Former British Intelligence Officer | Julien Fisher | Ep. 408

Former British intelligence officer Julian Fisher joins us to break down the real world of espionage, from MI6 tradecraft and denied-area operations to private intelligence work across Africa and conflict zones like Congo and Sierra Leone. He shares how intelligence officers build cover, recruit allies, and survive dangerous situations where a single decision can mean life or death. Grab Julien's book here: https://a.co/d/02yafSL6 https://julesfisher.com/ https://uk.linkedin.com/in/julian-fisher-67161920?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name Today's Sponsors: Spies Lies & Nukes Conference⬇️ https://www.spiesliesnukes.com/ Use the code "teamhouse" at checkout for an exclusive offer GhostBed ⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! Wild Alaskan Company⬇️ https://wildalaskan.com/HOUSE Get $35 off your first order! For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ PRE ORDER JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 — Start 01:00 — British intelligence, MI6, and the Official Secrets Act 05:20 — Childhood in Birmingham, family tragedy, and early hardship 11:30 — The Iranian nurse who taught Julian the power of allies 15:00 — Getting into Oxford and building social capital 20:00 — Winston Churchill’s grandson and learning influence early 27:20 — City of London finance, class, and becoming a chameleon 35:30 — Leaving finance for British intelligence 38:00 — Iraq War intelligence, David Kelly, and resigning on principle 45:30 — Moving into private intelligence and corporate security 49:00 — Tim Spicer, Sandline, Sierra Leone, and private military myths 55:00 — Head of Africa: Congo, mining clients, and ground-truth intel 59:50 — AK-47 in Kinshasa: using cover to survive 01:28:45 — Somalia, a mortar attack, and surviving by minutes 01:46:15 — How Think Like a Spy turns tradecraft into leadership lessons 01:51:40 — Final thoughts, book info, and where to find Julien Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57Jack Murphy?

  Hey folks, I want to tell all of our listeners tonight about the Spies, Lies, and Nukes Conference that's coming up pretty soon here. It's hosted by a former guest on this show, Valerie Plame. She is a former CIA Operations Officer, did undercover work all over the world. And if you're into the intel world, CIA operations, and the national security issues that actually matter, pay attention because this one's for you. There's a conference called Spies, Lies, and Nukes happening September 25th through the 27th in Tucson, Arizona. It was founded by Valerie Plame, and it brings together the people who actually did the work. We're talking former CIA Ops Officers, senior diplomats, national security professionals,

• 1:40Jack Murphy?

  and the investigative journalists who covered the stories nobody was supposed to know about. This isn't a convention hall with 1,000 people and a name tag. It's small, it's immersive, and it's built for real conversation with the people who have been inside the room. If you've ever wanted to sit across from the people who are running operations while the rest of the world had no idea, this is how you do it. Tickets are on sale now at spiesliesnukes.com. Use the code TEAMHOUSE at checkout for an exclusive listener discount. And also tell you folks, I was recently at an event where Valerie Plame spoke specifically about nuclear proliferation and anti-proliferation treaties. She's a great speaker, puts on a

• 2:23Jack Murphy?

  great event, and I think everyone will really enjoy this. And again, to get tickets, they're on sale at spiesliesnukes.com. Use the code TEAMHOUSE at checkout and you'll get an exclusive listener discount.

• 2:37Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. This is episode 408 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with today's guest, Julian Fisher. He is a former British intelligence official, and he is the author of Think Like a Spy, which we're going to talk all about in this interview. Julian, thanks for joining us on the show today.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Great. Thanks for having me, Jack. It's a real pleasure. I'm an esteemed company. I know you've had some of my former colleagues and amazing writers like I S. Berry on your show. So this feels like a great privilege.

• 3:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, thank you. Yeah, she put us in touch with so many people. I think a few friends of hers from the agency we have booked actually in the future as well.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Great.

• 3:22Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, she's great. And yeah, so what is it that we're allowed to say about your background, Julian? You told me a kind of funny anecdote about, you know, if you were a Walter Mitty, you'd be able to say much more.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  That's about the size of it, Jack. Yes. Okay, so there's a peculiarity of the legal system here in the UK, which I'll just very briefly explain, that there's no, there's no crime of impersonating an intelligence officer. There's a crime of impersonating a police officer, but not of impersonating an intelligence officer. On the other hand, if someone has worked in one of the three-letter acronym services and they avow themselves, that is arguably a criminal act under our Official Secrets Act. So that leads to a paradox. If somebody says that they worked for MI6 and they didn't, then they are not

• 4:20Speaker 03

  breaking any law. But if they did, they may well be, and they may face sanction. So I just get around that by not saying that I worked for MI6.

• 4:30Jack Murphy?

  I get it.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  And after I didn't work for them, I went on to work in the private sector. For initially for an extraordinary man called Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, who ran an organization called EAS Defence Services. So I was his point man in Africa for many years. Before I went on to set up my own private intelligence boutique called Africa Integrity Services. And then wrote this book, Think Like A Spy, Masters of Nine Secret Skills of Influence and Leadership, which came out in the US only a few months ago, in fact, the beginning of this year.

• 5:09Jack Murphy?

  Tim Spicer, if I recall correctly, he was the guy that was like kind of knee deep in Equatorial Guinea and all of that, right?

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Amongst other things.

• 5:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Tim is an extraordinary character. I mean, if you can get him onto your show, then I highly recommend him. He is, he's quite a figure in the private security, private military world. And he's done some amazingly good stuff over the years. I'm a big fan of Tim's. But you're right that there was some controversy in his career, including Equatorial Guinea. Question marks about his involvement through his former organization, Sandline, in West Africa, in Sierra Leone. But, you know, I know Tim well. I believe him to be a man of great integrity. And I think what he's done under the auspices of his various organizations

• 6:00Speaker 03

  tends on the whole to be a force for good, rather than anything else. And in fact, I recently gave another podcast, I won't name it here, in which I talked about the mercenary activity, broadly speaking.

• 6:16Jack Murphy?

  You can tell people where to find that?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  That's on True Spies, the True Spies podcast. It's a members only edition, in fact. But I think it's worth subscribing for their output generally.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  And in that, I was talking about how the world of mercenaries, the world of private contractors, military contractors is actually much misunderstood. And I think one of the saddest things is that the good that is done by some of those contractors, some of those private military types is never really recognized. We always talk about the controversies and we never recognize the heroism. And there is a great deal of heroism, but I think that's a separate subject for another day, maybe, or maybe it's a book that I need to write.

• 7:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we can touch upon that in a little bit. We've had Eben Barlow on the show years prior.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 7:09Jack Murphy?

  And I love his book that he wrote. He wrote a memoir that I really recommend to people, but we'll get to Sierra Leone in a

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, great.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Sorry, I've lost you, Jack.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  So I don't know what's going on here. I'm not getting you at all.

• 7:35Jack Murphy?

  Testing, testing.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's better.

• 7:38Jack Murphy?

  Okay, you can hear me now?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  I can now.

• 7:41Jack Murphy?

  Okay, strange. Okay, so just starting at the beginning, Julian, tell us a little bit about your upbringing, your background, and how that kind of propelled you towards governmental service.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Great question. It was the last thing I ever expected to do, to be honest. I was born in the Midlands of the UK, in a place called Birmingham, the country's second city. And my upbringing was, I mean, it was a fantastic upbringing in many ways. My parents were amazing characters. They were incredibly clever. They were incredibly creative, and they helped to foster those skills in their family. And I was one of seven. But it is fair to say that we were somewhat financially disadvantaged. So I was brought up in circumstances which were occasionally a bit of a struggle. You know, we would go to bed cold, sometimes go

• 8:38Speaker 03

  to bed hungry, not for want of effort on the part of my parents, but it was the 1970s, and the economy here was in the grip of a recession. Um, you know, it was the the era, I guess, that some people referred to as the winter of discontent, a lot of strikes, a lot of shortages, three day week. So the circumstances of my of my upbringing were not particularly auspicious. And they were also accompanied by a great deal of grief because when I was eleven, on my very first day at school, and that sounds like a quite a old, a bit too old to be having

• 9:19Speaker 03

  my first day at school, but for various reasons I won't go into, my parents elected to educate us at at home, homeschool us until the age of eleven. And on my very first day at school, I came home to the the news that my only sister, my oldest sibling, uh, had killed herself, um, after a very distressing illness, um, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. And because the age of eleven, that's a remarkable loss to have to face. Uh, uh, and there's a blindness, I think, sometimes to infant grief. You know, of course, my parents were absolutely, um, beside themselves of grief and they were

• 10:03Speaker 03

  having to look after themselves and they did a great job of looking after the rest of us. But there is, you know, I think there's always a hierarchy of grief and as an eleven year old boy, I'm not sure I felt I had much right to show that grief. And as a response to this, I became, uh, very, um, emotionally drained, I suppose. Um, and about a year later, um, having suffered about a year of bullying at school, uh, I decided to, the best way to put an end to all this was to walk in front of a moving vehicle.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  And luckily, I survived that impact, but it did hospitalise me for a year. And I have to say that that was probably the most important year of my life, and it really turned me around. And what happened was, there was a young nurse there called Maya. And she was an Iranian refugee, which sounds incredibly topical now.

