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- [00:02]
A
Listen, no real journalist will agree to sign this. Our job is not to be stenographers, but find out what's going on behind the scenes. What are people saying?
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B
Sign this pledge or hand over your Pentagon press pass. The administration has told defense reporters they must promise not to gather any information, including unclassified reports that has not been authorized for release. Otherwise they'll lose their press credentials. This is Sources and Methods from npr. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Every Thursday, we discuss the biggest national security stories of the week. By we, I mean those of us on the Nat Sec beat. For NPR today, I am with NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, who as of this moment, we are taping a little after 9am Eastern on Thursday. He still has that press pass. Tom, hi.
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A
Hello, Mary Louise. How are you? I still have it, but time's running.
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B
Out, I think, clutching it in your hot little hands. We also have with us Odette Youssef, who covers domestic extremism for npr. Because the other big NATSAC story this week is the president's move to designate antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Hey, Odette.
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C
Hey, Mary Louise.
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B
Hey. So before we dive in by way of welcoming new listeners, I want to explain that sources and methods is a term you may know from the intelligence community. It's shorthand for how do we know what we know? It's the name of our show, not just because we cover the intel community, but also because sources and methods are part of our work is journalists. And that work is what the Pentagon, it seems, wants to change with these new rules for reporters. So let's talk through how this move could impact Americans ability to know what our military is doing on our behalf in our name. Tom, you've been covering the Pentagon for how long? Like 28.
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A
Only 28 years.
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B
28 years. And you and I at one point, covered the Pentagon together. We were both Pentagon correspondents for npr. So just describe.
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A
And your desk was cleaner than mine, by the way.
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B
Yes. I did not eat my tuna fish sandwiches at the desk in the tiny booth that we shared. Sorry. People, aside from tuna fish sandwiches, describe what it was to cover the Pentagon before this administration. You would show up, you had your press pass in hand. Where could you go? Who could you talk to?
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A
You know, I keep telling people the Pentagon back then was kind of like a big city hall. You could go anywhere you wanted outside of the sensitive areas like the National Military Command center where they oversee operations. And you would often run into, you know, people like General Petraeus or General Mattis. He'd stop them in the hallway and chat up what's going on. You know, what should I be looking at? What are you hearing behind the scenes?
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B
You could doorstop them if they were not returning your call.
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A
Exactly. And they would pull you into an office and say, this is what's going on. This is what you should remember. And there are often daily gaggles or briefings about military action. Of course, now the press, Mary Louise is confined to the press area. There's one hallway and we can't walk the halls anymore. Defense Secretary Hagseth, get this, has briefed the twice in nine months. Despite all the talk of transparency, I have never seen that before. And soon we'll be tossed out of the building, as you say, unless we sign this loyalty pledge.
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B
What exactly does it say?
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A
Well, it says reporters must pledge not to report on classified or even unclassified material until it's released by the Pentagon. And if you do, you'll have your pass revoked. So no, listen, no real journalist will agree to sign this. You know, our job is not to.
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B
And I'll note npr, other news organizations have not yet said publicly what they're going to do. But you're saying, yeah, you know, listen.
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A
We'Re journalists and our job is not to be stenographers. But find out what's going on behind the scenes. What are people saying? What's the policy? Is it working? What weapons are you buying? Do they work? How much money is being spent? You have to hold government accountable.
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B
Yeah, I mean, just to state the obvious, a reporter who would sign this, they're effectively committing to reporting the company line and only the company line. Correct. And when the Pentagon says you can.
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A
Right. On their time spent, you're basically rewriting press releases, which is laughable.
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B
And what about beyond the Pentagon, like bases around the U.S. does this impact that ability to cover wars overseas?
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A
If they pull my press pass, I can't go to the Pentagon. I can't go to any US Military base anywhere around the world.
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B
Odette, hop in here. You're not covering the Pentagon, but you are trying to cover this administration and changes that it is making. We're going to get to some of those in a minute. Just broadly, are you feeling any changes so far in 2025 in terms of how you're able to report, how you're able to work sources?
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C
Well, I think it was really interesting that just last week one of our colleagues was on Air Force One coming back from London with the president and other members of the press. And Trump at that point had posted on social media that he intended to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. So our colleague asked, you know, how do you intend to do that when it's not really a formal organization? And the president basically asked if NPR has anything to do with Antifa. So this is a really sort of adversarial environment that the answer was no.
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B
For the record, Daniel Kurtzleben, the reporter in question, said, no, we do not, sir. And she carried on trying to question him. Go on.
