Leslie Cockburn

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Leslie Corkhill Redlich Cockburn (pronounced /ˈkoʊbɝn/, "co-burn") is an American writer and filmmaker who has covered a wide variety of international stories in almost every part of the globe.

Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she was among the first women to graduate from Yale, and went on to earn a master’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. While living in London she began work for NBC News in their London bureau. Among her early reports was an interview with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.^[1]

In 1978 Cockburn moved to CBS. As a New York-based producer for the network in the 1980s she covered, among other topics, the U.S.-directed Contra War against Nicaragua. Her 1984 report, “The Dirty War,” for which she traveled through regions of Nicaragua that were officially off-limits as being too dangerous for journalists to visit, revealed the Contra’s horrifying record of routine atrocities against the civilian population.^[2] In subsequent reports she laid out the degree to which Contras were heavily involved in the narcotics business as well as the first full account of the role of White House aide Col. Oliver North in directing the whole Contra war.^[3]

Following the overthrow of the Duvalier regime in Haiti in 1986, Cockburn’s report “Haiti’s Nightmare” (1987)^[4] on the brutality of a Haitian military unit being armed and trained by the U.S. led to an outcry in Congress and the suspension of all U.S. military aid to Haiti.^[5]

Other stories covered by Cockburn in this period included Pentagon military procurement scandals and the political history of then-Senator Jesse Helms in North Carolina. Shortly afterwards, Helms launched a campaign for his right-wing followers to buy the network.^[6]

In 1987 Cockburn began producing and reporting documentaries for PBS Frontline in collaboration with her husband Andrew Cockburn. In “Guns, Drugs, and the CIA,”^[7] (1987) she interviewed, on camera, Tony Po, aka Anthony Posephne, a legendary covert operations officer who had supervised the CIA’s secret war in Northern Laos during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the interview, Po stated that the CIA had supplied air transport for the heroin shipments of their local ally, General Vang Pao, the only such on-the-record confirmation by a former CIA officer concerning agency involvement in the narcotics trade.^[8]

In 1990 Cockburn produced and directed “From the Killing Fields” for the ABC News documentary show Peter Jennings Reports. The film revealed that the U.S. had long been covertly supporting the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal movement responsible for the deaths of millions in Cambodia in the 1970s who had been displaced by a Vietnamese-back regime in 1979. U.S. assistance to the murderous group, Cockburn revealed, had been ongoing throughout the 1980s.^[9] Following her report, an embarrassed Bush Administration terminated the covert program, a move that led to the eventual UN-supervised peace settlement in Cambodia.^[10]

During the 1991 Gulf War, Cockburn reported from Israel on the Iraqi Scud attacks against Tel Aviv. Her film, shot from a high rise building close to the impact zone, provided irrefutable evidence that contrary to official reports, the U.S.-supplied Patriot missile were not only entirely failing to intercept the Scuds but were instead impacting on the city itself.^[11] Her 1991 PBS Frontline documentary “The War We Left Behind,” produced with her husband Andrew Cockburn, exposed the disastrous impact of economic sanctions on ordinary Iraqis and helped persuade the Vatican take a stand against the sanctions policy.^[12]

In 1997, Cockburn conceived and co-produced The Peacemaker, starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, a thriller positing a terrorist attack on New York City with a stolen nuclear weapon.^[13] In a “60 Minutes” report she produced that same year, the former Russian National Security Adviser, General Alexander Lebed, admitted that several “nuclear suitcases” in the Russian inventory had gone missing.^[14]

In 1998, Cockburn served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.^[15]

After teaching for a semester, Cockburn returned to full time journalism, producing a number of pieces for 60 Minutes. In 2000, she produced "America's Worst Nightmare,"^[16] A 60 Minutes report on political instability in nuclear armed Pakistan and the growing power in the country of fundamentalist groups linked to the Taliban, a piece that was recognized as "strikingly prophetic" in receiving the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in 2001.^[17] ^[18] In 2002 she did a report on the true effects of U. S. anti-narcotics aerial spraying on the civilian population of Colombia.^[19]

In the course of her career, Cockburn has won numerous awards including the George Polk,^[20] Columbia Dupont,^[21] Overseas Press Club, and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism^[22] awards.

She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Andrew Cockburn, a journalist and film producer with whom she has co-authored several books. Together they have three children, Chloe Frances Cockburn, The O.C. and House, M.D. actress Olivia Wilde, and Charles Philip Cockburn. Cockburn has two brothers in law, Alexander Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, who are also journalists, and a half-sister in law, mystery writer Sarah Caudwell. Her son-in-law is filmmaker Tao Ruspoli, and journalists Laura Flanders and Stephanie Flanders are her half-nieces by marriage, daughters of her half-brother in law Michael Flanders. Her father in law was Claud Cockburn.

[edit] Publications

Cockburn, Leslie (1998). "Looking for Trouble, Six Wars and a Revolution"
Cockburn, Leslie (with Andrew Cockburn) (1997). "One Point Safe, the True Story of Russian Nuclear Security" Doubleday ISBN 0-385-48560-3
Cockburn, Leslie (with Andrew Cockburn) (1991). Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship HarperCollins Publishers ISBN 0-06-016444-1
Cockburn, Leslie (1987). "Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection"