Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and political appointees in his department pushed for the two crew members of an F-15 who were shot down over Iran in April to participate in Sunday’s highly publicized “60 Minutes” report about the ensuing rescue operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Both airmen initially expressed reservations about doing the interview, with one even raising concerns about the prospect of being potentially ordered to take part in the segment, while military officials were also wary of revealing classified details of the rescue effort, according to three of the sources.

Political appointees in Hegseth’s office were adamant that both crew members sit for interviews, two of the sources said.

But after the two survivors voiced concerns, Hegseth met privately with them and asked whether they wanted to participate rather than forcing their cooperation, the sources said. As a result, one of the pilots, dubbed “Bravo,” agreed to sit for an on-camera interview and discuss his experience, while the other, “Alpha,” declined to take part in the “60 Minutes” report.

The two crew members have not been publicly identified by the Pentagon, and CNN could not independently identify them to seek comment.

The episode underscores how Hegseth’s office is working to craft the narrative around the Iran war, which has become increasingly unpopular and put pressure on the secretary to claim victory.

It also shows how Hegseth has played an unusually hands-on role in that effort — engaging in the planning process for the “60 Minutes” interview far more than is typical for a Defense Secretary.

“This entire story is a complete lie,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said when asked about CNN’s reporting on plans for the segment.

“The decision to participate in the interview was each pilot’s alone — because it is their story,” he added. “As CNN notes, one pilot decided to participate and one did not. Additionally, the Department took great care to ensure operational security, sources, and methods were protected. To suggest otherwise is to denigrate every member of our military who participated in and supported the interview.”

Many major news outlets, including CNN, were eager to interview the pilots earlier this year, and the media competition was intense. At CBS, producer Keith Sharman, a 25-year veteran of “60 Minutes,” reached out to longtime US military contacts on the day of the rescue to start pursuing an interview.

The lobbying effort went all the way to the top. Soon after the rescue, CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss told journalists in her newsroom that the bookings of the crew members were “top priorities,” and she personally lobbied Hegseth to give CBS exclusive access, three sources at the network said. Weiss also reached out to other Trump administration officials.

Hegseth and members of his staff were very enthusiastic to broadcast a dramatic retelling of the incident with both crew members, three of the sources familiar with the production of the episode said.

But the process still took several months. Sharman and correspondent Norah O’Donnell, who ultimately secured the interview, originally pitched a story for the previous season of “60 Minutes,” which ended in May.

Then CBS was consumed by internal strife. Weiss forced out several “60 Minutes” correspondents and producers and installed a new executive producer, Nick Bilton, prompting weeks of critical news coverage.

With Weiss and Bilton under pressure to prove that the new iteration of “60 Minutes” would still deliver exclusive and impactful reports, the sit-down with the crew members was even more valuable to CBS.

A CBS spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

Officials raised concerns

The Pentagon, regardless of political party in power, has historically worked to frame retelling of incidents of military heroism — there’s even an office set up specifically to work with Hollywood productions. But the push for detail during an ongoing campaign concerned military officials, according to three sources.

Sunday’s show has been previewed as the inside story of the US rescue operation that extracted the two F-15 crew members from Iran.

The pilot of the plane was found in the immediate hours after the plane was shot down by Iranian forces. But the second crew member, a weapons system officer, spent more than a day evading capture by encroaching Iranian forces. At one point, he scaled the rugged terrain to a ridgeline 7,000 feet above sea level, equipped with little more than a pistol, a communication device and a tracking beacon.

The airman was rescued by a team of American commandos, accompanied by US aircraft dropping bombs to clear the area.

That crew member decided to sit for an interview after Hegseth gave the two the choice of participating or not. The pilot declined.

Uniformed service members have voiced concern that the “60 Minutes” presentation is an effort by Hegseth’s office to use the heroism demonstrated by US troops as part of a successful rescue operation for political purposes, two of the sources said.

