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The Current Transcript for November 5, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: We need to be on the side of rights and justice and not on the side of a government that has unleashed a cruel campaign against refugees.

LAURA LYNCH: Alex Neve of Amnesty International sets it out in stark terms. The U.S. has no safe harbour for those seeking refuge, and it's why his group and others want a Canadian court to kill the agreement that allows border officials to turn back refugee claimants who arrive at border crossings. Today, we look at the growing problem both here and in Europe. After that.

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VOICE: You have two metres of DNA in every cell in your body. And so many cells in your body, 37 trillion of them, that if you took all the DNA in your body and made it into a single fine strand it would stretch for 10 billion miles.

LL: Author Bill Bryson has a new guide for occupants of the human body. That's you and me, of course. And your long running DNA is just one of many fascinating facts about what's going on inside all of us. That's in half an hour. Plus, spy tales from a woman who immersed herself in that murky world at a young age and realized she needed out. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

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U.S. too focused on 'freezing out asylum seekers' to fix refugee deal with Canada: researcher

Guests: Luis Campos, Robert Falconer, Craig Damian Smith

LL: Yahya Samatar fled his home in Somalia in 2014 after being targeted by the terrorist group Al-Shabaab. His long journey took him through South and Central America into the U.S. There he was locked up for six months.

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VOICE: They took me to a detention centre. It was just like. Pretty soon. You don't have time to go outside now wearing a uniform. You don't have freedom of movement. You don't have freedom of work. You don't have freedom of, you know, anything. So I will thinking about the way that I can save my life, the way that I can not be deported back to Somalia. So my second option was to head to Canada in order to seek asylum.

LL: So that's what he did. Yahya Samatar headed north. He found himself on the shore of the Red River crossing the North Dakota-Manitoba border.

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VOICE: I was running to save my life, hiding myself. When I came into the bank of the river, it was a middle of the night. I took off my T-shirts sweaters, but I jumped into the river and the river. The river was very deep. It's going to be blue. Down, down, down, down. I was afraid of, you know, what attacked me. And then I could die easily. And then immediately I started swimming.

LL: Stories like this have compelled advocacy groups to challenge Canada's safe third country agreement with the United States. That agreement recognizes both countries as safe for refugees. So people are required to seek refuge in the first country they reach. But this week, that's being challenged in federal court on the grounds that the immigration crackdown south of the border has made the U.S. unsafe for refugees. Luis Campos is an immigration lawyer in Dallas, Texas. Hello.

LUIS CAMPOS: Hello. Good morning.

LL: When you hear about Yahya Samatar's journey, what do you make of it?

LUIS CAMPOS: I would say it's not an uncommon story. I've heard of, of course, I represent asylum seekers here in Texas, particularly on the southern border, asylum seekers who have been detained by U.S. authorities. And the story that he tells about his detention is certainly not unique.

LL: And what are the people you represent? What are they telling you?

LUIS CAMPOS: Well boy, I have numerous stories that I can tell. I think the best example, I've been involved in three federal lawsuits against the United States government, specifically Customs and Border Protection and Immigration, Customs Enforcement. And I can certainly illustrate the point with some of the testimony that we've heard in these federal court cases. In one case, we heard of individuals packed into cells that are made for 50 individuals, 150 to 200 persons in a cell. Keep in mind this testimony is public and was in federal court proceedings and individuals were forced to take turns sleeping because individuals couldn't sleep all at the same time. There were no bedding facilities. Individuals slept on concrete floors, shared one toilet, a toilet that, by the way, was very public, not an enclosed space. Toilets overflowed urine and faeces on the ground. In the U.S., authorities were slow to react to to clean up those kinds of messes. I've heard of individuals who have had serious medical issues. And when they've approached the Customs and Border Protection vigils for assistance, they've been told that if they ask for medical assistance, that they would go back to the to the back of the line, meaning that they would their asylum cases would be heard at a much later time. So the effort was to dissuade individuals from from seeking metal medical attention. And in one specific case, an individual was forced to extract his own tooth because he wouldn't get dental attention. So, yeah, the stories are terrible.

LL: Mr. Campos is this something new? Did it used to be different?

LUIS CAMPOS: It is used to be different. I've practiced for more than 20 years and I've never seen circumstances as poor as they are now, and I think what prompted it most recently was certainly a change in the agenda in the government and the administration of one, and then to the surges of asylum seekers that we've seen from Central America. So there certainly were surges and too late to middle 2018 into the end of 2018, which did admittedly create a overcrowding problem for the Customs and Border Protection officials. But there were mechanisms in place and tools in place, legal mechanisms that would allow for there to be a release of pressure. In other words individuals could be released under bond or, for example, through the use of ankle monitors. But the government refused to release individuals and instead detained them for excessive periods of time under very poor conditions.

LL: Do any of your clients ever talk to you about trying to seek asylum in Canada and leaving the United States?

LUIS CAMPOS: You know, not often. They don't. And I think if certainly if the subject came up, I mean the issue is that once they're in detention, I think it becomes patently clear they're going to be in detention for a very long period of time. So I think the the idea or the thought of being able to move through the United States to the northern border, it's just something that's just not viable.

LL: Do you think that Canada then should it should be getting rid of the Safe Third Country Agreement it has with the United States?

LUIS CAMPOS: Well, if that agreement depends on the safety of asylum seekers in the United States, and if the United States is currently not abiding by its end of the agreement, then I would say yes. I don't see the United States as a safe place for asylum seekers. One thing I haven't, I'm sorry.

LL: No, go ahead. Go ahead.

LUIS CAMPOS: Well, one thing I haven't mentioned is that that one of the reasons is there has been some alleviation in the population of detained individuals. Again, immigration detention. But one of the reasons or perhaps the principal reason is that individuals are now being sent to Mexican border cities by U.S. authorities to await their asylum claims. Keeping in mind, there is no Safe Third Country Agreement with Mexico. Nonetheless, there have been some agreements whereby U.S. authorities are able to ship asylum seekers into Mexican border communities that are rife with with violence. And this is no secret there have been numerous reports of asylum seekers from various parts of the world being assaulted in Mexico and robbed in Mexico while they await their their asylum hearings in the United States.

LL: Mr. Campos, thank you for setting the scene for us of what is going on there. I appreciate your time.

LUIS CAMPOS: You're very welcome Laura.

LL: Luis Campos is an immigration lawyer in Dallas, Texas. My next guest has been following the debate over the safe third party agreement closely. Robert Falconer is a researcher at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy. He specializes in immigration and refugee related issues and he joins me from our Calgary studio. Hello.

ROBERT FALCONER: Happy to be here.

LL: Robert Falconer if the court ends up suspending this agreement, what would that mean for people seeking asylum in Canada?

ROBERT FALCONER: It means two things. And it more means what would happen to people who are seeking asylum from outside Canada. And that's a key distinction because people who are already inside Canada have a right to a hearing. This is something that was decided in the 1985 Singh decision before the Supreme Court. But for people who are considering making asylum, claiming in Canada, if the agreement says is suspended, what that means, they will be able to go directly to a Canadian port of entry in a case, an official border crossing and claim asylum there. Whereas right now, if they do that from the United States, they'll be actually returned back to the U.S. to have their claim heard in the United States.

