James Risen
James Risen (born April 27, 1955) is an American journalist for The Intercept. He previously worked for The New York Times and before that for Los Angeles Times. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S. government activities and is the author or co-author of two books about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a book about the American public debate about abortion. Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Not to be confused with James Rosen (journalist), an American journalist for the Fox News Channel.
James Risen
1955 (age 68–69)
Journalist, author
Background[edit]
Risen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio,[1] and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. He graduated from Brown University (1977) and received a master's degree in journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism (1978). He is currently an investigative reporter for The Intercept.
Risen won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his stories about President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. He was a member of The New York Times reporting team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for coverage of the September 11th attacks and terrorism. He was also a member of The New York Times reporting team that was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, for coverage of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Risen has written four books: Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War (Basic Books) (Judy Thomas, co-author) (1998); The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (Random House) (Milt Bearden, co-author) (2003); State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (The Free Press) (2006); and Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) (2014). State of War was a New York Times bestseller. Pay Any Price was also a New York Times bestseller. The Main Enemy was awarded the 2003 Cornelius Ryan Award for "best nonfiction book on international affairs" by the Overseas Press Club of America.
Reports on government surveillance programs[edit]
In 2004 Risen came upon information about the National Security Agency's surveillance of international communications originating or terminating in the United States, code-named "Stellar Wind". He and Eric Lichtblau, who had obtained similar information, co-wrote a story about "Stellar Wind" just before the 2004 United States presidential election. Risen said the New York Times spiked the story at the request of the White House. The two reporters rewrote and resubmitted the story a number of times after the election but were rejected each time. Risen decided to publish the information in a book along with information about the CIA's Operation Merlin. He warned the paper about the book and suggested it publish the information itself. Bill Keller, Executive editor of the New York Times, and Philip Taubman, Washington Bureau chief, were furious with Risen. Keller and Taubman negotiated with the Bush administration and, after a delay, the paper published much of Risen and Lichtblau's report about "Stellar Wind" in December 2005. Risen's book, titled State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, was published in January 2006.[2]
Risen and Eric Lichtblau were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for the series of controversial investigative reports that they co-wrote about "Stellar Wind" and about a government program called Terrorist Finance Tracking Program designed to detect terrorist financiers, which involved searches of money transfer records in the international SWIFT database.[3][4]
Wen Ho Lee and civil lawsuit[edit]
In an article that Risen co-wrote with Jeff Gerth for The New York Times that appeared on March 6, 1999, they allege that "a Los Alamos computer scientist who is Chinese-American" had stolen nuclear secrets for China.[20][21][22][23]
The suspect, later identified as Wen Ho Lee, pleaded guilty to a single charge of improper handling of national defense information, the 58 other counts against him were dropped, and he was released from jail on September 13, 2000. No espionage charges were ever proven.[24][25] The judge apologized to Lee for believing the government and putting him in pretrial solitary confinement for months.
On September 26, 2000, The New York Times apologized for significant errors in reporting of the case.[26] Lee and Helen Zia would later write a book, My Country Versus Me, in which he described Risen and Gerth's work as a "hatchet job on me, and a sloppy one at that", and he points out numerous factual errors in Risen and Gerth's reporting.[27] The New York Times was one of five newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, which jointly agreed to pay damages to settle a lawsuit concerning their coverage of the case and invasion of privacy.[28][29]