My childrens godfather is a former special forces group and he had a line he got from a commander somewhere in his career that said there are some peoplpeople just need killing. Some you will not be able to reason with or negotiate with and there is just evil in the world and that is kind of the approach he takes. He doesnt necessarily like it when he knows it needs to be done he went out and he does it. He runs through the bucs as a combination of multiple people that ive known in the world of government, diplomacy, part of government. Hhes actually named after somebody right here in dc who processes fisa warrants for the prophetic justice. So there is one over at doj, real life, and i hope it is a great name for a character. He is a collection of these people and then what i tell folks is that hes my alter ego. He gets to go and do the things my wife wont let me do. She let me go to afghanistan but she drew the line of chasing female operatives. So there is a line i cant cross. Host how realistic are some of the exploits . Guest very realistic. I spent a lot of time talking with people at the cia, fbi, special Operations Community about a lot of state dinners and i like to listen to stories. I find i learn more by not talking with them because just hearing them talk, but there is one question i asked repeatedly and i asked multiple times every single year what are you afraid of right now, what is keeping you up tonight and that is what helps to form the plots for my thrillers. Your protagonist com from the rugged, resourceful, smart, hes got unlimited funds, the brazilian girlfriend. What are his thoughts . Guest thats a great question. Its something that i began exploring a few weeks ago. I made a choice as a writer and my wife when she read the manuscript three or four books ago said i knew what he thought now i know what he feels. I think that he is someone that his dad was a navy seal who passed away and he didnt have a very Good Relationship with his father. He decided he didnt want to go to college. He had an opportunity to be an athlete on the professional circuit and went that way out of high school. That made his dad worked hard to get his education upset. So they had grown apart and his dad died. The only reason he was just minimally talking with his father is because his mom was holding the family together. So his dad dies, he loses his case for the competitive athletics and decides to go to school and follow his fathers footsteps. So there is a part of him that is kind of looking for approval to make his dad happy. He became a navy seal and in the most recent that we will talk about come he has a whole other set of father son issues with his mentor wanting him to get up and do something that he found more valuable to the country. Host your 18th book, spy master coming out on tuesday july 3. He works for a group called the carlton group. What is bad and do these type of groups exist in our world a . Guest they do. Its a private Intelligence Agency. Basically they offer everything that the cia would do without all of the bureaucracy. That is the fictional idea. As ive watched the increase in popularity and the contract is going to private military contracting firms like blackwater and other ones like that, i thought okay, the next step in this process is going to be outsourcing intelligence gathering, and maybe even an alice has had some direct action assignments, where it allows the u. S. Government to have liability. So i thought this is the next big thing coming. And i got introduced to somebody that is retired from the cia. I dedicated last summer spoke to him. He had just passed away, sadly. He had something he was doing where he was outsourcing intelligence gathering in multiple different ways. Whether it was gathering atmospherics on the ground to help inform the dod about how to keep the troops safe, he was an interesting and fascinating guy and i actually based the carlton on an. Host do that cia intelligence operatives have the unlimited funds that scott has . [laughter] guest they do not unfortunately. There was a great pretense of a nonfiction, that was called the human factor, and it was written by a cia operative who was very unhappy with the culture at the cia. He would request, he would send in requests to approach certain potential assets and have the request sent back five times in the claim because things were in the wrong places. It is easier to do that than to string him along. He was paying us versus out of his own pocket and it would take the agency too long to get the money to him. More often than not, youve got agents that are dealing with a big pure crissy as well as there are great men and women of the cia. At one point i always make clear. Clear. Theres amazing american spirit overcoming some of the nations most dangerous business. There are people that think there are no problems there and ive talked to some that think it is so bureaucratic. Theres so much red tape. Its part o of idea within my thrillers but i think makes them all the more real. Host can we read a political philosophy in one of your thrillers . Guest you know, i think think i write political thrillers and i think that ever since human beings have been together in politics. When we decided to move to tribes in cities and anytime there is an interest, politics are involved. If you are protecting an interest or trying to leverage an advantage, politics are involved. I think i hope that with my books do is shine a light on some of the complications that operatives have in this world. And also, let people know that there is no American Dream without the men and women willing to go out and protected. I think politicians get in the way of things too often, but i also think the cia being so closely tied to the state department i and having the obligations and other countries through an ambassador, you know, i have a friend of mine ou now t was just made ambassador to germany, rick grenell. Before he was finally confirmed in the senate, there was this whole terrible thing with the cia out of the berlin station where they pay all this money allegedly for dirt that some russians had or Something Like this