106. Hunting Al-Qaeda: Anatomy Of A Terrorist (Ep 1)

18:03David:And so this is the crucial point, 2009, the trail is cold, the pressure is there. And that's why this story is going to turn out the way it does. Because suddenly, through a kind of surprising route, as we'll see, they're going to get what they think might be a lead into getting to that leadership of Al-Qaeda. And that lead is going to come an unusual route, but it's going to come through a blogger of all things, which is a really interesting aspect of this story. But yeah, it's going to be a blogger, a Jordanian blogger, no less.

18:39Gordon:A Jordanian blogger, yes. And again, as we tell this story, I would just urge everyone listening to think about this, not through the lens of, oh, there was another path that wound up leading to bin Laden. But, you know, think about this as we tell the story from the lens of the people who were there at the time, who, as this case goes on, will see that it presents really incredible potential intelligence value. So there is a blogger in 2007, 2008, using a pseudonym named Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. That is the pseudonym. Now, this Abu Dujana character writes for an outlet called al-Hizba, which is an outlet for radical Islamic teaching and discourse.

19:28Gordon:It's kind of a jihadi message board, Gordon, and chat forum. And Abu Dujana is a very active participant in this platform.

19:39David:Yeah, we've got an example of his post here. Brothers, download these videos until your internet cable gets overheated because of how hot the clips are. Readers can then clip to view a collage of attacks by Iraqi insurgents on US troops. And then he says, you know, watch how the Americans get killed as if they were in PlayStation video games. And I think it is worth saying, it sounds strange now, but these message boards and websites were really important at the time. This is slightly before social media. And so websites, bloggers, message boards were the new way of getting content out and where someone could get content out relatively anonymously and with relatively little controls over what they were saying.

20:20David:And so they were quite an important route for al-Qaeda to get its propaganda and messaging out, and for people who just supported al-Qaeda to kind of communicate. And so this Abu Dhajana is one of those people who's using a pseudonym and posting these pretty bloodthirsty, aggressive, sarcastic, but also, as we can see with his reference to PlayStation video games, quite kind of smart in his own way, posts. And I think as a result, he's going to get very widely read, isn't he, on Al-Hazba. He's going to get kind of widely commented on, seen as a kind of moderator for the group, you know, driving further traffic.

20:58David:He's going to become a kind of a big figure in this website world of people supporting Al-Qaeda.

21:04Gordon:And eventually he'll be asked, because he's so active and popular on the forum, he's going to be asked to serve as moderator of one of the discussion groups, which is going to draw further traffic to him. And here's an example of something he's typing as he's opening one of these sort of chat forums. Welcome to the Al-Hezba Cafe. This is Abadoujana writing. Go to the menu and pick today's dish. Roasted Humvee with sauce of human remains. Exploded tank by an IED, improvised explosive device, with no survivors. Or a pastry made of Americans' brains taken out with sniper bullets. Yuck. So this is an example of the kind of internet personality that is going to be increasingly of interest to the CIA, to the NSA, and as we'll see to the Jordanian General Intelligence Director at their service.

21:55Gordon:But so a couple more words on Abu Dujana before we get to his sort of connection with the intelligence services. So that pseudonym is carefully chosen. Al-Khorasan means from Khorasan, which is the ancient name for the Islamic lands that encompass much of modern day Afghanistan. And Abu Dujana is a 7th century Arab warrior who's a favorite of the prophets. And before battle, apparently, Abidujana would put on a headband and he'd sort of mock his enemies, very kind of peacock around in front of their lines. And I think it's telling, given this sort of online personality that this Abidujana has chosen, that that's kind of his online personality tracks with that as well.

22:38Now, no one knows for a long time who Abadoujana is.

22:43Gordon:There's speculation that he's Saudi. And I think this is interesting given what's to come. There's speculation that he's quite possibly a senior Al-Qaeda official given how closely his postings and commentary track with Al-Qaeda's propaganda. Now, because of all of this, the National Security Agency, the U.S. SIGIN Agency, the NSA, begin targeting Abadoujana to try to figure out who he is. And they work backward, essentially through a bunch of databases, a maze of servers and cables, and through some impressive technical collection, narrowed down the search to Jordan to try to geolocate this guy, and then to Amman, and then finally to a single house in a working class neighborhood of the Jordanian capital.

23:31Gordon:And it turns out that Abu Dujana is a very soft-spoken, mild-mannered Jordanian doctor named Humam Khalil al-Balawi.

