Charlie Sennott (center) on assignment for the Boston Globe in Kunar province listens to a conversation between the Afghan National Army and people from a village where insurgent attacks have been launched. (Courtesy photo)

Charles Sennott is a regular in the Harvard Elementary School gym on Saturday mornings, where he can be found coaching recreational basketball for third- and fourth-grade boys. He blends right into the scene, offering the boys high-fives and words of encouragement as they step off the court.

Nothing about his persona would lead you to realize that he’s actually spent the last week interviewing General David Patraeus, commander of forces in Iraq, among others, for a story that will appear in your Sunday Globe the next morning. Or the fact that he’s spent the past 20 years traveling in and out of Europe and the Middle East to bring news of foreign affairs to your doorstep.

As a foreign correspondent and former chief of both the Middle East and European bureaus for the Boston Globe, Sennott still portrays his job casually: “I’ve heard that a journalist should never try to tell people what to think. Instead, they should tell people what to think about, and that’s what I do.”

“I love hard news, and I love being on the edge of history,” Sennott explains. “One of the great things about being a journalist is that you have a front-row seat on history, which is true whether you’re reporting in your local community or out there covering the war in Iraq.”

On September 11, 2001, Sennott was unpacking boxes in his new London home. He and his family had moved less than a week before, after the Globe relocated them from their former home in Jerusalem due to the dangerous environment there.

“I knew as soon as I heard that the second plane went into the tower that it was definitely Al-Qaeda,” he recalls. “And I just started writing … a huge profile on bin Laden, and we had it on the front page of the Globe on September 11, because we did an extra issue. So, in four hours, I just wrote my heart out.”

How was Sennott able to accomplish such a feat? He had been in the Middle East since the first World Trade Center bombing back in 1993, the event that triggered what he describes as his “journey” reporting in the Middle East.

Sennott had some prior experience in the Middle East covering the Gulf War in 1991, but his knowledge of the region was fairly limited, he admits. In 1993, he was working for the New York Daily News as a police reporter in downtown Manhattan when there was a loud “bang” from inside the towers.

“I responded to the scene as if it was a generator explosion, which is what we thought it was at the time,” Sennott says. “It turns out it was a bomb, the first real terrorist attack on American soil.”

“Only six people were killed, and the towers didn’t fall down,” he says, “but it was a message, and that launched me on a reporting journey to find out who the people were who tried to blow up the World Trade Center.”

Sennott started with the five suspects who were arrested, examining the mosques where they congregated. He was able to trace their roots back to Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, where he literally went knocking on the doors of civilians, asking if they had any information on these men.

“I tell them that I’m a reporter, and if you can convince them that you really want to know about what’s going on, they’ll ask you to sit down, and they’ll tell you about it,” he explains. On one occasion, Sennott was lucky enough to talk with the parents of one of the suspects.

“They told me about how their son became a militant, and why he cared about Islam so much,” he recalls. “He had loved America when we helped Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union, a country trying to crush anyone who believed in God. But after the Americans won, many Afghans became angry because they felt that the Americans had betrayed their promise, and that we didn’t really care about the people.”

So in 1993, a time before the invention of Google, Charles Sennott began to write profiles on all of the suspects in the World Trade Center bombings. “Back then you couldn’t do research on the road,” he explains, “so when you traveled you had to bring your research with you. I was traveling in Khartoum, Sudan, carrying a few newspaper clips where I had circled just one little name: Osama bin Laden.”

This was where Sennott first came upon the knowledge that would become so important eight years later, after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. “I can say now that I was in Khartoum when Al-Qaeda was just being born,” he says. “I was taking notes on this tall Saudi [bin Laden] who was talking to all these militant groups about how they ‘must come together to fight a common enemy,’ which was the United States”

After three months of reporting, Sennott had compiled what he now considers a “highly ambitious” five-part series on terrorism in the Middle East. However, all his work was overlooked by his editors at the Daily News. “My story was verbally edited and terribly presented,” Sennott says with a sardonic, yet good-natured smile. “And so, I quit.” He grins, and adds, “It was one of my proudest moments.”

Sennott was upset that his editor wanted to cut so much of his story out. “I remember saying to him, ‘How can you do this? This is so important …’ And I’ll never forget what he said to me.” Sennott’s eyes gleam as he imitates his former editor’s British accent: “ ‘No one cares about terrorism, mate.’ ”

Shortly after the incident one of Sennott’s previous editors offered him a job at the Boston Globe, which he gladly accepted. A native of Sherborn, Massachusetts, Sennott feels right at home writing for the Globe. He spent almost four years continuing his investigative reporting, and he wrote one of the first stories on the Taliban. Then, in 1997, Sennott was offered the job he’d always dreamed of.

“My editor saw the passion I had for the Middle East, and he offered me the job of Middle East bureau chief. The Globe would pay for my family to live in Jerusalem, and I said, ‘Yeah, I really want to do that.’ ”

Sennott and his family remained in Jerusalem until early September 2001. During that time Sennott’s wife, Julie, gave birth to two of their four sons, which Sennott feels strengthens his connection to the Holy Land even more.

He also covered the 2000 al-Aqsa Intifada in Israel, Palestine, and the West Bank, which he describes as coming very close to home. “We could hear bombing in our backyard and constant gunfire in the distance,” he recalls. Finally in 2001, the Globe decided it was too dangerous for Sennott’s family to remain in Israel, and September 5 they were relocated to London.

Six days later, the planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By September 19, Sennott was already on the way back to Afghanistan.

“I knew then that my life would change for many years,” he says. “I remember saying to my wife days before the attack, ‘Thank God we’re out of the Middle East.’ But now the world had changed, and I really had to go do this report.”

Sennott’s decision was extremely difficult for him. “I had to calculate,” he explains. “I have three children, and was this worth the risk? And I decided it was, because I felt like I had a lot to add to the coverage. My wife has been very supportive and so I did it.”

Sennott acknowledges fully that his job is not an easy one. “I feel extraordinarily lucky,” he says sincerely. “In recent years, a confluence of events has led me to a crossroads, where all the knowledge and skills I’d developed as a reporter in the Middle East for many years really came into play, as it suddenly became extremely important to our country to have someone on the ground to explain what is going on.”

Sennott and his family moved to Harvard last year, but he continues to spend a great deal of time traveling for his job, whether it be a cross-country trip interviewing war veterans or a visit to local colleges as part of his lecture series. Undoubtedly his is a name that will continue to be seen beneath Globe headlines for a long time to come.