Scott Shane

Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he covers national security.

In addition to the debate over terrorism and targeted killing, he has written on the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden’s leaked documents; WikiLeaks and confidential State Department cables; and the Obama’s administration’s prosecution of leaks of classified information, including a lengthy profile of John Kiriakou, the first C.I.A. officer to be imprisoned for leaking.

During the Bush administration, he wrote widely on the debate over torture, and his 2007 articles on interrogation, written with several colleagues, were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written on the anthrax investigation, the evolving terrorist threat, the government’s secret effort to reclassify historical documents and the explosion in federal contracting.

     From 1983 to 2004, he was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, covering a range of beats from courts to medicine and writing series of articles on brain surgery, schizophrenia, drug corners, guns and crime and other topics. He was The Sun’s Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1991 and wrote a book on the Soviet collapse, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, which the Los Angeles Times described as “one of the essential works on the fall of the Soviet Union.”

In 1995, he co-wrote a six-part explanatory series of articles on the National Security Agency, the first major investigation of NSA since James Bamford’s 1982 book The Puzzle Palace. His series on a public health project in Nepal won the nation’s top science-writing award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001.

He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Francie Weeks, who teaches English to foreign students. They have three children.

Books in order of publication:

Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union – 1994

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone – 2015

Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland – 2023