Transcript: Corruption In A Shameless Age

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Photo credit: Justyna Gudzowska

COLD OPEN

Patrick Radden Keefe:

There’s an old saw in Hollywood among Hollywood screenwriters that if you’re writing a villain for your movie, your villain shouldn’t know that he’s the villain. Outside of a comic book, most villains don’t think that they’re the villain in the movie, they think they’re the hero of the movie. They’re watching a different movie than you are.

Jon Finer:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And I’m Jake Sullivan. Today we’re joined by one of the premier investigative storytellers of our time, Patrick Radden Keefe. Patrick is a staff writer at The New Yorker who spent the last two decades illuminating the above ground and underground institutions, the financial networks, the colorful characters, and the moral compromises that shape the modern world. For The Long Game audience, Patrick’s work is indispensable because he excels at taking a specific story, a single disappearance, a single corporate dynasty, a single mysterious death, and using it to diagnose broader trends in state capacity, social decay, crime and conflict, and even the map of global power. You can see this across his entire body of work, including his most recent book, London Falling, which came out earlier this year. I’ve read it. It’s a gripping investigation into the mysterious death of a London teenager who impersonated an oligarch son. And Patrick uses that tragedy to reveal how decades of deregulation, and frankly, a culture of willful blindness turn London into a sanctuary for anonymous, often illicit foreign capital.

He also wrote one of my favorite books, which we’ll also talk about on this podcast, Say Nothing, back in 2018, a book about Northern Ireland’s troubles. Framed around the 1972 disappearance of a mother of 10 children, which examines political violence, codes of silence, and the moral trade-offs that come along with peace negotiations. Then there’s Empire of Pain, which is just a brutal accounting of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma that was behind much of the American opioid epidemic. And his earlier work included Chatter, which was an ahead of its time look into Western electronic surveillance networks and post 9/11 signals intelligence. Patrick also conceived and hosted an addictive eight-part podcast, Winds of Change, which investigated whether the CIA secretly authored the Scorpion’s Cold War hit song as part of the covert influence operation. So we’re excited to talk to him about all of that, about how he does his work, what it means for the world around us.

And with that, Patrick Radden-Keefe, welcome to The Long Game.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

So good to be with you guys.

Jon Finer:

It’s great to have you. And Patrick, we’ll just dive right in. In London Falling, your most recent book, which Jake just referenced, you zoom out from the tragic death of a teenager to a larger story about London and Britain, and really, the wider world. For listeners coming to this story fresh, can you just give a bit of background of who was Zac Brettler, what happened on the night he died, and what did it reveal?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, absolutely. In some ways, the easiest way to tell you, to set up the book is to tell you how it came to me. In the summer of 2023, I was living in London for the summer, producing a TV drama based on the book Say Nothing, that Jake just mentioned. And I was on the set one day and there was a guy who was a guest of the director of that episode, and he came and he just sat down next to me. We were killing time between setups on the show, and we started chatting. And I told him what I do, that I write for The New Yorker, that I write these investigative narrative pieces. And he said, “I might have a story for you.” And what he told me was, there was a family here in London, the Brettlers, who I’m very close with, and they had a son named Zac, a 19-year-old who died in the summer of 2019.

So this is summer 2023 when I’m talking to him. And he died in mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of a luxury apartment building overlooking the Thames. And after he died, his parents, Matthew and Rachelle, made this astonishing discovery, which is that unbeknownst to them, he had been leading this secret double life. And he had been moving around adult London as a teenager, pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. And so you had a mystery in the forefront of just how did this kid die? How did he end up on the foreshore of the Thames? Was it a suicide? Was he pushed? Did he fall? And then you had this deeper question, which is, why would, in this case, an upper middle class, nice Jewish boy from West London, Zac Brettler, from this loving family... What is it about London today that would make that kid aspire to be the son of a Russian oligarch?

Jon Finer:

So Patrick, can you just talk a little more about, one, hearing the pitch, I guess, which may not have even been a formal pitch that you got. What made you think that’s more than just an interesting story to tell somebody in a bar, but something that’s worth 10,000, 15,000 words in The New Yorker? And then, what makes that 10 to 15,000 word story actually worth going even deeper into and treating it in full book form? What are the different hurdles that you overcome in your own mind to take those steps?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I have always, since my first book really, and my early days in journalism 20 years ago, I’ve always gravitated to narrative as a delivery device for complex information. I tend to find that people are much more amenable to following you down whatever your chosen path is if they feel as though they’re following characters in a story, if they feel as though there’s some sort of drama that you’re inviting them into rather than just a complex treatise on the origins of the opioid crisis, say, or the troubles in Northern Ireland. There always has to be some sort of frame story for me. And I should say that was initially a matter of just my own proclivities as a reader and as a writer. It’s always been that way in my career. But I think particularly over the last 10 or 12 years, it feels in some ways more urgent than ever to do that because I read less attentively.

I don’t read as well as I used to. My phone has broken my brain. I think this is true for a lot of people. And it doesn’t mean that I think we should all give up and just make videos or do podcasts. But it does mean, I think, that there’s a real premium on figuring out how to engage people and pull them into something. So I had already written an essay in The New Yorker, a short essay after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, about the awkward place in which the British establishment found itself, where suddenly it was as if they belatedly woke up to the fact that London had provided this pretty commodious sanctuary for a bunch of fairly dodgy Putin-connected cronies. And they, very late in the game, were getting around to sanctioning people in a more aggressive way.

