Ronan Farrow interview on Weinstein, Trump & US foreign policy | Unfiltered with James O'Brien #33

[Music] it's a remarkable year that you've had in the context of the British media you've gone from being more or less unknown to being the Pulitzer Prize winner responsible for probably the biggest story of a decade in the context of celebrity reporting and of course the the launch of the me2 movement but I'm going to begin just by highlighting the three areas that we're not going to talk about on the grounds perfectly reasonably that you're sick to death of talking about them and they're not particularly fruitful your estranged from your father Woody Allen on the perfectly reasonable grounds that he's now also your brother-in-law your paternity is your business and nobody else's and similarly your love life but but the fact that you stipulate that you don't want to talk about those things that speaks of it I certainly haven't stipulated that no have you no no well I'm happy to observe this because III appreciate the the pre-emptive gesture of wanting to focus on the work the reporting and the the foreign policy and before that on the background that created the journalists that you've become because it seems to me when you speak of being inculcated with your mother Mia Farrow's Catholic schoolgirl world view this altruism that was not but that was your reality you were born into a into a family with myriad siblings many of whom had severely disadvantaged backgrounds and there's a sense in everything you've done since that you have a deep desire to help I hope that I can be a small part of the solution and that does I think flow from having grown up in a family where the world's problems were very much at my doorstep because my siblings were adopted from all over the world with backgrounds a very difficult disability and abuse I'm adopted and when I've read you talk about your siblings you seem to have how can I put this you don't have a very high regard for biology your love for your siblings doesn't seem to be in any way informed or diminished by whether or not there's a blood link is that fair I'm happy to hear that that comes through because that is absolutely my worldview and you know the ethical responsibilities of family and the love that holds the family together has nothing to do with biology and blood ties when did you realize that your childhood was a little extraordinary I mean I think it was fairly apparent from the beginning point of reference how you need to compare it to well you know I was growing up in a predominantly in a small town in New England where we were the only family of color we were every minority under one roof you know I never saw another a black person an Asian person other than my own siblings in that community so you know we always looked different and people sort of were puzzled and said oh what's this about self-consciousness on your part did you have a sort of thing I wish we look like all the other families but plenty of self-consciousness but not about that I was always very proud of the family yes yeah what do you think that is you know I imagine my mother did a tremendous job as a very strong single working mother in you know always raising us from square one with a certain set of values about equality and about the importance of addressing problems where you see them and there was never any kind of you know regret about the kind of family I had or shame or stigma you know I had several cases where my black siblings in particular would get called you know the n-word in school by you know I think less from malicious people and more just kids trying on epithets for size and you know be interesting to see how different families dealt with that in different ways there was actually there was one prominent Broadway performer who I won't name to spare her son who was I think like seven or eight when this happened but who her son had you know used this word about one of my siblings and she came over with like pastries and tearful apologies and you know obviously that that kid was set straight but so I saw the ways in which you know race is such a complicated issue in America and in which I guess in the eyes of some this kind of family I had could be a source of stigma but I never internalized that for a second I always viewed it as a really wonderful positive thing to fly a flag about did you ever get into fights I wasn't really a scrapper in that way I mean it's funny people see in my work that I'm quite confrontational women afraid of a fight but that's not really my manner interpersonally and I actually you know I have to tangle in this line of work with some very aggressive people and people who use you know bullying as a tactic and kind of sort of intimidation and try to get you on the wrong foot and destabilize you and you know I know how to deal with that but it's definitely not my manner and I actually you know I don't enjoy that kind of sparring as some people do I find it inefficient I found a counterproductive yes I wondered how we were going to broach the subject of your sort of prodigal status as a child because again it's something that you're probably a little bored of talking about but for a British audience in particular some of the simplest statistics are staggering and it occurs to me as you answer that question that you answered as if there was no distinction between Rowan and the child and Rowan and the adult when I asked if you got into fights I kind of had an image of a of a kid getting into scrapes whereas the answer you gave and I suspect it did apply to Rowan and the child as much as it applies to right and the adult was was was very measured and almost utilitarian you don't you didn't get into fights because they wouldn't have achieved anything yeah I think that's right you know I definitely I think I probably had more temper than I have now as a kid I think that is one of the things that you know developed in a positive direction over time but I was never a big fighter I would say any flare-ups of that were very occasional you're right it's a really interesting and insightful way of framing things to talk about how sharp it is distinction any of us draws between our childhood selves and our present-day selves I don't really draw a sharp dividing line it feels to me much more like I've certainly evolved and I'm sure and suffer ibly annoying as a kid and I hope that well while I'm probably still somewhat annoying as an adult I've sanded the edges off a little but I don't reflect on that period in my life like I'm looking back on a different person I think probably because I had fairly adult responsibilities from a fairly young age as you alluded to yes this is enrolling at college yeah ap recent to me you were 11 years old when you enrolled at university university 11 and 11 years old yeah and then I got into law school which in the States is a you know three years graduate degree at fifteen or sixteen but I deferred to work for a couple of years and you know none of this seemed particularly extraordinary in the context of growing up with again a working single mom who had had to enter the workforce