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This Is Actually Happening
407: What if you found humanity in the depths of the criminal underworld?
01:12:30
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- [00:00]
Wick Nisteldine
Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of this Is Actually Happening ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the Show Notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.
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Mariana Van Zeller
The biggest threat isn't the monster, it's the systems that manufacture them. And I stopped chasing the villains and I started being more interested in understanding the broken systems that create these bad actors.
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Wick Nisteldine
From Audible originals, I'm Wick Nisteldine. You're listening to this Is actually happening, episode 407. What if you found humanity in the depths of the criminal underworld?
- [01:10]
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- [01:41]
Audible Narrator
Whether you're exploring your fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has stories that will introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantasy series. Know how true the latest blockbuster movies stayed to the sci fi story it was based on, or find unexpected reveals through an exclusive true crime podcast. However you listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. Select any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at $8.99.
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Leon Neyfak
Audible.
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Audible Narrator
Be fascinated. Be fascinating.
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Mariana Van Zeller
Both my parents are Portuguese. From Portugal. Both from big families. My dad has 10 brothers and sisters. My mother has five brothers and sisters. Very Catholic family. They met in the town where I grew up, which is Cascais. It's a small beach community just outside of Lisbon, and it's a beautiful place. My parents got divorced when I was three years old. They used to fight a lot. I remember that as well. And I remember that last day they had a big fight. I learned later it was because my mom told him that she didn't want to live with him anymore and that she had found somebody else that made her happier. My father obviously did not like this man. His name is Nuno who eventually became my stepfather. And I remember a year after they'd been separated, hearing my father say bad things about this new man, Nuno. One time I'd spent the weekend with my father and he was dropping me off at my grandmother's house where my mother would come and pick me up. And as he's pulling into the driveway, my mother is there with Nuno. And my father hadn't actually seen him in person. My father, when he sees Nuno, starts backing up the car. I was like 4 or 5 years old, and I told, hey, dad, why are you doing that? Why don't you talk to Nuno? Like he's really nice. And my father stopped and getting out of the car and saying, hi, Nuno, I'm Eduardo, shaking his hand. And that was it. They became friends. That was a big lesson in sort of forgiveness. And I remember being very impressed by my dad. My parents became friends and friendly at least very soon after. I think they realized that I was their only child and that it was more important for me and for my well being to have a friendly relationship. And they did. So I had a very easy and happy childhood. I mean, I didn't always get along with my stepfather or my stepmother later on in life, but in general, I had a wonderful upbringing. One thing that I love in particular about my family is that we talk about everything. We always have. Everybody is in each other's business. There's a lot of crying, there's a lot of yelling, but there's also a lot of love. We always watch the nightly news and Portuguese television. It was sort of mandatory in my family. You'd be able to watch the Brazilian soap operas, which we all loved. But in order to watch the soap operas, we had to watch the news together as a family. And I'd see these anchors on television talking about what was happening all around the world. You know, the economy in China, violence in Brazil, elections in the United States. And I just thought these were the smartest human beings on Earth, because I couldn't believe they were able to memorize all this information.
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And only later did I realize they
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were reading from a teleprompter.
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But it was pretty much there.
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I was like, okay, I want to be like them. I want to be as smart as they are. In many ways, I think I wanted to impress my dad, who's always been a very cultured man. I think I wanted to impress him and show him that I was going to be able to have that much knowledge as well. I always had a great relationship with my father, but he was always away. My dad had a factory. He owned the factory. He would spend from Mondays to Fridays away in the north of Portugal, managing his company. And then he would come down on the weekends, and I'd spend some time on the weekends with him. He also remarried when I was 6 years old and immediately started having my brothers and sisters. And I didn't always get along with my stepmother, so I knew that he was there for me. I knew that he loved me. I knew that he was incredibly proud of me always. But I also felt like it was a love that I had to fight for, unlike my mother's. My mother was very warm, and I was always her number one priority. And even, you know, when she remarried and she had more children, she always sort of made me feel like I was her number one. I was the most important thing in her life, and I was always taken care of. Well, my father didn't always feel like that. And I think it's in that sense that I wanted to impress him because I was the first daughter, I was the first grandchild on my mother's side of the family, and I was blonde in Portugal, a country where there aren't a ton of blonde people. You know, I think my family just was always commenting on how pretty I was. But I remember my father having several conversations with me. He would tell me, hey, you know, I know you're pretty and blonde, but that's not gonna get you very far in life. And really, you have to care about your grades. You have to start studying more. At some point, I think that clicked, and I decided that I wanted that for myself as well. And it was all tied up with the idea of wanting to be a journalist. But it's interesting, actually, because for the longest time, very much until this day, I think one of my biggest insecurities is that I'm not sure if I'm very smart. I remember coming from school and not having good grades and locking myself in the room crying, telling my mother thought I was stupid. But once I got into my public high school and I started actually studying, I immediately became one of the best students in the class. Growing up, I remember the first time I took a plane ride. I was about nine years old. It was to the Portuguese island of Madeira. I remember waking up really early that morning, super, super excited and realizing once I got on that plane, that I was, wow, this is like the best day of my life. And I want to spend the rest of my life on planes, traveling around. So very early on, I had this yearning of leaving my small country. You know, I think I had an idea that it was a beautiful place, but that it was very small. And so for me, it always felt a little claustrophobic. In my teenage years, I was very outgoing. I had a great social life. I had lots of friends. I was partying all the time. But I was also very focused on academics. I knew I wanted to leave Portugal and have an international journalism career. I was immediately very driven. Quite frankly, I didn't know much about journalism. No one in my family was a journalist. I just knew that I was curious, that I wanted to ask questions, that I wanted the opportunity to travel around the world. But I wasn't sure what kind of journalism I wanted to do. But when I graduated high school, I wanted to go and study abroad. I had a very close relationship with my mother, and she asked me to please go to college in Portugal. And then after college, you can do whatever you want. And I listened to her. I studied international relations, which I loved. But I remember finding out that there was a program called the Erasmus program where in the third year of university, you could go and study abroad for that year. So in my third year of university, I went to Rome. I lived in Rome for a year, and it was incredible. And, yeah, it was my first chance of getting out of the claustrophobia of fortune. I finished university and I started applying for Columbia University's journalism school. I knew it was the best journalism school in the world. First year that I applied, I got back a letter from Columbia saying that I hadn't been accepted. And I was devastated. I cried for days. It was very, very sad. But that didn't deter me. I decided, okay, I'm going to keep trying. I got an internship at a Portuguese television station. And that internship eventually became a job. They were just starting a new travel show. They offered me this job. And I remember my first trip for that show was to the Maldives. It was just me and a cameraman, and I was on the beach, and I was interviewing some honeymooners. And I asked them, so, is this your idea of paradise?
