is delightful to get back into that and it has been a while in because of the movie "atlas shrugged" coming out with my family, we are reading "atlas shrugged" which it is very timely i have to say for those of us who were here in washington d.c. . .

one against al qaeda and its allies in afghanistan and pakistan for going on to a decade. it recently enough the biggest victories when the cia working within the eisel team tracked osama bin laden to a safe house, identified him, rated the house and told the person who had been the top american most wanted fugitive for almost a decade but there's been failures along the way. my guest joby warrick has written a gripping narrative book about one of those setbacks in the war which was a triple agent, not a goebel agent who lead to the collette to the worst loss of life when he built up in afghanistan killing seven

agents my guess what is joby warrick he's covered intelligence for the "washington post" and has been there for more years than he wants to mention. it's good to have you here. let's talk about the title of the book. history is had double agents whether it was in the cia or the cold war. >> guest: this is historical and unusual in the sense that agents and informants, and various stripes sometimes low level who decide for whatever reason decide to sell secrets or their knowledge to an intelligence agency sometimes well-trained double agents who spent years behind the enemy lines to cultivate information and these are very special highly trained agents and the triple agent is really none of these. he's someone who came from a very much a al qaeda semper if you are sympathetic background,

and with the matured through some really unusual circumstances to become an informant for the cia while all the time being in al qaeda's campus and sympathies, he played a double game with us and made him a triple agent working for al qaeda spying for the united states. >> guest: if he's a triple agent what did each person who dealt with this, he's a doctor, a pediatrician, what did they think they were getting from him before the bombing he carried out in afghanistan? >> guest: the weekend to the intelligence agency was as a blocker for the chehab web site. he was a very radicalized young man, doctor who lived a fairly normal life and he decided to write off this very caustic internet blog under an assumed name and did this a number of years in which he criticized his own government, criticized u.s. policy and israel and was very much pro al qaeda and would

sometimes take al qaeda's words and try to interpret them and bring them down to language that ordinary young people could understand. he had a very big falling so that was his role in the beginning, someone agitating, educating and encouraging people to sort of be attracted to this course. i'm probably getting ahead of the story a little bit but because he becomes an important personality the government says this guy has to be stopped said they ended up arresting him, bringing him into custody for several days and then trying to flip him and make an informant. >> host: he was encouraging, darkly encouraging and inciting violence. >> guest: he was becoming a mouthpiece for al qaeda and was talking about becoming active himself to find a way to physically become involved in the war against the united states and against israel, but after he was arrested he made a convincing conversion and began

openly sympathetic to the jordanian intelligence agency and their goal and eventually offered his services so i can help you if you can find a way for me to try to create a rule so they were intrigued by this because they had perfect credentials, he was a well-known blogger in the chehab community and a doctor soviet skill and access and decided to give it a try. as we discovered in the course of this year long narrative, his sympathies lay with al qaeda of all time and he did not really make the conversion everyone thought he made in the early 2009. >> host: at no point early on -- were there people on the jordanian side because it was the jordanians who identified him ultimately helped work with him along with the cia. were there people who thought this is too good to be true? >> guest: a lot of people had the question in mind. there's a convergence of events that made him attractive and there was a new debt and attrition washington, january, 2009 when its begins to unfold.

a new counterterrorism tiemann washington it's above all to try to get in london that has included to the bush administration to something very high on their lists of the beginning to look around the world how can we get people into place to help accomplish this important mission. so the jordanian intelligence agency, a close ally to the united states looking around for possible candidates this guy shows up and offers his services and is appealing it was a bit of a leap of faith to think they might be able to accomplish something but in a sense there wasn't much cost involved. they could put him a place to see what he could come up with and if he gets killed or lost riverside, not much of a risk. not much lost. so for that sense i think they felt it was worth the gamble even if there were flags being raised he could potentially do some good and if not, no harm done. >> host: ultimately what made

him appealing the could take him to ayman al-zawahiri. we can come back to that in a minute, but his history was shaped in some way by his imprisonment by the egyptians where he was tortured and of course that torture radicalize these and further than it had been. do you have this sense from talking about the jordanians to the treatment takes someone who's already radical and make them more radical? >> guest: in a sense it did. i was expecting to hear he had been mistreated in the same way that ayman al-zawahiri was and it's clear that his own sort of intensity and ferocity in some ways relates to his treatment in prison when he was tortured for several years. he was brought into jordanian custody and didn't have much time with them.