as a teenager you know she was on the soaps because that was the family business and she needs to support the family so there was always this kind of attitude of you go out and you do the hard work and you know a lot of people do it earlier rather than later how did it affect you socially I mean you you have to kind of adopt them it's your demeanor I suspect that came very naturally to you but you can't really make friends with 19 year olds when you're 11 can you okay I mean you'll have to be the judge of how socially dysfunctional I picked small idiosyncratic schools you know Yale Law School is very small you know fraction of the size of each Harvard law class and you know even when I went in did a road scholarship out here at Oxford you know these were first of all very rarefied opportunities and I know tools a grant of all you know extraordinary groups of people to be involved when you know the the Rhodes or Yale laws the same way every classmate is a like paraplegic ballerina astrophysicist and they just blow you away and it keeps you humble but because of those smaller settings I think I was able to be in environments that were actually quite nurturing and when there was an age gap people like you know big siblings and were they yeah a few you have friends you have friends from from you I have I have close friends from from the college years and then you know it actually the timing worked out quite nicely in that because I deferred for a couple of years and worked when I started law school I was sort of at exactly the age when I should have been an undergrad at Yale and I was able to have both groups of friends they kind of the somewhat older law school friends and then also the undergrad friends who were in my age group so if I'd asked you at eleven what you wanted to be when you grew up what would you have said it's a really interesting question I mean I was passionate about science as a kid you know I read voraciously and read a lot of you know Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan and you know first was very much into the idea of you know astrophysics and sort of the fundamental questions about the origins of the universe and and then developed I think a more tangible love of like turning over stones and looking at worms and I read you know about gerald durrell and you know the work of naturalists and loved that and i think when i got to college it was really just finding that it's much harder to make a significant impact in the space of naturalism these days not that there aren't great people working in that space but that's quite an interesting admission well just that I you know I felt like if I wanted to make a you know real scientific stride you know it's really it's probably not how to be in write it's probably not going to be in animal behavioral studies I concluded and as I'm saying it aloud I'm realizing you know of course that that isn't fundamentally the case you know we could actually translation write the life-saving work that scientists are doing are not necessarily as much in that in that space and and so I became a biology major and you know was in pre-med for a while and then frankly I was just so bad at organic chemistry that I abandoned ship and like so many lawyers I'm a lawyer created by my inadequacy as a scientist you must ago six of Doogie Howser jokes a little bit yeah so we might might I just wasn't you know if I had been just a hair more brilliant maybe I would have moved out the doogie howser Darrin it's interesting and very honest to talk about impact being a being a consideration at such a young age so much so that it would steer you away from one course and perhaps towards another one it was all not just you know a an ancillary consideration it was really the fundamental philosophy that I was raised with for better or worse you know I have to figure out my feelings about this as I eventually raised my own kids you know I was not raised in a family where the number one goal was presented as happiness it was always the worldview that I was given that you know happiness is important but much more important is making the world a better place in whatever way you can and you know the the kind of role models that were held up in my childhood and you know whose life works I read about and internalized were you know people doing kind of selfless humanitarian work and of a level that I you know have not lived up to and probably will never because I'm I'm not that selfless but uh but those were sort of the you know the ideals that I was given which is quite an old backdrop for a journalist these days is it actually I mean these days maybe so I in my mind you know journalism is absolutely in the space of public service it's you know it's the only constitutionally protected profession in the United States yeah the power of the Free Press to hold the powerful accountable is tremendous and indispensable so I it was always you know an endeavor that flowed from wanting and not always succeeding in making the world a little bit better in the conversation a little bit truer and richer and and you get to look under stones a little bit figuratively yeah that's right Lucas I think you're correct to draw that way so Richard Holbrooke who course became your mentor and and special envoy to Afghanistan impact that he was right when he described you as having a great sense of destiny well destiny is something else though right because destiny is the conviction that you're gonna be in the history books in some way which I think that well I think impact is often silent and low-profile you don't necessarily need to be lauded yeah I think I mean look I'm grateful anytime I am because I'm also under plenty of fire and I've you know taken my beatings in the press I've been you know mercilessly essentially hazed publicly in various acts of my career and you know I'm grateful for any commendations and support for the work I'm doing but when I think of impact that's that's not what I'm talking about you know I think the you know Doctors Without Borders medical professional in a refugee camp we never hear about but I've you know seen these kinds of people in my work of my travels like that's someone who's saving lives right so that's a it's it becomes actually a very kind of like a utilitarian almost a numbers game of like how many people are you helping at how much and and I'm not really in that space where it's about you know how many people can I tangibly actually save but I do hope that you know the journalism I do lends some strength to people and elevates some voices that need elevating so when did that light come on when did the journalistic ambition first my Master's you know I grew up around stories and loving classic cinema my grandmother was Maureen O'Sullivan Jane in the Tarzan movie is one of the first American Irish movie stars also fish in select yeah yeah which people possibly didn't realize at the time she she was brilliant and a great rockin to see how she she knew her way around a damn good story and she actually was briefly what was called at the time of today girl you know a female anchor on The Today Show and obviously