And there was a a sense of embarrassment, honestly, I think, at fairly high levels of British society over this state of affairs. So I’d written a short essay on that, but it wasn’t the thing that I could sustain in a longer piece of writing unless I had some sort of narrative frame. And so in that respect, it was a gift to meet this guy because he told me this story. And in an instant, I knew this is a a family story, it’s a mystery, it’s quite an intimate story, and yet it’s a way to continue to explore these questions about the way in which foreign money has corrupted London that I was intrigued by. So I wrote the piece. It was a long piece. I think it was about 15,000 words. Most of the time when I finished a long piece for The New Yorker, I think readers probably feel the same way, you get to the end and you feel like, “I never need to hear anything about this again. I’ve done it.”

This was one of four occasions in my career where I got to the end and I felt as though there was much more. And we can get into it, but I was very interested in the backstories of... There ended up being three people in that apartment that night when Zac goes off the balcony. There’s actually two, and it’s him and this other guy and then there’s another person who’s there just before and just after. And their family histories were really interesting. And I was thinking about how cities change. And it’s also a book about parenting and adolescence and how people change and transform. And all of that felt, in a very purely literary way, just rich and novelistic in terms of the material. And I felt as though I could squint and I could see how there would be a basis, not just for stretching the piece out, but a basis for building something much bigger and more ambitious.

Jon Finer:

So you said a lot of interesting things there, but the one that really struck me maybe is the smallest thing you said, but the most relatable to me, which is that even you, as somebody who is just steeped in this tradition of long-form journalism, a writer’s writer of non-fiction, finds that your attention span, your ability to digest long-form material has been impacted by technology.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Totally. Not completely wrecked, but I still read probably more than most people, but I can’t explain to you the nostalgia that I have. I look back, it wasn’t even that long ago, but it has been years since I did what I used to do just routinely through much of my life, which is lie down on the couch on a Saturday afternoon and read uninterrupted for two or three hours. Maybe get up to get a coffee or go to the bathroom, but other than that, just be completely absorbed by a book. And that doesn’t happen anymore. I’m constantly reading, but I’m also checking my phone every 15 minutes. And I think, for me, it’s mostly been destructive. I think there was a time when I thought, “Oh, isn’t this convenient? Look at all the things I can do.” And I think now I’m beginning to, I have a real sense of what I’ve lost.

Jon Finer:

I think Jake probably felt the same way, but particularly I’ve found, coming out of government where you’re digesting everything in such short bursts, getting back the ability to even sit down and read a long article takes time. So anyway, gratifying to hear that you’re wrestling with the same phenomenon.

Jake Sullivan:

Just to come in here, because now that we’re all bearing our souls on this topic, I think is a really important one. When Jon and I were in government, our phones were in a box for most of the day, sometimes all the day. We’d go morning till night and maybe check our phone once. And actually, it didn’t take too long to lock into just a different type of attention span, a different type of focus. And so I found two competing impulses coming out of government. One is, I have more time to go in depth to read, to digest, to reflect. And on the other hand, I have the phone in my hand and I’m just constantly checking it. I can’t watch a movie straight, like a two-hour movie without maybe not even just looking at my phone, but doing something on my phone. And I just find that my nostalgia is about that. It’s about the feature film having disappeared from my life as a relevant pastime. So yeah, it’s been interesting.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I can walk out about this stuff all day, but I think about increments of narrative time and how long it takes to tell a certain story. And there is a thing that I often come up against, which is these people who sort of want the TLDR version. They want the sort of what are the bullet points? What’s the takeaway? And it’s funny, because for me, that’s completely antithetical to what I do. What I’m thinking about is the seductions, the narrative pleasures that you can get out of absorbing something that is told in a leisurely way. And I guess, without getting into too many specifics, if you’ve read London Falling, there are big reveals that come in the last third of that book about some of the characters, which, if it was a series of tweets or if it was a 2000 word article, just wouldn’t land with you in the same way because they actually...

I think about this stuff all the time, and I think about my own most profound reading experiences have often been these ones where you’re so immersed in something and you become emotionally involved over time that when the twist comes, it just hits you like a ton of bricks. It takes your breath away. And in a world in which none of us are capable of absorbing a longer narrative in the heedless way that we used to, that becomes more elusive, those kinds of pleasures. And again, I think there’s something lost there. Now listen, as I say this, people are buying the book and they’re reading the book. I don’t know how much comfort I can take in being one of the last of the dinosaurs, but people are still engaging with this thing. But I think the bar is very, very high to getting them to do so.

Jon Finer:

The change that you’ve just described has really happened during the course of your career. It was not present to the same extent when you started. It is obviously omnipresent now. I think another change in the milieu in which you operate, the context, is that people are just less trusting of what they read even at a place, maybe even especially at a place like The New Yorker than they once were. By the way, they’re less trusting of what they hear from their government too, sometimes with very good reason. But how has that contested nature of truth impacted your work? And do you find that when you put out something like London Falling that took just an almost infinite amount of reportage and interviews and research... I’ve seen you quoted as saying only roughly 3% of what you report ends up in the final product. So obviously a ton of rigor behind this. Do you find that some people, at least more people than maybe used to be the case, question the veracity even of something as rigorous as that?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

There’s a thing that I think I have benefited from to some extent, which, broadly speaking, I think is a lamentable trend, people don’t trust mastheads anymore in the way that they used to. They don’t trust institutions in the way that they used to. They do weirdly trust individuals. And I think you see this... Pushing away from my own personal experience, if you look at The New York Times, clearly there has been a institutional decision at The New York Times to promote certain individual writers as individual brands. I don’t entirely understand the push to vertical video. I don’t know why. I love listening to the Ezra Klein podcast, I don’t need to watch it. Part of the beauty of a podcast is that you can do the dishes or drive your kids to school while you listen to it. So I don’t-

Jake Sullivan:

Is this the time that I should tell our listeners to subscribe to our YouTube channel?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

There you go. Absolutely.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. Okay. Keep it on in the background. It’s a comforting... It’s like having the TV on in the corner. You see what I’m saying? That there is a sense in which I think people increasingly identify with individuals and there’s a whole weird parasocial thing that goes on there. So I’ve benefited from that to some extent, because there are people who’ve read my other books, and I have a very open kitchen, show my work approach with the books where you can go to the end notes and you can see how everything got there. So with the book, it hasn’t been an issue, honestly.