it appears he wasn't tortured, and as he described later he was humiliated. if you don't help us things can happen to you in your family. from the palestinian family they are guests in jordan, kind of vulnerable to losing their visas and passports and being kicked out of the country. once you are in the sort of intelligence community you don't have much choice but to cooperate so they had them where they wanted them and he felt he didn't have -- you have to either make a pretense of helping them or truly become an agent for them and work with them. >> host: there's dc-9 found in the book striking where he is first brought and their slogan is justice has come. it's intimidating given more than ironic and more than tragic given ultimately what happens. we talked at the outset of a triple agent with the jordanians and the cia thought he was one

thing, militants thought he was something else, he had a different persona. what did his family know of him? his school life on the internet? did they know he wasn't really a doctorate he had fairly radical beliefs? >> guest: he managed to keep this from his own family. they knew what sold and felt the same way. he comes from a family that is a palestinian origin. the ancestral land is back in israel and they can look across the border to what is now cotton fields owned by an israeli conglomerate so there is a sense of justice to the family persecuted and wrong and living in exile and this is what nurtured this young man as he came up so it turns out they were also exiled from kuwait because when the father of the bomber was a young man he moved with his family and worked iraq war most were kicked out of kuwait and sent back to jordan hit and exiled and mystery to all of a world and part of the

sorted family's way of looking at the world and looking at the situation and he's seek to in this. at the same time, no one really had a sense of how far, how extreme he had become and when he decided to take on this false identity in the these costly things on the internet no one knew he was doing it. even his wife. until he was arrested nobody understood how involved in this al qaeda world he had become curious connected his wife no? the reason i ask is in the book it seems as if his father had the least kluge and within families anyone had a clue it was his wife. what did she share of the believes? >> guest: the ideology for sure. they met in college and had quite a number of things if anything she was more shrill than he was in the belief. it's kind of dillinger that when the children came into the family they get to doctors and

the oldest the named after a palestinian hijackers after a document through filmmaker who did a movie about the hijackers so they had the strong anti-israeli and american views but it's not clear at all that she knew he had this personality they created. she's never acknowledged she knew he was on the internet riding but i don't believe they share with the were doing. >> host: citizen that he was riding but as i understand it posting links to video attacks carried out against u.s. personnel in iraq and in afghanistan. is that correct? did inigo beyond text? >> guest: he had this skill at doing it. he's a very clever man and not a bad writer. most of us would probably find it off-putting but he would create links to the latest carnage being killed in iraq and

then they would have a gleeful commentary about i'm going to see roasted brains of u.s. soldiers and this and that and just kind of try to be funny and darkly humorous about it but this is kind of his style and he became probably one of the four or five most important waters in the islamic jihadists blogosphere and nobody knew who he was which was striking. >> host: nobody realized this was a pediatrician, doctor living in a median relatively secular relatively prosperous city. this will send someone who came in pakistan. so that's the bomber. let's take a step back. the personnel on the cia, the base was led by a woman named jennifer matthews, mother of three who lived in virginia not far from where we are now. she came along the way and the aftermath of this attack for a lot of criticism but let's start at the beginning. why was she chosen for what was

a very important post. >> guest: she is a remarkable character in her own right and as you said, she came under quite a bit of criticism under the attack for perhaps being a naive maybe too trusting of this informant when he was coming onto the base. but this was a woman who paid her dues and had become over a period of about a decade and a half the most knowledgeable al qaeda expert. she was there before al qaeda was known by almost anyone arguing and agitating pay more attention to these guys and after 9/11 happened, her and her entire entire branch or sent screaming. we told you so. this is a huge mistake we didn't pay attention when we should have read we should have taken al qaeda and so she became even more involved in helping capture the key al qaeda figures, the

first high-value detainee the cia capture was a guy named abu zubaydah, so she focused and helped bring the cia to find this guy and after he was captured and brought to the prison and a waterboarded she was literally there helping feed the questions and exploit the information he could provide switch isn't someone who is my eve and had no experience. what she lacked was experience in a war zone and she'd never been to iraq or afghanistan and a sense of the operational security that other officers who worked overseas take for granted and that in hindsight is one of the big phalanxes sort of not having people in place to understand what could potentially happen if someone brought a bomb onto the base and got the company of as it turns out 16 cia operatives of the same time. >> host: and she had been linked early in her career to the biggest failing arguably of recent history on the intel