I was then on that set decades later anchoring and she is a minor footnote in journalistic history because her I think quite prompt dismissal from that job paved the way for Barbara Walters to take that job and I recall the fundamental problem with my grandmother as a news anchor was that she was such a good storyteller about herself and not at all interested in reading up on the news and that she was immensely charming and funny and that doesn't surprise me to hear that that was the demise of her TV anchoring career but that was that was your lodestar was it knowing that your grandmother had done it and then it was I just give that as an example of you know I grew up watching you know her but also films in general through the 30s and 40s and you know the the works of great directors you know I grew up on anymore Bergman and when well movies and Kurosawa movie is in Hitchcock and and would read scripts you know growing up like I always in recent years have always just delighted in like devouring whatever the scripts on the black list are and you know very often so this blacklist is a an organization in Hollywood that they sort of pick the best on produced scripts every year so that's sorry that's an inside baseball it's like it's a huge commendation if you're writing a script on spec and it gets its blacklist looks pretty yes and you know there's some great films that get made out of those scripts eventually and then sometimes they never get made or sometimes it's an incredible script and then it gets made into a mediocre movie that's sure I you know I also grew up loving fiction um you know as a reader and one of my goals with war on peace was to make sure it read like a novel it was vital and character driven and had a lot of density of observational detail thing but you kind of get the bit in between the fiction and the stories you want to be as someone who told stories that are true well I think therefore when I was in situations like you know a in refugee camps in Darfur and talking to women who were survivors of rape when you do this yeah it you know I got to see her advocacy early on and then I also ended up partly because of that there's no having opportunities to do my own advocacy and was immensely grateful for and informed by that and when listening to those stories especially the ones from survivors of sexual violence in those more zones it became very apparent that there wasn't enough reporting going on and indeed in some of these places that the press couldn't get in in sufficient numbers I mean they were obviously fantastic beat reporters in all of these places but there were some occasions where I was seeing things that not enough reporters could see and so you know I think it was immediately apparent to me that telling stories about that was a powerful way to maybe instigate change for the better or at least more understanding and I began submitting op eds to you know the big American newspapers and started getting stuff printed while working in foreign policy as well as visiting refugee because yes commander Richard Holbrooke swinging about the age of 21 which in normal years is about 40 and Faroese 21 yeah so by that time I had already been to law school I had already you know written extensively for some years and these were just rinky-dink small time off Ed's but I did develop relationships with those Abed yeah and foreign policy and human rights and heavily reported you know a lot of them with a lot of detail from on the ground and these places I was and I did develop you know ongoing relationships with publications where you know there would be stretches of several months where I'd be doing a column a month for The Wall Street Journal you know I did some stuff for The Washington Post the LA Times and it's funny because thinking back on that the landscape has changed even since then media wise those op-ed pages don't command these sort of exclusive force of influence that they did even ten years ago there's now so many more platforms online for people to write and but at the time it was um I was very grateful that I didn't have connections to any of those newspapers and truly I think op eds were and to an extent still are a rare kind of meritocratic way in that like you're standing fool you're looking at their inbox full of pitches everyday and they'll run you know an op-ed from a no-name college student with a with a vivid and important experience they'll run an op-ed from a wonky policy expert they'll run an op-ed for a celebrity or not so it was an interesting kind of level playing field where you know it was may the best man win and I was right well yeah I was writing about you know stuff that I thought was important and I was grateful to run into editors who then said okay we'll run this did you get scared pitching did you fear rejection because you haven't had much in your life oh that's absolutely not true I think I've failed as publicly and spectacularly as you know people can and of course everyone fears rejection I fear rejection terribly but you can't let that stop you you have to keep hammering away at things that matter you're referring to your TV show being axed yeah I mean look there's also all the all the jobs of course that you know I haven't gotten and that I fought for and all the near misses well you'll have to wait for the memoirs yeah no I've been I've been rejected all the time and criticized you know very very harshly and I don't think you know mercifully I guess those parts of one's biography don't stick as much as you think this year that there will be a time yes especially as we go the Atlantic between us so we've they just you get these successes god I love this for this filtered version of me but ya know I've had my share of being savaged publicly as well and I think it's you know it's one reason why people have sort of grudgingly you know just focused on the work and I think a knowledge to the importance of these women's stories without me creating any noise because I think in the American media they know that I've been sort of put through my paces and sufficiently beaten up that they can lay off a little bit not that I don't get plenty of attacks still but how thick is your skin honestly that's a great question that I'm probably not equipped with sufficient perspective to answer honestly I would hope that I can tolerate a lot now having been through a lot of withering public criticism and mocking I you know I guess it's not so much about having a thick skin in the sense that you don't care or are unaffected by it which you know I'm too insecure to ever probably get to that point but you have to have a thick skin in the sense that you know you can feel the hurt of that kind of public criticism and still carry on with your work and the benefit of doing work that is not really about you and matters for the sake of other people who are doing a tough thing is you know you don't have that much time or space to keep thinking about yourself know you don't give yourself much time and space to think about yourself no you can't mean look maybe you say you can't you can you choose not to yeah no I suppose I do