Jake Tapper (8:49)

It's great to be here. Thanks so much.

Mike Pesca (8:51)

So the main characters, there are three. There's the protagonist and antagonist and the FBI and DOJ worker. Workers are Dave Bickower and Shreve. How do you pronounce Shreve's last name?

Jake Tapper (9:03)

Shreve. Ariel.

Mike Pesca (9:04)

Yes. And you call them Bitcower and Shreve. First name for one, last name for another, and we get to know them. But somewhere in the middle or first third of the book, there is the phrase, they believe that they were prosecuting the first person to kill US Servicemen on a foreign battlefield. How could that be true?

Jake Tapper (9:26)

I know, it's crazy, right? But in a criminal court, they're the first ones, and I can find no examples before or since of prosecuting a foreign terrorist in a US Criminal court for killing service members on a battlefield. And what's so fascinating about it is even some of the loved ones of those who were killed wondered, is this even illegal, what they did? I mean, fine, they're al Qaeda, but they were on a battlefield. They ambushed soldiers. Like, how is that against the law? And that was actually a defense argument. They were going to try to say that spin ghoul, the bad guy, the al Qaeda guy, was just doing what any combatant would be doing in a war zone. And so I guess one of the reasons it's so interesting is because normally in the pre war on terror era, you know, the Americans were fighting the Vietnamese or the Americans were fighting the Germans or the Italians, and they were another army of a country. But Al Qaeda belongs to no state. They wear no uniform. And so it's different.

Mike Pesca (10:36)

Yeah. All the justifications that were used to explain things like extraordinary rendition and Gitmo, which is very much informing what was going on here. No uniform Though a fighting force, primarily a terrorist force, not recognized with any country, that was indeed the case. And without those circumstances, this never would have happened.

Jake Tapper (11:00)

I think what's so interesting about the case is just the huge Herculean effort to amass evidence. And it comes down to a choice that the prosecutors faced. Here's a guy, spin ghoul. He has confessed. And we can get into why he confessed. He has confessed that he killed Americans and wanted to blow up the US Embassy in Nigeria. And it's his life work. He wants to kill as many Americans as possible. That's his goal. And if the Americans don't prosecute him, he's being held by the Italians. If they don't prosecute him, the Italians will put him in a refugee camp. He'll almost assuredly walk out and kill a bunch of Americans. If they do prosecute him, they have to build this case out of nothing other than this guy's confession. And he doesn't even know dates or times and build a case that will stand up in a criminal court. And any first year law student will be able to say, you can't just go by this guy's confession. He's crazy. Who knows if what he has to say is true or not. So it's this big effort. But one of the things that I came to believe is this actually made us safer than if we had just sent him to Gitmo. Because if we had just sent him to Gitmo, I cannot imagine that he would not have been freed by now because there's no evidence against him other than his confession. And there wouldn't have been the amassing of evidence because that's not what the Gitmo prosecutors are as good at as the prosecutors and the FBI are. And he would have been freed and he probably would have gone and to a Starbucks in Barcelona and killed as many Americans as possible.

Mike Pesca (12:35)

Yeah, they've certainly traced many Gitmo former Gitmo detainees who returned to the battlefield. That was a big and accurate talking point. And let's go back to the refugee status. Fascinating. He's on a luxury liner, I guess repurposed or former luxury liner. And he doesn't want to less the audience heard what you said and said, oh, that was his plan to just blend in with the refugees. Oh, no, he wanted to make clear that. That he was an important person, that he was Al Qaeda. That doesn't mean he wanted to take it to court or did it. Didn't know what was happening. But spin Ghoul is an interesting Guy with interesting motivations.

Jake Tapper (13:14)

Yeah, I mean, one of the questions I always get is, why did he confess? And there's probably a lot of reasons for it. One of them is he had been in a Libyan prison for years and years, had been tortured, and I'm sure his mind wasn't right during the Arab Spring. This is before Gaddafi is killed. Some people come in to his prison where he's been locked up because Gaddafi locked up Islamists, and they take him to the docks and they throw him in a boat, and the boat ends up on the southern Italian islands with a bunch of refugees. So he maybe wasn't thinking completely clearly. But I keep coming back to something that isn't in the book. But that Bickhauer told me once. Bickauer is about our age and he went to Yale, and when he was at Yale, he got an opportunity to interview famous Mets pitcher Ron Darling and Yale alum. Yeah, and Yale alum. And he'd won a World series in 86. Everybody remembers that ball going through Bill Buckner's legs. But what Bitcower wanted to ask him about was a no hitter. He pitched at Wallet Yale a decade.

