In the shaded garden of her Islamabad home on a cicada-filled spring evening, Kathy Gannon was describing how she develops sources on one of the most challenging foreign beats – reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan since the late 1980s, work that nearly cost her her life less than a year later, when Gannon was severely wounded and AP photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus killed on assignment in Afghanistan. But on that peaceful Sunday, we had taken a walk through the mud-houses neighborhood across an unpaved alley from her villa, and a man getting a shave at the street-stand barbershop, the women strolling in their brightest saris, and the children busy with a pickup cricket game had all smiled and waved at us. Journalists like to say they are only as good as their sources – and Gannon's persistence, which has gained her access from top government leaders to children in tribal areas, is the main trait shared universally across time and space by AP correspondents who have developed strong sources at the Holy See, among the Taliban, and everywhere else.

Access to “the man on the street,” rulers, and insurgents is the foundation of foreign reporting, and each source presents unique challenges in different cultures and political systems. This chapter details how correspondents have found and kept their sources, from North Korean children to the anonymous spokespeople (yes, there is such a thing) for the Élysée in Paris.