Bernard-Henri Levy.(Interview)

To many outside France, Bernard-Henri Levy is the elegant caricature of a libertine Left Bank intellectual. But he also harbors a deep-rooted concern about the dangers of extremism--in all its shapes and forms-- which has led him to a project stirring controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. Levy learned about the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl while visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy in January 2002. He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?," released in the United States this month, argues that Al Qaeda and radicals in the Pakistani military and intelligence services have been working together to gain access to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Pearl's sin, Levy concludes, was that he got too close to those plans. NEWSWEEK's Marie Valla and Eric Pape interviewed Levy last week. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: You just returned from the United States. Tell us about the differences in the way the book was received there and in France.

LEVY: In the States, the book's reception was a lot more intense and emotional. American journalists carry the death of Pearl in themselves like an open wound. In France, Pearl is someone whose name people hardly remembered. In the United States, it's as if I was coming to tell people about [the story of] one of their relatives, a brother, a son or a best friend. I gave an interview to the first newspaper Pearl ever worked for. The journalist and I were both moved to tears. Fifteen months after Pearl's body was repatriated, I felt like I was bringing back a tiny fragment of his memory.

Why did you write such a personal book about a man you never met?

I was shaken by Daniel Pearl's death. Then, as I was investigating it, I grew more and more attached to what he stood for. I have written about 30 books now, but I never felt shaken up the way I did after I wrote this book. It shattered me, for reasons that I myself don't completely understand. I would never have been able to behave the way he did in captivity or to face death like he did. There is something both grand and beautiful in the way he rejected a war of civilizations, in his desire to communicate with adversaries and in his longing to understand the hatred of others.

When did you realize it would be necessary to introduce a form that would allow for fictional elements in the telling of the story?

I knew I ...