23:43David:And this is interesting, isn't it? Because they thought he was going to be a top al-Qaeda official, or potentially, given how influential he was. And yet they can't see any connection to al-Qaeda. And here is this guy who's a kind of quiet guy on the internet, as it were.

23:58Gordon:Yeah. I mean, he's obviously very online and his wife, and we'll talk more about her later because she does play an important role in his radicalization. But his wife was kind of worried about all the time he's spending on the computer. And Balawi, he's very much a social recluse, rarely goes out. He doesn't even attend Friday prayers at the mosque. And his wife will later say, you know, he was living in fantasy in another world as Avedujana. And the CI conducted this search alongside the Jordanians, but the information ends up with the Jordanian Intelligence Service probably in mid to late 2008.

24:39David:Worth introducing the Jordanians here maybe briefly as a kind of intelligence service, the GID, isn't it? That's right. General Intelligence Directorate. And explaining a bit about the context in Jordan as well.

24:50Gordon:I believe it's the GID's first appearance on the podcast, Gordon. Is that right? Well, welcome to the GID. Yeah. Welcome.

24:55David:It is. I don't think we've featured many spy services, but not them before. And I don't think we've done much on Jordan either. We haven't.

25:02Gordon:It's one of those countries that has a family name stamped on it. So it is the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. It's been ruled by Hashemite family who are direct descendants of the prophet for several generations. And I think there's four things to know about Jordan and its intelligence service to kind of set up the context for the story. One relatively small population, about 6 million people, fewer than Manhattan. Jordan really has no natural resources or much of economic value, and it is smack in the middle of an absolutely atrocious neighborhood. You think about the map, to the north is Syria, to the west is Israel-Palestine, to the east is Iraq.

25:43Gordon:And so you think about what's gone on in the Middle East over the last quarter century, the Jordanians have been in the thick of it. So that is one. Two is Jordan has been a very reliable U.S. ally. There are very deep ties between the Jordanian monarchy, the GID, its intelligence service, and the CIA. And this is a longstanding, pretty intimate relationship that even predates the Cold War, but certainly was cemented even further in the middle of the Cold War. I mean, just a couple examples of this. In 1958, the CIA helped then King Hussein, who's the father of the current king, King Abdullah.

26:26Gordon:The CIA actually sent officers to Amman to help King Hussein ferret out this cabal of coup plotters. So the agency actually played a really important role in the sustainment of the Jordanian monarchy.

26:42David:Interestingly enough, actually, we referenced this in our series on Crypto AG, that one of the reasons they knew about the coup plot was because they were inside the Egyptian kind of allies of the coup plotters communications but yeah that that allowed them to help and that's just one of the times where they've got this close relationship isn't there particularly in kind of counter-terrorism as terrorism picks up in in through the 70s and you get um you know the wave of kind of Palestinian terrorism Black September things like that Jordan becomes a place where a lot of this kind of centers on people are passing through some of these groups challenging the monarchy and the CIA and the Brits as well, I think, to some extent, are there helping Jordan as a kind of what they see as an island of stability, I guess, in the Middle East, in a difficult neighborhood.

27:26Gordon:Jordan is one of the few Arab countries that for years has been at peace with Israel. I believe the peace treaty with the Israelis was signed in 1994. So this is a country that is sort of firmly on side with the Americans in the region. Obviously, there are occasional differences of opinion and spats and things like that, but really firmly on side. I mean, I think interestingly enough, as we sort of dialed down to the intelligence services, the COS, our chief of station in Amman, traditionally has a direct line to the king, which is very unique. And there's a great book on this by a guy named Jack O 'Connell called King's Council.

28:07Gordon:And he describes, his former COS Amman, I mean, describes how essentially he became the monarchy's lawyer in D.C. after he retired, right? Took up representing them. So there's a very close relationship between the station in Amman and the monarchy. I'll note that when I visited our station in Amman, at least at the time, there was a very big picture of King Abdullah on a shooting range that was hung in U.S. Amman's office.

28:40David:I mean, actually, the king, I think, is a graduate of Sandhurst. There's quite close ties to the UK. The one time I actually met him was I produced an interview with him for the BBC. And I remember when we got the interview with him, I thought, this is kind of early 2000s. Great, we're going to go to Amman. And actually, he was in Britain because he spent so much time there. He had a kind of house in Surrey where we went to do the interview. So I think it shows how close these ties are to the West, really. So you had a bit to do with them, then, did you, in terms of briefing and your time in the agency, David?

29:11David:Are you allowed to talk about it?