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C
That's right. Yeah. But I mean, one of the really interesting changes for me has been maybe not necessarily in terms of my relationship with the administration, but just in terms of sources, willingness to speak on the record for stories about, on this topic. You know, there is a, there has been a bit of a chilling effect. I've, I've found, you know, people who used to go on the record with me just as a matter of course on domestic terrorism stories and extremism stories now saying that they want to be really only on background because the environment right now is so charged.
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A
You know, I've seen.
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B
Just explain, just, sorry, Tom, just explain that term. On background.
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C
On background. So, you know, they don't want their name. You know, they don't want us to use quotes from them. They don't want their name to be attributed in the story.
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B
So they're still talking to you, still sharing information, but much more worried about having their name out in the public domain in your reporting.
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A
Tom, you know, I agree with that chilling effect. A lot of officers I've known when they were junior officers in Afghanistan or Iraq, now two, three star generals, they're not returning my calls, even on background. And this retired three star general, I said, hey, just come on down to npr. We'll just talk on background. He said, there's no way I'm going into npr. I don't want to be seen going into npr. He had to go to my house for a background interview.
- [06:48]
B
Well, jump ball for either of you. Are there examples that come to mind where a top official or a press secretary were telling you one thing and you got a very different picture by asking questions of lower ranking, you know, enlisted folks, lower ranking officers.
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A
Tom, you know, I was thinking about this last night.
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B
Good afternoon. Wednesday's events in Baghdad were remarkable.
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A
You know, when Baghdad fell during the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, who was crowing about this success.
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And I think it's increasingly clear that most welcome coalition forces and see them not as invaders or occupiers, but as liberators.
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A
I remember walking down the hallway in the Pentagon and running to this army officer saying, hey, this is great news. Right? He said, tom, Saddam Hussein supporters are attacking our supply lines. We have to send troops back to protect them. And that's because, you know what? They never sent enough U.S. troops to Iraq. That was a scoop. Now, Mary Louise, I'm not allowed to walk down that hallway. Those kinds of stories, being on the ground with troops or talking with people at the Pentagon that know what's going on, those stories are now lost.
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B
Yeah.
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C
I mean, if I could jump in, I feel like I have a slightly different take on what I'm trying to frankly puzzle through in real time these days, which is that we've had a number of targeted attacks lately, certainly the killing of Charlie Kirk just a couple of weeks ago. And then yesterday there was this attack at an ICE facility in Dallas. And almost right from the get go after those incidents, we have seen administration officials, whether it's the president himself or the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, putting out on social media statements attributing those attacks to people on the radical left before we really know very much about even what transpired. And, you know, from what we have spoken to people about who are familiar with some of the evidence, sort of the characteristics of the evidence, if you will, that we saw in both of these, you know, these don't map out necessarily to ideologies. The inscriptions on bullet casings, for example, in both of these instances is something that is found sort of more generally within the culture of sort of people who are seeking notoriety for violence. And so it doesn't necessarily map onto an ideology, despite what we're seeing from administration officials. And so that's something that I'm trying to puzzle through right now. As we're seeing, you know, authorities say, oh, it's the radical left. We're trying to really figure out is it the radical left or is there something else going on here?
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B
Okay, we're going to pause after a short break. We're going to come back with more on the quote, unquote, Radical left with NPR's Odette Youssef and NPR's Tom Bowman. And we're going to turn to President Trump designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization and ask, is it actually an organization at all? You're listening to Sources and Methods from npr. After Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, was assassinated earlier this month, President Trump said that rhetoric from the radical left was directly responsible for the terror that we're seeing in our country today, end quote. This was before authorities had even ID'd a suspect. And he said he would go after organizations that fund or support political violence. Many of his allies have picked up that call in the days since. That is the context around this new executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Odette, first, the basics. What does this order actually say?
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C
So, as you said, it calls Antifa a major terrorist organization, and it directs executive agencies to investigate and prosecute anyone or groups that may be connected to Antifa. And it also particularly urges them to look at any individuals or entities that may be funding Antifa. And so this was sort of largely expected after President Trump had posted to social media the week before that he intended to make this designation. And we've also heard, you know, top Republican officials, specifically. I know Senator Ted Cruz spoke about this during a Senate committee hearing, you know, really imploring FBI Director Kash Patel to, quote, follow the money. But I do think it's worth noting that so far as regards the suspect who's been charged with killing Charlie Kirk, there is no known connection between that individual and Antifa.
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B
Okay, so I have so many follow up questions. First of all, designating something antifa, in this case a domestic terrorist organization, Just stay with that term, domestic terrorist organization. Is that a legal term? Like, what is it?
