side and you're looking. He's not revealed. And he walks in. Saunters in with a little gate sits down. You're staring at him like shaken. Yeah. And then he goes. And then the movie goes to Venezuela, just born, something like that. That's a great scene. Yeah. Okay. And then it ends. Can we copyright that? Yeah. Yeah. No, I might need to write this now. I see the movie getting adapted. Dibbs. Dibbs on that, dude. If we got that. That's wild, though. Like I'm getting chills thinking about like him walking in and just kind of. The other interesting moment in the beginning was him figuring out what language you were going to use. Said, can we can we speak in English? Even though he's been in a French prison for 30 years, English is his most comfortable language on the Spanish. And so there was kind of all good we can talk in English. And that was kind of relief to me too, because I wasn't sure. Did you speak French? No. I failed. Like 15 words. So it wasn't going to be much of conversation if we had to speak in French. And I had been so afraid. I knew that historically he spoke pretty good English because these on the record, many of his crimes, announcing himself in English and having conversations in English and writing letters. I just he'd been in jail in France for so long, does he still speak it? I just didn't know. And so it was a relief to me when he said, oh great, it was talking English, that'll be better for me. And so, okay Carlos, what will we talk about? And it was more kind of his curiosity, what did I want to know? And him being not reticent, but almost kind of like, oh, yeah. So do you want to talk about that? I can I can fill you in on Vienna in 1975. Let's chat with that. And so that's kind of how it evolved. And did you start with his childhood? I think, no, so I talked with, because this very key moment for me is how he parachuted into the Middle East as a young man and why and what were the circumstances. So I asked him, and because that was about, that was the heart of this effort to try to reconstruct this period of history of, you know, of sort of early terrorism, why did you go there? And what, you know, what were the circumstances, what did you hope to achieve? So I went right to this really pivotal moment early in his life when he became, made the step from being what had been college students in the Soviet Union got kicked out of school as it turns out. You got kicked out? Got a girl pregnant, had all these problems. Yeah, I got kicked out of school because you've such a, a partier, there's this great scene where he actually, you know, the sort of the Soviet minders come into the university dorm to kind of, because there's been a party and they're trying to figure out what went on. They go into Carlos's room, there's liquor bottles all over the place. And then this drunk prostitute stumbles out of a closet. And so Carlos has added, he's got money because his dad had money and he's, he has foreign cars. Communist had money. Yeah, he did, which is interesting because this communist who was actually very rich. But funny how that happens. So prostitute, someone's out of the closet and the Soviet authority is kind of, what are you doing here? Her reply is, I feel sympathy for the oppressed. So she was… trying to relieve their repression or something like that with whatever favors. But so that was his life and because he was such a wash out and he got kicked out of school and nowhere else to go. So he moved himself to the Middle East partly because he was just out of options. He didn't want to get in trouble with his family and he wanted to become a guerrilla fighter. So he went to the Middle East and became one. And so I wanted to try to get him to recreate that that feeling and when why did it back in that that's actually a really good spot to spawn in. Yeah, start in and then you kind of if the rest of his career proceeds from there. All right, real quick. I just got to go back and we'll come back and pick it up. Gotcha. All right, I could do the same. All right, we're back. We were actually just starting to talk off camera. I want to make sure we got on camera having this discussion because we were going back and forth about like the creative process and all that. And as a two-time Pulitzer winner, I always, you know, I think when I have a guy like you in here, I love to know what that looks like. But the thing I was just going to tell you about that said to save it for camera was whenever you're going to do anything, whether it's music or writing or, you know, drawing whatever it might be creatively. I always love the Ed Sheeran idea of it where he talks about the faucet. So he shows on one side, you picture a faucet that the water coming out is all brown and dirty and everything. And then on the other side, you see a faucet and the water coming out is crystal clear. And he always talks about how in order to be creative and make great shit, every session you do in some way, some longer than others has to start with the dirty faucet just to get it out and start working it out. And then you work your way, the clean faucet and create great stuff. Do you agree with that? It is such an important lesson to learn because you think you're going to sit down at a keyboard and just write some opus that and the thing is no matter what your talent is, it's all that muddy crap comes out first. It's not refined. And you kind of sometimes just have to get it out, kind of almost like free right. And then once you've once you're looking at that at some words on a page, then you can begin to kind of impose some order on it and do that filtering and purifying. And also the hard part from me is because writing is such a personal thing is to get other people to kind of weigh in, to get very smart editors to kind of look at what you've done and say, you know what? As a outside observer, I have to say this doesn't work or you should do more of this. And yeah, there's a lot of filtering before you come up with a product that looks like it's where you want it to be. Now, when you were writing stories for many years that are news stories, you generally, correctly, if I'm wrong, always have some sort of word number idea on it going into it. Yeah, right? Okay. And then you're also writing things pretty often. So you're going through stories, you're getting sources and it starts to become the kind of thing where you have your voice, you have your style, but I'd imagine you get a good feel for what you got to do to put out the similar. Here's what's going on. Everyone else, make your judgment. Yeah. Whereas when you're writing your books, you're sitting with research for months and years at a time, you're organizing your thoughts on based on all these different sources you're talking to and then trying to bring it back as you brilliantly as you brilliantly do to like a narrative driven story. What's your order there? Like how are you getting all the sources first or are you already outlining what you want before you talk to anyone? How do you go about? Yeah. So the other number, there's the number that word count you'd mentioned in your head, the other number that is factors in as a journalist, but also as a nonfiction writer is the is deadline. And if you're a journalist working for a daily newspaper or a wire service, as I've done, you have to be creative in a very constricted part of the amount of time. You have to kind of write the story. Sometimes you go walk in the newsroom in the morning. You don't realize it by the end of the day, you have to produce 1500 words or 2000 words on this subject that you may not know very much about. So you kind of do all this research in reporting. And then you have to kind of write quickly, which is not easy to do, especially for I struggle with that. And with this is same, if I didn't have a calendar deadline with an editor saying, we need this manuscript delivered by this date, I would probably research forever. There'd be no because it's often there's like an infinite infinite amount of information you could acquire, but you're forced at some point to shut off the research spicket and just start writing. And so for me, I usually just have just allow myself to just run free with the research in the beginning and just try to learn as much as I can. How many books are available on this subject and can I absorb them all? How many articles have been written? You know, what are the interviews? What are the original sources? Just just absorb all this data. And then at a certain point, you start to think, what is this story going to look like? And how am I going to structure it? And for me, that process is massive white walls. I have a basement that's just filled with just blank white walls. Whiteboard, whiteboard, whiteboard, whiteboard. Let's go. You can, there are many ways you can do it. You can have whiteboard paint, which doesn't work for a while as I've discovered. You can buy big rolls of it and just wallpaper your place with just rolls. Your wife let you do this. Only in the basement, which doesn't allow me to base, doesn't essentially walk into my space, because it's so messy and so cluttered, it'll just kind of make your head explode. Where are feet we work on? It's basically the size of my house, but you know what else it is. It's also my workout area. And I find that if I'm struggling with how to structure a story or how to start a story, I'll work out. And then suddenly as I'm doing something physical, it comes to me. And then I'll start writing it down on these ridiculous looking whiteboards where it's sometimes it's drawn out, like how the story starts here, the scene, or the kind of the moment where Carlos is walking into my guest room in the prison, and then how do I structure from there? And what's that almost novel like? What's the climatic moment? When does, you know, where's the point where there's the ultimate suspense? And you kind of create those moments because you want it to be, you want the reader to get to an end of the chapter and they just can't wait to see what happens next. But that has to kind of be planned out, like you have to kind of put those dots on a matrix and figure out. This is this is the rising action. This is kind of