side, the 9/11 attacks. she was one of the people singled out for not having done more and better coordinated with the fbi in the run-up to those attacks. >> guest: this is a very kind of something that resonated with her because as someone who did try to call attention to al qaeda before the attack she felt she had been unfairly accused of helping be part of the cia missing of the warning signs. there was an inspector general report that came out after the attack in 2004 that tried to identify how things went wrong with the cia, why they didn't see this coming and she was on a list of senior officers who had the inspector general argued known enough to be able to kind of put all the pieces together, prevent them from coming to the united states and its something that comes out in the book that hasn't been reported but she was one of the ones who was recommended for possible disciplinary review. this is something that haunted her and load defeated her to want to redeem herself and show

by going to a place like the coast leaving her family back home in virginia, sort of show overcome the stigma having been identified as someone who was part of the colossal scale year. >> it may be sort of two ways of asking the question would overcome the stigma or whatever guilt? >> guest: i think a little bit of both. maybe not so much guilt as a sense she had to expedite this sort of shadow that did come over her. only a handful of people knew she had been on the list of people recommended for possible disciplinary action and so there was important to demonstrate her dedication to the cause and finding al qaeda and it may overcome the stigma that developed. >> host: there's a scene in the book i find powerful in which she goes to see a mentor of hers, an older person she had dealt with in the agency when she's close to having decided to go to the coast and he tells her don't go, you are not the right

person for this position. >> guest: it was a tough message for her to hear. she came to the cia and the late 80's in a time there were not that many women in senior positions in throughout her life she and her colleagues felt they had overcome the sort of problem of being women they were given lower-level jobs for the most part and the kept having to prove themselves again and again and again that despite this being a boys' network still, very much a male oriented world they were as capable and if not more capable than anyone else so the idea you can't do this because you're a woman that kind of struck her in a visceral way and it's something else you have to prove is i'm a woman i can handle this job and i have -- on a woman and i weigh 120 pounds and have done a lot of weapons training doesn't preclude me from doing a great job i think she had to prove that to herself and others. >> host: it's interesting from the outside if we think about the shadow war we think of macho

men who come at night, but not just jennifer matthews and width of three of you had elizabeth hansen and as you describe her attractive but also very funny woman who could do a beavis and butt head impressions of its jennifer matthews was one end of the spectrum, elizabeth hansen, what was her background and how did she in that? >> guest: another interesting person and a symbol of the generation that's come to the cia after 9/11. people who call themselves the windows generation because they are very computer savvy and very capable and skilled at doing the kind of things the cia excels at which is bringing all kinds of different streams of information , the signals intelligence we do so well. all these communications capabilities and some of the human intelligence and bringing them together and synthesize them in a way that helps them go after particular targets.

her job was called a target her and she would be assigned a number of cases. here's some bad guys we need to go after and do whatever you need to do control all the resources you need to to help us figure out who these people are, where they are going to be and eventually put a missile on that person so this is how she came up and happened to be at the coast on this day because she helped bring together the intelligence that was lawfully going to lead the c.i.a. to go after a very important target. >> host: the way you described its striking you describe in the book how both mike hayden, leon panetta's predecessor who the new secretary defense was at the cia at the time these are men literally was power of life and death who have to make the ultimate decision on the given strike. >> guest: that's new. people don't i think appreciate that throughout the cia history it's done all kinds of intelligence gathering and all

kinds of means often breaking the rules of the other countries with this is the first time the cia basically is running a shooting war and being in charge of everyday deciding we are going to attack this target in this country using missiles over enemy territory in a way that's never really been done before and they got is that began the program right after 9/11 thought it was going to be hugely controversial, the idea of the united states using a covert operation sending these unmanned aircraft to the air space of a friendly sovereign country telling people was going to be extraordinarily controversial. it turns out it was highly effective and everybody eventually sold it as a value-added become a way to reach terrorists in their homeland but if you think about what goes on and the sort of decisions made every day by these guys it's difficult for them personally especially with leon panetta who is wrestling with this idea he's putting out a death warrant on a regular

basis for strangers that live half a world away. >> host: i was struck by your decision of the precision of the weapons. talking about robotic plants operating either from readers in the u.s. or in afghanistan but with of the ability to hit a person straight on you described the killing of one of the masseuse, one of the main taliban fighters on the pakistani side of the border where they spotted him on the rooftop and the missile hit him st.. >> guest: it literally cut him in half and this is a revelation to me even though i covered the intelligence committee and i've written about the droned strikes people don't realize this is something the cia doesn't acknowledge even exists. you can't say we are doing this and so details about how it works and how the decisions are made are very rare but as it turns out i was able to get greater access writing the story it's remarkably controlled and remarkably precise these machines have the ability to hit targets, very small targets and

