Adam Goldman

Adam Goldman is a reporter with The Washington Post, where he focuses on the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts and other aspects of national security. While at The Post, he has revealed the actual name of the man known as “Jihadi John,” who was responsible for the videotaped beheadings of Americans and Britons in Syria. He also wrote about a joint CIA-Mossad operation in which the spy agencies killed a Hezbollah operative in Damascus using a car bomb.

Before joining The Washington Post to cover terrorism, he spent 11 years as a reporter with the Associated Press. His last posting was on the investigative team in Washington, D.C., where he focused on national security since 2010. He broke many major terrorism-related stories such as the identity of the courier who led the CIA to Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and the lack of accountability at the spy agency when officers make grave mistakes. His reporting on an al-Qaida plot in Yemen revealed the country was facing a serious terror threat to aviation when even U.S. intelligence was telling the public otherwise. For reporting on that story, the Justice Department seized Goldman's phone records.

When not reporting on the CIA or FBI, Goldman has parachuted into major stories. He mucked around in the Mississippi mud in the days following Katrina; flew to Chicago without warm socks to report on the indictment of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich; and documented corruption in Kabul, Afghanistan. He once tracked down Levi Johnston in Wasilla, Alaska and persuaded him talk for the first time, and he was part of a team sent to South Carolina to get then former Gov. Mark Sanford to come clean about his adultery (Sanford did).

Goldman graduated from the University of Maryland in 1995. After college he immigrated to Israel, returning to the U.S. in 1998. He skipped journalism school and instead worked at newspapers in Virginia and Alabama covering cops and city hall. Goldman joined the AP in 2002, where he wrote about gambling and tourism in a once-booming Las Vegas. In 2005, he moved to NYC as a general assignment reporter and covered many stories such as the Miracle on the Hudson and an attempted 2009 plot to bomb the subway system, which he later turned into a book.

Goldman is the recipient of numerous journalism awards. Most recently, Goldman and three other AP reporters were awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for their series documenting the New York Police Department’s secret surveillance of Muslim and minority neighborhoods since the 9/11 terror attacks. The NYPD series also won the Harvard Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, a prestigious George Polk Award, the Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award and the Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents’ Association. He is the co-author of Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.