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Hello and welcome to The Bunker, for News Without the Nonsense. I'm Seth Teville. Take this plane to Cuba.

Fifty years ago, this fateful phrase was a fixture of nightly news bulletins through much of the 1970s,

an era that included all manner of bombings, hostage situations, uprisings and revolutions.

And they could be carried out from the smallest cell to the most ambitious state-backed operation. We're joined by Jason Burke,

the Guardian's International Security Correspondent. In a career spanning 30 years as a foreign

correspondent, he's looked at all manner of terrorism and security threats. And his new book,

The Revolutionists, The Story of the Extremists who hijacked the 1970s, is an exhaustive look

at the eruption of violence from the late 60s to the early 80s, and it's already been

shortlisted for the Bailey Gifford Prize. Welcome to the bunker, Jason. Hello, thanks for having me.

Firstly, I wanted to ask what really drew you to this topic?

I was primarily drawn to it by the people I found, actually, as I researched it, the individuals.

The intellectual process was quite straightforward.

I was writing a book in the middle of the teens around 2015 about Islamic militancy and the wave of

terrorism we had then was looking at the deep roots of that phenomenon, which I found lay

really in the 70s and the late 60s in some ways, started looking at the period and thought this is absolutely fascinating.

It hasn't really had a modern treatment. Nobody's really investigated it. And I started finding

these amazing events that's half forgotten, the attack on the Munich Olympics and the Entebbe

raid of 1976 by the Israeli Special Forces and the Iranian Revolution and much else.

And then started tracing people who'd been there, been involved in it,

...