There’s a separate issue, which is when you’re writing for The New Yorker or any other outlet along those lines, yeah, there’s a huge amount of distrust. And you experience that both when you put a piece out there in the world, that you can spend months and months investigating something and put out a big story, and there’s a bunch of people who just shrug and say, “Fake news,” or, “Liberal New York media,” or whatever it is. You also experience it when you’re reporting. I’ve had, when I’m sitting here at my desk making outgoing calls to various parts of the country to work on various types of stories, there are now some people who just won’t get on the phone at all because they’re making some a judgment about where they think I’m coming from. And it’s hard.

I’d be interested to hear your views on this. I personally have a little bit of an optimistic scenario here, which is that I think as you get more and more uncanny AI slop, as we’re exposed to more and more junk on our phones, strangely, I think some legacy media might make a comeback. Because I think that there is going to have to be a sense of, you need some port in the storm. You need something you can trust. And I think it’ll be a smaller number of outlets than it used to be, but I do think that there may be a sense in which the much derided legacy media ends up being one of the few places where you can believe what you see. Not just in the sense that there’s... I’m not talking about agendas here, I just mean you believe what you see in front of your eyes.

Jake Sullivan:

Jon, as a former legacy media journalist yourself, how does that strike you? You think that optimistic case could bear out?

Jon Finer:

I hope so. I guess what I would say though is I think even more likely than that is that people do have outlets, individuals outlets that they trust, but that they tend to be segmented into certain geographies or certain subsets of society, and anything that is not of their corner of the country and of the universe, they just put in a different category, and either don’t digest it at all or assume that it’s false. That’s what I worry about. The ability to just... And in the government context, I think it manifests itself as, if you work on certain issues, development, anti-corruption, you are in some ways stating a partisan affiliation, because one side of the partisan divide actually cares about those issues and the other has said explicitly in some sense they’re not important. And so crossing that divide is increasingly challenging. And I think there’s a similar thing going on when it comes to media consumption, but I hope Patrick’s right.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

But what do you think, and I don’t mean to go too off course here, but I’m curious what you think about the... One of the challenges that I think a lot of those of us who do investigative journalism have in the Trump era is that the sort of traditional syllogism in which corruption happens, the press exposes the corruption, and then somehow this is remedied. Some referee steps in and puts an end to the corruption. And that you can still have the first two steps, and then what happens is that in some cases you spend months and months exposing something and everybody just shrugs, and it’s sort of priced in and keeps going.

Jon Finer:

But I think it’s a little different from that. My own view is that it requires the actors whose bad acts are being exposed to actually feel shame about that or care about that on some level and then change course. And if you have leaders, officials whose revelations do not bother them in the least, and in fact in some ways they celebrate them in some ways, then you’re not going to get the same impact because they’re not going to alter course, they’re just going to proceed. That’s what I worry about in-

Jake Sullivan:

It has been striking how much just this element of shame has been central to that syllogism you laid out, Patrick. A key ingredient of investigative journalism holding leaders accountable is that once this misdeed or corruption is exposed, the leader feels some sense of shame. And if you have a completely shameless leader, a lot of the power of that revelation is removed. And then second, if you have behind that shameless leader a political movement or a political party that’s basically willing to close ranks and say, “We’re not going to keep our own house in order,” that makes things worse. And then finally, I think the other issue on corruption is that so many people in this country across the political spectrum see the entire system is fundamentally corrupt in some way because of campaign finance and other things. So there’s a little bit of a pox on all their houses, which has reduced the exposure of any particular act of corruption or any particular deeply corrupt individual, because so many people shrug because they say they’re all doing it. And I don’t know quite how you handle that.

One thing that I thought was quite striking was watching the election in Hungary play out. And Peter Magyar, who won that election, was able not just to say this guy, Orban, is corrupt, but to connect that corruption directly to people’s daily lives.

Well, this is a good time to actually shift to this larger macro point about what happened in the UK that you tell in the book, London Falling, but frankly, that also is present in the US. You talk about London shifting from this industrial port city to a global capital destination that essentially welcomed all of this anonymous foreign wealth with basically no questions asked, with a number of consequences. And the US has its own sordid history. We’ve had flows of capital from oligarchs and shady foreign billionaires. Up until midway through the Biden administration, you could purchase property in the United States with a shell company without revealing who the true owner was, which allowed people to move billions, tens of billions in ill-gotten gains to be invested in the US real estate market with no transparency or enforcement. The Biden administration changed that by requiring the true owner to be identified, but really implementation is hard. And our system is a wash in illicit cash.

