Patrick Radden Keefe is an American writer and investigative journalist. In addition to being the author of three books he has written extensively for many publications including the New Yorker, Slate, and New York Times Magazine. He is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Career
Keefe grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University. Keefe earned a J.D. degree from Yale Law School, an M.Phil. in International Relations from Cambridge University, and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. He has received many fellowships including those from the Marshall Scholarship Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He was a policy adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense between 2010-11. Keefe has written investigative reports on a broad array of topics and issues during his career. Topics included a conflict over ownership of iron reserves in Guinea, policy complications faced by states legalizing recreatational marijuana, and the capture of Mexican drug lordJoaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera. Keefe's 2013 story in the New Yorker, titled "A Loaded Gun", on the personal history of mass shooter Amy Bishop received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. In addition to winning the National Magazine Award in 2014, he was also nominated for "The Hunt for El Chapo" in 2015 and for "Where the Bodies are Buried" in 2016 about a woman that was disappeared in Northern Ireland. Keefe is the host of the 2020 podcast "Wind of Change", which explores a rumor that the song Wind of Change by the Scorpions was secretly written by the CIA, rather than by the band's lead singer, Klaus Meine.
Books
Keefe's The Snakehead reported on Cheng Chui Ping and her Snakehead gang in New York City that operated between 1984 and 2000. Keefe described how Ping illegally smuggled immigrants from China into the United States on a massive scale through cargo ships. The book included interviews with several of those immigrants where they describe their lives in the United States. In 2000, Ping was arrested by the United States government and sentenced to 35 years in prison for her part in leading these operations. Janet Maslin of the New York Times described The Snakehead as a "formidably well-researched book that is as much a paean to its author’s industriousness as it is a chronicle of crime." In Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World Of Global Eavesdropping, Keefe described how American security agencies, including the National Security Agency, eavesdrop on communications between individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism to determine the likelihood of terrorist attacks occurring in the near future. Keefe describes the electronic intelligence gathering apparatus for detecting this communication, often referred to as "chatter", which he examines in the context of the September 11 attacks. In a review of the book for The New York Times, William Grimes states that "Mr. Keefe writes, crisply and entertainingly, as an interested private citizen rather than an expert." He won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Say Nothing.
