A single explosion — 'It detonated right outside our house,' Baker recalls — helped propel Josh Baker, the creator of the BBC's hit series I'm Not a Monster, into his latest project: a deep-dive podcast about the disappearance of Austin Tice.
Tice, a former US marine who became a freelance foreign correspondent, vanished in Syria in 2012 while reporting on the civil war. If he is still being held, he would be the second-longest detained journalist in the world. Baker, speaking from Wales, said he and his team initially expected to be producing a more straightforward missing-person investigation.
'We thought we were looking for a missing person,' Baker said. 'What we fell into was almost like a Bourne novel, utterly extraordinary. A world of espionage, spies, dictatorship.' As the series unfolded, he said, it revealed layers beyond one individual's fate — including elements of state security operations and international intelligence involvement.
Baker also framed the project as a lens on broader themes. He described it as a story about American exceptionalism and a way to examine how the United States has positioned itself in a turbulent region. 'Through Austin's story, we also learn a lot about the last 14 years of the civil war in Syria,' he said, adding that the reporting takes listeners 'inside the regime's industrial complex of disappearance and torture.' He noted that by the time episode two begins in the series, 'Assad is gone, and we enter into these facilities.'
The podcast promises to weave personal, political and institutional strands: the fate of a single journalist, the intelligence and espionage threads that intersect with his disappearance, and the wider apparatus of detention and abuse in Syria during the prolonged conflict. Baker's previous success with narrative investigative audio has raised expectations for the new series, which aims both to illuminate Tice's case and to situate it within the long arc of Syria's war.
Baker's remarks, and the contours of the podcast as he describes them, underline how contemporary reporting can bridge individual stories and geopolitical narratives. The series will likely add to public understanding of Tice's disappearance while also illustrating the shadowy interplay of journalism, intelligence and authoritarian power in wartime Syria.