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C
It's not a legal term. There's no list of domestic terrorist organizations. And what's interesting here is that I think a lot of people have been at something that that might be closely related, which is there is a list of foreign terrorist organizations. So if you think about groups like Al Qaeda or isis, and there is a process to designate those organizations as FTOs, there is no process to designate a domestic terrorist organization. And this can lead to sort of like interesting outcomes where, you know, if somebody donates money to, like, their local KKK chapter, that's protected First Amendment activity, it is entirely within their rights to do that. If you contribute money to ISIS or Al Qaeda, you run the risk of serious criminal penalties. And so this is really new territory. This is an unprecedented designation. We've never seen the US Government make a designation of a domestic terrorist organization before.
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B
Well, and it gets into all kinds of questions about what is terrorism, what crime, law enforcement versus intelligence. Okay, I have another what even is it question. What even is antifa? Typically, if the government says we're going after an organization, it would be part of our job as journalists to say, let's get some response. What's the reaction from that organization? What do they say? What's their comment with Antifa? Odette, who do you call?
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C
Okay, so first of all, real basics, antifa is a shorthand way of saying anti fascist. Right. And so, you know, it's really, it's a set of principles, it's perhaps an ideology. And this question of whether it is a centralized organization is one that, you know, the Trump administration, during his previous term, really tried hard to establish, particularly in the spring and summer of 2020 when we saw these social justice protests all over the country after the killing.
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B
Of George Floyd back in his first term.
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C
That's during his first term. You know, your question of is it as an organization? So the thing about Antifa is that there are certain, like, nodes that you'll find in different places around the country, little collectives. Some of them actually do use the word antifa in their name. For example, there's like Rose City antifa. There's also anti fascist action, you know, down in the Atlanta area. So some of them, you know, do wear that label. But I mean, my experience reporting, there's.
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B
Not like a leader you can call.
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C
Exactly.
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B
So you speak for the movement.
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C
I have reached out to those collectives at times for stories I've worked on. And you run into this sort of frustration, frustrating experience that one often has with leftist groups, which is that you're like, can I have a statement or can I quote somebody on it? And they're like, no, you can't quote a person. And they're like, we have to mutually agree on a statement. And then like five days after your deadline, like, they send you back a statement and you're like, I don't have anyone to attribute this to. But that just goes to show, like, this is a completely different sort of. I don't know, I don't want to say the word organization because it's not an organization. It's a different kind of thing than I think, what people are expecting who are calling an organization.
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B
So a quick final thought from each of you. One thing standing out to me from this discussion is how much words matter, how much the terms we use matter. And what I'm hearing is that the administration is applying the word terrorist here in the case of antifa. We've also talked on past episodes, Tom Bowman, about the administration using that term to apply to Venice Venezuelan drug cartels. What does that framing do?
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A
Well, in the case of the Venezuelan supposed drug boats, it puts the military out there basically taking out these boats. There's no threat to them. They're not being shot at. There's no war with Venezuela.
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B
They're calling them terrorists, not a law enforcement issue, not a crime. Terrorist. Right.
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A
But you can call anybody a terrorist. And exactly what do you mean by that term? What's your evidence that this group terrorists. So I think that's the problem with the administration. They're just throwing out these labels. Could be antifa, could be, you know, the drug cartels.
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B
It's a big bucket.
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A
It's a huge bucket.
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B
Okay.
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C
Yeah. I mean, I think that there is, of course, a stigma associated with being labeled a terrorist. You know, that I think really could chill activity. I think that it will be interesting to see if there is an attempt, you know, perhaps in Congress to create a category of domestic terrorists. And if that happens, it really could go beyond just being a term that's thrown around and one that carries real criminal penalties. And that would really, I think, significantly affect organizing on the left right now.
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B
We'll take a quick break. When we come back, reading recommendations for the nat.sec curious and the espionage obsessed. You're listening to Sources and Methods from npr. Before we get to our last segment, a reminder that you can email us at sourcesandmethodspr.org, send us your questions, send us your feedback, send us your tips. We got one nice note this week from Brooks, who writes that diving deep on national security has been such an interesting midlife exploration. Brooks has a question for us. He wants to what book recommendations would you make to someone who wants to read the classics of the sources and methods world? Well, I'm thinking we could probably each fill a library, but let's take it on. Let's throw out a book or two that each of us is reading or has been thinking about recently. Tom Bowman, I was thinking of about.
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A
20 books, but I'll give you one book that I really enjoyed. And you know this book as well, Mary Louise, Ghost wars by Steve Cole.
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B
So good.
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A
It's the hunt for Osama bin Laden, how long it took, the delays, the missteps, the mistakes.
