It is the week between Christmas and New Years so I wanted to do something a little different this week and bring you one of my favorite episodes from deep in the archives. Now, I started Global Dispatches ten years ago, in 2013. And back then, aside from the BBC, there weren't really any international affairs and world news podcasts. Today, of course, the landscape is a bit richer and I am happy for that--I don't view other international affaris podcasts as competition, but rather believe that a rising tide lifts all boats so the more the merrier. But ten years ago the podcast industry was in its infancy and the format of Global Dispatches was a bit different than it is today. I would sit down with people who had interesting lives or careers in foreign policy and international affairs and interview them about their life and career, with digressions about the historic foreign policy moments in which their or career intersected. I did around 200 of these longform biographical interviews over the first several years of the podcast. I did so many of these I can't name them all here, but some names you might recognize include George Mitchell, James Stavridis, Joseph Nye, Nick Kristoff, Robin Wright, Fareed Zacharia, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, Dennis Ross, Linda Thomas Greenfield, and so many more. These interviews are mostly behind a paywall at this point, and unlocked for paying subscribers via apple podcasts or Spotify. But for today, I wanted to bring everyone my 2016 conversation with Clarissa Ward. She is CNN's chief international correspondent. At the time, Clarissa Ward had recently snuck into rebel held territory in Syria, including Aleppo. And it was because of her several excursions into Aleppo that she was invited to brief the Security Council later that year. We kick off with a long conversation about the mechanics of sneaking into rebel held territory and the risks that entails. We then have a long conversation about how and why she became a journalist, including her time in Beirut and Baghdad.   And I have been thinking about this nearly 8 year old interview because in December Clarissa Ward became one of the first, if only, western journalist to enter Gaza without embeding with the IDF. She filed a harrowing report from a makeshift hospital in southern Gaza, which I will link to in the shownotes of this episode.