Mike Pesca (14:17)

Or more against St. John's and Frank Viola. Right.

Jake Tapper (14:19)

Oh, my God, you're good.

Mike Pesca (14:21)

So, because it was a legendary game. I mean, St. John's Ron Darling and Frank.

Jake Tapper (14:26)

But St. John's also had a no hitter. Right. It was like a double no hitter. So it's this incredible game. Anyway, Ron Darling remembered every detail about that day from when he was 21. And, you know, here he is. He'd had gone on and had this hugely successful career as a major league baseball player, et cetera, but remembered everything about the day. And Bitcower says that Spin Ghoul talking about his days in terrorism was like Ron Darling telling him about his no hitter. It was his greatest day of. The best day of his professional career, or one of, in Ron Darling's experience. But it was Spingul's greatest experiences of his career. His career was. He was a terrorist. And he was really proud of it. He remembered everything about it. Spin Ghoul. One of the things that I was able to get for the book that you don't get in a lot of terrorist books is his whole life story, because he confessed, like, from childhood to the moment he was picked up by the Libyans, he told the whole story. So you see, like, he's in the 90s, he's in Saudi Arabia. His family is from Niger. His parents are basically indentured servants. There's huge Racism in Saudi Arabia. For anybody who thinks there's racism in the United States, they should check out the Arab world someday and see what it's like there.

Mike Pesca (15:42)

In fact, even the name Spin Ghoul is a racist.

Jake Tapper (15:45)

That's right, yeah. Pashto for White Rose, which they called him because he was black. Very dark, very black. And so Spin Ghoul was raised hearing the. In the way that you and I were raised, hearing about, you know, the Miracle Mets or The Philadelphia Phillies 1980 team or whatever, that he was raised hearing about jihadis fighting battles that even some Westerners talked about how great they were, the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan and the war against Putin's Russia and Chechnya and Muslims were the victims largely in the former Balkans. And so all of this before 9 11. He's learning about these legendary jihadis and meeting some and he's swept into the life and like the idea that then they're coming for the United States is just another fight against the West. It doesn't really matter to him. And you hear his whole life, obviously I'm not sympathetic to it, but you can't understand. You can't defeat an enemy you don't understand.

Mike Pesca (16:54)

Right, right. And one gets the impression from reading the book. More than the impression, though, it's not said. The most exciting thing, possibly the only exciting thing ever to happen to him was to be ushered into Al Qaeda, to have this opportunity as he sees it. And also we should point out in the news once more, his vector for that his handler or the guy who was one step ahead of his contact was a Saudi government official. This was quite clearly going on back then.

Jake Tapper (17:28)

Oh, absolutely, yeah. No, it's a guy who works for the government. It's not his job to recruit, but he recruited and he did so from his official office and was able to get whatever needed visas or passports there were to send him down the rat line to Pakistan. And then from Pakistan it was very easy going to Afghanistan where he was trained. And he knew that his status in Al Qaeda came up during the trial a lot because his defense attorneys kind of tried to make it seem like he was just a low level operative. But the judge did not buy it. The judge thought he was at least middle to high ranking operative because he knew so many high ranking terrorists, because he was involved in 2002, 2003, his ambush against the Americans was April 25, 2003. And so many of the guys he dealt with, so many of the guys are names that people who even have a passing knowledge of the terrorist world might know, like Hamza Rabiya or Zubaydah or Al Faraj or Al Hadi. Like names of people who are currently being held in Gitmo right now.

Mike Pesca (18:43)

Right. Of the, what, 15 or so left. These are the worst of the worst of the worst.

Jake Tapper (18:47)

Yeah. The ones that could not be released even after Obama said that he wanted to clear out Gitmo. And there was this Gitmo commission put together, and Bitkower and Shreveport were coincidentally on the Gitmo connection commission. And so when they met Spin Ghoul and he told them about Hadi or told them about Farage, they had worked on the Hadi and Farage cases because they knew everything, and they knew everything about those guys. And they knew. One of them, I think they recommended for trial. And the other one they recommended he was just going to have to stay at Gitmo forever because he was too dangerous to release. But the evidence against him was too tainted to use in a court.