In addition to concerns that the aircrew was hesitant about taking part in the CBS report, members of the military were also wary about potentially revealing classified specifics of the rescue mission itself — particularly while US forces are still engaged in active combat operations against Iran, multiple sources added.

But political appointees within Hegseth’s office insisted the interview go forward despite reservations voiced by the military the chain of command, the sources told CNN.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared some concerns about the possibility that the “60 Minutes” interview could, even inadvertently, disclose military tactics to the enemy but decided to participate in the segment nonetheless, according to one of the sources familiar with the production process.

A spokesman for Caine, Joseph Holstead, said that he would not “comment on agenda-driven sources, anonymous sources’ characterizations, other than to reiterate the story here remains that the Joint Force will do everything possible to ensure no one gets left behind.”

CBS mounted monthslong push

A key part of Weiss and the CBS team’s pitch to the Pentagon involved the huge platform of “60 Minutes,” the most-watched news program on US television.

After the shock of the summertime firings wore off, Bilton and the remaining staffers faced a deadline of September 13, the date of the first scheduled episode of the new “60 Minutes” season.

Weiss and Bilton hoped to have the Iran rescue story for the season premiere. But inside CBS, the interview with the pilot was not confirmed until mid-July, and even then, there was a chance it would fall through. The sit-down was taped in mid-August.

Early in the pursuit of the interview, Weiss leaned on a past connection she had with Hegseth, whom she personally booked for a CBS interview on the January day that the ex-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were seized by US forces.

One of the CBS sources said Weiss sought to build on her relationship with Hegseth in pursuit of the airmen story. Bilton also spoke to Hegseth and Washington sources in an effort to land the interview.

She remained in touch with Hegseth as the episode came together, two sources said.

Inside the Pentagon, Tami Radabaugh, who worked as Hegseth’s TV producer at Fox News before moving with him to the Defense Department as a senior adviser, was primarily responsible for orchestrating the “60 Minutes” presentation, the sources said.

Hegseth, himself, granted a rare interview for the “60 Minutes” broadcast, according to a preview clip released by CBS.

The network’s first sneak peek of the segment showed “Bravo” sitting silently while O’Donnell asked him, “Did you ever have any doubt that the US military was coming for you?”

Then the narrator intoned, “Dude 44 Bravo. For the first time. ‘60 Minutes,’ new season, CBS Sunday.”

But when I dug into the details, I realized the AI ban goes too far. As of now, it covers the use of AI tutors, and that is shortsighted. Evidence for the effectiveness of AI tutors comes from a randomized trial of the Khanmigo program in Tennessee middle schools. That study found only modest improvement for the AI-tutored group. Yet a closer look at that study revealed that students, when left on their own, barely used the tutor.

The tutors—several on the market are reported to be effective—are amazingly effective at some of the thorniest pedagogical challenges, especially adapting to the individual needs of students. Educators call this “differentiation,” and it’s nearly impossible to do well without technology unless you spend enormous sums of money to get student-tutor ratios down to the single digits.

At my first school, Nashville Prep, we had kids entering fifth grade who knew algebra and others who could barely add. It’s impossible for one teacher, or even two, to give a class of 25 kids spread along that continuum what each one needs. Absent technology, we lean on “tracked” classes grouped by ability—a widely criticized practice because it can cluster disadvantage—or pick a midpoint and teach to the “average” student, a statistical fiction that ignores what actual students need.

So what’s the answer? I believe we should use AI tutoring to give students a path toward “competency-based learning.” That’s a fancy way of saying students progress at their own pace—something that is easiest in math and science. We should then train adults to motivate, coach and hold students accountable for their progress.

We need to be careful, however, not to keep students in front of screens all day. If I were starting a new school, I’d make it 50/50: half the day would involve no technology, the other half would be maximalist on technology, including AI tutoring and learning to use large language models for meaningful work. The nontech time would be used to read books, work through problems by hand, learn trades and other tactile skills, exercise, and play with friends.