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And I remember just how gut wrenching that moment was for me, because I realized how far away I was from my dream of being a journalist. Because this was never the kind of
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journalism that I wanted to do, right? I wanted to do impactful work and just thinking, yeah, okay, this is a great beginning, but this is not it. I applied again for Columbia University. I was put on a wait list,
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waiting every day for the letter of
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acceptance to come through. But it never Did. So the third year I applied and then I decided, this is ridiculous, I have to do something about it. So I flew to New York. It was my first time in New York, going to this beautiful campus. It was everything I ever expected. My plan was to go up and knock on the door of the dean and try to convince them that they had to accept me somehow. But I remember there was a moment where I arrived and I saw sort of how big and massive and important everything felt and being very nervous too, and thinking, no, I'm just going to turn around, go back. But then I stopped myself and thought, this is ridiculous. I mean, I've come all the way here, I'm not going to turn back and not go up. So I was shaking and I went up the elevator and I found the dean's office. And I was so incredibly lucky because he happened to be there. And I knocked on the door and he actually opened the door and he was the Dean of Academic Dean, David Claytel. And he sat me down, we had an amazing conversations, lasted for about an hour. Turned out he'd been to Portugal, loved the country, asked me all sorts of questions about why I wanted to be a journalist. And then I left. And a couple of months later, I was in the newsroom at the television station in Portugal when I received an email saying that I'd been accepted to Columbia University. I started jumping up and down and crying. My colleagues were all hugging me because they knew this was my dream. I immediately called my mother and my father. They started crying too. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I knew immediately that my. My life was about to change.
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So I was 25 years old. I arrived in New York in August of 2001. And I remember just walking around New York and thinking I was the happiest human being on earth. I couldn't believe I was finally here. I started school and started meeting all these people from all around the world and everything was perfect. Four weeks had passed by now, and I loved my teachers. I loved the experience.
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My Portuguese boyfriend was visiting me.
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I'd been studying until really late that night. Suddenly, in the morning, my phone starts ringing. And I pick up the phone and first it's my television station that I'd worked for in Portugal. And they tell me there's been an attack on the World Trade center. And you are the only Portuguese journalist in Manhattan at this time. Our closest correspondent is in dc, But Manhattan is closed off, we can't get them in, so you have to go to this building. In Midtown and report live the events of what's happening right now.
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And at the same time, I was getting a call from my mother, who
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is in a panic, crying, yelling, begging me not to leave the house. I was explaining to her that I had to go and do this report for Seek the Portuguese television station. At one point, my sister got on the phone and said, you don't understand that mom is collapsed, is on the floor, and please don't do this. And I explained, I'm sorry, but I have to. I just have to. And so I hung up. I promised my mother I would do everything to be safe.
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And I ran as fast as I
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could to this building in midtown.
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I was excited about the possibility of reporting on the biggest event of our lifetimes. But I was also very nervous because
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I'd never done a live report in my life. And I get to the rooftop of this building, and there was all these cameras and all these journalists from all
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around the world, many of which I
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had watched on television, many of which
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were my heroes when I was growing up. And I was like, I cannot believe it. Here I am, 25 years old. I've never done a live report in my entire life. I was just in no way prepared for what was happening. And suddenly I just heard this anchor,
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one of the most famous anchors on
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Portuguese television, sort of like the Dan Rather of Portuguese television, opening up the newscast that night and then saying, okay, and now we're going to Mariana Van Zeller, who is in New York City at the moment.
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Mariana, what are you seeing from the ground? I started talking, and there was still smoke coming out of the World Trade center, and there was chaos everywhere. And me just explaining what I'd witnessed that morning, even on my way down to this building, what I'd seen and what sort of the mood was in New York at that time. In many ways, I was speaking for Portugal on these events. That seemed so much bigger than me is what made me nervous. I didn't feel like I had the gravitas or the knowledge to be talking about these events. As always, I thought that I wasn't perhaps smart enough to even relay what was happening in New York. But once I was able to do it, I think I felt very reassured that, in fact, I was capable of doing this. They said, goodbye, thank you so much. I started getting all these calls from Portugal, from friends and family congratulating me, telling me, you did so well, but please be safe. But this is amazing. I can't believe it.
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All of Portugal watched you on live television. My father called me and said, you have no idea what just happened. I was on a business lunch with a German guy, and suddenly we're watching what was happening in New York.
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Television is on, and your name came up. And the German guy turned to my
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dad and says, wow, she has the same last name as you. And my dad says, yes, it's my daughter.
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And he said, it's the proudest moment of my life.
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And then I remember walking down to
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the streets of New York and seeing
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all the people, you know, looking for their loved ones, holding posters with faces of their husbands and wives and sons and daughters that were missing, that they were still hoping we're alive and we're probably dead. It was a horrible moment. It was also a moment that really put me in my place of understanding. How could you possibly be excited in a moment like this? This is not about you. This is about something that's so much bigger than you.
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I continued that whole week doing live reports and package reports for the Portuguese television station.
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And that week I realized who I
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wanted to be was changing.
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The type of journalism that I wanted
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to do was not so much about
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the what happened and when, but much more about the why. I want to understand why things like this happen. I think in a way, I felt like if I understood the why, it would give me more control and more safety in the world. So, you know, I spent that week reporting on the events. My boyfriend, who was supposed to actually leave that day on 9 11, was stuck for a few more days, and he was very mad at me for not paying enough attention to him and for spending so much time reporting.
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And we realized that this relationship had no future.
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So we broke up with him. And I continued my studies at Columbia, and two months after 9 11, met the man that eventually became my husband. Right after 9 11, I discovered the world of documentaries. It's not something that I grew up with in Portugal. And I started watching docs. I started falling in love with them. And I decided for my thesis, I wanted to do a documentary which was about asylum seekers that come to the United States as unaccompanied minors. Sometimes they're placed in adult detention centers, sometimes even in prisons, surrounded by criminals and very harsh penalties. Particularly after 9 11. It was called Childhood Interrupted. And that documentary won the best documentary award at Columbia University that year. And through that, I got an internship at a documentary production company in London.
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The war in Iraq eventually started that year.
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I sort of knew that the Middle east was going to be the center of news for a long Time. And so I decided that I wanted to pack my bags once again. And I moved to Syria and I enrolled in the University of Damascus. I wanted to learn Arabic. I couldn't openly tell people, not even my closest friends in Syria, that I was a journalist, because Syria is a very, at the time, very authoritarian regime. Phones are bugged, emails are scanned. We knew that every movement, particularly the movement of foreign students, is monitored, particularly if you're a journalist.
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So I just told them that I
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was a student and I lived in this beautiful house in the Christian neighborhood of Damascus, right in the center of, like, so much history. Waking up in the morning with these donkey carts selling fruit, and it felt like I traveled back in time. I was very far away from anything familiar from my family or my friends or Western culture. And I loved every single second of it. I loved it.
