‘It detonated right outside our house’: the explosion that started an incredible podcast series

Josh Baker is the journalist behind the BBC’s smash hit I’m Not a Monster. He’s back with his most extraordinary investigation yet – to solve the mystery of Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria 14 years ago

In 2012, the US marine turned freelance foreign correspondent Austin Tice disappeared in Syria. If he’s still alive, he’ll be the second-longest detained journalist in the world. That, says Josh Baker (speaking to me from Wales), was the podcast he thought he was making: “We thought we were looking for a missing person, and what we fell into was almost like a Bourne novel, utterly extraordinary. A world of espionage, spies, dictatorship.”

It’s also a story of American exceptionalism – the way the US saw itself in relation to the rest of the world. Moreover, “I don’t mean this in a crass way,” Baker says, “but through Austin’s story, we also learn a lot about the last 14 years of the civil war in Syria. We really go inside the regime’s industrial complex of disappearance and torture. As episode two begins, Assad is gone, and we enter into these facilities.”