Random House announced a few weeks ago that the deal was forthcoming, but in an interview today Mr. Weiner said it wasn’t made official until a few hours ago.

Both books will be edited by Random House veteran Bob Loomis; the pair last worked together on Mr. Weiner’s 1995 book Betrayal.

Mr. Weiner, 51, had been reporting on American intelligence for the Times when he started working on Legacy of Ashes, but after returning to the paper from a nine-month book leave in May 2006, he changed his focus to obituaries and started writing national-security stories only occasionally. Since his return, he has filed about 16 obits for the Times’ print edition and produced a number of online “video obituaries.”

These video obituaries were Mr. Weiner’s idea; the basic concept, he said, is to interview people on camera before they die and then post the footage online once they do. Mr. Weiner said about two dozen of these videos have been shot to date, but only one of them—an interview with Art Buchwald featuring the line, “Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died”—has been posted so far. “We have no dominion over life and death, so we can’t choose when these things run,” Mr. Weiner said.

Mr. Weiner said he does not expect to return to the intelligence beat in the immediate future, not least of all because he and his wife, currently living in New York, do not want to move back to Washington.

As for the two new books, Mr. Weiner said he won’t start working on them until the beginning of next year (“I need to take a breath here”) and that he does not expect to be given any more time off from the paper. He said the two books would probably take between five and six years of work.

The full memo comes after the jump.

May 2, 2006

Colleagues,

Sometimes a great notion just needs someone to give it a push to make it a reality ­ someone with the enthusiasm and energy of Tim Weiner.

The idea had been kicked around before at the Times's Web site and in the television department, but it was Tim, winding up a book leave this spring, who seized on it and didn't let it go.

The idea was to give an old Times tradition-- writing comprehensive obituaries of prominent people in advance of their deaths--a 21st-century punch. What if we not only wrote the obits in advance but interviewed the subjects on camera? What if we built on our impressive file of advances and created a video archive as well?

Ask the most significant, celebrated, influential people of our time to agree to a videotaped interview. Get them to talk candidly about their lives and their times, in the tradition of Studs Terkel. Then, beginning the day the paper publishes the obit, stream the video, excerpted, onto the Web; make it available for documentaries and to scholars; create oral history in audio and print. In some cases the audio portion might overlay a slide show on the Web using archival photos. Over time, The Times could build a "great lives" archive without parallel.

Tim, who is back again on 43rd Street, is taking on the challenge of making all this happen, reporting, researching and writing authoritative advance obits while spearheading the video effort in partnership with the newsroom's television department and the Web site.

Tim came to The Times in 1993 from The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for national reporting. (That was his second; he shared a Pulitzer for local coverage in 1982 at The Kansas City Times.) At the Washington bureau, he covered national security and intelligence for six years, then went to Mexico for the foreign desk. The Times has sent him to 18 countries ­ Afghanistan before and after 9/11, Sudan and Liberia, Cuba and Haiti among them. He covered the military-industrial complex for BizDay in 2005 before taking an eight-month leave to write a book on the history of the C.I.A.

Tim is a fast, fluid and lyrical writer, a tireless reporter and researcher, and a journalist with vast interests and a voracious curiosity. He joins a gifted band of writers who, day in and day out, are producing some of the finest obituaries to be found in any paper in America ­and being increasingly recognized for it: see Marilyn Johnson's new book "The Dead Beat," with its tips of the hat to Doug Martin and Margalit Fox.

With Tim's arrival, the staff just got even stronger.

Bill McDonald