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I became really good friends with a
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Syrian guy called Tarek. Tarek was from a small little town right on the border between Iraq and Syria. Nobody quite knew what Hitariq did, but he always hung around the international crowd.
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One day he started telling me the
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story about how all his friends from this little border town were crossing into Iraq to fight against the Americans. And this was when the invasion of Iraq was being hailed as a success, a huge success. Saddam Hussein had been toppled. President Bush was calling this, you know, massive American success. And everything apparently was going as planned. There was no conversation, no talks of an insurgency whatsoever yet. And so when Tarek told me this, and I wasn't seeing this on the news anywhere, I remember telling this story to my boyfriend. He was coming to visit me in Syria. I didn't want to have any of these conversations on the phone again. Every conversation was being tapped. But when I picked him up from the airport, he finally arrives to visit me. He was supposed to spend a week with me in Syria. I told him immediately, look, there's this crazy story that I'm hearing from a good friend, Tarek, that these young Syrians are actually crossing to Iraq in the middle of the night to try to fight the Americans. And this is not being reported anywhere. And we decided immediately. It was, like, such a huge story at the time. Darren, my husband, then boyfriend, was a print reporter. And he started contacting some of the people he knew in journalism back home and got an initial interest letter from the San Francisco Chronicle to do a print story about this. If we were able to get to this town and if we were able to get anyone to talk to us, I contacted my boss from the production company in London that I work for. And he told me, you are crazy. Even if this is true, you absolutely should not head there. It is incredibly dangerous.
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You have no experience in this type of reporting.
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And he flat out told me, do not go there. But we started making a plan to go there anyway.
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We told Tarek, okay, we are in
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fact journalists and I really want to tell this story. And do you think there's any chance
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you could take me to this town
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and I could interview some of your
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friends who've gone to Iraq? And he said, look, the only way we'll be able to do this is, first of all, Darren is American, so we can't say that he's American. And I don't think it's a good
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idea to tell my friends that you
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guys are journalists either. So we're going to say that you are foreigners and you're curious to learn more about Islam because all of my friends in this town that are going to Syria are all very, very religious and they love speaking about Islam and their religion.
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So we packed our bags and we
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started driving up to his hometown.
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Leon Neyfak
I'm Leon Nayfak, best known as the host and co creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco and Think Twice Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show, Final Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious onstage fights. But before the Jerry Springer show became a symbol of cultural decline, its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious minded idealist with lofty ambitions. Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew Springer best, I examine Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV Persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Named one of the best podcasts of the year by the New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves, and how we transcend them. Or don't Listen wherever you get your podcasts or binge the whole series ad free right now on Auto Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app.
- [23:40]
Raza Jaffrey
I'm Raza Jaffrey. And in the new season of the Spy who, we tell the story of Dr. A. Q Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. He was the scientist spy who stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands and used them to give Pakistan a bomb. But he didn't stop there. He became a black market atomic salesman, the fix it man for rogue states seeking nuclear weapons, including Iran, Libya and North Korea. And that left the CIA and MI6 in a race against time to put him out of business before the world's most wayward regimes get hold of the world's most destructive weapons. Follow the Spy who Now wherever you listen to podcasts, you can also listen to the full season of the Spy who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran early ad free on audible.
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Mariana Van Zeller
We arrive there, sort of a desert like landscape, very rural, very conservative.
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We barely saw any women out on the streets. It was just men.
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If you did see women, they were
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covered, wearing headscarves, a lot of mosques
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everywhere, a lot of prayer. And we checked into our little hotel in the closest city, which was about an hour away.
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And then we came back to the town with Tarek.
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And our first interaction in the town. Tarek wanted to take us to meet one of his best friends there, who he told us was a very, very
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religious man, but had already gone to Iraq a couple of times and was training to go and kill Americans. He's now back here in Syria and during the day he's a bicycle repairman and he works in this animal market just outside of town.
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So that was our first stop. It's a big market and it's selling
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sheep, goats, and it was smelly but awesome.
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And all the men are dressed very conservatively with white dress. And we walked in.
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Tarek immediately introduces us to his friend,
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who was lovely, big smile. And I at the time spoke a little Arabic.
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So my husband and I wandered off while Tarek was catching up with his friend. So we just wandered into the middle of the market.
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We were taking photos.
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We were the only foreigners anywhere near this place. They were asking us all sorts of questions.
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Why are you here?
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Where do you come from? And then I just saw a man
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asking Darren, where are you from? Are you America?
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And Darren turns to the man and just like politely nods because he doesn't understand what he's saying.
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The guy takes a step back and says, maybe if you're American, we kill you.
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And he does the symbol with his finger. He shows that he's going to slit his throat. Strangely enough, I wasn't afraid immediately, per se. I realized that it was a dangerous moment and that they could actually kill him and that I was also the only woman in sight and that things
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could turn very ugly for me as well.
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But I wasn't afraid.
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I just thought, this is volatile.
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But I'm quite sure we're going to be able to get ourselves out of this situation. First of all, we have Tarek here who will explain what and keep us safe. Even if they realize he is in fact American, we will be able to rationalize with them because These were people working in a bicycle shop or selling goats and sheep. They were human beings. And maybe they're mad right now, but if we really explain why we're here,
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you know, not with judgment, we're here with a lot of curiosity and we're here to also see them as human beings, that we'll be able to create
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sort of a human connection that will protect us. That was what I kept thinking. And I also thought, I wish I
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had a camera with me because we had decided it wasn't safe to start filming yet. And I was thinking this would be an amazing moment because it is so
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telling, sort of the misunderstanding that exists between this world and our world. My husband was exactly like me. Like, we both felt the same way. And it didn't scare us. We didn't leave. In fact, it made us want to stay there more and explore more and really go deeper.
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It's at this moment that Tarek arrives, realizes what is happening and starts talking very fast.
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And at this point, I've lost the thread.
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I'm not sure what's being said. I'm just hearing Amriki, American, not American, back and forth, back and forth. And then Tarek turns to us and says, okay, guys, Darren, from now on, you're Irish. And they were suddenly very happy because they felt that the Irish proudly trying to fight against colonial Britain. They understood what it meant to fight for independence. And so they loved Darren and they could care less about Portugal. They don't know anything about Portugal. So I was totally okay to be there.