LL: Right. So there would be no need to set up some makeshift crossing at Rockson Road in Quebec.

ROBERT FALCONER: That's correct. So I think you what you'll probably see is you'll see an increase in overall claims, because now people won't have to weigh whether or not they're going to risk crossing. So you'll see an increase in claims, but those claims will probably be more regular, meaning they'll come through the official border crossings.

LL: If that happened, then what do you think what could it do to Canada's relationship with the United States?

ROBERT FALCONER: I think it could negatively impact it. We're already in a sort of a tenser period in terms of Canada U.S. relations than we have been. This is, of course, we have an ongoing issue over over trade with United States. While we do have an agreement in principle with the NSC, it's over the revised NAFTA agreement. That's not yet. We haven't got that across the finish line. And I think between that and other concerns, that it could certainly heightened tensions because as was mentioned, the previous section, a ruling like this would basically mean the United States was no longer or at least candidates no longer consider the U.S. a safe country for refugees.

LL: So at the very least, a slap in the face to the United States.

ROBERT FALCONER: Absolutely.

LL: The Liberals have said that they want to renegotiate the agreement to recognize all border crossings, but I'm wondering what you think in a minority government, what are the odds of that happening?

ROBERT FALCONER: I think it becomes increasingly difficult. The Bloc Qubecois, the NDP and the Greens have all said in their campaign platforms that they would want to actually see the agreement suspended. The Conservatives also want a renegotiated agreement. So I guess it depends on do the NDP, the Bloc or the Green make this a confidence issue? I'm not sure they will. I don't think it's their top priority issue. Will it make it more difficult for the Liberals to renegotiate an agreement? Absolutely.

LL: But the other question is what the Trump administration even want to negotiate? I mean for Trump, perhaps it relieves pressure on him because they keep coming across the border into Canada. So why would he want to renegotiate?

ROBERT FALCONER: That's my take as well. I'm not confident the U.S. wouldn't say they want to play ball in terms of renegotiation. The reality is that most most asylum seekers cross over from the U.S. into Canada and not the other way around. So any revised agreement where whereby Canada could send those back to the U.S. would actually favour us more than that with the U.S. and U.S. immigration policy is all about freezing out asylum seekers right now.

LL: OK, Robert Falconer just stay with us while I bring someone else into the conversation. These kinds of agreements have their roots in Europe where they're also facing some problems and some pushback. Craig Damian Smith is the associate director of the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. And he's here with me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

CRAIG DAMIAN SMITH: Hey, good morning.

LL: How do European Union countries handle refugee claims among member states?

CRAIG DAMIAN SMITH: So the European Union has something called the Dublin Regulations, which are essentially a Europe wide, plus a few other countries safe third country agreement. And that is an outgrowth of what's called the Schengen regime. So, you know, as when we travel to Europe now, the most remarkable thing about it, other than the fact that the food is better than in Canada. And the infrastructure is that you don't have to go through a border point. It's a open border regime to make that deal, to get states to drop borders. They had to come up with an agreement that they would ideally pool cooperation to control external borders. And part of that deal was something called the common European asylum system, of which the Dublin regulations were part that said that asylum seekers should claim asylum at the port of first entry. In effect, what that means is that states like Italy, like Greece recently, like Hungary, Spain, are the places where asylum seekers are basically stuck, especially in instances of large influxes. What happens after that is when there is a large influx. It turns out that the mechanisms that the EU built to try to cooperate on mass influxes, which were which were supposed to have been the share of people around Europe under something called a redistribution key, don't work because of domestic politics. So the cooperation breaks down.

LL: Is that because those countries that you mentioned are getting what they perceive to be too many refugees compared to other nations?

CRAIG DAMIAN SMITH: Yes. So one of the fundamental principles of the international refugee regime or what is supposed to be a fundamental principle and in the European system is what they call burden sharing or responsibility sharing. And that, interestingly, is also the second line in the preamble of the Safe Third Country Agreement is that we recognize that this agreement is about burden sharing internationally. And it turns out that other states who are not frontline states don't want to share the burden of people. And they say, I will send you some border guards or some equipment or we'll take part in a naval operation, et cetera. And then you have countries saying, well, that's all well and good, but we have 200,000 people that we have to deal with.

LL: So is it breaking down?

CRAIG DAMIAN SMITH: It never really worked. But what we've seen from that is what we call externalization of border controls. So when states can't cooperate, then they make deals with less scrupulous states, states that aren't signatories to the convention or just autocratic states. So when you have a fight between France and Italy over who is going to accept these asylum seekers, Italy will go and make a deal with Libya to keep the people at bay. And then the European Union will either pay for that kind of quietly or actively get states to cooperate on that. And then you see kind of a cascade moving down in a migration system, which is currently what we're seeing, the way that the U.S. is trying to control migration to its southern border by cutting deals with Central American states.

LL: OK. So, Robert Falconer, are there lessons Canada should draw from Europe's experience with safe third country agreements?

ROBERT FALCONER: One kind of just to really sort of underline Craig's point is that the these agreements have always had their flaws. You know, we've always had border crossings, of course, here ever since the agreement was signed. But they're at an elevated level now. I think the biggest takeaway is that that I think the best response in Canada is, is a strong domestic policy towards this. I've kind of made this point other places that I think there are things that we could be doing within the Canadian context in terms of processing asylum seekers in a timely manner. That doesn't really mean a more prescriptive regime, meaning that we sort of turn people away. That means that we dedicate more resources to the Immigration and Refugee Board, which add another asylum related agencies that process asylum seekers to do this in a faster way. How underfunded do you think it is right now? I think we could definitely allocate more resources towards it. We've kind of gone in the cycle pattern where we will get an elevated number of claims. This is not this is certainly the highest number of claims we've received in the longtime ever since the 1995 Singh decision. But it's certainly not the first time we've received the higher number of claims in the early 2000s. We saw that in from around 2008, 2012, we saw it as well. And each time we got to go through this pattern where we we higher and stalk the Immigration Refugee Board with a sufficient number of decision makers. And then once it's over, we tend to either not renew contracts or just through attrition, people leave. And in my opinion, I think we should keep that at a higher stock of IRB staff to just be more responsive to whatever we do receive a higher number of claims.

LL: Oh, go ahead.

CRAIG DAMIAN SMITH: What I wanted to say was that the impetus for the U.S. Canada safe third country agreement in the first place was an increase in people claiming asylum coming up through the U.S. because we have a difference in our asylum system. Canada has a more permissive asylum system and there are more rights and safeguards and steps in the process before being removed from Canada. And our removal numbers are low. Canada is the country that asked for the safe third country agreement with the U.S. because of a surge at the border that they called it the border surge back in the 90s and it was Central American migrants who saw their chances of receiving asylum in the United States as much lower than in Canada.

LL: Alright. But Robert, I just want to get you to touch on something else Craig said earlier. The fact the U.S. is signing safe third country agreements with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Those are countries with obviously not great human rights records. How should that factor into any decision about Canada's own agreement with the U.S.?

