DOUGLAS JEHL

Celebrating fifteen years as International Editor for The Washington Post prompts Doug Jehl (St John’s, 1984) to note that he’s the longest serving head of international coverage.

More importantly, he presents as seeming calm amidst the broader storms that he is caught up in: ‘leading our collective reporting of two wars, Gaza and Russia, over the past eighteen months.’ It’s a subject we return to.

A Rhodes Scholar, Doug came to Oxford having first achieved a BA in History at Stanford.

He remembers it as a deviation from his intended path straight into domestic journalism, also as ‘a ball of great good luck that landed in my lap,’ and with hindsight the making of a seasoned foreign correspondent when at the time he had never travelled save one brief holiday to Europe.

Of Oxford he recalls the first true deep reading, and the discipline of writing tutorial papers that had be to read aloud, a practise that he took back to American journalism and which he still swears by, joking that he still forces young journalists to read out their stories.

He also remembers the sheer sense of difference upon landing in the land of ‘warm beer and scones, and I couldn’t get a Diet Coke…’

Just a few years later Jehl would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, having helped millions of Americans to understand the routinely baffling politics of the Middle East, and the 2003 Iraq War.

Jump forwards to 2024, and his role as head of The Post’s international desk means managing seventy-five reporters. Just earlier this year he led a remarkable series of features detailing what the newspaper characterised as, ‘a global surge in…cross-border repression, as well as the global forces leading India and other nations to employ tactics normally associated with the world’s most repressive governments.’

At the centre, the Indian-government spy agency was claimed to have authored the assassination of Sikh activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen living in New York City.

To make such an accusation when the White House had recently rolled out the red carpet for the visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was high order journalism, the sort that takes time, tenacity, resources and nerves.

This particular revelation, of Indian assassination plots in North America, necessitated interviews with more than three dozen current and former senior officials in the United States, India, Canada, Britain, Germany and Australia, painstakingly put together.

In another series of features published earlier this year, Jehl’s team managed to continue to report from within Russia on Putin’s lightning speed attempt to turn Russia and its citizens into a crusading war machine against the West, carried out largely out of sight with the illegal invasion of Ukraine offering a perverse sort of cover.

The reporting, far from suggesting that Russia is just a side threat, raised ‘the prospect of an enduring civilizational conflict to subvert Western democracy and — Putin has warned — even threatens a new world war.’

Throughout Doug’s career the common thread of subject matter has been political extremism and terrorism and its challenge to what might be termed core, traditional American values of freedom and a dissenting tradition.

What scoop or inflection point does he most treasure? He says it was grappling with Al Qaeda in the days and weeks after 9/11, but that this year’s Russia and India reporting has revealed a much deeper turmoil in the perceived world order and whatever rules it is supposed to operate by.

It leads to a more basic question, whether Jehl has feared for his own safety.

He says no, but he is filled with apprehension on behalf of his reporters, especially those in troubled foreign lands, whose right to report is increasingly imperilled.

We briefly touch on the recent release of the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, detained in Russia since March 2023.

But the example of unlawful detention and false accusation that most affected Jehl and his team was that of Jason Rezaian, who served as The Post's correspondent in Tehran from 2012 to 2016, spending 544 days unjustly imprisoned by Iranian authorities until his release in January 2016.

You can tell that this still sits heavily on Doug’s shoulders, both for its human toll and the implication.

‘The trouble is that prisoner swaps such as the one that recently released Gershkovich, may encourage further opportunistic seizure of innocents, in a spiralling game of political poker. Journalism is the loser.

‘Actually performing the role of a reporter has now become very contested,’ he says. ‘While we have a degree of ‘outside in’ ability, often via video, and while the world has become more open through technology, in another sense it has become more closed off, with reporting in places like Gaza, Russia and Iran becoming extremely difficult.’

The international relations programme he embarked on at Oxford morphed into a longer engagement resulting in an MPhil thesis about American responses to terrorism, 1981-87.

While the world was already troubled then, it has slid much further towards chaotic, multi-polar conflict since. He remembers, with a detectable sense of cherished innocence, Oxford as the real gateway to international travel, and being abroad as an ‘awakening.’

His second winter at Oxford took him off travelling to Israel and Egypt, journeying down the Gazan coast and then into Egypt. He recalls having just stepped off a felucca, a traditional sailing vessel, to observe a local in traditional dress approaching him on foot. ‘I didn’t know if he was friendly or hostile’. ‘Soon enough I was in his front room meeting his animals, being served sweet tea…’

With 9/11 in mind as the main case study, while never forgetting the tangled web of history that preceded it, does he think that the West bears some of the responsibility for current unravellings?

‘There is a toxic circle over the past forty years and beyond. Never underestimate extremism but also don’t underestimate the inclination of powerful countries to overreact, to respond with temper and sometimes overreach. Some of that overreach was expressedas a curtailing of civil liberties , and we now see the echoes of that around the world.’