Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Inber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage,

intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

From August to December 2016, retired lieutenant colonel Ivan Ingram, then a Marine Special Operations Officer, lived on an assault ship off the coast of CERT, a city in northern Libya that lies

between Tripoli and Benghazi.

Cirt was the hometown of Omar Gaddafi, and he invested in it before dying there in Libya's

first civil war. A second civil war later, an ISIS had filled a power vacuum, overrunning the city and sending its civilians fleeing.

Ivan led a five-man special operations team attached to a marine expeditionary unit to help push the terrorists out at the request of Libya's UN-backed Government of National Accord.

It's a mission known as Operation Odyssey Lightning.

Hey, Ivan. Thank you for coming on SpyCast.

It's my pleasure.

So set the scene for us.

What's happening in Libya in 2015 before this operation starts?

So out of the ashes of America's involvement in Iraq, ISIS began to establish a caliphate across

the northern part of Africa in the Arab world.

And ISIS took advantage of unstable spaces, of which Libya was because it had been split by a civil war.

And they began to take root inside and take over parts of the country, taking advantage of the instability.

So my unit, once I was assigned to it, started focusing very particularly on ISIS in that part of North Africa.

And from that point, we began to track what was happening inside that country.

And this was the last major city that was under ISIS control in Libya.

But what were U.S. forces looking at to lay the groundwork in terms of the intel packages

and anything that needed to be prepared before this operation began?

...