Brad Thor's 'Full Black' is Frighteningly Steeped in Reality

Few, if any, successful authors actually majored in creative writing in college. Even fewer writers also majored in film and television production, and then get their series of novels turned into a major movie franchise. Then again, not every novelist is Brad Thor, the lucky bastard whose latest thriller is Full Black.
 
“Some guys are into sports and they do box scores,” Thor said, explaining how he got interested in national security issues, the basis for his books. “Ever since college, when the Soviet Union was crumbling, I said, ‘What’s going to be the next threat?’ And I saw it as radical Islam, and said, ‘This is interesting stuff,’ so I just started studying it.”
 
Though his hobby might be weird, it has also been very lucrative for Thor, who has penned ten New York Times Bestsellers and also serves as a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Analytic Red Cell program. His books revolve around a fictional character named Scot Harvath, a former member of the Navy’s SEAL Team Six, which gained international fame when it took out Osama Bin Laden earlier this year.
 
“I’ve always said, you don’t kill the kidnapper ‘til he tells you where your kids are,” Thor said of the SEALs shooting Bin Laden. “And so I wondered why we didn’t snatch this guy, and ring him out like an old dish cloth.”
 
As a thriller writer, Thor hopes Bin Laden is still alive. “I’m hoping the guy isn’t really dead, that he’s sitting in some black site right now and we’re pulling his fingernails out trying to get information from him,” Thor said. “Now that would be a gutsy move.”
 
He doubts the Team Six guys knew specifically that they were going after Bin Laden that night in Pakistan, but believes they knew it was a high-value target. But it also could have been Ayman al-Zwahiri, Al-Qaeda’s number two guy who goes by the hilarious nickname “Bumpy” because of a bruise on his forehead.
 
“That’s like one of Santa’s elves,” Imus aptly observed, then finally asked Thor about Full Black, not that its publication was the reason for his presence today or anything.
 
“I base all my books in reality,” Thor told Imus. “I went to a lot of the special operations and intelligence people who help me out with my books and I said, ‘What’s the one thing that keeps you up at night?’”
 
A few of them came back to Thor with a plan called “unrestricted warfare,” which was drawn up in the late 1990s by a military that was hostile to the U.S., but knew it would never beat the U.S. military. Instead, it would cripple the country form within.
 
“They had all these clever tactics for how they were going to do it,” Thor said, adding, “It’s funny, because a lot of the stuff this called for back in the 90s—creating financial catastrophe here, trying to collapse our financial markets, actually even co-opting AL-Qaeda to hit the World Trade Center—all these things this plan called for actually happened in the real world.”
 
Hilarious!
 
For more depressing laughs, and to scare yourself silly, go buy Full Black today!
 
-Julie Kanfer