In 2012, a former US marine named Austin Tice crossed into Syria as a freelance correspondent and was never seen again. If he is still alive today, he would hold the grim distinction of being the second-longest detained journalist on earth — a fact so extraordinary that it almost resists comprehension. It was this single, haunting statistic that drew Welsh-based podcast producer Josh Baker toward what he believed would be a straightforward missing-persons investigation for the BBC's acclaimed series *I'm Not a Monster*. He was, by his own admission, entirely wrong about what he had walked into.

"We thought we were looking for a missing person," Baker explains, "and what we fell into was almost like a Bourne novel — utterly extraordinary. A world of espionage, spies, dictatorship." As the series unfolds, it reaches far beyond the fate of one American journalist, pulling the listener deep inside what Baker describes as Assad's industrial complex of disappearance and torture — the very detention facilities that fell open to scrutiny only after the regime's collapse. The timing of the podcast's second episode, which arrives precisely as Assad himself is gone, lends the series a quality that no screenwriter could have engineered.

Baker, now 37, arrived at this kind of storytelling through years of immersion in conflict: night editing at the Times's foreign desk, reporting from the Middle East, and directing *Battle for Iraq*, a joint Guardian and PBS production in which he was embedded with Iraqi special forces in Mosul while explosions tore through the streets around him. That experience, he suggests, taught him the difference between the official story and the one that actually exists. What makes *I'm Not a Monster* remarkable — across all three of its series, including earlier investigations into an American woman drawn into the Islamic State caliphate and the case of Shamima Begum — is the sheer density of sources that Baker has cultivated. "I have never received so many leaks from so many different places," he says, describing intelligence flowing in from every direction imaginable.