Hello, true,

Hello, true spies listeners.

Welcome back to True Spies, Debrief.

Here on the debrief, we catch up with experts from the intelligence and espionage community

for a deeper look at the themes, events and insights that fascinate them, taking you behind some of

the world's most consequential, dangerous and outlandish missions. In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, a series of drastic changes

vastly expanded the remit of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. That made it

possible for the DEA to get its hooks into criminal organizations all over the world,

and to get tangled in the intricate

web linking some of the world's most dangerous drug criminals and terrorists with sanctioned

national governments. This week, True Spies producer Morgan Childs sits down with Miles Johnson,

a reporter for the Financial Times, and the author

of the book, Chasing Shadows, a true story of drugs, war and the secret world of international

crime. Miles' investigative journalism has unearthed frightening findings about the connections

and crimes made possible by our globalized world.

Miles, you started reporting on some of the things that have wound up in this book when you were working for the FT in Rome.

Can you talk to me about what you encountered there and how it sort of set you off on

this massive globe-spanning journey? So I was working in Rome and covering quite a lot of things,

but one of the things I started to write about a bit was the Italian mafia, the different mafia kind of groups in Italy,

and sort of looking at them from a business perspective up to a point to the extent where,

you know, these were really big organized crime groups, you know, running sort of drugs,

trafficking operations worth, you know, potentially hundreds of millions of

...