• 11:06Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  But of course, as you'll know, the Iranian revolution took place in nineteen seventy nine, when I was nine. And I was in hospital in nineteen eighty two, nineteen eighty three. And Maya had fled from Tehran with her mother after her father had been disappeared. He was a counter-revolutionary, so he was taken into custody one night. And it was presumed by her that he had died, been killed, assassinated. We know that's something that is not uncommon in Iran. And but Maya was an extraordinary character.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  And she had every intention of following in her father's footsteps because he'd been a doctor. So she was absolutely hell-bent on becoming a nurse. The problem was, she didn't really speak very much English. And so she failed her examinations at school, which was the first basis on which to be accepted to train as a nurse. And was in despair when one of her teachers had a good idea of getting hold of universities which taught Farsi, the language in Persian, now Iran. And through, so and introducing her to students of that language.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  And through that introduction, she met a young man called Dan, half Israeli, half Brit. And they would meet day, daily during a summer break. And they'd speak for one hour in Farsi and one hour in English to give her the ability and the skill and the practice to become fluent in English, which she did over the course of a few months. And then she retook her exams.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  But in the process of having to retake,

• 13:09Speaker 03

  they ran out of money, her mother ran out of money and she was proposing to send her into the workplace as a cleaner or some such, which is how her mother was earning money. And that's when Dan's father stepped in. And Dan's father, who was a local businessman, basically said that he would support Maya through college to make sure she got the qualifications she needed, so long as she continued to work with his son, Dan, to help in with his university course.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  And that arrangement worked. And hence, by the time I met her, she was just embarking as a student nurse.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  And she said to me, words I'll never forget.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  One day she said to me, look, what you must remember is allies are the most important thing you can have in life. They will make all the difference and you must never forget that. And I never have. And I realised from that day forward that actually there's something that some people are born to and it's called social capital. You know, they have parents, they have a wider social circle, they have schools, they have communities that can help them to

• 14:29Speaker 03

  navigate their way through the complexities of the education system to get the loans that they need to qualify, to get a degree, to get on to the jobs market. And if you're not born with that, you have to create it. And the way to create it is to build alliances. And so I became quite adept at building alliances with people who, not in a manipulative sense, but people that I assessed would be able to help me in my own journey. A journey from this financially deprived background, eventually on to Oxford University, from there into the financial sector.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Well, I can't say I was a bit of a square peg in a round hole in the financial sector. So I then moved into international relations, if I can put it like that. And the rest is history.

• 15:25Jack Murphy?

  Before we move on, Julian, I mean, Oxford obviously is, you know, the Ivy League of the UK. It's their top school. As you say, you come from an economically disadvantaged background. What was your journey coming from, you know, being that 12 year old kid in the hospital bed to gaining admittance into Oxford, which we should also point out is like the indoctrination center for British spies. They all go through there, don't they?

• 15:50Speaker 03

  More Cambridge, actually.

• 15:51Jack Murphy?

  Cambridge?

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Yes, there is, there's, there's, Oxford is famous for producing prime ministers here. I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing. I think the vast majority of our post-war prime ministers have been graduates in the same subject that I took, which is PPE, Philosophy, Politics and Economics. And Cambridge is quite famous for producing some dubious characters such as Philby Burgess.

• 16:16Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Cambridge, the Cambridge Five.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  I have, to answer your question, I have Reader's Digest to thank. It sounds a bit odd. I don't know if you even remember what Reader's Digest was. Yeah, it was a, I think, a weekly or a monthly publication which would provide abridged versions of novels. And I didn't read those, but what I discovered somewhere along the line was that every so often they'd have IQ tests, self-scored IQ tests. And I became a bit fixated on them and discovered that I was scoring very highly on these tests. Whenever I saw, I had to, you know, a table of piled high with copies of the Reader's Digest, which I flicked through looking for these IQ tests.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Eventually discovered that I was actually a lot cleverer than I thought I was.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Or I thought I must be because I was scoring highly on these tests. And so I set about, when I came out of hospital, I insisted that I change school because I didn't feel the school I was at had the right academic profile for what I wanted.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Um, and then I, I suppose I said about making allies of teachers. You know, so I, I would, I had a particular aptitude for English as it happened. So I'd always make sure that I had a good relationship with my English teachers. And they, they would take time out of their work, out of their personal time to help me to become a better writer, to help me to become a better public speaker, a better debater. And I think that was very valuable um when it came to the process of getting into Oxford. Because what they look for there really isn't necessarily um

• 18:14Speaker 03

  a traditional education in Latin, Greek and all the rest of it, although there's still an element of that. But they'll, they look for an ability to think for yourself, they look for an ability to form arguments cogently and to communicate them well. And through my alliances with two particular English teachers, one from the school I went on to. And then I, I moved again for my final two years. I had this remarkable English teacher called Johnny Cleek in my final two years. And he actually took time, his personal time, to coach me in the Oxford University Examination Papers. So he was an early ally and I, you know, if I, I would have looked at those papers without his guidance and, and basically been flummoxed.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  But he taught me through it um on top of his own curriculum work. Uh, and I'm forever grateful to him for that. So it was an early exercise in recognizing, yes, of course, Oxford is looking for an academ- a raw academic ability, of course it is, but there's lots of people with that raw academic ability. And they're looking for something else on top of that, which is an ability, as I say, to form cogent arguments and communicate them well. And I had my early allies, particularly in the form of Johnny Cleek, to thank for that.

• 19:35Jack Murphy?

  And that's what got you through those admission exams?

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, admission exams and then interviews. So the interviews were really, were then, I think they're now regarded as less important, but back then, talking quite a long time ago, the interview process was rigorous and frightening. And but in a way, very stimulating because, you know, you were being, I sort of expected to go into be asked questions of fact, but actually they were challenging to see whether I could sink on my feet. And that was a, that was quite a bracing experience. And without Johnny's input, I don't think I'd have performed as well as I did.

• 20:20Jack Murphy?

  And then, you know, speaking of your upbringing and, you know, growing up poor, it actually makes a lot of sense that you pushed yourself in this direction and towards finance because you didn't want to have to worry about that anymore.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  You make a very astute point.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  I mean, I came out of university having not a clue what I wanted to do, if I'm, if I'm honest. I knew I was quite interested in politics, but I wasn't one of those people who wanted to get into the political system early on. I sort of took the view that one needed to do something else to be qualified to be a politician. And I stand by that view, in fact.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  I think we see today that the quality of politicians, particularly in the UK, is quite low because so many people come into politics for politics' sake rather than having life experience.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  So I was interested in politics. I was interested in the world at large, international events, affairs. But I didn't really know what to do with that. And of course, as you say, I was quite keen by that point, having struggled through university with very little money, you know, surrounded by people who came from very wealthy families. I think it's fair to say that my priority was to get some money. So the city was the obvious place to go. And I was very lucky to be interviewed to join a firm called Casnov.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Casanova was an extraordinary organisation, extraordinary firm back in its day, since been acquired by JP Morgan, but it was the last independent partnership, stockbroking partnership in the City of London, and it was very, very dominated by the aristocratic class.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  And to the extent that I stuck it like a sore thumb, but I was lucky enough to be interviewed. And this is where another story about the importance of alliances comes in, because one of the things I did during university vacations was to work in the House of Commons, in our parliament, as a researcher, initially for an MP, I won't name the MP in question, but he was, I mean, he was a great guy, but didn't have the profile that I was looking

• 22:58Speaker 03

  for. So what I wanted, I had it in mind, and this is going to make me sound like a terribly scheming young man, and perhaps I was, but I had it in mind that I wanted, by the time I left university, to have a very highly recognisable name as a reference. And so I sat down, I went through what I described as a targeting exercise in the book, the first stage of the agent recruitment cycle. I sat down in the House of Commons library and went through the entire list of MPs, looking for two things. One was somebody

• 23:38Speaker 03

  who was very high profile and somebody who had a very small support team, in other words, that might be in the market for a researcher or parliamentary assistant.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  And one name jumped out at me, and it was Winston Churchill.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Now, not the original Winston Churchill, I'm old, but I'm not that old, his grandson, but Winston Churchill nonetheless, Winston Churchill MP. And so I set about...

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Cultivating Winston. First of all, I had to get alongside him. Find out where his office was, and quite close to his office was one of those old Reuters ticker tape machines which would spew out the daily headlines. And on spools of paper that was then just collected on the floor. It was quite, it was so archaic and quite amusing, but um. It, it, one of these was, was sighted just outside of his, his office. So I would just make a point of hovering around there, apparently reading the, the headlines. And I'd make sure I knew from his register of interests what his, what, um, his external interests were and what his policy areas of interest were. And then if I ever saw a headline and he was around,

• 24:55Speaker 03

  I would draw his attention to that headline if it was something that I knew he'd be interested in. And eventually, as a result of this, we got chatting. And I said to him, look, you, you know, do you, do you need a researcher? And he said, well, I don't, but I do need a speechwriter. So I became Winston Churchill's speechwriter.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Um, and I have to say, I wasn't terribly good at it, actually. I didn't really know at that point about how to con- construct a speech. I certainly didn't really know how to construct uh, an effective parliamentary speech. And there's somewhere, I don't know if you know, the, the, there's a, a record of parliamentary proceedings in the UK called Hansard. Um, and there's somewhere, uh, in my collection of books, a Ha- a Hansard from the day when Winston delivered one of my speeches. And the response from his opposite number was, uh, I don't know where the honourable gentleman, uh, I don't know who writes the honourable gentleman's speeches for him, but if I were him, I'd look for a new one. And that was me. Terribly insulting. Um.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Winston sent me a copy of that, but he laughed about it and said, you know, actually, that, that's just the, the cussing for us, the jousting of parliamentary procedure. And we became quite good friends. To the extent that I was able to put down Winston Churchill MP as one of my referees. And this was, because my boss at Casnov, a lovely chap called John, um, said to me at some point, as we were sat opposite each other, just chatting idly, he said, well, I had to offer you a job anyway. And I said, well, why is that? And he said, because I wanted to phone the House of Commons and ask to speak to Winston Churchill. And I like to think he was joking, but um maybe not.

• 26:39Jack Murphy?

  Well.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  And that but it was enough to get me into the city and then it sort of gave me it gave me a springboard.

• 26:44Jack Murphy?

  The the the way you describe it, you know, is like, you know, you maybe you were scheming or manipulating. But again, I I think that, you know, when when you come from poverty, it the other term you would use to describe that is surviving. Right. And you had seen from a very young age what happens, you know, that not everybody makes it. And I imagine that must have been a tremendous motivator uh for you when you were young.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  It's certainly incentivizing to know that you have uh to you don't have that network of social capital to rely on.

• 27:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Uh I think a lot of people don't understand the importance of that. I mean, I I quite fond of saying it. You know, what you know is important, but it's not just what you know, it's who you know. Uh and we can control both bits of that equation, you know, you can control who you know.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  And you can control what you know. So of course, I would say to all young people. Focus on getting the best uh education you can, but don't neglect the other side of it. Kind of build that network of alliances and and people are often surprised that. You know, those who have successful in life often want to give back. And so this isn't this isn't manipulative. I don't think it's a case of um exploiting somebody. Asking for help, asking for support is not exploitation. If you're clear about what you're doing. Um.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Uh many people, Winston was one of these, Lord Restham. Um many people in his position are quite keen to have the opportunity to to give a helping hand to younger people. So I always say, just, you know, ask, don't be afraid to ask, because the worst you can get is a no.

