Hostage Nation
Colombia's Guerrilla Army and the Failed War on Drugs
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Narrated by:
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Yetta Gottesman
About this listen
The crash of a U.S. reconnaissance plane into the Colombian jungle on February 13, 2003, set off a series of events that, five years later, would bring three South American countries on a collision course toward war, pit a giant government contractor against its employer - the U.S. government - and catapult a 40-year-old guerrilla army to the international stage as one of the most active and successful terrorist organizations in the world.
Hostage Nation follows the players in this international drama in which lives interweave across a chaotic and deadly chessboard. While at first the case appeared to be a one-dimensional kidnapping of three American contractors that would play out in backdoor negotiations, as many had before, the paradigm shift that took over Washington after 9/11 made impossible any such path to win the freedom of the hostages.
This is the story of Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell, and Marc Gonsalves, three Americans who went to work for the U.S. government's ill-fought "War on Drugs" and crash-landed into their worst nightmare, five years in captivity of the FARC rebel Army. It is the story of Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, poster child for all the prisoners in Colombia. It is the story of corporate malfeasance by Northrop Grumman, one of the largest defense contractors in America. It is the story of a paradigm shift that turned poor Colombian guerrillas into the biggest drug mafia in the world and earned them a prominent position on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
This is also a fascinating expose about the way that civilian soldiers have become the main players in covert wars that fly under the radar of the American people. It is the story of the U.S. government's ambivalence concerning victims who don't have to be tallied on the nightly news. It is the story of fragmented government factions that refuse to work together, and of foreign-policy blunders that put government contracts above American lives. It is the story of lives unraveling, of abandoned women and children, and of feuding families. And it is a revealing truth about the disastrous failure of the war on drugs that began back in 1970.
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Story
Kiss the Boys Goodbye convincingly shows that a legacy of shame remains from America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam even though that conflict ended over 35 years ago. Until US government policy on POW/MIAs changes, it remains one of the most crucial issues for any American soldier who fights for home and country, particularly when we are engaged with an enemy who doesn't adhere to the international standards for the treatment of prisoners - or any American hostage...
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God Grant Them Peace
- By Gillian on 05-19-15
By: Monica Jensen-Stevenson, and others
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The Wonga Coup
- Guns, Thugs, and the Steely Determination to Create Mayhem
- By: Adam Roberts
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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With so little to recommend it, why in March 2004 was Equatorial Guinea the target of a group of salty British, South African, and Zimbabwean mercenaries, traveling on an American-registered ex-National Guard plane specially adapted for military purposes that was originally flown to Africa by American pilots?
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Dictators and dogs of war, beware
- By PearlGirl on 11-05-06
By: Adam Roberts
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Kings of Cocaine
- Inside the Medellin Cartel - An Astonishing True Story of Murder Money and International Corruption
- By: Guy Gugliotta, Jeff Leen
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of the most successful cocaine dealers in the world: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, Carlos Lehder Rivas, and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. In the 1980s, they controlled more than 50 percent of the cocaine flowing into the United States. The cocaine trade is capitalism on overdrive - supply meeting demand on exponential levels. Here you'll find the story of how the modern cocaine business started and how it turned a ragtag group of hippies and sociopaths into regal kings.
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Almost Perfect.
- By Nick on 10-31-18
By: Guy Gugliotta, and others
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Holy War, Inc.
- Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden
- By: Peter L. Bergen
- Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
- Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins
- Abridged
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The September 11 assault on the World Trade Center was the most sophisticated and horrifying in a series of operations masterminded by Osama bin Laden and his Jihad group - an organization that CNN's terrorism analyst Peter Bergen calls Holy War, Inc. One of only a handful of journalists to have interviewed the world's most wanted man face to face, Bergen explains the Jihadist network that operates globally and in secrecy.
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sorry about spelling
- By Sergei on 10-18-07
By: Peter L. Bergen
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The Last Refuge
- Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia
- By: Gregory Johnsen
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and al-Qaeda are fighting a clandestine war of drones and suicide bombers in an unforgiving corner of Arabia. The Last Refuge charts the rise, fall, and resurrection of al-Qaeda in Yemen over the last 30 years, detailing how a group that the United States once defeated has now become one of the world’s most dangerous threats. An expert on Yemen who has spent years on the ground there, Gregory D. Johnsen uses al-Qaeda’s Arabic battle notes to reconstruct their world as they take aim at the United States and its allies.
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bin laden.
