Peter Bergen

Peter Lampert Bergen (born December 12, 1962) is a British and American-based United States 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.

Bergen has written eight 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 have been translated into 24 languages.

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.

Bergen is Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows at New America, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C.

He is a Professor of Practice at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, where he is the co-director of the Center on the Future of War, a research fellow at Fordham University's Center on National Security, and CNN's national security analyst.

He has held teaching positions at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Bergen is on the editorial board of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, the leading scholarly journal in the field, and has testified before multiple 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 Homeland Security Experts Group.

Bergen is the chairman of the board of the Global Special Operations Foundation, which is a non-profit advocating for the interests of special operations forces.

He is the founding editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief.

Bergen has been nominated four times for Emmy Awards – in 1994 (CNN), 2001 (National Geographic), 2006 (CNN), and 2018 (CNN).

Peter Lampert Bergen was born in Minneapolis and grew up in London, the son of Donald Thomas Bergen and Sarah Elizabeth (née Lampert) Bergen.

Her grandfather, Leonard Lampert, founded the Lampert Lumber Company.

Peter Bergen was raised in his family's Roman Catholic faith.

He produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, which aired on CNN.

Bergen was the recipient of the 2000 Leonard Silk Journalism Fellowship and was the Pew Journalist in Residence at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 2001 while writing Holy War, Inc.

Holy War, Inc. (2001), a New York Times bestseller, 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 Emmy Awards in 2001 and 2006.

He was a fellow at New York University's Center on Law & Security between 2003 and 2011, was a contributing editor at The New Republic for many years, and editor of the South Asia Channel and South Asia Daily, online publications of Foreign Policy magazine from 2009 to 2016.

His third book, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (2011), a New York Times bestseller, gave an overview of the War on Terror and was named by the Guardian and Newsweek as one of the key books about terrorism in the past decade.

The Longest War also won the Washington Institute's Gold Prize for best book about the Middle East.

and was named by Amazon, Kirkus and Foreign Policy as one of the best books of 2011.

Bergen's 2012 New York Times bestseller was Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad.

The Washington Post named Manhunt one of the best non-fiction books of 2012, and The Guardian named it one of the key books on Islamist extremism.

It was the 2012 Sunday Times (UK) Current Affairs Book of the Year.

The book was awarded the Overseas Press Club Cornelius Ryan Award for best non-fiction book of 2012 on international affairs.

The book was the basis of the HBO documentary film, Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Emmy award for Outstanding Documentary in 2013.

Bergen was Executive Producer of the film.

Bergen co-edited, with Katherine Tiedemann, Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders Between Terror, Politics, and Religion, a collection of essays about the Taliban that was published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

He was awarded the Stephen Ambrose History Award in 2014.

He co-edited, with Daniel Rothenberg, Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014.

In 2016, Bergen published United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists.

It was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2016 by the Washington Post.

HBO adapted the book for the documentary film, Homegrown: The Counterterror Dilemma.

Bergen's Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos was published in 2019.

The Washington Post described it as "the best single account of Trump's foreign policy to date." Bergen published The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden in 2021.

Bergen has worked as a correspondent and producer for the National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, HBO, Showtime, and CNN Films.