welcome to amanpour on pbs. we're looking back at some of our favorite interviews this year. tonight, does ronan farrow ever sleep? his nonstop groundbreaking report on sexual assault by powerful men earned him a pulitzer prize for public service. and his new book, "war on peace" is a timely look at the decline of american diplomacy. i spoke with ronan at the height of his journalistic productivity which comes at our time of greatest need. ♪ ♪ ♪ welcome to this special

edition of our program. i'm christiane amanpour in london. ronan farrow is a one man repertoire i whirlwind. these a 30-year-old journalist whose game changing scoop has helped launch the me too movement, bringing down powerful and abusive men from entertainment mogul harvey weinstein to new york attorney general eric schneiderman. all of this while putting finishing touches on something completely different, an essential new book called "war on peace, the end of diplomacy and the decline of american influence." as the united states lives its america first moment, fair owe chronicles the nation's unilateral retreat from the indispensable field of diplomacy and world leadership. managing to get every living former secretary of state on the record, including an extraordinarily candid exit interview with the happless rex tillerson. ronan dropped in our studio in london to talk about how

america's new direction is playing out around the world from iran to north korea, from climate change to trade tariffs. and about his own personal insight into sexual abuse as the son of mia farrow and woody allen. let's talk about your amazing productivity. every time we turn around there is another ronan farrow scoop, another ronan farrow book. there is literally according to the world of ronan farrow. how on earth do you manage it, first of all, disparate subjects, me too, america's role in diplomacy, very different subject? >> you know, i've been really fortunate to have leads come my way and brave sources turn whistleblower as they did in this book war on peace as all these brave women did as part of the me too movement and present hard truths that i really have had no choice but to work around the clock to ferret out.

>> you've won the pulitzer. you have the pope, a whole load of awards coming your way. does it feel like victory, does it feel like vindication to you? >> it feels like a relief, christiane. particularly the harvey weinstein story. we easily forget came at a different time in our history. already there is an been all this analysis and all these brave people coming forward. but as i was reporting on this, i was very, very fearful that this story was going to be fully shutdown and these women would never be heard so i'm relieved. >> you were essentially -- you didn't know whether you would get this me, too story out. the network that you were working for spiked it. the press had a role itself in suppressing some of these stories for a long, long time. >> absolutely. >> tell me about it. >> the questions about the role of the media over the years of silence around the harvey weinstein story are absolutely correct. and one of the ways in which i have conducted this reporting is to focus on the systems that it exposes, the way in which law

enforcement became an avatar for the interests of powerful men and this revolving door between the d.a.'s office in new york and high-priced private investigation firms that do the work of influencing the d.a.'s office, you know, media entities became a force for suppression and -- >> why do you think the media entities? our dna is to be investigative. what was it about the media that wanted you not to tell these stories? >> well, you know, i have to be careful about what i say at this point. i think there will be more to come later and i've been very focused on the underlying allegations. i don't want to distract from what these women did and said. but you're absolutely right to suggest that, you know, what happened here is contrary to the spirit of investigating the truth, and that's a real problem. >> well, we are going to come back to that, but let me get to your book first because this is "war on peace," and your subtitle is the end of diplomacy and the decline of american

influence. and that is a huge topic right now with the presidency of donald trump. it's almost like a cognitive disdense. on the one hand you want to make america great again. on the other hand you see actions pulling america away from projecting its greatness. from your perspective, having been so long in the state department, what do you think brought -- what do you think, for instance, the result of pulling out of the iran deal will be for american influence? >> a significant tract of war on peace is devoted to the inside story of how the iran deal was brokered and the sweat and blood and tears and literal broken bones in some cases that went into that deal. but also the acknowledgment -- >> what do you mean broken bones? >> wendy sherman, senior career diplomat broke a finger and nose, falling downstairs rushing from one negotiation to another. john kerry broke a femur. >> he was hopping around in a

plast plaster -- >> high stakes, they are first to acknowledge it is incomplete, imperfect by design because the feeling was, yes, iran is a rogue state in any number of other ways. the nonnuclear missile tests, the kidnapping tz, the human rights abuses. but you aren't better positioned to address all those issues if you also have on the table they are on the verge of becoming a major nuclear power. and in that one narrow respect, christiane, as you know, all of the world powers arrayed around this and behind this deal agreed that iran was complying and it was at least temporarily working. so there is great concern from the experts whose stories i tell in this book that the withdrawal from this deal will drive a wedge between the united states and all those other allies and also send this incredibly troubling message to north korea at a time when we so desperately want them to come to the table and stick to any commitments they make. >> let's unpack that a little bit. in terms of the deal, it wasn't