ROBERT FALCONER: Well, it's a complicated decision. My areas is in public policy. I'm not necessarily a lawyer. But I will say that that when somebody is crossing through, this isn't just an anecdote, but this was in a UNHCR report, that when people are transiting through Central American countries like Honduras, Guatemala, et cetera, many asylum seekers, many, many other people will actually, especially women, will pre-emptively take contraceptives. And that's because there is an extremely high likelihood for gender based violence against them in the form of sexual assault. And so when we do recognizing in Canada gender based violence and actually that's one of the arguments before the federal court right now against the Safe Third Country Agreement. And so I think we should definite consider when the U.S. is signing agreements with these countries where there is such a high rate of violence, especially towards women and we're kind of these safe third country agreements that the U.S. is signing with, with Guatemala, with El Salvador right now is the one that's kind of progressed the most, they're kind of using it not with the idea of burden sharing for asylum seekers that everybody will get a fair chance of safety, they're using it more in the way to avoid taking asylum seekers within the U.S..

LL: OK. Craig Damian Smith we've got just over a minute left. I'm wondering, given the background that you've given us about what's happened in the European Union, what do you think should happen in Canada with this case and with policy for that matter?

CRAIG DAMIAN SMITH: One of the things that Europe hasn't figured out how to do is to create what they call safe quarters or safe channels for people to claim asylum. The only way that people can claim asylum, given particularly the low resettlement numbers, is to hire smugglers and make a dangerous journey. In Canada, interestingly, with Rockson Road, despite the negative press that it's received, it's a very well managed border point and it is a de facto border point for asylum seekers who want to come to Canada. I've in the past 18 months just finished a research project where we interviewed 300 people who walked over that border from 50 countries. We have, whether you know, by accident, basically created a humanitarian corridor from the U.S. And that's something that we should think about, about maintaining the status quo, irregardless of whether or not the U.S. is a safe country. My policy prescription is essentially keep our heads down until we have a rational partner to negotiate with in the U.S..

LL: Alright. We'll have to leave it there. My thanks to both of you.

Happy to be here.

LL: Robert Falconer is a researcher specializing in immigration and refugee issues at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy. And Craig Damian Smith is the associate director of the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in Toronto. The CBC News is next. Then.

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VOICE: My dad's advice really flooded back to me. You have to understand the forces that take the people you love or they will overwhelm you.

LL: Amaryllis Fox was only 8-years-old when her friend was killed when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. She took that advice from her dad to heart and ended up with a storied career in the CIA. She joins me in just over half an hour to talk about taking on some of the organization's most dangerous and complicated missions. I'm Laura Lynch. You are listening to The Current.

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Here's how much it would cost to build your very own Benedict Cumberbatch

Guests: Bill Bryson

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current.

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LL: Still to come, at 22, Amaryllis Fox was one of the youngest ever female officers at the CIA. Assigned to work in the world's most dangerous places, it's the stuff of thrillers, but it's a memoir she's penned and she's my guest in about 30 minutes. But first, Bill Bryson takes on the body.

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VOICE 1: Benedict Cumberbatch, wherever you go, you have very ardent fans.

VOICE 2: That I do. Yes.

VOICE 1: And somebody saw Benedict on location in Boston and immediately rushed home and went on to Reddit. So she writes, he's fine. He's taller than I thought. I suspect he's about 5'11, want to be 6 footer. And ripped. There's not an ounce of fat on that man. It's all muscle. Wholesome goodness. And the last paragraph is though where you just kind of think, whoa! I couldn't smell him. I really tried. Just the lightest Cumbermusk in Boston.

VOICE 2: I musk in your general direction.

LL: That is Benedict Cumberbatch on Graham Norton's talk show in the United Kingdom, reacting to a pretty specific description of himself from a fan. But it turns out it is not the most detailed analysis of the British actor. The Royal Society of Chemistry calculated the cost of the base materials that make up Benedict Cumberbatch, element by element. They were using him as an example of an average sized man. The tally? $151,578.46 U.S. excluding labour. Now, I'll leave that to you to decide if that's a bit steep or a steal of a deal, but it's just one of the fascinating facts about our physical selves that best-selling author Bill Bryson has gathered together for his latest book called The Body: A Guide for Occupants. And Bill Bryson is here with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

BILL BRYSON: Good morning. Hello.

LL: What was actually added together to come up with that dollar figure? Wat are we humans made of?

BILL BRYSON: Well, that was the whole idea. This is an exercise done at 2013 Cambridge Science Festival. And Benedict Cumberbatch was the guest director of the festival that year. But what it was, is they worked out if you took you know, you reduced yourself to all your basic component parts, all of the atomic elements that are in you, you know, like oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and so on. Every human being has 59 atomic elements that comprises. And that what they did was they worked out if they went to a shop or and got all of these elements, how much it would cost. And it came to. I don't remember the U.S. dollar figure because it's in pounds.

LL: Well I'll say it again. $156,578.46.

BILL BRYSON: And the reason that I had that that was of interest to me was because I very clearly remember in junior high school in Iowa many years ago, being told by a biology teacher that all the components of a human being could be bought in a you know, in a hardware store for like $8 or $12 dollars or something. Some very trivial amount. And in fact, I'm pleased to say we're worth rather more than that.

LL: So what are the most expensive bits?

BILL BRYSON: Oh, well, the really expensive one was carbon, interestingly enough, because you would think, you know, you'd have just go off and get a bag of charcoal or something. But actually, they use purified forms of carbon in that. That costs, I think, something again, my brain is stuck on British pounds because that's what I used.

LL: Go ahead I can translate.

BILL BRYSON: 40,000 pounds I think.

LL: About $70,000 Canadian. Yeah, about that. Yeah.

BILL BRYSON: And then there are lots and lots of components in the human body are very expensive, but we have them in just traces. The interesting thing is that just six elements make up something like ninety nine point one percent of us. And what's even more interesting than that, I think, is that everything this into the stuff that, you know, that comprises a human is exactly the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. But in a pile of dirt, obviously, it just lies. It doesn't do anything. It's inert. And yet somehow, for reasons we really don't understand, you put them into human form and, you know, they start to reproduce and they become animate and and we get life. And and really, you know, probably the greatest mystery in in biology remains and very possibly always will remain is that how does life happen?

LL: Well, I don't have an answer to that question, but I do say that you brought us from a stratospheric price right down to earth, excuse the pun. Just before we go further, I just want to ask you, did the Royal Society actually figure out how to make a spare Benedict Cumberbatch?

BILL BRYSON: No, no, no. They were purely due to a certain hypothetical exercise to see how much it would cost to make a human being. And other people have done the same. Nova, the PBS television program in the States, did exactly identical exercise a few years ago and they came up with a figure of just one hundred sixty eight dollars us. So it obviously depends a lot of where you shop and what quality or quality of components you use that throws society chemistry. I mean, they did try to get the most valuable, the most refined products they could find, which I think is a good idea because you want to make the best human you possibly can, especially if it's going to be Benedict Cumberbatch.

LL: Right I guess we just have stick with watching the movies. So you know some people might be disappointed. So we have a good, pretty good idea now what we're made of on an elemental level. And you sort of addressed this, but how thoroughly did scientists and doctors know the human body and how it all works?