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• 33:51Speaker 03

  And often, you won't get a no. You'll get enthusiastic, wholehearted support. And if you think about it, in a way, that's giving something, that's a mutually beneficial relationship. Because I know it now, as a, I've got to the stage in my life where people will ask me to talk to their friends' children about their careers.

• 34:11Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  And it gives me an enormous sense of fulfillment, you know, to do that, to help a young person. It's partly why I wrote the book. It's, I mean, I think it's a book that anybody will benefit from at any stage in their life. But Charles Cumming, the spy writer, said of it that he wished, it was the book that he wished he'd had to hand when he was first embarking on his career. And I'd say, part of the point of this book is to help younger people to realize the importance of alliance building, to realize the importance of building social capital. It's something which, incidentally, your vice president's very keen on. He speaks about it on a number of occasions, the importance

• 34:54Speaker 03

  of social capital in respect of his own journey from rural Ohio.

• 35:00Jack Murphy?

  Guess it worked for him.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  It seems to have done, doesn't it? Absolutely.

• 35:05Jack Murphy?

  So when you go to work in the city of London, I'm picturing in my mind a Frederick Forsyth novel.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 35:15Jack Murphy?

  What was it really like?

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Actually, funnily enough, I had cause to reread because I did another podcast, again with True Spies, on, this one hasn't been released yet, but it's coming out shortly, and it's about a story of mine when I was invited to

• 35:35Speaker 03

  help plot a coup in a West African republic.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  And of course, I wasn't able to do that, and I wasn't going to do that. And actually, I don't know how to plot a coup, it's not something I've ever done. But I did have a copy on my Kindle of Freddie Forsyth's Dogs of War.

• 35:50Jack Murphy?

  Great book.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  It's a fantastic book. It also has many, many pages devoted to how to plot a coup.

• 35:57Jack Murphy?

  It's like a procedural, it's like a manual, step by step, this is how you do it.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. So that had been very helpful, because I was, you'll have to listen to the podcast, but I can, let me just say, without breaking the law, I was able to lean very heavily on what Freddie Forsyth had written. And Freddie is a great guy, actually. I knew him, he was the president of a club I'm a member of in London.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Sadly, I never got to tell him that story, because I think he'd have been very, very amused by it. But anyway, I digress. The important point is that in preparing for that podcast, I reread The Dogs of War, which I'm always happy to do anyway.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  And actually, your description or your suggestion that the city back in those days was a bit like the portrayal of, I think it's James Manson in the book, isn't it?

• 37:01Jack Murphy?

  I think so.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  The entrepreneur who funds the attempted coup. It was a bit like that. You know, it really was. I mean, it's a very...

• 37:18Speaker 03

  When I was working at Casanova, it was very much like a gentleman's club. You know, sort of plush furnishings and everybody talk about, well, before we started recording, we were talking about how Brits dress and we tend to dress a little, certainly if you're going to be on a podcast, you know, might put on a shirt, perhaps even a jacket, perhaps a tie. At Casanova, it was double cuff shirts with definitely no pocket on the shirt, you had to wear a tie, couldn't be too flashy. A particular cut of suit that was expected to be handmade. Everybody came across as very, very upmarket and quite old fashioned.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  So, yes, you're right in that respect. It did, and it sort of felt like there was an air of quiet power and authority in the corridors of this extraordinary stockbrokers who worked for something like 50% of the FTSE 100 or FTSE 250 companies, you know, they were renowned as power brokers. I don't think they were ever involved in any coups, as it happens, but other than economic and financial coups. But, yes, it was a remarkable place for a young man from a comprehensive school, that's

• 38:44Speaker 03

  what we call, what you would call a public school, from inner-city Birmingham, to find himself in. And it was extraordinary because I just didn't fit in, you know, I sort of turned up in a boxy suit, which I bought as cheaply as possible from a high street store.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  I had to be taken to one side by my boss because I I took my jacket off at my desk once upon a time and he said, you know, we don't, just to let you know, we don't take our jackets off at the desk. And by the way, I'm quite glad you did because it means that I've just noticed you're not wearing double cuffs. There's a cuffs on your shirt which you have to, you fold back and then you put the cuff links in. I was wearing, horror of horrors, a shirt with buttons. And that was not done. So he said, he gave me the name of a good tailor and sent me off. So there's that sort of sense of very old fashioned Britishness about it. And I really enjoyed that, actually. And but I had to do, I had

• 39:50Speaker 03

  to employ a skill which later on I came to rely on in the the intelligence world, if you like, of of being a chameleon. I had to change my accent. I had to change the things I said, not just accent, but idiom. Mm hmm. And I had to become familiar with the ways and expectations and social mores of an entirely different social group to me. You know, I'd never heard, for instance, of Val d'Isere, which is a skiing resort. When somebody left a note for one of my colleagues saying, I'll catch up with them at Val d'Isere, I had to write it down phonetically. And

• 40:34Speaker 03

  I remember, I got out of lunch, came back and everybody was gathered around this colleague's desk laughing at my note. And I said gauche. And I could have taken that to heart. But actually, I thought, well, all that's happening here is I'm being sent a message that I didn't take it as you're not welcome, but you need to learn to present differently. And that's where I developed the idea of cover in the book. I talk about cover not necessarily being about lying about who you are, but presenting that version of yourself that fits.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  In the environment in which you find yourself or aligns with the person that you're seeking to recruit as an ally or in the intelligence world as an agent. It's not, I mean, of course, cover's important in the sense of you have to pretend to be XYZ for defensive reasons, sometimes to make yourself attractive to the other person. But all of that's actually reasonably technical. The really important part of cover is how you present your personality. And in a sense, it's a bit like acting.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  You have to adopt a personality which is going to be attractive to your target. And again, that sounds like it's being manipulative, it sounds like it's being deceitful. But I don't look at it like that. You know, we're all very, very complicated creatures. Our personalities are like Rubik's cubes and you can adjust them, you can manipulate them to present many, many different faces. And what makes one more genuine than another? You know, we're getting into philosophical questions here. I don't think one is more genuine than another. You know, this is me. As much as somebody who speaks like this, which is the accent that I would have had

• 42:33Speaker 03

  when I was talking, when I was at home as a young lad, you know, because I'm from Birmingham and I had a Birmingham accent. Now, is that version of me the genuine me or is this version of me the genuine me? The answer is both.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  And so, again, you know, as I talk throughout the book about the importance of not being, not using your skills in a manipulative way. And I don't think they are per se manipulative. It's not manipulative to take the best of yourself or to take those aspects of yourself that make you attractive to another person.

• 43:10Jack Murphy?

  But presumably you didn't find everything you were looking for in finance. You still had this interest in politics and international affairs and so on. So what, how did you make the jump from finance to not working for the British intelligence services?

• 43:28Speaker 03

  Nicely put. So I, I realised I had a problem in the financial world when somebody asked me to explain a swaps curve and I didn't have a clue. And I, and I realised, I mean, they're quite important, swaps curves. I still don't have a clue.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  More important, I could have, I could have probably fudged it. More importantly, I realised I didn't care. I just wasn't in the least bit interested about what a swaps curve was. And it made me sit down and think, my, my heavens, I've been spending the past early years of my twenties thinking about gilt yields and thinking about the, um, the dividends on stocks. And I, I mean, you can probably tell, it's making me wince just thinking about it. You know, a few movements and a few basis points movements in gilt yields or a 50% cut in interest rates.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  What effect does that have on the earnings ratios? I, I don't care. And I really, you know, I realised after a few years of this that I was in totally the wrong job. So I thought, what, what's keeping me here? What am I doing that I enjoy about this? And I thought, it's the travel. It's the travel and it's the, the interest in trying to work out how politics intersects with the markets. Okay, that bit is quite interesting, but I'm more interested in the politics than I am in the markets. So I thought, what's the best thing I can do?

• 45:06Speaker 03

  And the answer was fairly obviously to apply for the diplomatic service.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  So I did that and was successful and along the way was invited to join a fairly specialised branch of it.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Um, which was a great period of my life. Um, you know, I I did some extraordinary things. I I'm going to draw a bit of a veil over what those were and where they were for for for good reasons that we discussed. Um, but there's plenty of other stuff to get our teeth into when we get into the private sector work. Um, but ultimately, um, I had a crisis of conscience over the Iraq war in the early 2000s. I found myself unable to support the war in itself. But more important than that, I was appalled at the manipulation

• 46:04Speaker 03

  of intelligence data by a man called Alastair Campbell, who was then very senior in um Number 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister's Office. The manipulation of intelligence to make a case for war, I just thought was absolutely unconscionable. I thought the politicization of the intelligence services was a tragedy. And I think the fact that one or two quite senior people in the intelligence services back then were complicit, I think they were perhaps drawn into relationships with um Alastair Campbell and uh the the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, which were not necessarily appropriate, because they were flattered to be seen to, they were like moths to a lamp.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  The proximity to power. Flapping around, the proximity to power. And and then we had this horrific event of uh a man called David Kelly, Dr. David Kelly, who was a weapons inspector. It took his life. Worked in the intelligence, it took his life. And that had a profound impact on me because um, you know, I've always had a very difficult relationship with suicide because of my the loss of my sister. Uh, and um, I remember I was in a city in Africa.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Working for government at the time, seeing that news and the sensation of nausea spreading across me and a stark realisation at that point that I could no longer continue to work for that government or for any service or service adjacent to it. That was complicit in the events leading up to the suicide of a man that I think had great integrity and great intellect, was bullied, harassed and driven to his death by some very deeply unpleasant people. And that was a terrible thing to have to do, you know, and I'll be completely honest,

• 48:05Speaker 03

  it had the most astonishing effects on my life. My marriage broke down shortly afterwards. I'm very, I'm ready to say that I suffered some emotional distress as a result of it. I was without work, my marriage had fallen apart, so I walked out on the job that I was both good at and enjoyed. And I look back on it and I think, did you make a stupid error? Could you have been very senior in a very interesting service now? What did I turn my back on all that for?

• 48:44Speaker 03

  And then I remind myself that it was a shameful episode in British international relations and British intelligence work. And I don't regret for a moment walking out on it, actually.