the resolution. This is kind of the cliffhanger moment. This is how I'm going to weave in this very complicated dramatic thread. And to me it all becomes written, scrolled out on big boards of lots of posted notes stuck here in there. And it looks like the product of a disease mind when you're kind of-- Charlie, you're always sunny. That's it. And I don't think unnecessarily a visual thinker in that way, but I found that just as a process of creating something like that, I can't create a book without that kind of this gathering information, let it kind of ferment a little bit and then start to kind of visually structure it and create on a whiteboard what those scenes are going to be and how they're all going to string together. But that's all it sounds like correct me from wrong. That's coming together while you're also still in the midst of flying to see people and meet with people and talk with sources on the phone and stuff like that. Because one thing that you discover is when you start to try to write, you realize how much you don't know, you've gathered a lot of information, but like, I'm writing the scene, but I don't really know the details that well. We're also going to get it. So it turns out that you're still reporting up to the moment you turn in your manuscript because there's things holes that you didn't realize you needed to fill in until you're that far along. And then it's, gosh, I got to find somebody who knows this fact and how am I going to find this person? Who could it possibly be? And there's a lot of kind of desperation reporting at the end. Because you do have that tick, tick, tick of a deadline that's always in the back of your mind that I got to turn this thing in. And so there's never enough time to kind of do it as well as you think you should be doing it. But it's still a different kind. Again, you're not the only the daily kind of deadline or the weekly deadline with writing the story. You know that you have a year or two to do something like this and you can get all enthralled in it. And also we forgot to say this, but I know in the past, when you've gone to write a book, they have, they've let you take some time away to go do that full time as opposed to like writing your stories all the time for the Washington Post. But now over the past year and a half, you've stepped back from being full time national security reporter for the first time. And now you're doing you're more like part time with them. Yes, all right. I've got a, I'm a contributing writer basically for them. But I don't have the staff position anymore as by my own choice. They took a, took a buyout. So I was able to get, I did it so I could get some space. That's where I can do some creative work. Because I feel like because I've been able to do this successfully, it is much more fulfilling to be in control of a story from start to finish and to have something when you're all done that, you know, this is not, you know, disposable daily journalism. This is something that that hopefully stands. And it's, it's, it's, it's more of an achievement. It feels like it's something that has kind of legacy value in a way. Yeah. Real quick. Can you just take the phone off the cord right there? I just don't want to interfere with the audio. We're all good. Yeah. It's, it's like very finicky. Like sometimes our cords down here, I'll step on in and I'll change that. Oh, wow. Okay. They're sensitive. I still don't understand some of that stuff with audio. It's crazy. But what is, so when you write though, again, it's a different emotion when you're sitting down writing a book and writing chapters that you're living with them when you're writing a story at the desk at the Washington Post. But when you sit down and you're starting to write the book, I imagine you're doing it in your basement where all these boards are. But do you have like a set process that you hear from so many writers where it's like I write from 8 to 12 a.m. or from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. I don't have any internet access. I'm sitting in the same place or are you more free willing? It has to be structured and disciplined and I'm not naturally very good at that. I'm a real procrastinator and that's the problem with a two-year deadline because you feel like, "Oh, I've got plenty of time." And I could take off and I can paint the living room or do something else and you can find a million ways to fill your time. So I have to say, "All right, every day this week I'm going to block out this amount of time in the morning. I'm not going to take any calls and to shut off all the alerts on my phone. I have to do that." And the other thing that is my own little personal trick is it's a physical hourglass, like an egg timer kind of thing. I've got a 30-minute hourglass and it's just a cheap plastic one filled with blue sand and I'll put it on my desk and go, boom, turn it upside down. That starts 30 minutes. I'm not going to look up until the last grade of sand is gone and that is like free right time. I'm going to do this and nothing else. Or if it's a research day and I have to find out the certain fact, I'll time myself and if I force myself to just not do anything else for 30 minutes, that doesn't seem like a lot of time. Oh no. But if it's focused time, you can write a start of a chapter in 30 minutes. You can at least have a, you're trying to do some research. You can at least have in your hands in 30 minutes a pretty good estimation of all the sources that you need to write this particular chapter. You can do a lot in 30 minutes if it's absolutely focused time and the way for me to physically do it is to have an hourglass in front of me. I also have an hourglass app. So if I don't have, if I'm somewhere else, I'm at the library at a coffee shop, I actually have an hourglass app that all it is is a picture of an hourglass with sand going to it. And you can set the time on it and I'll put the phone at an angle where I can see it. And it'll, until that little chime goes off that the hourglass is done with that amount of time, I'm not allowed to do anything, but this one task that I have for me. So that's my own little cheat. But I love that. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. I have a little, it's over there somewhere. I have a little round timer thing. Okay. Just kind of turn and I'll put it, I have to use it more than I do, but I'll do that for like 30 or 60 minute intervals when it's really shit that I don't want to be doing. And like try to time myself to get it done or even creatively restrict something. Yeah. Like, I make for every episode we ever do on the main channel, we're doing three a week. I make all the thumbnails. We end up testing three of them. There's usually 15 to 25 that people don't see. But like in that process, each of those mornings, I put out episodes usually like Tuesday's Friday, Saturday or Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, you know, I'll try to like, especially with a bigger episode that I know people are really looking for and want. I'll try to restrict myself to like an hour to come up with all the ideas. So that even if I end up working past it, I get so much done in that hour that the best ideas have somehow been creatively fleshed out because your mind is working against that. This needs to be done by 1030 instead of actually 12. Yeah. I don't know. It forces you to do something good. I find. I feel like these days, to get anything done, you need something like that because the distractions with these phones, if something's unpleasant, if it's even slightly, you know, like writing an opening sentence to a chapter is just really a hard thing to do. And if you're struggling with it, it's uncomfortable, then also I think, ooh, what's, you know, what's my friend Julian doing or what's his message you just sent me or what's going on in Iran and the news today? There's a million things that your mind wants to kind of shut off and turn to. And if you, if you allow yourself to wonder like that, you're never going to get that for Simmons written. So I, for me, at least I need to have a physical reminder that right now I'm going to focus and I'm not going to do anything else until this, until that sand finishes leaving the hourglass. What goes into writing a brilliant opening sentence because you described your writing style earlier and I totally agree like you, your nonfiction books read like beautiful fictional thrillers, like they're, you're engrossed in the story. You feel like you're there. You're not just reporting on facts. There's a time and place for them. Some people do a great job with that, but your style is like, I mean, I can see the movie playing out before my eyes. I, I love, I'm drawn to storytelling. And, and for me, it becomes a, I figured out the most appealing way to tell, to create a scene, to get people in the moment. It's very conscious with me, I want, I want people to be there at that moment with me. And so in order to create that scene, I kind of have to be there myself. And I spend a lot of time like in my little workout area or sometimes I'll take a walk and I'll just to kind of, I'll, I'll be in that scene myself. And then I have to figure out how do I, how do I bring people along with me? What's that? What's that image that I want them to see that I see? And and sometimes the first time you try, it doesn't work. So you just rewrite it and rewrite it until you come up the way it does. But that's always the scene creation is, is it, and I'm sorry, I'm jumping around here with this, but it's great. With nonfiction, is it, is it different exercise? Because if fiction, you're just kind of imagining this. You're creating something in your head. And with nonfiction, you're putting yourself in a historical moment. You're trying to make yourself see what it was like to be Carlos the Jackal all on this day where he did this certain thing. And and how am I going to kind of paint that picture for people who are going to read the book? And it's, it's really, it's, it's a fun exercise for me. And when it comes across, when it succeeds, it's just, it's thrilling to myself. I just, wow, that, that really worked. You know it. Right. Take a long time to get there, but once I feel like I've nailed it. It's exhilarating. I've created this scene that had in my head now it's on paper and it kind of works. So the first chapter after the prologue of Black Flags, I remember this, this is the opening paragraph you wrote and this is like, you want to talk about putting yourself there. The most notorious of Jordan's prisons is the old fortress of Al Jaffer, known for decades as the place where troublesome men went to be forgotten. It lies outside a Bedouin village of the same name on a road that marks the outer boundary of human habitation in the country's fierce southeastern desert. Beyond the prison, the terrain flattens into a basin of baked mud that stretches to the horizon without a hill or rock or stubble of grass. The agency that once stood here evaporated eons ago, leaving an emptiness like a missing limb, avoids so unnatural that it stirs feelings of dread among the few travelers who pause for a look. There's a terrible loneliness. Wrote filmmaker David Lean, who shot parts of Lawrence of Arabia in the same mud flats in 1962 and pronounced the place, quote, "more deserted than any desert I've ever seen." His picture editor Howard Kent would describe Al Jaffer as simply, quote, "a warning of what hell is like." You did, like, ten different things there in probably, like, seven or eight sentences that literally put people smelling the lack of grass. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Having been in these places myself, you have a visual impression and you know what it smells I can feel like. And I put so much time and thought into trying to create that feeling and what it smells I can feel like. And I'm flattered that you, when you read it, you kind of put yourself there too. And then when you have that moment, that opening moment when you're in this wild desert and then you superimpose on that, this prison where these hopeless, rejected inmates are kind of squandering their lives. And in that environment, this guy named Sarqawi, who ends up being the founder of ISIS and that you can sort of understand his story when you kind of imagine him and there in this very desolate place in this harsh prison. And from that, he creates his cadre of radical followers who become ISIS later on in their history. It's reminiscent of like you combining the spirit of like inception, the Matrix and Ebenezer Scrooge, a Christmas story, because in a weird way, it's a funny combination. But like, you're spawning in, like, it's the Matrix to where you can see this. You're creating the world and it's all coming together in front of you, like to Capriot, when you're walking through the different cities and everything comes together. And then you're also seeing people in real places and real things who can't see you back, but they were hearing it happen. Yeah, that's true. Like Scrooge did. Yeah. And that does it. And the thing is that that makes it challenging as a nonfiction writer is every element of that, everything I got to construct in that opening paragraph had to be absolutely real and authentic. I mean, I had to find those quotes from those filmmakers who were there on the same spot where the prison happened to be, which was a real find. There's just a great discovery when I found that. But to be able to describe those conditions and the fact that it used to be a sea there, but now it dried up. And it's like, when a sea is gone, it leaves kind of an impression, like an empty limb. [BLANK_AUDIO] of every bit of that has to be real and authentic. And so you have to know all that before you can be and describe it. And that's just an extra hurdle for somebody who does what I do. It's amazing. And that's what leaves a first impression too, especially the first one in the first chapter. That is true. Yeah. Get your little Pulitzer, by the way, apparently. Yeah. The support likes the kind of scene. That's that's what did it. That's the first one right there. But when when you sit down for that half hour and you're watching the hourglass and everything, it sounds like it's not so much you're like, I need a certain number of words or a certain percentage of a chapter. You're more just like locked in. And if you write and correct me from wrong here, if you write end up writing 200 really important great words or for 2000 very well written out outlines of what's going to end up being a bigger part of the chapter, either one is acceptable to you. Yeah, exactly. So it's not this you have an objective which is to create this evocative moment for the reader in the beginning of the book to give them kind of in a place to force transport them there. But you also have to be economical with the words because if you overdo it, if it begins to feel, you know, tiresome, there's a kind of a line there. You start to lose people because they don't want to be that invested in time wise in kind of being in a particular place. So you have to do it in this case in a paragraph. And that's to be the best paragraph you ever wrote. But you can't you can't let it go on too long because then then you start to kind of air the other way. And people are just kind of tired of your, you know, it's too much of a process. How do you how do you balance that? How do you because you said you know once you have it. Yeah. But on the way there, I'm sure there's a lot of times with a paragraph like that where you're like, I feel really good about this. But why do I feel like it's not finished? Yeah. Or what do I feel like I've it's too long. Yeah. And that's often you, if you see early drafts of that page, for example, there'll be, you know, something else I try to do there, a whole other image I tried to kind of layer on that felt excessive to me. And so I'm very aggressive in the cutting after I'm after I've finished the first try. And then I realized that, okay, I like where this is going, but it's too much. And I have to, I have to chop it by a third. And that's my own kind of the voice in my head saying, don't lose the reader here. You know, get them hooked on this spot. But don't give them too much. Just give them enough to kind of transport them there. And then move on to the next thing you're trying to do in the scene. I imagine it varies scene to scene like when you are chopping away. But do you find patterns? Sometimes maybe of there's too many prepositional phrases of descriptions here. Or, you know, I'm given extra quotes where I don't need them. Is there a usual kind of where the fact gets trimmed or it's, I like to think that it's, it's my own self editing. And it is trying to be just fierce about chopping out those extra prepositions and adjectives and inspiring to an economy of words that is exactly what you need, but no more. And sometimes I'll succeeded that and sometimes there will be an editor who will come and look at it and say, yeah, it's great scene a little too long. I can cut it some. And what I found the struggle with with Carlos book was that there was, I ended up cutting whole chapters because I would write something and I try to insert some historical context because I think it's important. And I realized when I'm finished that it was, you know, interesting to me, but probably not really interesting to most people. And I'm going to lose people in this detail if I don't just cut that out and get right to the next interesting scene with Carlos's life. And that's a hard thing to do because you'll spend a lot of time on that chapter and then you realize, I'm going to just have to cut it. It's going to be gone. And then you just, I realized I just wasted weeks because it took a lot of time for the research and also the writing and then just to discover and rereading it that it was just excessive. You just have to let it go. So that's that's one of the painful parts. How has your writing or has your writing changed and adjusted over the years based on people shortening attention spans? Yeah, it is always top of mind with me because I know that people struggle to read and that every page you have to be thinking people who read this are going to have an option to keep going or they can say, this is too much of investment. I'm going to go back to tech talk or something like that. So every page has to be approached with a discipline of like, I have to make this interesting enough to you want you to make you want to read the next page and to give some value used to be like in longer news stories. I mean, sometimes talk about leaving little jewels in a long story. You don't want to have just facts. You want to leave the reader with little surprises, little things they might not have expected, little quotes that kind of make, make something feel real and interesting and sprinkle those throughout a long story so that it becomes their little rewards for the reader when he gets to the next chapter. And I feel like I need to do that in my books too. Have you ever seen Matt Stone and Trey Parker from South Park talk about storytelling? I know I've seen a little of that and but you'll you'll be able to tell it better than me, but I know they have a real interesting discipline about it. Yeah, I want to find the clip because I think with art and storytelling is one of the most prime things in any kind of art. There's different ways to get there. There's not a straight formula like I've always taken issue with people talking about the formula of like a hit song. Yeah, there's sometimes where that can work, but then you'll see a lot of great art, a lot of great songs made. Yep, that's it. We'll get that in a second, but a lot of great songs made the challenge brand new boundaries where they didn't write it with the let me get this at the top as a 100. They wrote it as like, I feel this. This is me. And then suddenly, guess what? People feel that because it's genuine. Yeah, it's emotional power. So people have different ways of going about it, but this is a great clip, right? I think this is it. Well, I want the one where they talk about it's at NYU. So you that's the one, but they talk about like the but then instead of exactly. Yeah, you know the one I'm talking about for people out there. This is it. So it's only 36 seconds. Okay, let's play this real quick so people got