Arnaud de Borchgrave - Biography

Biography

Born in Belgium to Audrey Dorothy Louise Townshend, daughter of Major General Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, and Belgian Count Baudouin de Borchgrave d’Altena, head of Belgium's military intelligence for the government-in-exile during World War II, Arnaud de Borchgrave was educated in Belgium, Britain and the United States. He served in the British Royal Navy (1942-46), from the age of 15, after running away from home and using falsified papers to enlist. He gave up his title of nobility in 1951.

In 1947, he was appointed Brussels bureau manager for United Press, and three years later he became Newsweek's bureau chief in Paris and then its chief correspondent. In 1953 he became a senior editor for the magazine. Osborn Elliot—former Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek—once said:

As a correspondent for Newsweek, de Borchgrave secured numerous interviews with world leaders. In 1969 he interviewed both President Nasser of Egypt and Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. In October 1972, during the Vietnam War, he was accorded his most famous interview, travelling to Hanoi to speak with North Vietnamese Prime Minister and Politburo member Pham Van Dong. In that interview, Dong described a provision of a proposed peace deal as a "coalition of transition," which raised fears with the South Vietnamese that the deal involved a coalition government, possibly playing a role in South Vietnam's rejection of the deal.

Appointed Editor-in-Chief for The Washington Times on 20 March 1985, de Borchgrave also later served as CEO of a much-diminished United Press International, successor to his early-career employer, in the late 1990s, during the latter part of the agency's ownership by a group of Saudi investors. In that role, de Borchgrave orchestrated UPI's exit from its last major media niche, the broadcast news business that United Press had initiated in the 1930s. De Borchgrave maintained that "what was brilliant pioneering work on the part of UPI prior to World War II, with radio news, is now a static quantity and sofar as I'm concerned, certainly doesn't fit into my plans for the future." He sought to shift UPI's dwindling resources into Internet-based delivery of newsletter services, focusing more on technical and diplomatic specialties than on general news. The rump UPI thus sold the client list of its still-significant radio network and broadcast wire to its former rival, the AP.

The following year, de Borchgrave played a key role in the sale of the further downsized UPI to News World Communications, the international news media company founded in 1976 by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon, who was also the founder of The Washington Times for which de Borchgrave had worked earlier.

After his CEO turn at UPI, de Borchgrave retained associations with both Unification Church media outlets, as "Editor-at-Large" of The Washington Times and UPI, writing regular columns published by either or both. He also serves as Project Director for Transnational Threats (TNT) and Senior Advisor for The Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is a contributor to The Globalist, a daily online magazine.

According to Morley Safer's "Flashbacks", Borchgrave testified before senator Jeremiah Denton's subcommittee in 1981 that Pham Xuan An (a Time employee and Vietcong spy based in Saigon) "was an agent whose mission was to disinform the Western press". An denied to Safer that he planted disinformation, saying that his VC bosses thought it would be too obvious, and that they preferred he feed them information instead.

De Borchgrave is co-author with Robert Moss of the best-selling novel The Spike (1980). He is also a pundit for NewsMax for which he writes articles from time to time. He married his wife, Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave, daughter of ambassador and author Henry Serrano Villard, in 1969, following two earlier marriages. Alexandra Villard is also a published author, including a biography of her great-grandfather, railroad tycoon Henry Villard.