Andrew Cockburn
Monday, March 14, 2016
Topic: How the U.S. came to adopt a strategy of assassination, and why it has failed
Andrew Myles Cockburn, an English-Irish journalist who has lived in the United States for many years, is the Washington Editor of Harpers Magazine.
Cockburn has written numerous books and articles, principally about national security. His most recent book is entitled Kill Chain: the rise of High-Tech Assassins, about political use of assassination. He has also produced numerous documentary films, principally in partnership with Leslie Cockburn as well as co-producing the 1997 thriller The Peacemaker, starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, for Dreamworks.
After an early career in British newspapers and television, he moved to the United States in 1979. His film The Red Army, produced for PBS in 1981, was the first in depth report on the serious deficiencies of Soviet military power and won a Peabody Award. In 1982, he published the book The Threat – Inside the Soviet Military Machine (Random House), which examined the same topic in greater depth. He subsequently published many articles on the subject of U.S. and Soviet military power as well as lecturing at numerous military bases, foreign policy forums, and colleges and innumerable television shows. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and subsequent revelation that his analysis of the Soviet military had been correct rendered his subject otiose. He then began covering middle eastern subjects, including the 1991 documentary on the after-effects of the first Gulf war, The War We Left Behind, which he co-produced for PBS with Leslie Cockburn.
In 2009 he and Leslie Cockburn produced American Casino, a feature-length documentary on the Wall Street crash. New Yorker critic David Denby called it “A terrific documentary… Everything is connected: the movie embodies chaos theory for social pessimists.” Apart from his books he has written for National Geographic, Los Angeles Times, The London Review of Books, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, CounterPunch, Condé Nast Traveler, New York Times, and the Dungarvan Observer. He is currently Washington Editor of Harper’s Magazine.
In 2007, Cockburn wrote Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (subtitled An American Disaster in the UK edition). In the New York Times, reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn called it “perceptive and engrossing.” He is also known for writing “21st Century Slaves” for National Geographic. It was a groundbreaking article that shed light on the practice of modern-day slavery.
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