behind the news

The Challenge With Anonymice Is Getting a Lot of Them

Ron Suskind discusses his new book The One Percent Doctrine, his use of anonymous sources and how the U.S military targeted al-Jazeera.
June 30, 2006

Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine, has been a conversation starter for the two weeks since its publication. Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, got deep inside the workings of the CIA and Bush administration in the post-9/11 era. Among other front-page revelations, his book reports on a 2002 plot to poison the air of the New York subway system and that the U.S. intentionally bombed al-Jazeera’s Kabul bureau.

Gal Beckerman: Talk to me a bit about access. It seems that so much of what you have been able to uncover here in your book was dependent on a very high level of access to government officials. How did you get these people to talk to you? And also, what are the challenges of working with so many anonymous sources?

Ron Suskind: The challenge is that you need a lot of them. A few anonymous sources can be problematic, but having a lot of them gives you a kind of wholeness of perspective. You can cross-reference people. And you need to be able to check back with them. There are sources involved in this project who have spent literally dozens of hours of conversation with me. And I’ve also been able to give them a sense of what the whole elephant looks like. They usually know just a piece of the puzzle; they know the trunk of the elephant, they’ve seen the tail. And as you go forward, you are able eventually to construct it piece by piece, and then you do a full and frank follow-up so they know where they fit.

GB: Why do you think these people trusted you with information that they had?

RS: Well, because they know that I will never give up their identity. What you’ll find in the book is that there are scenes that are very detailed from recent history that are not specifically sourced to an individual, to one person. And that is by design, so that we can essentially be there in the key rooms where decisions were made that affect the future of the country but not have the dilemma of having anyone being specifically exposed. And I will also say those who are trying to figure out who the sources are based on the characters mentioned are probably going to find themselves in confusion.

GB: Because there are so many different people you talked to for any one scene you’re describing?

Sign up for CJR's daily email

RS: Absolutely. If anyone feels that the characters in the book are the key sources for the information, they are going to find themselves simply wrong. The characters were often chosen based not on their disclosure of the pertinent information but because they walked through various dramas in American life. Those people are there because they are particularly good protagonists. They have walked a journey of self-awareness, of search-and-find, of learning often from mistakes and responding.

GB: One of the things that has been mentioned about your book in relation to this question of sources is that it seemed that much of the perspective you were coming from was being gleaned from CIA people using you to strike back at the administration. And I’m curious how you suss out when someone is trying to settle a score through you and when you are getting authentic material.

RS: Well, when you talk to enough sources you can pretty easily discern when someone is trying to settle a score versus the sound and verifiable historical record. And obviously in this project I am searching, and I think finding, the latter. I think some of the reaction of some people is due to these odd imbalances in this post-9/11 era which has to do with how politically irresistible it is to blame the CIA for everything — it’s pre-9/11 intelligence, or the post-9/11 supposition of Iraq WMD. By virtue of being the only agent, the only key player, [the CIA has] been very convenient. What this book is, is simply a correcting of the historical record. If that ends up rebalancing what people may feel about the CIA, that’s just a byproduct of getting it right.

GB: So a figure like Tenet, when people say the book is written from his perspective, you’re saying that you are simply balancing out the really negative perception of his role that has been out there.

RS: Yeah. Look, the fact is that George Tenet messes up plenty in this book. There are plenty of things that George Tenet, I suppose, will not like at all. But none of the people around Tenet can deny that this is the real story of what’s going on inside the CIA during a seminal period.

Whether you like them or not, what’s undeniable at this point is that the CIA, as the lead player in the intelligence community during the post-9/11 era, has been the point of the spear in this global war on terror, this cat-and-mouse game around the planet, man-on-man war, lighting up the battlefield, trying to find out where people are, using intelligence, which is as much a weapon these days as mortars and gunpowder. This is really what went on. When people read the book, they say it reads like a spy thriller with the future of the planet at stake. The fact is that the dilemma of how we need to know what we need to know in time is an intelligence function. And like it or not we’re going to have to figure out what spies do and how they can start doing it better.

GB: Because most of the sources are anonymous, there is an implied contract with your reader that they trust you, yourself. I wonder if you can talk about that, if you think about that as you’re writing the book.

RS: Well, I’ve built up readers over twenty years in journalism. And part of the trust that readers have is because in some cases, many cases, they’ve read other things that I’ve written. And over the span of twenty years, everything has proven to be solid and correct and true, all that appeared in the stories I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, in The Hope in the Unseen, a standard reading in colleges all over the country, in The Price of Loyalty, in the New York Times Magazine, and now in this book.

I think over time readers are saying, okay, this is a Suskind offering, this is what he does. It’s more vivid, it moves. The anecdotes are offered not just because I happen to know certain things, but everything in this book is placed where it is because it advances a broader narrative idea, it helps frame the story, rather than here’s everything I got, let me just slap it down on the text. That’s not what I do. Readers know that at this point. Things are in this book for a reason.

GB: So it’s a similar phenomenon to a Woodward book, where people have built up so much trust that he feels he can write a book where he doesn’t list any sources.