• 49:03Jack Murphy?

  Were you personally drawn into, you know, this conflict in the Middle East?

• 49:09Speaker 03

  No, I won't go into too much detail about what it is that led me to conclude that there had been a quite unacceptable. Um, manipulation, uh, deceit, gaslighting.

• 49:25Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Essentially of the public, the British public. Um, and what led me to the conclusion that certain agencies have been complicit in that. I can't go into the detail of that and it wouldn't be right for me to do so. But suffice to say, I think I've been vindicated.

• 49:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Every, every sensible um analysis and uh every um inquiry that's been conducted since then um has vindicated my position. And I, I imagine to a certain extent that lessons have been learned and changes have been made. But the fact of the matter is, it, it was a shameful, shameful episode in British history. And a very good man lost his life as a result of it. Um harassed, as I say, harassed and intimidated to death by some extremely unpleasant characters and senior in British government. And you know, if you, if you lose confidence in your government and you're working for

• 50:25Speaker 03

  an organization that serves that government in very, um, sometimes in very dangerous and awkward places, I think you really don't, you owe it to yourself to resign. So I did.

• 50:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Um, how was that taken? I mean, did you were like pretty out about, you know, I'm resigning because of um, you know, a conscientious objector status?

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Uh, I think it was a combination of um disappointment and anger, really. You know, there was, um, I think there was a concern that I was going to

• 51:03Speaker 03

  tell a story to the press which would have.

• 51:06Jack Murphy?

  Of course.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Caused awkwardness.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Uh, is, there was another person who resigned from a related service called Catherine Gunn.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  And and she she was working for GCHQ um and she was prosecuted or they they started the process prosecution for her because she she had objected to the use of GCHQ to to listen into to spy on uh members of the United Nations Security Council who were allies of the UK.

• 51:39Jack Murphy?

  Did they make a movie about that?

• 51:41Speaker 03

  They did indeed.

• 51:43Jack Murphy?

  Okay, okay.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  I know it sounds familiar. I can't remember the name of the movie, um but it's it's very it's well worth watching. Um but I was in touch with Catherine for a short while afterwards, we agreed after a while that it probably didn't make much sense for us to maintain contact, but I respected her decision, but they put her through hell. You know, they the process is the punishment, as they say, and the process there was to stand her up in court before eventually the decision was taken to drop all charges. But by that point, you can imagine the emotional impact it had and I'd already gone through severe emotional um trauma of making the decision to leave. I wasn't going to compound that at that point.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  But, you know, um. I can't speak for the institution or or people within it, but I I I think there was sort of a general sense that's uh um. They would be very keen to remind me of my obligations under the Official Secrets Act and other surviving obligations of confidentiality and indeed remain so to this day.

• 52:51Jack Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  Uh these are conversations and letters I've had many times. So um but, you know, my position was I resigned on a matter of conscience. I would not say anything that would would compromise national security. I don't think I need to. Um but the fact of my resigning on that that matter of conscience, I think I am quite entitled to talk about. And actually, you know, it opened up a very much more fulfilling and interesting chapter of my life.

• 53:18Jack Murphy?

  Uh before we move on to that, I I I just want to ask you if there's any kind of stories you can tell, spy stories, if you will. Um I know you can't mention countries, dates, certainly not names, but in in vague terms, are there any interesting ones that you'd be able to share?

• 53:36Speaker 03

  From government service, I'm afraid not really, that's that's that's very difficult. But the but the next stage of my career where I worked in private intelligence. Um, there's there's a lot more that I can share.

• 53:47Jack Murphy?

  Okay, okay. Um, so you go through this, it sounds like a rather traumatic experience resigning from uh uh from governmental service. Um, how did you land in corporate intelligence? That that's a whole different world.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  It is and it isn't. Um.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  And the I I I was sort of assisted by an outplacement officer, if you like, though that wasn't the phrase, the the term they used, um, into working for a national, an international bank as head of intelligence.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Um, in a role that entailed some liaison with government agencies.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  So that was sort of the first step out. And from there, of course, I was exposed to this whole new world of private intelligence, private security. Um.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Because quite a lot of the the companies that worked in that area would uh minister to me, if you like, they or they would, they would, um. You know, they they they would see me as a potential client and court me and cultivate me. So I met, I I got to know the the range of providers and eventually, um, cut a long story short, Tim Spicer became aware that I was in the private sector. He liked my background. Um, and he asked for one of his staff who knew me to sound me out about whether I wanted to become, would like to become his head of Africa.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  And, um.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  I went for an interview with him. Um, I spent a whole night swat swatting up on every major subject I could think of relating to Africa and private security in those days. And there was quite a lot of them. Uh getting on top of the politics of the key African countries, knowing who was who. So I was exhausted, but stocked up on data and information as I walked into the interview with Tim. Um he sat at the far end of a very long office, waved me to a sofa. Tapped away on his computer for a bit, finished what he was doing, then turned to me and he said, are you Julian Fisher? And I said, I am. And he said, good, I think we've decided to give you a job. So if you go out, Dominic will sort out the paperwork for you.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  So all of that um preparation and loss of sleep was was for nothing. But I I I told him about that just recently when I saw him at a so- social event. And he said, yeah, I'd have been able to tell. And if you weren't prepared, I'd have put you through the wringer. I think he might be right.

• 56:35Jack Murphy?

  And Ti- Tim Spicer, just for for viewers uh who aren't aware, he was a SAS officer, if I recall right, retired a colonel?

• 56:43Speaker 03

  Uh left on a colonel. Um had a background in uh the Welsh Guards, I think I'm right in saying. Um maybe my my my memory may be playing tricks there. But he had a a very fine military background. Um and then when he moved into the private sector, was involved in some of the early corporatized private security capabilities, organizations. So in particular, he worked for a company called Sunline. A private military company or private security company, depending on how you want to cast it. Uh Sunline was famous for its uh its work in Sierra Leone,

• 57:29Speaker 03

  where it helped the elected but ousted government to fight back against the rebels. And that's why earlier on I mentioned, you know, some of the good things that private soldiers have done. And I count that as a a very clear example, actually. Um they were doing work that, for whatever reason, the traditional armies were not given the green light to do under the um under the governments of the day. But um they certainly took credit for it all later on. Um but didn't give sufficient credit to the likes of Tim and his and his colleagues in uh in Sunline.

• 58:12Speaker 03

  He then went on, in fact, they persecuted him to a certain extent because the questions were raised about whether or not UN arms embargoes have been broken, breached by private military work in Sierra Leone. And he was made the fall guy to a certain extent in some of the legal wranglings about all of that. And I think in the, unfortunately, amidst all that noise, what got missed was that he and his colleagues had done something extraordinary, which was supporting the democratically elected president to fight back against a really rather

• 58:57Speaker 03

  evil rebel group. And I think it's, I just think it's unfortunate that those things aren't recognised more readily. But Tim went on then to set up Aegis Defence Services, which was the company I joined. And Aegis was famous for winning what was then the biggest single private security contract. And it was issued by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and it was to provide security support and intelligence support to agencies involved

• 59:36Speaker 03

  in the reconstruction of Iraq. So having resigned over the war in Iraq, I rather ironically ended up working for a major beneficiary of the war in Iraq. And people occasionally have said to me, didn't that make you feel uncomfortable? And I'm like, well, no, because I resigned over the destruction of the country and I'm working for somebody who's involved, again, without adequate recognition, in helping to make the lives of ordinary Iraqis better. What could possibly be wrong with that? And again, you know, we look at the stories from Iraq in those days and actions of organisations like Blackwater, which

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  in one or two cases were highly controversial. But there are stories about people that I heard working for Aegis who...

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Would throw themselves on IEDs to protect their clients and suffer mortal injuries. And similar acts of heroism, all of which are unrecognized and unremarked on. I think that's terribly, terribly sad. So I'm proud of the fact that I worked for Tim. I'm full of admiration for him. I'm full of admiration for what Egypt's Defence Services did. But he was up against a lot of, a lot of opposition, political opposition, both in the UK and in the US.

• 1:01:05Jack Murphy?

  Why do you, why do you think that is?

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  He was involved in a controversy in Northern Ireland where he stood by a couple of his men who had shot a suspected terrorist and were subsequently tried for it. And Tim stood by them as their officer commanding, as, as was his duty, as sort of this military duty. But certain, certain stripes of political opinion in the US were disinclined to look favorably upon his actions, I suppose, like that. And so they lobbied against his company being given this huge contract. I think there was also a little bit of annoyance that the

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  contract had gone to a UK-based company rather than a US-based company.

• 1:01:58Jack Murphy?

  I can see that.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  One can always, always ask what the real motivation for some of the lobbying against him was. But even in the UK, you know, he, this is a man who should have been invited to Number Ten and fated by our Prime Minister for creating a company almost from scratch that then went on to work with one of the, one of the best armies, the best army in the world, to re, to undo the damage or help to undo the damage of that conflict. But far from being fated, he, he was. Politically, he had he had opponents, and I think that's very, very sad.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  But I wasn't involved in the Iraq side at all. He asked me to come in as as his head of Africa.

• 1:02:48Jack Murphy?

  Tell us about that about so this is I'm guessing mid two thousands at this point.

• 1:02:56Jack Murphy?

  What was the work situation like in in Africa at the time?

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Well, there was lots going on. And that's that's fair to say. If you remember, the conflict in Congo had recently come to an end. And that had been called the

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  had been referred to as Africa's Third World War because of so much death and destruction there. And I had my own experience there, actually. Later on, this was after I'd finished working for Tim. But I'll tell you a quick story about my adventures in Kinshasa, shall I? And again, this this actually touches on the use of cover.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  So, as I say,

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  the Congo had been this at the heart of a regional conflict which had drawn in countries around it, including Zimbabwe and Uganda, Rwanda.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  And the fighting had been very intense, particularly in the east of the country. And I was approached by a client, a mining sector client, that wanted somebody to go on the ground to get ground truth intelligence to assess whether or not they could recommence their operations in the east of the country.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  So

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  I was instructed to do this work and had to give fairly careful thought about how do I, as a civilian, without government backing, in a broadly with an intelligence remit, go and get this intelligence in the in the east of Africa. And I said, well, I need an ally, don't I? So I flew to Kinshasa via Johannesburg and

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  Those of your listeners who are familiar with geography of Africa will realise that Kinshasa is about as far away from east of Congo as you can get, it's on the western coast in fact. But I had good reason to go there because I was hoping to catch up with, I was hoping to work with a friend of mine who was a former Congolese soldier and had been appointed to what was called the Transitional National Assembly, that was their interim parliament.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  And he and I had had a conversation and we'd agreed that I would fly to Kinshasa and that we would then fly together to the east where he would introduce me to a number of sources and I could conduct on the ground intelligence debriefs. So that was the plan.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  I arrived in Kinshasa, which was a challenging place to be, managed to get myself through the airport without having too much, too many of my belongings and too much of my money extracted from me, spent a bit of an uncomfortable night in a local hotel, fending off the attentions of...

