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The reporter and the terrorist
Posted by Michael Putzel • January 02, 2020
Jennifer Parker called it a “stunning and addicting podcast.” In a review for the online writers’ magazine Across the Margin; Parker wrote, “I couldn’t recommend more getting hooked on American Jihadi. I am.”
Us Weekly pronounced it “explosive.”
Rolling Stone asked, “What’s it like to accidentally become confidants with a terrorist?” Forbes said it looks like a movie play by Endeavor, the famed William Morris talent agency turned producer.
American Jihadi, the new podcast from Endeavor Audio, is the story of a secret connection between Omar Hammami, an American-born terrorist, and investigative reporter Christof Putzel. Putzel reveals their clandestine connection in an eight-episode series now unwinding on a wide array of popular podcast networks and directly from the producer. [You may know Christof is my son.]
Putzel wonders if the remarkable communications they shared may have crossed an invisible line between reporter and source.
“I’m a third-generation reporter,” he said in introducing the new series, “and for years, I’ve been chasing Omar Hammami, a Southern Baptist from Alabama, who, by rapping an online video, became the face of Jihad in Africa and one of the most wanted terrorists in the world”.
The dramatic podcast is woven from hours of recorded phone calls between the two young men; hundreds of pages of decrypted emails; propaganda videos that Hammami made for Al-Shabaab, his Islamic terrorist organization rooted in Somalia, and extensive interviews with Hammami’s family and friends. It traces the American’s transformation from gifted and popular high school kid in Daphne, Alabama, to African terrorist with a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head.
Hammami was ambushed and killed by a rival Al-Shabaab faction in 2013.
American Jihadi’s first four episodes were released before Christmas. You can listen to them now at Endeavor Audio or wherever you get your podcasts. The final four will be posted on consecutive Mondays beginning January 13 and ending February 3.
Christof Putzel is the host and Executive Producer of American Jihadi in partnership with Endeavor Audio, a division of Endeavor, the entertainment conglomerate. Other Executive Producers are Adam Levine, Josh Gummersall and Adam Harrison at 222 Productions.
