Transcript of Former British Intelligence Officer | Julien Fisher | Ep. 408 New

Hey folks, I want to tell all of our listeners tonight about the Spies, Lies, and Nukes conference that's coming up pretty soon here. It's hosted by a former guest on this show, Valerie Plame. She is a former CIA operations officer, did undercover work all over the world. And if you're into the intel world, CIA operations, and the national security issues that actually matter, pay attention because this one's for you. There's a conference called Spies, Lies, and Nukes happening September 25th through the 27th in Tucson, Arizona. It was founded by Valerie Plame, and it brings together the people who actually did the work. We're talking former CIA ops officers, senior diplomats, national security professionals, and the investigative journalists who covered the stories nobody was supposed to know about. This isn't a convention hall with 1,000 people and a name tag. It's small, it's immersive, and it's built for real conversation with the people who have been inside the room. If you've ever wanted to sit across from the people who are running operations while the rest of the world had no idea, this is how you do it. Tickets are on sale now at spiesliesnukes.com. Use the code TEAMHOUSE at checkout for an exclusive listener discount.

And also tell you folks, I was recently at an event where Valerie Plame spoke. Specifically about nuclear proliferation and anti-proliferation treaties. She's a great speaker, puts on a great event, and I think everyone will really enjoy this. And again, to get tickets, they're on sale at SpiesLiesNukes.com. Use the code TEAMHOUSE at checkout and you'll get an exclusive listener discount. Hey everyone, this is episode 408 of The TeamHouse. I'm Jack Murphy. Here with today's guest, Julian Fisher. He is a former British intelligence official, and he is the author of Think Like a Spy, uh, which we're going to talk all about in this interview. Um, Julian, thanks for joining us on the show today.

Great, thanks for having me, Jack. It's a real pleasure. I'm in esteemed company. I know you've had some of my former colleagues and, um, amazing writers like I.S. Berry on your, on on your show. So this, this feels like a great privilege.

Yeah, thank you. Um, yeah, she put us in touch with so many people. Um, I, I think a few friends of hers from the agency we have booked actually in the future as well.

Great.

Um, yeah, she's, she's great. And, um, yeah, so, uh, what is it that we're allowed to say about your background, Julian? Um, you told me a kind of funny anecdote about, uh, You know, if you were a Walter Mitty, you'd be able to say much more.

That's about the size of it, Jack. Yes. Okay. So there's a peculiarity of the legal system here in the UK, which I'll just very briefly explain, that there's no— there's no crime of impersonating an intelligence officer. There's a crime of impersonating a police officer, but not of impersonating an intelligence officer. On the other hand, If someone has worked in one of the three-letter acronym services and they, uh, avow themselves, that is arguably a criminal act under our Official Secrets Act. So that leads to a paradox that if somebody says that they worked for MI6 and they didn't, then they are not breaking any law. But if they did, they may well be, and they may face sanction. So I just get around that by not saying that I work for MI6.

I get it.

And after I didn't work for them, I, I went on to work in the private sector, uh, for initially for, uh, an extraordinary man called Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, who ran an organization called Aegis Defense Services. So I was his point man in Africa for many years, uh, before I went on to set up my own private intelligence boutique called Africa Integrity Services, and then wrote this book Think Like a Spy, Master the Nine Secret Skills of Influence and Leadership, which came out in the US only a few months ago, in fact, the beginning of this year.

Tim Spicer, if I recall correctly, he was the guy that was like kind of knee-deep in Equatorial Guinea and all that, right?

Amongst other things. Yeah, Tim is an extraordinary character. I mean, if you can get him onto your show, then I highly recommend him. He is He's quite a figure in the private security, private military world, and he's done some amazingly good stuff over the years. I'm a big fan of Tim's, but you're right that there was some controversy in his career, including Equatorial Guinea, question marks about his involvement through his former organization Sandline in West Africa, in Sierra Leone. But, you know, I, I know Tim well. I believe him to be a man of great integrity. And I think what he's done under the auspices of his various organizations tends on the— tends on the whole to be a force for good rather than anything else. And in fact, I recently gave another podcast on— I won't name it here— in which I talked about the mercenary activity, broadly speaking.

You can tell people where to find that.

That's on True Spies, the True Spies podcast. It's a members-only edition of that, but I think it's worth subscribing for the, uh, for, for their output generally. Um, and, and in that I was talking about how the world of mercenaries, the world of private contractors, military contractors, is, is actually much misunderstood. And I think one of the saddest things is that the good that is done by some of, some of those contractors, some of those private military types, is never really recognized. We all— we always talk about the controversies and we never recognize the heroism, and there is a great deal of heroism. But, but I think that's a separate subject for another day, maybe, or maybe it's a book that I need to write.

Yeah, we can touch upon that, uh, in a little bit. Um, we had— we've had Eben Barlow on the show, um, years prior.

Amazing.

Um, and, you know, I'm— I, I love his book, uh, that he wrote. He wrote a memoir that I really recommend to people, but we'll, we'll get to see our Yeah, great.

Sorry, I've lost you, Jack. No. So I don't know what's going on here. I'm not getting you at all.

Testing, testing.

Yeah, that's better.

Okay, you can hear me now?

I can now.

Okay, strange. Um, okay, so to start at the beginning, Julian, uh, tell us a little bit about your upbringing, your background, and how that kind of propelled you towards governmental service.

Great question. Um, it was the last thing I ever expected to do, to be honest. I was born in the Midlands of the UK in a place called Birmingham, um, the country's second city, and my upbringing was I mean, it was a fantastic upbringing in many ways. My parents were amazing characters. They were incredibly clever, they were incredibly creative, and they helped to foster those skills in their family of— and I was one of 7. But it is fair to say that we were somewhat financially disadvantaged. So I was brought up in circumstances which were occasionally a bit of a struggle. You know, we would go to bed cold, sometimes go to bed hungry, not for want of effort on the part of my parents, but it was the 1970s and the economy here was in the grip of a recession. You know, it was the era, I guess, that some people refer to as the Winter of Discontent. A lot of strikes, a lot of shortages, 3-day week. So, The circumstances of my upbringing were not particularly auspicious, and they were also accompanied by a great deal of grief because when I was 11, on my very first day at school— and that sounds like a quite old, a bit too old to be having my first day at school, but for various reasons I won't go into, my parents elected to educate us at home, homeschool us until the age of 11.

And on my very first day at school, I came home to the, the news that my only sister, my oldest sibling, uh, had killed herself after a very distressing illness, um, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. And of course, the age of 11, that's a remarkable loss to have to face. And there's a blindness, I think, sometimes to infant grief. You know, of course, my parents were absolutely, um, beside themselves with grief, and they were having to look after themselves. They did a great job of looking after the rest of us. But there is, you know, I think there's always a hierarchy of grief. And as an 11-year-old boy, I'm not sure I felt I had much right to show that grief. And as a response to this, I became very emotionally drained, I suppose. Um, and about a year later, um, having suffered about a year of bullying at school, I decided the best way to put an end to all this was to walk in front of a moving vehicle. And luckily I survived that impact, but it did hospitalize me for a year. And I have to say that that was probably the most important year of my life, and it really turned me around.

And what happened was there was a young nurse there called Meher, and she was an Iranian refugee, which sounds— it is incredibly topical now, right? Um, but of course, as you'll, as you'll know, the, the Iranian Revolution took place in 1979 when I was 9. And I was in hospital in 1982, 1983. And Meher had fled from Tehran with her mother after her father had been disappeared. He was a counter-revolutionary, so he was taken into custody one night, and it was presumed by her that he, he had died, been killed, assassinated. We know that's something that is not uncommon in Iran. And— but Mehr was an extraordinary character, and she had every intention of following in her father's footsteps because he'd been a doctor. So she was absolutely hell-bent on becoming a nurse. The problem was she didn't really speak very much English, and so she failed her examinations at school, which you would— the first basis on which to to be accepted to train as a nurse and was in despair when one of her teachers had a good idea of getting hold of universities which taught Farsi, the language in Persia, now Iran, through— so, and introducing her to students of that language.

And through that introduction, she met a young man called Dan. Half Israeli, half Brit, and, um, they would meet daily during a summer break, and they'd speak for 1 hour in Farsi and 1 hour in English to give her the ability and the skill and the practice to become fluent in English, which she did over the course of a few months. And then she retook her exams Um, but in the process of, you know, having to retake, uh, they ran out of money. Her mother ran out of money, and she was proposing to send her into the workplace as a cleaner or some such, which is how her mother was earning money. And that's when Dan's father stepped in, uh, and Dan's father, who was a local businessman, um, basically said that he would support Maia through college to make sure she got the, the qualifications she needed, so long as she continued to work with his son Dan to help him with his university course. And that arrangement worked, and hence by the time I met her, she was just embarking as a student nurse. And she said to me words I'll never forget.