I’m just curious if you could spend a moment talking about both this dynamic as you’ve studied it in London, and then also whether you feel that the Russian invasion of Ukraine woke people up there and whether you think 2026, the story looks a little different than it did in 2019 when Zac Brettler died, or whether this is just a deep feature of these Western capitalist systems.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, I’m really glad you put it in that way, because on the one hand, this book is very specifically about London. It’s this extremely specific London story about the history of that city and going back well before the arrival of the oligarchs in the early aughts. On the other hand, it’s a broader story you could tell in a lot of places. I will tell you that when I traveled around the US for three weeks on book tour and talking about this book in Miami, there were a lot of heads nodding in the audience as I talked about scoundrels and supercars and dodgy real estate deals and all the rest of it.

Jon Finer:

Maybe not even judgmental in a place like that always, but sort of a little relatable. It’s funny, our mutual friend, who actually we had in our podcast, Evan Osnos, wrote this book, The Haves and Have-Yachts, about basically the super rich. And one of the story he told is that there are people who came up to him and said, “I’ve got a giant yacht. You never came to talk to me.” The book in some ways was a satire or a scathing critique, but there were some people who felt a little left out not to be included, given their stature.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It’s funny you should say that because I sent a note to somebody the other day. A lot of people are reading the book in the UK, and I’m getting notes every day from all kinds of people. But there is a sort of funny thing where you’ll have people read the book and then send me a note expressing their appreciation for the book. And in some cases, these are people who, I was just pointing out to a friend, that they feel totally unimplicated when they read the book, that there’s a funny way in which you can get... There’s this super high-end real estate person who really enjoyed and admired the book and has sent me a series of notes. And it’s just funny because I’m thinking, “Wow, you read the whole thing and didn’t feel like you might be one of the bad guys.” Some of this is not new.

At the end of London Falling, I quote The Gilded Age, the novel. And there is also, I think, a sense that you have to acknowledge that when London really started to change in a significant way, some of it was the oligarchs who came in the early aughts. But before the oligarchs, there were the Americans. It was the American bankers who came in with deregulation in the ‘80s, who really came in and said, “We want nice apartments and sports cars and fancy restaurants and all the rest of it.” That go-go atmosphere really started with the... It’s that the Michael Lewis generation. If you remember Michael Lewis’s first book, it’s about how he was one of those bankers who went into London.

In terms of the post-invasion question, Jake, they have taken steps to have more transparency in the housing market, which I think is a flawed system. There are loopholes, there are ways around, but it feels like a positive step. There have been a raft of new sanctions. People like Roman Abramovich had to sell Chelsea Football Club, and symbolically that has, I think, real meaning. But I will say, one of the things that I encountered when I started looking into all of the oligarchs who were selling their mansions because they were worried about sanctions, was I talked to one real estate guy who was like, “Yeah, it’s a huge opportunity for Chinese buyers.” So there’s a sense in which the revolving door keeps turning. I guess the one other thing I would add just quickly is that they’re getting rid of non-dom tax status, which does seem like a really significant thing. And I think that as is often the case in these situations, there was a hysteria sense that the wealthy would flee London, and it doesn’t seem to be happening in practice.

Jake Sullivan:

Can you say a word non-dom tax status for our listeners who aren’t familiar with it?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. The idea is that you can be resident in London, but not domiciled there for tax purposes. And it’s got a whole fascinating history actually dating back to the colonial era. But the idea is that money made abroad, you wouldn’t be taxed on in the UK. And what it has meant is that it becomes an extremely attractive second home, and probably second home only on paper, for all kinds of people. And they’re in the process of rolling that back.

Jon Finer:

New York City going through a version of this in a slightly different way right now with the pied-a-terra tax that the mayor has-

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. And as Mamdani has found, the devil’s in the details. These things are not actually easy once you get in and start sorting it out. But I think there’s a ethos that I describe in the book where, there’s a quote from Boris Johnson when he was the mayor of London, and he said, “London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. We are their natural habitat, and we’re proud of that.” And I think that on the one hand, I understand the sentiment. If you’re the mayor of a city, you want to attract investment. You like the idea of having wealthy people come in. I think Bloomberg’s New York had some element of this as well. On the other hand, these things sometimes have unpredictable consequences.

Jake Sullivan:

By the way, I used to do a pretty good Boris Johnson impersonation, but I’ve lost it.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Used to? No time like the present.

Jon Finer:

Exactly.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

You want that YouTube channel to-

Jon Finer:

Yeah, there you go. That’s going to be subscriber only material, I think.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Exactly.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. Patrick, because you’ve mentioned it a few times and I’ve been interested in it, you’re assiduously fair to the people you write about on the page, but I’m actually wondering how you have come to think about them, these “rogues” as you’ve called them. Our listeners probably don’t know that your mom, Jennifer Radden, is known for her philosophical work on identity and the idea that people can be, I love this quote, “Strangers to themselves.” I should have said Radden. How much of the corruption and moral rot that you document do you think is driven by explicit malice versus just this human capacity for self-delusion and rationalization? And how do you come to think about these characters when you are done with them, in terms of writing about them, but obviously they go on in the world, as do you?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I suppose there are people who are purely evil, but they’re not very interesting to me as a writer. I’m very interested in questions of self-delusion, sometimes individual self-delusion, sometimes collective self-delusion, but the stories we tell ourselves about the decisions we make. Having written about a lot of these types of people over a couple of decades, I’m always struck by how nobody ever gets there overnight. You get these incremental deviations. Those are the gray areas I’m really fascinated by. I’ve always been interested in, what does Chapo Guzman tell himself about the life he is leading? What did the Sackler family tell themselves? There’s a sort of interesting thing. We see it in a lot of the discourse about Trump too, where if you’re somebody who’s very wealthy and successful, you can curate your environment where you don’t actually have a lot of touch points with the real world.

