Jere Van Dyk, from Washington State, went to the University of Oregon (track and field scholarship), was in the U.S. Army, went to graduate school at the l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques, and began his career as an aide to U.S. Senator Henry M. Jackson in the U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C.
He covered the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s for The New York Times and for which he received a Pulitzer Prize nomination. He was co-founder and executive director of Friends of Afghanistan, Inc., overseen by the National Security Council and the State Department, in the Reagan Administration.
From 1981 – 1999 he worked for The New York Times or National Geographic Magazine in South Asia, the Far East, South America, East Africa, North America, the Soviet Union and Tibet. From 2001 – 2017 he was an analyst, commentator, and reporter for CBS News on Afghanistan-Pakistan, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Middle East.
He was kidnapped by the Taliban in Pakistan in 2008.
He is the author of “In Afghanistan,” (G.P. Putnam Sons, 1983), “Captive,” (Times Books, 2010), and “The Trade–My Journey through the Labyrinth of Political Kidnapping,” Public Affairs, Hachette, 2017). He is currently at work on a book on the Haqqani Network, with which he lived as a reporter for the New York Times in 1981 and which today is the oldest, most effective and most lethal anti-Western terrorist organization in the world. In 2015 and 2017 he met with the leadership of the Haqqanis, the only Western journalist to do so. The book is due out in 2018.