choose not to and maybe look it would take a better shrink than I am to uh to you know fully psychologize like is my you know breakneck schedule of you know trying to turn these stories around and writing these books you you were on the phone when you came here you've got something bubbling away clearly there's myriad unfinished projects I've picked up from other interviews yeah routinely put in 18 19 hours days you missed your sister's wedding staring the Weinstein did she forgive you she was just texting and she's lovely and I'm so grateful that she seems to have forgiven me for that I'll keep making that up to her over the years yeah I mean look as I said it would it would take you know some outside perspective to judge whether some of that is is deliberately trying to eliminate the space to contemplate those issues of self consciousness too deeply but in general I think you know I try to be self reflective about my own flaws and foibles and to address them without allowing myself to get mired in the the terrible echo chamber of public criticism and particularly social media era criticism yes it is a very different age I had I wrote a cover story for an American magazine called W Magazine about Miley Cyrus a few years ago who I thought was a fascinating character and sort of at the peak of her breakout moment there's kind of a canary down in the coal mine for this yeah a little bit and it was always sort of an interesting and dynamic artist more so than the platform she had be on allowed and a very forthright motormouth of a character you know we spent hours and hours together and she was high as a kite and let loose and said a lot of colorful things but you know she probably more than most of us had to grapple with this incredible public pressure and you know the combination of adulation and ridicule and felt I think at that time very embattled you know it was right when she was getting all this criticism about this mtv awards ceremony where she had been particularly salacious and people were shocked and clutching their pearls and you know she described withdrawing to her sort of you know walled mansion in the Hollywood Hills and you know saying like people ask me on dates and they want to go out and go to the movies with me and you know why would I ever want to go out like I have a chef here I have a TV here like I don't want to leave you know there's paparazzi everywhere I got chased by them it was her against the world to an extent but one of the insights you know that I gained from that because it was sort of a heightened version of what I dealt with is we both both talked about the distorting and traumatic influence of like reading about yourself online and the fact that you know everyone who I guess would have been relegated to you know ranting drunkenly at a bar now has Twitter account means you know every time you turn that thing on there's the full range of like I love you I want to marry you and also which is of course unearned and dangerous to internalize and that creates monsters and and equally I hate you you know get cancer and die die in a fire and then the more serious death threats they're like oh actually this is a little scary of the fun this woman and and you you know if you expose yourself to that in full force all day every day I think it really does kind of destroy your psyche and there's nothing there's no room for anything but thinking about yourself and your reputation and all these things that ultimately are noise that I think can impede your ability to do work that matters and and you know it's so funny to be quoting Miley Cyrus like you know a source of sage wisdom but even you know as at that you know you know she did say like I have enforced a ban on looking at Twitter or Google Inc for myself I have turned off the Google Alerts I I have you know strenuous laments with for her mental health and know clearly that was necessary for her to you know do her art in a way that was clear minded when did he last do nothing for several hours consecutively and and look I am fearful of the answer because obviously it's necessary for all of our mental health to do nothing for a few hours now and then I did get a good night's sleep on [Music] they did have cameras at Heathrow for my first TV performance right after just sitting and contemplating and doing nothing I mean I had a lovely dinner with a source a couple of nights ago yeah it's the answer is it's been a while okay then that may be why the work has ended up being so important I'm acutely aware of the compromises and the ways in which it's dangerous to not have space for a well-rounded existence and I do try to counterbalance the work when I can but this is a particularly you're on a roll can sleep on it I had an experience recently that you know really hit me hard where I learned that a friend from law school had had died tragically of ovarian cancer and I hadn't even known that she had been fighting as it came on quite suddenly and you know she was in a fair ly large category for me of you know friends that I cared about very much but I hadn't been good at keeping up with and she was a remarkable and generous person who was had given up a profitable legal career to do you know good works at a legal clinic and you know I was hit hard by both the loss but also the realization that you know thank God she died surrounded by you know family and friends and you know it does throw into relief these decisions we make early on and how they echo in all of our years and I certainly know plenty of people who have you know been absent parents and you know bad friends and lay down to die at the end of it I think quite lonely and bereft of something really important so it's a balancing act and I I am very fortunate to have wonderfully accommodating friends and family around me that I can talk to constantly and I I don't feel alone in it but yes it's a busy time this is a very busy time let's begin then with the pitch meeting at NBC where he proposed a multi-part series looking at the sinister underbelly of Hollywood I think and they said no no that's that's not correct they said did they said yes to that and that got greenlit and I worked for several months and I should do I should warn you I'm only gonna give you the broad strokes on this because there's more to come on that story down the line and that you know I still think we're in a window where it's important to focus on the underlying allegations which clearly with these latest reports and including ones I've been involved in you know are still coming to the fore but yes you know the behind the scenes progression was that I had retained a green light on this series and a lot of the edges got sanded off and some of the tougher stories that were supposed to be in there about rape pedophilia and race in Hollywood got killed but there was still a green light on a story on harassment and casting couch culture and it was in the course of reporting that story that you know I began to get leads about the weinstein allegations and interview people on the record and then very rapidly you know obtained this mythical NYPD sting tape which included