Leslie Cockburn - Documentary Films

Documentary Films

In 1987 Cockburn began producing and reporting documentaries for PBS Frontline in collaboration with her husband Andrew Cockburn. In Guns, Drugs, and the CIA, (1987) she interviewed, on camera, Anthony Poshepny, aka "Tony Poe," a legendary covert operations officer who had supervised the CIA’s secret war in Northern Laos during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the interview, Poshepny stated that the CIA had supplied air transport for the heroin shipments of their local ally, General Vang Pao, the only such on-the-record confirmation by a former CIA officer concerning agency involvement in the narcotics trade.

In 1990 Cockburn produced and directed “From the Killing Fields” for the ABC News documentary show Peter Jennings Reports. The film alleged that the U.S. had long been covertly supporting the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal movement responsible for the deaths of millions in Cambodia in the 1970s who had been displaced by a Vietnamese-back regime in 1979. U.S. assistance to the murderous group, Cockburn alleged, had been ongoing throughout the 1980s. The Bush Administration subsequently terminated covert aid to anti-Vietnamese forces, a move that led to the eventual UN-supervised peace settlement in Cambodia.

During the Gulf War in 1991, Cockburn reported from Israel on the Iraqi Scud attacks against Tel Aviv. Her film, shot from a high-rise building close to the impact zone, provided irrefutable evidence that contrary to official reports, the U.S.-supplied Patriot missiles were not only entirely failing to intercept the Scuds but were instead impacting on the city itself. Her 1991 PBS Frontline documentary The War We Left Behind, produced with her husband Andrew Cockburn, exposed the disastrous impact of economic sanctions on ordinary Iraqis and helped persuade the Vatican take a stand against the sanctions policy.

In 1997, Cockburn conceived and co-produced The Peacemaker, starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, a thriller positing a terrorist attack on New York City with a stolen nuclear weapon. In a 60 Minutes report produced the same year, the former Russian National Security Adviser, General Alexander Lebed, admitted that several “nuclear suitcases” in the Russian inventory had gone missing.

In 1998, Cockburn served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

After teaching for a semester, Cockburn returned to full-time journalism, producing a number of pieces for 60 Minutes. In 2000, she produced "America's Worst Nightmare," a 60 Minutes report on political instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan and the growing power in the country of fundamentalist groups linked to the Taliban, a piece that was recognized as "strikingly prophetic" in receiving the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in 2001. In 2002 she did a report on the true effects of U. S. anti-narcotics aerial spraying on the civilian population of Colombia.