Um, one day she said to me, 'Look, what you must remember is allies are the most important thing you can have in life. They will make all the difference. You must never forget that.' And I never have. And I realized from that day forward that actually there's something that some people are born to, and it's called social capital. You know, they have parents, they have a wider social circle, they have schools, they have communities that can help them to navigate their way through the complexities of the education system, to get the loans that they need to qualify to get a degree, to get onto the jobs market. And if you're not born with that, you have to create it. And the way to create it is to build Alliances. And so I became quite adept at building alliances with people who— not, not in a manipulative sense, but people that I assessed would be able to help me in my own journey. A journey from this financially deprived background eventually to onto Oxford University, from there into the financial sector. Well, I can't say I'm just a bit of a square peg in a round hole in the financial sector.

So I then moved into international relations, if I can put it like that. And the rest is history.

Before we move on, Julian, I mean, Oxford obviously is, you know, the Ivy League of the UK. It's their top school. As you say, you come from an economically disadvantaged background. What was your journey coming from, you know, being that 12-year-old kid in the hospital bed to gaining admittance into Oxford, which we should also point out is like the indoctrination center for British spies. They all go through there, don't they?

More Cambridge, actually.

Cambridge?

Yes, there is a— Oxford is famous for producing prime ministers here. I'm not sure that's a necessarily good thing. I think the vast majority of our post-war prime ministers have been graduates in the same subject that I took, which which is PPE— philosophy, politics, and economics. Um, and Cambridge is quite famous for producing some, um, dubious characters such as Philby Burgess.

Right, right.

Cambridge— the Cambridge Five. Um, I have— to answer your question, I have Reader's Digest to thank, which sounds a bit odd. I don't know if you even remember what Reader's Digest was. Yeah, it was a I think a weekly or a monthly publication which would provide abridged versions of novels. And I didn't read those, but what I discovered somewhere along the line was that every so often they'd have IQ tests, self-scored IQ tests. And I became a bit fixated on them and discovered that I was scoring very highly on these tests whenever I— so I had to you know, table of piled high with copies of the Reader's Digest, which I flick through looking for these IQ tests. Eventually discovered that I was actually a lot cleverer than I thought I was, or I thought I must be because I was scoring highly on these tests. And so I set about, um, when I came out of hospital, I insisted that I change school because I didn't feel the school I was at had the right academic profile for what I wanted. Um, and then I, I suppose I said about making allies of teachers, you know.

So I, I would— I had a particular aptitude for English, as it happened, so I'd always make sure that I had a good relationship with my English teachers. And they, they would take time out of their work, out of their personal time, to help me to become a better writer, to help me to become a better public speaker, a better debater. And I think that was very valuable, um, when it came to the process of getting into Oxford, because what they look for there really isn't necessarily, um, a traditional education in Latin, Greek, and all the rest of it, although there's still an element of that. But they look for an ability to think for yourself, they look for an ability to form arguments cogently and to communicate them well. And through my alliances with two particular English teachers, one from the school I went on to, and then I moved again for my final two years, had this remarkable English teacher called Johnny Cleek in my final two years, and he actually took time, his personal time, to coach me in the Oxford University examination papers. So he was an early ally, and I, you know, if I, I would have looked at those papers without his guidance and basically been flummoxed, but he talked me through it, um, on top of his own curricular work, and I'm forever grateful to him for that.

So it was an early exercise in recognizing, yes, of course Oxford's looking for an academic, raw academic ability. Of course it is, but there's lots of people with that raw academic ability and they're looking for something else on top of that, which is an ability, as I say, to form cogent arguments and communicate them well. And I had my early allies, particularly in the form of Johnny Cleek, to thank for that.

And that's what got you through those admission exams?

Yeah, admission exams and then interviews. So the, the interviews are really— were then, I think they're now regarded as less important, but back then, talking quite a long time ago, uh, the interview process was rigorous and frightening, um, but, um, in a way very stimulating because, you know, you were being— I sort of expected to go in to be asked questions of a fact, but actually they were challenging to see whether I could think on my feet. And that was quite a bracing experience. And without Johnny's input, I don't think I'd have performed as well as I did.

And then, you know, speaking of your upbringing and, you know, growing up poor, it actually makes a lot of sense that you pushed yourself in this direction and towards finance because you didn't want to have to worry about that anymore.

You make a very astute point. Um, I mean, I came out of university having not a clue what I wanted to do, if I'm, if I'm honest. Uh, I knew I was quite interested in politics, but I wasn't one of those people who wanted to get into the political system early on. I, I sort of took the view that, um, one needed to do something else to be qualified to be a politician, and I stand by that view. In fact, um, I think we see today that the quality of politicians, particularly in the UK, is quite low because so many people come into politics for politics' sake rather than having life experience. So I was interested in politics, I was interested in the world at large, international events, affairs, But I didn't really know what to do with that. And of course, as you say, I was quite keen by that point, having struggled through university with very little money, surrounded by people who came from very wealthy families. I think it's fair to say that my priority was to get some money. So the city was the obvious place to go. And I was very lucky to be interviewed to join a firm called Kasnov.

And Casanova was an extraordinary organization, extraordinary firm back in its day, um, since been acquired by JP Morgan, but it was the, the last independent partnership, stockbroking partnership in the City of London, and it was very, very dominated by the aristocratic class. And to the extent that I stuck out like a sore thumb, but I was lucky enough to be interviewed. And this is where another story about the importance of alliances comes in, because one of the things I did during university vacations was to work in the House of Commons in our Parliament. Um, as a researcher initially for an MP. I won't name the MP in question, but he was, um, he was a great guy but didn't have the profile that I was looking for. So what I wanted, I had it in mind, and this is going to make me sound like a terribly scheming young man, and perhaps I was, um, but I had it in mind that I wanted by the time I left university, to have a very highly recognizable name as a reference. And so I sat down, I went through what I described as a targeting exercise in the book, the first stage of the agent recruitment cycle.

I sat down in the House of Commons library and went through the entire list of MPs looking for two things. One was somebody who was very high profile and somebody who had a very small, um, support team. In other words, that might be in the market for a researcher or parliamentary assistant. Uh, and one name jumped out at me, and it was Winston Churchill. Now, not the original Winston Churchill. I'm, I'm old, but I'm not that old. Uh, his grandson, but Winston Churchill nonetheless. Winston Churchill MP. And so I set about, um, cultivating Winston. First of all, I had to get alongside him, find out where his office was. And quite close to his office was one of those old Reuters ticker tape machines which would spew out the daily headlines, um, on spools of paper that would then just collect on the floor. It was quite— it's so archaic and quite amusing. But, um, one of these was, was cited just outside his, his office. So I would just make a point of hovering around there, apparently reading the headlines. And I'd make sure I knew from his register of interest what his, what, um, his external interests were and what his policy areas of interest were.

And then if I ever saw a headline and he was around, I would draw his attention to that headline if it was something that I knew he'd be interested in. And eventually as a result of this, we got chatting. And I said to him, look, you know, do you need a researcher? And he said, well, I don't, but I do need a speechwriter. So I became Winston Churchill's speechwriter. And I have to say, I wasn't terribly good at it, actually. I didn't really know at that point about how to construct a speech. I certainly didn't really know how to construct an effective parliamentary speech. And there's somewhere, I don't know if you know, there's a record of parliamentary proceedings in the UK called Hansard. And there's somewhere in my collection of books a hand card from the day when Winston delivered one of my speeches. And the response from his opposite number was, "I don't know where the honorable gentleman, I don't know who writes the honorable gentleman's speeches for him, but if I were him, I'd look for a new one." And that was me. Terribly insulting. Winston sent me a copy of that, but he laughed about it and said, you know, actually, that, that's just the custom for us, the jousting of parliamentary procedure.

And we became quite good friends, to the extent that I was able to put down Winston Churchill MP as one of my referees. And this was because my boss at Casnov, a lovely chap called John, um, said to me at some point, as we sat opposite each other just chatting idly, he said, well, I had to offer you a job anyway. And I said, well, why is that? And he said, because I wanted to phone the House of Commons and ask to speak Winston Churchill. And I like to think he was joking, but, um, maybe not. Well, it was enough to get me into the city, and then it sort of gave me— it gave me a springboard.

The, the way you describe it, you know, is like, you know, you maybe you were scheming or manipulating, but again, I, I think that, you know, when you come from poverty, the other term you would use to describe that is surviving.

Right.

And you had seen from a very young age what happens, you know, that not everybody makes it. And I imagine that must have been a tremendous motivator for you when you were young.

It's certainly incentivizing to know that you have to— you don't have that network of social capital to rely on.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people don't understand the importance of that. I mean, I'm quite fond of saying, you know, What you know is important, but it's not just what you know, it's who you know. And we can control both bits of that equation. You know, you can control who you know and you can control what you know. So of course, I would say to all young people, focus on getting the best education you can, but don't neglect the other side of it. You know, build that network of alliances. And people are often surprised that You know, those who are successful in life often want to give back. And so this isn't, this isn't manipulative. I don't think it's a case of exploiting somebody. Asking for help, asking for support is not exploitation if you're clear about what you're doing. Many people, and Winston was one of these, Lord rest him. Um, many people in his position are quite keen to have the opportunity to, to give a helping hand to younger people. So I always say, just, you know, ask. Don't be afraid to ask, because the worst you can get is a no.

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And often you won't get a no, you'll get enthusiastic, wholehearted support. And if you think about it in a way, that's giving something, that's a mutually beneficial relationship. Because I know it now, I've got to the stage in my life where people will ask me to talk to their friends' children about their careers.

