Key Reflections
* When conducting research with court documents, a human understanding of the different patterns and quirks of individual prosecutors and courts is more valuable than using a computer or algorithm.
* Online tools such as PACER and courtlistener.com work as good starting points for research into court records. However, these systems are not the most user friendly and require some experience to get the best results.
* Court records can provide researchers with a sense of the priorities of particular administrations or states, allowing for comparisons of how certain crimes are prosecuted.
* If one knows what to look for, trends begin to emerge from court records research that can flag what to pay attention to regarding future challenges. This can be applied both to the behaviour of terrorists and that of hostile state actors.
* Law enforcement and security agencies today, particularly in the United States, are dealing with a fractured threat. This includes the idea of so-called “salad bar extremism,” where terrorists mix and match elements from different ideologies to construct a new hodgepodge worldview of their own.
* Building relationships with mentors and cultivating curiosity are key in terms of creating a successful career in the realms of national security, journalism, and other related fields.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
SH: Seamus Hughes
SG: Welcome to the NATO DEEP Dive podcast, I’m your host Dr. Sajjan Gohel and in this episode I speak with the pioneering researcher, Seamus Hughes, also known as ‘The Document Digger.’
Seamus is a senior research faculty member at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE). He previously worked at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), serving as a lead staffer on U.S. government efforts to implement a national terrorism prevention strategy. Seamus has authored numerous academic reports on extremism in the United States and co-authored a critically acclaimed book, Homegrown: ISIS in America. He also regularly provides commentary to media and press outlets and won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as part of a New York Times research team.
Seamus Hughes. A warm welcome to NATO Deep Dive.
SH: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
SG: You’ve been described as ‘The Document Digger;’ how did you earn this tag?
SH: It’s not the coolest title in the world, but I guess I’ll take it as an academic! So, I started my career in the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and I was a congressional investigator. So, what would happen is, we’d do an investigation, we did an investigation, like a year and a half, into the attack at Fort Hood by Nidal Hasan, and so we’re investigating the FBI and the Department of Defense. And they would just drop documents, like boxes and boxes and boxes of documents, and hoping to hide the ball in one of those files, and that you hope you didn’t notice it. And it was me, and there was another guy named Jim McGee, who was an old school reporter, who was a Miami Herald reporter for 25 years, then Washington Post, and he became a congressional investigator. And we would just spend hours and days and weeks even just going through every single document. And what I found is, when you look at documents, there’s things right in the black and white that are important. But there are things that they don’t say that are just as important. And so, you get a little bit of pattern in the system, you get a sense of the noise in the system, and then you can use that to pull the thread when you do actual interviews with individuals.
So, I think of documents as kind of the first step of things. I took that from the Senate, I kind of spent some time in the intelligence community for a few years, and then when I got out, I was trying to do an investigation into everyone who had been arrested in the US for ISIS related activities in the last 10 years, right. The problem is, I could not rely on the Department of Justice’s press releases alone, because sometimes they wouldn’t announce an arrest. Maybe they had a case that went south, maybe they pled out the guy, maybe he was cooperating, they just didn’t want to talk about all of them. So, I had to go through all the 94 federal districts in each single document until I found more ISIS cases. And damned if I didn’t find 40 or 50 cases that never saw the light of day. And as part of that, I found the weird quirks in the federal court system to be able to find things that most people unfortunately can’t because the system is so God awful!
SG: Well, it’s very much an earned tag that you have as ‘The Document Digger,’ and it is a cool title. I certainly am envious that I don’t have one at all, but maybe over time, people will decide something for me! Your work currently, though, is all effectively open source. You talk about pulling the thread. But the thing is this is that it’s not easy to find things, even if they are available online, because if it was, everybody would do it. So, do you have a methodology that you’ve sort of refined that you’ve had to get through a trial-and-error process? I ask this because for our podcast, which is by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme, a lot of us focus on research and building capacity tools to learn how to do research. So, your experiences on this are very important.
SH: So, my default is assuming that everyone is lying, and work my way backwards. And so, I use documents to augment that thing. So, I never go into an investigation, assuming I’m going to know what the answer is going to be. I go into an investigation assuming it’s a puzzle, and I need to put together as many pieces as I can to get a full picture. So, if I’m taking a look at, say, domestic terrorism cases in this in the U.S., what I’m looking at is Government Accountability Office reports in the last five years, I’m looking at Congressional Research Service reports that they’ve put out, I’m looking at FBI Inspector General reports, I’m looking at federal court records, and then I’m putting that all together and say, ‘Okay, a little bit of peace here, the GAO report, that’s in a weird footnote that no one really noticed. And if I combine that with the case that I saw in Southern California, damned if I don’t get a sense of the full scope of Atomwaffen in the U.S.’ And so, pulling those threads, putting together a mosaic, I see it as a puzzle, right.