a pretty direct confession from him that he had assaulted someone and was explosive exactly right so there was a lot of evidence and you know a lot of testimonials and eventually all of the sources from within the weinstein company and Miramax who were quoted in the New Yorker story that ultimately ran you know many of them went on camera and it began to coalesce quite fast I didn't it went into the New Yorker because NBC didn't give you that's rightful broadcast and this is where you're gonna confine yourself to broad brushstrokes because indeed that's absolutely fine it's your scope thank you who said do you think you would have got these people to talk to you in quite the way they did had you not yourself being a form of Hollywood royalty you'd have to ask them that I got the chance but I'm just asking what you think yeah I don't know you know I know it's an astonishing level of access and it is well I I think that you know look when you're recounting the most difficult experience of a lifetime and it was so reach Ramat izing to talk about it I don't think there's a lot of confidence gained by knowing that you know someone has family members in the industry um I think that's you know neither a cost nor a benefit no I I do think that the fact that I had been an outspoken Rapporteur on sexual assault issues and you know had come forward and supported my sister in her allegations against Woody Allen after a very careful review of those facts you know people understood that I was someone who would put my money where my mouth was if you will and would have some degree of sensitivity about just how hard this was for them and yet you're adamant that you're not an activist you're a reporter I completely understand that distinction but I'm not sure it's quite as clear as as you sometimes suggested yes I mean yeah I don't claim that it's it's a completely bright line between those two roles um I do think that there's an important distinction there yes my objective in telling a story you know like the Eric Schneiderman story this week or even like um you know war on peace which is quite a bit more polemical is not necessarily to affect policy change in a direct immediate sense it's to expose hard truths that hopefully can catalyze that conversation so others can affect policy change and I do think that that's that's a meaningful distinction I don't know in an investigation like this with a with a plotted out outcome or a specific hope necessarily and you know to give you an example if these allegations against Eric Schneiderman had not checked out to the extraordinary extent that they did you know you never would have been reading about it today for people who don't know this is the attorney positive official yeah the New York Attorney General could Sony general who had been a prominent advocate of the me to experiment as it were and has now stepped down and my colleague Jane Mayer at The New Yorker and I wrote this story about these horrific allegations of domestic violence and an abuse against him and in each of these cases I would only be too happy to have the facts tell me that there's you know a different side of the story or you know people have got it wrong yes um you know I'm guided by the facts and I interrogate the facts skeptically always scoped it always always I know you don't because we had an interesting and we're only halfway through the interview and I promise you that we will devote more proper amounts of time for the new work because I'm conscious that that's why you're in Britain and it couldn't really be more timely with the yeah yeah Iran announcement today but I just want to ask you a couple more questions about this well partly actually if we're honest because um the profile of this but we'll enjoy is going to be built partly upon the success of your other jobs and more beer in a completely different in a completely different field the most had stuff that the the former Mossad agents that uh Weinstein would routinely employed to quell some of these stories to keep them you you were moving into really scary territory when you were doing this investigation yes I mean one of the things that I am very proud that we exposed in that series of New Yorker stories about Harvey Weinstein was that he through his very powerful prominent you know Democratic Attorney David Boies hired you know muscle essentially these combat-ready former Israeli intelligence agents who assumed false identities and built front companies and went after women with allegations and reporters when did you first begin to grasp the the sheer scale of it rather than it just been quite what the adjective would be but but I suppose expectable maybe scandal as opposed to being utterly almost bonkers yeah I think the formal term may be bonkers I mean it really did feel at times like living in a movie and maybe that's a reflection of you know that scenario being created by you know a producer who's thought on some level he was living in a movie I mean it's an extraordinary step to take to hire these kinds of characters to do this kind of intrusive human intelligence work Roman almost in his scope of the kind of yeah in terms of the debauchery coupled with ordinary - yeah yeah take your pick exactly that exactly there and when did you know that you'd got over the hump as it were when did you know that you were that you'd got the story and you would be able to go to pressors with it I knew that I had the story very early last year you know by the time the moment I heard that recording the moment I had you know a sufficient number of conversations with women with allocations that were to uncannily similar and were produced independently you know and I think it was apparent to every journalist who looked at it even in those early months that this was a massive story backed by really explosive evidence kind of sense that in your mind we possibly haven't even seen the half of it yeah I think that's right I think that you know the behind the scenes story of why it didn't run then is very much tied into the systems that you're asking about and the campaigns of intimidation and you know these individuals digging up blackmail material and all of these colorful and elaborate lengths that not just Harvey Weinstein but powerful people in general can go to to warp and distort systems of justice and orderly process what are your feelings towards Weinstein personally now because your social circles must have crossed the case yeah and only in a really positive way had you know sort of cocktail party level interactions with him and you know felt totally neutral on him or sort of had the relatively fond perception that people did that he was this colorful maybe ill-tempered but in creatively genius which is and will get forgiven isn't it because of the content the position of journey and and you know I point out that the presence of these systems commanded by powerful people to suppress and intimidate more vulnerable people is a theme that runs through all of this reporting yes it through the Weinstein story and the Eric Schneiderman story where women are accusing him of using the power of its office to