Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and provides behind-the-scenes insight into how our journalism is created.
It was a sunny day in May 2015 when Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis stepped off a U.S. military-chartered plane and entered Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.
They were there to hear the unofficial story of Guantánamo, where the U.S. government opened a prison after September 11 to hold people it suspected of being members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
Thus began a story that would span nearly a decade and hundreds of hours of interviews.
That story is told in the new season of ‘Serial’, a podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Times. Over the course of nine episodes (the first two appear on Thursdays), Ms. Koenig and Ms. Chivvis, the season’s co-hosts, present a mosaic of life at Guantánamo using the experiences of those who survived and served there, such as Ms. Koenig put it in the season’s trailer. That includes former prisoners, guards, interrogators and more.
“There has been a tremendous amount of amazing and important reporting about this place in terms of geopolitics and policymaking,” Ms. Chivvis said. “But what we were trying to do was recreate the world of Guantanamo through the personal stories of people who lived and worked and were imprisoned there.”
Between Ms. Koenig and Ms. Chivvis’s first visit to Guantánamo in 2015 and Thursday’s season premiere, there were a few false starts and interviews with more than a hundred people. When Ms. Koenig and Ms. Chivvis first visited, they found that many sources were hesitant to speak on the record. Some staff members did not want to risk their careers. Former inmates they contacted were nervous about unpacking their experiences, or simply wanted to move on.
“People told us really interesting and crazy things, off the record,” Ms. Chivvis said. “But as soon as we turned on our microphones and put them in their faces, they completely shut down.”
Their editor Julie Snyder had the idea to put together a pilot for a TV show about a fictionalized version of Guantánamo. She thought people would be more candid if they contributed background information, rather than cited sources.
“That’s when crazy, riotous stories started to surface,” Ms. Koenig said.
By 2020, they had completed a script for a pilot that attracted the interest of a production company. But by then, Ms. Koenig thought perhaps enough people had returned to civilian life and agreed to share those stories on the record.
“I thought it was worth a try,” she said.
Her hunch proved correct: With a few years away from deployment or arrest, former guards and prisoners were willing to speak candidly. So Ms. Chivvis and Ms. Koenig interviewed the people again. The pair also returned to Guantanamo in 2022. This time they were able to observe and report on court proceedings. They also conducted more interviews.
Over the course of their reporting, Ms. Chivvis and Ms. Koenig collected hundreds of hours of interviews spanning nearly a decade, which they had to turn into a story.
“We have an incredible, wide range of stories and people who will talk to us at the end of the day,” Ms. Koenig said. “So then it was just deciding which one to focus on and why.”
Over the past year, the team went through the recordings and decided to dedicate the season to the stories of individual people, presenting listeners with a rich array of perspectives and personalities.
“The nice thing about the podcast is that you hear both sides,” Ms. Chivvis said. “You hear from detainees what it is like to survive from day to day as a prisoner and then you hear from a bunch of American soldiers who worked there what life was like on the other side of the wall.” (The city, she said, was surprisingly lively and had a robust nightlife, with security guards letting off steam after their shifts at the local bars. In the season’s trailer, someone even called it “la la land.”)
The series also explores why, 15 years after President Obama signed an executive order closing the prison, it remains open with 30 inmates. President Biden renewed the initiative to close the prison in 2021, but progress has been slow.
“I don’t think most people think about Guantanamo,” Ms. Chivvis said. “It’s one of those things that takes you to a page in the history book in your mind.” But because Guantánamo is still open, she added, “it’s not really history yet.”
The hope, Ms. Koenig said, is that people will leave the podcast with renewed interest in Guantanamo, a place they may not have thought about in years.
“We want to bring them into a very complicated subject in an intimate and compelling way,” she said. “I think – I hope – that people will understand Guantánamo in a way that they haven’t understood yet.”