perfect, but it was a good deal. and in the aftermath of president trump's withdrawal -- in fact, technically violating the deal -- the iaea has again come out and said iran is 100% supporting it. >> and what that means is that the united states is, as you say, violating the terms of the deal, unilaterally sabotaging it. that is how it will be seen. that plays into iran's hands. this is not a universe in which we have withdrawn from the iran deal to go to some mythical better deal. the president talks about this idea there is a perfect deal out there we can get. we don't have that on the table. and some of the best diplomatic minds we have went to work trying to get the best deal we could at that moment in history. at a point at which we had already sabotaged earlier opportunities, and there were too many centrifuges going to get a perfect deal. this was the best we had, and now we've left it for no alternative. >> you talk about whistleblowers in the state department who are brave enough to talk to you. you know, i mean, the one thing the world has got to know about america, certainly from the very

beginning when you had benjamin franklin, right, was a great american diplomat. george cannon many decades later. that seems to be going by the wayside in this administration particularly, but was it already a trend that was happening? fewer people signing up for the foreign service, gutting of the state department, fewer experts able to apply their important trade? >> everything you just described is absolutely happening and happening to a vast new extreme right now. there is a purge of the state department. offices devoted to crafting policy in some of the most dangerous and important places on earth for american interests are empty, are being run by lower-level acting officials. embassies around the world are empty. there is presidents in our past, the clinton administration slashed and burned in a significant way. we shuttered a lot of embassies, we surrendered a lot of influence. we ended up shuttering two government agencies devoted to information and arms control, priorities we could use more

experts on right now and, therefore, went into the post 9/11 world already badly handicapped in this respect. we have not learned the lesson in the past. indeed we are doubling down on those mistakes. >> to the idea that the president of the united states has a right to try to seek a better deal and that he campaigned on ripping up this deal, so to speak, how credible is it to you that a presidential campaign is run on americans thinking he's going to do something about the iran deal? is that even credible? >> you know, donald trump, like many politicians before him, invoked a strain of nationalism that is often set against the work of diplomats and the work of foreign policy. and that is profoundly damaging and also unfair and abusive towards public servants who are brave men and women doing life-saving work. there is this stereotype of the dusty bureau kar

dusty bureaucrat who doesn't get anything done. this book describes problems that need reforming at the state department. it doesn't give a rosy picture. it highlights the ways in fact these are not dusty bureaucrats. these are men and women on the front lines in conflicts around the world screening people trying to get in the united states, saving americans who are kidnapped or otherwise abused. crafting the high-level deals that hopefully keep our brave servicemen and women out of the line of fire. >> secretary of state tillerson was the last of the great slashers and burners. is that something that the state department believes or you believe will continue under mike pompeo, the new secretary of state, or is he going to try to rebuild this vital bureaucracy? >> rex tillerson is on the record, like all of the former secretaries of state in war on peace, and he's really as candid as he's ever been before. he says for the first time that he may have just been too inexperienced for this job, that he didn't know how to do budget advocacy. he lays a lot of blame at the

feet of the white house. a pretty extraordinary set of confessions from him. look, mike pompeo is less likely to be out of his depth in precisely the same way because he is a politician and a washington operator and is apparent from the first rounds of back and forth in his confirmation hearing that he knows how to say the right thing. that said, there was a lot of excitement about the opening salvo statements from rex tillerson, too. and while the rhetoric sounds good now, we have to wait and see if mike pompeo will pull out of this nose dive as so many career officials hoped that he will. >> so, you know, you mentioned so many vital areas being bereft of the foreign service personnel. north korea is one of them, north and south korea. mike pompeo has come back to the united states with the three detained korean americans in north korea. that obviously is a good will gesture on the brink of a summit between the two leaders. where do you think this could lead, based on all that you've learned from the state department and in the wake of

president trump pulling out of the iran deal? >> this book confronts in frank terms the prospect of this leader to leader meeting on the north korea issue. there are very legitimate reasons why we had said no as a nation to that kind of meeting before. you really run the risk of legitimatizing north korea as a nuclear power. history shows us and a lot of the history a of negotiations with north korea is laid out in war on peace. this is a slippery diplomatic opponent. they lie, thee speak out of both sides of their mouth. they don't live up to commitments. the problem, christiane, it's not intrinsically wrong to run this as a diplomacy by tweet operation and to saber rattle and to go in there and have the meeting, but all of the experts agree you need a core of individuals steeped in the history, knowledgeable about the pressure points and the pit falls to steer those kinds ever conversation and that is just not happening right now. >> the iran deal obviously was down to a hard negotiations between john kerry and the

iranian counterpart. and kerry basically said when the deal was signed he used the occasion to reflect on his service in vietnam. you write saying, i learned in war the price that is paid when diplomacy fails. and that is essentially the guts of your book, that the military, industrial surveillance complex takes over when diplomacy is on the back foot. >> and nobody in this book is arguing that the soldiers and spies doing important work to advance american interests aren't needed, but there needs to be a balance. madelein albright is also in this book saying, really incendiary terms, the balance is out of whack and especially in the years since 9/11 there has been less and less space for diplomats in the room. and the consequence of that are exactly as john kerry says, we give up opportunities to end and avert war. >> do you think that if this deal dies and the europeans somehow can't manage to save it along with iran because of u.s.

