The publication of Bernard-Henri Levy's "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" in English translation "has raised some questions about the facts surrounding the kidnapping and murder of Danny Pearl," The Wall Street Journal's managing editor, Paul Steiger, wrote today in a memo to the WSJ newsroom.

Steiger's lengthy memo, obtained by Straight Up, reports "what we know and don't know." While it takes issue with Levy, it nonetheless urges the authorities to read the book and says the Journal will examine it closely "for leads to possible further reporting" of its own. Here is the memo:

Mr. Levy offers a dramatic theory that Danny was kidnapped and murdered by a nexus of al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence officers who believed he had discovered and was going to reveal their partnership. Moreover, he hypothesizes that Danny was working on a story seeking to demonstrate that Pakistan was helping North Korea and al Qaeda produce nuclear weapons. We don't know and may never know what the kidnappers believed, so Mr. Levy could well be right on that score. We do know that Danny wasn't working on such stories, for several reasons.

First, Danny was in close contact with his editors and his colleagues while he was in Pakistan — even on the day he was kidnapped — and he told them what he was working on and what his proposals were for future articles. Nothing he was doing focused on Pakistan as a rogue state or on nuclear weapons. Danny knew the importance of working with his editors while overseas as well as any foreign correspondent at the Journal. Indeed, he'd written a memo after his experience covering the war in Kosovo that had stressed the importance of close contact between editors and correspondents as a way of protecting the safety of foreign correspondents. As Danny noted, reporters working in difficult places in the world would be safer if they didn't take risks for stories that editors didn't care about and if they checked in each day with their editors so that, if one of them didn't, the editors would know something was wrong.

Like many of the recommendations in his memo, this practice was adopted by the paper. Danny telephoned or e-mailed his lead editor, Bill Spindle, regularly while he was in Pakistan to make sure Bill knew what he was working on, and to get guidance. Danny did co-write a story in December 2001 on Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, but afterward didn't mention to Bill any plans for a follow up. In the days before he was kidnapped, Danny said he was trying to get an interview with Sheikh Mubarik Ali Gilani, who was believed to be the spiritual advisor to Richard Reid.

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