Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20110801

>> host: this is yochi dreazen from national journal. it's been waging a shadow where mike against al qaeda and its allies in pakistan going on to a decade. recently one of the biggest victories of the war when the cia working with the navy seal team tracked down osama bin laden, identified him later and killed the most wanted fugitive from the decade. but there have been failures along the way that last film a week. he's written a very gripping narrative book about what those setbacks in the war which is a triple agent, not a double agent who helped lead to the loss of life in 25 years when he blew up the base in afghanistan, killing seven agents. he's covered intelligence now for "the washington post" and he has been there for more years than he wants to mention. it's great to have you here. >> guest: thank you. appreciate you doing this. >> host: let's talk about the title of your book, "the triple agent." whether it was the cia, the cold war, what made him the trouble legion? >> it is a historical ks and unusual that agents come in various stripes the largest low-level people who decide for whatever reason and they're well-trained double agents who spent years behind enemy lines to cultivate information and these are the very special agents and our trouble agent is none of these. he came from a very al qaeda sympathetic background and the fletcher deutsch circumstances to become an informant for the cia being in al qaeda's camp so they played this game and made them a triple agent working for al qaeda the whole time for the united states. >> host: let's take a step back. each person who dealt with this, what did each person think they were getting from him before the deals were carried out in afghanistan? >> guest: the way he came to the agency to begin with was as a blocker for the g. hart website. he was a very radicalized smart young man who lived a fairly normal life in a modular and he decided to write this internet blog under an assumed name and did this a number of years in which he criticized his own government in jordan and u.s. policy and israel and is very much pro al qaeda and would sometimes take al qaeda's words and interpret them to bring them down to language that ordinary people could understand she had a big following so that was his role in the beginning. someone agitating, educating people to sort of be attracted to this course. he was arrested and i've probably getting myself ahead in the story but because he becomes an important personality, the jordanian government says this guy has to be stocked so they addressed him bringing him into custody for several days and then try to flip him and became an informant. >> the concern as he was encouraging, directly encouraging. >> guest: becoming a mouthpiece for al qaeda and even talking about becoming active himself in trying a way to become involved in the war against the united states, and but after he was arrested he made a very convincing conversion and became openly sympathetic to the jordanian intelligence agency and their goal and offered services i could help you if you can find a way for me to create a role so they were intrigued by this because the perfect credentials, a well-known border, his doctors, she had the skills and access and decided to give it a try and discovered in the course of this year long narrative his sympathies lay with al qaeda of the whole time and did not make the conversion everyone thought he made early 2009. >> host: people on the jordanian side 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: i think a lot of people had that question in mind. there was a conversion of even this first of all the new administration this is january, 2009 when the story first begins to unfold. inouye counterterrorism tiemann washington eager above all to get bin laden who's a target diluted to the bush administration for eight years and very high on their list they're beginning to look around the world how can they 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 very appealing and was a leap of faith to think that the training might be able to accomplish something that in a sense there wasn't much cost involved. they could send him somewhere and if he gets killed or gets lost, not much of a risk. not much loss so for that sense i think they felt it was worth the gamble even if there were flags being raised and if he didn't know harm done. >> host: the cia believed they could take him to ayman al-zawahiri, but the ayman al-zawahiri the history was shaped by the egyptians or tortured and radicalized even further than they had been. do you have the sense from talking to his family's and the jordanians his treatment, did that take somebody already radical and make them more radical? >> guest: i was expecting he had been sort of mistreated and it's clear to people who study his motivation or intensity and ferocity in some ways the relates to his treatment in prison when he was tortured for several years and he still bears the risk cars from that abuse. he was brought in to the jordanian custody and didn't have much time with them and in the conversation only was the jordanian intelligence officers, but it appears he wasn't tortured, he described later he was humiliated. bad things can happen to you and your family. he came up with a palestinian family and guests in jordan they are vulnerable to losing their visas and passports and kicked out losing their employment. so once you are in the vise of this intelligence community you don't have much choice but to cooperate said they had him where they wanted him and he felt he didn't have -- he had to either make a pretense of helping them or become an agent for them and work with them. >> host: there's a scene in the book i found striking and the slogan is justice has come. it's intimidating given more than ironic and more than a tragic. we talked at the outset about the travel agent where the jordanians felt he was one thing and militants thought he was