BILL BRYSON: Well, very little. I mean, really, that was something that surprised me, was how much of the human body is still a mystery to us. And partly that's understandable because it's just so complex. I mean, if you just think back just a few years, you remember when they did the Human Genome Project, it was assumed before they did that that we were going to find that there was a relationship of, you know. One gene equals one trait, and that, you know, one gene would determine your hair colour and another gene would determine your colour of your eyes and so on. Another gene, whether you were a good runner or whatever. And of course, what they found out was we have far fewer genes than they expected to find. And the way everything. Everything in your body works is by an immense combination of genes and trying to unravel all that and disentangle all of which which combinations of genes result in which attributes of a human. It's just amazingly complex. So in a sense, it's not very surprising that we still know so little about how humans are structured. I mean, we are immensely complicated devices at the same time, and there's lots and lots of other things which we don't know. I mean, quite elemental things like, you know, why do we yawn? Why? Why do we have chins? Your chin has no physiological purpose with only primates with chins. It doesn't make your jaw stronger. It doesn't help you chew or speak or do anything at all. And yet, you know, humans find chimps an attractive attribute. We evolve them for some reason, but nobody knows why. And it's just that the whole body is just a world of mystery.

LL: It really is. For those who don't study genetics, what is an example of a part of the body that many of us have misunderstandings and misconceptions about or what was the thing that most surprised you?

BILL BRYSON: Well, I think the level of complexity. I had no idea. Possibly the single most astounding fact I came across and I just you know, people say that the book is full of all these facts and is just because everything I read just amazed me and I thought, I have to put this in. But one of them was how much DNA we have in our body. You know, you have two metres of DNA in every cell in your body and so many cells in your body, 37 trillion of them, that if you took all the DNA in your body and made it into a single fine strand, it would stretch for 10 billion miles, which would take you beyond Pluto. So there's enough of you to leave the solar system. And I just think what I thought you know, so that's just one very small component of what is required in order to make you a, you know, a living, breathing, sentient organism. Everything in you is just packed full of stuff, which is, again, one reason why we're only at the very beginning of understanding it all.

LL: I was equally astounded by that thought. If we take a down though to its most basic level, what's the function of our body?

BILL BRYSON: What the function of our body is really just to provide us with a container, really the part of you that is you as your brain and all the rest is plumbing and scaffolding. I mean, you know, your dog is quite similar to you in terms of its lungs and heart and the way it works, but obviously distinguishes you from a pet is that you have this magnificent brain. And as far as we know that the human brain is the most incredible creation in the entire universe. There's nothing anywhere to touch it. I mean, obviously, there's a very good possibility that there are other intelligent beings out there, but as far as we know, there's nothing in the world that is, you know, can outdo the brain even with the greatest computers.

LL: You talked about the brain too and how much of our brains we use.

BILL BRYSON: Yeah, well, there's this myth and nobody knows where it comes from. Nobody's ever been able to track down the origin of it, but there's this common belief that I think we've all heard from a schoolteacher or somebody like that at some point, which is that we only use 10 percent of our brains, which is not true at all. We use 100 percent of it. You use all of your brain is engaged in doing something, not necessarily thinking, but just, you know, running your body and looking after all of the different processes that are necessary to keep a human upright and moving. But all of your brain is at work in one way or another.

LL: That makes me feel better.

BILL BRYSON: We don't always use it very wisely, but that's another matter.

LL: How good are we as humans using our bodies to their best ability for then and keeping them in good working order?

BILL BRYSON: Essentially we're terrible. You know, I sit here as living proof of that and it is so hard. I mean, one of the one of the extraordinary things about the body, human body is how little it needs in terms of inputs in energy in order to function. Well, your brain needs just 400 calories of energy a day, which is about the same as you get in a blueberry muffin. Try running your laptop for 24 hours on a blueberry muffin and see how far you go. And yet your brain, this magnificent creation. That's all it requires in Europe. All the other organs in your body have similarly modest requirements in terms of their energy needs. So we all eat way more than we need to because you don't actually need to put that many calories in your body to work at in an optimum way. But we evolved to really like food. We reformed in a time of want. We we evolve to appreciate plenty. And so we eat in case there's going to be a shortage somewhere down the line. But of course, nowadays we don't ever have to worry about running short of food, but we still love to eat because it's kind of an instinct for us to do so. So it's a terrible we're caught in this terrible bind, eating this a big part of almost everybody's life. And we eat too much and we don't exercise nearly enough.

LL: Not to mention other things like smoking or other things that we do that don't help us, our body's function.

BILL BRYSON: And we all know that we shouldn't do these things, but part of the problem too, is that, you know, the consequences tend to be way down the line. I mean, you ate something and it made you feel ill immediately, you would stop eating nothing. But in fact, you know, you can eat a lot of cheeseburgers and you don't have any consequence for eating those cheeseburgers until years in the future. We don't pay the price for most of us until it's too late.

LL: Let's look at it from another angle then. How good are our bodies at protecting us?

BILL BRYSON: Wonderful. I mean for all the reasons.

LL: For all the things we do to them, they still protect us.

BILL BRYSON: Yeah. I mean, I really you know, I'm 67 years old and I have to say, I spent most of those years just throwing beer and pizza down my throat. And you know living, just not living very well at all. And yet, you know, I'm still pretty healthy human being and, you know, suicide by lifestyle takes ages. You know, if you tried to kill yourself by living badly, by drinking too much or smoking or anything, it's going to take you years and years, if not decades to do it because your body protects you. It looks after you. Another extraordinary fact I came across was just blew me away was that according to a professor at Stanford, he's estimated that we all get cancer, something like in the order of five or six times a day. But several dozen times a week and couple of thousand times a year, your body gets cancer and that's because your cells, 37 trillion cells and they're constantly renewing themselves. They're reproducing. So, you know, every once in a while, something is going to go wrong and, you know, cancer is just a cell that's out of control. But your body, your immune system identifies these things before they can grow into tumours and kills them off and flushes them away before they cause you any damage. But this is just exactly the sort of thing your body's constantly doing to look after you. And right now, as we sit here and your listeners, as they said, that we're all breathing in pathogens and, you know, there's things in the air. And sometimes, of course, they make you sick and you get a cold or flu or something. But most of the time, your body protects you from all the stuff that you're taking in. And I just think it's marvellous that, you know, it looks after us so well without us really doing too much normally to look after it.

LL: You know, I gained so much respect for my body from reading the book. I want to look at some specific examples of what you learned about our bodies and that starts with something basic. As kids we learn we have five senses. How many do we really have?

BILL BRYSON: You can count it and systematize it all different ways, but at least 30 because we have, you know, the five elements of senses that we all know about with the seeing and hearing and that. But then also, you know, you have, for instance, the sense of where you are in space. You know, even when your eyes are closed, you know, whether you're sitting up or lying flat. And that's a properception. And then lots and lots of other senses.

LL: Let's look at something, one specifically, the map of our tongue shows where we taste sweet, sour, salty, bitter. How accurate is that?