intimidate them and through the story I just broke about those same black cube agents these undercover operatives in some cases using the very same front companies that they came after me using going after proponents of the Iran deal yes and in the testimonials of whistleblowers in war on peace these are all stories about sometimes overlapping forms of the abuse of power yes by there's no morality is there that that perhaps is the myth of ordinary people that they presume that there's a moral compass in place even in the highest corridors of power but in fact we seem to be living in an era and that that's why the reference to Rome and ancient Greece maybe was pertinent you seem to be living an era where the more power you have the more excused you are from conventional morality I get asked a lot you know what surprises me most in in different context what surprised me most about this story about that story and I think that sometimes it's not a fully thought-out question it's very open-ended yes but in fact I would say one of the consistent surprises is exactly what you alluded to the sheer lack of a moral core and backbone guiding people in corridors of power as you say you said earlier that sort of ethical journalism is not as present as we'd like you made some allusion to you know not everyone has that attitude about journalism as an act of public service with you know tied to profoundly important moral mandates and that really was a shock to the system to run headlong into the realization that people I thought were in a shared endeavor of journalism as a tool to expose the truth and injustice wherever it may lay at all costs were in fact operating on a totally different set of understandings and motivations yes yes and that's why actually this book does fit with your previous assignment because it does speak to that similar because I thought when I read the precis of this I thought that's that's bad because Donald Trump's only been president for six months or a year I forget when I first heard about the book but of course you're describing a malaise that goes back a couple of decades yes both parties you know and and very often an ugly trend in the name of political expedience denigrating brave men and women who served the United States as diplomats yes so what this is and correct me if my summary is too amateurish but you you're effectively if you see a I guess a Pompeo or what's our fellow Rex Tillerson air or Rex Tillerson they are that they're kind of like hoodlums it's it's a it's a it's a it's an aggression and reverence if you like from checked power that has replaced diplomacy which you described as softer power but but incremental change slowly seeking to influence by steering rather than ordering but I sort of identify on the tiller rather than hijacking the whole boat and I I hadn't realized and I still don't I haven't finished the book yet but I I hadn't realized how profound this culture change has been before we talk about that further when did when did when was this book conceived in the context of doing the Weinsteins stuff so I had started looking at the Miller of foreign-policy very early on it was the subject of my dissertation research at Oxford which goes on to this day I have not I have not as is sometimes erroneously reported dropped out of that program though these can be a very long people say finger-wagging Lee you know he dropped out of Oxford but I didn't stumble on the CV I think that's probably what it is because but it became apparent to me in a lot of the places that I had travelled and was working and even more so once I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the State Department yes whose run you were working fo when I was working for Holbrooke that there was this shrinking space for negotiate negotiators and peacemakers and people with a broader historical perspective that could as you say be a steady hand on the tiller and an important countervailing perspective in the room when we make our decisions about whether to barrel headlong into conflict and there's fundamental attitudinal differences between the military and the intelligence community and the diplomacy side of the equation and those incentive differences are totally fine you know the the the military is hardwired to focus on tactical success within the immediate theater of war measurable measurable success in the short term and this so you end up with examples like the ones I described in war on peace where you know we drop guns into Afghanistan right after 9/11 and you know give them to whatever warlord can help her out the Taliban but just as much as that is a useful skill set and perspective to have there also needs to be this counterbalance of voices that say hey wait a minute here's the opportunity for a negotiated settlement with these guys that can spare servicemen and women from being in the fray of a fight here's how this decision to arm someone might echo over the long term and very often when you don't have that perspective in the room when I document here is that it ends up coming back to bite you you end up being unstuck what was the heyday then of having that perspective in the room because my knowledge in this field is is dwarfed by yours but I would have thought of Kissinger of being an example of the problem you described rather than of being a kind of representative of the good old days well I'm careful when talking about Kissinger who is as you know you know every former Secretary of State went on the record for this book and Kissinger is in these pages saying some pretty interesting things I'm careful when rendering him as with all of these giant figures that run through these pages to give a nuanced sense of the pros and the cons you know I described the fact that he is very likely a war criminal and certainly in the eyes of many that that's the case but also you know he's certainly a voice of some insight and historical perspective and he made an interesting point about the way in which this trend of the evisceration of diplomacy actually is rooted in something much bigger a cultural shift towards the a historical in his view he talked about Richard Holbrook's conflict with the Obama administration where Holbrooke was trying desperately to raise the lessons of Vietnam and to caution against unbridled military escalation absent the COS of diplomats and he wasn't hurt and Kissinger reflecting on this of course he knew Richard Holbrooke well said you know in his kind of Bavarian rasp you know is it is one of the great American myths that you can always try something new that was a tremendous moment of insight you know that that we have with each new administration very often you know people coming in fixated on innovation and I think part and parcel with the dismissal of expertise that we're seeing under the Trump administration and during its you know burning to Hound of the State Department is also this broader dismissal of history and context so in that reading Trump's election becomes less shocking Oh No maybe right you know we as an electorate decided that we'd had enough of the establishment voices and the experts and