another call a different persona. did his family? what did they know of him? his life on the internet, did they know that he wasn't a doctor but also had a radical beliefs? >> he managed to keep this from his own family they knew how he felt and they felt the same way he comes from a family that the palestinian origin their ancestral land is back in israel and can look across the border to the cotton fields by the israeli conglomerate to be the family property and so there is this sense of the justice to the family been persecuted in iran living in exile and this is what nurtured this young man. it turns out they were still in exile from kuwait because when the father of the bomber was a young man who moved to kuwait with his family to work as a schoolteacher and after the first iraq war most jordanians were kicked out and sent back to jordan said they had a sense of being exiled and mistreated all over the world so i think it is a part of the sort of families way of looking at the world and looking at the situation and she's sort of steeped in this. at the same time no one really had a sense of how far he had become and what he decided to take on to write these things on the internet no one knew he was doing it, even his wife he knew he had these internet hobbies but until he was arrested no one understood how involved in this al qaeda world he had become. >> host: did his wife no? in the book it sounds as if his father had the least clue and within the family if anybody had a clue it was his wife. what did she know and share with his belief? >> guest: his ideology for sure. they met while he was in college and they had a number of things in common in terms of the we looking at the world and she was more shrill than he was. it's kind of telling the children came to the family they have two daughters and the oldest they named after the hijacker and the second was named after a documentary filmmaker who did a movie about the hijackers of they had this anti-israel and american view but it's not clear at all that she knew we had this personality create online. she's never acknowledged, she knew he was on the internet riding but i don't believe he fully shared with her what he was doing. >> guest: he was as light understand posting links to video of attacks carried out against u.s. personnel in iraq and afghanistan. is that correct and did it go beyond simply text? >> guest: the skill at doing get he's a very clever man and not a bad writer in the sense he's very expressive and compelling sense of humor and in his own way most of us would find a little bit off-putting but he would create links to the latest carnage of u.s. troops being killed in iraq and have a gleeful commentary about the roasted brains of u.s. soldiers and this and that and sort of the kind of try to be funny and darkly humorous about it but it's kind of his style he became probably one of the four or five most important bloggers in ft islamic jihadists blogosphere and nobody knew where he was. >> host: a pediatrician, a doctor living in a modern but what if we secular, relatively prosperous city like iman. this wasn't someone who caved in pakistan. let's take a step back. the personnel on the base was led by a woman named jennifer matthews, a mother of three who lived in virginia, not far from where we are now. she came along the way in this attack for a lot of criticism but let's start at the beginning why was she chosen for what was a very, very important part? >> guest: she's a remarkable character in her own right and as you say, she came under quite a bit of criticism after the attack perhaps being naive and maybe too trusting of this informant when he was coming on to the base, but this was a woman who paid her dues for the cia and had become overly period of a decade and a half of the most knowledgeable al qaeda experts she was there before al qaeda was known by almost anyone sort of our giving and agitating paying more attention to these guys and after 9/11 happened, her and her entire branch in the cia was screaming. we told you so. this is a huge mistake we didn't pay attention when we should have. and so she became even more sort of involved in helping capture some of the key al qaeda figures and the detainee the cia captured was named abu zubaydah and this was someone she focused on and helped bring the cia to find this guy and he was captured and brought to the prison and waterboarded she was literally there helping feed the question to exploit the information he could provide so it's not someone who is naive or has no experience. what she lacked was experience in a war zone she'd never been to iran or afghanistan she's seen in places like london and geneva she didn't have the kind of operational security that other officers who worked overseas take for granted. that in hindsight is one of the big failing this not having a place you understood what could potentially happen if someone brought a bomb into the base and about the company that would turn up 16 cia operatives at the same time. >> guest: and early in her career to the other, the biggest arguably since american history the 9/11 attacks. she was one of the people singled out for having not done more and be better coordinated to run these attacks. this is something that resonated with her because as someone who did try to call attention to al qaeda before the attack she felt she was unfairly accused of being part of the cia. the inspector general's report came out after the attack in 2004 that identified how things went wrong in the cia why they didn't see this coming and she was on the list of senior officers the inspector general argued was enough to kind of put all the pieces together and prevent these hijackers from coming to the united states and this comes out in the book and hasn't been reported before but she had been one of the ones commended for the disciplinary review. this is something that haunted her and motivated her to want to redeem herself and show by going to a place to leaving her family back home in