Nada Bakos on 'The Targeter'
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2019
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
In movies and TV shows like Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland, Hollywood has fictionalized the roles of intelligence officers in tracking down terrorists. But the truth is often filled with personal and political challenges beyond those that screenwriters imagine. Nada Bakos worked in several jobs at the CIA, including as a targeting officer focusing on the founder of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In her new book, 'The Targeter,' she describes the experiences and challenges she faced along the way.
Last week, David Priess got on the phone with Nada to talk about what a CIA targeting officer does, what it was like interrogating detainees in Iraq, and the difficulties she encountered in getting her book to print.
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | I think one of the things I was most aware of all the time is are we causing more |
| 0:39.8 | chaos or are we actually affecting the situation in a positive way? Are we |
| 0:44.8 | dismantling the violence in the chaos or are we just creating more by conducting |
| 0:49.9 | assembly operations from our perspective because a Roth Theater is a military |
| 0:55.9 | primacy theater so the CIA had primacy when they went into Afghanistan for |
| 1:00.7 | operations because they were first in this was not declared a war in the way |
| 1:05.4 | it's in the way that Iraq was and within Iraq COD had primacy so we were more |
| 1:10.4 | in the support role than we were in Afghanistan and continuously aware of how |
| 1:16.3 | military would be using some of the information wanted to make sure that we |
| 1:21.2 | always had some type of analysis, top line analysis even if it's just raw |
| 1:26.3 | intelligence for sending back to them we wanted to be clear here's the |
| 1:29.2 | context. I'm Matthew Khan and this is the LawFair podcast June 4th 2019. In movies |
| 1:37.1 | and TV shows like Zero Dark 30 and Homeland Hollywood is fictionalized the |
| 1:41.7 | roles of intelligence officers in tracking down terrorists but the truth is |
| 1:46.5 | often filled with personal and political challenges beyond those that |
| 1:50.1 | screenwriters imagine. Neda Bakos worked in several jobs at the CIA including as |
| 1:57.1 | a targeting officer focusing on the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi |
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