we're just desperate for change but you know I think that a lot of the characters profiled and more on peace also give us a different lesson which is that you don't have to sacrifice one for the other someone like Richard Holbrooke was a great example of expertise but also an outside-the-box maverick who wasn't afraid to reform and burn down old structures and traditions nah he would subscribe to the notion that you don't have to be one or the other you would clearly subscribe to them yeah or the other but society on both sides of the Atlantic seems to be lurching towards the binary know this Thomas Donald Trump would be the patron saint almost of a binary world view you're either 100% this or 0% and obviously you're seeing that exact a set of frustrations lead to parallel political changes here in the UK yes and and the kind of integration of expertise the well is actually you know I this is not a comparative study I think it's acutely relevant to British readers in that the United States posture in these ways I'm describing so effects all of the places where the UK is engaged but I honestly don't know the answer to this is this playing out to any extent in the foreign service here is the in the foreign office well it's hard to say with Boris Johnson as foreign secretary because you hope that he represents very little of what is going on in the department when it is not on television kind of appearing on Fox News trying to trying to grab Donald Trump's attention we've also got the kind of post brexit problem with things like foreign aid which as you will know is more often than on especially as your mum will know is more often than not the way of getting into difficult areas and you now have this nativist how old that countries still embark upon so they think it's wrong to do anything to help other countries it's remarkable in the States anyway it's you know it's 1% of the budget it's around error and on 27 here and it's it's stunningly important in terms of exerting influence and gaining access as you say to answer your question I think that the it's just hard to know who the grown-ups are and yeah what it takes at the moment but I think if there are any grown-ups left they're still aware of the importance of diplomacy when where would you see the pendulum began to swing back so I still that's why I raised Kissinger when would you have considered to be the the heyday interesting parallel you know I'm also careful not to describe this as a linear trend you know our American support for diplomacy has had ups and downs you know there are moments like the sequester several years ago where everyone's budget was hit including the Pentagon but there's an instructive parallels to be drawn if you look at for instance the coverage of the State Department during World War two right where and and in the years immediately preceding that that there were articles that read very much like the coverage of Rex Tillerson in the past year where people were to crying a State Department that was ill-suited to meet the challenges of the day and was outdated and slow-moving and it's interesting to look at what we did in response to that which was we actually really beefed up the State Department and put more resources in and restructured it and built all sorts of new offices that were meant to you know meet these you know changing facets of the international landscape and and it worked you know those there was this incredibly fruitful era of diplomatic accomplishment after that where the so-called wise men these sort of prominent diplomats at the time you know were instrumental to creating NATO and the World Bank and the UN and really securing a lot of the structures we still rely on and I think there's a similar inflection point now where reform is needed but we are not reforming we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater burning it down yeah we're running around fixing it what um it's uniquely depressing obviously but we're living in an era of uniquely depressing events when you arrived in Britain to tour the boat but if you'd been charged with imagining a news event that could be more suited to your purposes Donald Trump violating the Iranian nuclear deal would presumably have been a fairly good contender I'm sad to say that the news cycle has been overly kind to the timeliness of war on peace between the back-to-back revelations that you know there was undercover work being done by black cube to dismantle and smear the Iran deal and the people behind this actually involve the wife of a major advisors yeah they were AMA whose joint what Israeli private spies were you know using false identities and front companies to reach out to the wives of prominent architects and proponent proponents of the Iran deal and you know calling every possible Reporter they'd ever talked to and trying to ferret out anything that could be weaponized against them in one case pretending that they wanted to get involved in fundraising at the children's school yeah and I have to meet with you I can't meet with any of the other fundraisers that's when the alarm went off in a way and these were very you know this was often evolved the same agents that were coming after me and the Weinstein accusers sometimes the same front companies so we had that revelation and then of course we had this you know culmination of you know years of saber-rattling going back to trump on the campaign trail where he finally did pull out of the Iran deal and you know look regardless of what we ultimately learn about the Trump administration's potential links to that undercover operation we certainly know that there were plenty of overt operations designed to discredit the Iran deal and find ways out of it this was a campaign promise and a sincere commitment of Donald Trump why I think that there's a lot of wholesale destruction of Obama era accomplishments just cuts even but I think that a lot of it is petty Vendetta I think that you know I assume that there is also some since your conviction about the inadequacies of the deal but this goes back to a broader problem that I highlighted more on peas that there is this fundamental misunderstanding about what effective diplomacy looks like effective diplomacy is about compromise and it's limited and it's flawed and even the great modern acts of peacemaking like Richard Holbrooke in the Balkans results in deals that you know in that case overly empowered the aggressors in the conflict doubled down on ethnic divisions in a conflict imperfect in all sorts of ways but it's the least bad resolution it was the least bad resolution in it and it spared many many lives and I think likewise you know I spend a lot of time going into the inside story of the brokering of the Iran deal and all the sweat and the blood and the broken bones hum and these high-stakes negotiations around the world and the architects of that deal the characters in that story are the first to say this was by its design a limited and imperfect arrangement you know it did not seek to address Iran's many activities as a bad actor in the international space it did not seek to you know alleviate military