Who controls information in a free society? How can reporters fight censorship by oligarchs and intelligence services? How are intelligence services controlled in a democracy? These were among the main questions that Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award laureate answered during the lecture he gave on November 6 in Bratislava.
Tim Weiner has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his reporting and writing on the dilemmas of running secret intelligence services in a democracy. A reporter for The New York Times from 1993 to 2009, he has worked in 18 countries as a foreign correspondent, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Cuba, and Haiti. For a decade, he covered the Central Intelligence Agency as a national security correspondent based in Washington, DC.
Weiner won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as an investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, for his articles on secret intelligence programmes at the Pentagon and the CIA. He won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for his 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. His most recent book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, traces the history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations.
Weiner’s Bratislava lecture was organised by The Slovak Spectator, the Tatra Banka Foundation, the Comenius University in Bratislava, and Petit Academy.
See also The Slovak Spectator's interview with Tim Weiner.
