Cathy Scott-Clark – författare

The shocking true story of a brutal kidnapping high in the mountains of Kashmir that marked the beginning of modern terrorism.In July 1995, ten backpackers journeyed into the foothills of the Himalayas, trekking to an idyllic campsite known as the Meadow. But their search for tranquillity was savagely interrupted when they were taken hostage by Islamic extremists.Using diaries, letters, classified police reports and interviews with the jihadis themselves, The Meadow traces the escalating tension between kidnappers, victims and police, while examining the high-level conspiracies surrounding the abduction. It tells of the single escape attempt and how – with a brutal beheading – the hostage takers took an irreversible step into the abyss.The shocking true story of the crisis that foreshadowed a new epoch of global terrorism, this is the book that forced Intelligence and government authorities to uncover what really happened in the Meadow.

The shocking true story of a brutal kidnapping high in the mountains of Kashmir that marked the beginning of modern terrorism.In July 1995, ten backpackers journeyed into the foothills of the Himalayas, trekking to an idyllic campsite known as the Meadow. But their search for tranquillity was savagely interrupted when they were taken hostage by Islamic extremists.Using diaries, letters, classified police reports and interviews with the jihadis themselves, The Meadow traces the escalating tension between kidnappers, victims and police, while examining the high-level conspiracies surrounding the abduction. It tells of the single escape attempt and how – with a brutal beheading – the hostage takers took an irreversible step into the abyss.The shocking true story of the crisis that foreshadowed a new epoch of global terrorism, this is the book that forced Intelligence and government authorities to uncover what really happened in the Meadow.

The Siege by Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-Clark - a searing account of the 2005 terrorist attacks at Mumbai's famous Taj HotelOn 26th November 2008 the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai is besieged by Pakistani Islamists, armed with explosives and machine guns.For three days, guests and staff of the hotel are trapped as the terrorists run amok.On 29th November commandos launch Operation Black Tornado. The world holds its breath.The Siege is a helter-skelter thriller, threaded with powerful human stories. By turns tragic and heroic, the events are told through a cast of real characters, who were thrown together in the luxurious, century-old Taj: waiters, chefs, captains of industry, hedge funders, celebrities, tourists, policemen, special forces and terrorists. For the first time, this astonishing book takes us through the news footage and into the heart of the hotel. Each hostage has a choice: hide, run or fight. What would you do?This classic non-fiction account will grip readers of No Easy Day and No Way Down and will be enjoyed by fans of 'United 93' and 'The Towering Inferno'.Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy are the authors of four books, most recently the acclaimed The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 - Where the Terror Began (Harper Press UK; Penguin India). For 16 years they worked as foreign correspondents and investigative reporters for the Sunday Times and then the Guardian. In 2009, the One World Trust named them British Journalists of the Year, having won Foreign Correspondents of the Year in 2004. They co-produce documentaries for British and American television; their most recent for C4 Dispatches, on Pakistan's war on terror, City of Fear, was nominated for an award at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Currently they are filming new projects in Myanmar and China.

Some argued it would save the U.S. after 9/11. Instead, the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program came to be defined as American torture. The Forever Prisoner, a primary source for the recent HBO Max film directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, exposes the full story behind the most divisive CIA operation in living memory.Six months after 9/11, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah and announced he was number three in Al Qaeda. Frantic to thwart a much-feared second wave of attacks, the U.S. rendered him to a secret black site in Thailand, where he collided with retired Air Force psychologist James Mitchell. Arguing that Abu Zubaydah had been trained to resist interrogation and was withholding vital clues, the CIA authorized Mitchell and others to use brutal “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would have violated U.S. and international laws had not government lawyers rewritten the rulebook.In The Forever Prisoner, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy recount dramatic scenes inside multiple black sites around the world through the eyes of those who were there, trace the twisted legal justifications, and chart how enhanced interrogation, a key “weapon” in the global “War on Terror,” metastasized over seven years, encompassing dozens of detainees in multiple locations, some of whom died. Ultimately that war has cost 8 trillion dollars, 900,000 lives, and displaced 38 million people—while the U.S. Senate judged enhanced interrogation was torture and had produced zero high-value intelligence. Yet numerous men, including Abu Zubaydah, remain imprisoned in Guantanamo, never charged with any crimes, in contravention of America’s ideals of justice and due process, because their trials would reveal the extreme brutality they experienced.Based on four years of intensive reporting, on interviews with key protagonists who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of previously classified documents, The Forever Prisoner is a powerful chronicle of a shocking experiment that remains in the headlines twenty years after its inception, even as US government officials continue to thwart efforts to expose war crimes.Silenced by a CIA pledge to keep him imprisoned and incommunicado forever, Abu Zubaydah speaks loudly through these pages, prompting the question as to whether he and others remain detained not because of what they did to us but because of what we did to them.

A Financial Times 'Book of the Year'An intrepid reporter’s fast-paced investigation into the extraordinary life of Viktor Bout, the much-mythologised Russian fixer known as the ‘Merchant of Death’.Viktor Bout was a warlord’s warlord, according to MI6, the US National Security Council and the CIA—a terrorist facilitator, and the world’s most prolific arms dealer. They tracked him everywhere, smuggling weapons from North Korea and the former Soviet Union into the world’s bloodiest conflict zones, from Liberia to Afghanistan. Intelligence services called him a secret KGB asset; the White House, the most dangerous man in the world. But Bout strenuously denied this, describing himself as a businessman.Washington hunted Bout for more than a decade, before finally trapping him and jailing him for 25 years. Then, in December 2022, the story took an unlikely turn: President Biden pardoned Bout and sent him home to Moscow, in a prisoner exchange to rescue basketball superstar Brittney Griner, jailed in Russia on drugs charges. Soon enough, Bout cosied up with doomed Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov and the Russian governors Putin had installed in occupied Ukraine.Has America’s extraordinary decision to swap Bout undermined Western interests? Has Putin put him back to work in his old business? Through candid interviews with US investigators and Viktor Bout himself, this book reveals the true story of the ‘Merchant of Death’.