Barton Gellman

Newspaper and magazine writing[edit]

Gellman has said he found his way to his high school newspaper after washing out as a junior varsity gymnast.^[12] He began his tenure as editor with a legal battle. Carol Wacker, the principal at George Washington High School, directed him to kill a package of stories about teenage pregnancy. When he refused, Wacker seized and burned his first issue and fired him as editor. Gellman filed a First Amendment challenge in U.S. District Court against the principal and the School District of Philadelphia.^[13] He won a favorable settlement nearly a year after graduation, but the articles were never published. Gellman became chairman, or editor in chief, of The Daily Princetonian in his junior year of college, and worked as a summer intern at The New Republic, National Journal, The Miami Herald and The Washington Post.


The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee hired Gellman as a full-time staff writer in 1988 to cover Washington, D.C. courts, including the trial of former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. Gellman went on to become Pentagon correspondent during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.S. intervention in Somalia and the social upheavals relating to the status of homosexuals in the military and the assignment of women to combat roles. In 1994, he moved to Jerusalem as bureau chief, covering peace negotiations, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and the ascent of Benjamin Netanyahu. He returned to Washington as diplomatic correspondent in late 1997, covering Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the collapse of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) effort to disarm Iraq.


Gellman moved to New York in 1999 to take up a role as special projects reporter, focusing on long-term investigative stories. Among his early projects^[14] in the new role was a series on the early life of Senator Bill Bradley, with partner Dale Russakoff, during Bradley's run for the 2000 Democratic Party presidential primaries.^[15]


In 2000, he led a team of reporters in an award-winning series on the rise of the global AIDS pandemic and the failure of governments, pharmaceutical companies and the World Health Organization to act on clear warnings that the disease was on a path to killing tens of millions of people.^[16]


On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Gellman wrote an eyewitness account from the scene of the World Trade Center.^[17] He spent the next two years tracking the war with Al Qaeda. Gellman broke stories on the history of the "Global War on Terror" before 9/11 under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; the activation of a secret "shadow government"^[18] and the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora. In late 2002, he and fellow reporter Dana Priest disclosed that the U.S. government was holding terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas and subjecting them to abusive interrogation techniques.^[19]


Gellman broke important stories about the use of and misuse of intelligence Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before and after the war in Iraq, including an account of the previously undisclosed White House Iraq Group.^[20] In Iraq, traveling with weapons hunters with the Iraq Survey Group, he showed vividly how the search for WMD was failing, even as the Bush administration asserted otherwise.^[21][22] When Gellman reported that U.S. and allied teams had exhausted their leads on a "reconstituted" Iraqi nuclear weapons program,^[23] the CIA issued a strong rebuttal.^[24] In testimony before the U.S. Senate, less than 3 months later, Iraq Study Group head David Kay acknowledged that The Post's account had been correct.^[25] By January 2004, Gellman used independent interviews on the ground with Iraqi scientists and engineers, U.S. and United Nations officials to tell a comprehensive story about how the prewar allegations fell apart.^[26] During the presidential election campaign of 2004, Gellman and partner Dafna Linzer wrote a series on the Bush administration's national security record, offering behind-the-scenes narratives of the war with al Qaeda^[27] and of Bush's efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.^[28]


In 2005, Gellman discovered that the Defense Department, under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was building Strategic Support Branch, a clandestine human intelligence service to rival the CIA, and that the commander had a controversial past.^[29] Later that year he uncovered classified details about the FBI's abuse of National Security Letters under the new powers granted by the USA Patriot Act, revealing as well that the bureau issued tens of thousands of those letters every year.^[30] The Justice Department mounted a fierce campaign to discredit that story,^[31] but eventually was obliged to retract many of its accusations.^[32] Congress responded to the story by asking the Justice Department Inspector General to investigate the use of NSLs. The Inspector General's blistering report, nearly two years later, led to substantial reforms.^[33]


In 2007, Gellman and Jo Becker wrote a four-part series on Vice President Dick Cheney, persuading many of his allies and opponents to speak on the record for the first time.^[34] The widely honored series pierced the secrecy protecting the most powerful Number Two in White House history, demonstrating Cheney's dominance of the "iron issues" of national security, economic and legal policy. Gellman took an extended book leave in 2008 to expand the newspaper series into a book for Penguin Press called "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency."


After 21 years on the staff of The Washington Post, Gellman resigned in February 2010 to concentrate full-time on book and magazine writing.^[35]


Between 2010 and 2013, Gellman was contributing editor at large of Time magazine,^[36] where his work included cover stories on extremist domestic militias,^[37] on FBI Director Robert Mueller,^[38] and on the early influences in the life of Republican Party Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney. He also wrote Time's CounterSpy blog on digital privacy and security.^[39]