coming up without having the ambassador there. In that sense, that might have been better, but i think with the cia kind of rotating people through embassies and stuff like that, it probably adds to the bureaucracy and thinks their job more difficult. Host from last years but one of the most counterproductive things the cia had ever done was put its operatives in embassies around the world. Too many of them began to think Like State Department employees. Guest yet. And there was another book i was reading an im going to drawa blank on the title deposit interest operation in the middle east. One of the people the cia allowed to go on this team come on this assignment, he had a severe medical condition. Because of hippa, this gentlemans medical condition could be revealed to the leader of the team. And he had an episode whether it was an epileptic seizure or whatever but now they are way behind enemy lines and have to figure out how to get him out of there and get medical attention. So with that kind of pure crissy that will get people killed. So i think that is the balance the cia has. They dont want to be bureaucratic. They want to be out there helping the nation, protecting and gather the intel they have to. This certain pieces attached that make it difficult. Thats why i love writing about a private Intelligence Agency where you have guys out there that as americans we all hope that they are Like Software theres no rules, use unshackled and ten go do what needs to be done, which markets the trial, the story was told in one survivor with mark wahlberg. The first time i ever saw marcus speak for the sake talked about the book. One of the greatest things you can do for us in the special Operations Community is to just kind of look away. It doesnt mean we have no accountability, but let us do what youre trained to do, trust us to do the right thing. There is an incredible story where they decided three of his teammates were killed because they made a decision dated to let those goat herders in afghanistan go and they brought a taliban army on top of town and marcus was the only survivor. Host before we get into the specific purpose, can you pick up any one of your 18 bucks or do you have to read them in order . Guest one of the best pieces of advice i got when i started in this business was, first of all, i never write intended to write a serious character. I loved the idea that i could visit a new protagonist with a problem and background in each book. My editor sent me down and decide how many times have you bought the book because you wanted to go on another adventure with that same character. It happens all the time. Even if it sounds like maybe the plot isnt something you like, you love the character. I said okay ive got it. That is the Business Model of the franchise character. The next piece of advice for one thing you have to make sure is if somebody goes into a bookstore and before the book is there and they are going to start with you pick never read the other three, make sure they are able to buy about one and enjoy it even if the bookstore doesnt have the first three. So the answer to draw it out is yes, you can start anywhere and you wont be missing a thing. Host welcome to booktv. And our special in depth fiction edition all month long weve had fiction authors and this month it is bestselling novelist and thriller writer brad thor. We will take your calls throughout this three hours but we want to put the numbers up into social media addresses so you can go ahead and start filing in et cetera. Here are the numbers. And for this show today, we want to ask for firsttime calls only. If youve never called booktv before. If youre a fan of brad thor, please call. 202 7488200 with you but in the east and central time zones, 202 7488201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. Now, you can also send him on facebook, and email booktv is the social media address depending on which system you use. And our email is booktv cspan. Org. We will begin taking those in just a little while. Brad thor, i want to talk about some of the themes that come through the books before we go into the specifics about the. Terrorism is not going away. No time soon. Guest its funny ive got a couple of my friends that are in the defense of history they say peace isnt going to pick out any time soon. I agree with you. Its been interesting, because im trying to juggle all the threats going on in the world. Obviously, islamic terrorism whether it was al qaeda, isis or before al qaeda, which ive covered in my second book. That stuff has been there. With a longer program we could talk about the class of nationalism and the Muslim Brotherhood and all that kind of stuff. Thats one thing. We also have on the cyber front of the warfare if you ar they wg with russia which is very much at the forefront in spy master, things theyve done not only here but in the baltics. Youve got the chinese. There was that big hack where they took a lot of u. S. Navy secrets, everything the north koreans have been up to. The world is a very dangerous place. I continually remind people of america has been one of the greatest forces for good and safety and security in the history of the world, but they are constantly being bombarded. And i think the advent of the internet and our reliance on it has only made us more vulnerable to a different kind of terrorism, cyber terrorism. Host real life events are part of your books. Guest they are. So, its funny some of the stuff happens in my books before it happens in real life candid and sometimes the events are a backdrop. For instance, we traded a couple of years ago in the Previous Administration five gitmo terrorists for the guy that walked off his base, kind of a fire base in afghanistan. And i have done it with fire to that where there was a trade of gitmo terrorists to get somebody. So certain things happen. As i was working into the pit of my second book out, the iraq east put out that they found him and hed been in iraq and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head multiple times. I dont know how you shoot yourself multiple times in the head. The iraqis decided they had no use for