The McChrystal Rolling Stone article: the story behind the story

The Rolling Stone McChrystal article might never have exploded in Washington Wednesday if the Eyjafjallajokull volcano hadn’t erupted in Iceland this spring.

At least, that’s how Rolling Stone correspondent Michael Hastings has explained how his two-day stint with Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Paris turned into nearly a month-long “embed” with the US military officer who was, until Wednesday, in charge of the war in Afghanistan. Stranded in Europe, they traveled to Berlin together – and then later to Kabul and Washington.

Mr. Hastings, a salty Vermonter who earned his chops covering the Iraq war, was reached Wednesday by a number of US news outlets in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He is reporting on the ramp-up to an offensive that has been billed as key to McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy, which the more diplomatic Gen. David Petraeus will now oversee.

The comments McChrystal and his staff made to Hastings have many in Washington shaking their heads over how a top commander could let down his guard with what one outlet characterized as “an antiwar reporter from an antiwar magazine.”

By all accounts McChrystal crossed a red line by disparaging senior members of the Obama administration, and allowing his aides to do so as well – something that even McChrystal acknowledges he, and he alone, is responsible for.

But this was not a case of failing to hold one’s tongue during a one-hour, cross-legged interview in soft lamplight.

The Rolling Stone profile was sussed out over weeks in which Hastings, who in the past had prided himself on getting sources “drunk and singing,” followed McChrystal’s band from Parisian hotel rooms to dusty Afghan outposts with a tape recorder and notebook in hand “three-quarters of the time.”

1 | 2

Next