Jake Tapper is Back Again—With a Real Life Criminal Thriller

The CNN anchor recounts the strange case of an Al Qaeda operative who washed up in Italy with a claim he'd killed two American soldiers

A literary agent asked me the other day about writing another book. “Good lord,” I said. “I can’t imagine finding the time to do that while keeping SpyTalk up to speed.”

So you can imagine how astonished I am at what CNN anchor Jake Tapper does. He’s on the air every weekday with his own show, “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” Sure, he’s backed up by researchers and producers, but still…He’s a reporter at heart, which means he’s constantly scanning the internet for the latest news as well as calling up his own sources for inside dope.

And yet he’s managed to write seven fiction and non-fiction books, starting way back in 1999 when he was the Washington correspondent for Salon, then in its golden age under founding Editor-in-chef David Talbot. Not long after he was on to CNN, then to ABC-TV News, and then back to CNN, where he’s been a star since January 2013 and sometimes called the Edward R. Murrow of his generation.

All while writing books. His novels, sendups of American politics, are wildly entertaining. But he’s also won praise for serious nonfiction books on war and the failure of American government, like The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, about the war in Afghanistan, Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency, about the deadlocked 2000 election, and Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (co-authored with Alex Thompson), which gave many a Democratic Party operative angina.

In short, he’s a superior reporter with wide ranging interests and writing talents. And so it was a pleasure to welcome him this past week to the SpyTalk podcast, where we talked about his latest, Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al-Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War, which recounts the capture and prosecution of one Spin Ghul, an Al Qaeda operative who, while fleeing North Africa aboard a refugee boat during the Arab Spring of 2011, told Italian police he had killed two American servicemen in Afghanistan. The book quickly goes into high speed as two American prosecutors try to figure out how to bring him to justice in America before the Italians let him loose.

It’s a lively discussion, which starts off with me and podcast cohosts Michael Isikoff and Karen J. Greenberg raking over key events in the intelligence world in recent days. Do tune in, on Simplecast, Apple, Spotify or wherever your preferred listening platform. See you there!