Ron Suskind is the journalist who deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for his action-packed The One Percent Doctrine, with its revelations of the extent that the US was prepared to walk on what Dick Cheney called ‘the dark side’ in order to avert a catastrophe worse than 9/11. ‘Quite far out’ was his conclusion, with Egyptian secret policemen offering to chop a man’s arm off to provide their US colleagues with a DNA sample so as to identify a head in an ice box supplied by overly optimistic Afghans. 

Suskind has unrivalled contacts within the sprawling US intelligence community. He knows how to build trust with these individuals to the point where they reveal something new and striking, which he then follows up in creative ways. His latest book, The Way of the World, takes this earlier theme forward,