this and then we'll we'll talk about it. We can take these beats, which are basically the beats of your outline. And if the words and then belong between those beats, you're ****ed. Basically, you got something pretty boring, which should happen between every beat that you've written down is either the word therefore or but. And that's why you get a show that feels like, okay, this to that to this to that, but this here's the complication to that. Just like this happened and then this happened and then stuff. That's not a movie. You know, that's not a story. Like Trace said, it's those those two but because therefore that gives you the causation between each beat and that makes that that's a story. I love that. You can't string a string a bunch of facts along with Anne's has to be reasons therefore or a but so people want to move on to the to the to the next part or to the conclusion. What's impressive about that is you see what ordinary guys they are and they they kind of creating a show in their basement with with like real cheap cartoon effects almost like cut out characters and and they managed to figure out how to tell the story. And that's that's an impressive achievement. Then he went on to do Broadway shows. So it's just it I just pretty much in all of those two. Yeah, they also piss off every single group and organization known to man. Yeah, they have no chill on it. Like the whole show is making fun of it starts with middle class white suburbia and then it makes fun of every religion. Yeah, yeah. Scroop like in stereotypes that it's uncancellable. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, what they pulled off, but like the storytelling as your point now is is what brings it together because it's just you think about that and then you start to think about how you talk with people and when you're really maybe cooking on something personal and you can see people are feeling that go back and think about most of the patterns of how you're telling the story. Yeah, there's fewer and thens. Yeah, exactly. And and thing is about doing factual reporting is is you know a lot of facts and you're you're tempted to want to do and and then and then and then because you you discover these facts and you think they're interesting and you just want to share them. But if you don't have that structure of that therefore or that but then it just gets boring. It becomes like a recitation of of facts that nobody cares about. Do you ever have something like that written out on a way on your whiteboard to where you have the pictures or the bullet points of a part and then I'm not saying you use the words but were therefore but you're like you go arrow to here's the problem. Yeah, yeah. I do in the sense that when I'm doing my little outlines when I'm doing my whiteboarding I need to create those tension moments and those tension moments come from the therefore in the butts and you you just can't have facts like just laid out in a linear fashion they have to be going somewhere you have to be create that dramatic tension and that's as a nonfiction writer you have to do that with with the facts that you have but if there that story is there that you just have to figure out a way to structure it so you have those little cliffhangers you have those surprising moments and every chapter has something that just you didn't expect or create tension that drives people on to the next part part of the project. book. Besides the volume of research, like removing that first second, do you know going into beats of it where a chapter is going to be one chapter is going to be 25 pages roughly versus another one might be five or six, or does that happen naturally in the writing? It's, it's, it's an evolution and that you change your mind a lot. But one thing, just an example from Carlos, I end up deciding to tell the story of the Vienna OPEC, this, that's dramatic moment in Carlos' life. I tell it twice. I tell it, which is unusual. It's a weird way to structure things. But it's the prologue. So you open the book in this wild terrorist attack is happening. And so you go through at one time and you're introduced in the middle of it to this is really charismatic figure named Carlos, who just introduces himself to the hostages right in the middle of this hostage taking event. I'm the famous to Carlos. You know who I am. That's, that's essentially is coming out to the world, announcing himself to the hostages into history. I am the famous Carlos. And then the story replays itself about halfway through the book when you get to that moment organically, but the perspective changes. So now you're seeing it from perspective of six terrorists who are in a safe house in Vienna, kind of getting ready for this big attack they're going to do. So it switches the vantage point, but you see them fighting with each other. Or are we going to do it this way? We should, we, you know, Carlos wants to kill a couple of people. And the other guys think it's a bad idea. And you see the plan almost falling apart. And then they get themselves together and they do it after all and succeed at it. So it, so you're actually creating that tension twice in the book, but in a very different way. I want to come back to Carlos with that beginning in a few minutes, but going back to black flags and writing about alzacali, how do you determine where the start's going to be? Because with him, you start when he's an in Jordanian prison already an adult, you don't go to his childhood, you don't start with some flash forward to when he's pulling off some crazy bombing in a rock after we invaded or something like that. You don't start with his death, which is a whole thing. You started at the prison. What? How far into the process did you know you were going to start there? And why? That was, it wasn't super late, but it was as well into I'm trying to write, I'm trying to kind of put chapters together already. And I think for me, it becomes this process of trying to imagine put myself in Carlos's place, or sorry, not Carlos, but Zarcali's place. And, and imagine these pivotal moments, these moments where that is sort of life changing, transformative moments in his life. And the one that seemed to be most powerful, most impactful was his time when he had moved himself back to Jordan, and he ends up in a prison. And he's there with a bunch of guys who end up becoming his disciples later on in his story. And in just thinking about that moment and imagine what it must have been like for a guy in his late 20s to be there. It seemed to make all the difference in his life story. And so I wanted to come make that this moment where you you're walking in midstream in his life. You're not starting out with with Zarcali as a baby. And you're not at the end of his life where he's just international terrorists. This is moment that sort of changes him personally, makes him into who he is. And it's such a colorful place is such a evocative place that if I can put readers in that moment with him in that prison in that desert, then you've, you've not only kind of transported readers to us to a different place in time, but it happens to be the moment that young Zarcali is making this chef for being just a nair duel, you know, street thug to being a leader of men. That happens in prison. So I wanted to make that moment, you know, really powerful for readers. I was really lucky to just have the great HW brands sitting there. Oh, well, like a month and a half ago or a couple months ago, great guy. Obviously he's written like 42 American history books in 39 years. And I've lost some of the books he's written, but he talked to me about the relationship particularly in biographies that he has with the subject to where he's like, I live with this person for a year. I read everything, everything they ever wrote, everything I was written about them, you get to know them, you start when they were a baby, you end when they're dead. And he talks about the emotions, sometimes when he has to go kill them at the end, because they died. And how it's like, in one case, you could have a teddy rose about where he's like, Oh, thank God, this guy was exhausting. Great guy, but like holy shit, you know, too much coffee. And then with the Ben Franklin, where he's like, I'm crying, because I just spent 84 years with Ben Franklin in a way. And he was an amazing man. And now this giant is dead. You know, so what I wonder is when you're writing about an ounce of coffee, in the case of someone who's now dead, or even like a Carlos de Jackal, who's still alive, with the Ozzacali one, when you open in the prison right there, and you're seeing that moment where he takes the full step forward and has the disciples and says, I'm going to be a leader of men and start the movement, you're writing it out with beautiful pros. But do you have a moment where you're almost like in the room going, no, like, like Matthew McConney, don't do it. God dammit. Like, like we're fighting and you're like, shit, I got to write that he's like, yeah, I'm going to become this guy. Yeah, and that's a kind of been my curse and my writing career is that I keep coming back to these bad guys. And so you, you, you want to understand them and you want people to kind of understand their journey. But they're terrible people. So you don't really want them to empathize with them. I've been having this conversation with with families. I need to need to have a hero. So it has to center of a book for the next one instead of these really exhausting criminals, because they're very, yeah, you know, in enticing stories. And they're, they make great tales. But they're they're bastards. They're horrible people. And so you don't, you don't really sympathize for them. But you, but I thought they're necessary stories to tell in my, in my opinion, because they kind of helped define, help explain where we are as a society. But yeah, it is, it is, it is kind of a really odd thing where you're so deeply into this personality and what makes them tick. And also understanding not just their flaws, but they're just their pathology. Yes, these are really deeply sick individuals. And they do terrible things. So you're writing about these bad people. Is it