BILL BRYSON: Oh, well, you know, again, certainly my school days in the 50s and 60s, we you know, I can remember having these areas of your tongue mapped out. In fact, it's not it is much messier than that. IYour taste buds are all over the place. And the interesting thing about taste is that what you can taste on your tongue is only the very basic elements, as you say, bitter, salty and so on. Real flavour is entirely a process of smell and you don't realize that until you have a cold or something and your sense of smell isn't working very well and then suddenly food doesn't have much flavour to it. But almost everything you eat, your sense of its deliciousness is not because of what you're getting on your tongue or in your mouth, it's what drifts up into your nostrils. And one consequence of that is that people who lose their sense of smell are usually just totally miserable. You know, everybody thinks that the sense of smell is a fairly minor sense that you could you know, if you had to dispense with one of your senses, you could give it up. But in fact, it I mean, I've never lost my sense of smell, but what I've learned in doing the research for the book is that people who do lose their sense of smell is a really, really miserable existence because food stops having any flavour and life just kind of loses its richness.

LL: Yes. My my uncle, 93 now, has lost his sense of smell and I can tell you that's been very difficult for him. So there's some on the ground research here.

BILL BRYSON: And there's I mean there's all kinds of other things that can happen to you. There's a condition known as cacausmia, which is where everything smells like feces. I mean, everything. So everything you put, you know, everything you eat, yeah, I mean, that can be pretty miserable, too. So if you're smelling well, just count your blessings, you know?

LL: Okay. I'm happy with that for myself. So let's talk about these things. And I for listeners, I'm holding up my two thumbs here. Much is made of the fact humans can do things that many animals can't because we have opposable thumbs. How much truth is there?

BILL BRYSON: Well, it is and it isn't. I mean, I always have to stress with this that, you know, I'm not a medical person. I'm not an anatomist. So I'm only telling you what I've learned by talking to people who are qualified. But what I do know from talking to authorities is that it's often written that humans have opposable thumbs. We've all read that somewhere before. But in fact, most primates have a possible thought, which is what it means is that your thumbs can touch all your fingers and therefore you can get a good grip. You can move your thumb. Quite a bit in a way other creatures can't. But what what is actually different about the humans, as I understand, is a three tiny muscles in there with exotic names. One of them is called the first vole or interoffice of Hendley. I remember that name. And then two others with equally exotic names. And I don't know exactly what they do, but they really do help us to manipulate our thumbs in a daft way. Which is why we can do really delicate tasks. I mean, even even the best chimpanzee could not be a jeweller or something, you know? Good thing that they don't aspire to be jewellers. Then that would be difficult. I wanted something very basic that I'd never credit. But a doctor pointed out to me is that our thumbs are actually on sideways, that your fingers lie flat. Your thumb put your hand so flat. Which is why if you're typing, you know, you strike the keys with the side of your thumb and you do it with the tips of your fingers, but you you can't type with the tip of your thumb because it's on sideways. It's pointing the wrong way.

LL: Right. I'm just thinking about that now. So are there other features that actually make us different from other animals as humans?

BILL BRYSON: Yeah. I mean, all kinds of things. I mean, we walk upright, which obviously is very distinguishing characteristic. And because we walk up out, we've had to make all kinds of bodily modifications with which sometimes have been beneficial, but very often, if not the main consequence of our operating anatomy, women feel and experience every time they give birth. They need to have hips that support your weight in such a way mean that you have women will have a very narrow birth passage and a very complicated manoeuvre that the baby has to go through to kind of get out. Some other primates can give birth in like just moments, in seconds. I mean, the baby just drops out. Essentially just falls out.

LL: Okay. Having done all of this research about our bodies, how do you see yourself differently from when you began this process?

BILL BRYSON: Oh, well, first of all, I really appreciate what my body does for me. I mean, that, you know, life is is a miracle. I mean, it really is. As a student, as I said at the very beginning of our conversation, the atoms that make you everyone else in the universe, they just lie there. They don't do anything. They make rocks and they make stars. And, you know, but they don't make animate bees and we get it. Our Adam somehow gave us life and allow us to move around. It's where we're very, very lucky. And we're the only creatures that have ever existed that really have insight and ability to appreciate and just be able to sit down and have a conversation like we're having now. So to be a human is a fantastic gift and life is short. I mean, even a good full human life only goes on for about 650,000 hours. So and you think of all the hours you wasted on watching television or just, you know, fooling around, texting and things like that. 650,000 doesn't seem terribly abundant. And yet we go through, most of us go through our lives without really doing good things for our bodies or without even just appreciating how lucky we are to have a body that looks after us. So the one thing the book has given me, the experience has given me, is just an appreciation for what a gift it is to be a human and how really we all ought to look after ourselves a bit better. Having said that, I don't, I mean, I keep intending to, but it is the hardest thing in the world.

LL: That toois being human.

BILL BRYSON: Yes. But it's really hard. Partly because I want this book to announce I'm travelling everywhere. I have to just eat when I can and, you know, I'm not able to exercise the way I want to, but I swear, as soon as I get home, I'm going to lead a virtuous life and go on a diet and exercise. It's, you know, religiously and just be a good person.

LL: We're going to check back with you on that. So you're bringing us around to talking about death and the end, which is where your book comes to the end, the natural end is death. And I'm wondering how much improvement we're seeing in health and longevity nowadays compared to developments a century ago.

BILL BRYSON: Well, you've just touched on the two slightly contradictory things, health and longevity. There's certainly longevity, you know, all over the world, especially in the advanced world in which we get to live, longevity just keeps getting better and better. I mean, lifespans get better and better. But because medical science can keep you alive longer, it doesn't necessarily mean that can keep you alive healthily longer. You know, we're not killed off by the things that used to kill us off earlier. So we can live longer lives. But it means that we're prey to other things like notably dementia and Alzheimer's. A generation or two ago, people tended to die before they before a lot of them got dementia. Now, so many people are living so long. Dementia is almost an inevitability for very high proportion of people. So that is a problem we've got is how do we keep extending life but also then extending the quality of life. And this is something that we haven't resolved. And there's no there's no real prospect yet. I mean, one of the alarming things is that Alzheimer's has been a known condition for over a century. And yet, you know, of anyone who goes to a doctor today with the symptoms of Alzheimer's, the doctors today can do no more for them than a doctor could have done in nineteen hundred. And when we have made absolutely zero progress against this terrible disease of agents. We need to have a cure for that and lots and lots of other things, otherwise a lot of people are going to be condemned to a fairly wretched final years.

LL: Another aspect of this is, as we were talking about before, about cancer. If we cured all cancers tomorrow, how much would that extend the average life?

BILL BRYSON: Oh, very little. There is a law of diminishing returns with us because we're living so long now and because cancer tends, I mean what happens is if you don't get cancer, something else will get you. I mean the one inevitability is that you will die. And so however much you stop certain things from killing you, something else will get you. But I like to think that in a slightly upbeat way. The World Health Organization lists 8000 ways a human being could die at it. I don't know they came up with all these categories, but they calculated there are 8000 ways a human being could die. And my upbeat way of looking at it is that, you know, you survive every one of them except one. There's just, you know, and of these that can kill you, you know, overwhelmingly they don't. And you get away with eventually one thing will get you, but that's not bad odds, really.

LL: Well, in the last two lines of your book, a simple, beautiful description of what happens after death. Could you read those for me?