Right.

And it gives me an enormous sense of fulfillment, you know, to do that, to help a young person. It's partly why I wrote the book. It's, I mean, I think it's a book that anybody will benefit from at any stage in their life. But Charles Cumming, the spy writer, said of it that he wished it was the book that he wished he'd had to hand when he was first embarking on his career. And I'd say part of the point of this book is to help younger people to realize the importance of alliance building, to realize the importance of building social capital. It's something which incidentally, your vice president's very keen on. He speaks about it on a number of occasions, the importance of social capital in respect of his own journey from rural Ohio.

Guess it worked for him.

It seems to have done, doesn't it? Absolutely.

So when you go to work in the City of London, I'm picturing in my mind a Frederick Forsyth novel Uh, yes, what was it really like?

Actually, funnily enough, um, I, I had cause to reread because I did another podcast again with True Spies on, um, this, this one is— hasn't been released yet, but it's coming out shortly, and it's about a story of mine when I was invited to help plot a coup in a West African republic. And of course, I wasn't able to do that, and I wasn't going to do that. And actually, I don't know how to plot a coup. It's not something I've ever done. But I did have a copy on my Kindle of Freddie Forsyth's Dogs of War.

Great book.

It's a fantastic book. It also has many, many pages devoted to how to plot a coup.

It's like a procedural. It's like a manual, step by step. This is how you do it.

Exactly. So that had been very helpful. 'Cause I was, you'll have to listen to the podcast, but let me just say without breaking the law, I was able to lean very heavily on what Freddie Forsyth had written. And Freddie's a great guy, actually. I knew him. He was the president of a club I'm a member of in London. Sadly, I never got to tell him that story 'cause I think he'd have been very, very amused by it. But anyway, I, Um, digress. The important point is that, uh, in preparing for, for that podcast, I reread, uh, The Dogs of War, which I, I'm always happy to do anyway. Um, and actually, your, your description or your suggestion that the city back in those days was a, was a bit like the, the, um, portrayal of I think it's James Manson in the book, isn't it? The entrepreneur who funds the attempted coup. It was a bit like that, you know, it really was. I mean, it's a very— when I was working at Kasnov, it was very much like a gentleman's club, you know, sort of plush furnishings. And everybody— you talk about— well, before we started recording, we were talking about how how Brits dress, and we tend to dress a little— certainly if you're going to be on a podcast, you, you know, might put on a shirt, perhaps even a jacket, perhaps a tie.

At Kasanov, it was double cuff shirts with definitely no pocket on the shirt. You had to wear a tie, couldn't be too flashy, um, a particular cut of suit was expected to be handmade. Everybody came across as very, very, um, upmarket and quite old-fashioned. Um, so yes, you're right in that respect. It did, and it sort of felt like there was a, an air of quiet power and authority in the, in the corridors of this extraordinary stockbrokers who, who worked for something like 50% of the FTSE 100 or FTSE 250 companies. You know, they were renowned as power brokers. I don't think they were ever involved in any coups, as it happens, other than economic and financial coups. But yes, it was a remarkable place for a young man from a comprehensive school. That's what we call, what you would call, public school from inner-city Birmingham to find himself in. Um, and it was extraordinary because I just didn't fit in, you know. I, I sort of turned up in a boxy suit which I bought as cheaply as possible from a high street store. Um, I had to be taken to one side by my boss because I, I took my jacket off at my desk once upon a time, and he said, you know, we don't 'Just to let you know, we don't take our jackets off at the desk.

And by the way, I'm quite glad you did because it means that I've just noticed you're not wearing double cuffs.' There's cuffs on your shirt which you have to— you fold back and then you put the cufflinks in. I was wearing, horror of horrors, a shirt with buttons, and that was not done. So he gave me the name of a good tailor and sent me off. So there's that sort of sense of very old-fashioned Britishness about it. And I really enjoyed that, actually. And but I had to do— I had to employ a skill which later on I came to rely on in the intelligence world, if you like, of being a chameleon. I had to change my accent. I had to change the things I said, not just accent but idiom. Mm-hmm. And I had to become familiar with the ways and expectations and social mores of an entirely different social group to me. You know, I'd never heard, for instance, of Val d'Isère, which is a skiing resort. And when somebody left a note for one of my colleagues saying, "I'll catch up with them at Val d'Isère," I had to write it down phonetically.

And I remember I'd gone out for lunch, came back, and everybody was gathered around this colleague's desk laughing at my notes, you know, so gauche. And I could have taken that to heart, but actually I thought, well, all that's happening here is I'm being sent a message that— I didn't take it as you're not welcome, but you need to learn to present differently. And that's where I developed the idea of COVID In the book, I talk about COVID not necessarily being about lying about who you are, but presenting that version of yourself that fits in the environment in which you find yourself, or aligns with the person that you're seeking to recruit as an ally, or in the intelligence world, as an agent. It's not— I mean, of course, cover is important in the sense of you have to pretend to be XYZ for defensive reasons, sometimes to make yourself attractive to the other person, but All of that's actually reasonably technical. The really important part of COVID is how you present your personality. And in a sense, it's a bit like acting. You have to adopt an aspect— you have to adopt a personality which is going to be attractive to your target.

And again, that sounds, that sounds like it's being manipulative, it sounds like it's being deceitful, but I'd say I don't, I don't look at it like that. You know, we're all very, very complicated creatures. Our personalities are like Rubik's cubes, and you can adjust them, you can manipulate them to present many, many different faces. And what makes one more genuine than another? You know, we're sort of getting into philosophical questions, right? But I don't think one is more genuine than another. You know, this is, this is me as much as somebody who speaks like this, which is the accent that I would have had when I was talking, when I was at home as a young lad, you know, because I'm from Birmingham and I had a Birmingham accent. Now, is that version of me the genuine me, or is this version of me the genuine me? The answer is both. And so again, you know, as I, I talk throughout the book about the importance of not, um, being— not using your skills in a manipulative way, and I don't think they are per se manipulative It's not manipulative to take the best of yourself or to take those aspects of yourself that make you attractive to another person.

But presumably you didn't find everything you were looking for in finance. You still had this interest in politics and international affairs and so on. Um, so what— how did you make the jump from finance to not working for the British intelligence services?

Nicely put. So I realized I had a problem in the financial world when somebody asked me to explain a swaps curve, and I didn't have a clue. And I realized that— I mean, they're quite important, swaps curves. I still don't have a clue. More important, I could have probably fudged it. More importantly, I realized I didn't care. I just wasn't in the least bit interested about what a swaps curve was. And it made me sit down and think, my heavens, I've been spending the past early years of my 20s thinking about gilt yields and thinking about the dividends on stocks. I mean, you could probably tell, it's making me wince just thinking about it. You know, a few movements in a few basis points movements in gilt yields, or a 50% cut in interest rates, what effect does that have on the earnings ratios? I don't care. And I realized after a few years of this that I was in totally the wrong job. So I thought, well, what's keeping me here? What am I doing that I enjoy about this? And I thought, it's the travel. It's the travel. And it's the interest in trying to work out how politics intersects with the markets.

I guess that bit is quite interesting. But I'm more interested in the politics than I am in the markets. So I thought, what's the best thing I can do? And the answer was fairly obviously to apply for the diplomatic service. So I did that and was successful. And along the way, was invited to join a fairly specialized branch of it. Um, which was a great period of my life. Um, you know, I, I did some extraordinary things. I'm going to draw a bit of a veil over what those were and where they were for, for good reasons that we've discussed. Um, but there's plenty of other stuff to get our teeth into when we get into the private sector work. Um, but ultimately, um, I had a crisis of conscience over the Iraq War in the early 2000s. I found myself unable to support the war in itself, but more important than that, I was appalled at the manipulation of intelligence data by a man called Alastair Campbell, who was then very senior in, um, Number 10 Downing Street. The Prime Minister's office. The manipulation of intelligence to make a case for war, I just thought was absolutely unconscionable.

I thought the politicization of the intelligence services was a tragedy. And I think the fact that one or two quite senior people in the intelligence services back then were complicit— I think they were perhaps drawn into relationships with, um, Alastair Campbell and the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, which were not necessarily appropriate because they were flattered to be seen to— they were like moths to a lamp, the proximity to power. And then we had this horrific event of a man called David Kelly, Dr. David Kelly, who was a weapons inspector, took his life, worked at the intelligence It took his life. And that had a profound impact on me because, you know, I've always had a very difficult relationship with suicide because of the loss of my sister. And I remember I was in a city in Africa, working for government at the time, seeing that news and the sensation of nausea spreading across me and a stark realization at that point that I could no longer continue to work for that government or, or, or for any service or service adjacent to it, um, that, that, that was complicit in the events leading up to the suicide of a man that I think had great integrity and great intellect, um, was bullied, harassed, and driven to his death by some very deeply unpleasant people.

And that was a terrible thing to have to do, you know. And I'll be completely honest, it had the most astonishing effects on my life. You know, my marriage broke down shortly afterwards. I'm very ready to say that I suffered some emotional distress as a result of it. You know, I was without work, my marriage had fallen apart, so I walked out on the job that I was both good at and enjoyed. Um, and I, I look back on it and I think, did you make a stupid error? You know, could you, could you have been very senior in a very interesting service now? Um, what did I turn my back on all that for? And then I remind myself that it was a shameful episode in British international relations and British intelligence work. Um, and I don't regret for a moment walking out on it, actually.