him anymore. A lot of that stuff happens because of the way that i read the tea leave leaves but im a voracious consumer of news. I Pay Attention to domestic politics and geopolitics. And i think if you look at it and say what is, and i think that is part of the thriller writers job is to look at reality and say what if, and that helps create some interesting scenarios. One of the things, i dont know stephen king, and i would never, ever consider to judge how hard his work is because its different. Whats interesting, i do look at stephen kings work with a little bit of all. I like his writing but i think it must be interesting to create the parameters of the world that your fiction exists. Your characters exist here, you can move the walls, whatever. I cant do that with my books. If i say a senator has an ability or a navy seal does this or somebody at langley does that. I have very specific walls around my work or guideposts if you dont have to operate there. I dont get the cheapest stuff or i will hear from people if i get it wrong. Host scott invokes murphys law a lot. Guest yeah, that is something that you hear from whether it is a green beret, the seals, dies at the unit. If it can go wrong as well go wrong. The battle plans you can have the best in the world, but the minute the bullets start flying, things change. The mindset of adapt and overcome his pig in my novels. The success of the mantra that success is only option. You have to think on your feet and thats is interesting how they select these guys to be in the delta force or end up on the fuels teams and eventually of at one of the tier one teams. Its interesting. You have to be able to think on your feet. Murphys law is something they can quote chapter and verse because something always goes wrong. Its because the mission depends not only on how it was planned, but how well you handle the thing that invariably went sideways. Host another theme is potentially illegal operations on foreign lands and brutal integrations. Guest yet. So, theres been a lot of that kind of stuff in the book. I think it was Charles Krauthammer the recently passed away and said there are kind of two types of acceptable, morally acceptable interrogations. There is the ok, weve got time, we can work on this guy. We can try to build rapport. It is a misunderstanding about our intelligence operatives and our military people go from zero to 80 in the blink of an eye. They do try to build rapport and realize a lot more can be done without applying difficult as. The other thing that he taught that it was morally acceptable is what you can do under the ticking timebomb scenario. If there is a new pit is going to go off at times square in an hour, you know, you have to be prepared to get rough with somebody. Where is it and how do we defuse that kindiffuse that kind of th. And i think that it was charles that made the joke if you walked onto the floor of the New York Times in the aftermath of 9 11 and said there is a taxi cab speeding towards your building with a bomb and we cannot evacuate the building but they have someone in custody that knows how to stop, how much body and what you have been on the newsroom floor of the times of what they have to do to stop the cab from getting the ear and killing people. So its easy from a distance to say we dont like certain things, and i understand that and i certainly dont want that to be the only tool in the toolbox. I think that the details on the bed rock are a thriller, youre asking somebody the suspended release that is come with you on this journey. One of the pieces if you want to call it that that im most proud of what i hear from men and women in the intelligence field and thats exactly how we do it, i have that or ive done that or i have that problem with my boss that happens again and again, and again, and you nailed the Office Politics thing that follows you into the field, the details for me are important because if im not getting those right, its like a currency, and Building Trust with you. And nothing drives me crazier than to read another author who does Something Like put the safety on a glock, no manual safety, they dont get that right, tells me they did not care enough to go nasa but who is an expert, my books dont happen in a vacuum, if i was not able, i would not be able to get the level of accuracy and detail that i do which is kind of a hallmark of my books that people enjoy it i get those right, i grew up reading, i dont want to give you 20 pages on how a missile works, its important that you understand that we have a special forces team, that for me is the limit, peoples Attention Spans have gotten shorter, i dont know other people can do the chapter links and stuff, perhaps they could, he is god and he has great writers that have continued his work, really strong writers, for me that was the one thing, the best piece of advice i can give is the person people skip, long descriptions about technology didnt enter didnt resonate with me so my books and going to keep it simple with important detail. Have you walked the streets in france or pierce and been to the lake in poland or the streets in syria, et cetera, et cetera. The polish stuff no, that lake is interesting, the lake is half owned by russia, i want to know what it is that look like, i went on google earth, i cannot get an idea, the next step for me if i cannot go visit some place, i want to talk to somebody, not as a tourist but who has operated their, if your life is depended on hope what youre noticing around you could get interesting color detail, i want to talk to maybe somebody that was on a Diplomatic ServiceCommittee Team that had a u. S. Diplomat in the area, cia, Intelligence Officer, special operations and i want to see whether they pick up, a couple of books ago, code of conduct i set off in congo, i was talking to somebody who had operated there a ton, what kind of detail do you want from me, big rough guy, what if nobody else notices, give me a couple ideas, we were not getting there, it was not the stuff that i wanted, i said what im trying to ask, did you notice everybody had the same color a bicycle and he said oh my gosh yeah, they cal