BILL BRYSON: Sure. Of course. It's just you know, I'm talking about what happens to the body as you, when you die and how it shuts down and how it begins to decompose and everything. And I just say and that's you gone, but it was good while it lasted, wasn't it?

LL: And is that your view?

BILL BRYSON: Yeah. No, I think life is a real gift and we should appreciate it while we've got it.

LL: Wise words. It's been a delight talking to you. Thank you.

BILL BRYSON: Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure.

LL: Bill Bryson is the author of The Body: A Guide for Occupants. He was in our Toronto studio.

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LL: Now, coming up later this week on The Current, it's something that the locals have been seeing for years. The Arctic is facing some of the most dramatic effects from climate change and now Canadian researchers are spending winters in the north studying what climate change looks like. Sunniva Sorby is one of them. She's spending the winter on Svalbard, an island off of Norway's northern coast.

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VOICE 1: Right now, outside, it's blowing like crazy. We've got really heavy swells and lots of snow blowing. We're in a 20 square meters trappers cabin that was not designed for anybody to live in longer than maybe a month. We have no running water, no electricity. We're powered by a windmill outside that works quite well in this wind. Solar panels that are not working well right now because we've officially lost the sun. And there's two of us. We're collecting ice for water. And it's a pretty spartan basic existence where we've literally peeled back the layers of what most people might be used to in terms of what comfort means.

LL: I'll speak with Sunniva Sorby and other Arctic researchers later this week on The Current. But coming up in our next half hour, we delve into some of the deepest, darkest corners of the web and the crimes going on there. I'm joined by the host of a new CBC podcast. It delves into the story of a Canadian who was convicted for his role in running a child exploitation ring. I'm Laura Lynch. You are listening to The Current.

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Online child abuse 'goes undetected because no one wants to talk about it': Daemon Fairless

Guests: Daemon Fairless

LL: I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: During the summer we were driving to North Bay and I made a joke. It was something, it was something like that. It was like, ha ha ha, what are you doing? Creating child porn? Hopefully more clever than that. And he says, Gordon, that's really that's just messed up. Yeah, I feel really uncomfortable as someone who's worked with kids. I care about kids quite deeply and I really, really prefer it if you just tried not to call me a pedophile. And in my mind at that time, I said, well, I guess fair. Someone doesn't want to be called a pedophile? I think that's a reasonable request from anyone.

LL: It might have seemed like a reasonable request not to be called a pedophile, but it turns out Benjamin Faulkner was involved in distributing child pornography. He's serving 35 years in jail in the United States for his role in what the Justice Department called a highly sophisticated global child exploitation network. The road trip story was told by Benjamin Faulkner's roommate at the time, Gordon, and it's from a new podcast called Hunting Warhead. It's a co-production between the CBC and the Norwegian newspaper V-G. The six part series investigates Faulkner's crimes, his arrest and its fallout. It's hosted by CBC journalist and author Daemon Fairless, and he joins me now in our Toronto studio. Hi.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Hi there.

LL: So who or what is warhead?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So warhead is the user name that Benjamin Faulkner was using to run this massive child exploitation site called Child's Play.

LL: Okay and what was the scale of that site?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: It was, I mean, it's hard to get an exact number, but there were like over a million registered users on that site. So roughly a million. The size of a city.

LL: And it existed on the dark web.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: That's right. It existed on the dark. So it's a tourist site. So it was an encrypted site that you had to know where to look to find it. And everyone on it was anonymous. It was run by anonymous folks in the dark.

LL: And there were a million of them.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: That's right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

LL: So I want to play another clip of Benjamin Faulkner's roommate, Gordon here.

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VOICE 1: He never really stuck out. He was and I guess probably is still sort of thin, not super tall, kind of looks like a nerd, like a guy who plays a lot of video games. I knew that he had hacking skills of some description.

VOICE 2: It sounds like he was fairly evasive. Would he ever tell you specifically, like, I'm going to hack her or?

VOICE 2: No, no. I remember us walking down the street and he was kind of describing what he was doing. And I got to the part, it's like and then what's that final product that you're you're making or whatever and he said, ahaha. Not telling you that. Try to get me. Gordon, I'm not telling you.

LL: Alright. So why don't you tell me what you know about Benjamin Faulkner's background?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Well, Benjamin Faulkner is originally from North Bay, Ontario. He is an average guy by all appearances. And he he studied Internet security and he found himself over time early on in his life recognizing that he had pedophilic desires and he didn't know where to turn to to deal with this. In fact, he'd tried to seek some psychological help and to no avail. And he eventually ended up on the web and then further down into the deep and dark Web on sites that kind of helped support the notion that it was OK to abuse kids, which is his crazy course. But he became part of the subculture and eventually led was a leader in this subculture of child exploitation, a leader in the sense that he created sites. Yeah. So, I mean, he initially started off just kind of looking for help and becoming part of this community and finding like minded people. And then he became a technical support guy for some sites. And he eventually he eventually went on to build. What was that for? For a little while. The biggest site apparently on the dark Web. And and more than that, he was he was kind of he was consolidating power by taking over other sites, by running other sites. He had multiple user names. So he wasn't just worried. He was he was doing a lot of terrible things on a lot of different sites. And so in addition to the pedophile pedophilia and the child exploitation issue, there's a whole other kind of, you know, underworld aspect of his behaviours online.

LL: So he was running. He wasn't just having a sickness. He was running a business and profiting from it.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Yeah. And I think that's really important to understand a couple years. So profiting, I mean, there was a little bit of money exchanged, but it wasn't for money. It was for the images. That's the currency. But that's one of the things that I think is really important to point out, is that Warhead is a bit of an outlier. He isn't, it isn't that every pedophile is going to run a major worldwide network like this. He was trying to deal with this issue he had, but he took it to this kind of far extreme. We've talked to pedophiles who are not doing that sort of stuff, so in addition to that, he was also engaging in like serious heavy criminal behaviour. So there's another component of his behaviour there.

LL: OK. So you actually did speak with him from prison. And what did you learn about him from that conversation? Were you actually with him in the prison?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: No. No, we had, he could make local calls. So I got a number, a local number, and it would just direct to my cell phone. So we spent a lot, I've got dozens of hours of conversations with him. And, you know, I mean, I learned so much, it's hard to kind of encapsulate. I think that the biggest thing that I learned is that this is a person who probably could have gotten another way with the right intervention. Right. He comes from a really good family. He is an educated, very smart guy and I think that if he had the right kind of help or been able to talk to someone, maybe he would've gone the other way. But what I've taken away from this conversation is that here's someone who's built this world into psychologically built this world that justifies what he was doing. Like he doesn't see what he's done as wrong. He's got these very complex psychological distortions that make it okay for him to have done a lot of this stuff. Like he tells himself, I've got this illness. So I don't really have a choice. That that's kind of fallacious thinking. Right. But he's got he's built this complex world that's really hard to break down. Like talking to him was difficult because he didn't get what he was doing was so terrible. No remorse. Yeah. And he didn't also have he didn't have a lot of remorse. I think probably you could chip away at him and get that. But he's got this defensive mechanism where he can't see what he's done is wrong, I think.