Were you personally drawn into, you know, this conflict in the Middle East?

No, I, I, I won't go into too much detail about what it is that led me to cut— to conclude that there had been a quite unacceptable um, manipulation, uh, deceit, gaslighting, right, essentially, of the public, the British public. Um, and what led me to the conclusion that certain agencies have been complicit in that. I can't go into the detail of that, and it wouldn't be right for me to do so, but, um, suffice to say, I think I've been vindicated. Yeah, every, every sensible, um, analysis and every inquiry that's been conducted since then has vindicated my position. And I imagine to a certain extent that lessons have been learned and changes have been made. But the fact of the matter is, it was a shameful, shameful episode in British history, and a very good man lost his life as a result of it, harassed, as I say, harassed and intimidated to death by some extremely unpleasant characters and seen you're in British government. And, you know, if you, if you lose confidence in your government and you're working for an organization that serves that government in very, sometimes in very dangerous and awkward places, I think you really don't— you owe it to yourself to resign.

That's all I did.

Yeah. Um, how was that taken? I mean, did you— were like pretty out about, you know, I'm resigning because of, um, you know, a conscientious objector status?

I think there was a combination of disappointment and anger, really. You know, there was— I think there was a concern that I was going to tell a story to the press which would have, of course, caused awkwardness. There was another person who resigned from a related service called Katherine Gunn, and she was working for GCHQ, and she was prosecuted, or they started the process of prosecution for her, because she had objected to the use of GCHQ to listen into, to spy on, members of the United Nations Security Council who were allies of the UK. Did they make a movie about that? They did indeed. Okay, okay. I can't remember the name of the movie, um, but it's, it's very— it's well worth watching. But I was in touch with Catherine for a short while afterwards. We agreed after a while that it probably didn't make much sense for us to maintain contact, but I respected her decision. But they put her through hell, you know. They— the process is the punishment, as they say, and the process there was to stand her up in court before eventually the decision was taken to drop all charges.

But by that point, you can imagine the emotional impact it had. And I'd already gone through severe emotional, um, trauma of making the decision to leave. I wasn't going to compound that at that point. But, you know, um, I can't speak for the institution or, or people within it, but I, I, I think there was sort of a general sense that, uh, Um, they would be very keen to remind me of my obligations under the Official Secrets Act and other surviving obligations of confidentiality, and indeed remain so to this day. Oh, these are conversations and letters I've had many times. So, um, but you know, my position was I resigned on a matter of conscience. I would not say anything that would compromise national security. I don't think I need to. But the fact of my resigning on that matter of conscience, I think I am quite entitled to talk about. And actually, you know, it opened up a very much more fulfilling and interesting chapter in my life.

Before we move on to that, I, I just want to ask you if there's any kind of stories you can tell, spy stories, if you will. Um, I know you can't mention countries, dates, certainly not names, but in, in vague terms, are there any interesting ones that you'd be able to share?

From government service, I'm afraid not really. That's, that's very difficult. But, but the next stage of my career where I worked in private intelligence, there's a lot more that I can share.

Okay. Okay. So you go through this. It sounds like a rather traumatic experience resigning from, from governmental service. Um, how did you land in corporate intelligence? That's a whole different world.

It is and it isn't. Um, the— I, I was sort of assisted by an outplacement officer, if you like, though that wasn't the phrase, the, the term they used, um, into working for an international bank. As head of intelligence, um, in a role that entailed some liaison with government agencies. So that was sort of the first step out. And from there, of course, I was exposed to this whole new world of private intelligence, private security, um, because quite a lot of the, the companies that worked in that area would minister to me, if you like, or they would, they would, um, you know, they, they would see me as a potential client and court me and cultivate me. So I met, I got to know the range of providers, and eventually, um, cut a long story short, Tim Spicer became aware that I was in the private sector. He liked my background. And he asked for one of his staff who knew me to sound me out about whether I wanted to become— would like to become his head of Africa. And I went for an interview with him. I spent a whole night swatting up on every major subject I could think of relating to Africa and private security in those days.

And there was quite a lot of them. Getting on top of the politics of the key African countries, knowing who was who. So I was exhausted but stocked up on data and information as I walked into the interview with Tim. He sat at the far end of a very long office, waved me to a sofa, tapped away on his computer for a bit, finished what he was doing, then turned to me and he said, "Are you Julian Fisher?" And I said, "I am." And he said, "Good, I think we've decided to give you a job, so if you go out, Dominic will sort out the paperwork for you." So all of that preparation and loss of sleep was for nothing. But I told Tim about that just recently when I saw him at a social event, and he said, "Yeah, I'd have been able to tell, and if you weren't prepared, I'd have put you through the wringer." I think he might be right.

Tim Spicer, just for viewers who aren't aware, he was an SAS officer, if I recall right, retired a colonel.

Left Lieutenant Colonel. Had a background in the Welsh Guards, I think I'm right in saying. Maybe my memory may be playing tricks, but he had a very fine military background. And then when he moved into the private sector, was involved in some of the early corporatized private security capabilities organizations. So in particular, he worked for a company called Sandline, a private military company or private security company depending on how you want to cast it. Sandline was famous for its, its work in Sierra Leone. Where it helped the elected but ousted government to fight back against the rebels. And that's why earlier on I mentioned, you know, some of the good things that private soldiers have done, and I count that as a very clear example, actually. They were doing work that, for whatever reason, the traditional armies were not given the green light to do. Under the, um, under the governments of the day. But, um, they certainly took credit for it all later on, um, but didn't give sufficient credit to the likes of Tim and his, and his colleagues in, uh, in Sandline. He then went on to— in fact, they persecuted him to a certain extent because, um, the questions were raised about whether or not UN arms embargoes have been broken.

Breached by private military work in Sierra Leone, and he was made the fall guy to a certain extent in some of the legal wranglings about all of that. And I think in the— unfortunately, in, in amidst all that noise, what got missed was that he, he and his colleagues had done something extraordinary. Which is supporting the democratically elected president to fight back against a really rather evil rebel group. And I think it's— I just think it's unfortunate that those things aren't recognized more readily. But Tim went on then to set up Aegis Defense Services, which was the company I joined, and Aegis was famous for winning what was then the biggest single, um, private security contract, and it was issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and it was to provide security support and intelligence support to agencies involved in the reconstruction of Iraq. So having resigned over the war in Iraq, I rather ironically ended up working for a major beneficiary of the war in Iraq. And people occasionally have said to me, you know, didn't that make you feel uncomfortable? I'm like, well, no, because I resigned over the destruction of the country and I'm working for somebody who's involved again without adequate recognition in helping to make the lives of ordinary Iraqis better.

What could possibly be wrong with that? And again, you know, we look at the stories from Iraq in those days and the actions of organizations like Blackwater, which in one or two cases were highly controversial. But there are stories about people that I heard working for Aegis who would throw themselves on IEDs to protect their clients, you know, and, and suffer mortal injuries. And similar acts of heroism, all of which are unrecognized and unremarked on. I think that's terribly, terribly sad. So I'm proud of the fact that I worked for Tim. I've— I'm full of admiration for him. I'm full of admiration for what, um, Aegis Defense Services did. But he was up against a lot of a lot of opposition, political opposition, both in the UK and in the US.

Why do you think that is?

He was involved in, um, a controversy in Northern Ireland where he stood by a couple of his men who had shot a suspected terrorist and were subsequently tried for it, and Tim stood by them as their officer commanding. As, as was his duty, as sort of his military duty. But certain, certain stripes of political opinion in the US were disinclined to look favorably upon his actions, let's put it like that. And so they lobbied against his company being given this huge contract. I think there was also a little bit of annoyance that the contract had gone to a UK-based company rather than a US-based company. One can always, always ask what the real motivation for some of the lobbying against him was. But even in the UK, you know, he— this is a man who should have been invited to Number 10 and feted by our Prime Minister for creating a company almost from scratch that then went on to work with one of the best armies, the best army in the world, to undo the damage, or help to undo the damage of that conflict. But far from being fated, he was politically, he had opponents, and I think that's very, very sad.

But I wasn't involved in the Iraq side at all. He asked me to come in as his head of Africa. Mm-hmm.

Tell us about that. About— so this is, I'm guessing, mid-2000s at this point. What was the work situation like in Africa at the time?

Well, there was lots going on. That's fair to say. If you remember, the conflict in Congo had recently come to an end. And that had been called the, um, had been referred to as Africa's Third World War because there was so much death and destruction there. And I had my own experience there actually later on. This was after I'd finished working for Tim, but I'll tell you a quick story about, um, my adventures in Kinshasa, shall I? And again, this, this actually touches on the use of COVID Um, so as I say, the Congo had been this at the heart of a regional conflict which had drawn in countries around it, including Zimbabwe and Uganda, Rwanda, and the fighting had been very intense, particularly in the east of the country. And I was approached by a client a mining sector client that wanted somebody to go on the ground to get ground truth intelligence to assess whether or not they could recommence their operations in the east of the country. So I was instructed to do this work and, um, had to give fairly careful thought about how do I, as a civilian without government backing, uh, in a broadly— with an intelligence remit, go and get this intelligence in the, in the east of Africa.

