彼得·伯根

Peter Lampert Bergen is an American journalist, documentary producer, think tank executive, professor, and author, best known for his work on foreign policy, national security and counterterrorism.

He has written or edited eleven books—three of which were New York Times bestsellers, and four were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by the Washington Post. The books have been translated into 25 languages.

He has served as a producer of multiple Emmy-nominated documentaries. Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at the think tank New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University.

Bergen produced the first televised interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, in which bin Laden declared war against the United States to a Western audience.

Background

Peter Lampert Bergen was born in Minneapolis and grew up in London, England, the son of Donald Thomas Bergen and Sarah Elizabeth (née Lampert) Bergen. Her grandfather, Leonard Lampert, founded the Lampert Lumber Company. Peter Bergen was raised in his family's Roman Catholic faith. He attended Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire before receiving an open scholarship to New College, Oxford, in 1981, where he graduated with a degree in modern history in 1984. He is in the PhD program in the History & Politics department at the University of Portsmouth (UK).

Career

Bergen is vice president for global studies and fellows at New America, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C. and CNN's national security analyst.

As of 2026, he is a Professor of Practice at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, where he is the co-director of the Future Security Initiative, and also the director of the Center on Intelligence and National Security.

As of 2026, Bergen is the chairman of the board of the Global Special Operations Foundation, a non-profit advocating for the interests of special operations forces, which together with US Special Operations Command, organizes the annual SOF Week conference in Tampa attended by some 25,000 members of the global special operations community. He is on the Advisory Council of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for Americans held hostage or "wrongfully detained" by states. He is a member of the Corporation of the Perkins School in Watertown, MA, which educates deaf/blind children and young adults. According to The Washington Post in 2026, "A CNN journalist spent years reporting on al-Qaeda. Now he’s handing over a massive archive. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Peter Bergen donated more than 150,000 pages of documents to Georgetown University."

As of 2026, Bergen is on the editorial board of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, the leading scholarly journal in the field, and has testified 18 times before US congressional committees about national security issues, including the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He has held teaching positions at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He was a research fellow at Fordham University's Center on National Security from 2012 to 2025 and a fellow at New York University's Center on Law & Security between 2003 and 2011. He hosted the Audible podcast In the Room with Peter Bergen from 2023 to 2025. He was a contributing editor at The New Republic for many years, and editor of the South Asia Channel and South Asia Daily, online publications of Foreign Policy magazine from 2009 to 2016. He was the founding editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief which operated during the pandemic. He was also a member of the Homeland Security Experts Group.

Books

Holy War, Inc. (2001), a New York Times bestseller, and The Osama bin Laden I Know (2006) were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post. Documentaries based on both books were nominated for Emmy Awards in 2001 and 2006.

Holy War Inc. was translated into 17 languages. Jeff Stein in The Washington Post called Holy War "equal parts journalism, history, and whimsical travelogue." Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times states that Bergen "does a succinct job of pulling together a wealth of information into a coherent ... narrative ... that impresses upon the reader the crucial role that the Afghan-Soviet conflict played in radicalizing many Islamic militants ... and replacing the notion of Arab nationalism with that of a larger Islamist movement." Bruce Hoffman wrote in The Atlantic that Holy War gives a "unique perspective ... into bin Laden's mindset and behavior." For instance, he references bin Laden's education and work experience in his family's construction business that later informed his decisions on how to "transform Al Qaeda ... into the world's pre-eminent terrorist organization."

Bergen was the recipient of the 2000 Leonard Silk Journalism Fellowship and was the Pew Journalist in Residence at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 2001 while writing Holy War, Inc.

His third book, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (2011), a New York Times bestseller, gave an overview of the war on terror and was named by the Guardian and Newsweek as one of the key books about terrorism in the past decade. The Longest War also won the Washington Institute's Gold Prize for best book about the Middle East. and was named by Amazon, Kirkus and Foreign Policy as one of the best books of 2011.

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that The Longest War is an "essential book" that provides a "succinct and compelling overview" of the war on terror. Thomas E. Ricks, also writing for The New York Times, declares that Bergen "covers it all," adding, "For years, I tried to read every new novel about how 9/11 affected our lives. None of the novels were as effective or moving as The Longest War, which is a history of our time."