In tribute to our friend and past HBH guest, we're re-airing the first of former CIA officer Doug Laux's two appearances during our first season: CIA Officer Doug Laux explains how he developed a network of spies to track down the man responsible for running the Taliban's lethal IED network, which at the height of the Afghan War was responsible for over 80% of US and Coalition deaths. RIP Doug, you'll be sorely missed. Heroes Behind Headlines Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo Produced & Engi...
Oct 01, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 4Ep. 42
Henry (Dick) L. Thompson is back to share more adventures from his latest book SOG Code Name Dynamite 2 about his time in Vietnam as part of MACV-SOG. From 1964-1972 America engaged in a Top Secret war in Southeast Asia to support our efforts in Vietnam, with an elite group of warriors who were sworn to secrecy for decades. If caught, the US government would deny any involvement. Missioned primarily to do recon on North Vietnamese forces massing across the border in Laos and Cambodia, the small ...
Sep 29, 2025•57 min•Season 4Ep. 41
Courageous resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka, aka ‘Agent Zo’, was the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi-German occupied Poland during the Second World War. While being hunted by the Gestapo there, who arrested her entire family, she established a military intelligence network, couriered microfilm across wartime borders and, as the only female member of the Polish elite special forces, the ‘Silent Unseen,' played a key role in the largest organized act of defiance against Nazi German...
Sep 22, 2025•47 min•Season 4Ep. 40
On April 2nd, 2015, after getting a degree and paying off his loans, Tom Turcich stepped out his front door to start a quest that would last for seven years, take him to six continents, and cover twenty-eight thousand miles. At the end of it he became the tenth person to walk around the world, and his dog, Savannah, became the first dog to do so. Through encounters with strangers, weeks of solitude, and a sheer resilience of spirit, Tom emerged as a beacon of inspiration for countless individual...
Sep 15, 2025•59 min•Season 4Ep. 39
In 2009 Savannah Cannon joined up at nineteen, to escape her hardscrabble circumstances. She was quickly tapped as having an aptitude for math and computers. Once trained, she was promptly deployed to a dangerous desert outpost in Afghanistan, where female Marines were not supposed to be assigned. There Corporal Cannon worked as a "data dork" - a data networking specialist - setting up and maintaining critical communications and computer systems. She also went on patrol. The stakes were life and...
Sep 08, 2025•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 38
Oxford Professor in International History Steve Casey lays out the fascinating media history of the Korean War. He explains how the Truman administration promoted their case for participating in the Korean conflict to a nation fatigued from WWII, and how Truman faced public resistance led by his own commanding general, Douglas Macarthur, who used his powerful cult of personality and enormous public popularity to try and sway national policy, even as he was mulling his own presidential run for th...
Sep 01, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Season 4Ep. 37
Part two of this terrific interview: One of HBH’s favorite guests is back, sharing more stories from his time on a Huey gunship helicopter as a Crew Chief and Door Gunner. As part of the 101st Airborne and a Black Angel, Roger Lockshier and his crew were routinely tasked with extracting MACV-SOG Green Berets during hairy combat in the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In this episode and his latest book, “ Saving Infantry and SOG Souls ,” Distinguished Flying Cross recipient, (and many othe...
Aug 26, 2025•54 min•Season 4Ep. 36
One of HBH’s favorite guests is back, sharing more stories from his time on a Huey gunship helicopter as a Crew Chief and Door Gunner. As part of the 101st Airborne and a Black Angel, Roger Lockshier and his crew were routinely tasked with extracting MACV-SOG Green Berets during hairy combat in the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In this episode and his latest book, “ Saving Infantry and SOG Souls ,” Distinguished Flying Cross recipient, (and many other awards) Roger shares his adventures...
Aug 25, 2025•53 min•Season 4Ep. 35
A living national treasure, Col. Paris Davis was one of the first sixteen U.S. Marine officers–and the only African-American–recruited to help form the Special Forces division–the inspired brainchild of JFK, who himself had seen the limits of military bureaucracy during WWII and wanted to add smaller, nimbler highly trained fighting squads to the US military’s toolkit. A native of Cleveland, Paris describes what it took to create the SF cadre; meeting JFK; his combat experiences in VIetnam–and h...
Aug 18, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Season 4Ep. 34
Judyth Vary Baker was a teenage science prodigy who caught the attention of the top cancer researchers in the country, including Dr. Alton Ochsner – past president of the American Cancer Society and head of the prestigious Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. In the summer of 1963 Judy accepted a summer job at the Oschner Clinic in return for a promise to enter Tulane Medical School in the Fall. Arriving in New Orleans – a city she had never been to before – she learned that instead of working on a cu...