And I said, well, I need an ally, don't I? So I flew to Kinshasa via Johannesburg. And, um, those of your listeners who are familiar with geography of Africa will realize that Kinshasa is about as far away from east of Congo as you can get. It's on the western coast, in fact. But I had good reason to go there because I was hoping to catch up with— I was hoping to work with a friend of mine who was a former Congolese soldier and had been appointed to what was called the Transitional National Assembly. That was their interim parliament. And he and I had had a conversation, and we, we'd agreed that I would fly to Kinshasa and that we would then fly together to the east, where he would introduce me to a number of sources and I could conduct, uh, on-the-ground intelligence debriefs. So that was the plan. I arrived in Kinshasa, which was, um, a challenging place to be. Managed to get myself through the airport without having too much too many of my belongings and too much of my money extracted from me. Um, spent a bit of an uncomfortable night in a local hotel, fending off the attentions of, um, the local gals.

But the, the oldest profession in the world. And, um, following day I went to the Palais de Perp, as I, as agreed, to meet my friend, only to find it absolutely deserted. And the Palais, sorry, the Palais was where the transitional National Assembly would meet. So the parliamentary center, horrible Chinese construction, which reminded me of the school that I first went to when I was 11 years old, sort of 1960s prefab construction. But I was surprised to find it completely deserted and the doors were open. Which I thought was a bit odd. You know, this important government center, no— as far as I could see, no restrictions on entry and exit, no security anywhere. So I went in and sort of wandered around the— these deserted corridors before realizing, you know, there was absolutely no way that I was going to find anybody who could help me to locate where my friend was. So I had a very rudimentary mobile phone, and we're talking about the sort of Nokia that can make phone calls and nothing else. But back in those days, again, it's fair to say that the signal wasn't very strong in the Congo.

So I was struggling to get through. I was trying to phone my chum, my contact, and I had my head down as I pushed my way out the door, and then suddenly I felt a blow to the side of my head. Dropped the phone, which went skidding across the tarmac, or looked up into the barrel of an AK-47 and suddenly realized that there was security around and I was surrounded by it. It was a group of 6, 7, something like that, uh, very angry soldiers who wanted to know, A, what I was doing there, B, who I was, and C, who I was spying for, you know. So the whole thing was very, very uncomfortable. And just little old me with my phone now sort of somewhere over there smashed on the ground. And so I had to think quite fast. I thought, well, what am I— what do I say about this? You know, because if I say to them, look, I'm here to go to the Eastern Congo and get intelligence on the state of the war, which had recently ended. So, you know, but it was still lots of conflict going on, but there was a peace deal in place effectively.

But if I say that my job is to go and gather that intelligence, you know, this isn't going to help, right? They're not going to— it leads to more questions. Exactly. They're not going to conclude that that makes me unthreatening. So it so happens that the, um, the night before— when I saw— two nights before, when I'd been in, uh, Johannesburg en route, I'd stayed in a lovely hotel somewhere in Sandton, which is a very upmarket part of Johannesburg. And I met this chap who turned out to have been the head of um, African government relations for a very major international consulting firm. And very interesting chat. We'd, we'd had a few drinks, and the end of the evening we'd swapped cards. And I was wearing a jacket because, you know, Brits abroad in hot countries always wear a jacket. And I put his card in my top pocket and my jacket pocket. I happened to have the same jacket on, so I thought, ah, okay, um, I'm going to be the head of African government relations for this major consulting company for the purposes— for this— for the purposes of this very specific conflict, um, or dilemma.

So I told the guy who was sort of still waving his gun at me, the chap in charge— and I say in charge very loosely, you know, I'm not sure there was a great deal of command and control going on here, they were all fairly high or drunk or whatever— but anyway, I told him that I was, I'd been, I was working for a company that had been instructed to work with the military in the Congo for the peace period to establish how their terms and conditions and salaries could be improved. And of course, what that did was play into their motivations. So I said that my role was to interview as many people from the army as I possibly could so that they could tell me what needed to be done to improve their day-to-day existence and to improve their salaries. And of course, that's a great motivator for them, isn't it? So suddenly I think, okay, we're pointing a gun at this guy who's going to be reporting to the president and potentially can help us to, you know, improve our rations and accommodation and salary. But there was still a lot of suspicion.

So the lead character said to me, the chap in charge said to me, well, look, how do I know you're telling the truth? I said, I'll give you my business card. And I so happened to still have the business card of my— the chap I'd met in Joburg in my jacket pocket, and I handed it over to him. And that was enough, you know. It was a— and this is one of the interesting things about COVID when it comes to defensive cover. Quite often, very small amounts of ephemera are sufficient to to convince people that what you're telling them is true. And a business card, you know, is probably the most flimsy evidence of your identity and background that you can think of. But it works. It works partly because people don't— and I think this is a universal human trait— we don't expect to be lied to, actually. We may be suspicious, but we don't expect to be lied to. And we're quite pleased when proof is offered to us that somebody is who that they, that they say they are. And we see this even with, you know, again, I don't want to put ideas into people's heads, but, you know, we see it with criminals who will manage to blag their way into buildings just by wearing a yellow hi-vis jacket.

But because they look official, they look like they're doing something, they look like they've got a reason to be there, carry around a clipboard, and Absolutely, all of that sort of stuff. And, um, so I was, I was very lucky in that I had the card with me, but I think actually, you know, it wasn't that I hadn't formed in my mind some idea of how I would deal with the question of what are you doing here. I didn't expect it to be quite such immediately challenging circumstances. But, um, I was ready to default to a use of COVID And in that particular case, the COVID was twofold, wasn't it? It was a defensive cover, by which I mean, you know, this is— this is— here's my reason to be here, here's the business card. This is—

yeah, it makes sense for a white guy to be there doing that.

Exactly. But there was also what I call an offensive cover. And what I mean by that is, what is it about what you're telling that person that's going to motivate get them to engage with you? What's going to draw them to you? And so my being able to say that I was going to work with them to get their views on, um, how to improve their terms and conditions and salaries was a strong motivation for them. And that's what I mean by offensive cover. And it worked because we then sat down I would also routinely carry a packet of cigarettes with me in circumstances like that to work on the reciprocity principle. So I offered round cigarettes, which sort of creates that sense of reciprocal obligation. And we got chatting partly about terms and conditions, which of course I wasn't even vaguely interested in, but also they had recently returned from their tours of duty in the east of the country, so they were able to give me a fairly good operating picture even before I went in there. And it was a valuable debriefing session in its own right. So that was the offensive aspect to the COVID Incidentally, the reason I didn't find my friend in the transitional National Assembly building in the Palais du Peuple is because I'd got the week wrong.

He'd understood. So when I said la semaine prochaine, I meant this coming week, and he understood from that phrase the week after next. It's actually a fairly common confusion. So it turned out that he wasn't even in the country.

So I have to ask you about the Tim Spicer stuff cruising around Africa. Yes, I read, I read that book, The Wanga Coup, years ago. Like, I got to get what you know about the, the background behind all that.

Well, Tim wasn't involved in the Wonga Coup, of course, um, and, you know, he, he's been asked about it and people assume that he was, but he, but he wasn't. Um, I mean, that, that's an extraordinary story. Um, it, for me, the most important part of that story— and can I assume that your listeners will broadly understand what we mean by the Wonga Coup? Or should I outline?

Maybe just briefly explain. I believe it was in 2004, there was a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea that was allegedly plotted in the UK.

It sounds like mostly, um, it's all a bit Wild Geese, if you've seen that, right? Yeah, yeah. If not, I recommend it, you know. So sort of coming out of boardrooms in theory, um, that, that nexus between commercial interests in resources and military capability. Um, a brilliant film, Wild Geese. I recommend it.

Yeah, it is.

And, um, the idea was to remove the highly dictatorial leader of Equatorial Guinea, um, obiang. And it was the, the, the coup was get— was actually plotted between London and Cape Town. And it involved somebody who was a— who was a very good friend of Tim's called Simon Mann. Um, he's now no longer with us. Um, and perhaps more controversially, it involved the son of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, right, Mark Thatcher, um, whose former house— I gather I was in Cape Town earlier this year and his former property is on sale down there, as it happens, if anybody's in the market for a palatial, uh, palatial building in the, um, uh, Groote Constantia region of Cape Town. Very beautiful part of Cape Town. Anyway, it's a bit by the by. Um, the coup was plotted in London and in Cape Town, and for reasons which have never really been entirely clear to me, it was decided to use Harare in Zimbabwe as a stopping point for, um, their airframe to collect weapons. And I, I just literally can't think of a worse place to have chosen. I know a bit about Zimbabwe.

Yeah, Mugabe was still in charge at the time. That was not a great idea.

This was, this was not a clever idea. You know, they, they— there was a— it was a febrile, suspicious, um, environment in which the CIO, the Central Intelligence Organization, was incredibly active. Um, there may have been good logistical reasons to, to use Harare, but I just can't really see.

They, they probably thought they had bribed off the right person.