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It was the next day we were taken into this mosque and I was the first and only woman that had ever been allowed into this mosque. And we sat down on the floor under the premise that we were there to learn about Islam. I think they saw this as an opportunity to convert these Westerners to Islam. And so we were all sitting around a circle and one of the first things that happens is that this kid, he was like 7 or 8 years old, starts reciting the Quran by heart. His dad, I think, was sitting next to him and was so proud of him. And then he went from reciting the Quran to recite a Death to America essay that they had memorized again. Eight year old kid, and everybody was cheering. I realized, yeah, that we were in many ways the enemy. But I was very curious to try to understand what led to that feeling that this was just an incredible world that very few people had access to and how privileged I was to be able to see it. That afternoon we were taken to the bicycle repair Guy at his home, it
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was him and his best friend, who
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were also two of Tarek's closest friends, were showing us on their computer all these videos of maimed children bodies, all this death and violence that had been perpetrated by Americans against Islam. There was a realization, I think, on both Darren and I's part that, wow, this is what they're seeing. This is why they hate us.
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And by the way, there were a
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bunch of like eight, nine year old kids watching this violence, watching these maimed children, watching these explosions, killing people, you know, people that look like them, that come from the same place, that believe in the same religion.
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And this couldn't be further from what
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we were being told in the west, right? This was so different.
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This was literally the other side.
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And so this realization that, you know, the power of these videos in creating this real culture of violence and hatred, even with young children, was very scary. And I think the difference between my immediate life being in danger or this moment was that there would actually be an intellectual reason as to why they would want to kill us. We Americans or Westerners, were killing their own children and wives and husbands, so
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why wouldn't they do it too?
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In their eyes, above all, we're the enemy. We're the people that are responsible for what is happening to their loved ones. And this is clearly what they truly believed in. Then gave them a motive as much as I would then want to explain to them, look, we're good people that wouldn't go anywhere. So I think that's what was scary, is like there was an actual motive here and a motive that everybody seems to believe in. We finally convinced one of Tarek's friends to give us an interview. He was 25, 26 years old, and he was sort of the class clown. He was always making jokes. Wherever he walked, he'd be followed by a bunch of kids. He was just beloved in this town.
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Eventually he told us, okay, we'll do this interview. Let's go to sort of the top
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of this little mountain where it'll be away from everybody. And as soon as we got to the top of this mountain, he kneels down and he starts singing the Celine Dion song from Titanic.
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And he knew all the words, even though he doesn't speak a word of English. But it was his favorite song and he knew it by heart. You know, we're about to sit down with a guy whose wish is to kill Americans, right? And yet he's watched Titanic a billion times. He's a romantic at heart. Like, I've Met a million people in my lifetime that are like him. He reminds me of so many people back home. It's like seeing the human being behind the stereotype.
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It was like, okay, I want to
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do stories where I have the privilege
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of gaining access to worlds that few
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others do, but also where I'm able
- [32:45]
to scratch the surface and see the human behind the criminal. You realize when I start meeting these people that we build them up as monsters, right? And I definitely do not condone what they were doing. You know, it was very hard for me to be able to be sharing a meal with them and very honestly sort of enjoying their company and starting to like these people and having that sit in my brain at the same time as I hated what they stood for and didn't agree with the idea that they were going and advocating for violence and killing people. That experience in this town in Syria taught me that the biggest threat isn't the monster, it's the systems that manufacture them. And I stopped chasing the villains and I started being more interested in understanding the broken systems that creates these bad actors. So that was the beginning of my fascination with these criminal underworlds and black markets, because I understood that these were
- [33:49]
worlds that had an enormous global impact, but very few people had access to these worlds. And to try to understand why and
- [33:58]
how can I contextualize this in a way that we can see the full picture, I took the material back to the production company I'd worked with in London. My husband and I did, and we put together a 20 minute report. With all these interviews and our time spent in this region, it was breaking news. Nobody knew about the insurgency at this point. And we thought, for sure we're going to be able to easily sell this. And it's going to be our first big story as freelance journalists. And we started conversations with American networks. And I spoke to some sort of heroes of mine at the time who told us, look, we've been told by our bosses that America isn't ready to hear from the enemy, so we can't air this. It ended up not airing in any American news station and it aired in Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. But the anchor showed our report and then had the Syrian ambassador to the United States on and had him comment on the report. And the Syrian ambassador called me a young, stupid blonde girl that doesn't know anything or something to this effect, which was a badge of honor for me. A year later, I moved to the United States with my husband and we started doing stories about the death train that carries immigrants from Southern Mexico to northern Mexico. We started doing stories about one of the biggest illegal diamond reservations in the Amazon that led to a massacre and the opiate crisis in the United States. So all these sort of black market stories, opiates and guns and human trafficking. And suddenly one day I realized, wow, all these stories sort of have a connecting tissue. They're all about these big black markets, which I didn't know much about. And I started looking into it and realizing that actually these black markets make up for about a third of the global economy. It's what economists call the hidden third. And yet we know nothing about them. An estimated 35% of the global economy are gray and black market. And it has a huge impact on our. And there is very little information out there about how these black markets operate, who runs them and how can they be stopped. And I realized that the only way that I could understand these hidden worlds was to really dive headfirst into these underworlds. You know, you have newspapers and organizations out there studying and analyzing every up and down of the legal economy. But there's no one else actually devoted to understanding this hidden third. And that's what I wanted to do. I was became fascinated by these markets and so I pitched a show to National Geographic. At the time I was working in their news magazine show Explorer. And we put together a show idea, it was called Trafficked. And the idea was every episode we'd go out and gain access, difficult, unprecedented access into a different black market. First episode we did was about counterfeit money. We went down to Peru, I remember perfectly well. We had basically sold National Geographic on Access. We told them that I was the queen of access.
- [37:14]
And we go down to Peru to
- [37:16]
do our first story and I, you know, this is an expensive show. It's going to be their brand new project. Nancyo execs are very excited about this.
- [37:25]
And so all eyes are on us. And it's also sort of dangerous reporting. So they have a lot at stake here.
- [37:30]
And we go down to Peru to
- [37:32]
tell our first story and it's our first Access scene. We meet with these people that run a huge counterfeit operation. They make fake dollars and euros and they've said yes, they're going to give us access to their world. And we are so happy. They said, do not worry, tomorrow I'll bring you the keys to unlock this underworld and you are not going to believe what you're going to see. And the next morning we show up
- [37:58]
and we wait and we wait and we wait.
- [38:01]
We waited for eight hours and they Never showed up. So then I had to do the incredibly difficult thing of calling National Geographic
- [38:07]
and telling them that on my first
- [38:08]
attempt, it was a crush and burden,
- [38:11]
but they stuck with us. So we kept on coming back to Peru and eventually did our first episode, and then we did our second.
- [38:18]
When it started airing, it did really well. It became a big success for National Geographic, and I couldn't believe it.
- [38:25]
So eventually we got a call that they wanted a second season and then a third season, and the show just kept on growing.
- [38:31]
I just thought that I was so privileged to be able to tell these stories. I had my dream job, and then the fact that people actually were watching and it was having some sort of an impact was, I mean, way more than I could ever expect. We spent five years filming Traffic.