RS: Obviously Woodward is the standard-bearer of this era in reporting. I think that as a fan of Bob and his work, one area where we are a little different is that my books tend to be more analytical in their framing, in trying to frame the thinking around an issue. And Bob, of course, provides enormous insight into the key rooms and counsels of state, kind of a granularity, you-are-there. But I think there is plenty of room for both of us.

GB: Because one of the criticisms that I’ve seen of your book is one that Woodward gets, too, and it has to do with these incredibly precise quotes. You have to wonder how, unless you were literally a fly on the wall, could you be sure, for example, that the president told George Tenet, “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” I’m curious how you decide to include something like that, how do you ensure that it isn’t just one person’s skewed memory of what they thought they heard?

RS: The fact is that in a book like this, even though there are a lot of disclosures, there are often just a few quotes that are very resonant, that have legs, and the fact is that those quotes are things that people remember because they are so telling, they are so resonant. They often remember not just the next morning, but the next week, the next month, the next year. Often, there are many people in various rooms. Often the participants with one or two others come out and brief others as to what was said. Especially in that some of the key quotes in the book really frame the struggle that we’re in. And so what I do with those quotes, is that I get more than one source. And almost all of the key quotes are not just things that people heard, but that they reacted to, because they are markers for the individuals involved with this struggle that they use to guide their path.

GB: But you’re taking on a pretty heavy responsibility putting down a quote on the record that you weren’t actually there to hear.

RS: The participants understand that in terms of the sourcing of the quotes, they are multi-sourced, not only in terms of those who heard them, those who reacted to them, those who were guided by them. And the fact is that they have experience with me, many of them in previous work, and so they have no doubts.

GB: You mentioned on CNN the other day, pretty emphatically, that the U.S. had bombed al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul. I wonder what implications you think this has for other instances where it appears al-Jazeera was targeted by the administration — and particularly this memo in which Bush apparently joked or didn’t joke with Blair about bombing their main headquarters in Qatar.

RS: The many sources I interviewed about the U.S. government’s conflict with al-Jazeera are sound and impeccable on exactly what occurred here. I think what the al-Jazeera conversation prompts is the potentially productive dialogue that we need to have as to what the intentions of the U.S. government is toward institutions around the world. It is not an area of dispute as to what we looked at as our options in November 2001 and then what we did to send a message to al-Jazeera.

The conversation, however, continues as you go into the summer of 2002, eight months later, when the emir of Qatar, the ostensible owner of al-Jazeera, ends up handing to the CIA some of the most precious intelligence we had received up to that point, which he essentially lifted from the files of the star reporter of that network, Yusri Fouda, who I think is a fine journalist. Fouda had no idea what the emir was doing. But essentially he came back, he briefed his bosses that he had the biggest scoop al-Jazeera had until that point, that he had visited Khaled Shiekh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al-Sheib, the 9/11 planners, two of the most wanted men on the planet, in April, in Karachi, in their safe house. They had sent a message to Fouda and he had gone through a long labyrinth to get there. He kept it under his hat. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. He brought it to his bosses in June. They all agreed to keep it quiet. They passed it up the chain and the emir of Qatar summarily reported it to the CIA, offering the location of these two most wanted men. Three months later in September Pakistani and U.S. forces raided the apartment. They almost caught Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. They did catch Ramzi bin Al-Sheib, the biggest capture thus far in the war on terror. They also got KSM’s family.

This raises another set of questions. What the book does is it simply raises question after question as to how we might best conduct ourselves in a new kind of war. And it also raises questions as to the actions of the U.S. government and what principles are guiding those actions. Al-Jazeera is, in some ways, what we in the United States have been hoping for in the Arab world, an independent media outlet. I will say only this: Our mixed feelings about al-Jazeera are probably tantamount to our mixed feelings about various Arab democracies that might emerge in that part of the world because, in a way, al-Jazeera is like CBS or NBC, but a little bit different.

The U.S. needs to think clearly, not just in a tactical response mode, but clearly as to what it does, why it is doing it, and does it comport with U.S. principles? And I think the al-Jazeera incident, on both ends, is part of that conversation.

GB: What do you think about the way your book and its revelations have been covered in the past week? Has there been too much focus on the sensational aspects at the expense of the bigger picture you’re trying to paint?

RS: Look, we live in a very partisan environment these days in America, and I think it’s an old journalistic saw that if it’s a controversial story and you hit it down the middle, neither side is going to be completely pleased. Both sides will have things that roil them.

But ultimately both sides will see that this book was not written to advantage any side in the partisan struggles of these days. It simply is the best historical record, at this point, that might be offered to the public as to the real nature of this new kind of war. Both sides are taking bits and pieces — this part we like, this part we don’t. And it has not fit neatly into the playbook, the game plan, or the strategies of any political position. That’s the way I think journalism tends to work when it is working.

I think people in all parts of America are yearning for the material, the basic matter, to have a productive, public dialogue. It’s what Americans are about. The purpose of this book is to try and help that along. To say, at least now you know the facts of the case, what the real threats are, what the threat matrix is. It’s not having to do with some of the yellow [alerts] and the orange [alerts]. It has to do with something that has frankly been invisible to the American public. Now it’s visible, along with the one percent doctrine, which is the guiding principle that has shaped U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. We can have now, I think, a real discussion. That’s the goal of the book, to make that more possible than it has been.

Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.