far away. they can change the course of a missile after its left the aircraft, they can even digit if they decide somebody's gotten away. people spend a lot of time to come up with numbers and many people were killed accidentally because the strikes the cia is very careful record keeping because they stick around the drones' after the strike takes place to see how many bodies, and was killed and taken away, did they get the guy they were trying to get and by their own account these have been remarkably effective in getting the guys they want to get and very little collateral damage. >> host: one of the things you describe in the book is we think about the drone's we think of it from the point of view of the u.s. as a policy question, as a question of number of strikes, obviously under the obama administration to you describe what it's like for the militants on the ground to hear them buzzing overhead. they have a word they use to describe it and they look for in four murders and when they find an informer they told them.

>> guest: exactly. it's become there's no understating the sort of psychological impact this has had a physical impact disrupted al qaeda taking up leaders of the sort of idea that you can be killed at any minute while you were sleeping in your bed or driving a car has a heavy toll on the way they are thinking and the way we can act and the pakistanis, the word is bees, they think of them as buzzing bees of 20,000 feet in the air sometimes they can hear them and they almost never see them and the missiles themselves trouble at faster than the speed of sound so you never really see it coming and the great thing about the bomber he describes some of this in his own personal writing and some of his video interviews in the sense of being in a taliban safe house or compound and the fear of these working out in the dark some place with all kind capabilities they can only imagine possibly going to

kill them at any moment so it does lead to superstition and suspicion about who's doing the informing and what kind of elaborate series about how they find them and there's some special marking the use or computer chip or maybe somebody's bring something with a chemical that allows the planes to see them, so a number of cases people accused of spying for the west and executed because they are being informants, sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not. >> host: if you're one of the unfortunate in this poorly for you when you have that attitude of paranoia and pervasive fear and suspicion, when someone shows up in pakistan was their reaction? did they have the feeling of this is too weird and too good to be true? >> guest: the most extraordinary thing to me and we kept asking in the beginning how does a guy like this, someone who first full doesn't speak the local language, he speaks arabic

and english he comes from a country of jordan which is notorious in supplying informants in the past the of a great intelligence service has all kind of strikes against him of being suspicious and i think in fact i know many of the operatives involved in the case expected he would be killed and this is just another reflection of the cleverness as he is able to work between the two worlds without getting himself killed for this number of months. he managed in the beginning to make some good allies on the al qaeda side and particularly this massoud who's a key taliban figure who decided the introduction was made for them they decided he was trustworthy they need medical help, he was a doctor so he was able to supply it so he was able to sort of winep least one really important ally who took care of them and let them stay in the house and ate dinner with them and

eventually the guys around began to think that this guy is okay. until the end you can see in the riding people laughter he killed himself in a suicide attack some of them continue to be suspicious and al qaeda's official pronouncement about the suicide attack was congratulations use proven yourself to be true and worthy but that a little bit of questioning was there to the end. >> host: you note in the book he was one of the most feared militancy and pakistan wouldn't be in the same room. she thought this was someone there to bring a missile into the building. >> guest: some of that information came at the fortune of having some helpers and pakistan, journalists of good context in the taliban and brought back stories of how these discussions would take place about do we like him, do not like him is he a good guy, bad guy, and divided opinions even among the haqqani and masood thinking he's trustworthy and some not and as you say deciding is he is by i'm not going to be in the same room?

and after he was killed in the missile strike that literally clean them in half i think there's a concern they would not survive because they lost the main sponsor of the spot he was a bad guy and wanted to kill him. >> host: we will talk about it further into the show but ultimately was a harbinger of what was to come because the massoud who was killed in the family got revenge and even more violent member of the family was the one who ultimately helped plan and carry out this attack. >> guest: exactly. the cousin to the slain a tel dan leader was even more ambitious and a sort of younger guy with lots of charisma and this personal sense he needed to get revenge for the death of his cousin so he inherits this young richard a. ne and looks for a way to use him to reach out to the guys who killed his cousin and extract revenge and so they were very much involved in trying to plan what became a