virginia sort of show -- loss of failure to overcome and maybe the two ways of the question but overcome the stigma order whatever guilt she may have felt? >> guest: a little bit of both. not so much guilt just a sense she did have to only a handful of people knew about but the key people knew she had been on this list of people recommended for possible disciplinary action and so it was important for her to demonstrate her dedication to the cause to al qaeda and overcome the stigma that developed over the years. >> host: there's a scene in the book i find powerful she goes to see a mentor is an older person she dealt with at the agency when she's close to having decided to go to the coast and she tells her don't go you're not the right person for this position. >> guest: it was a tough message for her to hear. she came to the cia in the 80's and a time there were not that many women in senior positions and through her life she and her colleagues felt they had overcome the problem of being women they were given the sort of lower-level jobs for the most part in the beginning and kept having to prove themselves again and again and again despite this being a boys' network still very much a male oriented world they were as capable if not more capable than anyone else of the idea of someone telling her you can't do this because you are a woman struck her in a visceral way and it's something else you have to approve is i'm a woman i can handle this job and i have a -- effect 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 as a chief she had to prove that to herself and others. >> host: from the outside if we think about the shadow and the intel we think about macho man who come in at night along this coast you have not just jennifer matthews but you had elizabeth hansen as you describe her attractive but also very funny woman who could do the beavis and butt-head impressions of its jennifer matthews was one in of the spectrum experience wise comedy elizabeth hansen what was her background? >> guest: another interesting person and a sort of symbol of the generation that's coming after line 11. they call themselves the windows generation because they are computer savvy and very capable and skilled at doing the kind of things the cia cells that which is bringing in 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 goes after particular targets. her job was she was called a target for 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 drew control whatever resources you need to draw to help us figure out who these people are and then eventually put a missile on that person so this is how he elizabeth hands and came up and happened to be at the coast on this day because she helped bring together the intelligence and would lead the c.i.a. to go after the important targets himself. >> host: the way that you describe it did so striking you described in the book how both my kagen, leon panetta's predecessor at the cia, the new secretary of defense who was at the cia at the time of the corresponding -- these are men literally with power of life and death. they have to make the ultimate decision on a given strike. >> guest: that's new. people don't i think appreciate that. throughout the cia history is done all kinds of intelligence gathering and all kind of means breaking rules of other countries but this is the first time the cia basically is running for shooting war and being in charge every day deciding we are going to attack this target in this country using missiles flying over enemy territory in a way that's never been done before and the dice that began after 9/11 would be controversial of the united states using a covert operation sending these unmanned aircraft to the space of differently sovereign country killing people it was going to be extraordinarily controversial. it turns out it was highly sec to offend everybody eventually solve this as a value added to reach the homeland. but if you think about what goes on and the decisions made every day by these guys it's difficult for them personally especially with leon panetta, very religious man whose wrestled with this idea he's basically putting out death warrants on a regular basis for people that live half a world away. >> host: that struck to me and i was also struck by your description of the precision of the weapons. we are talking about robotic plants operating from operators in the u.s. or afghanistan with the ability to hit a person street on. you describe the killing of one of the misuse of the main taliban fighters on the pakistani side of the board they spotted him on the rooftop of a missile hit him straight in his body. >> guest: this is a revelation to me come to mckeithen dewitt covered the community and i've written about drone strikes people perhaps of realize this is something the cia doesn't acknowledge exists. they can't say we are doing this, so details about how it works and how the decisions are made are rare but i was able to get greater access and it's remarkably controlled and a remarkably precise these machines have the ability to target small targets and very far away. they can change the course of a missile after its left in the aircraft if they decide somebody has gotten in the way people spend a lot of time to come up with numbers of how many people were killed accidentally because the strikes. the cia has careful record keeping because the stick around the jones after the strike takes place to see who was killed, was taken away did bigot deride didier were trying to get and these were remarkably effective in getting the guys they want to get. host we think about the drone's from the point of view of the u.s. as a policy question and number of strikes, obviously under the obama administration the you describe what it's like for the militants on the ground to hear these drones buzzing overhead all the time they have a world they used to describe it and they look for informants and when you find the informant they tell them. >> guest: exactly. there is no understating the sort