But that's right, but they probably in the process— I think the understanding is that they had inadvertently bribed a CIO officer who was entrapping. I think something like that, but it's a long time since I've read the Wonga Coup, but, um, You know, it— I'm— to this day, I'm just amazed that they chose Harare. In any case, they did, and of course it went spectacularly wrong. And they were— Mann and his team were arrested on the tarmac in Harare, imprisoned there for a while, but also then ultimately extradited to the tender mercies of President Obiang in Equatorial Guinea. Where they were imprisoned for some years until Simon cut a deal and became a security advisor to the president. In a neat twist of, I suppose, gamekeeper turned poacher. For me, that was the point at which the the era of the mercenary rather than the private security or private military contractor came to a definitive end. And I think it's interesting to reflect, isn't it, that I don't think there's been any high-profile case since then of attempted coups led by third-party military figures in Africa. And so the question arises of what is it, what's changed, you know, because there was a period from the 1960s through to certainly the late, latter end of the last century when coup activity, mercenary activity was fairly common, actually.

Some of it was implicitly endorsed on a deniable basis by governments. Some of it wasn't. Um, and there was some, you know, very high-profile figures involved in all of that, quite renowned. Um, the likes of Bob Denard. And then suddenly it stopped. And you've got a question— it's an interesting question as to why it did, you know. Why, why is all of that type of, uh, adventurism come to a halt? And I think the answer is better intelligence generally, actually better, better intelligence. It's more difficult now to disguise flows of money or to buy arms or to communicate with a wider group of suppliers and, and boots on the ground, um, logistical support, all of that. You know, you've got to— you've got to— when you think about how relatively easy it is now to track the whereabouts of airframes, to track where money is going, uh, reporting requirements on banks, an easier ability to track people's whereabouts through mobile phones, uh, an enhanced capability to intercept communication. I think it, it, it— all of that spelled an end to the era of mercenary adventurism.

I have to think that there's some economics involved as well, that there's like a more mature corporate model came about which saw security contractors supporting governments rather than overthrowing them, and that there was a lot more money to be made in that reconstruction or security for a sitting government. If you get a training contract to train soldiers in Libya, there's a lot of money there, and these mercenary adventures go wrong like 9 times out of 10. So there's a—

yeah, you're right, exactly. So why take the risk if you can actually be a semi-official arm of government? And you're absolutely right, because, you know, people like Eben Barlow, who you've interviewed, were of course setting up the likes of Executive Outcomes to do exactly that, which is to be more legitimate arms of government. And Aegis Defense Services was effectively working as an arm of the US Army. That's the reality of the situation.

Right, right.

And so from both from a legal footing and from a moral footing, it's much easier to justify. And from a risk management perspective, what would you rather do? To fly in with a band of merry men and try to overthrow an insane dictator on the potential promise of funds when you've finally managed to get the resources out of the ground, or take very highly paid work from Western governments where you know the money is going to hit your bank account? I mean, it's a bit of a no-brainer, isn't it? So, I mean, you know, I'm not— I don't want to romanticize the era of mercenary activity, but it Let's put it this way, I don't think Blackwater, Aegis, or any of the others will be inspiring films like The Wild Geese or even books like Dogs of War.

And some, some of it too, I imagine, has to do with the Cold War political climate where, you know, in the case of Mike Hoare, the CIA was kind of in bed with him and Five Commando and sending them into the Congo. So there's those sorts of like Cold War dynamics that were going on as well.

The deniability of it all was very important in those days. Right, right. That's right. And, you know, there was a lot of proxy wars being fought across Africa, you know, whether that was in Angola or Congo or wherever. So governments were quite keen to be able to distance themselves from it, but they were also quite keen to have some some attempted direction over events. I mean, if you, you know, politically now, it would be unthinkable for governments to turn a blind eye to or even be complicit with mercenary activity. I just don't think we can—

well, maybe Western governments. If you look at the Wagner Group, uh, oh, absolutely, yes.

Sorry, I do— yes, that's a very, very important distinction because mercenary activity coming out of Russia particularly remains remains a very significant feature of the world, particularly in parts of Africa, in fact.

And it's just as well, though, that things changed. I mean, can we think of any examples where a mercenary coup led to the government transitioning to a democracy? I'm hard pressed to really come up with one.

I think that's a resounding no.

Yeah. Yeah. So maybe it's for the best.

I certainly think it's for the best. I mean, you know, as I say, um, it is an era that you can romanticize.

Sure.

Um, but the reality was it was pretty bloody, and it was— as it was a result of a, of a wider conflict which was being fought much more in the shadows than it, than it was in plain sight. And, and that's changed to a certain extent now. And so it's evolved. And now private military companies, of course, have got— they've become bigger and bigger. They've shifted towards being more strategic and training support rather than necessarily boots on the ground. So, you know, these things will continue to evolve. And who knows, there may be stories out there which are as good as Dogs of War and Wild Geese coming out of the activities of private military companies.

It's a far cry from Mike Hoare and his guys landing in Seychelles, undercover of being the Fraternal Order of Froth Blowers, I believe it was, that they were a group of international beer drinkers.

That's the thing, isn't it? They were just characters.

Yeah, yeah.

As much as anything. Um, I mean, not for nothing was Mike Hall known as Mad Mike Hall, right?

Yeah, we had his son on the show who wrote a biography about his dad.

Yeah, what's it called? Um, do you happen to remember?

The book is, the book is called My Father the Mercenary.

Great title.

Yeah, it's, it's a very good book. He did, he put a lot of research into it and it came out very well. And I, I know Eben Barlow was at Mike Horace's 100th birthday at the birthday party before he passed away. I would have loved to have heard that conversation between those two guys.

Yeah, amazing. I mean, it's a different age, isn't it? Yeah, it really is.

Yeah, yeah. Um, so, well, tell us about your more— your experience, uh, working in Africa.

So I, I've spent many years working in Africa, but in fact decades, because, um, when I was working for government service, I was posted to a couple of places in Africa. I was fortunate enough to be sent to Zanzibar to learn Swahili.

Okay.

Um, which was, which was hardly a hardship. Um, so I've sort of— Africa's in my blood. And then, as I say, Tim had me working as his head of Africa, and that was quite an extraordinary experience. And after that, I set up a company called Africa Integrity Services, which I closed last year, which was a private intelligence boutique providing support for ethical engagement in Africa. I slightly changed the approach I was taking by that point. But I, I really enjoyed working for Tim because there's no sentence where you have Tim Spicer and risk-averse anywhere near each other unless there's a big knot in the middle of it. So he was, you know, he was the sort of character who would send me off to do things which I think would have probably taken months to get clearance to do when I was working in government sector, like flying into Somalia pretty much the day after the fall of the Islamic Courts Union. Mm-hmm. Um, so the Islamic Courts Union was the forerunner of the terrorist group al-Shabaab, uh, and they had taken control of Somalia, um, mainly in Mogadishu and around, um, and run a horrible sort of Islamofascist government there.

They, they— I think their biggest mistake was to outlaw football. Watching football in public. They also outlawed public dancing and so on. They were not popular, but the people of Somalia were not able to remove them by themselves. They relied on support from the government of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian army basically came in and removed the the Islamic Courts Union, to be replaced with something that was called the Transitional Federal Government. And the TFG was based in Baidoa, and Tim wanted me to go into work with the TFG to look at how we could help to provide them with architecture for national security, and it's like that. Um, so I had to find a way of getting in. At that time, I was based in Nairobi, and I had to find a way of getting into Baidoa, which is inland, um, in, uh, in Somalia. But there were no commercial flights, no commercial passenger flights. So I got around that by heading down to Wilson Airport in Nairobi, where I learned that there was a daily consignment of khat which was flown between— khat is that stuff which, yeah, uh, is chewed as a mild stimulant, sometimes not so mild.

Um, and, um, basically hitched a ride with a couple of and other team members on one of these CAT flights into, into Baidoa, where we met the incoming prime minister and then were driven in a convoy from Baidoa to Mogadishu. And it was an extraordinary drive in these, what they used to call technicals. Right. That's basically a flatbed truck with an Uzi 9mm mounted on the back, sort of, you know, riveted into the flatbed of the truck, with child soldiers. There's a picture of me somewhere, I'll send it to you, surrounded by these, my security guards, who— I'm looking like a poet, I'm wearing a white smock, so looking foppish. And apparently when I sent a picture back to London, that picture and the cry went up in the ops room, "Oh my God, we sent a poet to Somalia by mistake." And, but, you know, my view was there's no point in trying to— I'm not going to blend in. Yeah, you know, there's no point in trying to blend in. Don't be ridiculous. So sort of lean into the, you know, the looking non-threatening. That was my, that was my approach. Very much the approach, actually, it's a very English approach.

Please don't be offended, I don't mean this as a— to decry the American approach to security, but if you take convoys driving from the airport to the green zone in Baghdad, the American approach has sort of been bristling with arms and sort of armored cars, whereas— which is obviously very effective at one level, but oftentimes I know Tim quite liked the idea of people just getting in the back of a sedan Yeah, yeah. And just, just being as low-key as possible. And that was the approach I took. It's just like, don't, don't, don't for God's sake try to blend in, because you can't for fairly obvious reasons. So just look unthreatening, you know, which I was anyway. We were working with the government. But of course, in a situation like that, there's so much distrust and there's a lot of clan warfare, if you like. So it was incumbent upon me to look as unthreatening as possible. Left that sort of military bearing to my colleagues. And so we drove from Baidoa down to Mogadishu, and it was an incredibly eventful drive. I was with a chap, I called him Magic, because he seemed to just get us out of scrapes.