similar? Do you have a process like a lot of script writers will have where they'll write down tone and theme words before they ever write a word of like, what is the tone of this script? I'm, this is the story I'm telling, but these are the emotions that I kind of want people to feel. Do you ever do that? I do it. And with sometimes with an aid of music. And this is maybe unusual. But I have a playlist that has tone attached to it. This is this is dark music. So I'm in a dark place. I'm in a desert. And I've got music to match. And I like to have like music in the background that's not kind of distracting. But it kind of helps evoke the mood. So I really like to do that. Alright, what was the was the music playing in the background for black flags? So there's some really one playlist has a lot of Mozart, especially in this Requiem period. There's some really kind of deeply disturbing music that he that he put out as part of that, particularly this like, it's, you know, if the lyrics, which people don't understand because they don't speak Latin or whatever was written in it, but it's like being consigned to the flames of whoa, and you know, all these basically recreating hell. And and it's some of the darkest music on my playlist, but I'm getting in a really dark place. I'll put on something like that that kind of just. It's the emotion of music that sometimes leads to the words that that create the scene. That's awesome. I love that. Alright, so Carlos the Jackal right here when I opened up black flags, I went to the first chapter and skipped the prologue of what you wrote on the first chapter, but I'm going to read what you wrote at the beginning, the prologue right here to set the scene. So it's called a hostage taking in Vienna. As you said, you were writing about December 21st, 1975. There had been signs of trouble, but these were few in fleeting mere apparitions that appeared and then vanished amid the blinding snow squalls that swept through old Vienna in the twilight days of late December. No one had paid attention to the olive skin foreigner, a lost tourist, perhaps, who wandered uninvited onto the second floor of the Vienna headquarters of the world's leading oil cartel, pausing for a long moment to study the corridor and the signs pointing through the executive suites. And no one thought twice about the salo youth with hair like greasy straw, who paced out the length of the sidewalk by the building's entrance, stealing glances at the police officer posted at the doorway and the bodyguards in the limousines parked out front. That is some dark night level opening scene shit right there. Yeah, it gets crazy. My mom, I won't give too much away, but it's first seen leads with these terrorists arriving by streetcar of all things. So they show up at the OPEC and an ordinary streetcar. And you see them just kind of breezing to the building, saying hello to the cop outside who doesn't search them. And then they they're all carrying these duffel bags, identical sports bags, it's like they're on away to some sporting event and you see them go into the building and climb up back stairway and then they stop open in their bags and when I'm put some mask over their face and that's the end of the scene. So you've got get the up to the moment we're about where they're just getting their guns out and getting ready to storm into the place and then that's that's where it cuts off and then you're it moves on to another place but I really it is a it is a dark opening scene by one of people to be present and that very snowy cold um everything's shut down because there's almost Christmas and this very weird place which is Vienna and in the 70s during the cold war where there was kind of crossroads between east and west and in the middle of that comes just outrageous terrorist attack that have been unlike anything that ever happened in history before. It also reads like you can't see his face you see his gate you see his walk you're seeing him from behind you're seeing chaos building like yeah little hints of something bad that's about to happen and guys you're in the wrong place you're doing this something that had no business doing but nobody connects the dots until much lighter that something bad is about to happen and you're also painting a picture of people very calm to create chaos yeah walking into a place very deliberately like soldiers and getting ready to to kill people yeah now you had said you what this was a story that you were gonna end up telling twice because you started the prologue from one vantage point and then you go when it comes up in the book eventually to the part where you kind of see them build into it and actually see it from their vantage point but same question I asked you about black flags how soon into researching this or writing this did you know this is the scene I got to start with because it shows who he is there was a eureka moment and it was in my basement working out one day when I had my little whiteboard solve displayed I said I know what I'm going to do I'm going to open like this in Vienna because it was the most powerful moment of this this criminals life but I'm going to tell it a second time because I've got this great detail about how it all came together it's too much for the prologue but when readers are coming along in the journey of this guy's life and they've seen him as a young man and now he's like trying to be a terrorist and then the process that leads him to this his ultimate act is most the thing you will forever be famous for what are people that got a goal along with him as a 26 year old he's just so young when he did this 26 but all the all the tension within the group and all the kind of uncertainty and whether this was ever going to work or not and you have them come along with him as it was unfolding in real time and in the thought of doing it twice which is I remember very vividly just just thinking this is what I got to do this is how I'm going to tell the story that's awesome yeah I love that open I can't wait to read this it's going to be great but you you know you talk about that kid that just was kicked out of school and then spawned in in Middle East and Lebanon said sign me up yet it's strange because he comes from a wealthy family that happens to be communist so he has and then he has Che Guevara as you said is like this heroic figure so he wants to get the fame almost that comes with that but he puts himself decides to put himself at what age 19 20 2021 2021 20 when he moved okay 20 when he moves there to an entirely new place that he's never been in Lebanon in the middle of a lot of shit going on danger and he's it's like somehow seemingly his very natural environment he seemed to have a real I don't know if I'm reading into this too much but like a lack of fear of death or danger yeah if you go to chapter one after the prologue it's basically opens with that this young man who's walking into a place he's never been and but as the first couple of sentences indicate he is he just his one trick in life was to act as though he owns the world act as he belongs here I'm you know I'm fearless I don't you know I don't know Arabic at the time he didn't speak any Arabic he didn't know any never been to the Middle East before but his one trick is he could just put himself in a place and act as if he belonged there as white people didn't question when he would walk into you know OPEC in 1975 with with guns in in a bag and never get stopped in questions because you just had this way of just seeming like I belong here I kind of he just walked the party looked the party looked like a rich guy and nobody ever questioned him my friend Jim de Oreos special forces and at the eye for a long time did a lot of undercover work he always had a phrase politeness and familiarity breeds access now it's that was his motto yeah and his other it's a corollary to that was look like you got money in your pocket yeah and nobody ever suspects a rich guy and so he had the kind of the the the tailored suits and the handcrafted shoes you know you looked a little bit conservative kind of had his hair parted in a you know when in relatively short in the time when people were kind of shaggy and dirt and but it was the the look that mattered to him that if you look a certain way nobody asked questions and he got away with half the crap he didn't his his career because of that and then he just and there's this repetition this kind of this kind of language that gets repeated early in the book is that it does something horrible and then just walks away and blends in with the crowd shoots a guy in the face and London walks out into the night blends in with the crowd where does that come from where did he get that like it it reminds me of like when decaprio and the departed is talking about how my hand doesn't shake yeah right he's like around this crazy murderer in my hands like this obviously he has that no pulse just ability to be like just did that that's that's where's that from that's the other trick with him and I think that's becomes that's part of the so the criminal narcissist mind because he can't empathize with other people he doesn't relate to he doesn't feel pain that other people feel it's all about himself in his own ego so he can look at somebody in the face from two feet away in this house in London he just walks into this rich guy's house was targeted because he was happened to be a wealthy Jewish businessman that's only reason he was targeted walks up to his into his bathrooms in their you know using the bathroom walks up to him and shoots some square in the face and then walks out and then in the next scene just a couple months later he's at a shopping mall in Paris there's all these it's it's a it's a day before the start of school year there's kids you know with parents shopping and just a very kind of ordinary scene nobody you know in the scene below him he's standing on a balcony has anything to do with any of his causes there are no bad guys here just ordinary people takes a grenade out of his pocket has a suit on because you see again has looks the part of a just a business guide you know doing his normal stuff and causes the grenade below into the into