of psychological impact this has had a physical impact in the sense it's disrupted al qaeda and it's taking out leaders but the idea you can be killed any minute while you're sleeping in your bed or driving in a car is a heavy toll on the way they're thinking and how they can act and the pakistanis, the word means be used and if you think of them as buzzing bees of 20,000 feet in the air sometimes they can hear them they almost never see them and the only way the missiles themselves travel faster than the speed of sound so you never really see it coming. the great thing about the bomber, she describes some of this in his personal writings and video interviews in the sense of being in a taliban safe house or compound and the fear lurking out in the dark some place with all kind of capabilities they can only imagine possibly going to kill them at any moment and so it does lead to superstition and suspicion about who's doing the in forming and what elaborate ferias of how the find them and there's a special marking or computer chip maybe somebody's breaking something with a chemical that allows them to see them so it has led to a number of cases accused of spying for the west and you think fear being informants sometimes it is true and sometimes it's not. >> host: if they think it in this poorly for you and you have that attitude of paranoia and pervasive year when someone shows up in pakistan was their reaction? did the of the feeling of this is too weird and too good to be true he must be ase by? >> guest: i kept asking in the beginning how does a guy like this who first of all doesn't speak the local language, speaks arabic and the language, comes from a country of jordan which is notorious in supplying informants in the past all kind of strikes against him in terms of being suspicious and i think in fact i know many operatives expected he would be killed and this is a reflection of his 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 good allies on the al qaeda side and this massoud who is a commander of the taliban pakistan who decided the introduction was made for him and decided he was trustworthy they needed medical help and he was able to supply it and so he was able to sort of been at least one really important ally who protected him and let him stay in his house and the guys around began to think that he is okay until the end. al qaeda's official pronouncement about the suicide attack is congratulations you've proven yourself to be true and worthy. but the question was there to the very end. >> host: you write in the book that one of the most feared militants in pakistan wouldn't be in the same room. he thought this was someone there to bring a missile into the building. >> guest: information canada fortune of having some helpers in pakistan who journalists of good contacts in the taliban brought back stories about how these discussions would take place about to be like him, do not like income is he good or bad? even among the haqqani network and massoud thinking trustworthy and some not they decided this is probably a spy and by not going to be in the same room and after he was killed in the missile strike that literally cleaved them in half, i think this concern they would not survive because he'd lost his main sponsors and others thought he was a bad guy and wanted to kill him. >> host: we will talk about this later in the show but ultimately was a harbinger of what was to come because the massoud who was killed the family felt revenge and even more violent member of the family was the one who ultimately helped plan and carry opposite tack. >> guest: is a cousin to the slain taliban was even more ambitious and a younger guy with lots of charisma and also this personal sense in the pashtu tribal since she need to get revenge for the death of his cousin so he inherits this young jordanian and looks for a way to use him to try to reach out to the guys who killed his cousin and extract revenge and so the massoud were involved in trying to plan what became a massive revenge operation. and after of the cia base killed nine people, they claimed victory. this is our way to reach back for the revenge. >> host: you describe something in the book i had never seen before and found it really striking that when they realize, when they suspected he had the lead back of some sort to the cia this was before the killing. they decided they were going to test it effectively by having him really information to the cia that they knew he wanted to kill would be in a certain car in a certain moment and then see what happened. what did happen? >> guest: this is a remarkable story and it's one of these apocryphal tales but they are convinced it's true and several of them relate to the same story to us, but he wanted to make the show that he was trustworthy and faithful dedicated a guy that drove him run in his car deposes himeno surgeon car and was related with the knowledge to be related to the cia and let's see what happens and sure enough on the strike it takes place the car is blown up and this man is killed it seems like a cruel act but from massoud's point of view it not only proved the bombers loyalty but it showed a demonstration to his own people, the power to have. he does great things for me and he can even some in the cia to commit these acts so it was a nice showcase for him as well. >> guest: >> host: he was willing to have his own person killed. >> guest: every time someone is killed by the cia it creates ten more recruits from me. >> host: took a moment ago about the odd relationship about the doctor that english and arabic and grew up in a relative modern city and the masseuse kind of sluggish for lack of a better word, religious, extremist, living in a tribal regions of pakistan and the form effective relationships another you describe in the book is between the cia agent and to run. tomé a about how they were together and what year if any they began to develop. >> guest: those are interesting men from different backgrounds. he was a jordanian