Photography by Pascal Perich
When he worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mark Bowden was the guy the editors sent over to the reporter whose desk was stuffed with notes for unwritten stories. “Talk to me,” Bowden would say, and the glazed reporter would launch a long, garbled account with as many branches as the Habsburg family tree. At the end, Bowden would say, “Well, here’s your story,” and describe a simple, compelling arc, and the reporter would resist—“No, no, you can’t do that without doing this, and this…”—and Bowden would say, firm as an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, “Yes, you can.”
He understands story, knows what it takes to make the reader hold her breath and resent the second it takes to flick to the next page. His book Black Hawk Down recounted a history no one had documented, not even the Pentagon. It became a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into a movie, as was Bowden’s book Killing Pablo. His latest, The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden, happened in reverse; he was approached to write a screenplay, but got such amazing access—including an in-depth interview with the president—that he wrote a book instead.
You were born in St. Louis, so we’ll gladly claim you, but when did your family move?
I was born at St. John’s [Mercy] Hospital and taken home to a little house in Webster Groves on Oakwood Avenue, where my mom grew up. I lived there for the first two years of my life. My mom was one of 10 children, so she has this very large extended family all over the St. Louis area. Every summer we would load up all the kids and spend a week or two in St. Louis—I’ve probably visited St. Louis at least once a year my entire life. And now my son and daughter-in-law live in Kirkwood. My granddaughters are 4 and 2. We’re wearing a rut between Philadelphia and St. Louis.
You’ve written about sports, war, drugs, theft, computers, and counterterrorism. What’s the common thread?
One of my women friends pointed out that all my stories are about men. I’d never thought about that—but she was right. My first book was about a guy who started dealing drugs in his fraternity. Then I wrote about sports, which is a fraternity of sorts, and then the military. I never had any desire to join a frat—to join anything, for that matter. But I’m one of six brothers, so I’m just a natural member of a fraternity.
Would you go into combat?
Yes. When I was younger, I might have wondered if I’d have the courage. But at this point in my life, I’ve had enough experiences with dangerous situations that I know I’m not inclined to panic and flee.
What dangerous situations come to mind?
The whole time I was in Mogadishu, I was terrified; there was fighting all over the place. When I was in Colombia, Americans were being targeted for kidnapping. In the West Bank in Gaza, I found myself in some pretty hairy situations—often without realizing it, which I think is often how reporters get killed. But probably the most dangerous was a moment of truth that turned out to be nothing. I went out on an anti-poaching patrol in Zambia. Very frequently, these groups would get into firefights with poachers. At one point, we came upon the carcasses of a very large animal, and the men I was with were convinced the poachers were at the top of the hill. They fanned out with their weapons and charged the hill. My photographer had basically chickened out, and he’d given me his camera. Now, as a writer, I can hide behind a tree, but with a camera… So I ran up the hill. And there were no poachers.
How much has the U.S. approach to national security changed since you wrote Black Hawk Down?
Oh, hugely, and it was 9/11 that did it. Go back to the Battle of Mogadishu, and most Americans were under the illusion that our country was so powerful militarily that we were invulnerable. We thought our soldiers were invulnerable. Clinton thought he could send these soldiers over to Mogadishu and none of them would get hurt, which was just naïve. Now you have people like Barack Obama, who I think is by nature nonconfrontational and much more inclined to try to work things out than go to war, readily embracing the need to target terrorists with drone strikes. I think we’ve matured as a country.
A sad kind of maturity.
But real.
How did you find out so much about Osama bin Laden?
There were several books. The stockpile of correspondence that was found with him, which the White House started letting me read early this year, gave me tremendous insight. And reporters like Mir, the first to interview him after 9/11—what a great story that was.
Just exactly how did they know there were three families living in that compound?
Laundry was a big tipoff. They would count the shirts. And they started paying attention to how much food was coming in, how much garbage was leaving.
Have you gotten any interesting responses to the book?
A fellow came up to me at Fort Lewis in Washington and asked a question having to do with the helicopter unit involved. I didn’t understand his question, clearly because he knew something I did not know. He’d assumed I did know. And he shut up really fast.
That great quote in The Finish—“Information and intelligence is the fire and maneuver of the 21st century”—will that change who’s recruited into the armed services?
Oh, without a doubt. It already has. West Point is looking for computer geeks, the kind of kids who would not be attracted to a military career. And in a larger sense, I think the incorporation of women into the military is having a slow but sure cultural impact. For centuries, the idea of a warrior culture was very masculine, but that doesn’t make sense anymore. Increasingly, the bulk of the jobs in the military require subtlety and intelligence and patience and carefulness, qualities that are found as often in women as in men.
Will that make war less harsh?
Not if you’re on the receiving end. It’s less personal. Encounters where people are struggling with one another with knives in their hands happen very rarely. The deemphasis on the traditional macho values is actually, I think, beneficial. It’s wiser for a country like the U.S. not to react in anger.
Has your stance on torture changed since you wrote “The Dark Art of Interrogation” in 2003?
No. I still think that it should be banned; I think any effort to legitimize coercion leads inevitably to sadism and abuse. We saw that actually happen during the Bush Administration. Nevertheless, I freely acknowledge that there are instances where I would torture someone. And I should be held accountable for that.