LL: What was it like for you Daemon talking to him for hours and hours?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: It was first and foremost exhausting. And it was I'd find I'd get off the phone and then I just kind of zone out for a bit because I think I was processing. I'd often be really angry and it was hard. You know, I've got a kid at home and it's hard to hear about this. And I felt sad for his family. I felt this didn't have to happen. Right?

LL: How did he eventually get caught?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Well, he was on he had, the details are he had a coding problem and he went to the web and posted does anyone know how to solve this problem? Police had been monitoring the site and they knew to look on the web and look, if someone had a similar kind of technical issue. When they identified him through that email poster that forum post, they were able to identify where he was. And so they were keeping a track of him as well as some of his co-conspirators and they just watched him for a long time until he went into the States and met up with one of his co-administrators. And they they arrested him down there.

LL: So he is in jail now. What about the children who were abused on Warhead's site? Do you know anything about where they are? What's happened to him?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Well, I mean, I know some of the details about some of the that one of the children, at least, that he had physically abused. I think she's in in good care now. The issue the issue is that these kids, these kids, their pictures live forever on the Internet. Right. So so whether they're actually ever been harmed by warhead, they've been harmed at some point the past. But then also they know that guys are looking at their pictures every day. And there are sites out there with these pictures on them still. And what's crazy is that 30 percent of them there's a study from the Canadian Centre of Child Protection, 30 percent of them have been recognized on the street. That's crazy.

LL: So they were victimized over and over again.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Yes, 60 percent of them have attempted suicide. So the long term con, like this is really serious abuse and long term consequences are incredibly serious. It's not like, you know, they'll forget about it as they get older, this has like profound psychological impact.

LL: So I know that, you know, I've playing the podcast, but is there any sense of how this could ever be dismantled entirely?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Well, I mean, I think the police are always looking for ways of doing this. I mean, one of the ways that the Australian police who were who were running this major investigative operation is to is to get on. Take over the site and then find the people on it and arrest them and that's important, I think.

LL: OK. Thank you, Daemon. I'll be listening. Thanks for the podcast and thanks for coming in.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

LL: Daemon Fairless hosts the new CBC podcast Hunting Warhead, out today.

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Former CIA agent talks smuggling video out of Myanmar and working undercover in new memoir

Guests: Amaryllis Fox

LL: I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. December the 21st, 1988, the world gets news of a terrible plane crash.

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VOICE 1: A Pan American Airlines jumbo jet has crashed in Scotland. The Boeing 747 was on a flight from London to New York. The plane came down in the town of Lockerbie in southern Scotland. Witnesses say there was a huge explosion.

VOICE 2: A rumbling over the hotel. We thought the roof was falling in. And then we saw sparks and then this enormous flame going about 200 or 300 feet into the air. So there was debris flying everywhere.

LL: Amaryllis Fox was one of the many people devastated by that news. She was only eight-years-old and her schoolmate Laura was on that plane. The death of her friend spurred her on to learn more about terrorism and eventually led to a job with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, taking on some of the organization's most challenging missions. Amaryllis Fox has just written her memoir, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA. And she's with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

AMARYLLIS FOX: Thank you for inviting me.

LL: What do you remember about that night that you heard your friend Laura had died?

AMARYLLIS FOX: Laura was the first person I knew who died and someone that I loved very much. I remember being very, very overwhelmed by the loss and my dad intervened and said, you have to understand the forces that took her or they will drown you. And he introduced me to the newspaper. And it was a really pivotal moment for me. I mean, I suddenly the whole world opened up and I read it with such care. I mean, I think that I was always aware in my childhood mind that these names seemed really distant, but that they had the power to kind of jump off the newspaper pages and steal my friends from the sky, you know. And so I would read them almost like a monitor or guard on behalf of the people I loved trying to be aware of of what dangers might lurk in their pages.

LL: Right. So how did it shape your perspective on terrorism?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: In those early days, I didn't really understand the causes of terrorism, but began to see that there was this global chessboard with all these different perspectives that were different from my own. And then after 9/11 was really when I began to try to understand what was driving terrorism in particular, I was in D.C. for 9/11. My little sisters were at the cathedral school. And I remember going and picking up these two little girls in their school uniforms and remembering Laura's death. And my dad's advice really flooded back to me. You have to understand the forces that take the people you love or or they will overwhelm you. And I set out then to look at the historical data around terrorism and see whether there were correlations there that might not seem evident on the face of it that could begin to explain this thing that seemed otherworldly and inexplicable.

LL: I want to back you up for for just a minute. In high school, you became intrigued by Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar. Instead of shopping for a prom dress, you took the money to buy a ticket to Thailand and make your way to meet her. Tell me about that secret meeting.

AMARYLLIS FOX: Yeah, my poor mother didn't find out about any of this until it was over, which was probably good for her. But I took this time off before college with the money she gave me to buy a prom dress and went over initially to work in the refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border. I was aspiring to be a journalist at that time. While I was there the democracy movement secretly arranged a meeting for me with Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest at the time, and told me that I'd probably be detained as a result, and how to hide the film to get through that detention and get it out to Thailand. The meeting was very inspirational. Suu Kyi has come under a lot of fire since then about her failure to stand up for many of the ethnic minorities in Burma, but at the time, to my young mind, she was this tiny, petite single woman who, by telling the truth, could bring this entire military dictatorship to its knees. And taking her words out on on this film — and then being detained by that very military government, eventually being deported and getting those words out to Thailand, where they were broadcast by the BBC back into Burma — it was electrifying for me. It was this idea that truth can be more powerful than military force and that really began to shape my aspirations in the world.

LL: You did take a real risk here. You were working with someone else, another Westerner. And and as you say, you were getting ready to get the message out and Aung San Suu Kyi told you how to do it. Tell me what she told you to do.

AMARYLLIS FOX: She did. You know, in our young and naive way, we had brought these Bic pens that we were going to wrap the film around the inside of, as a kind of crude concealment device. And we started taking the tape apart after the interview there with her. And she stopped me and she said, those are fine for the film that you want them to find, you know, the decoy film so that they think they've found it all. But for the real film you want to get out, you have a better hiding place. And here was this Nobel laureate sitting across the table from me and she took the film and wrapped it up smaller than a tampon and gave it to me and told me the the bathroom was down the hall.

LL: I don't want tell old war stories, but I did at one point put film in a Tampax box to get it out of the country. So I understand the technique. Now let's get back to you end up studying terrorism at Georgetown University and you just talked about your thesis. Tell us a little bit more about it and why it became so important to the CIA.

AMARYLLIS FOX: I had done my undergrad at Oxford and I'd been approached by British intelligence while I was there and just not found it interesting at all. But 9/11 happened right before my last year at Oxford, and that was when I began trying to understand these forces in a more academic and rigorous way. And that did become my thesis at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. And it turns out, unbeknownst to me, that Georgetown has a CIA officer in residence. And that guy asked me to tell him a little bit about this algorithm. It is the algorithm that is, you know, that word often seems intimidating, but really, in the end, it's about going and finding these indicators that you might not immediately expect and weighing them based on how much impact they've had historically in predicting terror activity, things like the percentage beneath livable wage that a border guard gets paid and therefore the open borders or the ability to to bribe officials or the ratio of hookah bars to madrassas and how fast that ratio changes as an indication of kind of social change and upheaval. And this officer said to me, do you think you got all the inputs? And I said, I think I got all the ones that I could find in the Georgetown University Library. You know, on the microfiche machines and early AOL, what I'm really interested in is actually going overseas and sitting across from someone who is committed to this abhorrent ideology and having them look me in the eye and tell me why they're going to get up tomorrow morning and commit one of these attacks. And he said, so are we. And that's what we're interested in as well.