And I’m fascinated by the way in which that can bleed over into an almost... It’s not clinical delusion, but it is this weird situational delusion that you can build. And yeah, those kinds of questions are really fascinating to me. I think there’s an old saw in Hollywood among Hollywood screenwriters that if you’re writing a villain for your movie, your villain shouldn’t know that he’s the villain. Outside of a comic book, most villains don’t think that they’re the villain in the movie. They think they’re the hero of the movie. They’re watching a different movie than you are. And those questions of how the person gets from here to there are always very intriguing to me.

Jon Finer:

Are you surprised that people who could end up the villains of your stories are still in many cases willing to talk to you?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, listen, sometimes they’re not, and often they’re not. I think people want to be understood. Listen, even the Sacklers, who didn’t talk to me and threatened to sue me for a couple of years, I think the Sacklers would tell you that they are just terribly misunderstood. I think it’s often the case with some of the people that I’ve talked to, gangsters and ex-IRA people and murderers and gun runners, and what have you, they often have this sense of, “The problem is just that my story hasn’t been told in a good and honest way.” I am surprised sometimes, but I do think that there’s a very natural urge that we have as humans to talk and be understood.

Jake Sullivan:

Patrick, I wrote my master’s thesis on the troubles in Northern Ireland. Nobody has offered yet to turn it into a TV miniseries. I’m still waiting. Maybe I can get some tips from you. But I did want to say to you directly that Say Nothing was honestly one of my favorite books ever. I thought it was just absolutely masterful. One thing that I was struck by in reading it is how it really exposes that the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to the act of conflict in Northern Ireland, relied on a certain level of collective amnesia, that people had to forget a little bit of the bad stuff that happened so everyone could move forward.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, both generally and taking your cue that it’s always best to answer questions in the context of a character. You decided in the book to actually identify the individual that you concluded killed Jean McConville. How did you come about reaching the decision to do that? And how did that fit into this larger question about accountability, about documentation of the truth as balanced against the desire for moving forward for political stability, for sustaining a fragile peace?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I grew up in Boston, which is a city with a big Irish American population. I came of age during the Clinton administration. You had the Good Friday Agreement, which at the time was really embraced, I think rightly, as a diplomatic miracle. And I think there was probably some slightly triumphalist sense in which there was a sense that this happened because of people like Bill Clinton and George Mitchell, and the sort of American hand was indispensable in getting everybody to the table. And so I grew up with maybe a somewhat rosy picture. And I was startled when I went to Northern Ireland to find that the peace was so cold and that there were so many unresolved issues. And to be clear, I say none of that to diminish the miracle of the Good Friday Agreement. It’s more just that I think that in the American imagination, it was sort of done and dusted. And in fact, the truth is messier than that.

And in this case, what happened was, when they got all the parties to the table, they essentially had to say, “Listen, we are not going to discuss what happened in the past. There’s going to be no question about truth and reconciliation, statutes of limitations. Is there going to be an amnesty process?” All these types of questions basically were tabled because there was a sense, I think a realistic sense that if all that stuff was in play, there would be no Good Friday Agreement. You’d just never get there. And so they had to instead concoct an agreement which was essentially purely forward-looking. So you end up then with this vacuum where there are prosecutions, but it’s all a little piecemeal and there is no established process of historical memory or accountability or any of these types of things. And into that vacuum, Russia’s litigation and journalism and all these less than ideal substitutes.

So I came into a situation in which you had this place, you had this conflict. Everybody in Belfast seemed incredibly haunted by what happened during those three decades of conflict. And I should say, including so-called ceasefire babies, that is kids who were born basically after the ceasefire and had grown up during peace time. There was a sense in which they too were surrounded by the ghosts of things that had happened before they were born. I was looking at this one particular murder. I ended up figuring out who had pulled the trigger. The decision to name that person was probably the most consequential decision I’ve made in my career. I just mean in terms of the moral consequences. It’s a significant thing to accuse somebody who’s never been accused before of this very famous war crime. But I gave it a ton of thought and consulted with a lot of lawyers in four different jurisdictions and ultimately felt it was the right thing to do. And I’ve never had any regrets about that.

I should say, this person has never been prosecuted subsequently, not even questioned by the police. And that was an eventuality that I could have predicted. But I think importantly, the threshold, the evidentiary threshold for a writer is different than it is for the cops or for prosecutors. And so I felt very comfortable and confident with what I did, but I also think that I’m in a different lane.

Jake Sullivan:

One thing that really came through in your book is just how local this conflict is. It had this international patina to it because the whole world had its eyes on Northern Ireland. But we’re talking about neighborhoods and streets. And when you have that close quarters reality and people know the people on the other side, they know the faces and the characters and the gangs and the whole thing, it does make it hard to just say, “Okay, we’re all moving on. We’re just going to look at the macro and not focus on the micro.” I think that’s definitely true in Northern Ireland. On the other hand, Irish people in general like to just shove things down. Beyond just getting the Good Friday Agreement done culturally, it strikes me as a Sullivan that there’s a certain degree of-

Jon Finer:

I was going to say, this is now taking on the era of the local and the personal.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Jump in anytime, Jon.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, exactly.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, please, Jon.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. Listen, there’s a moment in the book, which was for me, one of the most chilling things that I encountered in the reporting, which is that the story starts with this woman, Jean McConville, this widowed mother of 10, being taken away from her children at gunpoint in 1972. So you have her kids clinging to her legs and she’s taken away by this gang of intruders and never seen again. The kids are orphaned and they grow up not knowing what happened to their mother. And one of the people that I talked to extensively for the book was this guy, Michael McConville, now a middle-aged man with children of his own, but at the time an 11-year-old boy who was hanging onto his mom’s legs as she was pulled out of this apartment. And Michael told me the story about, as a grown man, being in Belfast and catching a taxi one night, and flagging down this taxi and getting into the back. And they pull away from the curb and he looks in the mirror and he recognizes one of the men who in 1972 took his mother away.