intelligence officer who is quite western by the standards of his colleagues at the intelligence agency. he studied the united states and had an internship with john kerry when he was in college. big baseball fan, loved to talk about his time in america and would take longer trips they lived in boston so he could see the red sox games eat hot dogs and take trips to the mountains and down into the south to the blue ridge mountains of to montreal and left to explore the united states, spoke perfect english with an american accent and became someone the cia came to rely on because someone who could not only translate for them when they needed to but understood both worlds and was a bridge between them and he became the case agent and his partner was a former american ranger who was a special forces guy, really strong, fought in iraq and had been a paramilitary officer in afghanistan and had the sort of deadly skills and he came just before the story unfolds and becomes the sort of counter part for the cia counterpart to handle the case and the two of them develop this relationship which in some ways reflects the relationship between the cia and the jordanians very close. the work on cases close together and travel around the world together to try to take down terrorism networks. they were very good friends and they took vacations together. sometimes they would take off on his boat and disappear a couple days or go out on the desert. so the two of them were good friends and they would be sent from a lot to afghanistan on this meeting to check to see what they had. >> host: your reference to the boesh brings up the other interesting aspect that he was a cousin of the king of jordan. >> guest: and for that reason he becomes an intriguing target for al qaeda deciding how we have this man who's not only an agent of the government which they hate, the jordanians echford hostile to everything they stand for and they have a treaty with israel and the united states but also a cousin and a direct descendant of the family and a special about him that makes an interesting character but also someone al qaeda would love to see killed. >> host: one of the poignant parts of the book is that he knew that people would look at him differently because he was a relative of the king and it sounds as if he wanted to be known for his own reputation not because he was a cousin of the king and not to be treated better. against some of his friends called him the most on royal of the royal because he had no pretense and the only time he pulled rank as when he could get things for his friends and colleagues to read this story hokies training in the desert with some of his intelligence officer friends and they got hungry so he ordered a bunch of big macs to be sent to the training place so it's one of the kind of things he does to help his friend the downtown, he sort of drove around in his trucks he had a couple boggs and blended in the population and was very unassuming and a lot of people were surprised after he was killed to find out only was the intelligence officer because some of the king because he didn't show in any way. >> host: i should say their plan was to come after him. they wanted to kidnap him and put him on a sort of mock trial. >> guest: the cia sort of part of this became a windfall at the end. in the beginning it was all about trying to isolate this guy come get him into pakistan somewhere so they could kidnap him and if they couldn't successfully bring in a way they were going to kill him on the spot but the ideal thing was to be able to capture and kidnap and have this incredible propaganda coup without having this cousin of the king on display on the deal for people to see and perhaps try and execute him so that's planned a which didn't quite turn out. >> host: had that happened it would not have been a trial that would 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 just maybe they could get the cia team as well? >> guest: it's interesting because being the sort of point of contact with the intelligence community was arguing strongly to have some kind of meeting take place in pakistan, and it's a reflection of his own personal desire to be able to kidnap him and not sacrifice themselves which i don't think he was particularly keen on doing is they wanted the meeting to take place where they could control the circumstances. so you see this period of weeks in which he's trying to bargain in meeting you can take place and to russia down for various reasons and the only place the cia would agree to is at the base they can control access and egress they could control the possibility of spying and said they had insist on this happening inside of the base and when it was clear there was no goal on this issue than the idea began to serve blossom that we can actually attack the cia itself the whole challenge that didn't seem at the outset. >> host: the cia's insistence on having the meeting on its own base, it would be cliche but that was the seat of the disruption of the base. >> guest: it didn't have to be the coast and was the fastest base across the pakistani hills from where he was operating. it had heavy security and all the people who needed to be there for the debriefings could quickly come in so it seemed like an ideal place but it was strictly because the geography and because the cia wanted to control this and make sure that nobody else would recognize him and be able to be treated leader. >> host: you describe in the book that he communicates often by e-mail and at one point there's a chapter that you've read about a video clip of the doctor and all in and al-zawahiri that sets them buzzing. why was that some important and why was that the reaction to that tape? >> guest: it just shows how clever this al qaeda operation was. a day essentials and -- the understand us better to read the most sophisticated than we sometimes think they are and given some thought they knew the ways to push the cia buttons to make them absolutely mad to meet this guy said they did