About His Other Works
Your first book, Red Carpet: The Connection Between the Kremlin and America's Most Powerful Businessman, made quite a splash. It detailed the strong relationship between the then Soviet Union and America's Armand Hammer. You were only 24 when it was published. How did you handle all the controversy surrounding the book?
It was tough being that young, with the threat of a libel suit from the multimillionaire Dr. Hammer and his staff of lawyers. He had his claque write letters to editors of newspapers and magazines attacking the book - which was comic, actually, because the letters were all the same, and all sent directly from Occidental headquarters in L.A., even though they purported to be from "friends" of Hammer's. In one particularly egregious example of political horse-trading, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith actually called up the New York Times Book Review and asked to review the book - only to trash it. Why? Apparently because he was a friend of Hammer's and belonged to organizations to which Hammer contributed money. Hammer even called up my Harvard adviser and promised to donate his papers to Harvard if they'd get rid of me or call a halt to my book. My adviser, to his credit, refused. Hammer had his lawyers contact my publisher, Holt Rinehart & Winston, and threaten them with legal action. Hammer then bought up as many copies of the book as he could find, which meant that the book's first printing sold well, though there was no second printing (because of the legal pressure from Hammer). That book is extremely hard to find these days. I didn't intend the book to be particularly political, but because it exposed the sordid nature of Dr. Hammer's dealings with the Kremlin - including the astonishing fact that he and his family worked for Soviet intelligence in the 1920s and 1930s - I got caught up in the political battle without meaning to. A number of reviewers lambasted the book because of my reporting on Hammer's intelligence ties. Then, when the Soviet archives opened up after the Soviet Union collapsed, the documents proving that I was right were published by Yale University Press. I sort of feel I got the last laugh.

What obstacles did you face when writing your first novel Moscow Club?
As any new writer will find, the literary world is constructed to keep out people who've not done anything. And agents only really want to represent you if you have an agent.

What was the release of your first book Moscow Club like?
In August in 1991 after the book had come out, I was awakened really early in the morning by a guy that I know in the CIA, who said, "Well somebody in Moscow read your book. Put on CNN." It was unbelievable, history was playing out in a really similar way to what I had written in Moscow Club. In fact, with some of the same cast of characters, some of the same people in the coup involved in my book. So Moscow Club actually got a lot of attention at that point because people thought I had sort of predicted the future. I hadn't predicted anything, I had just done my homework.

Where did the idea for Extraordinary Powers come from?
Extraordinary Powers came from a source of mine who had been employed at the CIA. We were having dinner one night and he told me about a program both at the CIA and in the Pentagon to use telepathy in espionage. I thought that was so far-fetched and completely cool that I asked him for more details and began to research it. Very little had been written about this, in fact, the CIA officially denied there ever was such a program and so did the Pentagon. By the way, there are now books on both of those programs. The CIA has admitted it and so has the Pentagon. So I knew from reliable sources that it was true.

Where did the idea for Zero Hour come from at a time when the events of September 11th were years from happening?
Zero Hour really came from my reading in terrorism and my asking myself why haven't we been attacked yet. Terrorism was rife in Europe and South America; why hadn't the U.S. been attacked? It didn't make any sense to me. The U.S. is so hated. So what if we were attacked, what would be the one most serious, most crippling blow to the U.S.? I had read about this one particular location in Manhattan which I visited and it turned out it did exist, and it is really sort of a nerve center of Manhattan. While I was doing the research, I became really nervous that someone might read my book and try it. So what I did was, I camouflaged in so many serious ways, the location of the place, and the real security so I made this as difficult as possible. The real attack on Wall Street and Manhattan on September 11th was different in a lot of ways from what I imagined in The Zero Hour because they chose a symbolic target and not a crippling target so much; they chose to inflict maximum civilian casualties, which is not what the guy does in my book. The counterterrorists in my book are better than they are in reality.

Moving on to High Crimes, how did you pick to go into military systems and procedures?
High Crimes didn't start out as a story about military justice, it started out with the question of whether someone could be charged with a serious crime in a closed courtroom where the evidence is kept secret, where it's basically a 'kangaroo court'? I wanted someone who had been charged with committing some sort of atrocity or some sort of international act and finds himself unable to prove his innocence because the evidence is sealed. The more research I did, the more I found that the only place that could happen was in a military court.

So I went into court-martials and I sat there and took notes and I talked to the participants. I went to about five different court-martials with the same judge. She saw me and she stopped the proceedings and said 'You're the writer? You're the one who wants to write about a hard-ass judge, is that it? Well, you've come to the right place.' So I became known on the circuit.

I talked to lots and lots of civilian lawyers who do military trials and military lawyers and began to get their stories and realized this was an untapped field. There were so many great stories to digest and make into High Crimes. It's really rich material and for me it was this whole new cool world of military justice. That's why it was important that the main character be someone who is completely removed from this world. Claire had to be a civilian and she had to be a lawyer of course in order for this plot to work but I wanted to have her know nothing about military law so that she's completely bewildered by the way it works. In that way, she's like the reader who knows nothing about it, and she is our way of being introduced to this world.

How did you feel about the differences between the movie and the book and how much interplay, if any, did you have with the movie and those changes?
I had a very good relationship with the producer, Janet Yang of Manifest Films and the director, Carl Franklin, who invited me to play a part in the movie. I flew in to L.A. for five days to act in the courtroom scene and I really learned a lot about how movies are made and the hard work it takes to make a movie. I had often thought, sitting in my office writing my book, that someone's going to buy this and make it a movie and a couple months later it's going to be seen by millions of people and no fair and how easy it is. Making a movie is really, really hard work and I saw that. I began to appreciate that when I flew back from L.A. and found myself back in my own office…that I was the boss, I didn't have any studio executives to answer to, no one was faxing me notes in the morning. I had complete autonomy for a long stretch, so I really began to appreciate that.

When High Crimes was sold to Hollywood, I didn't believe anything would come of the movie deal until I got a call from my agent telling me that Ashley Judd had agreed to star. But even then I was pretty dubious until I heard they actually had a start date to begin filming. The director, Carl Franklin, is a cool and talented guy who very graciously invited me on to the set (most directors want to keep the writer as far away from the set as possible), even cast me as a JAG officer, a prosecutor. It was a nonspeaking role, but I was in something like 5 scenes, and I got a SAG card out of it. And I have to say, it was extremely cool to be acting in the movie based on my book. Here I was, sitting in a court room that, two years or so earlier, I had made up - totally imagined, and it looked exactly the way I envisioned it. Amazing!