29:12Gordon:I will share that the worst briefing that I ever gave while an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency was for a member of the Jordanian royal family.

29:22David:Why was it the worst?

29:23Gordon:Well, so this is, and again, another example of just the closeness of the relationship is, we will, when it makes sense, given the position, provide briefings to members of the royal family. and one of them was coming to Washington. It wasn't in a month. And I was a very young analyst and probably should not have been given this briefing, but I think someone who was more experienced than me was like out on maternity leave or something like that. And so I was like the Stuckey and there were a couple topics that we got cabled in from Amman where like he wants to talk about these two things. So of course I just went completely heads down on those two things and got in really deep and made this briefing, got the talking points all cleared and everything like that.

30:10Gordon:And then when I showed up to the briefing, he was like, let's talk about these three things. And they were three things that I had not prepared for at all. And so I just kind of like, I just kind of like froze and my team chief had to like step in and it was like, it was a legitimately, it was bad, a legitimately terrible briefing after the, after the briefing, my, my team chief pulled me aside in the hallway and it was basically like, I think that could have gone 90 % better or something like that. It was absolutely, absolutely atrocious. But again, I mean, just the fact that you have a situation where it's not actually that abnormal for a really young analyst to be briefing a member of the royal family.

30:52Gordon:The CI is really close with the GID. It is a partnership, but it's a dependency also for the Jordanians. It is both of those things. And this is an important point for the story around Balawi is the Jordanians are always, as the smaller members in a partnership always are, they're always keen to demonstrate their worth.

31:20David:Bit like the Brits.

31:21Gordon:I wasn't going to say it, Gordon. I wasn't going to say it. I was going to let you say it. So that's two. Jordan, reliable US ally, deep ties between the Intel services. Third point on GID itself, Obviously, you know, the Jordanians, they're not operating in the context of like a progressive liberal democracy, right? This is a constitutional-ish monarchy, right? But GID has become more professionalized in the past few decades. The headquarters, which I've been to, is on this hilltop, I think in Eastern Amman. It's got this reddish color. It's made of big, chunky reddish limestone blocks. I do appreciate the GID's motto, Gordon, justice has come, which is a very ominous motto.

32:09David:Sounds like something from a Marvel movie or something like that.

32:11Gordon:GID used to have actually a prison at the center of that compound, which was closed in 2005 when King Abdullah shifted and turned over the GID leadership. But this used to be one of these kind of classic Middle Eastern mukhabarat, you know, situations where the people were tortured and whipped and electrocuted there. It used to be called the fingernail factory. As I said, I've been inside for a number of liaison meetings. Great coffee, I will say. The Jords do the coffee right. And based on my visits, I would also say that 100 % of the GID officers I met are just like chain smoking. I mean, it's like two packs a day, right?

32:51Gordon:So GID, much more professionalized than 30 years ago. And then the fourth point is the Jordanians were a really significant counterterrorism partner for the U.S. after 9-11. And I think this is an example of a service that, particularly on CT topics, punched above its weight. You know, because you think about the neighborhood they're in, their sort of familial tribal connections into Iraq, into the West Bank, into Syria. And that counterterrorism work is like right up GID's alley. And I think it's also fair to say that the Jordanians, you know, they've got a big target on their back. I mean, you think of in 2005, there were massive hotel bombings in Amman.

33:37David:Yeah.

33:37Gordon:conducted by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was then the leader of the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq, send suicide bombers to blow up three hotels in Amman. So the Jordanians, I think, on counter terrorism, there's this shared sense of threat. And there's this great quote from Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who asked former CIA director George Tenet, which intelligence service had been most successful in penetrating al-Qaeda? And the answer was the Jordanians. and they're superstars.

34:08David:So there, I think, with these superstars from Jortanian Intelligence having their sights on Balawi, this important blogger who looks like he could be connected in some way to Al-Qaeda. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see what they do with him.

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38:40David:Okay, welcome back. We are in Jordan 2008-2009 and the Jordanian Intelligence Services, thanks to this tip-off from the Americans, have got their sights on Balaoui, haven't they? And they're going to be looking at him as the real identity, the real person behind this blogger.

38:59Gordon:Yeah, in the case, Gordon is going to end up on the desk of a captain at the Jordanian G.I.D. named Ali bin Zayd. He's known among his peers as Sharif Ali, which is an honorific that denotes his noble birth. He is a direct descendant of Jordan's first king, and he is a cousin to the present king of Jordan, King Abdullah. Ali is 34 in 2009. He's a 10-year veteran of the GID. He's got a slew of medals and commendations to his credit, including one apparently from the CIA. He seems by all accounts to be a hard worker. He puts in long hours. Doesn't seem to have been much of a rank puller, you know, using that sort of royal connection to sort of advance his own career.