• 1:06:03Jack Murphy?

  The local gals?

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  But the oldest profession in the world.

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  And

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  following day I went to the Palais de Perp, as I, as agreed, to meet my friend, only to find it absolutely deserted. And the Palais, sorry, the Palais was where the Transitional National Assembly would meet, so the parliamentary centre, horrible Chinese construction, which reminded me of the school that I first went to when I was 11 years old, sort of 1960s prefab construction. But I was surprised to find it completely deserted and the doors were open, which I thought was a bit odd. You know, this important government centre, no, as far as I could see, no restrictions on entry and exit, no security anywhere.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  So I went in and sort of wandered around the, these deserted corridors before realising, you know, there was absolutely no way that I was going to find anybody who could help me to locate where my friend was.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  So I had a very rudimentary mobile phone, we were talking about the sort of Nokia that can make phone calls and nothing else. But back in those days, again, it's fair to say that the signal wasn't very strong in the Congo, so I was struggling to get through, I was trying to phone my chum, my contact. And I had my head down as I pushed my way out the door, and then suddenly I felt a blow to the side of my head. I dropped the phone, which went skidding across the tarmac, and I looked up into the barrel of an AK-47, and suddenly realised that there was security around, and I was surrounded by it.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  It was a group of six, seven, something like that, very angry soldiers who wanted to know A, what I was doing, A, B, who I was, and C, who I was spying for, you know, so the whole thing was very, very uncomfortable. They just hit on me with my phone, now somewhere over there, smashed on the ground. And so I had to think quite fast, and I thought, well, what about, what do I say about this? You know, because if I say to them, look, I'm here to go to the eastern Congo and get

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  intelligence on the state of the war, which had recently ended, so, you know, but there was still lots of conflict going on, but there was a peace deal in place, effectively. But if I say that my job is to go and gather that intelligence, you know, this isn't going to help. Right. They're not going to, they're not going, exactly, they're not going to conclude that that makes me unthreatening. So.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  It so happens that the night before, sorry, two nights before, when I'd been in Johannesburg en route, I'd stayed in a lovely hotel somewhere in Sandton, which is a very upmarket part of Johannesburg. And I met this chap who turned out to have been the head of African government relations for a very major international consulting firm. And very interesting chap, we'd had a few drinks and the end of the evening, we'd swapped cards. And I was wearing a jacket because, you know, Brits abroad in hot countries always wear a jacket.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  And I put his card in my top pocket, in my jacket pocket, and I happened to have the same jacket on. So I thought, ah, okay, I'm going to be the head of African government relations for this major consulting company for the purposes of this very specific conflict or dilemma. So I told the guy who was still waving his gun at me, the chap in charge. And I say in charge very loosely, and I'm not sure there was a great deal of command and control going on here.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  They were all fairly high or drunk or whatever. But anyway, I told him that I was, I'd been, I was working for a company that had been instructed to work with the military in the Congo for the peace period to establish how their terms and conditions and salaries could be improved.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  And of course, what that did was was play into their motivations. So I said that my my role was to interview as many people from the army as I possibly could, so that they could tell me what needed to be done to improve their day to day existence and to improve their salaries. And of course, that's a great motivator for them, isn't it? So suddenly, I think, OK, we're pointing a gun at this guy who's going to be reporting to the president and potentially can help us to, you know, improve our rations and accommodation and salary. But there was still a lot of suspicion.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  So the the lead character said to me, the chap in charge said to me, well, look, how do I know you're telling the truth? I said, I'll give you my business card. And as I say, it happens, I still have the business card of my card, the chap I'd met in Joburg in my jacket pocket, and I handed it over to him. And that was enough, you know, it was a, and this is one of the interesting things about cover when it comes to defensive cover. Quite often, very small amounts of ephemera are sufficient to convince people that what you're telling them is true.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  And a business card, you know, is probably the most flimsy evidence of of your identity and background that you can think of, but it works. It works partly because people don't, and I think this is a universal human trait, we don't expect to be lied to, actually. We may be suspicious, but we don't expect to be lied to, and we're quite pleased when it, proof is off.

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• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  to us that somebody is who that they that they say they are. And we see this even where, again, I don't want to put ideas into people's heads, but you know, we see it with criminals who will manage to black their way into buildings just by wearing a yellow high vis jacket because they look official. They look like they're doing something. They look like they have got a reason to be there.

• 1:14:55Jack Murphy?

  Carry around a clipboard.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  And absolutely, all of that sort of stuff. And so I was, I was very lucky in that I had the card with me, but I think actually it wasn't that I hadn't formed in my mind some idea of how I would deal with the question of what are you doing here? I didn't expect it to be in quite such immediately challenging circumstances, but.

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  I was ready to default to a use of cover. And in that particular case, the cover was twofold, wasn't it? It was a defensive cover, by which I mean, you know, this is, this is, here's my reason to be here. Here's the business card.

• 1:15:37Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it makes sense for a white guy to be there doing that.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Exactly. But there was also what I call an offensive cover. And what I mean by that is, what is it about what you're telling that person that's going to motivate them to engage with you? What's going to draw them to you? And so my being able to say that I was going to work with them to get their views on

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  how to improve their terms and conditions and salaries was a strong motivation for them.

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  And that's what I mean by offensive cover. And it worked because we then sat down. I would also routinely carry a pack of cigarettes with me in circumstances like that to, to work on the reciprocity principle. So I offered round cigarettes, which sort of creates that sense of reciprocal obligation. And we got chatting partly about terms and conditions, which of course I wasn't even vaguely interested in. But also they had recently returned from their tours of duty in the east of the country. So they were able to give me a fairly good operating picture, even before I went in there.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  And it was a valuable debriefing session in its own right. So that was the offensive aspect to the cover. The, incidentally, the reason I didn't find my friend in the Transitional National Assembly Building in the Palais de Pap is because I'd got the week wrong. He'd understood, so when I said last and then prochaine, I meant this coming week. And he understood from that phrase, the week after next. It's off, it's, it's actually a fairly common confusion. So it turned out that he wasn't even in the country.

• 1:17:24Jack Murphy?

  Uh, so I have to ask you about the the Tim Spicer stuff cruising around Africa.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:17:33Jack Murphy?

  I read I read that book, The Wongaku, years ago. Like, I gotta get what you know about the the background behind all of that.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  Well, Tim wasn't involved in the Wongaku, of course. And he he's been asked about it, and people have seen that he was, but he but he wasn't.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  I mean, that is, that's an extraordinary story. For me, the most important part of that story, and can I assume that your listeners will broadly understand what we mean by the Wongaku? Or should I outline what it was?

• 1:18:07Jack Murphy?

  Maybe just briefly explain. I believe it was in 2004, there was a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea that was allegedly plotted in the UK, it sounds like, mostly.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Um, it's all a bit Wild Geese, if you've seen that movie.

• 1:18:22Jack Murphy?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  If not, I recommend it. You know, so sort of coming out of boardrooms, in theory, that that nexus between commercial interests in resources and military capability. Brilliant film, Wild Geese, I recommend it to you.

• 1:18:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  And

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  the idea was to remove the highly dictatorial leader of Equatorial Guinea, Obiang. And it was the the coup was actually plotted between London and Cape Town. And it involved somebody who was a who was a very good friend of Tim's, called Simon Mann. He's now no longer with us. And perhaps more controversially, it involved the son of the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

• 1:19:24Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  Mark Thatcher, whose former house, I gather, I was in Cape Town earlier this year, and his former property is on sale down there, as it happens. If anybody is in the market for a palatial, palatial building in the

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  Hru Konstancia region of Cape Town, very beautiful part of Cape Town. Anyway, it's a bit by the by.

• 1:19:54Speaker 03

  The coup was plotted in London and in Cape Town. And for reasons which had never really been entirely clear to me. It was decided to use Harare in Zimbabwe as a stopping point for their airframe to collect weapons. And I just literally can't think of a worse place to have chosen. I know a bit about Zimbabwe.

• 1:20:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, Mugabe was still in charge at the time. That was not a great idea.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  This was, this was not a clever idea. You know, they, they, it was a febrile, suspicious

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  environment in which the CIO, the Central Intelligence Organisation, was incredibly active. There may have been good logistical reasons to to use Harare, but I just can't really see them.

• 1:20:47Jack Murphy?

  They, they probably thought they had bribed off the right person.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  But that's right, but they probably in the process, I think the understanding is that they had inadvertently bribed a CIO officer. Who was entrapping, I think something like that. It's a long time since I've read the Wongaku, but you know, it, it, I, I'm, to this day, I'm just amazed that they chose Harare. In any case, they did. And of course, it went spectacularly wrong. And they were, Mal and his team were arrested on the tarmac in Harare, imprisoned there for a while, but also then ultimately extradited to the tender mercers of President Obiang in Ektoria, Guinea.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  And where they were in prison for some years. Until Simon cut a deal and became a security advisor to the president. In a neat twist of, I suppose, gamekeeper terms poacher.

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  For me, that was the point at which the, the.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  Era of the mercenary, rather than the private security or private military contractor, came to a definitive end.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  And I think it's interesting to reflect, isn't it? That I don't think there's been any high profile case since then of attempted coups

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  led by third party military figures in Africa. And so the question arises of what is it? What's changed? You know, because there was a period from the 1960s through to certainly the late latter end of the last century, when coup activity, mercenary activity was fairly common. Actually, some of it was implicitly endorsed on a deniable basis by governments. Some of it wasn't.

