The Man Governments Send to Negotiate with Terrorists | Tom Gregg

Hostage negotiator and UN mediator Tom Gregg on Afghanistan, the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner exchange.

He has spent more than twenty years in rooms most of us will never see. Tom Gregg is a conflict and hostage mediator — the man governments send when they need to talk to people they officially refuse to communicate with.

He was the UN's man in eastern Afghanistan, the most dangerous corner of the country, when a full-blown insurgency against America took hold. In September 2006 a suicide bomber assassinated Governor Hakim Taniwal, the man he worked alongside — a former university professor who'd come home from exile in Australia to try to rebuild his homeland. The next day a second bomber walked into the funeral and blew himself up among the mourners who'd come to bury him.

He has mediated in Somalia, Nigeria and the Sahel, negotiated with kidnappers to bring hostages home, and run back channels for the United Nations, the U.S. government and the World Health Organization. When Kabul fell in August 2021, the UN sent him in to open the first face-to-face talks between the United Nations and the Taliban leadership.

He almost never gives interviews, because almost none of his work can be discussed. This is one of the very few long conversations he has ever done.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Tom Gregg sits down with me to explain how the invisible business of negotiation actually works. We talk about:

The 2014 Bowe Bergdahl exchange: five Guantánamo prisoners for one American soldier, and how a deal that big actually gets done

Flying into Kabul days after the Taliban takeover to open the UN's first face-to-face talks with the new regime

The Haqqanis: how the family America armed to fight the Soviets became the deadliest enemy the U.S. faced in Afghanistan

Washington armed the father. The son now runs the police. How Sirajuddin Haqqani went from a ten-million-dollar FBI bounty to Afghanistan's interior minister

The morning a suicide bomber killed Governor Hakim Taniwal, who he worked alongside in Gardez, and the second bomb that hit the funeral the next day

Why those two attacks were the first sign that America's plan for Afghanistan was already failing

How a kid from Australia ended up as a UN Political Affairs Officer in the most dangerous corner of Afghanistan

The backpacking trip that changed his life, and the time he almost got mugged in Mexico City — the strangest night of his life

Negotiating vaccine access with armed groups, and what it takes to get a nurse safely into a war zone

Private diplomacy at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, and what an NGO can do that no government can

What Afghanistan looks like in 2026, with Pakistan now bombing the same provinces the insurgency once crossed from

How Bono once told him he was against Bill Clinton engaging Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin leader the U.S. had banned for twenty years — and how watching that gamble help deliver the Good Friday Agreement changed his mind about talking to your enemy

Why the most consequential work in the world is done by people whose names you will never learn

His PTSD, how he got better, and why he believes communication is the only thing that ever really ends a war

If you're interested in war, hostage negotiation, Afghanistan, the Taliban, intelligence, diplomacy, or the hidden systems that decide who lives and who comes home, this conversation goes somewhere almost no interview does.

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