39:49Gordon:It's so fascinating when you dig into the Jordanians. Everybody's educated in the US or in the UK. He went to college in Boston, went to Emerson, was a fan of the Boston Red Sox, went to Fenway to see baseball games when he was in the States. He actually worked as an intern for then junior U.S. Senator for Massachusetts, Democrat John Kerry, future presidential candidate. Ali Benzadeh is an avid pilot. He's actually got a flight simulator in his home. And so I think, you know, in some ways, the kind of deep connection to the United States is very common for a Jordanian royal. But Ali is unconventional in some other ways, right?

40:30Gordon:He's married to a Christian, a Jordanian Christian. There aren't that many Christians in Jordan. It's a pretty small minority, even though he is a Muslim. he's he's openly affectionate toward dogs which is very very non-arab um you know i would say when i was in damascus if i had told anybody i had a dog they would sort of look at you like you were unclean but ali has two german shepherds that he like he carts around amman i would say the pictures of ali he looks like a very smiley and happy guy he's got thick dark hair he's got this wide face. He looks very, very friendly, and by all accounts, he was.

41:11Gordon:Bin Zaid, he speaks immaculate East Coast accented English. Gordon, I'd love for you to try that accent.

41:19David:It's not Boston, is it? I can't even Boston accent.

41:21Gordon:It's not like a Southie accent, Gordon.

41:24David:He's a member of the royal family. He doesn't need to be an intelligence director, I'd imagine. He strikes me as someone who's probably quite committed to it, perhaps because of his US background, perhaps enjoys it as well. Because I guess he's going to get to interact a lot with the CIA. He's going to be close to the CIA station chiefs there in Amman, who we talked about, quite influential. It allows him to keep that connection with the US, but also in an interesting way, and probably be a bit different maybe from other members of the royal family. I can't imagine there are that many royals inside the GID.

41:52Gordon:I don't know how many British royals have served inside SIS. Not that many.

41:58David:Yeah.

41:58Gordon:Yeah, the American connection will be an important one here because it's very natural for the Jordanians, of course, to cooperate with CIA. But here, there's going to be a really, I think, a personal component to the cooperation as well, because Benzade is really close with one of his American counterparts in the CIA station in Amman, a former army ranger turned case officer named Darren Labonte, who we'll talk about more in these episodes to come and who is soon going to become Benzade's partner on the CIA. the Balaoui case. And, you know, Labonte, the American and Bin Zaid, they're friends. They work CT cases together.

42:35Gordon:Their wives are actually friends. And sometimes they'll actually spend weekends together on the Red Sea in Bin Zaid's boat. He apparently has a Bertram fishing yacht that he anchors in Aqaba Harbor. And Bin Zaid is the guy who gets handed the Balaoui file. And he starts to look. And I think he's really asking this question of like, who is the real guy behind this Abu Dujana personality. So the GID conduct physical surveillance. They trail Balaoui for weeks, and he's got this 10-mile commute from central Amman to the UN Center for Motherhood and Children, which is where he works inside the Marca refugee camp, right?

43:17Gordon:So there's a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan called Marca. The physical surveillance turns up basically nothing. This is extremely boring. It's not like Balaoui is having any meetings with radicals, doing anything interesting at all. He's literally just at his house and going to work. Balaoui has got no record, right? His most serious infraction at this point is a traffic violation. He's got two young girls who he dotes on. He is a massive introvert, right? He lives modestly. He doesn't go anywhere besides work. Balaoui drives a banged up Ford Escort. And Benzade's investigation doesn't turn up, at least initially, any connections to Hamas or any other radical groups.

43:57Gordon:There's no apparent signs right up front of radical links or religious fanaticism. As we said, it's not like Balaoui is going to sit underneath a radical Islamist preacher. He's not even going to Friday prayers at the mosque. The other thing that Bin Zaid finds about Balaoui is that he's He's smart. He's got impressive academic achievements under his belt. He graduated high school with top honors and a 97 % grade point average. I don't know how that translates in the Jordanian system, but it sounds pretty good. Um, Balaoui is the winner of a college scholarship from the Jordanian government. He speaks English.