Our job is—we deal with the worst of society, right, the skinheads, the ISIS guys, the al-Qaeda guys, that can eat you alive. And so, what I think is important for me, at least intellectually, is to just take a step back and say, ‘Okay, well, what kind of thing can make this kind of more of a, not a game, but at least an intellectual exercise of how to do this?’ And so, you should use the court records as basically the starting point of an investigation, and then and then augment that with interviews. I guess I’m dating myself a little bit, but I feel like I’m a bit old school in the fact that I’ll pick up the phone if I don’t know the answer, right? So, if I don’t know the answer, I’ll call somebody. And if they don’t want to give me the answer, I’ll get on a plane. If they don’t want to talk to me in person, I’ll wait outside until they’re ready. And some of that is a little bit of the reporter in me and some of that is a little bit of just like, if I don’t have the answer, it’s going to kill me. And so, part of that is a bit of a drive to be not only the first but also to get it right. It’s one thing to be first, it’s another thing to get it right. And so, trying to make sure that the type of stuff you’re looking at actually passes muster is important to me.
SG: So, court filings seem to be your starting point, and perhaps maybe the most important research material, how many pages a day do you consume?
SH: Oh, God, don’t tell my wife! So probably, at any given day, I’ll probably look at about 1500 to 2000 pages, and at least 30 to 40 districts. And so, you’ll say to yourself, ‘Man, that seems like a lot of time.’ And some of it is, but usually it’s not. I can very quickly get a sense of, when I look at a document, whether it’s going to be useful for me or not, just because of the rhythm and pattern to it, right? I know how the FBI files their stuff, I know ATF files or stuff, I know if I have a prosecutor who I’ve looked at for the last five years, I know he likes to hide the ball in a footnote, and the other one doesn’t, right? And so, knowing those kinds of quirks, makes things a little bit quicker on things. So, people always ask me, ‘Why don’t you automise this? Why don’t you use a programme and figure this out?’ And you can, but sometimes you miss stuff.
So, some of my biggest findings have been: I found Julian Assange’s indictment before anybody else, and that was because they accidentally filed it in a national security case, unrelated to Julian Assange. They basically copied and pasted their old Julian Assange indictment into another guy’s case. And it was on the third page of a 10-page filing, and I just happened to be looking at that case, because I thought it was interesting that the prosecutor on that case was a national security prosecutor. That’s it right. And so, you wouldn’t be able to train a computer to know that type of stuff. And so, it also helps you to get a sense of patterns too. So, I know that DC convenes grand juries on Wednesdays, and I could probably sit on the docket on Thursday and have a good story. Or I know that there’s a clerk in California, who is very busy and every Tuesday night, she gets around to unsealing all the documents in that district. And so, I know on Wednesday morning, I’m going to a goldmine.
SG: So, quirks in many ways are more important than algorithms when it comes to actually anticipating things.
SH: Right. So, I mean, when you look at the federal court system, at least at the circuit level, you have 94 different districts, right, which means you have 94 different local rules, which mandate how you can release public records. And so, in Massachusetts, it’s 180 days before things get automatically unsealed. In the Western District of Virginia, it’s 90 days. In Iowa, it’s never. And so, you have to understand those local rules to get a sense of whether it’s going to be worth spending your time in Iowa for a search warrant, or whether it’s worth your time elsewhere. And then every once in a while, you get surprised, right? So, you’re never going to find a search warrant in Florida, unless it’s the former president’s right. Sometimes they release things and sometimes they don’t.
SG: You often use the PACER system, which is the Public Access Court Electronic Records. Why them? And are there other tools available that can also help in doing this research?
SH: Sure. So, PACER is the online repository for all federal court records in this country. The U.S. is unique in that it’s relatively—and people will yell at me for saying this—it is relatively accessible. Meaning that if I wanted to get a court record in the UK, or Canada, it’s a few more hoops. Whereas this actually has an online repository, you can kind of at least get some of the information, things like that. And so, it’s the online repository for all of the documents. The problem is, it’s a fee-based system. So, it’s 10 cents a search, and then 10 cents a page for each PDF. As if PDFs get more expensive, the bigger they are or something. And it’s basically a slush fund for the U.S. courts to be able to buy flat screen TVs and other things like that. And that’s fine, that’s just kind of how the system is set up.