- By Rhea on 07-15-13
By: Gregory Johnsen
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King of Spies
- The Dark Reign of America's Spymaster in Korea
- By: Blaine Harden
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1946, Master Sergeant Donald Nichols was repairing jeeps on the sleepy island of Guam when he caught the eye of recruiters from the army's Counter Intelligence Corps. After just three months' training, he was sent to Korea, then a backwater beneath the radar of MacArthur's Pacific Command. Though he lacked the pedigree of most US spies - Nichols was a seventh-grade dropout - he quickly metamorphosed from army mechanic to black ops phenomenon.
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Unplayable recording
- By Lin Tin-tin on 10-18-24
By: Blaine Harden
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Hunting Evil
- The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice
- By: Guy Walters
- Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley
- Length: 18 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From its haunting chronicle of the monstrous mass murders the Nazis perpetrated and the murky details of their postwar existence to the challenges of hunting them down, Hunting Evil is a monumental work of nonfiction written with the pacing and intrigue of a thriller.
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Eye-opening and riveting
- By Ellen on 10-20-10
By: Guy Walters
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Black Flags
- The Rise of ISIS
- By: Joby Warrick
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In a thrilling dramatic narrative, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents.
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So much learned
- By mike flavin on 02-11-16
By: Joby Warrick
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Revolution’s End
- The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA
- By: Brad Schreiber
- Narrated by: Brad Schreiber
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Revolution's End fully explains the most famous kidnapping in US history, detailing Patty Hearst's relationship with Donald DeFreeze, known as Cinque, the head of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Not only did the heiress have a sexual relationship with DeFreeze while he was imprisoned, she didn't know he was an informant and a victim of prison behavior modification.
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Interesting spin
- By jay rollins on 08-29-20
By: Brad Schreiber
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The Good Spy
- The Life and Death of Robert Ames
- By: Kai Bird
- Narrated by: René Ruiz
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The Good Spy is Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird’s compelling portrait of the remarkable life and death of one of the most important operatives in CIA history - a man who, had he lived, might have helped heal the rift between Arabs and the West. On April 18, 1983, a bomb exploded outside the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. The attack was a geopolitical turning point. It marked the beginning of Hezbollah as a political force, but even more important, it eliminated America’s most influential and effective intelligence officer in the Middle East - CIA operative Robert Ames.
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Biased but interesting
- By Peggy on 05-09-18
By: Kai Bird
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Civilian Warriors
- The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror
- By: Erik Prince
- Narrated by: Jeff Gurner
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Blackwater is one of the most misunderstood companies of our time. As Erik Prince, its founder and former CEO, writes: "Hundreds of American citizens employed by private military contractors, or PMCs, would lose their lives helping our government wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to have their memory tarnished by the unfair and/or ignorant depiction of PMCs as profiteers, jackbooted thugs, or worse."
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A different look a Security Contractors
- By Ryan on 01-20-14
By: Erik Prince
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Inside the Kingdom
- Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia
- By: Robert Lacey
- Narrated by: Robert Lacey
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Robert Lacey tells us what happened in the Middle East's oil-rich powerhouse---while we weren't looking.
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Inside the Kingdom
- By Ibrahim on 03-19-10
By: Robert Lacey
What listeners say about Hostage Nation
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JP
- 06-06-19
Biased, but interesting...
I purchased this audiobook as I had deployed in support of the recovery efforts of the three American contractors on multiple occasions prior to their rescue and repatriation. The authors use an obvious anti-US approach in the writing and, it seems, they relied on source material based on how it supported their biased views. The book is very interesting and engaging, but it also works to legitimize Jorge Enrique Botero's related works and actions and does so from a third-person approach. Yet, it is obvious that Botero is largely responsible for the parts of the book that slant all of his actions and interactions with the FARC in a positive light. A lot of the assumptions and conclusions on US involvement prior to and during the rescue are wrong. The primary reason is not the fault of the authors: US Special Operations are either covert or clandestine. If they are the latter, US involvement is hidden, denied, and concealed. The second reason, I believe, is because a positive slant on any US involvement in this book goes against the authors' pre-conceived biases. They also rely too much on the conclusions of a hostage negotiations consultant who - in the end - had little to do with the rescue operation and repatriation. I still recommend this book. It is well written - for the most part. But, read it knowing that it is biased and should be balanced with multiple sources.
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- Rori
- 06-01-18
Not what I was expecting
At this point very slow, I'm 4hrs in and can't take it. I have stopped and went back a couple days in a row. I just can't get into the book, I thought it would be more on saving the hostages and not giving history of this and that. I do respect the writers, it's not my cup of tea.
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