Within New York’s announcement were a few tells that its leaders don’t understand the reality of schools. For one, they announced this change extremely late and without a clear implementation plan. One teacher wrote on X: “Are we still using I-Ready? Assessments still digital? What do STEAM classes look like now? Can we still do remote instruction? Where’s the list of banned/allowed resources so we can plan? School starts in 6 days.”

The city also announced a limited number of pilots of tech-based curriculum, evidence of the suffocating degree to which big-city school systems micromanage their educators. But teachers and principals don’t need a cue from on high to experiment, and they shouldn’t have to fill out reports every time they want to try something new. Strong educators are tinkerers, and we should let them experiment without asking for approval. By the time the approval comes, the technology and curriculum will inevitably have evolved enough to make the trial obsolete.

New York City spends more per student than any large school system in the country, and it produces mediocre results. It has been losing students—a trend that is expected to continue. So we should welcome AI tutors that could help reach the most vulnerable students and deliver high-quality instruction without unsustainable spending.

But AI tutors don’t pay union dues. That means powerful interests will be working against them. Those interests achieved a one-year reprieve, but I suspect they won’t be able to hold off these innovations for long.

Mr. Gupta is founder and former CEO of RePublic Schools and author of “The Invisible List: One Passion a Year, Every Year,” forthcoming Sept. 22.

The companies have a roughly $50 million development agreement that includes an investment by RTX into the Denver-based startup. Xcimer is working on a gas-laser fusion system that in many ways harks back to a Cold War-era technology program.

The pairing would combine recent advances in laser fusion technology with the need to develop cheaper ways to defend against missiles or drones, which have emerged as a key weapon in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The details

RTX and Xcimer say they are developing a prototype for a pulsed ultraviolet laser system about the size of a shipping container that could be moved from place to place. They aim for an initial demonstration within two years.

Because Xcimer’s laser system would run on electricity, it offers what Juan de Bedout, chief technology officer at RTX, called an “infinite magazine depth.”

Xcimer has raised nearly $200 million from investors. Xcimer Energy

“This system operates very nicely to kind of thin out those low-cost drones that are starting to pop up,” de Bedout added.

Xcimer was founded in 2021 and has raised nearly $200 million from investors including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective. The Department of Energy awarded the company $9 million through a program meant to advance fusion development.

Co-founders Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys met in 2004 as undergraduate roommates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They later worked together as graduate students at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they dug through Cold War archives and Soviet research papers about laser fusion.

During the 1980s, researchers for the Defense Department and national labs worked on high-power gas-based excimer lasers designed to shoot down missiles for then-President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which came to be known as “Star Wars.”

Interest and funding faded after the end of the Cold War, and the program was canceled in the early 1990s. Excimer lasers are used in semiconductor manufacturing, but the government’s work on laser fusion for energy and managing the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile shifted to glass lasers instead.

The Department of Energy awarded Xcimer $9 million through a program meant to advance fusion development. Xcimer Energy

Galloway and Valys returned to the idea around 2020 when it appeared that interest in the technology and demand for electricity was rising.

“We realized that no one was actually pursuing the approach to fusion that we thought was going to work, and so ultimately that’s what led to Xcimer,” said Valys, who serves as president and chief technology officer.

The context

Fusion, the reaction that powers the sun, has long been considered the ultimate clean-energy prize: potentially limitless electricity without greenhouse gases or radioactive waste. 

There has been growing enthusiasm for the technology following a 2022 breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where researchers were able to create a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed. 

Xcimer’s fusion design would build on the national lab’s work and try to bring down costs. Instead of passing light through costly, specialized glass that gets damaged, the design relies on excimer lasers that use a gas mixture. 

Scientists at Xcimer Energy. Xcimer Energy

The company has built what it calls the largest, privately-owned laser system in the world in Denver.

The weapons work with RTX will complement Xcimer’s efforts to create a commercial fusion power plant by 2035, said Galloway, who is chief executive and chief science officer. It would provide the company with some near-term revenue—something that has been lacking for most companies pursuing fusion energy.

Galloway said the companies have been talking for about a year. 

