"All Things Considered" host Mary Louise Kelly talks with KC Counts about her new podcast which drops every Thursday.
KC Counts:
I want to dive right in because I want to talk a little bit about your background and how you gravitated toward this side of journalism.
Mary Louise Kelly:
Sure. So, I launched the intelligence beat for NPR back in 2004 and took a few different permutations of it. I was Pentagon correspondent at one point. I was national security correspondent, but it all boiled down to I've just been fascinated by U.S. intelligence agencies and the intelligence world and the whole way that the United States and, of course, all of our allies and all of our adversaries conduct foreign policy through non-foreign policy channels, i.e. through defense channels, through intelligence channels, all these things happening that are never made public by design. If you cover the CIA, they almost never hold a press briefing. There is no directory with everybody's names and extensions. They don't give you a hard pass to let you wander around the building the way they do on Capitol Hill, for example. But there are all these important things happening that are shaping the direction of our country and our world. And I just have always found that so fascinating to try to figure out what's going on that they don't want me to know. And how do I make this a story that other people are going to say, yeah, this matters and what happens next? So that was my beginning, and this podcast represents the apex of my intent and desire to geek out on all this stuff and draw my colleagues along for the ride.
KC Counts:
Yeah, how did you decide what to tackle in the first episode?
Mary Louise Kelly:
That was kind of a no-brainer. We launched the week after the Putin-Trump summit in Anchorage. I went and reported on that summit. I had reported on the last couple of Putin summits. Joe Biden met him in Geneva. Trump had met Putin before, during his first term, in the famous, infamous, summit in Helsinki, Finland. And so, we knew the summit had happened. We knew there was very little actual news that came out of it. There were all these questions about where diplomacy might go next, even as, from what we could tell, the war in Ukraine was ramping up, not down. Russian attacks were intensifying. So, we thought, how can we push this forward? Let's capitalize on the fact that NPR, unlike most major news organizations, has kept a full-time bureau, full-time correspondent in Kyiv in Ukraine, and also in Moscow, even in times when it has been very challenging these last few years to report from Russia itself. So, let's get them on the line. Let's ask, how are you trying to cover all this from your perch? What does it look like? What are people telling you? And let's talk it out in real time and figure out what we know and what we don't and where things may go next.
KC Counts:
A reminder how important those resources are to all of your member stations across the country. who we wouldn't be able to share these stories if it weren't for the work being done by NPR. So thank you.
Mary Louise Kelly:
Well, thank you. And if I can give a brief plug, you know, we, for example, at the summit in Anchorage, we're working really closely with our colleagues at Alaska Public Radio to the extent that I that our White House correspondent, Tamara Keith, who couldn't get a hotel room at the last minute because that summit was slung together so quickly, ended up crashing with colleagues at Alaska Public Radio, and they apparently made her a lovely pie. So it matters, and it goes two ways, and they helped us get into places we would not otherwise have been able to get into, like literally onto the bus that was taking reporters to the summit when our name wasn't on the list. So it very much goes two ways, and we're grateful for all that you do as well.
KC Counts:
Fast forward just recently, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, you've got Modi at this meeting and President Trump saying somehow we may have lost India. Is there a progression there in your reporting that you'll talk about on the podcast?
Mary Louise Kelly:
Yes. So you're talking, I mean, most viscerally and visually of this big gathering, a military parade in Beijing, when the heads of a couple of dozen countries all showed up. It was the very first time that these three particular men, the leaders of China, of North Korea and of Russia had all met, had stood shoulder to shoulder, and it was such a dramatic visual because the U.S. was not there, and all of its rivals and adversaries were. And we had a really fascinating conversation about what was the military messaging, what is the political messaging, what was President Xi of China hoping to accomplish with that very striking visual of those people together. So we got into some big questions, and Anthony and Tom were going back and forth about kind of what they are hearing from sources. Anthony had been working sources in China. Tom has been working sources at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, and they were swapping what they knew and saying, oh, that makes sense, you know, with what my source was telling me now that you give me this bit of perspective.