And so, I always use PACER as kind of the starting point of some of these investigations, because there’s kind of interesting stuff that’s sitting there. And again, because it’s not a user-friendly system a lot of the public doesn’t know how to traverse it. And so, a lot of stuff just kind of sits there untapped unless you kind of dive into it. So, I use PACER. I also like a website, courtlistener.com/recap, which basically scans court records and lets you do keyword searches of things. So, for example, if I was doing an investigation into everyone who had been arrested for January 6, I would go to courtlistener.com/recap, and I type in the word ‘cordoned.’ And the reason I would is because the FBI—God bless their souls—are sometimes lazy when it comes to affidavits, and they use the same language in every single January 6 affidavit, ‘Mike Pence was cordoned off from the crowd.’ That is a unique enough word that if I searched the word ‘cordoned’ it pops up every January 6 case. And you can take that 1000 different ways, right? You can look at ISIS cases that way, you can look at ISIL, or you can look at ghost guns or fentanyl coming in from China, like whatever you wanted to, you get a sense of the rhythm of how DEA or ATF or FBI files or affidavits, you can get a sense of other cases that are out there.
SG: You spoke about January 6, you talked about, earlier, Julian Assange? What would you say are the stories that you’ve uncovered in the last few years, potentially those as well, that you feel have been the most consequential to your research?
SH: So, I use my Twitter account—basically whenever I find something interesting, I just tweet it out. And we can dive into psychoanalysis of why that is, but I found that when I tweeted out like the Julian Assange case, or there was a sitting congressman in Pennsylvania, and another one in California, who were both under investigation for campaign finance, or there was bombings at—alleged bombings—at JCCs around this country, or any number of other things, and I actually found that when I send it out there, it actually starts getting more leads. People will reach out to me and say, ‘Hey, you found that let me tell you the real story behind it,’ or ‘You found that, you haven’t found this, you should look at this document.’ And so, I like getting out the information as soon as possible, because I’m just trying to fill the picture for me. I’ve got a little bit of information, it’s probably not enough to run a story or run copy, but it’s enough to start the wheels going. I also horribly don’t care about credit, right? I don’t know why that is, but it’s just not my thing. Great if you give me a hat tip, but I don’t really care. What I want to get is the story out there and get it out from there.
SG: So, I want to come back to the aspect that you don’t seek credit or even attention for the research you do in a second. But there was one thing you mentioned that stood out. Well, a lot of things that stood out, but one of them was the thing about fentanyl and China. It keeps getting mentioned, but not necessarily everybody in the world outside the U.S. knows what that actually entails. Can you maybe explain more on that, and also how your research has sort of led into it?
SH: Yes, so that’s more of the research I do for like the reporting side of my work. Search warrants in certain parts of the country are relatively open, and that I can see when the DEA seizes a warehouse in say, Ohio, and they’ll trace back how that fentanyl showed up in that warehouse. And so, they’ll walk through, ‘Ok so, this is a shell company in China that transferred the drugs, this is how they transfer the money,’ and things like that. And then you get a sense of how big an investigation is, right? So, you’ll see on page five, that it’s telling you that operation whatever ridiculous name that the authorities want to give it that day. And then you use that fact to look for other operation documents that have been filed. And then you get a sense of the web of progress against a certain thing.
What’s interesting about court records too, is you could also get a sense of priorities, right? So, I could look at, say, border apprehensions during the Trump administration and border apprehensions during the Biden administration. And I can tell you whether resources are being used or not. Or I can tell you that in, say, Tennessee, they’ve been prosecuting the hell out of people for COVID fraud for under $20,000. Whereas every other district doesn’t really bring those cases because they think it’s too small ball. So, that tells me there’s a U.S. Attorney in Tennessee that really cares about this issue, and he has made it a priority for his office. And so, sometimes you get a sense of those aspects too.
SG: That’s really interesting. In many ways, as we were discussing earlier, you don’t hold on to this information like some sort of prized possession. You share it, and very much on social media. You’re not interested in getting personal credit on many of the stories you uncover. Why is that? Why are you okay with just throwing all of this out there in the open?
