David Ignatius

David Reynolds Ignatius (born May 26, 1950) is an American journalist and novelist.

He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post.

He has written eleven novels, including Body of Lies, which director Ridley Scott adapted into a film.

His parents are Nancy Sharpless (née Weiser) and Paul Robert Ignatius, a former Secretary of the Navy (1967–69), president of The Washington Post, and former president of the Air Transport Association.

He is of Armenian descent on his father's side, with ancestors from Harput, Elazığ, Turkey; his mother, a descendant of Puritan minister Cotton Mather, is of German and English descent.

Ignatius was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Albans School.

He then attended Harvard College, where he studied political theory and graduated magna cum laude in 1973.

Ignatius was awarded a Frank Knox Fellowship from Harvard University and studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he received a diploma in economics.

After completing his education, Ignatius was an editor at the Washington Monthly before moving to The Wall Street Journal, where he spent ten years as a reporter.

At the Journal, Ignatius first covered the steel industry in Pittsburgh.

He then moved to Washington, where he covered the Justice Department, the CIA, and the Senate.

Ignatius was the Journal's Middle East correspondent from 1980 through 1983, during which time he covered the wars in Lebanon and Iraq.

He returned to Washington in 1984, becoming chief diplomatic correspondent.

In 1985 he received the Edward Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting.

In 1986 Ignatius left the Journal for The Washington Post.

From 1986 to 1990 he was the editor of the "Outlook" section.

From 1990 to 1992 he was foreign editor.

From 1993 to 1999 he served as assistant managing editor in charge of business news.

In 1999 he began writing a twice-weekly column on global politics, economics and international affairs.

His 1999 novel, The Sun King, a reworking of The Great Gatsby set in late-20th-century Washington, is his only departure from the espionage genre.

In 2000, he became the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris.

The column won the 2000 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary and a 2004 Edward Weintal Prize.

In writing his column, Ignatius has travelled to the Middle East and interviewed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Lebanese military organization Hezbollah.

Ignatius's writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Talk Magazine, and The Washington Monthly.

Ignatius's coverage of the CIA has been criticized as being defensive and overly positive.

Melvin A. Goodman, a 42-year CIA veteran, Johns Hopkins professor, and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, has called Ignatius "the mainstream media's apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency," citing as examples Ignatius's criticism of the Obama administration for investigating the CIA's role in the use of torture in interrogations during the Iraq War and his charitable defense of the agency's motivations for outsourcing such activities to private contractors.

Columnist Glenn Greenwald has leveled similar criticism against Ignatius.

He returned to the Post in 2002 when the Post sold its interest in the Herald Tribune.

Ignatius continued to write his column once a week during his tenure at the Herald Tribune, resuming twice-weekly columns after his return to the Post.

His column is syndicated worldwide by The Washington Post Writers Group.

His 2007 novel, Body of Lies, was adapted into a film by director Ridley Scott.

It starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.

Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have acquired the rights to Ignatius's seventh novel, The Increment.

On March 12, 2014, he wrote a two-page descriptive opinion on Putin's strengths and weaknesses that was published in the Journal and Courier soon after.

In September 2023, Ignatius wrote a column which appeared in The Washington Post, arguing that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris should not run for re-election, despite what Ignatius described as Biden's numerous successes in his time in the Oval Office.

The op-ed received widespread recognition from several news publications across the political spectrum.

In addition to being a journalist, Ignatius has written eleven novels in the suspense/espionage fiction genre that draw on his experience and interest in foreign affairs and his knowledge of intelligence operations.

His first novel, Agents of Innocence, was at one point described by the CIA on its website as "a novel but not fiction."

He is a former adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was a Senior Fellow to the Future of Diplomacy Program from 2017 to 2022.

Ignatius was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts.