Legacy

Content warning: this episode describes the aftermath of 11 September 2001, including torture and civilian deaths.

How does a country go from the sympathy of the entire world to invading a nation that had nothing to do with the attack?

What does a blank cheque from the UN Security Council actually buy?

And if torture only counts as torture when the pain is equivalent to organ failure, what exactly is everything below that line?

Peter Frankopan follows the response from NATO's Article 5 to the caves of Tora Bora, while Afua Hirsch — then a trainee human rights barrister — describes what the war on terror did to British law.

Within twenty-four hours, NATO invokes Article 5 for the first and only time in its history. Within three days, Congress passes a sixty-word resolution with a single vote against it; it has since been used to justify American military operations in more than twenty countries. Afghanistan is meant to be narrow and quick, and for five weeks it looks like it. Then bin Laden walks over the mountains into Pakistan, Washington's attention swings to a country with no connection to the attacks, and Colin Powell goes to the United Nations holding a small glass vial. Ten years later he is found living a mile from Pakistan's military academy — and by then the war no longer needs him. Part two of three, twenty-five years on.

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[0:00] The scorecard: two invasions, $8 trillion, 900,000 dead, and the Taliban back in Kabul
[3:56] Nous sommes tous américains — Le Monde, the Brandenburg Gate, and candles in Tehran
[5:39] Article 5, invoked once in NATO's history, to defend America from nineteen men
[12:37] Five weeks to Kabul — then a cave complex at Tora Bora, and bin Laden walks away
[18:53] "These are facts. They're not statements." Colin Powell at the United Nations
[26:32] Afua's first day as a pupil barrister, and a man accused of training the hijackers
[33:19] The torture memos: pain that only counts if it's equivalent to organ failure
[41:50] A compound in Abbottabad, a mile from Pakistan's military academy

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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who taught you that the Mongols only destroyed things?

What if the empire that sacked Baghdad also invented blue and white porcelain, elected its leaders, and let the Khan's first wife decide on war?

And why do the Mongols still have a worse reputation than any other empire in history — including the ones that lasted longer and killed more?

In this Legacy Inbox episode, Peter is joined by Marie Favereau, one of the world's leading historians of the Mongol Empire, whose work has done more than anyone's to dismantle the story of a bloodthirsty wave that destroyed everything in front of it.

A small group of nomads from what is now Mongolia — probably fewer than a million people — reached Central Europe within sixty years. They did it partly by fighting in winter, when everyone else went home, and by bringing their families and their herds with them so they never had to depend on the villages they passed through. Then they stopped conquering and started building: cities, workshops, tax systems, religious debates at court, and a trade network running from Korea to the Mediterranean. Marie Favereau is co-curator of Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World, at the Royal Armouries in Leeds until 1 November — almost 250 objects out of Mongolia, most of which have never left the country before.

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[0:00] Peter introduces Marie Favereau, and the 248 objects that have just landed in Leeds
[5:48] Ridden, eaten, milked, worn — why everything starts with the horse
[9:47] Khans are elected, can be deposed, and the senior wife decides on trade, diplomacy and war
[13:22] "If you just build your empire on the family, you have a dead-born empire"
[16:44] Blue and white porcelain turns out to be a Mongol invention
[36:12] Why the Mongols get a worse press than any empire that came after them

Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World runs at the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, until 1 November 2026. Adults £9, concessions £7, under-16s free. Co-curated by Marie Favereau and Natasha Bennett.
royalarmouries.org/leeds/whats-on/genghis-khan

Marie Favereau's book The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World is published by Harvard University Press.

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Content warning: this episode describes the events of 11 September 2001 in detail.

What if the deadliest terror attack in history began with an American chequebook?

What if the men who carried it out had once been armed, trained and celebrated by the West as freedom fighters?

And what if the whole thing was set in motion more than twenty years earlier, on Christmas Eve?

Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan begin the story of 9/11 two decades before it happened, in the mountains of Afghanistan.

July 1979: Jimmy Carter signs off half a million dollars of covert aid to Afghan rebels, and a CIA programme called Operation Cyclone begins. By 1987 it is running at $630 million a year, matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia. Among the thousands who answer the call to fight the Soviets is the softly spoken son of a Saudi construction billionaire. Twenty-two years later, nineteen men walk through airport security in Boston, Washington and Newark carrying box cutters that nobody had thought to ban. This is the first of three episodes marking twenty-five years since 9/11 — where al-Qaeda came from, what happened on the day, and the moment almost the entire world stood with America.

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[0:00] The story doesn't start in New York — it starts in the mountains of Afghanistan
[2:17] Christmas Eve 1979, and Soviet transport planes land at Kabul airport
[4:04] Operation Cyclone: Carter, Brzezinski, and a plan to build Moscow its own Vietnam
[7:48] Romanticised as freedom fighters — and the Saudi billionaire's son who answers the call
[12:01] Afua puts it to Peter directly: did the CIA fund bin Laden?
[16:38] The Soviets leave, the West loses interest, and bin Laden names his new organisation
[23:32] A cloudless blue Tuesday, and a primary election in New York
[29:39] Two and a half hours, nineteen men, and the deadliest terror attack in history

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How does a man go from calling Donald Trump a kook and a jackass to becoming his closest ally in the Senate?

What do you give up to keep a seat at the table, and what do you actually get for it?

And when the obituaries settle on calling you a pilot fish, has anything you did survived you?

Lindsey Graham flew home from Kyiv on a Friday and was dead by Saturday evening, aged 71 — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch on a career built almost entirely on proximity to other people's power.

He was orphaned in his early twenties and raised his younger sister. He was the first in his family to go to university, served in the Air Force, and reached the Senate in 2002 by taking Strom Thurmond's seat. For a decade he was the Republican who legislated with Democrats: the Gang of Eight immigration bill, one third of the three amigos alongside John McCain and Joe Lieberman. Then he called Trump a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot and said the party would be destroyed and would deserve it. Then McCain died. A year to the day before January 6th, the Republican strategist Steve Schmidt gave Rolling Stone the line that has followed Graham ever since: he is a pilot fish, the small fish that swims beside the shark and takes on its colouring. Peter and Afua on whether that is the whole story, and on what a seat at the table is worth.

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[0:00] A flight home from Kyiv, a cardiac arrest on Capitol Hill, and a death nobody saw coming
[6:14] A restaurant, a pool hall, two funerals, and a younger sister to raise
[9:13] The three amigos, and the decade Graham spent legislating with Democrats
[11:42] A kook, a jackass, and a party that would be destroyed and would deserve it
[12:46] "McCain died" — the two-word answer to how everything changed
[17:24] The pilot fish, the shark, and what a seat at the table actually costs

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who decided that the thing stopping people travelling was not money, but choice?

What happens to a country when the holiday is designed so that the visitor never has to leave the compound?

And of every hundred dollars you spend at an all-inclusive, how much do you think actually stays there?

Gerard Blitz opened his first holiday village on a Majorcan beach in 1950 on the theory that what people wanted was not adventure but the removal of every decision — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch follow that idea all the way to the gated resorts of the present.

The all-inclusive is now worth close to a hundred billion dollars a year. In the Dominican Republic it accounts for more than seventy per cent of hotel rooms and helps generate over forty per cent of GDP. And of every hundred dollars a guest spends, roughly five stays in the local economy. The rest is repatriated to foreign operators, international airlines and global supply chains, along with the food flown in so that nobody has to eat anything unfamiliar. In water-stressed places, guests can use ten times what a local resident uses in a day. In Jamaica there is now a movement against the privatisation of beaches that local people can no longer reach. Afua has just come back from an Arawak village in the Guyanese Amazon where all-inclusive means something entirely different. Peter, who has enjoyed rather more package holidays than he lets on, is not convinced the answer is to take them away from people.

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[0:00] Sun lounger wars at dawn, and the buffet as a way of life
[7:58] Gerard Blitz, a Belgian on a Majorcan beach, and the founding of Club Med
[14:59] A hundred billion dollars a year, and the country where all-inclusives are seventy per cent of the rooms
[16:39] Five dollars in every hundred — where the rest of your money actually goes
[17:54] Ten times the water a local resident uses in a day
[26:47] The beaches in Jamaica that Jamaicans can no longer reach
[31:07] Plantations sold as celebratory places, and what the industry assumes you cannot handle
[34:14] Afua in the Amazon: an all-inclusive of a completely different kind

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.