Mike Pesca (19:23)

And they have this. An assistant in the case who's this human factotum who under. Who just imbibes every bit of detail, like I would do now.

Jake Tapper (19:33)

Yeah.

Mike Pesca (19:34)

And he's one of the characters that you talk about. There are also parallel investigators, and this is important to their case. It's a quite unusual case because you have spin Ghoul admitting to all these things, but he has the date maybe within one or two days. And then he describes from his perspective, the details of this ambush which killed Americans. But what the American researchers and justice department officials have to do is look through all the cases, find everyone that matches up with what spin gool is saying, and then go. And this is harder than I thought it would be. And then go and convince. They find them. They find the unit. They find the unit whose friends have been killed, and convince them to become witnesses in this case. Uh, we meet everyone involved in this. We even get to know the deceased US Service members. Can you explain what the reaction of these former US Service members was to this really unusual request? We're taking your friend's killer to court in New York City.

Jake Tapper (20:39)

They couldn't believe it. First of all, they're being contacted by the FBI in 2011, 2012, for. They don't know why. And the ambush was in 2003. Most of them are out of the military by then, and most of them don't want to talk about it. It's the worst day of their lives. Two of them were killed. Four of them were seriously wounded. It messed up a ton of them. I Mean, you learn, you meet a bunch of these characters, a bunch of these real guys, and, like, you know, some of them, again, not people that were physically wounded, but some of them just their lives have been destroyed, their marriages have been wrecked. One of them tells a story about his sisters confronting him. They're terrified of him. They think he's gonna hurt them or hurt himself. It just really messes up a bunch of people. One of the things that's so interesting. Well, this is how the way I learned about this case was I was hosting my son's birthday party. It was a paintball birthday party. And because it's so far out in the middle of the boonies in Virginia, I have pizza and drinks for the grownups just to stay for the two hours. And they just sit and we talk or they bring a book or whatever, but that way they don't have to drive. That way they don't have to make four trips back and forth. You know what I mean? Four hours of travel. I suppose they can only do two. So one of the dads comes up to me and he says, oh, I read your book, the Outpost. It's this book I wrote about Afghanistan in 2012. And I know Dave Roller, blah, blah, blah. And I said, that book was really tough to write because the military keeps such horrible records and they do not share them. Whatever they have, they don't share. And he's like, tell me about it. This is Bitcower. He's telling me the story. And as you're describing, he has got. There is no list. Nobody says, here is the list of people that served at Firebase Shkin during this ambush. Here are their phone numbers. Go ha. Go at it. They are in the same boat that you and I are in. When you and I want to write about an ambush or whatever, you have to find one guy and then hopefully he puts you in touch with another guy. And, like, it's all piecemeal. The military is not keeping records. There is no, like, list of everybody who ever served and where they are right now. And so in addition to Jim Hodgson, who is the Rain man kind of guy, who just, like, his brain is like the scene. The guys compare it to the scene at the last scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark is put in a crate and just stuck in this enormous warehouse. And they think of his brain that way, except he knows where everything is. There is also, like, okay, here are the things that were found on the battlefield after this ambush. And there's the Quran and there's this. And there's that. And there's this. Where are they? Because if we. We would love to prove that Spin Ghoul was there physically. Maybe one of these was his. Maybe one of them has a fingerprint. How do we track it down? And not all of these items are in the Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse. Some of them. Some of the guys have taken home with them as battle souvenirs. So it is this incredible case of sleuthing to find this stuff. And, you know, with a very trepidatious group of veterans who have no idea what's going on. Are we in trouble for taking things off the battlefield? What are you doing? Why do you want to talk to me about the worst day of my life? And anyway, it ends up just being fascinating to me.

Mike Pesca (24:04)

But to be clear, Bitgauer comes up to you at your son's paintball party, and he doesn't say, have I got a story for you?

Jake Tapper (24:12)

No.

Mike Pesca (24:12)

He said, oh, you had a story for me? Yeah, yeah.