SH: Because I like a good story, I think, more than anything else. I don’t have the bandwidth to tell every story that I find. And there are people who do it much better than me. And so, my favourite thing to do, and I do this weekly, is I’ll farm out probably about a dozen stories to local reporters that I find in the district dockets. And I’ll say, ‘I found this little thing, I think it’s a story, do you want to run with it?’ And then they have to go do their thing. And a reporter in Silver City, North Carolina can do a better job of a local HUD official taking bribes than I could in DC making phone calls. They know the area, they know the people, the players, they can make the phone calls, they can advance the story in a way that I can’t. And so, for me, I just want to get the story out there.
There’s also times where you decide it’s not baked enough. And so, there’s been plenty of times where I’ve kept things that I thought were interesting. But to get a search warrant is a very low threshold compared to rising to a criminal complaint. And so, sometimes you may have to decide that there’s not enough there to blast this out and make someone have a very bad day, when a local TV reporter shows up at their house. And so, some of that is a judgement call. And to be fair, sometimes I’ve made the wrong mistake on things. Sometimes I made it right. It just depends. And I hope I learned in the last 15 years, how to do it right.
SG: You spoke about farming out stories to others that may be local to a story that’s directly connected to their part of the US. Do you also get asked by academics and journalists to actually help them do their research?
SH: Yes, so…every year, I train about 2000 journalists and researchers on how to use PACER. A lot of that is online training. And so, I provide, every quarter, kind of a free training to anyone who’s a local reporter. Like I said, I grew up with a mentor, this guy, Jim McGee, in the Senate who loved reporting. And I, as such, now love reporting too, and I see these news deserts developing, where you’d have whole swaths of states not having any reporters. And I think to myself, that’s not fair; at the very least, I should give them some level of tools, so that they know what they’re doing on these types of things. So, I try my best to train people as much as possible. Also, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I don’t want that knowledge to just go away. I want as many people as possible to know it, so that we can get some transparency in the system.
There’s also better experts than me on stuff, right? I had the transcript of Richard Reid [who] was the shoe bomber. During the early 2000s, he was going to set off a bomb on a shoe on an airline as part of an al-Qaeda plot. I wrote up very quickly what I had, but I also farmed that out to a bunch of terrorism researchers who had studied Richard Reid’s every move for years, because they’ll see that weird thing on that one page that I thought was inconsequential, that they know is a big deal. And so, let’s get that information out as much as possible.
SG: Yes, and speaking of al-Qaeda, my book on Ayman al-Zawahiri is coming out later this year. And I’m actually kind of almost wishing we’d had this conversation last year because I could have potentially utilised your skill set in seeing if there was something I missed in some court record, but I’m also now nervous in case there is something that was getting missed, because I’ll probably end up crying that I did miss out on something that you potentially can find!
SH: I won’t show you anything, but listen, a lot of researchers will reach out to me and say, “I’m writing a book on Sayyid Qutb” or “I’m writing a book on Anwar al-Awlaki. Can you find me every case that mentions him or her?” And I’ll track it down, and then that adds a little bit more colour to a book, or a little bit more context to a book, and so I’m always happy to do that. Like I said, for me, it is mental floss—meaning that I spend my days looking at the worst of society: beheading videos, horrible atrocities against civilians. And so, if you can give me a puzzle and say, find me every Anwar al-Awlaki case in the US in the last 10 years, and I can spend half an hour, 45 minutes just doing that and kind of clearing my line in doing so, great. And again, it keeps me a little bit fresh when I’m doing actual research for terrorism stuff.
SG: Well, that’s very creditworthy to you. Watch this space; there might be a lot of mental floss heading your way! Speaking about the terrorism dynamic, can you talk about where you see the terrorism threat today, not just, say, in the US, let’s start with the US, but also broader, globally?
SH: So, in the US, it’s kind of an interesting time. Think of it like a fractured threat. 5, 10 years ago, the FBI and most terrorism researchers, and actually just law enforcement in general, was largely focused on ISIS at the time, which made sense; it held territory the size of the UK, it had 50,000 people travelling there, it was a serious organisation that needed to be focused on. Now what you’re seeing is basically a fractured threat. And by that, I mean…if it was 90/10 jihadism to domestic terrorism, it’s now about 50/50. And so, the FBI has 1000 active investigations in all 50 states as it relates to ISIS. They’ve got 2700 active investigations for domestic terrorism, which is this catchall phrase for white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anarchists, left-wing, right-wing, everything in between. And then you had this really interesting bubbling up of what some have called kind of composite violent extremism. So, this is the idea that these kinds of people choose their own adventure: a little bit of incel, a little bit of white supremacy, a little bit of even Hezbollah, they throw it all together, and they shoot up a mall.