“What we converged on was a plan to integrate our technology with RTX, where we are building the laser systems and the light sources,” he said.

RTX technology, de Bedout said, would “point and track and provide the command and control.”

Teresios Bundi once symbolized the strange, life-changing opportunities the internet provided.

Hailing from a farming village in Kenya, Mr. Bundi moved to the capital, Nairobi, in 2011 to be the first in his family to attend university. There, a friend suggested he try a new online job: writing essays for cheating overseas college students.

His first assignment was a two-page essay on the health benefits of the Garcinia cambogia. It was a fruit he had never heard of, and an essay written for a student he didn’t know anything about. He earned $7 for three hours of work.

“That was a lifeline for me, I needed the money,” Mr. Bundi, now 34, said in an interview in Nairobi. He added: “I could not sleep that night. I was ready to burn the midnight oil.”

Mr. Bundi estimates he wrote more than 2,500 essays over the next 12 years, sometimes three a day. He balanced completing his public health degree with helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish theirs. Some students gave him their school login information so he could keep up with their assignments.

Mr. Bundi didn’t know it then, but he was in the boom era of internet gig work. Newly wired to the global internet and hungry for jobs, well-educated youths from places like Kenya, the Philippines and India found opportunities in the crevices of the digital economy. They could make money online doing unglamorous tasks that others further up the economic ladder did not want to do.

Then A.I arrived, and the good times ended.

In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. At colleges worldwide, students made a simple calculation that has become more pronounced today: Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?

Essay work began to thin. Rates fell, and assignments dwindled. Before long, the industry shrank to almost nothing. “I never would have expected A.I. could do this,” Mr. Bundi said.

His fate is shared by others who had found a foothold in the global online gig economy. Kenyans also transcribed meetings through the freelance platforms Upwork and Fiverr. They flagged Facebook posts to help the platform decide what could stay up. One after another, those opportunities have withered.

As technologists, economists and policymakers worldwide debate the future of A.I., Kenya’s experience shows how the technology is already dismantling some lower rungs of the global labor market.

“It’s not just going to be Kenya — it’s going to be everywhere we see a big transformation,” said Mark Graham, an Oxford University professor who has studied the global gig economy. “A.I. has come in and taken big chunks of these labor markets.”

Mr. Bundi said he had regrets. When he graduated from college in 2015, he bypassed a public health career to start an online essay-writing business, charging $40 to $70 per paper. Assignments came in through digital platforms, and he divvied up work between himself and students he hired. He rented a house near a university and filled it with desks, fast internet and mattresses. Students worked between classes and slept when too exhausted to write.

Mr. Bundi said he had made at least five times as much as he could earn in public health. He sent money to his parents, coffee farmers who had taken out a loan to buy him a laptop for college.

He sometimes considered the ethics of helping students cheat, but decided it was ultimately their choice. He said he saw himself as a tutor and was proud that a young Kenyan was thriving unnoticed inside Western academia.

Around Nairobi, new money among essay writers was visible. At its peak early this decade, at least 40,000 people in the city were being paid to do other people’s homework, researchers estimated. Essay writers drove new Subarus, carried the latest smartphones and booked exclusive tables at clubs.

After the crash, Mr. Bundi closed his essay-writing business and struggled to find a career path. He is now working for a German government development organization helping young Kenyans find opportunities in the digital economy. He said his experience was a cautionary tale.

“A.I. is coming for bankers, for accountants, it’s coming for engineers, and A.I. will come for architects,” he said. “It’s coming for everybody.”

A Master Plan Goes Awry

Few have much sympathy for those aiding an international cheating scheme. But the “essay mills” were, in their way, a Kenyan success story.

More than 100,000 students graduate from Kenyan universities each year into an economy where salaried jobs are scarce. Roughly 80 percent of work is informal — delivery driving, construction, street vending — and youth unemployment is estimated to be over 25 percent. Lack of economic opportunity has fueled a Gen Z-led protest movement.