- [38:46]
We did 50 episodes, and every single one of those was a huge adventure.
- [38:52]
It was everything from getting stuck in a shootout in Sinaloa to traveling halfway around the world to meet people who
- [39:01]
decided last minute that they didn't want
- [39:03]
to be on camera getting smuggled into
- [39:06]
scam city in Myanmar.
- [39:09]
I mean, literally every single episode was crazy.
- [39:13]
When we started filming Traffic, for me, it was all about exposing these sort of broken systems, right, and how they create these criminal pockets in the world. And when we started filming, I realized that it was something much bigger than that, that I had the opportunity to do something really special and unique with this show. And I think it was the second episode we ever filmed where I was interviewing a Jamaican scammer. It was an episode about scams. And I was interviewing, speaking to this woman. She was 30 years old. Her name's Tweety. She was telling me the story of how when one of their victims was an old American woman, and how she was so proud that she had taken every single cent from this woman, including her wedding ring. This woman had to sell her wedding ring to pay Tweety because she made her believe whatever scam it was. And she came across as very unrepentant and cold. But then I asked her, well, why? Why do you do what you do? And she stopped and looked at me and says, look, I work a full time job at a resort here in Montego Bay. I make in a year what a regular American family spends in a day at the resort. My grandfather that I was incredibly close with got very sick, needed a surgery that was going to cost us $2,000.
- [40:39]
And yet no one in my family,
- [40:41]
including me, could afford to pay for that surgery. My grandfather died. And that was the moment that I decided that in My family, where everybody talks about God will provide. I realized that I was God in the family, that it was up to me to provide for this family. So I had to do whatever I needed to do to make sure that
- [41:02]
this never happened again.
- [41:04]
So that day she realized that she wanted to be a scammer. This was one of the first really impactful statements that started to change my view about what this show could be. Another one was a 16 year old kid who carries cocaine on his back through the mountains of Peru, spends weeks on end with this really heavy backpack full of cocaine, really dangerous terrains. He'd seen many of his best friends being killed in front of him by rival groups. And when I asked him why he did this, he said, look, I grew up in a really small town. My parents are very poor. I always wanted to go to school, to university, and they can't afford it. This is the only job that's going to provide me enough money to save to one day go to college. And I asked him, what do you want to do when you go to college? He says, I want to be a dentist. Why a dentist? And he said, because in my town you see all these posters for these dentist authors and there's all these people with these big smiles and I want to make people happy.
- [42:05]
So again and again I'm hearing these
- [42:07]
stories and realizing, I think for us it's just easier to see the world as black and white, us versus them, as good versus evil, sort of flattening people, and that the world is so much more complicated than that. And so if I could show people that they're real human beings, that these are people just like us, that they are mothers and fathers with dreams and goals and aspirations, much like any single one of us, but that because of the lack of opportunities and the enormous inequality that exists in the world, that they sort of have to turn to a life of crime. Your opportunities are only as good as the options you're given. And for the vast majority of the people out there in the world, those options are very small. The more I filmed for Traffic, the more I understand that this is also an amazing opportunity that I have for people watching this show to start having conversations about the opportunities that they've been given and the privilege that we have, and what are we doing with our own opportunities and how can we actually have some impact in the world. It became about much more, just an access into the black market, but a real understanding of humanity and the biggest problem we have in the world, which is that half of the world's population lives with under $7 a day. 10% of the world's population, this is 700 million people do not have enough money to feed their families on themselves at the end of the day. And as long as there's growing inequality, there's going to be growing violence. That has been, to me, the biggest lesson through all of this. But also, I think one of the beautiful lessons for me in all of this is that people always say, you must have a really depressing view of the world because you meet with all these criminals constantly and hear all these really sad stories. You must be constantly depressed. And. No, quite the opposite, actually. No matter how far into the edges of our society that I travel, I can still find people that are relatable and that are redeemable. Has given me a really powerful and hopeful view of the world, and that I'm able to connect with people that we think we have nothing in common with. When I'm sitting across from a South African assassin called JoJo, and he has rationalized somehow in his mind that he only kills bad people, that he doesn't kill women and children. And when I start digging into his own life, and he tells me that he was orphaned when he was about 8 or 9 years old, both his parents were killed. And then I asked him, do you understand that even if you're not killing the children or the mothers, you're killing their father? So you're doing to the children is the same that was done to you? When I asked him that, he said, no. I really had never thought about the harm that I am causing children. It never crossed my mind. And once we turned off the cameras, he comes up to me and he was visibly emotional. He said, no one has ever sat down and asked me a single question about me or my life. No, nobody has been interested in what I've been through. And you were the first person that actually was curious about how I became who I am. It's made me think so much about what I do, and I really want to figure out a way out of this. I don't want to be an assassin anymore.
- [45:25]
I think the hardest thing about the work that I've done all these years is really balancing it all, making sure that I am the best journalist I
- [45:34]
can be, but also making sure that I'm the best wife and daughter and mother. I mean, particularly when I became a mother. I mean, I think that was the hardest because I've always been very ambitious and driven, But I've also always wanted to have children. And when I Became a mother. I know I would never be happy just half assing it. That's been the biggest challenge and staying grounded because you go and you experience these wild adventures and wild stories and, you know, you're pumped with this adrenaline and almost like this sense of self importance, right?
- [46:08]
That you have these unique access that
- [46:10]
no one out there has. And then you come back to your home and you just have to be a mother and you have to make sure that you're taking your kid to running practice and spending nights building Legos. You know, no matter how jet lagged I am, just, you know, making sure that I'm present. It is hard, you know, when you come back from these adventures, you just want to share these stories, right? I remember I filmed a woman trafficking 4 kilos of heroin laced with fentanyl from Mexico into the United States. We literally filmed her car packed with drugs. And then we filmed her when she arrived in the United States. It was crazy. And then going straight from there, driving to my son's soccer game and having one of the other moms talking to me about, oh my God, my weekend has been crazy. I've been driving my kids to soccer practice and this practice and I've been driving all around, how's your weekend then? And really thinking, do I really want to get into this now? It's going to be all about me and my stories and my crazy life. And I think there's only so much I can share with people about what I've seen until it gets like, okay,
- [47:16]
here she goes again. One of the most memorable stories was Niger, July 2023.
- [47:26]
The story is about gold trafficking and how illegal gold trafficking in this region, in the Sahel region of Africa, is funding terrorist organizations that are planning to attack the west, including the United States. We were filming for the fourth season of Trafficked. I traveled always with the same camera team, with the same directors and producers were usually six people that travel.
- [47:52]
I've been pitching this story to National
- [47:53]
Geographic since day one. And they always thought it was too dangerous for us to go there.
- [47:59]
It is incredibly dangerous because you've got
- [48:01]
isis, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, the worst
- [48:04]
of the worst terrorist organizations out there are operating from this region.