• 1:22:54Speaker 03

  And there were some very high profile figures involved in all of that, quite renowned,

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  the likes of Bob Denar.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  And then suddenly it stopped. And you've got a question, it's an interesting question as to why it did. You know, why, why has all of that type of ventureism come to halt? And I think the answer is better intelligence generally, actually better, better intelligence. It's more difficult now to disguise flows of money or to buy arms or to communicate with a wider group of suppliers and boots on the ground.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  Logistical support, all of that. You know, you've got a, you've got a, when you think about how relatively easy it is now to track the whereabouts of airframes, to track where money is going, reporting requirements on banks, an easier ability to track people's whereabouts through mobile phones.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  An enhanced capability to intercept communication. I think it all of that spelled an end to the era of mercenary adventurism.

• 1:24:12Jack Murphy?

  I have to think that there's some economics involved as well, that there's like a more mature corporate model came about, which saw security contractors supporting governments rather than overthrowing them, and that there was a lot more money to be made in that reconstruction or security for a sitting government. If you get a training contract to train soldiers in Libya, there's a lot of money there, and these mercenary adventures go wrong like nine times out of 10.

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right, exactly. So why take the risk if you can actually be a semi-official arm of government? And you're absolutely right, because you know, people like Even Barlow, who you've interviewed, were of course setting up the likes of executive outcomes to do exactly that, which is to be more legitimate arms of government. And Aegis Defence Services was effectively working as an arm of the US Army. That's the reality of the situation. And so, both from a legal footing and from a moral footing, it's much easier to justify. And from a risk management perspective, what would you rather do?

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  To fly in with a band of merry men and try to overthrow an insane dictator on the potential promise of funds when you've finally managed to get the resources out of the ground? Or take very highly paid work from Western governments where you know the money's going to hit your bank account? I mean, it's a bit of a no brainer, isn't it? So, I mean, you know, I'm not, I don't want to romanticize the era of mercenary activity, but let's put it this way, I don't think...

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  Blackwater, Aegis, or any of the others, uh, will be inspiring films like The Wild Geese, or even books like Dogs of War.

• 1:26:08Jack Murphy?

  And, and some, some of it too, I, I imagine, has to do with the Cold War political climate, where, you know, in, in the case of Mike Horr, the CIA was kind of in bed with him in Five Commando and sending them into the Congo. Um, so there's those sorts of like Cold War dynamics that were going on as well.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  The deniability of it all was very important in those days.

• 1:26:28Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  That's right. And, um, you know, the, uh, there was a lot of proxy wars being fought across Africa, you know, whether that was in Angola or Congo or wherever. So, um, governments were quite keen to be able to distance themselves from it, but they were quite, but they were also quite keen to have some, some attempted direction over events. I mean, if you, you know, politically now, i- i- i- it would be unthinkable for governments to turn a blind eye to, or even be complicit with mercenary activity. I just don't think we can get away with that.

• 1:27:00Jack Murphy?

  Well, what, what, maybe Western governments. If you look at the Wagner Group, uh.

• 1:27:04Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. Yes, sorry. I'm sorry. I do. Yes. But that's a very, very important distinction. Good. Mercenary activity coming out of Russia particularly remains, remains a very significant, uh, feature of, of the world, particularly in parts of Africa, in fact.

• 1:27:19Jack Murphy?

  And it's, it's just as well, though, that things changed. I mean, can, can we think of any examples where a mercenary coup led to the government transitioning to a democracy? Um, I'm, I'm hard pressed to really come up with ones.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  I s- I think that, I think that that's a resounding no.

• 1:27:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. So maybe it's for the best. Uh, what, what?

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  No, I, I, I certainly think it's for the best. I mean, I, you know, it did, as I say, um, i- i- it is an era that you can romanticize.

• 1:27:51Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  Um, but the reality was, it was pretty bloody. And it was, as, it was a result of a, of a wider conflict which was being fought much more in the shadows than it, than it was in, um.

• 1:28:07Speaker 03

  Plain sight and and that's changed to to a certain extent now um. And so so it's evolved and now private military companies, of course, have got they've become bigger and bigger. They've shifted towards being more strategic and training support rather than necessarily boots on the ground. So you know, these things will continue to evolve. And who knows, there may be stories out there which are as good as dogs of war and wild geese coming out of of the activities of private military companies.

• 1:28:41Jack Murphy?

  It's a yeah, it's a far cry from uh Mike Horr and his guys landing in Seychelles undercover of being the fraternal order of froth blowers, I believe it was that they they were a group of international beer drinkers.

• 1:28:54Speaker 03

  That's the thing, isn't it? They they were just characters.

• 1:28:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  As much as anything, there's um I mean, not for nothing was Mike Horr known as Mad Mike Horr.

• 1:29:04Jack Murphy?

  Right, yeah, we had his son on the show who wrote a biography about his dad, yeah.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  I must not know that. What's it called?

• 1:29:12Jack Murphy?

  Um.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Do you happen to remember?

• 1:29:14Jack Murphy?

  The the book is the book is called My Father, the Mercenary.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  Great title.

• 1:29:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's it's a very good book. He did. He put a lot of research into it and it came out very well. And I I know Eben Barlow was at Mike Horr's 100th birthday at at the birthday party before he passed away. And I I would have loved to have heard that conversation between those two guys.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, amazing. I mean, it's it's a different age, isn't it? It really is.

• 1:29:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, so well, tell us about your more your experience uh working in Africa.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  So I I've spent many years working in Africa, but in fact decades because um when I was working for government service, I was posted to a couple of places in Africa. I was fortunate enough to be uh um sent to Zanzibar to learn Swahili.

• 1:30:03Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:30:04Speaker 03

  Um, which was which was hardly a hardship. Um, so I've sort of Africa's in my blood. And and as I say, Tim had me working as his head of Africa. And that was quite an extraordinary experience. Um.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  And after that, I set up a company called Africa Integrity Services, which I closed last year, which was a private intelligence boutique, providing support for ethical engagement in Africa. I slightly changed the approach I was taking by that point. But I really enjoyed working for Tim because there's no sentence where you have Tim Spicer and risk averse anywhere near each other, unless there's a big knot in the middle of it. So he was, you know, he was the sort of character who would send me off to do things which I think would have probably taken months to get clearance to do when I was working in government sector,

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  like flying into Somalia, pretty much the day after the fall of the Islamic Courts Union. Mm hmm. So the Islamic Courts Union was the forerunner of the terrorist group Al-Shabaab, and they had taken control of Somalia, mainly in Mogadishu and around, and run a horrible sort of Islamo-fascist government. I think their biggest mistake was to outlaw football, watching football in public. They also outlawed public dancing and so on. They were not popular.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  But the people of Somalia were not able to remove them by themselves. They relied on support from the government of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian army basically came in and removed the Islamic Courts Union to be replaced with something that was called the Transitional Federal Government. And the TFG was based in Baidoa.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  And um.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Tim wanted me to go into work with the TFG to look at how we could help to provide them with architecture for national security. I did like that. Um.

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  So I had to find a way of getting into, at that time I was based in Nairobi. And I had to find a way of getting into Baidoa, which is inland um in uh in Somalia. But there were no commercial flights, no commercial passenger flights. Um. So I got round that by heading down to Wilson Airport in Nairobi. Where I learned that there was a daily consignment of cat which was flown between. Cat is that stuff which uh is is chewed as a mild stimulant, sometimes not so mild. Um and um.

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

  Basically hitched a ride with a couple of other team members on one of these cat flights. Into um into Baidoa, where we met the incoming prime minister. And then we're driven in a convoy from Baidoa to Mogadishu. And it was an extraordinary drive uh in these what they used to call technicals. Right. That's basically a flatbed truck with an UZI nine millimeter uh mounted on the back, sort of, you know, riveted into the the flatbed of the truck. Um with child soldiers, there's this picture of me somewhere, I'll send it to you. Um surrounded by these, my security guards, who, I'm looking like a poet.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  I've wearing a white smock, so looking foppish. And apparently when when I sent the picture back to London, um that picture. And the cry went up in the ops room, oh my god, we sent a poet to Somalia by mistake.

• 1:34:23Speaker 03

  And but, you know, my view was there's no point in trying to, I'm not going to blend in.

• 1:34:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  You know, there's no point in trying to blend in, don't be ridiculous. So sort of lean into the is a looking non-threatening. That was my, that was my approach. Very much approach, actually. It's a, it's a very English approach. Please don't be offended. I don't, I don't mean this as a, to decry the, the American approach to security, but if you take convoys driving from the airport to the green zone in, in Baghdad. The American approach has sort of been bristling with arms and sort of armored cars. Whereas, uh, which is obviously very effective at one level, but oftentimes, I know Tim quite liked the idea of people just getting in the back of a sedan.

• 1:35:09Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  And, you know, just, just being as low-key as possible. And that was the approach I took. It's just a, don't, don't, don't for God's sake try to blend in because you can't for fairly obvious reasons. So just look unthreatening. Yeah, which I was anyway. We were working with the government, but of course, in a situation like that, there's so much distrust and it's a lot of clan warfare, if you like. So it was incumbent upon me to, to look as unthreatening as possible. Um, left that sort of military bearing to my colleagues. And so we drove from Baidur down to Mogadishu and it was an incredibly eventful drive. I was with a chap, I, I called him Magic.

• 1:35:55Speaker 03

  Because he seemed to just get us out of scrapes. There was one point at which we were sort of bombing along. I'm sure the driver had already chewed quite a lot of cat. And there was this mortar crater in the middle of the road, which was about, you know, half a car's size. Um, and we were headed straight forward. And I thought, oh my God, we're gonna, we're gonna go in there and we're gonna flip. And that's it. It's all over. It's game over. And there's, you know, we don't have any, no medevac arrangements, place or anything like. And I'm thinking, what the hell am I doing here? She was at that moment, she's like, what on earth am I doing here? And why didn't I phone my mum before I came home? You know, there's all those weird thoughts going through your head. But Magic just turned over, turned around and tapped the shoulder, the driver's

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  shoulder and he said, just blow the accelerator, almost in that effect. Which the driver did. And we just basically sailed over this.

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  That was one thing he could say. Then there was um.

