Toby Harnden is an author, editor and former foreign correspondent who specializes in intelligence, terrorism and war. A former Royal Navy officer, he holds a First Class degree in Modern History from Oxford University. He was born in the U.K. and became a naturalized American citizen in 2009.

He was Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times of London from 2013 to 2019. Before that, he was with the Telegraph for 17 years, based in London, Belfast, Washington, Jerusalem and Baghdad, finishing as US Editor from 2006 to 2011. He has reported from all 50 US states and travelled from coast to coast four times. He reported extensively from Afghanistan from 2006 to 2010, culminating in his second book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan, which won the 2012 Orwell Prize for books, Britain’s most prestigious award for political writing.

Harnden was The Sunday Telegraph’s Chief Foreign Correspondent from 2005 to 2006. He has reported from 33 countries. In 2005, he was imprisoned in Zimbabwe for 14 days after being arrested and charged with ‘practicing journalism without accreditation’. He was subsequently acquitted, deported and banned from Zimbabwe. He was Middle East Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph from 2003, based in Jerusalem but travelling throughout the region. He spent much of 2004 and 2005 covering the war in Iraq. He was a “unilateral” reporter during the siege of Najaf in August 2004 and three months later was embedded with the US Army’s Task Force 2-2 during the battle of Fallujah.

From 1999 to 2003, Harnden was The Daily Telegraph’s Washington bureau chief. He was in Washington on 9/11. He joined The Daily Telegraph in 1994 as a home news reporter before being posted to Belfast as the newspaper’s Ireland Correspondent in 1996. Harnden’s first book was Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh, considered essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the Irish Troubles. Harnden was held to be in contempt of the Bloody Sunday tribunal for refusing to identify two confidential sources. He was threatened with prison but the case against him was dropped in 2004.