44:35Gordon:This part though, I think is a bit odd, which is Balaoui by, by sort of that record probably could have gone to a premier institution in Jordan, right? But he decides to go to the university of Istanbul to study medicine, even though he doesn't speak any Turkish. And he returns with a Turkish wife named Daphne, and they move into an apartment in his father's home in Amman. And this is where I think we do get some insight into maybe the sort of justice obsession that Balaoui has because he turns down a hospital assignment for a really decidedly unglamorous position, which is tending to mothers and young children at this sprawling refugee camp, which is home to tens of thousands of Palestinians who had moved there as refugees after the 1967 war.

45:31David:Yeah, we should say that lots of Palestinians were displaced and moved into Jordan. I mean, a kind of significant chunk of the Jordanian population is basically Palestinian. And Bulawi's own family, you know, I think this is kind of interesting, isn't it, have got links to this refugee community, haven't they? I mean, they've been displaced on multiple occasions. His father was born in Palestine, you know, left in 1948. He's clearly called to that world, I think is what you get, even though he doesn't appear to be, which I think is interesting, linked to any particular extremist groups in terms of his outward activity.

46:09David:Such an interesting character because it's all inward in his kind of alternate character online. Outwardly, he's this kind of doctor working in the refugee camps. Inwardly, he's quite a kind of blood-curdling jihadist. It's kind of interesting contrast of someone who's built these different personas, I think.

46:27Gordon:Yeah, that bloodthirsty online persona, you know, lionizes Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Sometimes on that Al-Hazba messaging forum, I mean, he, Balawi, almost seems to speak for Al Qaeda. He is a big fan of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had been the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and who personally made videos of himself beheading hostages, right? And who had conducted that spate of vicious terrorist attacks in Jordan. Now, anytime Al-Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, comes out with a new statement or video, you know, Abu Dujana is there. He's got his own analysis, his own take, but he's always defending Al-Qaeda and parroting its message.

47:08Gordon:And he becomes a kind of proxy, Abu Dujana does, for Al-Qaeda in this online world. Now, then on December the 27th, 2008, Abu Dujana writes, when will my words taste my blood? Which I think you could read as an indication that he might be ready to turn this online persona into something real.

47:34David:so they're going to arrest him this kind of dramatic arrest in january 2009 three black cars pull up near the four-story house men in dark clothing get out his father so he lives with his father it's the father and lots of the kids all live in this one big house opens the door he's pushed back as the men come in you know the father clearly doesn't understand why they're there and yet as his son is brought down he has no inkling that his son is kind of involved in anything his son is brought down and his computers are brought down. And I think his father does notice this kind of defiance in his son's eyes.

48:11David:I guess that's the moment maybe the father realises what the son has been doing online might be a bit more dangerous or a bit more serious than he realised. But now clearly he's going to be in the hands of the GID, the General Intelligence Directorate, and they're going to think that he's someone significant, even though at this point he's online links to Al-Qaeda in that he's supporting them, but he doesn't actually have any direct connection with them, does he, as far as we know and we can tell?

48:37Gordon:But he is notorious and he does have connections. I mean, I think this is the sort of intelligence brief for the interrogation. So, you know, they arrest him. He's taken to this interrogation facility run by the GAD and their aim is to quickly exhaust him and extract from him any intelligence that he would have about connections, his own connections to radical groups. But also, I think the identities of other members of the forum, because I think if you're the GID or even the CIA, you're going to be really interested, you know, if any of these people are in contact with actual insurgents in Iraq or terrorists, you know, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, you want to know if any of them are receiving or serving as a conduit for funding for any of these people.

49:21Gordon:And so there are actual intelligence questions that I think you'd have as part of this interrogation. And the GID essentially try to exhaust him so thoroughly that he just breaks down. So they spend an hour with him in the interrogation room. Then they take him back to his cell. They put him there for a couple hours on his own, and they'll bring him back for fresh interrogators. They won't let him sleep. So if he tries to sleep in his cell, the guards will shout or bang on the door so he can't. And for three days, there's kind of this rinse and repeat where Wallawi is held in this nine by six foot cell.

49:59Gordon:He's got a cot. He's got a two way mirror. He's got a metal toilet and a sink. He's hooded for large portions of the time and left alone in total darkness. And it's kind of this sensory deprivation tank. And, you know, I think Joby Warwick in his book, Triple Agent, cites some medical research on what can happen to a human if they undergo sensory deprivation for long periods of time. and volunteers who have been subjected to similar forms of sensory deprivation actually start to hallucinate in as little as 15 minutes. I believe, Gordon, our friends on the rest of science are actually going to be doing an episode on sensory deprivation.

