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Ken Silverstein is the Washington Editor for Harper's Magazine. In addition to contributing to the print edition of Harper's Magazine, Silverstein publishes a weblog entitled "Washington Babylon" on the magazine's website.

In 1993, Silverstein started Counterpunch, a political newsletter.

He resides in Washington, D.C.

the Story

Silverstein, Ken SourcesKen Silverstein is the Washington Editor for Harper's Magazine, and a regular contributor to both the print and web version of Harper's. A former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Silverstein has covered such topics as intelligence collaboration between the CIA and controversial foreign governments in Sudan and Libya, political corruption in Washington, and links between American oil companies and repressive foreign governments. His 2004 series “The Politics of Petroleum,” co-written with T. Christian Miller, won an Overseas Press Club Award. His stories on ties between the government of Equatorial Guinea and major U.S. companies—including Riggs Bank, ExxonMobil and Marathon Oil—led to the convening of a federal grand jury, and to investigations by the Senate and the Securities and Exchange Commission. His report, co-written with Chuck Neubauer, on a lobbying business opened by Karen Weldon, daughter of Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, led to the opening of an investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

Silverstein has been an outspoken gadfly in the newspaper business. In December of 2005, a memo he wrote to his editors at the Los Angeles Times expressing his dismay over their insistence on false “balance” was discussed in an article by Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books. While reporting on potential voter fraud in St. Louis in 2004, Silverstein was angered to learn that his findings were to be woven into a larger “balanced” piece on accusations being made nationwide, when it was clear that Republican charges of irregularities in St. Louis were insubstantial. “I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news,” Silverstein wrote. “The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn off our brains and repeat the spin from both sides.”

Silverstein had been a contributing editor to Harper's before joining the Times. One of his pieces for the magazine, The Radioactive Boy Scout, became a highly acclaimed book of the same title published by Random House in 2004. He has also written for Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Slate, and Salon. From 1989 to 1993 he was a correspondent for the Associated Press in Brazil.

Ken can be emailed at ken@harpers.org.

Newest Book

Private Warriors

As the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed a decade ago, military hawks around the globe were instantly seen as obsolete. But as journalist Ken Silverstein documents in his new book, Private Warriors, the end of the Cold War has only seen many of the best and brightest Cold Warriors move behind the scenes.

Silverstein, who’s contributed to Harper’s and Mother Jones, establishes that many defense experts who once served in official ranks now roam the world as think-tank advisers, mercenaries and private arms dealers. More often than not, the American government, "as a means of strengthening foreign alliances and propping up domestic manufacturers," ends up hiring these self-stylized renegades.

We’re introduced to a motley assortment of fighters. The gallery includes Nazi military hero Gerhard Georg Mertins, whose clients have included Klaus Barbie, Saddam Hussein and Oliver North’s freedom fighters (one of his contacts rationalizes working with him by saying, "In this business, you don’t ask about politics or religion"); Ernst Werner Glatt, another former Nazi turned American-backed gun dealer to Afghani rebels ("Western civilization required his services," says an American colonel); and ex-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, now sucking up to Chinese leaders as a lobbyist for an American defense contractor.

Private Warriors ultimately comes across as a collection of magazine profiles instead of a sustained book; the chapter on SDI, for example, can’t compare in sophistication or outrage to Frances FitzGerald’s recent "Star Wars" history Way Out There in the Blue. But Silverstein has a sharp enough ear to capture the casual duplicity and amorality of these gentlemen, who survive outside constitutional checks and balances. His book shines a much-needed light onto the dark side of contemporary foreign policy.

External links

• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ken_Silverstein
• Washington Babylon, the blog of Ken Silverstein

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