And that’s kind of where I find the most interesting dynamic, when we look at the threat picture in the US, is we don’t have structures to deal with that. The idea behind the 9/11 Commission was we’ve got to break down the silos and get us all working together. And in one respect, we did that for information sharing. In the other respect, we didn’t because we set up other silos. So, we have experts on al-Qaeda, we have experts on ISIS, we have experts on Hezbollah, we have experts on domestic terrorism. And so, if you see these new cases coming up, and the guy is talking about Chads and Stacys, he’s an incel. But he’s also talking about Anwar al-Awklaki, well he also likes al-Qaeda and ISIS. And if you don’t know those two different worlds, you are going to miss something. And we haven’t set up these threat pictures to understand that we’re dealing with basically…what the FBI call “salad bar extremism,” where they kind of choose what they want. And that makes this dynamic a little bit harder.
It also means the tripwires we’ve set up post-9/11 may not hit on some of these guys. They’re not necessarily reaching out to people overseas or known, respected terrorists. They may not be on the normal platforms, and so it becomes a little bit harder. From the law enforcement perspective, they can understand groups. You give them al-Qaeda, you give them the Oathkeepers, they’ll create a bulletin board with yarn everywhere, and everyone’s connected to who, old-school mafia kind of takedown thing. But if you look at the attacks that have happened in recent years in the US, they tend to be individuals who had no connection to known groups, right? Think of the Buffalo shooter or things like that. And so, they don’t hit against the tripwires. They’re also more difficult for law enforcement to wrap their head around on how to address it.
SG: With your work, can it provide a window in assessing the future challenges? Obviously, you’re looking at current ongoing cases, and you’re finding nuggets throughout your research, but can the work you do maybe demonstrate a pattern of terrorist dynamics that we don’t necessarily pay much attention to, but because you’re looking at all the cases, you’re seeing plots, you’re seeing investigations, does that together form a bigger picture, like you talked about the mosaic earlier? Does it form a mosaic as to what we could have to deal with down the road?
SH: I think so. People that are extremely online as researchers, they will notice these trends very quickly, but folks that are kind of tangentially so may not. And I’ll give you an example. When we were doing the Fort Hood investigation 15 years ago, we looked at all the cases where Anwar al-Awlaki popped up before Nidal Hassan. And you saw a sharp rise, probably about a year before that, where individuals were always citing him or always reaching out to him. And if you had looked at those 15 cases, you’d be like, “Okay, Anwar al-Awlaki seems like a really important guy in the homegrown violent extremism world, we need to pay more attention to him, or his lectures are having residency, so we need to dive into that.” And so, you do see that play out in a lot of these other cases now, which people have the most influence and also which platforms. If you look at the recent filings, it’s going to be all Discord all the time. So that tells me, if I’m a researcher, let me get away from Facebook and Twitter for a little bit, let me try this platform, and let me dive into that area because this is where my guys are going. And so, you do get a pattern in the system.
Maybe I’m overthinking this, but sometimes I find a lot of the FBI analysts and agents, they know a lot, they’ve been on these cases for years, and they want to tell someone. And so sometimes, they will put some interesting stuff in footnotes in public documents and hope that someone sees it. So, a great example of that would be, there was a Boston case of two guys who got arrested for attempting to travel to ISIS, one of them had been killed by the police because he had a knife. And in the memo for that, they had a footnote that mentioned that another guy in New Jersey had travelled to ISIS and had become a high-level commander in ISIS. There was no need for them to put that footnote in. I then took that footnote, cross-referenced it with the videos they’ve referenced, and found that the Zulfi Hoxha from New Jersey was the American in all of these ISIS videos and was a commander in those aspects, and then wrote an Atlantic piece kind of exposing his background on it. I’ve never talked to the Boston guys that worked that case, but I kind of feel like they wanted to get that information out, and they were hoping somebody would pull the thread on it.
SG: That’s a really interesting dynamic and sort of, I guess, a case study of how we can actually work and come together. Do these principles of research, can they also be applied when you’re looking at, say, hostile state actors and their potential role? Is there a way of seeing a pattern emerge with them in a similar way that we’ve been talking about terrorism?
