William Arkin is an author, journalist and analyst who has been working on the subject of national security for over 50 years. He currently works for Newsweek magazine as a senior national security correspondent. His unique career spans an early assignment in Army intelligence in Cold War Berlin to being a best-selling author today. He has written articles that have appeared on the front page of The New York Times,The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. He has worked as a military advisor to the most influential non-governmental human rights and environmental organizations, equally at ease heading Greenpeace International’s response to the first Gulf War or teaching at the U.S. Air Force’s premier strategy school. He is weirdly proud to say that he spent the night in Saddam General Hospital after being injured by an unexploded cluster bomb in Iraq and that some of his fondest memories were picking through the rubble of Slobodan Milosevic’s Belgrade villa and Mullah Omar’s compound in Afghanistan. He is probably the only person alive who can say that he has written for both The Nation magazine and Marine Corps Gazette.
In 2021, Arkin will publish three books, The Generals Have No Clothes: The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars (Simon & Schuster), History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11 (Featherproof Books), and On That Day: The Definitive Timeline of 9/11 (PublicAffairs).
Arkin is co-author of the multi-award winning and national best seller Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (Little Brown), based up a four-part series Arkin and Dana Priest wrote in 2010. The book and series were the results of a three-year investigation into the shadows of the enormous system of military, intelligence and corporate interests created in the decade after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The series was accompanied by The Washington Post’s largest ever online presentation, earned the authors the George Polk Award for National Reporting, the Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists award for Public Service, was a Goldsmith finalist for Investigative Reporting and Pulitzer award nominee, as well as recipient of a half dozen other major journalism awards.
Arkin's other national bestseller was Nuclear Battlefields (Ballinger/Harper & Row) with Richardl Fieldhouse, the first book to reveal the locations of nuclear weapons around the world and introduce the concept of the "infrastructure" behind war. The book was a news sensation from the front pages of The New York Times to media in Italy, Germany, and Japan, and even earned Arkin a mention in a monologue on the Johnny Carson show. The Reagan Administration went as far as to seek to put Arkin in jail for revealing the locations of American (and Soviet) nuclear weapons; those were the days.
Arkin’s then worked on the multi-volume Nuclear Weapons Databook series for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a set of references which the Reagan Administration also sought to prevent from publication. His subsequent revelation of "mini-nuke" research efforts by the Pentagon in 1992 led to a 1994 Congressional ban and ultimately a pledge by the U.S. government not to develop new nuclear weapons. His discovery of Top secret U.S. plans to secretly move nuclear weapons to a number of overseas locations shattered governments from Bermuda to Iceland to the Philippines. Foreign Affairs, the bible of the foreign policy establishment, commented about Arkin in 1997: “The author is well known (and in some government quarters, cordially detested) as an indefatigable researcher in military affairs, whose cunning and persistence have uncovered many secrets ..."
Arkin then led Greenpeace International’s research and action effort on the first Gulf War, being the first American military analyst to visit post-war Iraq in 1991, and the first to write about civilian casualties and the cascading effects of the bombing of electrical power. Gen. Charles A. (“Chuck”) Horner, the commander of air forces during Desert Storm, said in a ten year anniversary interview in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings that the briefing Arkin gave him on the war and its civilian effects in Iraq was the best he’d ever received.
Working for the activist organization Greenpeace in its anti-nuclear hey-day, Arkin conceived a worldwide “Nuclear Free Seas” campaign, which combined research and action that proved so successful at dogging nuclear armed ships and submarines visiting foreign ports that the headache convinced the first Bush administration to remove nuclear weapons altogether from naval vessels.
After the Gulf War, Arkin shifted his attention to the new era of conventional warfare. His groundbreaking research on the effects of the use cluster bombs in Iraq and Serbia formed the foundation for the international treaty that later banned their use. Arkin conducted the single most methodical assessment of the causes of civilian casualties after the Kosovo war (1999), a report done for Human Rights Watch that was accepted as authoritative by both NATO and the United States government. Arkin has also visited war zones in the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Israel on behalf of governments, the United Nations and independent inquiries.
Arkin’s pioneering methods and meticulous work on the effects of conflict led also to a close collaboration with the United States Air Force, where he became a consultant. He was affiliated with the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies of the United States Air Force from 1992 to 2008 as lecturer and adjunct professor, and conceived and led the SAASS “Airpower Analyst” project to provide better tools for professional on-the-ground study. In 2007, he was National Security and Human Rights Fellow in residence at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he worked on “Why Civilians Die.” He authored Divine Victory for the U.S. Air Force, a meticulous accounting of the 2006 Israel-Hizballah war.
All during his period, Arkin found room for independent journalism and writing. His New York Times op-ed in 1994 revealing the development of blinding laser programs led to a U.S. decision to agree to an international ban on such weapons. He was the first to write about the effects of cluster bombs, leading to a partial ban on their use. He wrote about the secondary effects of bombing electrical power infrastructure, leading to a shift towards "effects" based targeting. After 9/11, he was the first to write about the Bush administration’s preemptive nuclear war concepts, provoking front page coverage in Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world. Before the 2003 Iraq war, he revealed the details of prospective war planning in the highly compartmented "Polo Step" special access program, provoking one of the largest leak investigations in the history of the Defense Department. Arkin revealed the fundamentalist religious activities of Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, then the architect of the global war on terrorism.
Arkin’s 2005 book Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World (Steerforth), the product of years of research, was featured on the front page of The New York Times and in an Emmy-nominated History Channel documentary. His 2006 revelations of renewed domestic intelligence collection by the Pentagon provoked not only a change in policy to end the so-called “Talon” suspicious activity reporting program but also to the eventual closing of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.
A 2003 Washington Post profile of Arkin commented: “From his home in the mountains of Vermont, William Arkin seems to have mastered one of the great juggling acts of the multimedia age -- persuading news organizations, advocacy groups and the Pentagon, through sheer smarts and a bulldog personality, to take him on his own terms.”
Over the years, Arkin’s research and journalism has brought his work to the front pages on dozens of occasions and he has appeared on television and radio countless times. As a long-time military analyst for NBC News, one of the few regular on-air analysts who was not a retired general or admiral, he brought both a journalistic and “civilian” perspective to contemporary military affairs from 1999-2019. He has appeared multiple times on CBS’ 60 Minutes, on Meet the Press, and other programs as an independent analyst.