pressure, that we are back to a -- what president obama said, either a nuclear armed iran, or a much higher likelihood of another war in the middle east? >> there is an extraordinarily high risk of that. the obama administration -- you know, this isn't just partisans. these are top military officials who have in some cases survived multiple administrations, both parties looking at the options on the ground and tactically what they concluded was the ability to strike iran to reduce their nuclear capacity was woefully limited. they can put things underground, they can rebill. once they have the technical know how, they can always in a few months get back to where they were. you're at the very real risk of a perpetual cycle of strikes. this is a very dangerous footing we've put ourselves on. >> of course, part of the big issue right now is syria and america's role there and the obama administration sadly will be remembered for having failed in syria. >> absolutely. >> and you use syria paz part of your case study. >> uh-huh.

syria was one of the examples of the chaos of not having a concerted unified diplomatic effort with empowered diplomats at the helm. the obama white house vacillated and talked about red lines and didn't react to the crossing of red lines. as you know, i've done extraordinary reporting on christiane, the pentagon and cia were running amuck. arming and supporting factions on the ground were at each other's throats. it's complete chaos. i tell the story of members of the factions going to command centers on the ground and talking to an american official and say, oh, no, i'm with the cia, not the pentagon. you have to talk to the other guy. this is the chaos that results in the absence of diplomacy. >> let's get back do your own story, because no one can avoid the fact that ronan farrow is also embroiled in one of the big me, too stories of the last couple of decades.

how much of your experience, your writings about your own father, woody allen, have informed your zeal on this issue? >> only in a very attenuated way, christiane. i want to be careful to point that out because this idea that there is some kind of deeply rooted personal vendetta is an attempted weaponization of that happening by harvey weinstein. there is no truth to it and any journalist looked at it immediately saw i was an ambitious reporter on a lead. i had reservations going to harvey weinstein. you and i were at events he was at. polite interactions, members of my family worked with him in a totally productive way. >> wouldn't it have been risky for you -- your mother is an actress, your father is a director. as you say, members of your family. was it risky for you to take on harvey weinstein? >> it turned out to be profoundly risky, you know? really for a time my television career ended when i refused to stop reporting this story.

he made devastating personal threats, you know. i had some unsavory characters following me and staking me out. none of that is at all commensurate with the tremendous trauma that these women, these sources went through. but it is -- >> what sort of threats? >> i want to be careful to not become the story. that falls into the category i think there will be time to look behind the scenes. it was not an easy process. and the personal links to it that kept me driven were simply that i had experienced what happens to a family when this devastating issue of sexual violence hits it. it was an emotional understanding of the broad strokes at how important it was to tell these stories. it's not a personal feeling about harvey weinstein. >> indeed. i'm not even suggesting a personal vendetta. i'm suggesting what might motivate and inform a human being when you're taking on an issue. but particularly, i think you even said to your uss ter dylan,

dylan, really, do you have to keep writing about this stuff ? >> i think i had an acute understanding of the conversation we all went through nationally in the united states. of initially grappling with, why is this worth it? and then over time reviewing how incredibly well corroborated my sister's story was and hearing her anguish, understanding that as painful as it was to dredge that up, her determination to have those allegations see the light of day was actually a brave and important thing. and certainly that informed my conversation, you know, that sometime later with accusers of powerful men that i was reporting on. >> and then you came out and defended her. >> so, i had to go through a complicated process after my sister insisted on speaking out, and really review the evidence carefully and then conclude almost grudgingly at first, that this was so serious and so credible that i had an obligation to respond to these questions that i was then

besieged with and say, yes, actually my judgment as a brother, but also as a reporter and an attorney who has reviewed the evidence is this is really serious and she should be heard. and i did that only one time in a hollywood reporter column that they asked me to write. i said yes because i felt that sense of moral obligation. since then she has been more than equipped to raise a very loud voice herself. >> and you did that, but that also, i think you write, it sort of empowered or encouraged the women who you then were able to break their story to come to you, because they knew that you would be open to their story. >> well, i was quite badly attacked and smeared for writing that. it wasn't particularly convenient for my career, but i have no regrets about it. i'm very proud to have been able to support my sister as she did a brave thing. i do think that for some of the accusers of harvey weinstein who did this incredibly courageous

