KE: There’s never a single standard. One element is the way the interview works. I’ve never disclosed this before. The interview is three, well, four parts. Part one is always [gathering] general background on the individual being interviewed. Depending on that person’s significance to the story — if they are a minor player it can last forty-five minutes, if they’re a major player it can last two-and-a-half hours. Now, the reason that is done is several things. One, to give me a sense of how the person talks. Two, to give me a sense of who is this guy, where does he come from, what is his background? What are his influences? And when you talk to someone for two-and-a-half hours about their background, you are learning a lot of that. And three, to disarm them. When a reporter sits down with an interview subject, the first thing they’re thinking is that they are going to talk about the center of the storm. But suddenly we are talking about their favorite counselor at summer camp. And when you go on and on and on down that path, people relax. They also begin to learn how the interview works in a very non-threatening environment. When you are talking about people’s childhoods for the most part — a few times I’ve been surprised thinking to myself “this is the most horrible childhood I’ve ever heard about” — but for the most part it’s because it’s so non-threatening that people get used to speaking in the level of detail that I’m looking for.


Part two is what I call the overview. It can last about six hours. Again, I’m talking about for a major individual. You go from start to finish of the story. You do that, usually, without reference to documents. I do, however, do that with … [a] timeline that I bring to every interview that I’ve constructed prior to that.


Part three is the drill-down, where you go back and go through the exact same time period, day-by-day. That day-by-day drill-down where things get very, very specific. By then — I hate to say this—- people have been trained. By then, people have had their blowup at least once. Where they go, “Why do you need to know this kind of information? What you asking me about this for?” Somebody will get frustrated at me asking what kind of bread was on the sandwich they had for lunch. It gets frustrating.


Part four, the last part, is the specific drill-down. In other words, going back to areas of a problem. What’s useful — throwing aside the background — about [taking the individual being interviewed through] three renditions of the same story is that each time I’m going over the same topics, and at the end I have knowledge of thirty hours ago we talked about this and you said things slightly differently. People are not able to maintain a complete falsehood — or even a minor falsehood — with that level of specificity without slipping up. And I’ve experienced that.


The other is, when you’re doing it coupled with everybody else you can get, what I settle on is the consistencies. Whatever is consistent is the story. Now, I’ve had people that have denied things that are provable through the documentation. That’s the other thing, I would encourage [readers] to look at the notes and sources because it does give you the who-wins-and-who-loses standards. Documents are the foundation of the story. Documents define the story. And each document I give a different level of weight. The video or audio of the very thing I’m talking about is the ultimate winner. But if the documents establish something — and establish it clearly — I’ve had someone deny that something I had on video happen. He didn’t know I had it on video and I didn’t alert him to the fact that I had it on video. That told me that this guy was willing to lie. …


I don’t ever come in and say, “Ha, I know you’re lying,” at the beginning. That I’ll just save until the final drill-down when I go back and say there are some problems here. Primarily, that allows me to see how far this guy will go. So, when you take all that material, and you put it all together, and you have the foundation of the documentation that gives you a very good protector against deceit.


Whereas, I don’t think the traditional journalistic practice of two sources [for every fact] even gives you protection against mistakes. I don’t do “majority rules” on these things. My favorite story came out of my last book. I had four people in a room. I interviewed them and one of them said they had listened to a voice mail and three of them said they had listened to a tape recording. The question came down to “Where did the tape recorder come from? ” “Who picked it up?” “Who brought it in?” “What kind was it?” And people were having problems answering the question. The guy with the voice-mail, when I went back to him, said it wasn’t a tape recorder, it was a voice mail. Now I keep circling around and around and around, because I have this clear conflict. If I’m going to describe what they’re doing I can’t figure out where the tape recorder came from and I don’t have them picking up the phone to listen to the voice mail, so I have a problem. And it took four or five rounds until finally everybody said “Oh, it was a voice mail.” Now, if I had been a newspaper reporter and I had talked to two of them and they said it was a tape recorder that would have ended up in the paper.