And to this day, it’s unclear whether the taxi driver knew who he was. Michael didn’t say anything. They basically finished the ride and he paid the guy and walked away. But the intimacy of that, the horror of that, that idea that you have these things that nobody’s spoken of that happened decades ago, but then you keep bumping into the people. Again, listen, I think it would be familiar to people who come from Sarajevo or any number of other... Rwanda. These stories are hardly unique to Belfast, but they’re really striking.

Jon Finer:

It’s just a small place in some ways. Patrick, you know this. Jake may not actually, and our listeners certainly don’t, but I actually showed the first episode of Say Nothing to Irish American President of the United States, Joe Biden, on Air Force One on the way back from one of our trips. And he was predictably enthralled by it. Didn’t find it uplifting, maybe enough for his entertainment taste, but was an interesting moment to be able to see how he absorbed this material. Obviously, he’s been intimately familiar with the subject for a long time. But our fan credentials are in good standing, given that.

I want to ask you about Wind of Change as well. That was the first podcast I ever really consumed in full, podcast serial, I guess. It came out at a very opportune moment when everybody was stuck inside their house or able to go on walks and not much else. I listened to it running around Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York. I want to ask you point-blank, after all the interviews, the dead ends, the new leads, the deep dives, what does your gut tell you now, I’m sure you hate this question, as to whether the CIA actually was involved in writing or propagating the Scorpion song Wind of Change.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, I should be asking you guys if you want to make some news here.

Jon Finer:

We spent a ton of time on this, as you can imagine.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

That YouTube channel isn’t going to watch itself. I think that there was something there. I don’t think this... Spoiler alert for your listeners who have not yet consumed the whole podcast. I think there was something there. I think it is very unlikely that the CIA wrote the song Wind of Change. I think it’s unlikely that some songwriter under contract with the CIA in some cutout capacity wrote the song. I think the band probably wrote the song. But at that time, the way in which music traveled in the Soviet Union was through the copying of tapes and this whole underground rock scene. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the agency had something to do with that promotion, making the song what it was.

The one thing I know for certain is that there are people inside the agency who have passed this story down. And so I think probably it was a game of telephone, where it starts with, “Oh, we had something to do with that,” and it becomes, “We wrote the song.” Not the first time in rock and roll history where success would have many fathers. But yeah, I think there was something there.

Jon Finer:

You have said previously that part of how this became a podcast is that you had some sense it would be a sort of open-ended ending, and that you think that lends itself better to the podcast as a medium than it does to, say, a magazine article or a book. Maybe because we could use the advice. What else do you think makes podcasts work, or not, that is different from other media, given how much you are interviewed on them and obviously have been a producer of one yourself?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

One of the things that’s so interesting about the podcast business, and on some level this is true of the media business in general now, is just like, everything is constantly in flux. And so podcasting now is totally different than it was when we made Wind of Change six years ago. I’m in the very early stages of a new podcast, and it’s really striking the degree to which... It’s like, I get no credit for any of my hard won experience from six years ago because it’s a completely different industry now. It’s interesting. I think that podcasting has moved in a really dramatic fashion much more toward the conversation we’re having right now, for understandable reasons. I think it’s somewhat lamentable that the heavily produced, heavily reported, long narrative podcast, like Wind of Change, they still do them, but not as much. It’s not really where the business model is at this point.

And I think that’s a shame because I think there are some great ones. I did think that in the case of Wind of Change, there is something about... I think it’s because we all started with serial, if you remember serial, that serial was... Ironically, they subsequently did figure out what happened in that case. But at the time when the podcast was made, it ended in this ambiguous fashion, and that was okay. I think it’s tougher to do that with an article or a book where it’s a mystery story and you don’t solve the mystery, at least to some extent. Another big one for me, honestly, it’s not, I mean, this wouldn’t be relevant for you guys necessarily, but this new podcast I’m doing is about music. And I do think there is something about being able to incorporate music and really fully... And with Wind of Change, that was a big part of it, was being able to play the songs.

Jake Sullivan:

Especially the song, man. I hadn’t heard that song in a while when I started listening to Wind of Change and it was in my head for weeks. What just a great, great song.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, and the thing is, and to be... We went, for the podcast, we saw The Scorpions play Kyiv in 2019. And when that song came on, it was like thousands of people around me were crying. These big, scary looking Ukrainian guys with tears streaking down their faces. When you experience the song with people for whom it had this profound historic importance, I don’t know, it was magic.

Jake Sullivan:

So we’ve kept you for a long time. I want to ask you one other question, then turn it over to Jon to bring us home with a couple of questions. My question is that you actually spent time serving as a policy advisor at the Office of the Secretary of Defense at OSD, and I’m curious whether in your experience there, there was anything you found that national security reporters and journalists actually get wrong about the Pentagon or about how government decisions are made? Anything you’ve learned in that where you said, “Huh, I had a different view, coming from the world of journalism, than I do seeing things from the inside.”?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, it was a very profound case of exactly that. Part of the reason I wanted to do it was to sort of... I didn’t have a sense that I would become a public servant in any longer term capacity. I had a fellowship where I came in under the, I think it’s called the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, and I came in for a year. I thought of myself as having a PIF helmet and trying to learn the anthropology of DOD. I was just struck by the magnitude of the bureaucracy and the strange functioning of the bureaucracy at quite a low level. I think I went in expecting Seven Days in May. And when I got there, it felt like The Office to me, in a a strange way.