SH: Particularly the court records, yes. If you look at how Iran uses actors in order to push information through, you have a number of cases like that. If you wanted to get a sense of, say, how Hezbollah is funding their operations, you’d look at cigarette smuggling in North Carolina. Or if you wanted to get a sense of how Russia was trying to encourage disinformation during the election, you would look at a number of other cases where they’re kind of adding into Facebook comments in random court filings in Illinois. And so, you do get a sense of it. You also get a sense of whether the priorities have changed. And listen, sometimes it’s false positives, right? Sometimes you see more cases because the FBI is focusing on the cases more. And sometimes you see more cases because those state actors are acting more or acting differently than they were. So, if you look at, say, Iran and the plots they’ve put against dissidents, or John Bolton, or things like that, so those are types of cases you didn’t see, say, 10 years ago. You saw mostly more of a kind of fundraising, smuggling gun type of operation, and less of an operational tempo behind it. And so, the question then becomes, have we changed our law enforcement approach to refocusing on that, and we’re catching things that we hadn’t caught before? Or is that state changing the way they’re doing things on this? And so, you have to be aware of that when you’re doing it, and you have to caveat the hell out of it when you write your analysis, but it’s worthy of looking at.
SG: Most definitely. Final question: we have a lot of budding researchers that listen to the podcast. You’ve provided such a wealth of your knowledge and experience and how you go about doing things, but if you were going to encapsulate things, if you were going to provide advice to people that want to be the next Seamus Hughes, what would you guide them, advise them on doing?
SH: Two things, I think. First is find mentors. The reason I’ve been relatively successful in things I’ve done is because people took a chance on a punk kid when he was a 20-year-old intern in the Senate. And they put them under their wings, and they taught him as much, and they let him make mistakes, and they pulled him aside and said, “You made mistakes here, but this is how you get better” and things like that. And having those mentors was vital. And not just one, but a bunch of them from different experiences. I have one who was a former reporter, I have another one who was kind of a former congressional staffer his entire life, I’ve got another one who’s very good at other things. And so, getting all those things together, you get a sense of how to be a more holistic researcher. Now, I spend a lot of time on PACER but don’t get pigeonholed in one area. I know that court records give me a little bit of a window, but I know if I don’t get on a plane, I’m not going to see the full picture. If I don’t go talk to someone and actually see what happened in an operation, I’m not going to get a sense of the whole thing.
And the other thing I would say is just be curious. And don’t assume that you know the answer before you start. I never ever write a report with a conclusion already done. When I walk into an analysis of, say, homegrown terrorism in the US post-caliphate, I thought I knew where it was going, I looked at the data, and I said, “Actually, it’s going the opposite way,” and not being afraid to say that. I’m giving way too many examples and way too many suggestions, but I would say, don’t be afraid to be wrong. I’ve written an op-ed that said that it’s important to have a material support to terrorism clause for domestic terrorists; I wrote it for The Washington Post. About a year ago, I wrote another op-ed saying we should not have material support to terrorism clause for domestic terrorism. Why? Because I got convinced that I was wrong, or I got convinced that it wasn’t worth the political fight to do so. And being okay to have different opinions or changing your mind on things is actually quite important. I never want people to read my analysis and know what it’s going to say before they read it.
SG: Well, these are all very important suggestions and words of wisdom, pearls of wisdom, I should say even, it’s really important what you’re saying, and especially about mentors. I think I could definitely endorse that as well, because I don’t think I’d be where I am without the mentors that I was able to have. And hopefully, that can also then continue when someone gets into that position of authority, that they can then in turn guide others as to how to do the work. And your experiences have been really important for that.
SH: One thing is I block off a couple hours every two weeks to talk to young researchers and people in the field. So, if your podcast listeners are listening to this, and they want to get a sense of national security careers, or journalism careers, or things like that, just reach out to me, and I will make time, because people made time for me 20 years ago. And so, you should feel free to do so.
SG: Well, definitely. I’m sure a lot of people are going to take you up on that. Be careful what you wish for, I should just say!
Well, Seamus Hughes, you’ve been really, really gracious with your time. It’s been fascinating to talk to you, to get your understanding of how you do your research, and hopefully you’ll consider coming back to DEEP Dive in the future.
SH: Of course. Thanks for having me.
SG: It’s been our pleasure.
Thank you for listening to this episode of NATO DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP). My producers are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.