Computer-assisted reporting: the phrase brings to mind complicated programs written to run analyses of miles of numerical data to create a litany of statistics to prove a trend, track the market, to do myriad tasks that have little to do with the old-fashioned investigative method of running around the country asking questions lots and lots of questions.

Certainly when we began the six-year odyssey of researching and writing "Blind Man's Bluff," our tale of submarine espionage during the cold war, we knew that there were no statistics to analyze, at least none we could get our hands on. Just about everything we wanted to write about was classified, and the Navy had made it clear that it was all going to remain classified. If this book was going to be written - and we were determined that it was - we were going to have to dig out 40 years of undersea espionage the old-fashioned way: one source at a time. Our analysis would be similarly low-tech: if a submarine came back to port damaged at the same time another submarine was reported missing, maybe the two incidents were related.

Still, here are, writing an IRE article on computer-assisted reporting, and for good reason. Even for an old fashioned information dig, we quickly discovered that all the modern trappings of modems, databases, and laptops were going to prove crucial. Had the infant Internet been worth talking about when we began, that might have been a big help as well. Instead, we ultimately used the net at the end of our project, to announce rather than to dig for findings. But on to that in a bit.

Tracking interviews

First our start. The very first thing we did was build a database - one of statistics but names, lots of names, all of them potential sources. This was a comprehensive list of just about every man who served on any submarine we had any reason to believe may have been involved in some incident that just might, maybe, if it panned out, end up in our book. There are all sorts of great database programs out there; D-Base, Foxpro and Access are among them. We didn't know about any of them at the time, and so we used an old DOS program called Profile. It worked great. It did just what we needed it to do: let us list men, their phone numbers, addresses, and just what subs they served on in which years.

By the way, when we say list, we mean type. Each profile was typed in by hand until we had thousands of names. We amassed those before we went out on a single interview. Then, as we traveled around the country - and we traveled a lot - we had the means of finding men by location, boat, by year, and we hoped these men just might be willing to tell us tales that they had never told their wives, children, parents or best friends.

It's worth noting that an awful lot of our interviews were typed directly into a laptop computer. Ultimately, the laptop proved to be no more distracting to sources than a pad and pen. In fact, often a bit of electronic show-and-tell was the perfect way to break the ice. It was also the perfect way to keep interviews sorted and to prevent scrawled notes from becoming more illegible with time. Later, when we were looking for that particularly great quote, the one we found two or three years before we were ready to write, a simple computer search dug up the tidbit every time. While the two of us ran around doing interviews, Chris' wife Annette Lawrence Drew scoured books and old newspapers, creating a time line of events on dry land. When were the summit meetings held, the treaties signed, when was talk of detente taking place on land while spying heated up at sea, how often did the rhetoric match the reality? All of it now rested on keyboard access and helped us create context.

As we wrote, we used a modem and a direct computer-to-computer connection to bounce ideas and drafts back and forth. And we used the computer to encrypt everything we sent. It wasn't that we really thought our phone lines were tapped. We just knew that it was possible. So we used Norton encryption - PGP is a better choice these days - to play what we called "I-Spy," maintaining protection against the unlikely.

Net spreads word

By the time our book was researched and written, the Internet had grown up enough to become our first marketing tool. We found new Web pages written by and for submariners. We found their bulletin boards. We created long e-mail distribution lists. We spread the word, a new book with tales long untold was coming out.

We know the effort was effective. We became one of the top sellers at Amazon.com before we were ever published. At least one man who received our e-mail on the fifth forward between submariners and spies turned around and organized a book signing that drew more than 200 people and where we signed nearly 500 books. This was the first book for submariners and their relatives that showed that the men did more than guard the Golden Gate bridge. Soon we found heated discussions about "Blind Man's Bluff" on bulletin boards dedicated to the CIA and to Tom Clancy.

It was also through the Internet that submariners came to find us, to write their concern about secrets that no longer were, to thank us for ending the silence, to offer their congratulations for a book by a couple of unknowns that surfed the best sellers list for longer than six months.

Sherry Sontag can be reached by e-mail at sherry@panix.ocm

Christopher Drew can be reached by e-mail at drew6@.com