- [48:08]
But eventually, after a lot of work, we came up with a security plan. We were going to film these gold mines, interview a few of the miners and the gold traffickers and possibly even some of the members of these terrorist groups as safely as we could do this and then get out. We were also given a military escort that would accompany us when we run out to the mines. Important to note that there has been a lot of investment in the country by the US government. They had recently built a military base in this area of the sahel. Cost them $110 million to build. And yeah, we arrived in this small town. It's called Agadez. It's UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's a beautiful town that for centuries has been the main center for the
- [48:58]
trafficking of everything from salt and spices
- [49:01]
and slaves and weapons and human beings. And nowadays is a huge center for gold trafficking. But it is absolutely stunningly beautiful. And the next morning we wake up and we're going down to the mines. And it's an eight hour journey to get to the mines. You're off roading the whole time. We had three four by fours with our team. We're a team of six that came from the us, plus a Malian journalist and a local journalist. So we're eight people, plus we have two four by fours in front of us and two behind us with heavily armed military, many of them trained by the US military, by the way. Very long journey, about eight hours to get to the mines. We would stop once in a while and as soon as we'd get out of our cars, the military would like spread out with our weapons in hands just in case we were approached by one of these dangerous groups out there. They were very well trained and we felt sort of protected. We get there in this crazy landscape. It looked like Swiss cheese. There was just holes on the ground everywhere. These tunnels that are dug by hand by these miners, some of them going down up to 200ft and mining. If you've never seen it, it's like one of the rawest ways of earning a living, right? You literally have human beings clawing at the earth looking for these very small specks of gold. We went down to this mine that was 200ft deep. We get to the bottom of it, it was very narrow, you could barely breathe. It was very, very hot. It was 110 degrees outside. So inside the tunnel it was even hotter. It was very thick air. And we get to the end of the mine where you could see people sort of clawing for gold. And we got our shot. We interviewed a miner, we filmed everything and suddenly they told us, oh, we forgot to tell you, but in 20 minutes they're going to start dynamiting this place because that's how they open up more of the tunnels. But what happens very often is that it caves in, all of them. The mines cave in and People get trapped and die. And Suddenly we had 20 minutes to get out of there before they start dynamiting the place. And as we get out of the tunnel, suddenly it's like fourth of July. You're hearing explosions everywhere. And it was a very successful trip. We were all in sort of a high. We had a beautiful night. We camped out in the desert. I was the only woman again surrounded by the soldiers and by my team. I remember going to sleep and thinking, I cannot believe that I'm this lucky that I get to see this kind of thing. Next day, we wake up, we start making our way back to town, and it's again, very, very hot. And slowly, one by one, the AC starts breaking in all our cars. And we're about 30 minutes outside of Agadez. We cannot wait for the moment I'll be able to go back into the hotel and get a shower and call
- [51:54]
my family and tell them that I'm okay.
- [51:57]
And we start hearing the walkie talkie from the car in front of us where Baba, who is our Malian fixer, telling us something that sounded like, there's a cook in Yame. And he's like, no, there's a Ku in Yame, Nyame being the capital, and there's a coup d'. Etat. And my initial thought was, okay, this is not good news, because we still have a couple of days of reporting to do in Agadez. And I'm thinking, once National Geographic finds out that there is a coup in this country, they're going to take us out of here. And I want to spend more time in this country. The story is not done. And then we arrive at our hotel. Everybody's unpacking, getting gear out of the car, and Baba comes to us, and he's visibly shaken, and he says, guys, this is serious. The airspace is closed. The borders have been shut down. The military coup leaders are telling us that they have no plans to reopen at any time in the future. So this could be weeks, this could be months. We have no idea when we'll be able to get out of here. I decided to do this trip exactly at this time because we had a security plan in place, but also because it was when my son goes to camp, she's usually in July every summer. And he goes to a performing arts camp in upstate New York. We drop him off, and then there's my favorite day of the year, which is the day that we pick him up. They have all these performances and concerts and theaters that they put on for the parents and it's literally my favorite day of the year. And it's also around his birthday. And so I knew that I have nine days until I have to be back in New York for pickup day. So when I realize that this is out of my hands and that there's a chance that it'll be weeks or months for us to get out of there, I'm filled immediately with guilt. As a working mother, a person who spends half of my life traveling around the world away from my family, I
- [53:56]
already live with this guilt of not being a good mother, right? Not being present as much as other
- [54:02]
mothers are, as much as my mother was. And it's constantly sort of a balancing act, right? Which is why when he spends three weeks at a sleepaway camp in New York, I thought, great, I'm going to spend that time traveling. So that's what I was thinking, okay, how am I going to be able to get out of this country in time to pick him up? Because I cannot miss that day. We go back to the hotel, I call my husband, I tell him what's happening.
- [54:31]
Get in touch with my insurance company
- [54:33]
that we've paid a lot of money for exactly moments like this. We have an evacuation company to actually get us out of moments like this. So we're thinking, sounds really bad, but I'm sure you know, we have National Geographic and Disney that owns National Geographic, this evacuation company, we have all the plan in place for if events like this happen, that they will get us out of this.
- [55:06]
Audible Narrator
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- [57:13]
Mariana Van Zeller
I remember that night going back to my room and deciding, okay, now I
- [57:17]
have a lot of time on my hands.
- [57:19]
I'm going to read the risk assessment and find out exactly what it says because for every trip we do we always have a company that does these risk assessments. So tells us what are the risk
- [57:29]
assets, environment and what to do in case something happens.
- [57:32]
Which said criminal and Islamist militant groups maintain a presence in the region, conducting regular attacks on security forces, commercial vehicles, convoys and passenger vehicles along major roads
- [57:44]
and in smaller towns across the area.
- [57:46]
Extremist groups including Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West African province have carried out dozens of attacks in the region in recent years. There is also a high risk of kidnap for ransom and this was bolded. So the feeling was very much that we were sitting ducks. The military escorts that we had disappeared, they were called to the capital. We didn't have that anymore. And the only security we had was the two guards that were sit on their plastic chairs by the hotel and would spend half of their days asleep. And that was the security to protect us from the kidnapping squads and terrorist organizations that were outside our gate. I realized that I was the boss. This was my production company that makes traffic. So I felt an enormous responsibility for my team. Then you know, we all gathered and watched TV to see what the updates were. We had Internet, but it was very, very slow and slowly realizing that this was really bad. West African countries such as Nigeria were saying that they were going to possibly invade Niger and depose and take out the coup leaders to reinstall the democratically elected president. And the Wagner group that's sponsored by Russia had said that if African countries invaded that they would come and fight against these countries and that it would be an all out war.