There was one point at which we were sort of bombing along, I'm sure the driver had already chewed quite a lot of khat, and there was this mortar crater in the middle of the road which was about half a car's size, and we were headed straight forward. And I thought, oh my God, we're gonna go in there and we're gonna flip. And that's it, it's all over, it's game over. And we don't have any medevac arrangements in place or anything like that. And I'm thinking, what the hell am I doing here? At that moment, it's like, what on earth am I doing here? And why didn't I phone my mom? Before I came out. You know, these are all those weird thoughts going through your head. But Magic just turned over, turned around, and tapped the shoulder, the driver's shoulder, and he said, just floor the accelerator, or words to that effect, which the driver did. And we just basically sailed over this, um, that was one thing he got saved off. Then there was, um, there was a lot of firing by the side of the road and a lot of commotion. Suddenly we we were off-road, seen that we were chasing a bunch of camels because there was this huge herd of camels.

Actually, we were chasing camel rustlers. Camel rustling is a thing in Somalia. Who knew? But great value attached to a herd of camels. And we'd seen these bandits, probably offshoots of al-Shabaab, trying to round up and rustle this herd of camels, and our driver decided to go after them. Again, Magic's like, "Look, I think for the sake of our guests, like, we might want to get back onto the road here." So, you know, it was extraordinary. There's all these kids, these child soldiers on the back of the technical, sort of jumping up and down, firing off rounds. And Magic's calm as you like, like, "Let's just get back onto the road and get our guests safely to Mogadishu." And then the most extraordinary thing was We went in to see the president in a place called Villa Somalia, which is the presidential compound in Mogadishu. And we had a meeting with him in the main reception room, so very Middle Eastern style, sort of low seats, sort of all down one side, both sides of the room. And then the president sat in the middle, receiving us with grace and and tea. And there came a point at which Magic just decided that we had to go.

It's just like, I think we should leave now. So, and I just took it, I think he must have decided that we'd outstayed our protocol welcome from the president, which is fine because it was a courtesy call. And off we went. And as we drove away, probably about half a mile down the road, we heard this crump of a mortar bomb. And it turned out that that mortar bomb had hit the very room in which we'd been sat about 5 minutes earlier. And it's almost like he had this sixth sense. And of course, what— if you think about it, the Islamic Courts Union had been recently deposed from power, so they knew exactly where the layout and the geography of this compound— they knew exactly what they were targeting. And they'd probably just seen a group of cars go in with white men. And white faces at that point were not very common in Somalia ever since the Black Hawk Down incident, if you remember that. So from 1994 all the way through to 2006, 2007, it's quite rare to see white faces in Somalia. So they clearly were watching it. They'd obviously seen us go in.

They obviously had an idea where we would be meeting the president, and that's what they targeted. But But Magic had managed to magic us out of that, spirit us out of it before the, uh, before the bomb hit.

Did, uh, were you successful in drumming up some business in Somalia?

Well, um, we, we worked on the, uh, I can't— there are obviously, um, non-disclosure agreements in place about that, but what I can say is that we I, I wrote a fairly lengthy piece on, on the national security architecture such as it was, um, and I have to say, trying to draw up a coherent national security plan for Somalia back then, and probably today, is a challenge that is beyond most mortals.

Yeah, I mean, we've ground through like 12 transitional governments or something like that in Somalia.

Yeah, it's not— it's, it's, it's not— my view is it is not susceptible to what we understand to be systems of governance and security and central governance. It's fissiparous, it's clan-driven, um, obviously corruption is a big part of it. The economy is actually in some parts very, very healthy. Charcoal is a big export, for instance. But it is not run according to precepts that we understand. And I think it would be almost impossible for any Western— and I'm not saying— this is not a value judgment, by the way. I'm just saying I think it's impossible for any Western advisor with understanding of Western intelligence, security, military protocol to go in there and apply a template. I just don't think that's possible. And, you know, hey, I'm not the first person to find that out, am I? As Black Hawk Down illustrated very, very effectively and very, very tragically.

Hey everyone, I want to tell you about my new novel, The Most Dangerous Man, out in June. It is a novel about a regimental reconnaissance company soldier who gets kidnapped while he's on a mission to West Africa. And when he wakes up, he finds that he is now being hunted for sport by a group of tech billionaires through the wilds of West Africa. This book is based on stories that I heard over the years about safari guides taking wealthy clients hunting for poachers on game reserves in Africa. I took that and I took a century-old short story, The Most Dangerous Game, and modernized it. And the product is this book, which I think will feel contemporary and resonate with audiences today. Thank you, and please check it out. Uh, okay, so, uh, any other experiences in Africa you want to share?

I, I'd love to tell you the story about the coup planning, but that's, that's now been cornered by another podcast, sadly. Um, there was the case— again, this is about— I'll tell you a story about um, another uncomfortable experience, this time in Zimbabwe. Um, and this is about targeting, actually. I, I— it's a story I tell in the book.

Sure.

Um, because I try to find stories from my personal life and then from my professional life which, which illustrate the principles that I outlined, which are the principles being the, uh, the agent recruitment cycle. Sort of targeting, cult— targeting, use of COVID cultivation, elicitation, assessment of motivations, recruitment, debrief, and detection of deception, and use of tradecraft, obscure running. So I sort of go through the, the 9 separate skills that are involved in the recruitment of an agent. And the running of an agent in a secure way. And in each of them, I try to tell a story which is relevant both in my personal life to show how it can be applied in non-intelligence settings, and then from professional life. And there's one particular one which is, I think, shows the power of targeting, and that's when I was in Zimbabwe. Harare. Um, this was shortly after the 2008 election, which had been particularly bloody. Um, I mean, it had been, you know, um, I think it's fair to say that it was probably one of the most violent elections Zimbabwe ever had to deal with. Um, and I was visiting for various reasons, but one of the things I wanted to do was to see a friend of mine, and that friend was a senior figure in ZANU-PF.

ZANU-PF being the ruling party in Zimbabwe. And ZANU-PF had its headquarters, I kid you not, on a street called Rotten Row in Harare. And I went down to Rotten Row and my friend's Office was on pretty much the top floor, not quite top floor, sort of third one down of this, not quite a skyscraper, but 9 floors or whatever. And I went and met him. We'd known each other of old, let's put it like that. We had a good catch-up. We had tea and cake and warm Fanta, all the things that you expect when meeting a senior African official. Um, and then as I came out, I was thinking about taking the steps down because I can be a little bit claustrophobic, but the lights in the stairwell were out, so I thought, well, I better— I'll just jump, you know, hell, it's only a short, uh, ride in the elevator. So I waited for the elevator to arrive, doors opened, nobody in there, get in, went down one story and the doors opened. Two gentlemen in suits, quite tatty suits, but suits nonetheless, got in. I thought, okay, that's good, at least I've got some company if we get trapped and I have to spend half a day here.

Because let's put it like this, they wouldn't have engineers out very, very quickly, and electrical cutouts were quite common at that point in Zim. But at least I'd have some company. But then behind them intruded a group of God knows how many Zona PF youth leaguers. Now, the Zona PF Youth League, they use the word youth in a fairly loose sense, so it was anybody sort of under 40 really. And one of their roles, apart from organizing community events and football games, was beating up the opposition. And so they would often get groups of Youth Leaguers together to go down to opposition rallies and knock heads together. One of their favorite weapons was, um, one of those curved blade, um, uh, kanjar, pangas, yeah, which have been used. I mean, you see those in use of cutting hedges, but they were also very frequently used in the, uh, the Rwandan genocide. So that's quite a chilling, uh, weapon to see in somebody's hand. And there were a lot of them in the hands of these Youth Leaguers as they climbed in. Um, and they were all high as kites or drunk. I could smell this evil local brew on their breath.

Um, so I was like, you know, this is, I think, probably advisable if I just keep myself to myself here. I don't want to draw any attention to myself. So sort of shrunk into the corner, doors closed, and we went down about half a floor, and suddenly the weight was too much. And the whole thing juddered to a halt, and then the lights went out. So we were there in pitch dark, surrounded by these youth leaguers, and given my claustrophobia, I, I saw I just need to have some light. So I had again fairly rudimentary foam, but there was a little torch thing at the top of it, so I put that on just so I could see what was going on. And of course I, in so doing, did that thing which I said I shouldn't do, which is draw attention to myself. So suddenly there's this whole group of slightly inebriated, or rather inebriated, youth leaguers brandishing their pangas and looking. I mean, they weren't brandishing, the place was packed, they wouldn't have been able to brandish, but they were sort of, you know, chaining their eyes on me and wanting to know who I was and what I was doing there.