it using very clever western-style tools and one of them was to send video that showed that he had actually gone inside the tent of al qaeda and had come face-to-face and was meeting with senior operatives and one video clip in particular showed him standing next to this guy who was the rankings are always a little bit difficult with al qaeda but he was one of the senior spiritual leaders and they were sitting together in this video a few inches apart from each other and the act of sending that little bit of a video to the cia said i inside the tent, and right next to these people and i can do all kind of damage. that got them very excited and there was a part to which a devotees tension is on him now the next thing he delivers is the fact she's become the doctor to owls arcuri himself. he his medical issues and is diabetic and needs medicine so he says he can see this guy, in treating him by the way his all his scars and medical conditions by the we need to to get some medicine for him i'm going to see him a few weeks and this is the information the cia for years the loved nothing better than to be about to get this guy. >> host: he is the number two behind bin laden. >> guest: if the it said the same thing about a lot of himself it might have seemed too fancy for him, too hard to believe that al-zawahiri had been seen on a number of occasions since line 11 he seemed more accessible and he had no medical conditions he needed a doctor, everything made sense that he was telling the truth and so it was a perfect trap and it worked. >> host: official washington not only to sit seriously but as you write in the book the instruction comes to jennifer mac use is treated this man as a trusted asset even as he played out no american ever met her. >> guest: only one of the team ever met with him is a jordanian agent and yet this was so important and the potential rewards were so great that the case is briefed to a number of white house officials including the president himself this is a chance to get him. we forget now sometimes after the takedown of bin laden how long it had been and how difficult and how hard people worked for so many years to try to get the number one and it the number two and it had never come that close. he was the chance to do it and devotee got excited and wanted it to happen as quickly as possible. host could you describe the briefings about this this went to the white house. >> guest: president obama himself was told about this meeting was going to take place. it wasn't the president giving advice were saying how things should go with the cia felt he was an informed person. >> host: on of the details you have in the book is sort of if dhaka if is there was such a concern for the safety for his identity that they told the afghan guards outside of the base to turn away as he drove up. they were so afraid most of him but of preserving his identity. >> guest: something extraordinary of his hindsight and as alluded to in the beginning notable legion had never killed himself to but no one had gotten into the room of officers and a blown himself up so there's no precedent for that. nobody was looking for that to happen and instead on the contrary they were concerned with keeping this guy safe and his identity protected and so the sort of what was a lot about the plan for getting this guy into the base was how they were going to do it without anybody knowing about it and get him out of pakistan before anybody missed him and get across the mountains and into the base where on a typical day people outside the base will be waiting for jobs or this or that and so the guards at the base were told to look away, got an important person coming through so they didn't even get a chance to look. so scooting through the first entrance and then past two more stations before he's into the inner part of the base. >> host: not just the inner part of the base but there is an honor guard waiting to see him. you talk in the book about jennifer matthews was there, elizabeth hansen and then you have very well trained operatives from black water who appear to be the first ones right before the explosion to think something is going terribly wrong. >> guest: and in the days before the because as i mentioned there's a lot of back-and-forth about whether we come to the base or not and when this began to think about the exercise and rehearse it and go through the motion of how this happened some of those guards were concerned about the fact he could be troubled and might be an impostor and worry about security elements of the meeting at the end of the cia decided it was important to have a lot of people they're much more than he normally had in an informant meetings to squeeze as much information as they possibly could. as a u.s. people other weapons experts that can help figure out the best way to carry out the mission and try to kill him and so there's a big on josh people literally waiting for him to show up in the first ones that meet the of the duty finally is making sure he's not carrying a weapon and that's when things go wrong. >> host: the notice that he's walking a little bit funny and start to see his lips. >> guest: yes. this is quite a dramatic scene when he gets in the base and car pools to the stop and have three security officers ready to greet him and the of the two are black water guards and become up to the door and open the door to let him out this other line of americans waiting to meet him and instead of coming out the door she does this strange maneuver a love shoveling away which is the first clue something's wrong. opens the door on the other side to let himself out and he has a leg injury he's hurt himself which is a whole other story in a motorcycle accident he starts to make his way around the car and he starts to chant in arabic god is great. this is the sort of first thing that freezes everyone and helps them understand this is not who we thought it was he's about to do something. >> host: of course it is tragically way too late. >> guest: and