act in speaking out about there and at risk, it was a helpful precedent i had spoken in a forthright way about this issue when so many others refused to. >> just this week as you are promoting this book, you also had another big scoop about the attorney general of new york. he obviously denies these allegations, but you had women come up and tell you about issues of domestic abuse and violence. tell me about that one. >> these are terrifically serious allegations of violence being raised about eric schneiderman, the attorney general of new york, now former attorney general after the publication of this story. woman after woman describing beatings essentially, slapping, choking, punching. and, you know, part of his response, christiane was to say this was consensual role playing. indeed, it appears in his sexual activities by the accounts of the women there was proclivity

for that kind of violence. but they went to pains to say this was not role playing that they are raising these allegations about, and they wouldn't have raised the allegations if it was simply that, that this was, you know, a set of physical attacks that transpired when they were clothed often, in one case with a woman who was simply a colleague of his, a professional contact who he came onto at a party allegedly. when she rebuffed him, he began hurling terrible misogynistic up at the time and hurled her hard enough to leave a mark. i looked at the photo of that mark afterwards and heard all of these stories and looked at medical records and my colleague jane mayor and i worked hard to make sure we knew this was dead to rice. all i can say is these are both serious and very credible claims. >> i wonder what you make of the latest verdict, the result in the latest bill cosby case, and remembering that books are being

written about him that never even broached the subject of the sexual abuse that many of these women alleged against him. i mean, this was years ago. you go into that as well. again, it's part of i think what you describe as the conspiracy of silence around powerful actors. and i just mean players, not just theatrical actors. >> i remember just a few years ago, you know, being on air and interviewing one of cosby's biographers, having fights in the newsroom about whether i could ask about the absence of these allegations in what was supposed to be the definitive biography of cosby, which obviously has not aged that well. you know, there was a lot of push back. there were a lot of veteran journalists and television producers who said this is salacious, these women have been discredited. it's not in the headlines right now. why would you want to raise that? we wound up with a compromise where i was allowed to ask one final question about it as a

kicker to the rest of the interview. that illustrated how hard it was to cover these issues. only a few short years ago. i am so grateful for every reporter that's banged their head against the wall trying to change that culture. >> you also this week revealed black cube, the israeli-based intelligence operation. >> private investigation. >> private investigation arm, had actually been contracted to dig up dirt on obama administration officials who had entered the iran nuclear deal. >> that's right. we were able to expose for the first time that this was, this firm black cube, there have been reports that were just beginning to emerge there was some kind of campaign by private operatives targeting the proponents of the iran deal. i have reviewed internal materials that show how those under cover agents were directed. they were using false identities. they were using front companies. in some cases, the very same front companies that were used to pursue and smear weinstein's accusers because black cube had

weinstein through his attorneys as a client and was doing work on that case, too. here, with respect to the iran deal, they used the same tactics, going after people's personal lives, smearing them, looking at whether they had extra marital affairs. this was an all-out campaign to discredit the iran deal. >> on behalf of who? >> that remains the out standing question. the language in these materials, christiane, are politically targeted. it closely resembles rhetoric people around trump linking officials in the obama administration talking about the obama echo chamber and the influence of democrats on the media. so there is certainly a political element. now, i should point out as well, we were not able to document that, a direct client involved was a trump official as has been speculated. and, in fact, one source near black cube said this was a private client, that there was potentially a powerful

commercial interest that wanted to dismantle this deal in some way. >> and finally, richard holbrooke was a mentor to you, he's somebody i have followed throughout his entire balkan experience as well. you said once to henry clinton he was like a father to you. what did you get from him personally and professionally? >> you knew him well. he was a profoundly difficult man as we all knew. he had a larger than life personality. i'd see pictures of you together. the counter point to that was as many bridges as he burned and as sharp as his elbows were, he was the most devoted and loyal mentor. and i think every single person on that afghanistan and pakistan team would agree he would have taken a bullet for any one of us. and he was also, of course, one of the last great examples of a celebrity diplomat, someone who used the force of his ego and his persuasion to wrangle people

into deals that advance the interests of the united states. and his last days were spent decrying in secret memos i released for the first time in this book, the lack of space for any of that work, the fact he couldn't even get a meeting with the president at the end to make a case for peace in afghanistan. >> it really is a shocker and it's incredible stuff that you've unearthed. and everybody should have a look and read this book, war on peace, ronan farrow. thanks so much. i think now more needed than ever particularly at this crucial time. thanks a lot, ronan. >> it is more timely than i hoped it would be. thanks, christiane, for being here. >> we hope you enjoyed dipping into our archive with us. that's our special edition. that's amanpour on pbs. thanks for watching and join us tomorrow night. >> you're watching pbs.

>> national presentation of bbc world news is made possible by contributions to your pbs station by viewers like you. thank you. >> welcome to bbc news front casting in north america and around the world. a scathing war of words between donald trump and his former diversity officer. he's accused of using racist language. he calls her a low life and a loser. as the taliban batter afghan forces, hundreds are dead and it is still not clear who cons