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B
I will very much second that endorsement. I've actually been sitting interviewing a former CIA official asking about the chronology of something that happened after 9 11. And he said, hang on, let me check. And he pulled Ghost wars off his shelf because he said this is I haven't found an error in it yet. It's the definitive accounting of what happened. Okay. I, as a writer of spy fiction, I'll throw in fiction and I will throw in a trio of espionage novels by a man named Jason Matthews. Jason Matthews was longtime CIA, three decades in the clandestine in service. The first of this trilogy is called Red Sparrow. And because of Jason's background, I loved reading things about a brush pass or a dead drop in Gorky Park. And he also has a lot of great recipes. Each chapter ends. There'll be a scene where a spy, a KGB spy, is meeting her source in, say, the Lithuanian embassy. And at the end, he gives you the recipe for the canopies that were being served as they're swapping secrets at the embassy. So it's a ton of fun. Odette, what do you got?
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C
Well, so I feel like covering domestic extremism. I'm sort of the weird stepchild on the NATSAC team. And so I am not going to recommend any books from the canon of literature that animates the extremist world in the United States. I usually have to escape that, actually.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And so my latest escape, I just finished reading Hawaii by James Michener. Definitely recommend it. It is a tome and it starts with sort of the primordial origins of the islands and goes all the way up through World War II. But it was an excellent read.
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B
I haven't read it. I'm going to add it to my. To my stack. Thank you so much. All right, that brings us to our last segment. As always, Osint Open source intelligence. Revealing details. Just sitting there in plain sight. If you know where to look, I will throw one in. And what I'm going to throw in is news. MI6 has ventured onto Instagram. MI6 is the British equivalent of the CIA. The official name is SIS Secret Intelligence Service. Secret. So this is not an agency that is prone to oversharing on social media, but they opened an Instagram account this month, September, and they put the chief of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, out there in a video. He's on camera. It's a recruitment video. Have a.
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A
We need your help. If you have truths to share and the courage to share them, I invite you to speak to us.
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B
And what follows is instructions for accessing a new secure YouTube channel, which will then help you access their new Tor portal called Silent Career. I will note that the CIA has done something similar. This is how you recruit people to share sensitive information with you in the digital age. You go on Instagram, but the question.
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C
Is, are they on signal?
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B
Mary Louise, they're steering you. And it's very interesting when they steer you to the secure YouTube channel, they're saying, make sure you do it on a computer that is not in any way associated with you. Make sure that you're on a secure vpn. So it's the whole download for how they want to hear from you, Tom.
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A
Well, the Pentagon will soon come up with tougher physical fitness standards for the troops. Secretary Hegseth wants to restore what he calls a warrior ethos. But secretary might want to work on his own physical standards. There's a video circulating on the Internet showing Hegseth with RFK Jr.
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B
He and I are going to do our part and encourage American youth to do this challenge. And the challenge is to do 100 push ups and 50 pull ups in any order you want in under 10 minutes.
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A
They're doing pull ups and his pull up needs a little work. He's kind of jerky. His knees are up. He's not really going over the bar. And another video has surfaced of Congressman Jason Crow from Colorado. He's a former Army Ranger saying, secretary Haig said this is how you do a pull up and you have to fully extend yourself and then pull your chin up over the bar. I do pull ups every morning and I think about that every time I do a pull up that I have to fully extend. If the Marines saw you doing that, they would say, bowman, do it over.
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B
Having never managed to do a pull up at once in my entire life, I can pass no judgment. But Odette and I have been in plank position for this entire podcast.
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A
I hate doing those.
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B
That's our story. We're sticking to it. Odette, what do you got?
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C
You know, this isn't exactly related to intelligence, but I think we've all been feeling that the news cycle on our beats has been just really particularly relentless the last three weeks. And so, you know, this week there was a lot of talk on TikTok about the rapture. There was a South African TikTok user who was predicting that it was going to be happening on the 23rd and the 24th. It did not happen, as I'm sure you all have noticed. But honestly, I was kind of amid covering all the horribleness that has been unfolding in this country in the last month, I was kind of like, well, that wouldn't be the worst thing, would it?
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B
We are still waiting. That is NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Youssef joining us from her home office in Chicago, and NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman here in the studio with me in Washington. Thanks you two.
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A
You're welcome.
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C
Thank you.
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B
Before we go, if you are enjoying the show and you would like to help support our work, please do. A really easy way to do this is rate us and review us on your podcast platform of choice. This only takes a moment. You can do it right now while you're listening. And in a world of algorithms, it really does go a long way toward helping new listeners find us. Finally, speaking of good books, as we just did, we will be back on Monday with a new kind of episode. This is my one on one conversation with former CIA analyst turned spy novelist David McCloskey. We're gonna talk tradecraft and the blurry line between fact and fiction. When you are wr, those kind of espionage books look out for that episode Monday afternoon. And of course, we will be back with our regular episode next Thursday. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Thanks for listening to sources and methods from npr.