Aug 11, 2025•1 hr 32 min•Season 4Ep. 33
Investigative journalist and author Nick Bryant broke the story of high-level sex trafficking networks operating in the U.S. with his groundbreaking book " The Franklin Scandal " about a pederast ring based in Nebraska. Nick was one of the first journalists to break the Epstein story, and he lays out the common attributes of the notorious Franklin network and Epstein's more recent operations, and how both sought to minimize public awareness of underage victims. He highlights key facts about Jeff...
Aug 04, 2025•49 min•Season 4Ep. 32
Laura Kern volunteered to join the U.S. Army's nurse corps in May 1968 at the height of the conflict in Vietnam. 22 years old, she remembers her first day in Vietnam as her most pivotal: "I just jumped off the helicopter with my bags looking for my supervisor...They wheeled a soldier by me missing both legs and one arm. They were blown off." Laura talks about what it was like being one of 11,000 women who served in the war. Upon return, many of these women received a hostile reaction from their ...
Jul 28, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 4Ep. 31
The ultimate insider in the world of espionage: 24-year CIA veteran Ric Prado has spent his life at the heart of the intelligence world as an Operations Officer through the end of the Cold War and the advent of the Age of Terrorism. After serving around the world, he was assigned to the Bin Laden Task Force and then led the Counterterrorism Unit, creating the special task force to combat terrorism post 9-11. In this episode, Ric lays out the challenge of stopping terrorist groups before they str...
Jul 21, 2025•52 min•Season 4Ep. 30
Host Ralph Pezzullo is the guest this week—talking about his new book, “ The Great Chinese Art Heist, ” (Pegasus Crime.) Interviewed by renowned art theft expert Anthony Amore, Ralph breaks down the series of ‘pink-panther-like’ museum robberies of Chinese art and antiquities across Europe, and links them to the systematic looting and destruction during the Opium Wars of China’s famed Old Summer Palace. Taking only what they perceive to be rightfully theirs—and often leaving valuable European ar...
Jul 14, 2025•53 min•Season 4Ep. 29
When the Vice-President of Iran invited Nizar Zakka to speak at a September 2015 conference – as CEO of a global tech NGO working closely with the U.S. government – he never hesitated, and promptly booked a flight from D.C. to Tehran. He never dreamed he’d end up in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison as a political prisoner, experiencing solitary confinement and repeated torture. Following his speech at the conference, Nizar entered a taxi to take him to Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. E...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 28
Author Tom Sileo tells the inspiring story of the late Michael Ollis, one of thousands of young men who followed their fathers into the military. On August 28, 2013, Ollis, Staten Island native and 10th mountain soldier, was serving at Forward Operating Base Ghazni, a joint force partner mission with the Polish military. During a sneak attack, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest and Sgt. Ollis threw himself in front of Polish comrade, Karol Cierpica, whom he’d only met and fought side-...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 27
Born in Hawaii shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Wade Ishimoto grew up to help found the storied Delta Force special operations group. Wade shares the story of his amazing career in U.S. Army intelligence starting in Vietnam, to the planning of the failed 1980 mission to rescue the U.S. hostages from Iran. He describes what it was like to be on the ground in the desert of Iran when Operation Eagle Claw was compromised and ended in tragedy. Author of “The Intoku Code,” Wade has lived his ...
Jun 23, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 26
When New Orleans native Ed Haslam began his research into the curious life and shocking murder of brilliant Tulane medical professor Dr. Mary Sherman, he didn’t imagine that his inquiry would reveal a secret lab connected to some of the city’s most unusual and historically significant citizens—Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, Guy Bannister, mob boss Carlos Marcello, medical titan Dr. Alton Oschner—and forces high up in the government. Nor did he expect his discoveries to change our understanding...
Jun 16, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 4Ep. 25
Historian and author Brian Bruce vividly describes an often neglected but important aspect of the Pacific Theater in WWII: The campaign to liberate New Guinea from the Japanese and thwart their planned invasion of Australia. In his book MacArthur’s Bloody Butchers: Company G, 163rd Regiment, Bruce follows the path of four men from the 41st Infantry Division – including Bruce’s great uncle Doyle – as they fought their way from New Guinea, to the Philippines and prepared to invade Japan. Along the...
Jun 09, 2025•57 min•Season 4Ep. 24
When the United States retreated from the chaos of Kabul in August of 2021, General Sami Sadat was still fighting until the end. He recounts how his troops were starved for ammunition for two years before the final pullout, while the U.S. was negotiating with the Taliban. He also talks about how earlier in his career he fought alongside the CIA to track down al-Qaeda in the mountains on Hindu Kush. General Sadat provides a uniquely different view of the war in Afghanistan, how it was fought and ...
