Peter Bergen
Peter Lampert Bergen (born December 12, 1962) is an American journalist, author, and producer who is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast In the Room with Peter Bergen.
Peter Bergen
Journalist, author, professor, podcaster, producer
Tresha Mabile
2
Bergen has written seven books and edited three books. Three of the books were New York Times bestsellers, four of the books were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by the Washington Post, and they have been translated into 24 languages. He produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, which aired on CNN.[2]
Background[edit]
Peter Lampert Bergen was born in Minneapolis and grew up in London,[3] the son of Donald Thomas Bergen[4][5] and Sarah Elizabeth (née Lampert) Bergen. Her grandfather, Leonard Lampert, founded the Lampert Lumber Company.[6] Peter Bergen was raised in his family's Roman Catholic faith.[4][5] He attended Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire before receiving an open scholarship to New College, Oxford, in 1981, where he graduated with a degree in modern history. Bergen is married to the documentary director/producer Tresha Mabile. They have two children.[7]
Documentaries, TV series, and podcasts[edit]
Bergen has worked as a correspondent and producer for the National Geographic Channel,[44] Discovery Channel, HBO, Showtime, and CNN Films.[45]
Bergen has been nominated four times for Emmy Awards – in 1994 (CNN), 2001 (National Geographic), 2006 (CNN), and 2018 (CNN).
Since 2023, he has hosted the Audible podcast "In the Room with Peter Bergen." He was a producer of "Ghosts of Beirut" for Showtime in 2023, a docudrama series directed by Greg Barker that traced the long conflict between the CIA and Hezbollah.
He co-produced, with Tresha Mabile, the National Geographic Channel documentary, American War Generals (2014).[46] Bergen and Mabile produced CNN Films' Legion of Brothers, which premiered at Sundance in January 2017.[47] It was released in theaters in June 2017. It was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Politics and Government documentary in 2018.[48] In 2020, together with the producers of Homeland, he produced the Showtime documentary, The Longest War, which documented the CIA's long involvement in Afghanistan.
On May 2, 2016, the five-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, CNN aired the documentary We Got Him: President Obama, Bin Laden, and the Future of the War on Terror.[49]
In addition to interviewing President Barack Obama in his first sit-down interview in the Situation Room, Bergen also conducted the first in-depth interview with the architect of the bin Laden raid, Admiral William H. McRaven, as well as interviewing senior administration officials including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Four of Bergen's books have been made into documentaries for CNN, HBO and National Geographic. The documentaries based on Holy War, Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know were nominated for Emmys in 2001 and 2006.[22] Bergen was a producer of those films. Manhunt was the basis of the HBO documentary film, Manhunt,[36] which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary in 2013.[37] Bergen was Executive Producer of the film.[36] HBO adapted United States of Jihad for the 2016 documentary film, Homegrown: The Counterterror Dilemma.[42]
In 1997, as a producer for CNN, Bergen produced bin Laden's first television interview, in which he declared war against the United States for the first time to a Western audience.[50] In 1994, he won the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow award for best foreign affairs documentary for the CNN program Kingdom of Cocaine,[51] which was also nominated for an Emmy.[52]
Bergen co-produced the CNN documentary, Terror Nation, which traced the links between Afghanistan and the bombers who attacked the World Trade Center for the first time in 1993.[53] The documentary, which was shot in Afghanistan during the civil war there and aired in 1994, concluded that the country would be the source of additional anti-Western terrorism.[54] From 1998 to 1999, Bergen worked as a correspondent-producer for CNN.[55] He also produced documentaries on the Clinton administration, the Cali Cartel, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, and advances in AIDS research. He was program editor for CNN Impact, a news magazine co-production of CNN and TIME, from 1997 to 1998.[56]
Previously, he worked for CNN Special Assignment as a producer on a wide variety of international and U.S. national stories, including the first network interview with white supremacist author, William Luther Pierce. From 1985 to 1990 he worked for ABC News in New York. In 1983, he traveled to Pakistan for the first time with two friends to make a documentary about the Afghan refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion of their country. The subsequent documentary, Refugees of Faith, was shown on Channel 4 (UK).
Journalism[edit]
Bergen has reported on al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, ISIS and counterterrorism and homeland security for a variety of American newspapers and magazines including The New York Times,[57] The Los Angeles Times,[58] Foreign Affairs,[59] The Washington Post,[60] Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic,[61] Rolling Stone,[62] Time,[63] The Nation,[64] The National Interest,[65] Mother Jones,[66] Newsweek,[67] and Vanity Fair.[68] He writes a weekly column for CNN.com.[69]
His story on extraordinary rendition for Mother Jones was part of a package of stories nominated for a 2008 National Magazine Award.[70] He has written for newspapers and magazines around the world such as The Guardian,[71] The Times,[72] The Daily Telegraph,[73] International Herald Tribune,[74] Prospect,[75] El Mundo,[76] La Repubblica,[77] The National,[78] Die Welt,[79] and Der Spiegel.
In 2015, Seymour Hersh criticized Bergen for "view[ing] himself as the trustee of all things Bin Laden"[80] after Bergen wrote a piece for CNN.com disputing what he called Hersh's revisionist account in the London Review of Books about the raid that killed bin Laden. Bergen wrote that Hersh's account was "a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense."[81]