• 1:36:53Speaker 03

  There was a lot of firing by the side of the road and a lot of commotion. Suddenly we were we were off road. Seen that we were chasing a bunch of camels because it was this huge herd of camels. Actually, we were we were chasing camel rustlers. Camel rustling is a thing in Somalia, who knew? Um but great value attached to a herd of camels. Uh and um we'd seen these bandits, probably offshoots of Al Shabab, trying to round up and and rustle this herd of camels and and our driver decided to go off. And again, Magic's like, look, I think for the sake of our guest, that we might want to get back onto the road here. So, you know, it was extraordinary. All these kids, you know, these child soldiers on the back of the

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  technical sort of jumping up and down, firing off rounds. And Magic's calm as you like, like, let's just get back onto the road and get our guests safely to Mogadishu. And then the most extraordinary thing was. Um. We went in to see the president in a place called Villa Somalia, which is a presidential uh compound in Mogadishu. And um we had a meeting with him in in the the main reception rooms, a very um Middle Eastern style, sort of low seats, sort of all down one side, both sides of the room. And then the president sat in the middle. Receiving us with grace and and tea.

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  And there came a point at which Magic just decided that we we had to go. It's just, I think we should leave him now. So and I just took it, I think he must have decided that we'd outstayed our protocol welcome from the president, which was fine because it was a courtesy call. And off we went. And as we drove away. Probably about half a mile down the road, we heard this crump of a mortar bomb. And it turned out that that mortar bomb had hit the very room in which we'd been sat about five minutes earlier. And it's almost like he had this sixth sense. And of course, well, if you think about it, the uh the Islamic Courts Union had been recently deposed from power, so they knew exactly where

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  the layout and the geography of this compound, they knew exactly what they were targeting. And they'd probably just seen a group of cars go in with white men, and white faces at that point were not very common in Somalia. Ever since the Black Hawk Down incident, if you remember that. So from nineteen ninety four all the way through to two thousand six, two thousand seven, it's quite rare to see white faces in Somalia. So they clearly were watching it, they'd obviously seen us go in. They obviously had an idea where we would be meeting the the president, and that's what they targeted, but but magic had managed to, magic is out of that, spirit is out of it before the uh before the the bomb hit.

• 1:39:44Jack Murphy?

  Did uh were you successful in drumming up some business in Somalia?

• 1:39:48Speaker 03

  Um we we we worked on the

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  uh I don't I can't, there are obviously um non-disclosure agreements in place about that, but what I can say is that we I I wrote a fairly lengthy piece on on the national security architecture such as it was. Um and I have to say

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  trying to draw up a national, a coherent national security plan for for Somalia back then and probably today is a challenge that is beyond most mortals.

• 1:40:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, we we've we've ground through like twelve transitional governments or something like that in Somalia.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's not, it's it's it's not, my view is, it is not susceptible to

• 1:40:43Speaker 03

  What we understand to be systems of governance and security and central governance. It's precipitous, it's clan-driven, um, obviously corruption is a big part of it. The, the economy is, is actually in some parts very, very healthy. Charcoal is, is a big export, for instance. Um, but it is not run according to precepts that we understand. You know, and I, I think it would be almost impossible for any Western. And I'm not saying, um, this, this is not a, a value judgment, by the way. I'm just saying, I think it's impossible for any Western advisor with, with understanding

• 1:41:24Speaker 03

  of Western intelligence, security, military protocol to go in there and apply a template. I just don't think that's possible. And, you know, hey, I'm, I'm, I'm not the first person to, to find that out, am I? As, as, as Black Hawk Down illustrated very, very effectively and very, very tragically.

• 1:41:44Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone, I want to tell you about my new novel, The Most Dangerous Man, out in June. It is a novel about a regimental reconnaissance company soldier who gets kidnapped while he's on a mission to West Africa. And when he wakes up, he finds that he is now being hunted for sport by a group of tech billionaires through the wilds of West Africa. This book is based on stories that I heard over the years about safari guides taking wealthy clients hunting for poachers on game reserves in Africa. I took that and I took a, a century old short story, The Most Dangerous Game, and modernized it. And the product is this book, which I think will feel contemporary and resonate with audiences today.

• 1:42:28Jack Murphy?

  Thank you and please check it out.

• 1:42:32Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:42:47Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:42:58Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone.

• 1:43:03Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:43:09Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:43:29Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, Study Mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment,

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• 1:44:38Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:44:53Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:45:04Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:45:09Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:45:15Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 1:45:35Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of

• 1:46:17Jack Murphy?

  five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:46:33Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so any other experiences in Africa you want to share?

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  I'd love to tell you the story about the coup planning, but that's there being cornered by another podcast sadly.

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  There was the case, again, this is about, I'll tell you a story about another uncomfortable experience, this time in Zimbabwe. And this is about targeting, actually. It's a story I tell in the book.

• 1:47:05Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  Because I try to find stories from my personal life and then from my professional life, which illustrate the principles that I outlined, which are the principles being the agent recruitment cycle, sort of targeting, targeting user cover, cultivation, elicitation, assessment of motivations, recruitment, debrief and detection of deception.

• 1:47:35Speaker 03

  Um, and um, use of tradecraft, secure running. So I sort of go through the

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  the nine separate skills that are involved in the recruitment of an agent and the running of an agent in a secure way. And in each of them, I tried to tell a story which is relevant for both my personal life to show how it can be applied in in non um, intelligence settings and then from from professional life. And there's one particular one, which is, I think, uh shows the power of targeting. And that's when I was in um Zimbabwe, Harare. Um, and this was shortly after the two thousand eight election, which had been particularly bloody. Um, I mean, it had been, you know, um.

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  I think it's fair to say that it was probably one of the most violent elections Zimbabwe ever had to deal with.

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  Um, and I was visiting for various reasons, but one of the things I wanted to do was to see a friend of mine, and that friend was a senior figure in ZANU PF. So ZANU PF been the ruling party in Zimbabwe. Um, and ZANU PF had its headquarters, I kid you not, on a street called Rotten Row in Harare. And then I went down to Rotten Row.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  And my friend's office was on pretty much the top floor, not quite top floors, I've said one day of this, not quite a skyscraper, but nine floors or whatever. And I went to meet him, we'd, we'd, we'd known each other of old, let's put it like that. We had a, we had a good catch up. We had tea and cake and warm fanta, all the things that you expect when meeting a senior African official.

• 1:49:35Speaker 03

  And then as I came out, I was thinking about taking the steps down because I can be a little bit claustrophobic, but the lights in the stairwell were out. So I thought, well, I'd better, I'll just jump, you know, and it's only a short uh ride in the elevator. So I waited for the elevator to arrive, doors opened, nobody in there, get in, went down one story and the doors opened, two gentlemen in suits, quite tatty suits, but suits nonetheless, got in. I thought, okay, that's good. At least I've got some company if we get trapped and I had to spend half a day here. Because let's put it like this, they wouldn't have engineers

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  out very, very quickly and electrical cutouts were quite common at that point in time. But at least I'd have some company. But then behind them intrude a group of god knows how many um ZANF youth leaguers. Now, the ZANF youth league, uh they, they, they, they use the word youth in a fairly loose sense. So it was anybody sort of under forty really. Um and they had, one of their roles, apart from, you know, organising community events and football games, was beating up the opposition. So they would often get groups of youth leaguers

• 1:51:00Speaker 03

  together to go down to opposition rallies and knock heads together. And one of their favoured weapons was um one of those curved blade um

• 1:51:11Jack Murphy?

  Uh, con jar.

• 1:51:13Speaker 03

  Pangas, yeah, which have been used, I mean, you, you see those in use of cutting hedges, but they were also very frequently used in the uh the Rwandan genocide. So they're just quite chilling uh weapon to see in somebody's hand. And there were a lot of them in the hands of these youth leaguers as they climbed it.

• 1:51:38Speaker 03

  And they were all high as kites or drunk. I could smell this evil local brew on their breath.

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  So I was like, you know, this is, I think, probably advisable if I just keep myself to myself here. I don't want to draw any attention to myself, so I sort of shrunk into the corner. Doors closed, we went down about half a floor and suddenly the weight was too much and the whole thing juddered to a halt.

• 1:52:15Speaker 03

  And then the lights went out.

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  So we were there in pitch dark, surrounded by these youth leaguers.

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  And given my claustrophobia, I thought, I just need to have some light. So I had, again, fairly rudimentary foam, but there was a little torch thing at the top of it. So I put that on just so I could see what was going on. And of course, I, in so doing, did that thing which I said I shouldn't do, which is draw attention to myself. So suddenly there's this whole group of slightly inebriated, or rather inebriated, youth leaguers, branching their pangas and looking, I mean, they weren't branching, they, the place was packed, they wouldn't have been able to brandish, but they were sort of, you know, chaining their eyes on me and wanting to know who I was and what I was doing. And it's important to understand that at this point, Britain was not well regarded

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  in Zimbabwe government circles. So in fact, we were the, we had been put up as the bogeyman. Yeah, former British colony. Politics, former British colony, all of that stuff. So there was a lot of question about what is this British man doing here? You know, are you spying? Who are you going to, you know, all this stuff, the usual stuff.

• 1:53:34Speaker 03

  And so I thought, well, okay, I need to do, I can't say I need to do, I thought I need to do what mayor taught me to do, which is to find an ally. But by this point, it was it was almost ingrained that I would look for allies that I would target. So I scanned around, of course, the two, very quickly, it occurred to me, there's only two people that I'm actually going to be able to engage with here in any meaningful way, other than conflict, and that's the two gentlemen wearing suits. And I thought also, given that they're wearing suits, they're quite likely to be quite senior, so there might be some deference shown to them. So I needed to find a way of engaging with them. And I noticed on the

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  lapel of Wallace, too, he had a little enamel badge, and it just said, United. And I worked out that that must be Manchester United. It must be sort of half a broken badge and half a badge for Manchester United. And because I knew that British soccer was immensely popular in that part of the world, and I knew that the most popular team was Manchester United. So I was able to work out that must be who we're talking about here. So I sort of looked over to him, caught his eye, and I just simply said, I had no idea whether

• 1:54:59Speaker 03

  there had been a recent game or not, but I took a gamble. I just said, how was the game the other night? And there was this like pause, everybody sort of looked at him. And then he laughed and he said, oh, yeah, it was great. But, you know, Rooney could have played better. You know, he's one of the best players in the world. And then somebody From the youth league, he goes, ah, no, no, no, it's not Rooney, Rooney's not the greatest, Ronaldo's the greatest. And suddenly, we were into a debate about something I know nothing about, which is soccer. I just learned literally nothing about it. I think, I don't think I've ever seen, maybe I might have seen a couple of matches of the World Cup or something on occasion,

• 1:55:42Speaker 03

  but it's just not something I know anything about. But it was my gamble to say, you know, tell me about the game the other night, worked, and it got the whole debate going about soccer and drew all the attention away from me. And by the time we got, we got moving again, which wasn't actually as long as I feared, it was about sort of half an hour to an hour late or so.

