Dana Priest covers the intelligence community and national security issues for The Washington Post and is an analyst for NBC News.
In her 20 years of work for the Post, Priest has written extensively on the CIA’s covert counterterrorism operations around the world, the agency’s secret rendition and detention practices and the intelligence lapses involving the Sept. 11 plot and the failure of pre-war intelligence in Iraq.
She was the Post's Pentagon correspondent for seven years. She covered the invasion of Panama (1989), reported from Iraq (1990), covered the Kosovo war (1999), and has traveled widely with Army Special Forces in Asia, Africa, and South America and with Army infantry units on peacekeeping duty in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.
In 2006 she received a number of awards for her reporting on CIA secret prisons and counterterrorism operations overseas. These include The Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting, The George Polk Award for National Reporting, and The Overseas Press Club’s Bob Considine Award for interpretation of international affairs. She also received the first Distinquished Social Sciences Alumni Award from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2006.
Priest’s widely acclaimed 2003 book about the military’s expanding responsibility and influence, THE MISSION: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America’s Military, won the prestigious New York Public Library Bernstein Book Award and was a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize. In 2004, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice, for her reporting on clandestine intelligence, and for her contribution to the Post's reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
In 2001, Priest was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing grant and was a guest scholar in residence at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She received the 2001 Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the National Defense for her series "The Proconsuls: A Four-Star Foreign Policy?” and the State Department’s Excellence in Journalism Award for the same series.
Priest holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She lives in Washington DC with her husband and two children.
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