massive revenge operation and after the cia base killed nine people, they claim victory. this was our way to reach back and get revenge. >> host: you describe some the in the book i've never seen before and i found a really striking that when they realize, when they suspected he had a link back of some sort to the cia this was before the killing. they decided they were going to tested effectively by having him really information to the cia they knew they wanted to kill would be in a certain car at a certain moment and then see what happened and what did happen? >> guest: this is a remarkable story, and it's one of these perhaps apocryphal tales that they were convinced it's true and several of them really to the same story to us but he wanted to make this show to prove to everyone he was trustworthy so he arranged for his driver, this faithful

dedicated guy that drove them around in the car, deposes and in a certain car at a certain time, and the information was related with the knowledge it's going to be related to the cia and let's see what happens and sure enough a missile strike takes place, the car is blown up and this man is killed which seems like a cruel act but from massoud's point of view it not only proved the bombers loyalty but also sort of showed the demonstration to his own people. he could summon the cia to commit these acts so it was a nice little showcase for him as well. >> host: he was willing to have his own person killed for that reason. >> guest: he liked to say every time someone is killed by the cia it creates more for me so it's a good story all around for him. a doctor who spoke english and arabic to grown-up his whole

life in a modern city like kuran and masood, kind of fun dish for lack of a better word, religious, extremist, living in a tribal regions in pakistan and they form very effective relationship, another relationship in the book is about barron, a cia agent and to run for lack of a better word. tell me a bit about how those to work together and what fear if anything began to develop. >> guest: those are interesting men from different backgrounds. he was a jordanian intelligence officer who is quite western by standards of his colleagues at the intelligence agency. he studied in the united states and have an internship with john kerry. >> host: big baseball fan. >> guest: he left to talk about -- you see the red sox

games and take longer trips to the mountains down to the south to the blue ridge mountains about to montreal and with an american accent became someone that the cia came to rely on because he could not only translate them on the need to but someone who understood both worlds it was a bridge between them and he became the sort of case agent and the cia partner was an american ranger who was a special forces guy, really strong, had fought in iraq and was a paramilitary officer in afghanistan and have the dead leaves skills and he came just before the story unfolds and becomes sort of the counterpart to handle this case and they develop the relationship that reflects the relationship between the cia and the jordanians were very close, the

work of the cases close together and travel around the world together to try to take down terrorism networks and very good friends. the took vacations together, sometimes they would take off and disappear a couple days' work well in the desert so the two of them were good friends and they would be sent to afghanistan for this meeting to check to see what he had. >> host: it also brings up the interesting aspect that he was a cousin of the king of jordan. >> guest: for that reason he becomes an intriguing target for al qaeda when they are deciding exact revenge. you have a man that is not only an agent of the government which they eat and the sea as hostile to everything they stand for and the peace treaty with israel in the united states but also with a cousin and a direct descendant of the royal family so this was

something very special that makes an interesting character but also somebody that al qaeda would love to see killed. >> host: he knew people would look at him differently because he was a relative of the king and he hated it. it sounds as he wanted to be known as his own reputation. >> guest: some of his friends called him the an arroyo of the royal because he had no pretenses and he pulled rank when he would get things from their friends and colleagues there's a story how he's training in the desert with his intelligence officer friends and they go hungry so he ordered a bunch of big macs to be sent out to the training place so the kind of thing to help his friends but around town he was a driver and his truck come have a couple dogs, blend in the population, very unassuming and a lot of people were surprised after he was killed to find out what only was he in intelligence officer but he didn't show it in

any way. >> host: i should say initially their plan was to come after him. they wanted to kidnap him, put him on a mock trial. >> guest: the cia began a windfall at the end but in the beginning it was all about trying to isolate this guy, get him into pakistan somehow so they could kidnap him and if they couldn't bring him a waiver going to kill him on the spot but the ideal thing was to be able to kafta and kidnapped him and have a an incredible propaganda coup on display on video for people around the world to see and execute him so that was the plan which didn't quite turn out. >> guest: to post to it wouldn't have gone well. this would have been a show trial followed by execution. when did the plan shift away from trying to just get him to the believe that maybe they

could get the team as well? >> guest: it's interesting because being the sort of point of contact with the intelligence community was arguing strongly to have a meeting take place in afghanistan and it's a reflection of his own personal desire to be a will to kidnap him and also not sacrifice himself which he isn't keen of doing to take place where they can control the circumstances, so you see this period of weeks in which he's trying to bargain for a meeting to take place someplace else and he listed the various cities shut down for various reasons and the only place they would agree to is the base they could control everything from the possibility of spying, so they insist on this happening inside the cia base and there was no give on this issue than the idea began to sort of blossom that we could