the galley and and and kills three people just creates mayhem and then with his suit on steps over glass and he broken bottles and walks out into the street and vanishes and nobody thinks twice about him keep this mic straight by the way just so people have but yeah I do you think you actually believed in anything or more or less believed in whatever was going to get him access to be that folk hero yeah he wanted to be important and I think he was willing to do things that would be really hard for most people to do not so hard for Carlos because he was he just didn't seem to have the emotional empathy but he knew that he had to do aggressive daring things to to get the attention of people who who he wanted to wanted to think he was important the sort of the Palestinian leaders who saw him as a potential asset for them but he didn't quite trust him so he did things like shoot a man in the face or throw this grenade into a shopping center to impress them so they would give him bigger jobs and eventually he became so kind of devoted to his own image and kind of promoting his own brand the Palestinians got sick of him and kicked them out of their organization so from then on everything was about Carlos everybody every principle that he once espoused even if it was superficial didn't matter anymore because his only creed was how to make Carlos rich and successful how he was going to live the life that he knew the exotic life that he always wanted to live and big even as an old man he would repeat the jargon saying that I'm a Marxist I'm you know I'm trying to fight for the oppressed he didn't care about the oppressed he never did one thing to help Palestinian people but he but he liked to think that he did but he was really just was trying to about trying to promote Carlos as a brand do you think he really actually believed he did and clearly he didn't but like that was it he had lied to himself so much that he genuinely thought he helped the cause yeah I think that because that's what he says to this day and when you say well what about your life or what do you regret or what you know what about your life wasn't important in your point of view and he sees himself as as kind of a fighter against you know the colonial imperialist powers you know a champion of Marxism even though is real views of those things which was quite superficial and he was very flexible in his ideology and who he would work for well when he did spawn in the Beirut and said hey sign me up I'm here I believe like did he go to training camp yeah like what was it like for him to be in indoctrinated into actually doing some of these things now. So you got this opening scene after he kind of parachutes into Lebanon. It doesn't know his soul and shows up on the frillio shows up at the headquarters of the biggest terrorist group in Lebanon at the time. Just knocks on the door and says he had a note from somebody, met somebody in college who knew some people. So he's just and how he just doesn't get shot there or like, you know, just kicked out is just remarkable. But he was such a charmer and he was so convincing to these Palestinian radicals that met him that they thought, well, we'll give him a chance. We'll see if he'll work out maybe he won't. So they let him go to one of their training camps and he learns to shoot guns. Turns out he's a pretty good shot. And throughout his life, this one thing about him, he's an excellent marksman because you're very well with left or right hand. But he was a kind of actress. Yep. It had had this attitude, though. There's one scene and early on in his training camp, you know, the sort of supervisors are walking to the camp to view the exercises and activities. And there's Carlos kind of kicking back on his cot, smoking a cigarette, just kind of ignoring, you know, all the training that's going on around them. And he says, it's all make believe. None of this is important. You know, it's I'm here to learn how to do real things. This isn't real. And but he said it so convincingly that the Palestinians decided to promote it to give him, you know, send him to another tramp to another training camp to for real terrorist operations. Instead of just being a gorilla, he was getting special training after that. Always because of this attitude that I'm really too good for this. You need to send me to advanced training or I'm going to leave. And he got his way. Did he? Were his parents still alive at that point? They were and they they didn't know about his little caper going off to the Middle East. And so he ends up after some months there and getting involved in fighting gets becomes as involved in real violence. Goes back to London, where his parents moved to. And his parents are just distraught. You know, I've, you know, what have you driven? You were all crazy with worry about you. Where have you been? And his answer to his dad was, I've been in the Middle East learning how to kill Jews. Well, yeah, great line. What is dad's saying? This dad was saw these railings as being evil as far as this from his Marxist worldview. So I think they didn't particularly like that language, but they didn't as Carlos would say later is his dad was kind of proud of that is because he kind of liked the idea of his son being this kind of revolutionary character. He didn't like some of the violence, but he didn't really disapprove. His mom was more traditional. She was Catholic, very conservative, and was just mostly worried that their Carlos was going to get killed. What a household Catholic conservative mother with a lawyer communist father. Communist father, who was just a outrageous womanizer, had mistresses in the house. Apple don't fall too far from the tree. And Carlos would say later, he says, we were all like that, in terms of the womanizing. It's just something natural about us. It's just who we are. And his dad was the same way. And he says they just, you know, some of the CIA guys that tracked Carlos down later in his career would talk about his crazy charisma he had with women. By the time they caught him, this is he was in his 40s, he had this big belly, jaoli, not a detractive guy, but the quote from one of the agency guys who was watching him, literally watching him at the time, said, women would flop on their backs for this guy. And the CIA people just could not figure it out. But he had this ability just to get really beautiful and sometimes like the wives of government officials in Sudan, just to to fall in love with him. And that was, he talks about it almost in a nostalgic way, you know, as an old man that yeah, we have something about us. Some animal charisma that people that women like and you just milked it. I don't know if I'm oversimplifying it, but I might be a hypocrite and oversimplify it for a minute. Obviously he had charisma. That helps. That's one step. But evolution is just written this way. Every guy wants a good girl that only he can secretly make bad and every girl wants a bad guy that only they can secretly make good and they will chase that forever. And that's the guy that they're never going to make good, but they love how bad he is. That's how most of us got here. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's insane that he can't, I mean, it's not insane because you see it again and again, he can't see the duality of his life and how one doesn't really jive with what he actually thinks it was. You know, being a Marxist and all that, but really it's just an opulent womanizer who's doing contracts after he gets kicked out of the organ. What was that organization called again? So it's a popular front for the liberation of Palestine. It was the one Palestinian group. They're two, but this was the one that was considered itself Marxist. So you know, very different from al-Qaeda, these were not religious people at all. They were secular comments. Carl Marx was. Well, they admired him in their own way. Yeah. But but yeah, that yeah, he's a Jewish guy. So yeah, it is interesting that although, you know, you see all these strange bedfellows. So later on in Carlos' career, his benefactor and the Palestinian's too was a Swiss Nazi, a guy who had been actually a devotee of Adolf Hitler. And after the fall of the Reich, he smuggled some of their gold out of the country. He acquired rights to Joseph Gerber's writings and republished his his works. What's this guy's name? It's a François good no. He's a Swiss, a Swiss guy, G-E-N-O-U-D. And just was such a rabid anti-Semite that he thought he sort of became in league with these Palestinian militants because it was anti-Israel. And he helped bankroll some of their activities. He got legal help for them when they when their members were arrested. And he later becomes, you know, a personal friend of Carlos and helps him out. Later on in the book, Carlos is basically an exile and Syria. The Syrians are sponsoring him. They're allowing him to live there. But he's kind of a prisoner of the state. They don't let him do very much. This old Nazi comes and hangs out of them and they listen to old Nazi songs and you know, reminisce about the good old days when the Hitler almost took over the world. It's just crazy stuff. Such strange bedfellows too. I mean, there's so much going on when you hear about non-layers and layers of it. That's right. Yeah. What about his brothers? Are they alive? Did they follow him into any part of the life at all? Yeah. So that one of them went to school with him in Moscow, got kicked out with him and kind of was in his shadow throughout his life. But then they went back to Venezuela as adults and just became business people. And for them, it's always been this strange little footnote for the family. Oh yeah, where we have this guy, Carlos, it's our brother. And he's living in prison in France. But did you talk with him? I didn't. I tried to reach out and it wasn't able to get any reaction. But the mother and father died years ago. But the couple of brothers are still around. Yeah. Now, did you get a chance before he died in 2023 to talk to Billy Wall about this? I regret that I didn't. By the time I knew that I was working on this book, he had just passed. And I remember seeing the obituary's about him. But he was