The Spy Who Raised Me Podcast
The Spy Who Raised Me Podcast
Unlikely connections - the Hindu Kush and Pine Gap
In this episode, Jane Craigie talks to Iain Craigie about the instability of Afghanistan and Pakistan and the coming together of the international intelligence community to create the facility at Pine Gap in Australia to understand and mitigate this threat.
The discussion also covers Iain's views on how power might shift towards countries like China as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. "China is in a very strong position," he said.
Iain talks about the value of diplomats and international intelligence community. terrorism, about truly feeling for a country, its land and its people.
"Terrorists are looking to bring humanity to a standstill."
Welcome to the spy who raised me podcast conversations between a daughter and her father. Yes, you've guessed it. He was a spy.
Unknown:Hi, my name is Jane Craigie and I'm on Zoo with my dad in Craigie. And this is our eighth podcast. And in this podcast, we're going to talk about a trip that we did to Afghanistan, which was a holiday, not the most likely destination for a holiday, but it was one of the many adventurous trips that we made as a family and we have covered
Unknown:Some of this in a previous podcast, but what we're going to go into a bit more detail about today is the history of Afghanistan, the turmoil in the country, and how the country and the intelligence surrounding that region has changed since since we were there in the 1970s. Through to now. And so dad, just tell us a little bit about set a little bit of context to, to our trip to Afghanistan, and and also, you know, in the context of when you were based in your intelligence role in the consulate in Delhi.
Unknown:Yeah, it's
Unknown:it's a crazy place to visit Of course, Afghanistan. I think whatever you are, whatever. Whatever century you're in, people think of Afghanistan is being a hostile place, with lots of with lots of data.
Unknown:And that was basically the case in 19 7071. And we were in New Delhi. And I can remember discussing where to go for holidays. And whenever Afghanistan was brought up, people said, well, you don't want to go to Afghanistan. Too much happening, too many dangers and so on. But anyway, being as we are, we decided to go. And
Unknown:it was quite a long journey.
Unknown:We were well prepared. We've read up on on basic facts on Afghanistan. And circumstances at the time, was that
Unknown:my wife Wilma was pregnant. And Jane was four years old Jane, I think that Yeah, probably about four. And we had passenger two who was the daughter of one of my colleagues.
Unknown:And I commissioned in Delhi. So we set off in a BMW 1800 not brand new but sparkling. And it was read very ostentatious. We set off
Unknown:one weekend and we had to drive for quite a number of hours to get from India into Punjab and then into Pakistan and reset off and the farther west we went, the more we started thinking, My God, are we doing the right thing? So Anna Marie, we after some time, we arrived at the border into
Unknown:Pakistan. And that was that was an eye opener. We really hadn't seen being stationed in Delhi.
Unknown:We hadn't seen at that time any of the routier parts of
Unknown:For that part of the world, a anyway, we got to land the cattle. And we had to, we had to show the papers that were required
Unknown:passports and so on.
Unknown:And as we sat and waited for the papers to be to be processed, we looked up and we could see
Unknown:odd people walking past the
Unknown:border, up a ravine, and then you seem to disappear. So we thought, we'll have a look at this closer look at what it was was the public latrines. And it was incredible. It was there was a deep deepish Gorge with a huge tree that had been felled, to lay across it. And the public critique lottery in was
Unknown:was this big chunk Transcribed by https://otter.ai [This note may be incomplete because it was exported before processing was finished.]