For a generation with degrees and nowhere to use them, gig work looked like the way out. Kenya’s government thought so, too.

After cheap high-speed internet began arriving around 2009, the government saw online outsourcing — transcription, data entry, graphic design, website development and basic software coding — as a way to climb the economic ladder. Essay writing, while never officially condoned, fit the model.

In 2016, the Kenyan government started a program training university graduates to navigate online freelancer platforms like Upwork. In 2022, the year ChatGPT appeared, Kenya adopted a 10-year National Digital Masterplan that further emphasized outsourcing and online gig work.

“We just wanted jobs,” said Frida Mwangi, 46, who in 2015 turned to transcription work as a path back to the work force while raising four children.

Gig work meant that she could show her daughter that a woman can be a mother and earn a living, Ms. Mwangi said. One big assignment was transcribing interviews of Ellis Island immigrants; she also did medical transcriptions.

That work began drying up in 2017 when transcription software became one of the earliest applications of A.I. Ms. Mwangi’s wages fell, and employers told her to use A.I. and supplement it with her own expertise. She found that process more time-consuming than transcribing on her own, because the A.I. butchered the medical terms. Still, the jobs disappeared.

“My job went completely,” said Ms. Mwangi, who now advocates for better pay and working conditions for gig workers.

Kenya’s outsourcing push brought jobs, but also a backlash. Firms hired by American tech giants faced criticism for low pay and poor working conditions.

That led to a pullback. Sama, a company that hired Kenyans to police user-generated content for Meta, cut back in the country. Scale AI, a start-up that hires people to train A.I. models, discontinued some Kenyan operations.

A.I.’s abilities continue to advance. One test from Scale AI and the Center for A.I. Safety tries to quantify A.I.’s ability to do online freelance work like product design and data analysis. Last October, leading A.I. models completed 2.5 percent of the tasks. By July, they completed 16 percent.

The ‘Humanizers’

Many who grew up doing essay writing and other gig work are now struggling to find a way back into the labor force.

Alex Munyua, 30, an industrial chemist who worked in the essay business because it was more lucrative, briefly performed data labeling and social media moderation after the industry declined. Now that work has also gone.

“Some have gone back to the villages,” he said. “There are those that tried other sectors, but they were frustrated because they couldn’t get formal jobs.”

Kenya is being buffeted by economic turbulence, with 40 percent of its more than 54 million people living in poverty. Tech jobs are scarce, despite a start-up scene.

Richard Eshilache, 38, built a profitable career in essay writing and said he employed more than 100 writers in 2022. He worked for some overseas students so long that one sent him his diploma.

“He told me it is for the two of us,” Mr. Eshilache said.

He is now trying to embrace A.I. for jobs editing photos and data annotation. None of it pays as well as essay writing.

John Tanui, principal secretary in the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, stood by Kenya’s economic potential as an outsourcing hub, saying it would “unlock opportunities for our young people.”

Yet what jobs remain in essay writing are mainly for “humanizers,” who edit papers written by A.I. to avoid detection from the cheating software used by many universities.

Alphline, who began essay writing in 2021 and gave only her first name for fear of harming future job prospects, said business was as good as ever. With A.I., she can do more work, using the technology to quickly write a first draft and then writing through it herself. She eschews A.I. tools designed to disguise A.I. writing as human, preferring her own touch.

“I can clearly tell a paper that’s A.I. generated compared to one that’s human generated,” she said. “But for a student that doesn’t have that human writing experience, they can get caught.”

For Mr. Bundi, the transition has been difficult. He said he missed the intellectual wrestling match of learning new subjects and writing under a tight deadline, as well as working with some students from when they were freshmen through graduate school.

“It was like getting a parallel education,” he said.

Mr. Bundi sometimes wonders what his life would have been like if he had stayed in public health.

“All my peers that started in 2015 after graduation, they rose through the ranks,” he said. “Now if I go back, I’ll start at an entry level working for somebody who graduated just last year.”

Edwin Okoth contributed reporting from Nairobi.