I was there before the show, Veep, but the thing that Veep captured really brilliantly was the degree to which... On the one hand, there’s the grandeur of the idea that you’re working for the federal government and major matters of national security and what have you. On the other hand, there’s also just office politics the way there are anywhere else. And I was very struck by that and struck by the degree. There would be little pet projects and things that were funded because there’s one guy on The Hill and the appropriation keeps coming through. And then you have this whole little office of people who are working and everybody else around them is wondering, “Why are they doing that?” But they have this, just all those types of being able to see the map and understand a little bit better.

It’s funny, it’s a thing Jon has talked about in the past, but just the idea of being a reporter in Iraq and being downrange and seeing the consequences of decisions that are made over the horizon back in Washington. And I was working at a low level. I wasn’t much help to anyone, honestly, but I learned an enormous amount just by being there. And I have to be candid with you, it wasn’t hugely reassuring to me as a citizen.

Jon Finer:

There’s a cliche about TV shows about Washington, probably a cliche because it’s largely true, that The West Wing is what people want to believe Washington is like. House of Cards is what people actually believe Washington is like, and then Veep is the most accurate depiction of life in Washington. I think there’s some truth to that. Patrick, last couple questions, and thank you again for giving us so much of your time. The first is one that we’ve been asking many, if not most of our guests. And then the last is particular to this episode, which will function effectively as our August summer reading edition, to the extent you can have that on a podcast. But the first one is, I’d like you to give us one opinion you hold, on any subject, it can be related to your work, it can be related to anything else, that is unpopular, that you’re willing to confess on this show.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, this is going to be a cheat because it’s hard for me to gauge the popularity of this, but if you want to know the thing that has occupied an enormous amount of my psychic energies lately, I’ve been traveling a lot. It is people in public places and on public transportation who listen to stuff on their phones without headphones. And I think that this should be a federal crime. This may secretly be a popular-

Jon Finer:

I think it pulled pretty well.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

But let me tell you, it is often. I’ve just been traveling a lot-

Jon Finer:

A lot of people do it.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

... and I am always wanting to engage the person. And I will say, “Do you have headphones?” Sometimes I’ll come over and be like, “What are we watching?” And my poor children are mortified that I would do this. But I truly think it is hard for me to envision a sanction too severe for this behavior, and it’s gotten out of control.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s good.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

So that’s my subway take.

Jon Finer:

You heard it here first. And then, what are you reading right now? And what would you recommend, either that you haven’t read yet or that you’d like to recommend for our audience?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Oh, boy. So I’m always reading a lot. I just recently quit blurbing, but until recently, a lot of books coming in to blurb. There’s a book by-

Jon Finer:

Do you always read every book that you blurb, start to finish?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, so this is part of the problem is that it just starts to seem insane if I’m just blurbing books that I haven’t read, and so I do try and read them. And there’s no good system. I don’t want to just log roll for friends. Anyway, this is why I quit. But yes, I mostly do read most of the book, at least, if I’m going to blurb it. There’s a book by Pam Colloff, has a new book called Catch the Devil. Really incredible non-fiction book. She’s an amazing reporter. It’s a page turner, but it’s also a story of a really remarkably bad guy who realizes that he can essentially be a a witness for law enforcement and put other people in prison by lying, and stay out of prison himself. And so it’s a very scary upside down picture of the American justice system and where it can go wrong.

There’s a new book I just finished called The Castle, by Jon Ronson, a very funny English writer, which gets into a lot of the weirdness of the present moment. It’s a non-fiction book. Very funny, very strange. I read the Ben Lerner novel, Transcription, which I though was-

Jon Finer:

I did too.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It’s hardly original, but did you like it?

Jon Finer:

I thought it was excellent. Yeah.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, I did too.

Jon Finer:

And short, mercifully short. I think more books should be short.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Short is good. Well, and then on the other side, I’m listening to East of Eden, which I haven’t read since I was in the ninth grade. And it is great. It’s great. Boy, it holds up.

Jake Sullivan:

I haven’t read that since the ninth grade either. I’m excited to go back.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It’s great. It’s really good. Oh, and one last one, a nonfiction book, which really knocked me out. There’s a book by a young guy, young Spanish journalist who’s now with The New York Times. His name is Carlos Barragan. And he has a book called Yahoo Boys, which is... I’ll set it up for you. It’s incredible. It’s nonfiction. His mother fell for a Nigerian romance scam. And he went to Nigeria to try and track down the scammer. Didn’t find the guy or woman who tricked his mother, but did fall in with these young guys who were engaged in that business. And earns their trust and figures out this whole economy of Nigerian romance scams. But then it gets into the psychology of why do, essentially lonely Americans who get these messages out of the blue and know that it’s not real, but then are sending money. And it’s an extraordinary piece of reporting. It’s called Yahoo Boys.

Jake Sullivan:

Good list. Excellent.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. Patrick, an honor and a privilege. And thank you.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Thanks, guys.

Jon Finer:

And great to see you.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Thanks for having me.

Jake Sullivan:

Thanks, Patrick. Real appreciate it.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Fun to talk with you.

Jake Sullivan:

That was good fun.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Known Patrick a long time. I think I first met him when we were grad students overseas. And it’s been fascinating to watch his career, because he did not begin his professional life as a journalist. He went to law school, he sort of wrestled with wanting to become a writer and then just has absolutely become one of the most successful nonfiction writers in America, if not the world. So remarkable to see his trajectory. And while we got a few recommendations from Patrick as to what’s been on his mind, what he’s reading, what he thinks our audience would benefit from, we figured we should probably offer some of those thoughts ourselves. So Jake, do you want to start off by sharing some reading recommendations for people as we head into August? Maybe the month the most reading takes place, in the United States at least.