one of the guys that caught him right? He was. And he was kind of this, it was a strange character to be part of the CIA mission. He was a former green parade just to explain who he was. But he was, by the time he got involved in the Carlos story, he was already in his 60s. So he's an old guy. It was a savage, though. Savage. And he was decided to take a job for the CIA's paramilitary division, working in Africa, tracking this group called Al-Qaeda that was suddenly everybody's radar screen. Al-Qaeda had its base at the time in Cartoum in Sudan. Everybody else was there. Hamas was there. Abu Nudal, who was like a big Palestinian terrorist at the time. Every bad organization you could think of was had headquarters in Sudan. And into this environment comes Carlos the jackal. Besides, he's going to basically make it his base. And CIA was there. They ended up learning most famous terrorists in the world is now in your town. And you've got to go find them. And Billy Wall, this retired green parade, becomes one of the operatives that helped track him down. And they got so close to him. There's a scene or the end of the book where they realize they don't even have to watch him all the time because they can predict every minute of his day. And he wasn't careful. Well, he wasn't careful at all. And there's this one scene where they follow him to a nightclub one night just just to watch him. And there's Carlos in the dance floor drunk. But flirting with women, having a nice time. And the CIA guys who are there, there's a woman CIA officer in the station too. So they go out to the dance floor. And they're dancing on the dance floor next to Carlos the jackal. As close as you to me. And just so they could see beads of sweat on his face. At this point in his life, he's he's a middle-aged man. But he still has his natural grace. He's a good dancer. He's having a great time. And here's both famous outlaw in the world. And these these Americans who are trying to track him inches away from each other dancing to a song. That's nuts. Did he have what I mean, Sudan was a hell of a place as you said at that time. A lot of stuff going on. I remember there's a famous story where Billy Wall had a shot at a song and been lawden. And I forget it's been a while. I want to say like he was asking permission to go and he was posing as a cameraman or something. And he couldn't get permission in time. And then you know, this is yours before everything happened. But you know, did do we have evidence of like [BLANK_AUDIO] Carlos now is a mercenary terrorist at this point working with any of these guys at the time and actively meeting with, you know, the early days of al-Qaeda or some of these other groups. He'd do all of them. So small enough of a place, they actually got together. These groups had little conferences, you know, so they got jihaddi international. And Carlos was like an unofficial invitee. He committed, he converted to Islam or as he claimed to, it's always been kind of a murky story. He just, I think he made the conversion because he wanted to marry another woman without divorcing the wife, the woman he was married to. So he, you know, big of me is allowed. And so he becomes a Muslim for that reason. But because he's Muslim, he's kind of grandfathered into the community. So they all know each other. But Carlos is a bit of an odd duck, even back then, he's not a jihadist, you know, he's a secular terrorist. And he's not, you know, not an Arab. He doesn't belong to any of the other groups. He's just kind of this weird guy out by himself. But they all knew each other, it was kind of a clubby place. So he's a secular terrorist, but he comes up working with, you know, a Palestinian organization fighting for liberation through the things they do. It's an interesting way to describe him. There's this moment in the middle of the, the OPEC hostage situation where the, the VNEs send an Iraqi negotiator in to try to figure out who Carlos is and what he wants. And he tells him, where are the arm of the Arab revolution? And the Iraqi guy says, but you're not Arab. What are you doing here? And that's always been the kind of the thing about his life and his career. He was, you know, working for people that he had absolutely in causes, he had nothing to do with. And, and that kind of makes him stand out. There were lots of terrorists at the time. None of them were memorable to us because they have names we can't pronounce. They, you know, they sort of self-sacrificing and a lot of them got killed. But Carlos was a strange guy who was just not of any of those worlds. But he ends up being the face of international terrorism at the time just because he was, he was different. He was charismatic. He kind of milked the publicity part of it, just a very, very strange guy. And he got the name from British tabloid. Yeah. Is that right? How did that happen? He had like a fake passport or something. Yeah. So his name is Ilich. And he never tried to change it. But he had, you know, he said, you know, in interviews that he had like 100 fake passports in his time. And one of them happened to be a guy named Carlos. So, you know, he called himself a Peruvian businessman. And when he was arrested or when he was, when the police figured out in France that they wanted to catch him, they found one of his passports and his name in the passport was Carlos. And they thought that's really who he was. The jackal part of it became, it was just an accident because one of the safe houses he stayed in in London, you know, the reporters were kind of pouring over the house and they found like caches of weapons that he had there. They also found a copy of this novel by Frederick Ford's side called The Day of the Jackal. It was famous novel at the time, became a movie recently made into a TV series. And they just assumed that Carlos, it was his book and he had read it and it's juxtaposition of the novel and his safe house. And the man named Carlos, it just became the tabloid's Carlos the Jackal. Genius. Genius. Yeah, he liked it. He liked it. It became a headline and it stuck. And for the rest of his career, he was known as Carlos the Jackal, even though it was just completely fake, made up name. Now he had gotten kicked out, as you said, of the, I still forget the name of the group. He got kicked out of the popular front because he did some Hollywood shit or something like that. Like he did a hostage situation and what was it? He chartered a flight and they didn't like that he took the money. What happened there? Yeah, so this was the, again, the Vienna thing, which is most known for the Vienna operation taking over OPEC wasn't his idea. Actually, it was something that was put on him by Moamar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, who hated other members of OPEC because they refused to raise gas prices higher. He thought they should really shake down the Western world and get as much money as they possibly could. The Saudis and the Iranians at the time were resistant to that. So part of Gaddafi's plan was that you're going to take over, you take these guys hostage and I want you to execute these two individuals, which execute the head of the Saudi delegation and the head of the Iranian delegation, just as my own kind of personal payback. Carlos, in the end, he wanted to do it, but he never got around killing those two people. So he disobeyed an order and he also took money for himself, took ransom money that was eventually offered to him. It's got to be paid for. It's got to be pocketed. Yeah. It's pocketed the money for himself. It's hard work. Two reasons the Palestinians said, well, you're not obeying orders, you're always promoting yourself. So you become a show boat. We're not interested in that. So they kicked them out and they almost executed it. I was going to say, why didn't they kill them? Yeah. So that was one of the options. They actually had a little tribunal at the popular front where they were weighing options. They could have just kicked him out of the organization. They could kill him. They could imprison him. They were going to put him in a kind of a jail. That sounds nice. And eventually they decided just to kick him out. And so he was banished from the Palestinian movement. He was never allowed to return. But then he keeps doing terrorism for contracts as a mercenary. How do they feel about that? It was freeing for him because then he could just work for himself and they never trusted him after that. They never allowed the Palestinians, never allowed him to take part in any of their operations after that. But there was some begrudging admiration because he kept getting away with things and he kept making the newspapers and they were all fascinated by that. But he became a free agent, basically. He decided that he would work for whoever would pay him money and that was going to be the rest of his career. It was a mercenary terrorist. But he had guys working for him, right? Yeah. It's not like he's just on his own. He had people that were on his payroll. Yeah. He had a gang. It was an international game. There was one Palestinian who was a deputy, but the others were German. He had a German woman who was the girlfriend of his best, his number two. Then he steals this woman and marries her for himself. Partly. Yeah. Nice thing. And then the guy just took it and he said, you know, we're changing living arrangements now. So the woman was living with his other guy and then suddenly next day she was living with Carlos instead. And then she becomes a terrorist with him and they do things together. Well, at least he was into diversity. He was into diversity. In fact, she would say about him that she was drawn to him because he promoted women's equality and gave women important positions in the organization. That's right. Women terrorism just in the scales. They had a baby together and then he just abandoned her and ran off of some other woman instead. So that was kind of Carlos' style. How many children does he have? So he has one actually from a, I mentioned that he impregnated a woman in college. So this woman gave birth to a child and Carlos never saw her. But there's somewhere in Cuba today, there's this woman who is Carlos's