50:38Gordon:Longer periods of this can induce extreme anxiety, helplessness, depression. In one study, British scientists actually discovered that people held under these kind of conditions for a couple days could be made to experience symptoms by mere suggestion. So, you know, a very comfortable kind of clean, cool, dry room could suddenly be made to feel freezing cold or filled with water or alive with snakes. And so the point here is that Balaoui's sort of sense of reality and his personality in many ways is kind of melded and shaped by G.I.D. in this time. And Balaoui apparently has a dream in which he is visited by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda and Iraq terrorist.

51:28Gordon:And Balaoui interprets this dream as an omen that he was being prepared for an act of jihad. And the interrogators, you know, throughout this time are asking him, you know, do you know the identities of other bloggers? They want to know sort of the full landscape of Al-Hezba, this messaging board, other jihadi websites. They want to understand also, I think, if he had hinted at this idea that he might actually start participating in jihad. So they're trying to press him on, do you have plans for actually joining a group or conducting a martyrdom operation? And Balaoui seems absolutely spent after even a single day of questioning.

52:09Gordon:And I think this is important because the GID, I think, come to the conclusion that this guy is malleable. We can shape this guy. Because he breaks pretty quickly. Yeah, he breaks quickly. He's kind of soft. He's kind of weak. He's an introverted doctor. He's got two little girls. He's got this online persona, but the actual guy is not tough. And on the third day of interrogation, and then in a bunch of meetings afterward, I mean, Balaoui finally just starts to talk. You know, he gives up names of figures inside Al-Hazba, other jihadist websites. He really starts to cooperate and the sessions become really freewheeling.

52:45Gordon:And Balaoui basically disowns the entire Abu Dujana persona. He says, I'm against violence. You know, that's kind of just me online, none of it's real. You almost think today to the difference between someone's potentially insane persona on X versus who they are in real life. And he kind of says, look, it's just a hobby, right? What I was up to isn't the real me.

53:09David:So it's very interesting here, isn't it? Because they've got someone who has this status in the jihadist world in terms of the Abu Dijana personality, but who the real person they think is weak and soft and they've broken down and they've got control of him. They also have elements, don't they, in which they can control him because, you know, he wants to keep practicing medicine. If he's got vulnerabilities, they've got leverage over him. So I guess, in a sense, they think this is an opportunity, this kind of high status online jihadist and this weak individual. the contrast between these two things, being in their hands, gives them something.

53:50Gordon:There's an important point here on the effectiveness of a jailhouse recruitment, which is kind of a classic Middle Eastern intelligence service move. You bring someone in and you turn them because you've got a tremendous amount of leverage over them. The long-time case officers I've spoken to about these kind of recruitments in general would say, You know, oftentimes your control is pretty illusory.

54:21David:It's temporary. Yeah. It's related to the specific conditions.

54:25Gordon:It's related to the specific conditions. And frankly, it is related to your ability to control that person inside the borders of your state, right? That's when a jailhouse recruitment could be really effective because that person who you've brought in and I mean, I don't know if we'd want to call what he underwent torture, but it's pretty close. you've interrogated this guy, beaten this guy down, and all of a sudden you turn him out. Well, if he's inside the borders of the kingdom of Jordan and you can watch him and understand exactly what he's doing and control him, yeah, you probably have something you can work with.

55:01Gordon:But as we'll see, if you send that person outside and you no longer actually have physical control over them, the extent to which a jailhouse recruitment is going to be effective, it's It's pretty limited.

55:14David:So there he is broken. He's going to get released, I guess, a few weeks later. It's interesting when he talks about what happened to his father, he says, they humiliated me. It's an interesting phrase, isn't it? Which I think suggests the kind of deep personal pain that he may have felt from what happened to him and what he spoke about and the fact that he was broken and which might also raise some flags. But I think there, with Balawi having been detained, interrogated, but now released, but crucially in contact with Jordanian intelligence, let's stop. And next time we'll see how what happens next takes him on an extraordinary journey, really, into the heart of Al-Qaeda.

55:59Gordon:But, of course, if you cannot wait and you want access to the rest of this four-part series right now, including our interview with Joby Warwick, who wrote the book The Triple Agent on Belaoui and on this entire case, go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

56:19David:And don't forget, if you want tickets to our live show, January 31st on the South Bank in London, where we'll be talking about spy facts and fiction and some extraordinary cases, then don't forget to get those while you can. Otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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