detect the cia if we could get on the basis which was in charge. >> host: it was the insistence on having the meeting on its own base. that was the seat of the destruction of that base. >> guest: exactly. it didn't have to be the closest cia base was across the pakistani hills and it had heavy security and all the people who needed to be there for the debriefing could quickly come in the geography because the cia wanted to control nobody would recognize this guy and the tree and later. >> host: you discover he communicates by e-mail and at one point there's a chapter you write about a video clip of the

doctor and ayman al-zawahiri that sets washington buzzing. why was that important and why was that reaction to that tape? >> guest: it shows how clever this al qaeda operation was and they understand us better. the are more sophisticated than we sometimes think they are and giving it some thought of a new ways to push the buttons to make them absolutely mad to meet this guy so they did a using the clever western-style tools. one was to send video that showed he'd actually gone inside the tent of al qaeda and had come face-to-face meeting with senior operatives and one video clip in particular should am standing next to this guy that the new rankings are released difficult with al qaeda but was one of the senior spiritual leaders and the worsening

together in this video a few inches apart from each other and the act of setting up the video to the cia said i'm inside the tent. i can do all kind of damage, that often very excited and there was a part to which a devotees tension is on him now. the next thing he delivers as he did become the doctor to a al-zawahiri himself. he has all kind of medical issues, diabetic, needs medicine, and so he says i've seen the sky, by the way here is all us cars he has, medical conditions, information he knows the cia will know as well and by the time i have to pick up medicine i'm doing to see him in a few weeks and this is the kind of information that delude did the cia for years. they would love to get this guy. he was number two behind bin laden and if you think about it if he said the same about bin laden it might seem fanciful, too hard to believe he had been

seen on a number of occasions. he had no medical conditions, everything made sense that he was telling the truth said it was a perfect track in their work. >> host: did not only to get serious because you write the instruction that comes down this treat this man as a trusted asset even though no american had ever met them. >> guest: only one of his team that met with him as the jordanian agent yet this was important and the potential rewards were so great the case is briefed to a number of white house officials including the president himself this was a chance to get al-zawahiri. we forget after the takedown of bin laden how long it had been and how difficult and hard

people work to get these the number one and number two. here's a chance to do it. everybody got excited and wanted it to happen as quickly as possible. >> host: you describe the briefings about this went up to the white house. >> guest: the president was told about this meeting was going to take place. it wasn't a sort of president giving advice and seeing how things should go but they told he should be informed. list one of the details you have in the book is there was such a concern for the safety for his identity that the told the afghan guards outside of the base to turn away as he drove up because they were afraid of him that as preserving his identity. >> guest: extraordinary high inside. no double agent had ever killed himself. no one had ever gotten so nobody

was looking for that to happen but on the contrary they were absolutely concerned with keeping this guy safe keeping his identity protected so what was the labour about the plan for getting this guy into the cia base was how they were going to deal with anybody, get out of pakistan, how they're going to get across the mountains and into the base where on a typical day people al-sayyid the base will be waiting for jobs and this or that and so, the guards at the base are told to look away, got an important person coming through so not only searching the didn't get a chance to look so she goes skidding through the first entrance and pass to more before he is in the inner part of the base. >> host: you talk about jennifer matthews was there, elizabeth hansen was there and

then you have free will trained operatives from blackwater who appear to be the first ones right before the explosion to think something is going wrong. >> guest: in the days before the arrival because as i mentioned there's a lot of back-and-forth whether we come to the base or not when this began to think about the exercise to go through the motions how this happened some of the blackwater guards were concerned about the fact he could be trouble, he might be an impostor of some kind, worried about the security elements but in the end of the cia decided it was important to have people there much more than normal just to squeeze as much information as possibly could so you had all these case officers and a physician and people who were weapons experts who could help to clear up the best way they

could go find to carry out the mission and try to help them kill him and so there's a big entourage of people waiting for him to show up and the first ones that meet the driver of course are the guards who have the duty finally of searching to make sure he's not carrying a weapon. >> host: they notice he's walking funny and they start to see his lips. >> guest: it's quite a dramatic scene the car pool to the stop and have three security officers ready to greet him, one is a security blackwater cards and they come to the door to let him out this big line of other americans waiting to meet him and instead of coming out of the door he does a strange maneuver shoveling away from them across the sea to the other side of the door which becomes the first clue that something is wrong, opens the door on the other side to let himself out and has a leg injury he's hurt himself which

