Exposing Secrets
Writer Annie Jacobsen ’85 opens doors the U.S. government would rather stay locked.
BY MICHAEL MATROS
Born into a “very verbal” family, Annie Jacobsen ’85 knew from early childhood that her purpose was to be a writer, and she worked hard at the craft. But, as an adult, pursuing her gift toward marketable short fiction and novels became an increasingly unsustainable goal.
“By my mid-30s I hadn’t made one penny writing fiction,” she explained in a previous interview with Alumni Horae.
Finally, she turned to a professional adviser, who urged her “to stop making stuff up and write about something true.” Jacobsen soon realized one particular truth was lurking behind the public representation of how federal agencies work.
Now, six non-fiction books later, the SPS alumna is widely admired as a dauntless investigator of national-security issues — and the unlocking of doors that hide intriguing secrets.
Jacobsen’s first book, published in 2011, created a sensation. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base “shocked even the most devoted conspiracy theorists,” according to a review in Time. Although many readers’ attention was devoted unsurprisingly to its investigation of UFO-related mysteries, the book reported more comprehensively on the Nevada site of secret weapons development.
Five years later, Jacobsen revisited that theme with The Pentagon’s Brain, a Pulitzer Prize finalist that investigated the work of the top-secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
But it was her work for 2014’s Project Paperclip, named for the program that secretly brought Nazi scientists to America that, she says, set her on the path to examining the moral conundrums involved in national-security secrecy. While the rocket specialist Wernher von Braun was celebrated for fathering the U.S. space program and his Nazi past was not widely known until after his death, Jacobsen reported how the wartime atrocities of other ex-Nazis have remained hidden.
Jacobsen’s laborious research for each book has included dozens of interviews, with up to 100 hours of speaking with “main protagonists,” as she calls them. Through these subjects, named and anonymous, she reveals the complexities and moral dilemmas involved in decisions of national security. The subtitle of her 2019 book, Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins, rather adeptly indicates the unnerving nature of such reporting.
And though some of Jacobsen’s revelations about the inner workings of their own government may outrage readers, her role as an investigative writer, she says, must be objective. “As a national-security journalist,” she insists, “I don’t drag politics into it.”
Such objectivity allows Jacobsen to gain the trust of her interview subjects. But it helps, she says, “to have developed a true ability to listen, added to caring about other people.”
If there’s one of her books that Jacobsen hopes President Biden might read, it’s her 2020 title, First Platoon, which is a study of the project by the Defense Department “to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the power to identify, monitor, catalogue, and police people all over the world.” In many ways, Jacobsen says, this book is “my most frightening, a cautionary tale.”
Meanwhile, even as other book projects compel her attention, she takes time with slightly more escapist assignments, including writing and producing for the TV thrillers Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and Clarice (a spinoff of Silence of the Lambs).
Pursuing a purpose, a writer can wander multiple avenues. Jacobsen’s paths are sinuous, it seems, and darkly lit.