Peter Bergen - Career

Career

Bergen is the director of the National Security Studies Program at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C. He is also a research fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security and CNN's national security analyst. In 2008, he was an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and an Adjunct Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (2003–07).

Bergen is on the editorial board of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and has testified before several congressional committees, including the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is a member of the National Security Preparedness Group, a successor to the 9/11 Commission, and is the co-editor of the AfPak Channel, a joint publication of Foreign Policy and the New America Foundation.

In 1994, he received the Overseas Press Club's Edward Murrow Award (OPC). Holy War, Inc. (2001) and The Osama bin Laden I Know (2006) were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post. Documentaries based on both books were nominated for Emmys in 2002 and 2007. His third book is The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (2011), an overview of the War on Terror.

Bergen has reported on al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and counterterrorism and homeland security for a variety of American newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Time, The Nation, The National Interest, Mother Jones, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic. His story on extraordinary rendition for Mother Jones was part of a package of stories nominated for a 2008 National Magazine Award. He has also written for newspapers and magazines around the world such as The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, International Herald Tribune, Prospect, El Mundo (Spain), la Repubblica, The National (Abu Dhabi), and Die Welt. He has worked as a correspondent for National Geographic Channel and Discovery Channel, and CNN. On May 2, 2011, shortly after it was reported that Osama bin Laden had been killed, Bergen stated on CNN: "Killing bin Laden is the end of the War on Terror. We can just sort of announce that right now."

Bergen is married to the documentary director/producer Tresha Mabile.