Jake Tapper (24:15)

He's like, oh, yeah. You think it was tough writing that book? Let me tell you about how tough it was prosecuting this terrorist.

Mike Pesca (24:21)

Right.

Jake Tapper (24:23)

Do you remember we're just bitching about the Pentagon? We're just bitching about the Pentagon.

Mike Pesca (24:26)

Yeah. Did you remember the case? Did you cover it?

Jake Tapper (24:29)

Nope. I said to him, did any. After he was done, and he told it, like. And I was a wrapped audience. I was just sitting here listening, and, like, wow, what a great story. And every clue is interesting and this and that. And he's telling me about the characters. Hodgson that we just talked about. This incredibly curious, kind of, like, oddball character, but brilliant. And we're so lucky in the United States to have him, you know, working for the criminal intelligence division of the Army. And, you know, this Muslim woman who works for the FBI, two Muslim women who work for the FBI, and this, you know, immigrant from the Caribbean who works for the army. I mean, just all this American mosaic of incredible characters. The woman who works at Quantico is, like, a character right out of, like, Criminal Minds. She's got, like, dyed red hair and a nose ring, neck tats. She's the one who, like, is looking for fingerprints. So all these incredible. He tells me the story, and then I say to him, has anyone written this story before? Because it really was just an incredible story. He said, no. People covered the verdict or the trial, but nobody knew how we built the case. And the truth is, we never really find that out. It's really kind of interesting because it is almost entirely what we watch on tv, when we watch dramas, it's almost always the, the sleuthing. And the case is almost an afterthought. But in real life we only hear about the verdicts really, or the trials, but not how they got the evidence. And I just thought how they got the evidence was so interesting.

Mike Pesca (26:04)

Yeah, I was listening to an interesting interview. You mentioned this baseball game. Bill Simmons, I think, was interviewing Pablo Torre who's in the news because he exposed something about the LA Clippers player Kawhi Leonard. And Pablo just kept saying we as species that like stories, what we really like is mysteries. That's make everything a mystery and everything is a mystery and sleuthing is what drives us along. But you're absolutely right, a verdict isn't sleuthing or how or the process of getting to a verdict, it's just ending, just starting with the end of a story. And so maybe, yeah, and maybe this is why, I don't know, we either backfill the mystery that led us up to the verdict or we let 12 part podcasts tell us about this. But yeah, there's something about the news that doesn't really pull us along and lead us there as storytelling creatures and story appreciating creatures.

Jake Tapper (27:03)

It's a strength of podcasts and a severe limit of day to day journalism, which is. Well, first of all, nobody would have told me any of this stuff while the trial was going on, right? I mean, like only able to tell me after the verdict's done and the case is closed so that, you know, nobody would have told it along the way. But it does make me think that there is a huge genre. I don't know if it exists, but there is a huge genre to be created of the sleuthing of these cases. I don't know if they're all as compelling and dramatic as I hope Race Against Terror.

Mike Pesca (27:39)

They can't possibly be all as sprawling. It would bankrupt.

Jake Tapper (27:41)

Well, certainly not around the world and certainly not the, the fingerprint on the Quran. It's. I mean, but, but I mean, you'd think that, I mean, this is really interesting. I mean, just forget me, forget my book. Just like the sleuthing of it was so cool and so interesting and I just didn't even know most of this stuff.

Mike Pesca (28:00)

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Mike Pesca (30:21)

And we're back with Jake Tapper talking about Race Against Terror. Well I'll tell you Jake, when I say I'm interviewing Jake Tapper and then whoever I say it to will have whatever opinion they have of you or Joe Biden or whatever I say. And then they say about what I'm like, oh, he wrote this book. It's about this guy named. I usually forget the name Gould. And then they say is that a Batman villain? I'm like, no different guy. But then when I tell the story, everyone's rapid.