these guards in the navy seal had been trained to take out people like this. they knew what they were doing that you have a man coming to the base who could be the biggest informant and the most important in format the agency has had. at what point do you decide to shoot him and not ask questions? it's a limited release frozen and they don't know what to do but they pieced together it was too late and they detonate the bomb. >> host: you mentioned that the agent from iman is a truck near driving and before this happened to detect a sense something that was going to happen? >> guest: looking back at least in terms of family members sensed something was wrong and the two men were very close as we said, and they begin to exchange text messages during the day that they had a bad feeling about this. they began to worry even before their husbands left to go to the meeting because there had been apprehension they could tell their husbands were concerned about this case and the wife said it's a suicide bomber and yes, he could be. but he felt as others in the agency did that he was so important to least confront the guide to see what he knew that made it worth the risk and they felt that enough precaution would be taken that if he was -- if there were problems he could be caught. it turns out he wasn't searched until he got within a few feet of these men and blew himself up. >> host: there were others on that horrible day who had written warnings about all the things about this they were uneasy about and those -- >> guest: he had written e-mails saying we are going to fast, there's too many people involved, serious concerns and there's others as well back in jordan and the intelligence agency, one of the senior officers had met with of the cia before the two men went to afghanistan for the meeting saying be careful about this guy. everything he's saying makes us wonder maybe he's not what he seems and is leading to an ambush were the words used so there were red flags would eventually every time somebody raised a caution there were arguments and it wasn't of the cia was being dismissive of the warnings so much as plausible explanations and in the case there's jealousy among the officers and they're sort of notorious for it so there's this concern that maybe people don't want this guy to go because they wanted for themselves or they feel like they are worried that he's climbing the ladder to quickly so there's all kind of fighting going on so they took these warnings into consideration that they were able to have counter arguments to dismiss them even chile. >> host: there is a riding in the book i find very powerful when you describe how this was a failure of imagination and the way that you describe it is desperately wanting to be real. there was ultimately the feeling was it not? >> guest: that maros was seen not just by people locally at the base but in langley virginia at the cia headquarters where the senior officers with years of experience and counterterrorism have tried to get al qaeda for eight years and saw the chance to do something important and other officers told me everyone wanted to be part because it seemed historic like just as we saw now if we can imagine to take down of bin laden when they were getting close this is a historical event and is going to change history and go down in the books and they wanted this to happen and there were a bit too credulous and moved quickly to try to explore the information. so that speed and desire to move things along quickly allowed them to drown out the caution and the warnings coming from those places. >> host: jennifer matthews, the mother we talked about, and three and the cia should k. vanderbilt of criticism by the agents speaking anonymously. having spent this much time now studying with of the jihad does she deserve any of that now? >> guest: mistakes were made and the cia in this circumspect and their own wheat use not blaming her and just saying very generally that there is no single person or element that causes this to happen i think that in the sort of private conversations agency officials say that among the things that went wrong with the decisions made locally to overrule concerns that some of the officers had and case officers headed about how many people should be involved in the meeting. these are made locally at the base with the blessing of people back in langley so whatever responsibility she might there is also shared by her supervisors who we're aware of interest but the process who may wish she was doing, signing off on her plan and so if she committed fractions the same essentially. >> host: i curious to talk briefly about how the book came together they don't typically talk about loved ones who are killed in the line of duty and especially something as a profile in this attack what did you find as you were reporting this in terms of the one who is to talk and then when you had the but finished your descriptions are graphic of the wounds suffered by the following operative's jennifer mac euskadi elizabeth hansen how to the families react to the description of the loved ones after this tragic attack? >> guest: the one thing all the families have in common and i've talked to the families is this curiosity and it's the same that i had as i set out to do this they wanted to know what happened and in the cia world it's hard to get devotee answers. the cia did eventually reach out to families and brought each of them into the agency headquarters and have the briefings to answer questions and instead to this day they are puzzled how could this have happened how could these mistakes have been made. so it's their way of reaching out to me was also a way of trying to understand themselves what went on, each of them interesting we had their own little insights just based on personal conversations and text messages, e-mails that reflected the concerns of that person and the days before. but i think in the end the since the lagat and the feedback i got was the gratitude someone tried to explain the