So by banning torture you don’t necessarily stop it, you just preserve responsibility for it?
Yeah. All banning says, in a nutshell, is that torture is wrong. And having said that, there are situations that require you to do something wrong, in order to avoid a greater wrong. The guy who had buried a 10-year-old alive? I would torture him. And if someone wanted to prosecute me, bring it on.
What’s your prediction about Islamist militarism—will it grow even bloodier or wane away?
It’s already waning. As people have legitimate avenues for political expression and hope of changing their lives for the better nonviolently, the appeal of these dead-end fanatics grows less and less. Human beings will not freely choose, in large numbers, to live under the strictures of shari’a as it’s practiced by these extremists. It’s a hateful way to live. It’s medieval.
Why did it gain so many adherents?
What we’re experiencing is a backlash against the increasing modernization and secularization of the world. We live in the least violent period in human history, and that, I think, is a trend that will continue. People do not have the same rigid belief systems that used to drive them to war. They are becoming much more aware of how other people live in the world, so the level of ignorance and fear is declining.
You’ve said you think the decline of religion is “one of the most important stories of our time.”
And by that I mean the decline in magical thinking. For most of human history, when people saw something happen that they didn’t understand, their first instinct was to seize upon a supernatural explanation. In the 18th-century—I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, because I’m writing a historical novel now—their first thought would be “Well, that must be an angel or a devil.” More and more, people look for a natural explanation. So there’s a general demystification of the world. There also is an awareness of entirely different belief systems. Maybe both of us are part right and part wrong, which I think is where most sensible people wind up. As barriers between people of different faiths decline, religiosity itself declines.
You were once held in contempt of court for refusing to turn over your notes—has there been any other fallout from your stories?
After I wrote Killing Pablo [about Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar], there was an FBI investigation to find out who’d leaked information to me. It finally ended when I told some people who’d be in a position to talk to the investigators that they were barking up the wrong tree if they were assuming sensitive information was leaked to me by someone in the U.S. military. People in Colombia couldn’t care less about what’s secret in the U.S., and I’d spent a good deal of time in Colombia.
What’s given you the greatest ethical qualms?
Something that surfaces in almost every story is the conflict between presenting people as they are—or at least as I perceive them—knowing that very often it’s going to be unpleasant or offensive or difficult for that person to read. That’s a constant, unless you gussy up everything you do. David Simon, the creator of that wonderful TV series The Wire—I wrote an essay for The Atlantic which so infuriated him that he’s been badmouthing me ever since. People will assume it’s mutual and call me, and I’ll say, “You know what? I think David is brilliant. It’s a one-sided feud.” The story’s called “The Angriest Man in Television,” and it pointed out that the roots of David’s genius are his anger and his resentment, and he frequently, in his work, seeks to settle the score.
So reading that made him angry?
Yeah. Which proved my point.
What elements have to be present to make a story worth telling?
Some sort of dramatic action has to take place. I have to be able to discern some kind of universal theme, some aspect of the story that resonates broadly. In Killing Pablo, there’s a universal center: someone who became so rich and powerful that he overreached. He got too big for his britches, and he basically challenged the whole concept of statehood by terrifying people. So it became this struggle of the community against an individual—and the individual nearly won, as tyrants often do. I think even if someone couldn’t find Colombia on a map, they would find that interesting.
How has your writing changed over 30 years?
Probably the biggest way is making something of the material, not just regurgitating something that you have learned, which pretty much sustained me as a reporter for the first 20 years. Now I need to arrive at my own understanding and use it to inform the story. The Finish is a story about a country trying to defend itself against a new enemy. And it’s a story of two men: Barack Obama, whose first instinct is to try to understand and embrace things that are foreign to him, and Osama bin Laden, whose first instinct is to push away and even attack those things. Osama bin Laden kills people because he decided at a very young age to embrace this harsh ideology. He anointed himself with the right to take other people’s lives. And Barack Obama evolved by election to higher and higher office and has accepted the responsibility for protecting the American people, and he’s had to come to grips with the implication of that. To the rest of us, the question of when the U.S. should use force is purely abstract. When you have a dossier from the CIA and someone is in the crosshairs and you have to decide whether to shoot that person…
You’re the only journalist I know who says people’s attention span is not shortening. I believe you labeled that notion “horseshit.”
The notion that something which has evolved over a million years would change in one generation is ludicrous. It stems from two things. One, a technology geared toward presenting information very quickly and effortlessly. The notion that this is the only way becomes a kind of fad. In Hollywood 10 years ago, they would say, “The attention span of the audience is so flighty, you can’t have a scene that takes longer than 15 seconds.” And then someone will come along and make a movie like The Master, and that fad will change. Two, it stems from a rosy notion that everybody sat for an hour and read the newspaper every day. Newspapers used to be the one source for everything you needed: coupons, TV listings, sports scores, cartoons… Even when newspapers had enormous circulation, people didn’t necessarily read them. Now the only reason to pick one up is to read the stories, so what we’re beginning to see is the number of people who were reading these stories all along.
What’s it like writing for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic?
At first I thought I had no good ideas, because I kept pitching and hearing “no.” Now I’m at that stage where everybody wants what I do, and that’s a very dangerous place to be. It used to be people would say, “Mark, that’s a really dumb idea.” Now they say, “Go ahead and do it.”
