You're Hello and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in

Washington DC. I'm Mark Stout historian of the museum. I'm a PhD author and historian who served for 13 years as an analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks with authors,

scholars, and practitioners who has something to do with the world of

intelligence and espionage.

We have with us today Benjamin Runkle a former paratrooper and also former

presidential speech writer who perhaps unusually for paratroopers also has a PhD

in international relations from Harvard.

He also has a bronze star from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

He's worked in the Defense Department on the National Security Council staff.

And the proximate cause for bringing him in today to talk with us is he's the

author of the book Just Out, Wanted Dead or Alive, Manhunts from Geronimo to

bin Laden. So Benjamin, welcome. Thank you very much, Mark.

Glad to be here.

You start your book out, which by the way is a tremendous read, I want to compliment you.

You start your book out by talking about George Bush and his famous or perhaps infamous remarks, I think about a week after September 11th

2001 where he invoked the the phrase wanted dead or alive with regard to Osama bin

Laden and Bush came in for a lot of criticism over that but you

suggest that strategic manhunts because that's what we were embarking on

there are in fact something the United States has done many times in the in the

book I find about 11 cases that could be described as strategic manhunts, which I

broadly define as campaigns in which the operational objective is to capture or kill one individual.

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