daughter. Oh, she's in Cuba. Yeah. She made her way from Russia to Cuba. Because the mother was a exchange student from Cuba in Russia, when he met her. And so that became, that was his first love. And then then he had a daughter with this, with a German woman, the kind of the woman that he stole from his deputy. And she's, she's still around. Apparently there's a relationship between this woman and Carlos. They see each other occasionally. Why not? And that's, that's it for kids that we know of. Yeah, that's it that we know of. There's grandkids. No, so Carlos is a grandpa. But yeah, that it's, it's, it's, you know, nobody else as far as I could tell ever visits Carlos in prison, but he does have this one family member who checks on him and everything. That's interesting. Now, he got caught because there was something wrong with his balls. Oh, yeah. That's what happened there. Wonderful. Kind of an interesting karma there. But he, so he ran off, ran off with this other woman. She was a young Jordanian dental hygienist and he met her in Jordan and fell in love with her, moved in with her and then she goes to cartoon with him. So they together. But she wants, she's young. She wants to have kids. They're not conceiving. So Carlos decides to get medical treatment for himself. And he had a condition that was essentially, it's like a varicose vein that, of the testicles. But it restricts sperm cowl. So this was essentially identified as the reason they couldn't have baby. So by the time he decided to have something done about it, the CIA is watching Carlos every day. So they're, they're trying to come up with a way to capture him that would be subtle and they can kind of fly him out of the country. But the, the big break is they find out that he's going to have surgery. And when you have surgery, you're under anesthesia. So it became this perfect moment as he was recovering from this testicle surgery that they could catch him when he was completely vulnerable. And he was snatched up, put on the back of a French airplane and flown to Paris for trial. Why, why France? Because it turned out that after the CIA had been watching him for all these weeks and were just waiting for the right moment, they checked back with the Justice Department and discovered there was no warrant for Carlos's arrest in the United States. He'd never killed an American, so no paperwork existed that would cover, you know, an extra addition to the United States. The French, on the other hand, had not only had warrants, but they had convicted them in an absentia for a murder. And so the French very much wanted to get their hands on them. So they, the CIA and then the French worked together to, to, to bring them together. him to justice. And the French basically got dibs on on the body. And they were able to take him to Paris for trial. Did you wake up on the plane? Yeah. And there's this moment. There's seen the book where he's, you know, he was all groggy, but he's like, he knows he's been arrested and he's on this plane. And he's trying to figure out where, who's got him and where they're taking him. So the French don't reveal that it's them. He's listening for voices trying to figure out, you know, getting clues about where he's heading. And he's trying to track the movements of the plane. The plane's taking off from Sudan. He knows what direction the, the runway is. So at the first he's going to the east and he's thinking, oh, shit, they're going to send me to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi is, you know, have reasons for wanting him. Saudi's behead terrorists. So they're going to go limb by limb with him. It's a terrible place to end up. Then the plane turns to the north and it's clearly heading up. So the Red Sea. So I'm going to be tortured to death. And then the plane keeps going for hours. So he realizes he's not going to Israel. And then finally, the moment of realization is the plane lands. It's European summer. The smell of grass and vegetation. And he hears French voices. And his reaction is, oh, thank God, it's a moment of relief because I'm in a country of laws. So I may never get out of this. I may be in prison for the rest of my life, which it turns out he was. But at least he's in a place where he's going to be treated under international rules. He was okay with that. He said, and he's described this to me, thank God, I'm in France. And I'm okay. I'm alive. And that's one of the lives. It didn't care that he's going to be in a cell for the rest of his life. As long as it wasn't being executed or maimed, he just wanted to live. That's really interesting. A guy whose whole life was based on living free under his own selfish, you know, ways was going to have his freedom taken away from him. But he felt relief. No more high living, but he could live out his days. I don't believe him. Yeah. You don't think so? No. I think that's posturing. Yeah. I think that's him, puffing his chest. But he also thought, and that's one thing that came clear to me is that he would get out one day. That even though the French had him, he just kept thinking that the Venezuelans are going to make some prisoner swap. He really put his cards on that for a long time. There's going to be some kind of deal on the Venezuelans are going to get him out. Or that there'd be, you know, his argument, legal argument was that he was legally detained, legally captured and repatriated to France against as well. And that some international court was going to overturn his conviction. He was going to get released. And he held onto that belief for his, I think he still somehow thinks that someday he's going to get out. He does? Yeah. That this is going to be, he's going to be able to live at the rest of his life somewhere, you know, outside prison, but he's next level delusional. Yeah. And now he's, now he's in an age where it's not going to happen. So, but it will take us completely sunken, even after 30 years in jail. Did he tell you how many people he was willing to take responsibility for killing in his life? Yeah. And he said it was almost, it made a, it made a point, almost as a way, I think, of intimidating me, of letting me know that he had killed 83 people with his own hand. And he directed the deaths of 1,000 others. He said that very explicitly. And without being asked, he just how early in the conversation, this pretty early on. And then he said something like, and so you better watch what you write about me. So it was kind of a threat. Oh, he hit you with that. Yeah. So like, I've got sources and means. But he probably is full of crap with his numbers. The French tied 16 deaths to him. He certainly killed more people than that. Some of his allies and comrades he killed himself. So he is definitely responsible for a lot of deaths, probably not 83, maybe half that, but still, still a lot of people. That's 42 more bodies than you. More than you. I think so. Yeah. Unless you unless you're hiding something over there. What's below that basement? That's right. No, Ben Franklin shit going on. All right. There's a torture chamber. Okay. I still think Ben Franklin was innocent. He was just studying corpses. But that's a little weird. Yeah. That's crazy that you get to sit with him too after you've done all the work. And I messed it up. It was March 2025 when you talked to him. So you were here in March 2024 and you were gonna talk to him. I guess it's still took a while. Okay. So that was that was wrong. But you know, as you see the time coming up and you know, he's about to have to leave. How do you decide to leave it with him? Like what was the last things you were talking about with him? I think it was asking about regrets and what did he did he feel any remorse about things he did in these 30 years to look back at his life? What do you what do you've done differently? And and this is when he said to me, I wish I would have killed a few more people. And that that was a wild line to leave it on. But that's that's what he had to say. It's good for a scrub brighter though. That is good. That's what he said word for word. Word for word. I wish I would have killed a few more people. What'd you say to that? Interesting. What a great comment. So I was a little blown away by it. But it was interesting. But I could see what what he was trying to say. It wasn't like I just would have been just more prolific in my murdering, but it was basically those bastards from the CIA, those French idiots. I knew they were trying to get me should have killed a few more people because I got kind of screwed at the end. And he feels like he was betrayed by the Sudanese who ended up letting the French, you know, basically have their way in exchange for a lot of money as it turns out. But it just wished he would have settled some scores, you know, back then. And we might not have been the situation that he's in now. Well, given this, he was a cowboy and he's going to die a cowboy apparently. Yeah. But this boots on. He's still got that for sure. But how'd you leave it? Did you shake his hand? I don't know. Didn't I just thank them? I didn't. I don't think I ever touched them. And that's fine with me. And there's this moment I describe it. You know, he's shuffling back to his cell. And he's given the kind of the old Marxist salute to one of the guards just in passing. You're just watching just watching them. Say it's a way like a ghost. Yeah, shuffling away with this. And his Coteroid pants. There's the end of your movie. Yeah. Oh, I see, I see this one. It's good. Well, I can't, I can't wait to read this. I know all your work's been amazing. We talk about it all the time on here. So a lot of fans are always reading your books. And now they've got a brand new one to get into. We'll link that down below the jackal, the rise and fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist played by Pedro Pascal on the, uh, on the cover. Absolutely. I'm just kidding. It's not that's actually him. But Joey, thanks so much as always for coming through and going through everything. Always a great time with you. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought and get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Shopify is the most common source.