- [59:18]
So the next morning we wake up,
- [59:20]
I knew there were other aid groups operating in the region so we decided to go and visit some of these. I went to the UNHCR compound to the World Food Program, and all of these compounds were surrounded by these massive walls with barbed wires and with a lot of security guards outside. We tried to basically convince them to take us in as guests because we knew we weren't safe outside, but nobody wanted to come out. We ended up not being able to meet any single person. Eventually I decided, okay, we should go to the airport, because they're saying that all planes are grounded, but maybe if there's a plane that comes and go, maybe we can figure out a way to get on one of these planes. So we head to the airport, we go to the little office, and I
- [60:03]
find there's the managers, there's a guy
- [60:04]
called Kader, and he's saying, no, all planes are rounded. There's nothing. I don't think for weeks we're not going to see any activity here. And I said, look, do you have kids? He says, yes. And he shows me the photo of his children on his phone, and I showed him mine. I said, yeah, this is my son. It's his birthday next week. And I promised him that I was going to be back home. Please, Kader, take my number. If you hear of any planes coming in and out, please, please, please let me know. Know an American military base close to us. They tell us that, unfortunately, the United States has not declared this a coup d' etat yet. Because there's a lot of economic interest
- [60:41]
that the United States has in the country.
- [60:43]
And the moment that they call it a coup d', etat, they have to remove all of their military. And the millions of dollars that they spent in the country are awash. Right? So there's a lot of American interest in not declaring it a coup d', etat, which means that they can't evacuate us. And we tell them, we understand that, but is there a way that we can go and sleep in your compound and be protected? They knew it was dangerous. One of their military convoys had been attacked just a few months before. So imagine what they can do to these unarmed journalists. It was crazy to me that they weren't taking us in, but they didn't. We started seeing that all the other
- [61:24]
governments around the world started evacuating their citizens.
- [61:28]
I got a direct line to the Portuguese government, and they told me, look, we've secured seats for you and your team on this plane that's leaving the capital tomorrow. If you can make it to the capital, we will get you out. But we had no way of getting to the capital. We were Three day car ride from the capital. It was really dangerous roads. Eventually, there was a moment when we
- [61:51]
were getting increasingly desperate that we had
- [61:54]
organized to interview this gold trafficker who
- [61:57]
is also a human trafficker.
- [61:59]
If we just keep doing our job,
- [62:01]
you know, at least we'll be somewhat distracted.
- [62:04]
And halfway through the interview, he's telling me about how he smuggles gold, but he also smuggles weapons and human beings.
- [62:11]
I ask him on camera, I say,
- [62:12]
can we repay you to smuggle us out of the country? And he starts laughing and says, you guys, you're Americans, you're high value targets. There is no way in hell I'm going to take that risk. We also had a call with the evacuation company. We filmed it. We say, look, a war hasn't broken out, but if it does, do you have a plan in place to take us out of here? And they did not. We were on our own. It was up to us to figure out a way out. And so we started conversations with my team and eventually they managed to get in touch with another evacuation company run by this incredible guy who was able to find two pilots who were crazy enough to agree to come in the middle of the night to take us out of Niger. It's a private jet, and once they get to the ground, they'll have 20 minutes get on the plane and leave because they know the situation is very dangerous and volatile, and they're probably going to come the middle of the night or somewhere in the early morning. I mean, we were jumping up and down and cheering. We were like, I cannot believe it. It's actually happening.
- [63:20]
I am not an anxious person. And I have to say that my whole time in Niger, I couldn't sleep at all. I was incredibly anxious. Even if I'd fall asleep for 20 minutes, I wake up with sort of
- [63:32]
a pounding heart, sweaty palms, and pick up my phone. My son sometimes would call and I would tell him I was in Niger, but I never told him what was happening. I didn't want to get him scared.
- [63:43]
And I think that for me was the hardest part. Right. I am willing myself to go into these risky situations, but it was really hard to know that I was putting my family through this.
- [63:56]
My father, who lives here in LA with us, was with my husband. My husband kept telling him, oh, don't worry, there's a plan in place, we're going to get them out of there. But I knew he was worried. I spoke to my husband every day, several times a day.
- [64:10]
I knew he couldn't sleep and he was really worried. That was what was filling me with anxiety.
- [64:15]
And then the idea that this was my family. Imagine all the other families. The enormity of the responsibility weighing on my shoulders were just horrible. Finally, that morning arrived, and we are arriving at the airport as the sun rises. It was just this beautiful moment, and the plane wasn't there yet. It had been delayed. And so we get there, and there is my friend Kader, who had called me the night before. He said, I found out there's a plane coming, and I thought this might be you. For you. Is it? And I said, yes, Kader, thank you for calling. It is. And he said, I'll make sure I'm there at the airport when you guys leave. And so there he was. Big smile. He's this beautiful, wonderful, warm man, and he's helping us with the luggage. And as we entered the airport, we realized there's dozen or so military men there that are not so nice or kind, and they want to make our lives miserable, and they want to do everything in their power to not let us leave the country. First they asked to see all our paperwork. The plane was coming from Ibiza, was picking us up, and then was taking us to Dubai.
- [65:20]
And so we had gotten visas to
- [65:23]
go to Dubai, but our local producer, who is actually from Mali, Baba, did not get his visa. It was delayed. We believed he was going to get it, but because he had an African passport, it was much harder for him to get the visa. And after a lot of discussing, they say, okay, you guys can leave, but Baba, the Malian guy, has to stay behind. There's this moment where I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to send my whole team on the plane, but I have to stay. I'm the boss, and I need to make sure that Baba gets out of here safely because he is part of our team and he is my responsibility. So I have to call my husband and tell him that I have decided that I am going to stay in Niger. He says, of course, 100% respect your decision and really admire it. And I think that's what you should do. Very grateful for having this kind of support, but also incredibly devastated.
- [66:21]
My son would be there, and I would be there for him. Yeah, it was torn to pieces.
- [66:29]
The military didn't want to let Baba go, but they were also telling us that there was no way these pilots would allow Baba onto the plane without a visa for Dubai, which was our next destination, because it's illegal, and pilots just don't do that. And while on the phone with my husband, suddenly he says, hey, I'm reading the manifest and the names of the pilots. They seem like they're Portuguese names. So suddenly we see the plane and it's coming, and it lands, and the clock starts ticking, and now we know we've got 20 minutes. I see one of the pilots start stepping down from the plane, and I run for it. I get to him before anyone else does, and I ask him, are you Portuguese? And he says, yes.
