Steve Coll | |
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![]() Steve Coll, 2012 | |
Born | Washington, D.C., U.S. | October 8, 1958
Occupation | Journalist, author, business executive |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Occidental College (BA) University of Sussex |
Genre | Journalism |
Notable works | Ghost Wars ; The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008) |
Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting (1990); Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (2005) |
Spouse | Eliza Griswold |
Children | 4 |
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Steve Coll (born October 8, 1958) is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
He was dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he also served as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism until 2022. A staff writer for The New Yorker , he served as the president and CEO of the New America think tank from 2007 to 2012.
He is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prize awards, two Overseas Press Club Awards, a PEN American Center John Kenneth Galbraith Award, an Arthur Ross Book Award, a Livingston Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, a Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and the Lionel Gelber Prize. From 2012 to 2013, he was a voting member of the Pulitzer Prize Board before continuing to serve in an ex officio capacity as the dean of the Columbia Journalism School.
Steve Coll was born on October 8, 1958, in Washington, D.C. He attended Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland, graduating in 1976. Following high school, he moved to Los Angeles, California, and enrolled in Occidental College, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1980, he graduated cum laude with majors in English and history. Coll also attended the University of Sussex during his studies. [1] [2]
Coll is married to the journalist and poet Eliza Griswold. [3]
After college, Coll wrote for the PasadenaWeekly. He then wrote general-interest articles for California magazine. [4]
In 1985, he started working for The Washington Post as a general assignment feature writer for the paper's Style section. Two years later, he was promoted to serve as the financial correspondent for the newspaper, based in New York City. He and David A. Vise collaborated on a series of reports scrutinizing the Securities and Exchange Commission for which they received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers. [5] [6] [7] In 1989, he moved to New Delhi, when he was appointed as the Post's South Asia bureau chief. He served as a foreign correspondent through 1995. [8]
Coll began working for the newspaper's Sunday magazine insert in 1995, serving as publisher of the magazine from 1996 to 1998. He was promoted to managing editor of the newspaper in 1998 and served in that capacity through 2004. He has also served as an associate editor for the newspaper from late 2004 to August 2005.
In September 2005, Coll joined the writing staff of The New Yorker . Based in Washington, D.C., he reported on foreign intelligence and national security. [9]
On July 23, 2007, Coll was named as the next director of the New America Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. [10] [11] He has also contributed to the New York Review of Books, particularly about the war in Afghanistan. On June 25, 2012, Coll announced his resignation as President of the New America Foundation to pen a follow-up to Ghost Wars. [12]
On October 23, 2012, Coll was elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board, administered by Columbia University. [13]
On March 18, 2013, it was announced that Coll would succeed Nick Lemann as the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, effective July 1, 2013. [2] [14]
Coll's The Achilles Trap was published in 2024 to positive review, with The New York Times that it offers, "a more intimate picture of the dictator [Saddam Hussein]’s thinking about world politics, local power and his relationship to the United States than has been seen before". [15] The Washington Post argued that despite its holistic picture of Hussein, Coll failed to accurately portray the CIA's motivations. [16] In a March 2024 interview, Coll told PBS that the contributions by Hussein were missing from Americans' understanding of the war. [17]
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian-born Islamist dissident and militant leader who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death in 2011. Ideologically a pan-Islamist, he participated in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union and supported the activities of the Bosnian mujahideen during the Yugoslav Wars. Bin Laden is most widely known as the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks in the United States.
Peter Gregg Arnett is a New Zealand-born American journalist. He is known for his coverage of the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. He was awarded the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for his work in Vietnam from 1962 to 1965, mostly reporting for the Associated Press.
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
David J. Remnick is an American journalist, writer, and editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, and is also the author of Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named "Editor of the Year" by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He also has served on the New York Public Library board of trustees and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2010, he published his sixth book, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
Joseph Cofer Black is an American former CIA officer who served as director of the Counterterrorism Center in the years surrounding the September 11th attacks, and was later appointed Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department by President George W. Bush, serving until his resignation in 2004. Prior to his roles combatting terrorism, Black served across the globe in a variety of roles with the Directorate of Operations at the CIA.
Gary Charles Schroen was an American intelligence officer who spent 32 years with the Central Intelligence Agency, most notably as a field officer in charge of the initial CIA incursion into Afghanistan in September 2001 to topple the Taliban and destroy Al-Qaeda. He retired as the most decorated CIA officer in history.
Farouk Hijazi is a former Iraqi government official who served the Iraqi government during the rulership of Saddam Hussein. Hijazi served as Hussein's Director of External Operations for the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service for many years before becoming Iraq's ambassador to Turkey.
This article is a chronological listing of allegations of meetings between members of al-Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's government, as well as other information relevant to conspiracy theories involving Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted their own separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Mission Center forCounterterrorism is a division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, established in 1986. It was renamed during an agency restructuring in 2015 and is distinct from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is a separate entity. The most recent publicly known Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Mission Center was Chris Wood who led the organization from 2015 to 2017.
Bob Drogin is an American journalist and author. He worked for the Los Angeles Times, for nearly four decades. Drogin began his career with the Times as a national correspondent, based in New York, traveling to nearly every state in the United States. He spent eight years as a foreign correspondent, and as bureau chief in Manila and Johannesburg, before returning to the U.S. He covered intelligence and national security in the Washington bureau, from 1998 until retiring in November 2020.
Several sources have alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had ties with Osama bin Laden's faction of "Afghan Arab" fighters when it armed Mujahideen groups to fight the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War.
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, abbreviated as Ghost Wars, is a book written by Steve Coll, published in 2004 by Penguin Press. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
Vincent Cannistraro was Director of Intelligence Programs for the United States National Security Council (NSC) from 1984 to 1987; Special assistant for Intelligence in the Office of the Secretary of Defense until 1988; and Chief of Operations and Analysis at the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Counterterrorist Center until 1991.
The Afghanistan conflict began in 1978 and has coincided with several notable operations by the United States (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first operation, code-named Operation Cyclone, began in mid-1979, during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. It financed and eventually supplied weapons to the anti-communist mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan following an April 1978 coup by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and throughout the nearly ten-year military occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.). Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, supported an expansion of the Reagan Doctrine, which aided the mujahideen along with several other anti-Soviet resistance movements around the world.
Mark Mazzetti is an American journalist who works for the New York Times. He is currently a Washington Investigative Correspondent for the Times.
Ilene Prusher is an American journalist and novelist.
Adam Goldman is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist. He received the award for covering the New York Police Department's spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities and for his coverage of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
List of works by or about Steve Coll, American journalist.
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