is a whole other story in the motorcycle accident she starts to make his way around the car and he starts to chant in arabic god is great and this is the first sort of thing that freezes everyone and helps them understand this is not who we thought it was this guy is about to do something terrible. >> host: by that point is tragically way too late. >> guest: the blackwater guards are not just security officers but special forces. one was a former green beret and a navy seal and the hit been trained to take out people like this. they knew they were doing but here you have a man coming to the base who could be the biggest informant, the most important informant the agency has had. at what point they decide to shoot him and not ask questions so it's a moment everybody froze and they didn't know what to do by the time they pasted together hit it and made the bomb. >> host: you mentioned the cia

agent is a dog loving unusual truck driving friend their wives were close. did they have a sense before this happened a sort of 6 cents something that is going to happen? >> guest: looking back, the people what least in terms of family members sensed something was wrong and the two men were very close as was still said and they began to exchange the messages during the day and they have a bad feeling about this. they began to worry even before their husbands left to go to the meeting because there had been some apprehensions they could tell their husbands were concerned replicase and the white said to him you know this guy could be a suicide bomber and he suggests he could be. but as others in the agency he felt it was so important to at least confronted by to see what he knew that it made a worth the

risk the would be involved and they felt i believe enough precautions were to be taken that if he -- if there were problems it could be found out and caught, and as it turns out he was not searched until he got within a few feet and blew himself up. >> host: there were others among the dead who had written warnings about all the things they were uneasy about and those effectively -- >> guest: he wrote an e-mail saying you're going to fast with this there's too many people involved and there's others as well back in which jordan the jordanian intelligence agency, one of the senior officers met with the cia before the men went to afghanistan for the meeting saying be careful about this guy everything he says makes us wonder maybe he's not what he seems to be his leading to an

ambush so there were red flags but interesting every time somebody raised a caution there were counter arguments and it wasn't it was being dismissive of the warnings so much as plausible what's planations. there's a lot of jealousy and the agency that they are notorious for so there is this concern that maybe people don't want him to go because they want the glory for themselves or they feel like they are worried that she's climbing the ladder to quickly so all kind of fighting going on so they took the warnings into consideration the they were able to have counter arguments that led them to dismiss them. >> host: there's a line in the book titled powerful when you describe how this was a failure of imagination and the way you describe it is the eagerness of the war who desperately wanted it to be real. the was the feeling was it not? >> guest: that was seen not

just by people locally at the base and in virginia and the senior officers with experience and counterterrorism and something important. other officers told me everyone wanted to be part of this because it seemed historic as we saw now if you can imagine to the takedown of bin laden where they were getting close this is a historical event to change history and is going to go down in the books. they wanted this to happen and they were credulous it moved quickly to exploit the information that he had before it was too late so the speed and desire to move things along quickly to drown out the cautions coming from the various places. >> host: jennifer matthews, the mother of three that we talked a lot, long career in the cia came in for criticism by the

current agents speaking anonymously. having spent as much time studying this as you have does she deserve the blame? >> guest: mistakes are made and the cia has been circumspect in their own reviews and not blaming her and just saying very generally there's no single person or single element that causes this to happen. i think in the private conversations the agency officials say among the things that went wrong with the decisions made locally to overrule concerns some of the security officers had and the case officers had how many people should be involved in the meeting. these were decisions made locally at the base with the blessing of people back in langley so whatever responsibility that she might bear was shared by her supervisor who knew what she was doing, off on her operations plan so if she committed

infractions there's a long list of people in the same offenses essentially. >> host: i'm curious to talk about how the book came together. cia families don't typically talk about loved ones who are killed in the line of duty as something high-profile in this attack. what did you find as you were reporting this and be, when you had the wood finish to descriptions better graphic of the wound suffered by the fall one operatives, jennifer how did the families react to seeing the description of their loved ones of with the corpses like right after this tragic attack? >> guest: the one thing they have in common and i talk to people on each of the families is this curiosity jury much the same curiosity i had as i set out to do this they wanted to know what happened and the cia world is sometimes hard to get direct answers. they reached all to families and

brought each of them into the agency headquarters and had briefings to answer questions and to this day i think a lot of them are puzzled how could these mistakes have been made without anybody being searched. so their way of reaching out to me was a way of understanding what went on and each of them had their own in sight based on personal conversations and text messages, e-mails and the feedback i got as a sense of gratitude and explain the fact as best he could as an outsider looking in which is never going to be put to put it all together and unpleasant in some cases to look into the eyes of the bomber