facts as best as he could as an outsider looking in which is never going to be perfect but put it all together and it's unpleasant in some cases to try to look into the eyes of the bomber whose someone who has been demonized and certainly should be but he's a real person to see him as a flesh and blood person is a bit disturbing and the explosion itself and what happened in this scene is very painful but i think it's all part of the closure for these families to cope with this and they seem grateful for that. >> host: as you do in the book do you make him a real person reading that you think there was the hardest part? >> guest: some said that it was and yet i think it's important perhaps not so much for them all of us to understand the sky is not a caricature, he isn't some guy that is going to cave to some aliterate president paid 100 bucks to kill some people with the promise of going to some reward to some unsophisticated who is learned and educated in the west and it could identify with us and i think we have to kind of look this dhaka in the face and understand what he did in the fact many people feel exactly as he does. >> host: the second of the massoud and arguably got that revenge listed as a thug but is responsible for a failed attack in the times square bombing and this is all interestingly all connected the same guy that sponsored or helped sponsor the attack was also responsible in this attack on times square which shows these people living out in these remote recesses of the countries in pakistan without a great deal of resources or ability to travel to india we are able to project a threat to the largest cities in the united states and the famous times square so it's not insignificant what they can do and try to do. >> host: we start off talking about the double agent where it's kind of easy to note -- >> guest: it was bribery, blackmail, sex, money, how do you flip someone continues with someone who's as committed in an ideologue as he turned out to be? >> guest: they turned out to be possible. this is one of those warnings that is appropriate and something that hindsight they aren't thinking about. you get in foreman's oftentimes motivated by simple things as easy like money, like sex and in fact talk to the cia officers in afghanistan and they were able to meet tribal leaders loyal to them by giving them viagra sometimes it is as simple as that someone that is a real believer and who is an ideologue and puts his beliefs ahead of everything else in his life it's almost impossible to turn this person but deep down they may lie to you and try to deceive you but ultimately they won't change and this guy was painted from the beginning and even though he made this pretense of becoming an informant for the cia all along he was a jihadists gandy committed one. >> host: does that suggest to you the way the war is going forward someone won't be about necessarily captain someone but there will be more and more of the robotic plan of dealing with death as you talked about? >> guest: that may have to be part of it and the other half will have to be this difficult task to change the hearts and mind as hard as that is but we see the motivation that turned and twisted them where the impression he fell on the family the united states was helping support the regime that was inflicting pain on people he was treating every day. this was something very close to his heart, and it's a tough problem to solve when there is peace in the middle east and to sort of fix these problems that are instigated ill will toward america for years as we began to tackle those problems and address them that's another way to attack but it takes a very long time and we have lots of problems to deal with in the meantime just keeping people from doing bad things to less. >> host: for the death of osama bin laden. nels your book makes clear it isn't and no parts of the world they still seek intent and many cases the capability of that least try and to carry out if not successfully or ultimately carry out attacks within the u.s.. >> guest: it's been said many times they can feel many times and they communicate times kerr bombing didn't work and had to be completely different history meaning event with other him plans in the works perhaps we may read about in the days and weeks ahead. this book does something amazing it takes the story you know the ending at the start and it makes it gripping all the same. i thoroughly enjoyed it. >> guest: thank you. >> in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators and others familiar with the material. afterwards like ears every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 p.m. and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch afterwards that online. goucher booktv.org and click on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. spoke with booktv on the recent trip to charnel sense of carolina about his books the jewish confederates. >> i wrote the jewish consider it's because i was really surprised that the jewish community was so hard and for the confederacy you don't associate the jews of the confederacy that in fact the truth is hundreds of thousands of jews, not hundreds of dolphins but 50 those in jews came to america in the 1840's and they were german, spoke german and mostly immigrant day at 25,000 came to the south, not a lot come small number of people they were mostly in charleston savanna, new orleans, richmond. they were marching, they were puzzlers committee work in saloons, they were not well-to-do people. they were i think surprised by the fact they were so accepted people allowed them to conduct business treated as equals fee to open their houses of worship and so when the war came i think the story is a long story, and the other words, they were here, they got caught up in the excitement in the secession. you find them in the infantry, in the calgary, the artillery, you find them spread out. the whole story they were just like everyone else.

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