Episodi

  • You let one hundred and fifty FBI agents into Yemen and lost the partnership

    You let one hundred and fifty FBI agents into Yemen and lost the partnership
    Sep 7 2026
    A U.S. ambassador in Yemen blocks an FBI return-whose approach will protect lives and the fragile partnership?

    You let one hundred and fifty FBI agents into Yemen and lost the partnership

    In this episode, we follow the clash between two officials who both believe they know how to keep Americans safe. The story traces Barbara Bodine's patient diplomacy and John P. O'Neill's urgent investigative approach as they collide after the USS Cole attack-what choice do you make when partnership or procedure hangs in the balance?

    Person: Barbara Bodine
    Person: John P. O'Neill
    Event: USS Cole bombing, October 12, 2000
    Number: 150 FBI investigators and support personnel
    Source: Ali Soufan, The Black Banners

    - Bodine arrived in Yemen on November 7, 1997, after a diplomatic career across Asia and the Middle East and framed her work around patient partnership.
    - O'Neill had spent years building expertise on al-Qaeda inside the FBI and responded to the Cole bombing convinced of an immediate criminal threat.
    - After the Cole attack, O'Neill brought 150 investigators to Yemen intending a full criminal investigation with standard evidence chains and witness control.
    - Bodine expected a much smaller footprint-closer to 50 Americans-and viewed the 150 as a threat to Yemen's sovereignty and the bilateral relationship.
    - Physical evidence from the Cole bombing passed through Ambassador Bodine's hands rather than the FBI's chain of custody, creating potential legal and diplomatic complications.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    15 min
  • If you'd hidden your daughter's paper in a salon, would you become someone else?

    If you'd hidden your daughter's paper in a salon, would you become someone else?
    Sep 7 2026
    A mother in a Dundee hair salon hides a daughter's papers inside Nazi parcels and becomes someone else - what would you have done?

    If you'd hidden your daughter's paper in a salon, would you become someone else?

    In this episode, we follow the life and choices of Jessie Jordan, a naturalised German who returned to Scotland in 1937 and opened a Dundee hair salon where military maps and parcels began to arrive. The episode traces her movements, relationships, and the decisions that turned an ordinary salon into a postal relay - and asks what responsibility and identity mean in such moments.

    Person: Jessie Jordan
    Date: 23 December 1887 (birth); July 1937 (registered with Glasgow police)
    Location: Kinloch Street hair salon, Dundee, Scotland
    Event: Salon used as postal relay for parcels containing maps and documents
    Topic: Recruitment by German military intelligence (Abwehr)

    - Jessie was born in Glasgow as Jessie Haddow, later naturalised German after marrying a German waiter in 1912.
    - She ran a salon in Hamburg, lost her first husband in World War I, and returned to Germany before moving to Dundee in 1937.
    - Her daughter Marga needed documentation proving Aryan heritage, prompting Jessie’s trip and furnishing a motive for collecting papers.
    - Before arriving in Scotland Jessie had been recruited by the Abwehr and set up the salon to receive packages from abroad.
    - A cleaner discovered military maps hidden among parcels, an ordinary discovery that set a wider chain of events in motion.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    19 min
  • The will he signed excluded Black people — and founded a university

    The will he signed excluded Black people — and founded a university
    Sep 7 2026
    The will he signed excluded Black people — and founded a university

    An old man sits alone in a plantation house in South Carolina, drafting a will with eight hundred and fourteen acres and a lifetime of grief behind him. He has already buried a wife and four children, and the document he writes will outlive every person he might have left it to. What he chooses to build with that land — and what he chooses to write into its founding rules — will outlast him by more than a century.

    In this episode, we trace Thomas Green Clemson's path from Philadelphia and Paris through Confederate nitrate mines to a South Carolina plantation house, asking how a scientist's grief became a university, and what it took to undo the exclusion he wrote into its founding document.

    Person: Thomas Green Clemson
    Location: Fort Hill, Pendleton, South Carolina
    Date: April 6, 1888
    Case: the will that founded Clemson Agricultural College
    Status: honored as written, then dismantled by federal court order decades later

    - Clemson was born in Philadelphia on July 1, 1807, and studied chemistry and assaying in Paris, training at the Sorbonne and the Royal School of Mines
    - He married Anna Maria Calhoun, daughter of John C. Calhoun, in 1838, and served as U.S. Chargé d'Affaires to Belgium from 1844 to 1852
    - Both of his surviving adult children, Floride and John, died three weeks apart in the summer of 1871; his wife Anna died in 1875
    - His will left Fort Hill and its 814 acres to South Carolina to found an agricultural college, with explicit language barring Black and white students from attending together
    - Harvey Gantt won a federal lawsuit and became the university's first Black student on January 28, 1963, seventy-five years after Clemson's death

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    20 min
  • Thirteen craftsmen he sent vanished on the road and killed the alliance

    Thirteen craftsmen he sent vanished on the road and killed the alliance
    Sep 7 2026
    Thirteen craftsmen he sent vanished on the road and killed the alliance

    Thirteen men left Aragon in 1428 carrying a king's promise toward the court of Ethiopia's emperor, and none of them ever arrived. No names survive, no route, no graves — only a number and a silence that lasted twenty-two years. What was Alfonso of Aragon really trying to build across that distance, and why did a sovereign who could storm cities and outmaneuver popes fail to protect thirteen ordinary men?

    In this episode, we trace Alfonso of Aragon's reign from his Castilian birth through his wars for Naples to the diplomatic overture from Yeshaq I of Ethiopia, asking how a king capable of reuniting kingdoms and commissioning triumphal architecture could not close the gap between ambition and the limits of the fifteenth-century world.

    Person: Alfonso of Aragon
    Location: Aragon (departure point); route and fate unknown
    Date: 1428
    Case: thirteen craftsmen sent toward the Ethiopian court of Yeshaq I
    Status: none returned, no names or graves recorded

    - Alfonso was born in 1396 at Medina del Campo.
    - He was betrothed to Maria on 12 June 1415 at Valencia, a marriage that produced no children.
    - His father Ferdinand died on 2 April 1416, when Alfonso was about twenty.
    - In 1428, two dignitaries sent by Yeshaq I of Ethiopia arrived at Alfonso's court proposing an alliance sealed by marriage and Aragonese craftsmen.
    - In 1450, Alfonso wrote to Yeshaq's successor, Zara Yaqob, offering to send more craftsmen if safe passage could be guaranteed.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    21 min