• 1:56:04Speaker 03

  Um, I'd actually made quite good friends with the, the guy who was wearing the United badge. And he went on to become quite, um, we stayed in touch and he became quite a powerful, useful source of mine. So that was a, that was a miniature example of using targeting in the moment. It's, and the, and the lesson in there is you're looking for something which matters to somebody else on which you can engage them. And the really key point is you don't necessarily, you don't have to be an expert. Because guess what? People who are experts on their subjects that fascinate them are very happy to tell you their view.

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  So you can spark a conversation. If you've got your targeting done right, you can come, you can win a, um, win an ally, win over an ally relatively easily by appealing to their areas of interest and asking them to educate you.

• 1:57:01Speaker 03

  And that's something which I found fairly common across Africa, actually. You know, there, there's a, Africa is a very, very diverse place. So I always hesitate to, um, generalize. But I think I'm right to say generally Africans are incredibly welcoming and they are very eager usually to help. Of course, it's not always the case and sometimes it goes very badly wrong.

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  But I found appealing finding out what your interlocutor is interested in and asking them to talk to you about it is a very powerful technique, not just in Africa, of course, but it seemed to work particularly powerfully in Africa because of that sense of wanting to educate, wanting to help, wanting to support and wanting to be welcoming.

• 1:57:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I think the most full I have ever been in my life was in West Africa. They like to feed you.

• 1:58:01Speaker 03

  Yes, they sure do. And it's, it's, I, I managed the time I've had to make excuses for not finishing a plate of food, which would have probably have fed my entire family.

• 1:58:15Jack Murphy?

  Exactly.

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  And I'm talking about when there were seven of us.

• 1:58:18Jack Murphy?

  Uh, so you did this for a while. You had your own firm for a while, uh, which you said you had shut down. Um, what was sort of the next step in, in your life? And, and how did this book Think Like a Spy come about?

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  Well, the, the book came about mainly because, um, I, I've, I've had it in mind for some years now. And what I was very struck by was working in private intelligence and working in government. Many of the skills were the same, actually. And then I realized looking back that, that those skills in intelligence recruitment, agent recruitment are something which all of us use pretty much all the time, but we just don't do it in any structured way. We don't do it in any intentful way. Uh, and I think that's very sad. It's very unfortunate, especially as I think people who don't have, we talked about social capital earlier, those people who don't have a network of social capital can benefit from understanding

• 1:59:13Speaker 03

  how to build relationships. Um, and I thought, why should spies have all the fun? You know, why should they, you know, these, these are not, um, national secrets. They're not, they're not massive national security. These are techniques about relationship building, about interpersonal skills, about enhancing your self-awareness, your others' awareness and your situational awareness. That's essentially what the book is about, how to do those three things. Uh, and to turn enhancing your three awarenesses into building, enduring, um,

• 1:59:51Speaker 03

  Ethical relationships, what I call alliance, alliances, with goals allies, people who can help you to get to that next stage of your career, or whatever your, whatever happens to be your goal. You know, so I draw an equivalence between the intelligence cycle and your achievement cycle. Rather than trying to focus on the outcome in fifteen, twenty years, focus on the outcome in the next year. What do you need to be doing in the next year, the next two years, three years? Who do you need to support you in that iteration of your achievement cycle? So that's, that brings you to targeting. How do you get alongside them? How do you cultivate

• 2:00:32Speaker 03

  them? How do you recruit them to support you? What can you give them back? What are their motivations?

• 2:00:41Speaker 03

  And I thought, I've realised I've been doing it all my life, one way or another, ever since Mayer had taught me about the importance of building alliances. And so it strikes me as a very powerful set of skills for anybody to use at any stage in their life, particularly for younger people who are looking to get into the workplace for the first time. Now, recently, I've also been focusing on the

• 2:01:10Speaker 03

  the relationship between intelligence skills and leadership.

• 2:01:17Speaker 03

  Now, that, that may sound a little bit unlikely, because intelligence oftentimes involves working by yourself in the field. So what's the leadership all about? Well, John C. Maxwell, the leadership guru, said that leadership is influence, nothing more and nothing less. And if you think about what an intelligence officer is doing, persuading somebody, perhaps in a dangerous country, to become a traitor, at risk of their own freedom, potentially at risk of their own life. I can't think of a better example of influence. So it strikes me that corporate leaders, um, third sector leaders.

• 2:02:02Speaker 03

  Local leaders, politicians could all benefit from learning what the skills of intelligence relationship building are and apply those in the leadership context. Because leadership is influence and influence is right at the heart of what intelligence officers do.

• 2:02:26Jack Murphy?

  And is the book of

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  We've been, I've been, I now run occasional workshops. I don't do publicly accessible workshops at the moment, but there are plans afoot to do that.

• 2:02:41Speaker 03

  Called the Stars and Spies Leadership Programme. And this is, this is working with an actor.

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  The idea being that there's a relationship between intelligence work and acting. Because it's all about, as we were talking about, presenting that best version of yourself, stepping into a role.

• 2:03:05Speaker 03

  And by using acting skills, you can assert a presence and an authority, which is perhaps not something that feels natural to you, but is very, very powerful in the presentation to other people. So we're exploring this Stars and Spies Leadership Lab. And offer it as a private offering to corporates currently. But I will be, we will be planning to

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  offer it publicly. It's with an actor called Louise Osborne.

• 2:03:37Speaker 03

  And we will soon be, I think later this year, we will have our first publicly accessible leadership masterclass.

• 2:03:45Jack Murphy?

  And the book is available now if people want to go and read Think Like a Spy?

• 2:03:49Speaker 03

  The book is available. I'll show you again.

• 2:03:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, please.

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  It's the

• 2:03:57Speaker 03

  Think Like a Spy Master the Nine Secret Skills of Influence and Leadership. And it's now out in the US. I think it's been out since the beginning of this year. So should be available in all good bookstores and obviously on Amazon.

• 2:04:13Jack Murphy?

  Where can people find you online? I know you have a website, right?

• 2:04:18Speaker 03

  Julesfisher.com is my personal website, my author website. You can contact me through that if you'd like to. I'm not a great user of social media, but I am quite active on LinkedIn and very happy to have connection requests there.

• 2:04:32Jack Murphy?

  And for the people watching this on YouTube or listening to the podcast, we'll have links down in the description to all of those places where you can find Julian. As we wrap up here, I mean, any final thoughts, anything that you would like to talk about that we didn't get to?

• 2:04:49Speaker 03

  I just want to reiterate that point really that the, there's an idea around that spying is the preserve of a certain type of person, that people, spies are born and born in B O U R N E sense as well as born as in the B O R N sense. But actually, you know, what spying is all about, what intelligence work is all about is the use of personality, the use of human and human relationship skills, interpersonal skills. And we're all capable of enhancing those, learning them, practicing them and mastering them. And that can make a huge difference to your life. And my final thought is this.

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  We are in an age of artificial intelligence. And I believe, given the encroachments of artificial intelligence on our work life and our personal lives, compounded by the prevalence of social media and the ready access to forms of entertainment, streaming entertainment. We're in danger of losing some of those interpersonal skills. We're in danger of losing the human touch. And I think the thing that will mark out Your listeners from everybody else as we go as we hurtle into this artificial intelligence age is enhancing interpersonal skills. So, human intelligence is more vital than ever

• 2:06:16Speaker 03

  in the age of artificial intelligence. And that's what's going to make all the difference in the in the coming years.

• 2:06:23Jack Murphy?

  I think we have one viewer question for you.

• 2:06:25Speaker 04

  It's actually not a question, it's just a statement. Think Like a Spy from James. Think Like a Spy is a fantastic book for those who are working in all disciplines that demand analysis and decision making.

• 2:06:36Jack Murphy?

  Okay, you have a fan.

• 2:06:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06:39Speaker 03

  Brilliant. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

• 2:06:43Jack Murphy?

  So, Julien, thank you for coming on the podcast this morning. Really appreciate it. Well, this morning for us. And Julien Fisher is the website if you guys are looking for him. And again, we'll have links down in the description. Thanks again. And please stay in touch.

• 2:07:04Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed that. Great to speak to you, Jack.

• 2:07:07Jack Murphy?

  And all you out there, we will see you next time.

• 2:07:14Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House Podcast Newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free. And what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the Team House, on our geopolitics podcast, Eyes On, things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the high side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have coming on the show, and also filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out, we send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can find

• 2:07:59Jack Murphy?

  our newsletter at teamhospodcast.kit.com/join. Again, the website for that is teamhospodcast.kit.com/join. So we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.

• 2:08:15Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:08:29Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:08:40Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:08:45Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:08:51Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:09:11Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, Study Mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:09:39Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:10:12Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:10:27Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:10:38Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:10:43Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:10:49Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:11:09Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:11:36Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:12:13Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:12:28Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:12:39Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:12:44Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:12:50Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:13:10Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, Study Mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:13:37Speaker 06

  Cash Flow Crunch, OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:14:17Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:14:32Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to "I'm deathly allergic", in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:14:43Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:14:48Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:14:54Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:15:14Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:15:41Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses, like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:16:18Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:16:33Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:16:44Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:16:49Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:16:55Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:17:15Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:18:16Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:18:31Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:18:42Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:18:47Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:18:53Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:19:13Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  Cash Flow Crunch, OnDeck's small business line of credit, gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:20:18Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:20:33Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:20:44Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:20:49Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:20:55Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.

• 2:21:14Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  Cash Flow Crunch, OnDeck's small business line of credit, gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:22:20Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:22:34Speaker 06

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:22:45Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:22:50Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:22:56Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:23:16Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:23:44Speaker 01

  Cash Flow Crunch on deck. Small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:24:14Speaker 05

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens. Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Call anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolaire should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolaire is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolaire.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolaire. This is an advertisement for Zolaire, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 2:25:14Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:25:42Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.