Jake Tapper (30:48)

Yeah, it's just so, like, again, forget me, remove me from it, remove my book from it. It's just an incredible story. I can't even believe it happened. And then you learn about the individual characters who make up this book. I still can't believe that two of the key FBI investigators are Muslim women. It's just so interesting. You would put that in a dramatic rendering of this book and people would be like, ah, get that DEI crap out of here. And it's like, no, that happened. It really happened. Rashauna Muhammad and Susanna El Jazi, like, they were important for the case and they come from Islam of different ways. One of them from the Black power movement in Baltimore and the other one for her parents and the other one from the former from Eastern Europe. But they're both Muslim and proud Muslims. And it's an important part of the story because this isn't a war against Islam, right? It's a war against a twisted interpretation of it by, by a terrorist group. Just like the war against right wing or left wing radicals is a war against the twisted interpretations of progressivism and conservatism. But, but it's so. It's just such an important part of the story. In the American mosaic, Shreve, this WASPy genteel Virginian, and Bitcower, the intense, wiry Jew who was a Jeopardy. Champion. I mean, like, again, you couldn't, you couldn't make it up.

Mike Pesca (32:07)

Are any of the characters still at the doj, DOJ or FBI?

Jake Tapper (32:12)

A few of them. One of them, I have to say, and this is really just disappointing news, although very timely. George Toscas, who would not cooperate with my book, would not talk to me, would not return emails, but I know all about him because he was legendary and his colleagues would talk about him. He was basically the last hurdle before a case would be brought to the Attorney General for approval and to extradite spin ghoul in 2011, 2012, that's a big ask because at this time, the entire political system on Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans, were protesting the idea of bringing terrorists to the US for criminal prosecution. They acted as though that they were like, thanos, you bring them into the United States and they're going to kill everybody and burst out of prison. And there was this real fear. I mean, we were still very traumatized 10 years after the fact. And anyway, to get the case approved. So they would extradite Spin Ghoul and then bring the case and try him in a criminal court in Brooklyn. They had to get George Toscas to sign off. And he was the guy that his skepticism, his scrutiny, his pressure testing of every argument. Like he had been through situations where he was prosecuting somebody and the case had been thrown out of court because they had been interrogated under duress by a different government of a different country's government. And so he was just like, he was a hard ass and legendary. And he's been sidelined at doj and his last day is coming up because he signed off on the warrant at Mar A Lago for the classified documents that Trump refused to hand over. And so he's been basically pushed out. I mean, he hasn't been fired, but his last day's coming up. That's a huge loss for the United States. It's a huge loss in the war on terror. Incredibly shortsighted and of a piece because it just happened a few days ago that I told you that Spigel was the very first foreign terrorist tried in the U.S. criminal Court for killing American terrorists. Trump is bringing the second one. And Trump brought the second one, this guy Jafar, for the Abbey Gate attack. And Jafar, nobody said boo. Like, that's how far we've come. Ten years later, or whatever, everyone's like, okay, great, prosecute him in the criminal court. Nobody expressing concerns that he's gonna bust out or whatever. Great, prosecute him. And the lead prosecutor on that case was fired Wednesday night because some MAGA person said something crazy about him on Twitter. Like, I bet he was resisting the Comey prosecution. This is. And he was fired for no reason. More than 20 years building a case against Jafar, and just said today in a public letter that he thinks that he has confidence in his co counsel, but this hurts the war on terror. This hurts the prosecution of Jafar. So on one level, Trump has learned the lesson of Obama, although I'm sure he has no idea in trying these guys in criminal court is good and effective and locks them away forever. On the other hand, if you're only like, if you care deeply only about what wing nuts on social media are saying, and also whether or not somebody is personally loyal to you as opposed to the Constitution and protecting the American people, then we're making some bad decisions here.

Mike Pesca (35:36)

And it comes through so clearly in the book, the attention to detail, the requirements that everything be so thoroughly documented and that mistakes cannot be made. And then I can't help but contrast that with the dissolute nature of the most recent high Profile indictment of Jim Comey. There is a phrase in the book about a non talking indictment against one of these guys because you wouldn't want to give away your case. I mean, has there ever been a more mute indictment than the one against Jim Comey?

Jake Tapper (36:12)

Yeah, we still don't. I mean, I reported a source familiar with the case told me who person three is, which is that it's this Dan Richmond, old friend of Comey.

Mike Pesca (36:20)

But yeah, it's the Comey law professor, right?

