Mary Louise Kelly is the host of NPR's All Things Considered, heard each weekday on KAZU. Now she's got a new weekly podcast, Sources and Methods, about national security. Kelly spoke with KAZU News Director Amy Mayer.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Amy Mayer: What inspired this podcast?
Mary Louise Kelly: I think it was a sense that the world order is reordering in real time. We're all trying to figure out what is happening, and why, and what it means, and how it may matter in our own lives. And we have all these great NPR correspondents on the national security team, mostly based here in Washington, but in other parts of the U.S. as well—and a truly extraordinary stable of international correspondents. But we didn't have a dedicated podcast where people could go find their reporting.
AM: Say a little more about what people should understand more broadly about what those terms mean and what you all are doing when you are pursuing "sources and methods."
MLK: So, "sources and methods" is a term widely used in intelligence and national security circles, and it describes how they know what they know. Like, who is telling them? How are they getting this information? That's the sources. And then the methods is: is this a satellite intercept? Is this a human spy in a well-placed circle? U.S. intelligence officials will tell you they will go to the ends of the earth to protect their sources and methods because sometimes there may be information that they would like to be able to share with the world. And if they do, it might link back to—"Aha! So that's how the U.S. figured something out." So they try to protect their sources and methods. And I, as we were thinking about what to call this podcast, thought, well that resonates.
AM: Is it fun to produce a podcast that's just presented a little more casually than a formal magazine show?
MLK: It's absolutely in the DNA of this show. I said, "Look, if we're gonna just, you know, write down what we think about things and then read these things out loud to each other, that doesn't work." Cause I want people to get to hear the questions we're asking [that] we don't have answers to yet.
AM: What are some other ways that hosting this podcast is different from your day-to-day work hosting All Things Considered?
MLK: A podcast is once a week, so you have to give people some sort of takeaway, some sort of story that they can hang on. And I think the other thing is, we're trying to reach a huge range of people—from former generals, ambassadors, people who are currently working with security clearances in the intelligence community—and try to offer them something they didn't know or help them make sense of something or connect dots.
But we're also trying to speak to and reach people who have never worked in that world, don't have any inside information, but are deeply interested in global events. And so the idea [became], how can I tell a story in this podcast, how can I hook you in? Because we're talking sometimes about big abstract things.
All of our reporters are opening their notebooks.
The easiest way to say that is, all of our reporters are opening their notebooks. The crazy or tiny or colorful little details that maybe don't make their way into the daily deadline news piece 'cause there just isn't time to pack it all in—you get to hear some of those unravel a little bit.
AM: Like when Anthony Kuhn talked about the second limousine [for Chinese President Xi Jinping] that is there in a parade, just in case the first one breaks down.
MLK: Yes. Absolutely. This is one of my favorite segments. We're calling it "OSINT," for open source intelligence, meaning it's not classified stuff. Anybody could know it, but you might not if you're not out reporting on stories. We ask everybody to share something—maybe it's not a fully formed story. [It] doesn't need to be a full beginning, middle, and end story, but just some little tidbit that caught your eye. And Anthony Kuhn, as you note, who has tracked China for many years—he was based in Beijing for many years, he's now in Seoul—he was tracking the big military parade in Beijing last week and noted that, yes, it's apparently tradition for the president of China to have not one but two giant limos. I thought, "Oh, it's a decoy, so you don't know which one he is in." Anthony was sharing, no, it's because they're not entirely confident that the first one won't break down, so they have a backup. And he knew that because he'd reported [on it] years ago and had interviewed one of the guys who'd helped design these vehicles. [That's] just a piece of information I would never have known. And now every time I see Xi Jinping rolling down the street in a car, I'll think, mm-hmm, there's one and there's the other one.
NPR's Sources and Methods has new episodes every Thursday.