- [67:10]
And in Portuguese, I explained, look, I
- [67:12]
am a Portuguese journalist. I'm here with my team. We have been trapped in this country all this time. The military is here. I'm explaining to the pilot, but they're saying that they don't want this guy and my team to get on the plane. And I know that it's very risky for you, but would you be willing to take this risk? Because his visa is delayed. But I guarantee that once we land in Dubai, all the paperwork is going to be sorted for all of us. And somehow he said, yeah, let me talk to the military guy, but I'll convince him. I think we're going to be able to do this. They talked. Kader was there the whole time. He's sort of even yelling at the military, and I can hear him, and he's trying to make the case for us. I mean, this man that I'd met, like, five days before, right? And here he was sort of devoted to helping us. The pilot finally finishes his conversation with the military and turns to me and says, okay, we got it. I really hope this visa comes through, because if it does, doesn't, I'll be in real trouble here. But let's do it. We have to get on the plane. So my whole team at this point is on the plane, pilots inside, and I'm the last one. And I'm running onto the plane, and I hear my name being called, Mariana. And I look back and it's Khadr.
- [68:29]
And he looks at me and says, say happy birthday to your son. Yeah, it was just this moment where I stepped onto the plane and we took off. I mean, we were so happy. We were so relieved. But with that relief also came so much guilt. For us, it had been a really hard nine days in a distant country. But, you know, I remember looking down the window and thinking about all the people I'd met, the miners and even the human smugglers and the Gulf traffickers and the people that worked at the hotel, and all these wonderful human beings that I'd come across, and thinking that for them, it was the beginning of a very Uncertain future with no democracy and possible violence coming their way.
- [69:23]
I landed in Dubai and then made
- [69:25]
my way to New York. And I landed in New York the morning visiting day. We made our way straight to camp and seeing my son running to me, we hugged. He had no idea what had happened.
- [69:39]
I remember I was hugging him extra hard.
- [69:41]
He was like, are you okay? And I'm crying, crying. At this point, he's 13 years old and so immediately I felt like I needed to share it with him. And I said, dude, you have no idea what just happened. I just, I was stuck in a military couldn't Niger. And it took dad and myself and a whole bunch of amazing people turning the world upside down to make sure that we were all back home safely and that this moment happened where I was able to pick you up. And he turned to me and I remember he said, I'm so happy you're
- [70:11]
here, but if you weren't here because you were stuck in a military coup
- [70:15]
in Africa, now that's a story I could tell my friends. And I said, I felt so guilty. And he said, you should never feel guilt. I'm so proud of the work that you do. He's been such a big supporter of what I do.
- [70:28]
Yeah, it's special. Perhaps the smart or rational learning from all this would be that I would decide, okay, I've led an incredibly exciting, different life with incredible opportunities and it's a very fulfilled life. And now I should probably stop doing that. You know, I remember a journalism professor of mine once saying that in journalism there is a line, right, that you never step over the line, but the best journalism happens right on that line. I always wanted to take it as far as I could without actually causing any harm to myself or my team. So maybe while I was in Niger, there were moments where I thought, okay, I'll go back home and I'll stop doing this kind of reporting. I came back home, I took a week or so off, I spent a lot of time with my family, I spent a lot of time reflecting on my life. And six weeks later I was back on the road and I went to Uganda to do this story about the trafficking of hate and ideologies was instrumental into passing these really horrible anti homosexuality law laws in Uganda. And I think what it did to me is instead of making me afraid of the work that I do, it gave me more of a drive. These stories that we were doing, they were important stories that needed to be exposed. I don't know what I would be if I weren't a Journalist. Now I have an opportunity with my podcast to really dive deeper into. Into these people's stories, because with Traffics and my TV work, we get to air about five minutes of their stories. But I really want to understand, much like I wanted with Tweety and Jojo and Kader and all these amazing people that I've met around the world, like, what makes you who you are? How do you become the smuggler and the trafficker and the assassin and all of these things? So now I have this opportunity on podcast the Hidden Third. It's my diary where I also get to share a lot of my experiences and my stories that most people have never heard about. One thing that has allowed me to do the reporting that I do is the way that I approach people, which I think goes back to the way I was educated by my parents is like my parents always told me, you are judged not by the way you treat people with more power. You are truly judged by the way you treat people with less power than you are. So when I'm traveling to all these places around the world, I'm treating everybody with respect and with humanity. And often because of that, they treat me with respect back. I remember reading this line once, and it stuck with me forever. That the wheel of history turns and where and when you are born defines whether you will be lifted or crushed by it. And in many ways, I was born with a lottery ticket, right? I grew up in a beautiful, wonderful, loving family that gave me all the opportunities that I ever wanted. And that for the vast majority of the world out there, that is not the case. And so we have to have that in the back of our minds always and not be so quick to judge and just try to place ourselves in their shoes and try to understand what they've been through. People ask me often, is it about the adrenaline? Is that why you want to go to these dangerous places? And it's not. The high doesn't come from the adrenaline of the danger. I think the high comes from the sense of doing something that is bigger than you, right? Of doing something that matters.
- [74:06]
I'm both driven by ego and a
- [74:10]
purpose of wanting to see change in the world. I get really mad at injustices, and I think that sort of drives me as well to really show the truth and show the whole context behind these human beings, whether they are traffickers or assassins or smugglers or scammers or criminals and outlaws and pirates and all of them. To me, being able to show the full picture, you know, the diversity of our humanity and that there is kindness, good and evil in all of us. It has given me an enormous perspective on how wonderfully complex our world is, and it's not made out of easy solutions. And there's all sorts of different people out there, but behind every single person there's a human being.
- [75:07]
Foreign.
- [75:20]
Wick Nisteldine
Featured Mariana Van Seller Mariana is an award winning correspondent and investigative journalist. She's the host and executive producer of National Geographic's original documentary series Trafficked with Mariana Van Zeller, which explores the complex and often dangerous inner workings of the global underworld, smuggling networks, and informal and black markets. For her reporting, Mariana has earned some of the most prestigious awards in journalism and storytelling. She hosts a podcast called the Hidden, a weekly dive into the underground markets that quietly power a third of the global economy. If you'd like to reach out to Mariana, you can find her email, socials and website in the Show Notes. If you'd like to hear some deeper reflections on Mariana's story, as well as reflections on the last few episodes and updates about the show, please subscribe to my substack called beyond the story@whitmisteldine.substack.com from Audible Originals. You are listening to this Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music to listen ad free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the Episode Notes you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host Whit Misseldine. Today's episode was co produced by me and Aviva Lipkowicz with special thanks to the this Is Actually Happening team including Ellen Westberg. We'd also like to thank Head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Navin, Head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louie, and Chief Content Officer Rachel Gyazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originates LLC the opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velasquez. You can join the community on the this Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram Actually Happening on the show's website thisisactually happening dot com. You can find out more about the podcast. Contact us with any questions, submit your own story or visit the store where you can find this Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, T shirts, wall art, hoodies and more. That's thisisactuallyhappening.com and finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com happening even 2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. We thank you for listening. Follow this Is Actually Happening on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of this Is actually Happening ad free by joining Audible.