And the It's important to understand that at this point, Britain was not well regarded in Zimbabwe government circles. And so in fact, we were the— we had been put up as the bogeyman. Yeah, the former British colony politics, former British colony, all of that stuff. So there was a lot of question about what is this British man doing here, you know, are you spying, who are you going to, and all this stuff, the usual stuff. And so I thought, well, okay, I need to do— I can't say I need to do— I thought I need to do what Mayer taught me to do, which is to find an ally. But by this point, it was, it was almost ingrained that I would look for allies that I would target. So I scanned around. Of course, the two— very quickly it occurred to me there's only two people that I'm actually going to be able to engage with here. In any meaningful way, uh, other than conflict. And that's the two gentlemen wearing suits. And I thought also, given that they're wearing suits, they're quite likely to be quite senior, so there might be some deference shown to them.

So I needed to find a way of engaging with them. And I noticed on the lapel of one of the two, he had a little enamel badge and it just said United. And I worked out that that must be Manchester United. It must be sort of half a broken badge, half a badge for Manchester United. And, um, because I knew that British soccer was immensely popular in that part of the world, and I knew that the most popular team was Manchester United, so I was able to work out that must be who we're talking about here. So I sort of looked over to him, caught his eye, and I just simply said— I had no idea whether there had been a recent game or not, but I took a gamble— I just said, 'How was the game the other night?' And there was this like pause. Everybody sort of looked at him, and then he laughed and he said, 'Oh yeah, it was great, but you know, um, 'Rooney, um, could have played better, you know, he's one of the best players in the world.' And then somebody else said from the youth league, 'No, no, no, it's not Rooney.

Rooney's not the greatest, Ronaldo's the greatest.' And suddenly we were into a debate about something I know nothing about, which is soccer. I just know literally nothing about it. I think— I don't think I've ever seen— maybe I might have seen a couple of matches of the World Cup or something on occasion, but it's just not something I know anything about. But it was my gamble to say, you know, tell me about the game the other night, worked, and it got the whole debate going about soccer and drew all the attention away from me. And by the time we got, we got moving again, which wasn't actually as long as I feared, it was about sort of half an hour to an hour later or so, um, I'd actually made quite good friends with the the guy who was wearing the United badge. And he went on to become quite— we stayed in touch and he became quite a powerful, useful source of mine. So that was a, that was a miniature example of using targeting in the moment. And the lesson in there is you're looking for something which matters to somebody else on which you can engage them.

And the really key point is you don't necessarily— you don't have to be an expert. Because guess what? People who are experts on their subjects that fascinate them are very happy to tell you their view. So you can spark a conversation. If you've got your targeting right, you can come— you can win a— win an ally, win over an ally relatively easily by appealing to their areas of interest and asking them to educate you. And that's something which I found fairly common across Africa, actually. You know, there's a— Africa is a very, very diverse place, so I always hesitate to, um, generalize, but I think I'm right to say generally Africans are incredibly welcoming and they are very eager usually to help. Of course, it's not always the case, and sometimes it goes very badly wrong, but I found appealing— finding out what your interlocutor is interested in and asking them to talk to you about it is a very powerful technique. Not just in Africa, of course, but it seemed to work particularly powerfully in Africa because of that sense of wanting to educate, wanting to help, wanting support, and wanting to be welcoming.

Yeah, I think the most full I have ever been in my life was in West Africa. They like to feed you.

Yes, they sure do. And it's— I've managed the time I've had to make excuses for not finishing a plate of food, which would have probably fed my entire family.

Exactly.

And I'm talking about when there were 7 of us.

So you did this for a while, you had your own firm for a while, uh, which you said you had shut down. Um, what was sort of the next step in your life, and, and how did this book, Think Like a Spy, come about?

Well, the book came about mainly because, um, I, I've had it in mind for some years now. And what I was very struck by was working in private intelligence and working in government, many of the skills the same, actually. And then I realized, looking back, that those skills in intelligence recruitment, agent recruitment, are something which all of us use pretty much all the time, but we just don't do it in any structured way. We don't do it in any intentful way. And I think that's very sad. It's very unfortunate, especially as I think people who don't have— we talked about social capital earlier— those people who don't have a network of social capital can benefit from understanding how to build relationships. And I thought, why should spies have all the fun? You know, why should they? These are not national secrets. They're not, they're not massive national security. These are techniques about relationship building, about interpersonal skills, about enhancing your self-awareness, your others' awareness, and your situational awareness. That's essentially what the book is about, how to do those three things and to turn enhancing your three awarenesses into building enduring ethical relationships, what I call alliance, alliances with goals, allies, people who can help you to get to that next stage of your career or whatever you'll have, whatever happens to be your goal.

You know, so I draw an equivalence between the intelligence cycle and your achievement cycle. Rather than trying to focus on the outcome in 15, 20 years, focus on the outcome in the next year. What do you need to be doing in the next year, the next 2 years, 3 years? Who do you need to support you in that iteration of your achievement cycle? So that's, that brings you to targeting. How do you get alongside them? How do you cultivate them? How do you recruit them to support you? What can you give them back? What are their motivations? And I saw— I realized I've been doing it all my life, one way or another, ever since Mayerhood taught me about the importance of building alliances. And so it strikes me as a very powerful set of skills for anybody to use at any stage in their life, particularly for younger people who are looking to get into the workplace for the first time. Now, recently I've also been focusing on the, the relationship between intelligence skills and leadership. Um, now that, that may sound a little bit unlikely because intelligence oftentimes involves working by yourself in the field.

So what's the leadership all about? Well, John C. Maxwell, the leadership guru, said that leadership is influence, nothing more and nothing less. And if you think about what an intelligence officer is doing— persuading somebody, perhaps in a dangerous country, to become a traitor at risk of their own freedom. Potentially at risk of their own life. I can't think of a better example of influence. So it strikes me that corporate leaders, third sector leaders, local leaders, politicians could all benefit from learning what the skills of intelligence relationship building are and apply those in the leadership context. Because leadership is influence, and influence is right at the heart of what intelligence officers do.

And is the book—

we've been— I've been— I now run occasional, um, workshops. I don't do publicly accessible workshops at the moment, but there are plans afoot to do that. Called the Stars and Spies Leadership Program. And this is, this is working with an actor, the idea being that there's a relationship between intelligence work and acting because it's all about, as we were talking about, presenting that best version of yourself, stepping into a role. And by using acting skills you can assert a presence and an authority which is perhaps not something that feels natural to you, but is very, very powerful in the presentation to other people. So we're exploring this Stars and Spies Leadership Lab and offer it as a private offering to corporates currently. But I will be— we will be planning to offer it publicly. It's with an actor called Louise Osborn, and we will soon be— I think later this year we will have our first publicly accessible, uh, leadership masterclass.

And the book is available now if people want to go and read Think Like a Spy.

The book is available, um, I'll show you again.

Yeah, please.

Um, it's the, the Think Like a Spy: Master the 9 Secret Skills of Influence and Leadership. And it's now out in the US. I think it's been out since the beginning of this year, so should be available in all good bookstores and, and, uh, obviously on Amazon.

Where can people find you online? I know you have a website, right?

julesfisher.com is my personal website, my author website. You can contact me through that if you'd like to I'm not a great user of social media, but I am quite active on LinkedIn and very happy to have connection requests there.

And for the people watching this on YouTube or listening to the podcast, we'll have links down in the description to all of those places where you can find Julian. As we wrap up here, I mean, any final thoughts, anything that you would like to talk about that we didn't get to?

I just want to reiterate that point really, that, um, the— there's an idea around that spying is, uh, the preserve of a certain type of person, that people— spies are born, and you're born in B-O-U-R-N-E sense as well as born as in the B-O-R-N sense. But actually You know, what spying is all about, what intelligence work is all about, is the use of personality, the use of human, human relationship skills, interpersonal skills. And we're all capable of enhancing those, learning them, practicing them, and mastering them. And they can make a huge difference to your life. And my final thought is this: we are in an age of artificial intelligence, and I believe Given the encroachments of artificial intelligence on our work life and our personal lives, compounded by the prevalence of social media and the ready access to forms of entertainment, streaming entertainment, we're in danger of losing some of those interpersonal skills. We're in danger of losing the human touch. And I think the thing that will mark out your listeners from everybody else as we go as we hurtle into this artificial intelligence age is enhancing interpersonal skills. So human intelligence is more vital than ever in the age of artificial intelligence, and that's what's going to make all the difference, um, in the, in the coming years.

I think we have one viewer question for you.

Um, it's actually not a question, it's just a statement. Think Like a— from James, uh, Think Like a Spy. Sorry, fantastic "book for those who are working in all disciplines that demand analysis and decision-making." Okay.

You have a fan.

Yeah.

Brilliant. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

So, Jules, thank you for coming on the podcast this morning. Really appreciate it.

Well, this morning, of course.

I really enjoyed it. And Jules Fisher is the website if you guys are looking for him. And again, we'll have links down in the description. Thanks again, and, um, please stay in touch.

Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed that. Great to speak to you, Jack.

And all you out there, we will see you next time. Hey guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the TeamHouse Podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free, and what it will do is aggregate all of our data all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the team house, on our geopolitics podcast Eyes On, things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the High Side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have coming on the show, and also, you know, filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out, We send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll-up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can find our newsletter at teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Again, the website for that is teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. So we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.