Jake Tapper (36:22)

Yeah, but we still, like, they still haven't even. It's possible that they have gotten a lot of information and a lot of evidence and it's all good and ready to go. But remember, they fired the last US Attorney, Eric Siebert, very conservative prosecutor, a lot of experience, because he wouldn't bring this case. And I think it's also possible that it's a non speaking indictment or a non talking indictment because they're still trying to fill in the blanks. They still don't even know which case they're bringing against him or why or how or whatever. And it's not easy to get an indictment necessarily. And one of the other things that's just so important about this prosecution of Spin Ghoul is that like it is the government working as it is supposed to work. It is everybody doing their job, working across different jurisdictions, working across different agencies. Everybody. Like nobody knows who anybody voted for. This happens during Obama, but the case is carried over through in the first Trump administration and it's just about locking this guy up. Nobody's asking Spin Ghoul who he voted for. Nobody's asking Bitcower or Shreve who they voted for. The truth is, I don't even know. I have no idea Sharif and Bitkower's politics. I mean, they told me basically that they were in the middle of Bush and Obama when it came to their philosophies on war on terror, and they thought Obama was a little naive, maybe even. But it wasn't about that. It was just like, well, what are the rules? How do we get this guy locked up?

Mike Pesca (37:51)

Is there any thought within the FBI or even among people who either support or aren't terribly exercised by the vindictive pettiness of some of the purgings of justice officials who were only doing their jobs but got crosswise with a Trump acolyte? Is there any concern that you've picked up that this has or inevitably will have an impact on something that we assume that they would value keeping America safe and the war on Terrorism or.

Jake Tapper (38:26)

Yeah, yes, 100%. Yes, of course. FBI agents, people who are part of the justice system. Judges, prosecutors. Yes, 100 times. Look, there's a reason why experience is valued, right? I mean, one of the reasons why George Toscas, again, I keep singing his praises. He never did a damn thing for me. He never returned a call, he never returned an email. I only know about him because of his colleague's esteem for him. One of the reasons why George Toscas was so good at his job is because there had been times when bad things had happened while he was trying to prosecute cases. And he learned things, experiences, the accumulation of mistakes and screw ups. And then you learn how to avoid them in the future. Like, I mean, it's cliche, but again, you and I are old enough to know that you learn a ton more from your failures than your successes and that they stay with you longer and you do actually become better if you're, I mean, you should anyway, if you, if you do it, if you handle it correctly. And George Tosca's had all this experience sidelining him is madness. It is madness. Here's a guy who'd been at the department since 1993 and what is that? So that's 32 years. And like removing him from, from protecting us from terrorists, making the prosecutions as tough. Here's this guy, Ben Ari, Michael Ben Ari at the Eastern District, who says today out loud, this makes us less safe. I mean, it's incredibly alarming. It's theoretical, so it's tough to prove. And because it's in the national security realm and people right now are, you know, maybe they're more focused on the impact of tariffs on, on the prices they're paying or the war against free speech, whether Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel. I get it. People don't necessarily see this as the dire threat that I see it, but I think it is potentially, and it's almost impossible to prove something like this has an effect. After 9 11, there were all sorts of people saying, well, we recommended this, this and this, and it was never done. But you couldn't draw a line between the failure to take the recommendations of the Hart Rudman Commission to 9 11, you can say, and because of that this happened. But it's bound to be. You remove a whole bunch of experts from a situation, you're going to be deprived their expertise, their knowledge, their wisdom. And like, mistakes are going to be made that could have been avoided and that could cost a human life.

Mike Pesca (41:08)

It could, of course, or many, because that's the scope of the ambition of these terrorists. The name of the book is Race Against Chasing an al Qaeda Killer at the dawn of the Forever War. I have to emphasize it's nonfiction. Jake has been on for his fiction books. He is the host of the lead on cnn. Jake Tapper, thank you so much. Again, it's always a pleasure.

Jake Tapper (41:28)

Thank you so much and thanks for what you do. You do such a great job.

Mike Pesca (41:35)

And that's it for today's show. Corey Warr is the producer of the gist. Ashley Kahn does our coordination of production, which is one way to say it. Jeff Craig runs our socials. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the GIST list. Michelle Pesca helps more than helps, really orchestrates it all from above, pulling the strings, sort of a Svengali in robes. When she wears a robe, a bathrobe, sometimes it's white, it's not black. And thanks for listening.