that demonizes but is a real person and try to see him as a flesh and blood person is disturbing and reading about the explosion and a self was a perfect scene and painful but it's part of the closure for a lot of these families to understand and digest it and they seem largely grateful. >> host: do you think a portion of as you do in the book to me him with a three-dimensional person? >> guest: fi think it's perhaps not so much for them but for us to understand this guy is not a caricature in a cave, some of illiterate peasant being paid $100 to kill people with a promise of going to a reward. it's someone who's sophisticated , educated in the

west, in some ways could identify with us and we have to look him in the face and know what he did and the fact there are other people out there who feel as he does. >> host: it think also worth pointing now that the one who filed for the revenge and arguably got their revenge he was a snug but also was responsible for the failed attack in the times square bombing. >> guest: this is interestingly interconnected that the same guy the was a sponsor to help sponsor this attack is also responsible in a certain sense for the failed attack which shows the reach of the people living out in these remote recesses of the tribal country without a great deal of resources or ability to travel and we are able to predict a threat right to the largest of the united states and its famous

times square so it is not significant what they can do and try to do. >> host: during the cold war it was easy to know the formula was there was bribery, blackmail, it was money. how will or can you flip someone who was has committed an ideologue as he turned out to be? >> guest: it may turn out to be possible and this is one of the warnings from the jordanians it is appropriate and something that hindsight the people were thinking about. you get all kind of informants often they can be motivated by simple things as you say like money, like sex, and you talk to cia officers in afghanistan and they were able to make tribal leaders loyal to them just by giving them viagra sometimes it is as easy as that but someone who is a real believer who is ideologue and kind of points his beliefs and views ahead of

everything in his life it's almost impossible to turn this person that deep down they may try to deceive you but they don't change in the fiscal nine was tainted from the beginning and even though she made a pretense becoming that cia she was a jihadists and was committed. >> host: does that explain the way we fought the world before is going to turn someone, not necessarily capturing someone but more and more of the robotic planes as we talked about. the other part i think is going to have to be this very difficult and years-long task to change hearts and minds as hard as that is, but we see the motivation, the things it's turned in were sort of the impression he felt that his family have gone through and that the united states was

hoping support a regime that was inflicting pain on people in his clinic. something very close to use part in the face tough problem to solve but when there's peace in the middle east and ways to sort of fix these problems that have instigated then as we sort of tacos and try to address those that some other way to address this but it takes a long time and we have lots of problems to deal with. in the meantime just keeping from doing bad things to us in afghanistan. >> host: with the death of gozemba in london and the feeling of the war is over and your book makes clear that it isn't and people living in caves and remote parts of the world still have the intent, the desire and the capability of what least trying to carry out of not successfully ultimately

carrying out attacks in the u.s.. >> guest: it's been said many times they can feel many times they only have to succeed once to communicate the message they want to communicate. the times square bombing didn't work and had it worked it would have been a different set history changing event and we don't know what other plans are in the works perhaps and we may read about in the days and weeks ahead. >> host: this book does something amazing. it takes a story you know the ending at the start and have a grouping known the wild. thank you. >> guest: i really enjoyed it. >> come was "after words," booktv's signature program which authors of the weirdest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators and others familiar with the material. "after words" there's a free weekend of booktv and 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 p.m. and 9 p.m. on

sunday and 12 yen on monday. you can also watch online. go to booktv.org and click on afterwards and the topic list on the upper right side of the page. on our recent trip to charleston's of carolina, booktv along with local cable foley of comcast visited several prominent in use. one was the edmondson house. up next a brief interview on the significance of this location >> you are looking at the house built in 1826. it's a great town house and mansion of the austin mittal ten and edmondson family and it's owned by middleton place foundations. the house museum, and the

significance is the general watched the bombardment of fort sumter most people call them fernandez or purchase the the to -- porches. robert e. lee was sent down to defend charleston staying at the mills house. fire broke and out, he had to leave and the family offered to put him out here so this is where robert e. lee stayed the short time he was here and the defenses of charleston most importantly i think is that when he was in charleston he bought his famous horse traveller and began growing the famous white beard comes of the house is open to the public and it's a very charming mix sample of the architecture. >> for more information on book tv's recent trip to charleston south carolina, does it