Jake Sullivan:

Okay. Since you’re the more lyrical and literary among us, I assume you’re going to have a good diverse list. I’m more of the nerdy, technocratic type. So I’m going to recommend a few books in our area, national security and technology in particular. But the first book I want to recommend is from a former colleague of ours, Eddie Fishman, called Chokepoints, which is a book about the use of economic statecraft and economic tools to advance political ends. And he argues basically, these tools, whether it’s sanctions or the swift banking system or export controls, have become impactful and powerful in the way that only really military force used to be. And the book does just a fantastic job of explicating this in a way that is not boring or wonky at all. It’s really quite compelling. So that’s the first one.

The second one is a book by a guy named Jeffrey Ding that’s called Technology and the Rise of Great Powers. And boiled down to its essence, what Ding is arguing is that invention is not enough. The way that great powers succeed is by being able to diffuse technology through their economies, their societies, their militaries. And that it was really the United States’ ability to diffuse technology even more than invent it that led to the US winning the Cold War. And he puts that in the context of the current US-China technology competition. And I think that’s just an awesome book for people to read.

And then the third is a book by Amy Zegart who’s out at Stanford, called Spies, Lies and Algorithms. I recommend it just on the title alone. The subtitle is The History and Future of American Intelligence. It’s now a few years old, it’s from 2022, but it just really stands up well for people trying to understand the role of technology, AI, cybersecurity in the intelligence enterprise today. So I know that’s all books in the same vein, but I thought I would have a thematic basket for people to consider from different perspectives on somewhat different elements in national security.

Jon Finer:

Despite your description, I reject the label that I’m in any way literary or lyrical, but I will share some books that I’ve been looking at recently that I think are fantastic. One, and I won’t dwell on it because Patrick recommended it, is this book Transcription by Ben Lerner. Which, to give just the one sentence synopsis, is about a young academic who goes to interview his mentor at the end of his life and has a technological failure of some kind that prevents a transcript of this interview from being created, and then much flows from that. The second is a book I recently reread, but that I think is quite illuminating about our current moment. It’s another novel. It’s called Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart. Which, if you haven’t read it and you are someone who has traveled to particular parts of the world... And what’s interesting about this book is it’s not about any one part of the world, it is about a fictional country called Absurdistan, essentially. Parts of the world that are in the east that cause so much geopolitical trouble and turmoil and embroil themselves in our politics.

It’s a hilarious sendup of all that, from the perspective of someone who has become American, didn’t start that way, and I think is as good as any nonfiction book can be as an introduction to many of the places that are sources of geopolitical instability today. Third one, also fiction, is a book called Country People by a guy named Daniel Mason, who is a friend of mine from college, who I’ve probably not seen in 25 years. He is a doctor, a psychiatrist who is also one of America’s greatest novelists. He wrote a book called The Piano Tuner, which was his first novel, which was a sensation. He wrote another book that came out a couple years ago called North Woods, which was about a house in Massachusetts and its various occupants over more than 200 years of history. This one is close to my heart, not just because it was written by a friend, but because it’s about Vermont, about an academic couple that moves to Vermont to take a job.

And I will confess, I’m only halfway through this book, but it is fantastic. And look forward to finding the time to finish this very soon. Another one I would recommend. Last book, the only nonfiction one I will put on my list is a baseball book, because for me, summer has always been baseball related and baseball themed. And it is a book that is short and actually really is basically a book length version of an article that was written in The New Yorker in 1960. And it’s by John Updike. It’s called, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. And it is the story of John Updike, who was 28 years old at the time, a student in Boston, going to Fenway Park to watch Ted Williams play his last baseball game. It is very short. It will take you less than an afternoon to read. And it’s the beginning of literary sports writing in America, and of just a fantastic read. So I will stop there.

Jake Sullivan:

I will second that as a... I read the article. I didn’t actually realize it was turned into a book.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, they published it in a little short length book version, which is great.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s just awesome. You put me to shame in a couple of respects. First, you managed to get a Vermont book plugin. Maggie’s going to kill me that I didn’t get a New Hampshire themed book on my list. Sorry, Maggie. And second, a book that involves Ted Williams, who Maggie actually met as a kid, got to know Ted Williams a bit. So I’m going to have-

Jon Finer:

Friend of her grandfather’s.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. Something like that. So I’m going to have some-

Jon Finer:

Well, you did Eddie Fishman’s book, who worked for me at Policy Planning and is a buddy in New York.

Jake Sullivan:

So it’s okay, good.

Jon Finer:

Eddie’s the best. Good choice. Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow the audio feed so you never miss an episode.

Jon Finer:

For additional content, episode transcripts, and exclusive podcast segments, subscribe to The Long Game on Substack or join The Long Game Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I always go back to Lance Armstrong on this for some reason, but that sort of Lance Armstrong notion that, “Listen, I’m the best biker who ever lived. And I wanted to play by the rules, but we live in a system that is so corrupt, that everybody else is cheating and so the only way for me to get a level playing field is to cheat as well. And I don’t want to be the fool who doesn’t cheat when everybody else is cheating and I actually deserve to win.” I think that that quite Trumpian sense of the world is dangerous.

Jon Finer:

Head to thelongame.substack.com or subscribe to The Long Game Plus on Apple Podcasts. The links are in the show notes. That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us. The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

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