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 4Ep. 23
Commissioned a Marine second lieutenant on November 8, 1967, G.M. Davis arrived in Vietnam less than a year later to lead a rifle platoon against the North Vietnamese Army in the northernmost province of what was then the Republic of Vietnam. In his deeply personal book, My War in the Jungle: The Long-Delayed Memoire of A Marine Lieutenant in Vietnam, 1968-69 , Davis brings to life the relentless heat, the worry, the responsibility he carried and the daily grind of firefights, battles, victory, ...
May 26, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 4Ep. 22
Robert F McLean was just 19 years old when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy to do his part in WWII. Invited to join the Navy Seals, he declined and enrolled in the U.S.N. Patrol Torpedo Boat School in Melville, R.I. Upon graduation Bob was assigned to Squadron 30, destined for the European Theatre of Operations. Shortly after midnight on June 6, 1944, his squadron became the outermost fighter convoy of the Normandy Invasion. The largest force ever assembled included his Patrol Torpedo Boat 461, a fi...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Season 4Ep. 21
The success of the submarine-borne Polaris missile was a critical nuclear deterrent that helped President Kennedy stare down Khruschev during the 1961 Berlin Crisis. Ever since, this weapon has been a key strategic tool of the U.S. Tom Ramos's book "From Berkeley to Berlin," chronicles the scientific journey leading to the development of this and other nuclear weapons and the singular man whose "buoyant optimism spread to everyone around him and accounted for the attainment of many an 'impossibl...
May 12, 2025•57 min•Season 4Ep. 20
Former U.S. Air Force Combat Controller Dan Schilling relates the heroic story of John Chapman captured in his book "Alone at Dawn" – a fellow combat controller who fought and perished on an Afghan mountainside, and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Chapman was the first airman to be so awarded in nearly fifty years. Dan gives a behind-the-scenes look at the Air Force Combat Controllers – the worlds deadliest and most versatile special operations force. Heroes Behind Headlines Executi...
May 05, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 4Ep. 19
A financial investigator for Federal law enforcement, David Asher is an expert in the financial side of organized criminal activities. He has been working for decades 'finding the money' to help build cases against some of the most notorious criminal organizations, (including the Gambino crime family) terrorists, and China. In this episode, David lays out the link between China and Mexican drug cartels to promote drug trafficking into the U.S., especially of deadly fentanyl. He also discusses he...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Season 4Ep. 18
Shetland, Scotland native and independent journalist Jen Stout was in Russia in late February 2022 when the war with Ukraine broke out and quickly left for a border post in southern Romania to cover the great flood of refugees who were fleeing the fighting. Weeks later she entered Ukraine to report first-hand from the front lines and cities across the country. A writer with a great sense of empathy, Jen’s main interest was not military strategy or international politics, but the Ukrainian people...
Apr 21, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Season 4Ep. 17
Former SAS medical officer and current war surgeon, Richard Villar, volunteered to provide medical support in Gaza during the 2024 invasion following the October 7 Hamas attack. He found himself working in a 200-bed hospital overrun with 700 patients, many of whom were women and children The hospital was under constant threat from drones, missiles and naval shells. Despite the constant danger, he and his fellow medics performed complex surgeries on bombing victims. His moving account of his expe...
Apr 14, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 4Ep. 16
Past guest and highly decorated former CIA operations officer Gary Berntsen is back and he's breaking down the facts about Tren De Aragua--the notorious gang of trained criminals at the heart of the illegal immigrant debate. Gary explains how he and his colleagues gathered intel about Tren De Aragua as part of their investigations into the Cartel Del Sol, the largest criminal organization in the world, and how they provided the government with a list of names of TdA members intentionally sent in...
Apr 07, 2025•39 min•Season 4Ep. 15
CIA contract pilot William "Tosh" Plumlee is back—this time with his eyewitness account from the South Knoll of Dealey Plaza, in Dallas on November 22rd, 1963. Present as part of a Pentagon abort team, Tosh counted five shots, coming from at least two directions, with the fatal headshot coming from the South Knoll parking lot. Tosh drew a map of the events as he saw them, and shared his eyewitness account under sworn testimony to the FBI, the Church Committee, the House Select Committee on Assas...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 4Ep. 14
Doctor of behavioral science and pastor Michael Caparrelli spent 100 hours with convicted serial killer David Berkowitz in an effort to better understand the reasons he committed the notorious Son of Sam murders, which terrorized New York City during the late ‘70s. His highly compelling book on the subject is called The Monster Mirror . Michael Caparrelli’s approach is unique. Not only is he a doctor of human behavior, he’s also pastor who regularly lectures on mental health in churches, schools...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Season 4Ep. 13
