Michael R. Gordon Biography

Michael R. Gordon has been a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal since October 2017. Previously he was a military and diplomacy correspondent for The New York Times for 32 years. During the first phase of the Iraq War, he was the only newspaper reporter embedded with the allied land command under General Tommy Franks, a position that “granted him unique access to cover the invasion strategy and its enactment”.

He and General Bernard E. Trainor have written three books together, including the best-selling Cobra II. As a journalist for The New York Times, he was the first to report Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear weapons program in September 2002 with the article “The U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.”.

Michael R. Gordon Age

Michael R. Gordon has been a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal since October 2017. Previously he was a military and diplomacy correspondent for The New York Times for 32 years.

He was born on February 10, 1951. Michael R. Gordon is 68 years old as of 2019 but his birth month is not yet revealed yet but stay ready for the update soon

Michael R. Gordon As an author

Together with Bernard E. Trainor, Gordon has written three books: The Generals’ War, which covers the 1991 Gulf War; Cobra II, which covers the Iraq War begun 2003; and The Endgame, which details the U.S. struggle for Iraq from the aftermath of the invasion and the decision to “Surge” under the Bush administration, to the withdrawal of American troops under President Obama.

The General’s War won high praise from several critics and decisionmakers, with then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney describing it as “a fascinating account of the war” that he would “recommend” “as something that gives them a different element of some of the key decisions that were made.”

Jim Lehrer described it as “A superb account and analysis of what went right and what went wrong in the Gulf War”; and Eliot Cohen, writing in Foreign Affairs, called it “the best single volume on the Gulf War.”

Cobra II, which “focuses on the rushed and haphazard preparations for war and the appalling relations between the major players,” won praise from Lawrence Freedman in Foreign Affairs, who wrote that “the research is meticulous and properly sourced, the narrative authoritative, the human aspects of conflict never forgotten.”

Gordon’s paper, The New York Times, called it “a work of prodigious research”, adding that it “will likely become the benchmark by which other histories of the Iraq invasion are measured.”

The New Republic, while calling the book “splendid”, wrote that “Gordon and Trainor remain imprisoned in an almost exclusively military analysis of what went wrong … (which) … unintentionally underplays the essential problem in Iraq–the problem of politics.”

Michael R. Gordon Rabta articles

From West Germany on New Years Day in 1989, Gordon, together with Steven Engelberg broke the news that Imhausen-Chemie, a West German chemical company, had been serving as the “prime contractor” for an alleged Libyan chemical weapons production plant at Rabta since April 1980.

The article has based a leak to Gordon “by U.S. administration officials of data that the United States previously had asked West Germany to keep secret”.

The German government initially denied the allegations, but following further reports on the Rabta plants and pressure from the US administration, a total of three Imhausen employees, including the director, were convicted of illegally supplying CW materials to Libya in October 1991 and a fourth German national was convicted in 1996 for “facilitating Libya’s acquisition of computer technology and other equipment to enhance chemical weapons development”.

Gordon and Engelberg won a George Polk Award for international reporting following their series of articles.

Inaccurate coverage of Iraqi insurgency
In 2002, reporting by Gordon and Judith Miller played a key role in raising public support for the Iraq War. Their article, “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts”, asserted, “Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.”

Anonymous “American officials” and “intelligence experts” are the only sources. Following Miller’s later refusal to reveal her source in the “outing” of C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, the Times reporter spent 85 days in jail and was later released from the newspaper.

The decision to release Miller also involved the controversy over the bias of her joint reporting with Gordon regarding Iraq’s nuclear intentions and the Bush administration. Despite his joint involvement in the controversy, Gordon remains the chief military correspondent for The New York Times.

Michael R. Gordon Image

Michael R. Gordon Wife, Married, Family

Michael R. Gordon has been a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal since October 2017. Previously he was a military and diplomacy correspondent for The New York Times for 32 years.

During the first phase of the Iraq War, he was the only newspaper reporter embedded with the allied land command under General Tommy Franks, a position that “granted him unique access to cover the invasion strategy and its enactment”. His pieces of information about marriages, wife, the family are not yet revealed yet but stay ready for the update soon

Close Up With ISIS Captives: Reporter’s Notebook

ERBIL, Iraq — Some stories tell themselves. As soon as I sat down with four former prisoners from an Islamic State prison for an article I wrote on Oct. 27, it was clear the challenge was to do justice to their extraordinary accounts.

These Iraqis had been rescued from near-certain execution at the hands of the militants by a twist of fate. Kurdish and American Special Operations forces had mounted a dramatic raid to free captured peshmerga in Hawija, an Islamic State stronghold in northern Iraq.

There were no peshmerga fighters to be found. Instead, the commandos stumbled upon 69 prisoners, who had been beaten and tortured. These were flown here on American Chinook helicopters, and I was the first journalist to interview them.

I had spent some quality time in Iraq over the years. Along with Bernard E. Trainor, a former military correspondent for The New York Times and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, I had written three books about the Iraq war and the previous 1991 American-led campaign to evict Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.

Falih Hassan, in the Times Baghdad bureau, alerted me on the morning of Oct. 22 that Iraqis in and around Hawija were talking about some sort of United States raid. My first reaction was that it could not possibly be true. Nothing like this had happened since President Obama sent about 3,500 American military advisers and other personnel back to Iraq.

My job, however, is to check things out, however improbable. I thought it would be, as we sometimes say, another story ruined by good reporting. But when I called one official who works for the American-led coalition he declined to discuss the matter. At that point, I knew at least some of the tale had to be true.

My next call was to the governor of the surrounding Kirkuk Province, whom I reached on his cellphone. He told me what he had heard about the operation, which was a lot.

When helicopters land in the dead of night, a firefight breaks out, airstrikes are conducted, bridges are dropped, and nearly 70 hostages are freed, it is not an easy thing to hide. Eric Schmitt, who was in Washington, also reached out to his contacts, who confirmed the outlines of the account.

It was an important military story: the first known instance since Mr. Obama sent advisers back to Iraq that American soldiers had accompanied Kurdish or Iraqi forces onto the battlefield.

The Times had the first report on the raid that I know of. We pinned it down early enough that our initial article was edited by our team in London before being posted.

CBS’s Pentagon correspondent, David Martin, later reported that an American had been killed, which we quickly confirmed as well. As the day went on, I heard that the aim of the raid had been to rescue peshmerga fighters.

But late that night, Kurdish officials put out a terse statement, which included this line: “There are no Kurds among the rescued hostages.”

So who had been rescued? I was going up to the Kurdish region to do some interviews before making my way back to Washington. Kurdish security officials were debriefing the hostages. So I pressed to see them.

On Oct. 27, I headed to Salahaddin, a mountain town that is a 45-minute drive from Erbil. There I was introduced to four of the former prisoners in a heavily secured government building. No restrictions were placed on what I could ask.

One of the former prisoners, Muhammad Hassan Abdullah al-Jibouri, a police officer from Hawija who had worked with American soldiers during the United States occupation, responded in broken English.

The rest spoke in Arabic, and that required two interpreters: one to translate their replies into Kurdish and another to translate the answers once more from Kurdish to English. Tinker to Evers to Chance.

These were strong men, all Sunni Muslims, who had endured terrible suffering at the hands of fellow Iraqi Sunni Muslims. As we drank sweetened tea, they answered without hesitation my questions about the torture they had suffered and the executions of their family members. At times, two covered their faces and cried.

The day before heading to Iraq I had bought a point-and-shoot camera, which Stephen Crowley, a talented photographer in the Washington bureau, had shown me how to use. I have covered six wars. Like many other Times reporters and photographers who have worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have seen soldiers killed, Americans as well as Iraqis.

I was with American soldiers in Baghdad when they helped a Sunni woman recover the body of her husband from a hospital morgue. He had been killed by Shiite militias or perhaps by members of the national police. It was 2006, at the height of the sectarian bloodletting, so it was not always easy to tell the difference.

Still, as Mr. Jibouri spoke about how the Islamic State had killed one of his brothers and began to sob, I froze. Mr. Jibouri was sitting directly opposite me across a conference table, and I was both startled and uneasy about documenting his misery. I left my camera on the table.

As he continued his story and shared his despair that he might never see his wife and son, who remains in Hawija, he again erupted in tears. This time I snapped a couple of photos. He did not object. I still feel uncomfortable about doing that, so I suppose I should never work for a tabloid.

But I told myself that I had come to share their story with the world and that the photo would help tell it. In my 30 years at The Times, it was one of the few photos I have taken for the paper and the only one that I can recall the paper used.

After I interviewed them one by one, we had a general discussion about what life was like in the Islamic State, how the militants imposed dress codes down to the tiniest detail and told residents how to hold their fingers when they prayed. They showed me how they had to roll up the cuffs of their trousers above the ankles to conform to the militants’ customs.

At the end of the session, Mr. Jibouri asked if he could make a statement. It was the only request he made. He wanted to thank the United States, and he wanted to express his dismay that Joshua L. Wheeler, the Army Delta Force master sergeant, had been killed in the rescue. “He gave his life,” Mr. Jibouri said. “We are very sorry for his family.”

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