I'm Bob Garfield, and this is episode two of our summer podcast series, Bob's Docs.

Last week, we examined the notion of manipulation.

This week will replay two interviews I did with documentarians who could not have made their respective movies without extraordinary access.

The first of the two is a 2003 doc called Terror in Moscow by filmmaker Dan Reed.

In October 2002, Chechen terrorists stormed a Moscow theater firing shots in the lobby

that the oblivious audience knew nothing about.

That night's performance was recorded, as was usual, by the theater's video camera.

Then a masked machine into toting man appears,

fires a shot into the air,

and shoves the bewildered actors off the stage.

The theater goers are surrounded by terrorists

clad in black from head to toe.

The suicide squad numbered 22 men and 19 women.

The women's job was to guard the hostages and, on command, to detonate the explosives strapped to their bodies.

The siege ended with the death of all the terrorists and 129 hostages,

most by anesthetic gas pumped into the theater by the Russian

security services. Reed, using video actually left behind by the terrorists themselves, presented

an extraordinary view of the crisis, the unbearable agony as 800 people sat for 57 hours waiting to die.

When I spoke to him in 2003, he told me that he was astonished to have been given access to that footage

and that it was unclear to him why the video was made in the first place.

That's one of the puzzles.

Was it to a message to their sponsors?

...