Jeff Stein is a columnist at Newsweek and covers spy agencies and national policy topics. Previously, he was the SpyTalk columnist and National Security Editor for Congressional Quarterly. He specializes in U.S. intelligence, military and foreign policy issues. In addition to his work for CQ, he has written three books and hundreds of news articles, opinion pieces and book reviews. He has also made numerous television and radio appearances.
Biography
Stein was born in Philadelphia but grew up in New England, moving with his family to Maine in 1954. After attending school in Providence, Rhode Island, he moved to Hingham, Massachusetts, where he graduated from high school in 1962. Following high school, he attended Boston University, earning a bachelor's degree in American history. Stein then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for a master's degree in China studies. He entered the U.S. Army in 1968 and served with U.S. Army Intelligence as a case officer from 1968 to 1969. While stationed in Vietnam, he was awarded a Bronze Star. Stein began his journalism career at a suburban Washington, D.C. weekly. He reported for NPR during its early years, while freelancing for major newspapers and magazines. In 1981, he briefly edited the Washington City Paper before founding his own paper, The Washington Weekly, which folded in 1984, after a year of publication. He then joined United Press International, rising to deputy foreign editor. During this period he also wrote his first book, The Vietnam Factbook, published in 1987. In 1992, Stein followed up with A Murder in Wartime, a book which detailed a Green Beretmurder case that occurred during the Vietnam War. Time magazine lauded the book, calling it "...the best military morality tale since The Caine Mutiny... an exhaustively researched and heavily documented history of the Green Beret murder case." In the 1990s, Stein began writing for Salon.com eventually becoming a national security correspondent and breaking one of its biggest stories, an exposé of the secret ties between the Ringling Bros. Circus and a former CIA official, Clair George. In 2000, Stein teamed with Khidhir Hamza, a scientist who worked on Saddam Hussein's nuclear program before defecting in 1994, to write Saddam's Bombmaker. The book garnered widespread and enthusiastic reviews, including one from former chief of the National Security Agency, Gen. William E. Odom, who, in The Washington Post, called it "Not only stranger but frequently bloodier than fiction. The book should attract a wide range of readers, from foreign policy and security specialists to bored airplane passengers looking for a thriller." In 2002, Congressional Quarterly hired Stein to launch and edit CQ/Homeland Security which was nominated for an award in its first year of existence. In 2005, Stein began writing a weekly column for CQ, entitled "SpyTalk", which evolved into a daily blog featuring original reporting and regular exclusives. In October 2006, Stein sparked an uproar when he reported in The New York Times that many top counter-terrorism officials and members of the House Intelligence Committee did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. Two months later in his column, Stein got the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to reveal that he knew little about Al Qaeda and the Middle East. In April 2009, Stein, writing for CQ Politics, broke the story that RepresentativeJane Harman had been wiretapped discussing aid for AIPAC defendants. The scandal brought additional attention to the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy and implicated a number of other figures. In addition to his SpyTalk work, Stein continues to write op-ed pieces and book reviews for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Through the years, he has also written for a wide range of other publications, including Esquire, Vanity Fair, GQ, Playboy, The New Republic, The Nation and The Christian Science Monitor. He also appears on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and BBC, among others, to comment on U.S. national security issues.
