MILES PARKS, HOST:
For nearly 30 years, NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman has covered the U.S. military. When not in the field talking to officers or troops, he would regularly do most of his reporting at the Pentagon itself, roaming the halls of the sprawling building, attending briefings and speaking to officials both on and off the record. That is, until this fall, when his access to the Pentagon was cut off. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said anyone covering the military would have to sign a pledge. Here's how Tom put it.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: It basically says, you can't solicit information, if you're a reporter, from Pentagon officials. You basically have to wait until they release information, then you can report on it.
PARKS: Like most other media organizations, no one from NPR signed the pledge. Tom says he didn't even consider it.
BOWMAN: Basically, it's telling us, you can't be reporters. You have to be state media. Those that are now in the Pentagon are conspiracy theorists, far-right media. A lot of them aren't even reporters.
PARKS: When we sat down earlier this week, Tom told me about a very specific moment he had around the time he turned in his press pass.
BOWMAN: I was at a reception, and this guy walks up to me, and he introduces himself, and he was a Chinese military attache. And this guy says, tell me about this Pentagon policy. And I explained, just like I said to you, well, it says we can't solicit information. We have to wait until the military releases information. Then we're allowed to report on it. He said, oh, just like us.
PARKS: So for this week's Reporter's Notebook, with the military so much in the news, I asked Tom if he was missing out on scoops because of this new policy.
BOWMAN: No, I wouldn't say that. And I think my colleagues are doing an even better job getting scoops. And one of the reasons is - and I saw this under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld - once you try to put the lid on people, either military or civilians or reporters, more people pop up and are willing to talk with you.
PARKS: Right, and it almost seems like the policy is backfiring in some way, in that it's motivating a lot of people who maybe wouldn't have talked if there wasn't such a sort of draconian policy about it.
BOWMAN: And, you know, Hegseth and his friends basically say, oh, you're - you know, you're going into classified areas. That's completely untrue. We're not allowed in those places. We walk around the hallways, talking with people. And a lot of times, Miles, it's just for direction. You could go up to a general or an admiral and say, hey, listen, I'm hearing this. Is this true? And he'll say, Tom, you have it half right. It's not really true. So it's helping us as reporters. It's also helping the military to make sure we get the stories right.
PARKS: Right.
BOWMAN: And now one guy I talk with at the Pentagon said, the problem now is if somebody gets it completely wrong, we can't get a handle on that story 'cause you guys aren't in the building. We can't go up to you in the press area and say, hey, listen, that story is not right. Don't repeat what you're hearing on X, you know...
PARKS: That makes a lot of sense. Access, in a lot of ways, is just as advantageous to the source as it is to the media outlet. totally.
BOWMAN: Absolutely.
PARKS: I want to help people understand. You're somebody who's covered this for a long time. There are a lot of stories about the military right now people are trying to track and make sense of. There is the ongoing military buildup in the Caribbean. There is the buildup of National Guard troops in the nation's capital. I guess I want to ask you, big picture, all of these disparate threads - are there bigger-picture takeaways, I guess, as you think about covering the second Trump administration and the military that you're taking from a number of these stories?
BOWMAN: Well, I think one of the things is, clearly, the Trump administration is leaning forward, using the military in ways that had not been used in the past. I think, you know, sending all these National Guard troops to the streets - you know, this is a police job. It's not a National Guard job. And I think some people in Washington may say, listen, I'm glad the National Guard's in my neighborhood, particularly higher-crime areas in D.C. But a lot of them, you know, they're walking around the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument. They're walking through Georgetown. There's not a lot of crime in these areas.
The - what's going on in the Caribbean - they still haven't explained exactly what's going on here. They've now taken out 21 drug boats, of course, much of it, if not all of it, with cocaine. Some of those boats, I'm told, were heading to Europe or Africa, not even to the United States. So why are you doing this in the first place? And is this about really going after drugs and the cartels, or is this trying to get rid of President Maduro in Venezuela? No one is getting an explanation - not the Hill or not the American people - about where this thing is going.
PARKS: Now that you don't have a press pass in the Pentagon, how are you getting information about these sort of - these strikes happening in international waters? Obviously, you're not there. You're not at the Pentagon physically. Can you walk listeners through how information about some of this stuff is coming to you?
BOWMAN: Now, we're still talking to military officials, many active duty, some that are in the retired community that keep in touch with their former colleagues. People on the Hill, we talk with as well. Also I'm reaching more out to the embassies, who would find out what's going on, let's say, with Ukraine or in some cases, you know, like, what's going on in the Caribbean. So, you know, we have to find workarounds, I think, to find out what's going on. So the information is getting out there. We're going to find a way to get the information for the American people, period.
PARKS: What are the big questions you still have - specifically focusing on what's happening in the Caribbean right now - that we don't have answers to?
BOWMAN: Well, again, I think, what is the overall policy? Are you trying to go after the cartels? If you're trying to do that, you're not going to do it by blowing away a couple of dozen boats. Are you going to start hitting land targets for cartels in Venezuela and elsewhere? And again, if you're going to take out the Maduro government, then, you know, the American people have to have a sense of what your plan is, what you're going to do, if you're going to overthrow a regime. Now, President Trump said he's spoken with Maduro. Well, are you trying to get him to leave on his own? What's going on behind the scenes? I mean, those are the questions.
PARKS: Well, let me pivot to the other big story that we're all tracking here, which is the National Guard story - specifically, the shooting in Washington, D.C. of two National Guard members from West Virginia. Tell me a little bit about your reporting on that story and kind of the outstanding questions that you're thinking about.
BOWMAN: Well, I went down to the site. I got within a block of the shooting site maybe an hour and a half after it happened, spoke with two young women, Emma McDonald and Leila Christopher from northern Virginia, who were just coming out of the Metro moments after it happened. Here's Leila.
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LEILA CHRISTOPHER: And then we, like, came up to the street, and a National Guards person told us to, like, run.
BOWMAN: And they told us, they went into a bakery next door. People were really afraid, and they said, you know, they saw an ambulance pull up. Emma said she looked out and saw this.
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EMMA MCDONALD: The National Guard member was covered in blood.
BOWMAN: You know, after that, you know, we were reaching out to people and sources of mine and trying to find out what happened. And Kristi Noem...
PARKS: That's Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
BOWMAN: ...Basically said that this shooter was radicalized at his community in Bellingham, Washington, his Afghan community, without offering any evidence that that's the case. And my colleague Brian Mann has spoken with a volunteer who worked resettlement for the Afghans who dealt with this guy's family and said his mental health was clearly deteriorating over the past couple of years. And, you know, he would sit in his darkened room. He wouldn't come out for hours. He would drive around the country, to Illinois, to Arizona. He wasn't able to keep a job. So it could be more PTSD as opposed to some radicalization.
I know this particular guy, this alleged shooter, worked for the CIA in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. I spent a lot of time there around the time he was working with the CIA. He was part of this group called Zero Unit that worked going after senior Taliban leaders. They would do night raids in heavy combat. And frankly, Human Rights Watch said some of these groups were involved in illegal killings and in torture. He has spoken to, apparently, a friend or a colleague who said that he was really troubled by what he went through in Afghanistan.
PARKS: How long have you been covering the military now, Tom?
BOWMAN: Twenty-eight years.
PARKS: Is all of this unprecedented to you, or do you have any comparisons in your career?
BOWMAN: No, I think it's unprecedented. And again, you know, back in the day, we would have had background briefings, on-the-record briefings, you know, in the Pentagon explaining what they were doing and why they were doing it. But we don't have that anymore.
PARKS: NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, thank you so much for talking with us.
BOWMAN: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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