claims right the kidnappings or the missile tests or any of the human rights abuses but we weren't looking at the Iran deal we got or alternatively a perfect deal that solved all of Khan's problems as a bad actor we were looking at the deal we got or nothing except for Iran as a nuclear power in a few months flat and the tactical challenge of having to strike a country that can move things underground and by that point would have the technical know-how to rebuild rapidly and you know I talked to some of the military guys involved in the determination during the Obama administration that that was not a satisfactory tactical option that basically the position we would have been in absent DT the deal was a few months Iran breaking out as a nuclear power us bombing them then them rebuilding immediately and us having to bomb them again yes we have unfortunately stepped away from the table basically violated the deal driving a wedge between us and our allies sending a troubling message to North Korea at a time when we want them to believe we stand by our commitments if you come to the table with the United States and leaving us no alternative there's no plan B so this is a you know a devastating development from the perspective of this story I tell them war on peace and I spend a lot of time unpacking all the possible ramifications of it well do you think the most likely ramification is I mean I think we've set ourselves back tremendously with respect to Iran and with respect to North Korea and what does Trump get out of it apart from the Yabu socks to Obama's legacy I mean I think that's a pretty big incentive for him you really do yeah and the great irony is if there is any deal with North Korea and we're kind of we're flying blind there you know could a meeting between Kim jong-un and Donald Trump yeah bear fruit maybe time will tell we are doing it in exactly the wrong way which is without the bearing of any expertise you know we have dismissed all of the people who have tried for decades to talk to North Korea and know the ways in which they lie and the ways in which they will play you if you go into a meeting with them we're not allowing these ongoing proceedings to be informed by those voices in any way and I think that's really troubling whether we succeed or fail there because he thinks somewhere deep inside is just like building a casino yeah look I mean certainly there there seems to be this recklessness and this total disregard for that kind of careful guidance is there any possibility that is actually a little more cyclical than you allow and that if we look at from the British perspective I think that the joining Gulf War - probably wouldn't have happened if Sierra Leone in Kosovo hadn't delivered such a boost to Tony but hadn't been so successful I don't make it sound too cynical so that he just kind of was on the crest of a of a militaristic wave and then that wave crashed against ashore in Iraq and therefore for Obama and and for camera and the reluctance to get properly involved in Syria for example had more to do with what happened in Libya than it had to do with what was happening in Syria so that I think it's absolutely cyclical right um and that's something I I confront in this book you see this trend and I I don't want to overstate it and imply that this is always the case but on a number of occasions you see administration's come in go for the military options first because it's splash here and it's quicker and you want results and easy to communicate to the public it's a newspaper editors like it's easy to communicate in the public the media reinforces it you know you think of like Ted Koppel going in with his hardhat to Iraq and and moreover internally and this is something I document in in the book there are systems in place to encourage presidents to listen more to those military voices saying let's go in and you see that happening in george w bush's administration where there is the disasters of Iraq and : powell talks very frankly in this book about you know the ways in which we were snowed and the ways in which he and the State Department were marginalized in that first term you see it in the Obama administration's first term where Ben Rhodes and cement the power and others are very frank and kind of giving a Mia culpa in this book and saying like yeah we had to change some stuff in the second term as a result of this Ben Rhodes says you know there was a culture of celebrity generals and we had to course-correct after it cools and then you do see that same course-correction across multiple administrations so after Iraq you know Condoleezza Rice I think reflecting on those strategic disasters it did make a push for you know she said we need a few good diplomats yes and she embarked on those six-party talks with North Korea for instance there was a refocusing on diplomacy in Iraq and beyond in the Obama administration you saw those last few years devoted to I think a sincere reinvestment in large scale diplomacy and that's how you got the Iran deal and the fall in relations with Cuba and the Paris climate change accord and if we could squint a bit and keep Donald Trump out of our line of vision that would be as we come to the end of our time together that would be grounds for cautious optimism for the future or not explain what you mean by that well I think Donald Trump gives the lie to any notion of a cyclical process doesn't it he's such an aberration he's such an anomaly and if I'm frank about acknowledging that some of the current moment and the the extremity to which this trend has been driven yes is born of an idiosyncratic president hooked on twitter and with a unique disregard for expertise and truth but I also think that this is the ultimate cautionary tale in a string of cautionary tales that I document in this book and I sincerely hope that whatever comes next in terms of American leadership there is some understand standing that it is a matter of urgency that we pull out of this nosedive finally Ronan Farrow you you struggled to tell me what you would have answered if I'd asked you at 11:00 what you wanted to be when you grow up at the age of 30 what would you describe as your ambitions I hope that I can be a small part of making the world and the conversation better and if that means telling stories that expose injustice and elevate voices that have been silenced for too long then that's something I would be really proud to continue to have the chance to do run in Fargo thank you it's a pleasure thank you it was hello I'm James O'Brien thank you for watching this episode of unfiltered not only is there plenty more where that came from but there's plenty more to come as well so make sure you subscribe to unfiltered and put yourself at the front of the queue for all forthcoming [Music]

Channel: JOE

Views: 424,232

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Keywords: JOE, JOE.co.uk, JOEcouk, Weinstein, Trump, America, Interview, Ronan Farrow, Journalism, Unfiltered, James O'Brien, Harvey Weinstein, MeToo, Ronan Farrow Interview, podcast

Id: BoqWwMP5GmQ

Length: 61min 22sec (3682 seconds)

Published: Mon May 28 2018