LL: So you join the CIA and you really quickly rise through the ranks. You get assigned to the counterterrorism centre. You move on, you become something called a non-official cover. What does that mean?

AMARYLLIS FOX: You know the idea is, of course, to be able to do this work and to be able to do it safely in places where it may not make sense for a young white girl to be walking around. So you need to create an ability to be on the ground in foreign places.

LL: A cover story, in other words.

AMARYLLIS FOX: That's right.

LL: And not attached to the embassy at all. You're there on your own. So what is it like living under those kinds of circumstances where you can't be who you really are?

AMARYLLIS FOX: It's lonely. It's a really lonely way to spend your 20s and I think that that loneliness is part of the commitment and part of the sacrifice, but it also forces you to get quiet in your own private time and understand who you are at your core and revisit that regularly so that you don't lose sight of it. And I found that that was also very important in building relationships with sources, because we humans are very emotionally intelligent and we clock somebody right away if they are trying to create some false sense of connection.

LL: So as I understand it, your undercover profile was that you were an art dealer in dealing in indigenous arts and you moved to different places, including China, to maintain that cover.

AMARYLLIS FOX: The work that I did operationally was actually all in the Middle East, but being overseas in Asia allowed me to have a little bit more space, a little bit more distance from the American government. The American identification that might make it more difficult to build relationships with the people that we needed to in order to prevent these attacks.

LL: You're pretty unstinting in describing the apparent cost to your personal life of keeping undercover with your husband, having a child, the strains on your marriage, perhaps also contributed to by his experiences in Afghanistan, but also with your child when she's not reaching her milestones, in your view and then something happens that really touches you. Tell me about that moment.

AMARYLLIS FOX: Well, I think kids really see the truth. My daughter certainly proved that true for me. She didn't really connect with me when I was thinking through all of the multi-layered game of pretend that we were engaged in. It wasn't really until she saw my kind of raw, authentic self that she first locked eyes with me. We were sitting next to a koi pond. I was talking with her and try to draw her out and then there was a moment where my eye drifted to the fish in this koi pond. And I just mused out loud, "we must look really weird to that fish, huh Zoe? It must be weird to see the fish eye view of things." And I laughed a little to myself, and that was the moment where she locked eyes with me and I really saw her and connected with her for the first time as a tiny baby. And that became a touchstone for me. She sort of became a little bit of a Yoda in leading me to this lesson that sometimes in geopolitics and the war on terror, but also in our personal lives, when we're afraid or feel nervous, we often think that the right response is to pile on these layers of armour. And counterintuitive though it may be, she taught me that often taking off that armour and being raw and human and vulnerable can be even more powerful.

LL: And then you come to what what I see as the climax of the book. And again, I'm not sure how much you can talk about this, but it is the story of negotiating with an al-Qaeda extremist in Karachi who is planning a bombing in Pakistan. Tell me what that was like.

AMARYLLIS FOX: Well, that interaction was one of many, but probably the most striking of these situations that knocked this lesson into me, which is that even when you're sitting across from someone who in that case is a sworn adversary of the United States, of me personally, whose work on a daily basis, involves putting us at risk, there is a way to step back and re-engage with that person wearing a different hat. A hat that maybe you share. The versions we were playing were to military adversaries and we were digging our heels in and dig our heels in.

LL: And just to set the scene for the listeners, you go in there by yourself.

AMARYLLIS FOX: These are very personal communications in general. And the agency is that's, as I say, what makes it a very different option from the military.

LL: Weren't you frightened?

AMARYLLIS FOX: Yeah, I think it would be crazy not to be frightened in any of these situations, but feeling that is important, right? Feeling the stakes for yourself and for everyone else. There's not a lot of room for goodwill and being able to take a step back and engage not as adversarial fighters, but as two parents, which it turned out was something we shared, allowed us a little bit of space and common experience and respect.

LL: He was holding onto his daughter.

AMARYLLIS FOX: That's right. And I had a young baby girl at the time as well. I'd just had my daughter, both of the environment. So we're raising our kids and we're really heavily polluted. And both of our kids were struggling from asthma. That moment of saying, isn't it unbearable to see our kids struggle in this way was a uniting experience rather than digging our heels in on this thing that we both disagreed on.

LL: You're trying to get him to stop a bombing from happening. You connect, as you say, on the level of your children suffering from asthma and you pull out a bottle of clove oil for him. What made you do that?

AMARYLLIS FOX: Well, clove oil had proven to be really helpful for Zoe. And here we were in an environment where we had both just enumerated the great losses and harms and crimes that we viewed the other side as having committed against us and our allies and being able to exchange those parenting tips, as weird as it might sound with somebody who is a sworn adversary, creates that glimmer of recognition that the person across the table is not a monster.

LL: And in this case, the bombing did not occur. You did come with a successful outcome. Your work took place against the backdrop of the global war on terrorism. And we know in the years since some of the things that the United States did in the name of fighting that war, such as extraordinary rendition, such as torture. How comfortable are you with that aspect of the global war on terrorism that you were a part of?

AMARYLLIS FOX: Not at all comfortable and in many ways, one of the strange things about siloing, about the compartmentalization that happens for security reasons, is that many of us learned about those things through the press in the same way as everybody else. I had the fortune, I guess, in my career, to never be exposed to any of that directly. But one thing that I find really heartening is the degree to which the country, the policymakers and the intelligence and military community have really reviewed those mistakes and, I think, have come to the conclusion that they were not tactics that were A, useful and B, more importantly acceptable for a country that has been and aspires to be a moral leader in the world.

LL: You now have another child. You have two daughters now.

AMARYLLIS FOX: I do.

LL: What would you say if one day one of them wanted to walk in your footsteps into the CIA?

AMARYLLIS FOX: When young women in particular consider whether or not this form of service is for them? I worry that what they see on the screen is either no female figure in national security at all or this kind of preposterous archetype that we see away like thigh high boots kicking doors down. You know that on some weird surface level it's supposed to be empowering to women, but actually is just so degrading, this idea that if you are a serious, substantive, intelligent person, this is not a role for you. And it is, in fact, the people who will grapple with these questions with the most care that need to be doing this kind of work.

LL: Amaryllis Fox, thank you.

AMARYLLIS FOX: Thank you. It was my pleasure.

LL: Amaryllis Fox is the author of Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA. She was in our Toronto studio. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. This morning artistic director and former ballerina Karen Kain is celebrating 50 years with the National Ballet Company. She joins Tom Power to talk about the evolution of the company and her retirement in 2021. Now CBC Listen is the new free app that lets you discover the very best in Canadian audio from CBC Radio, CBC podcasts and CBC Music. And you can listen to The Current live from anywhere on your phone or tablet. Catch up with the show highlights on demand anytime. I'm Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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Nov. 5, 2019 episode transcript

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