Barton David Gellman (born 1960) is an American author and journalist known for his reports on the September 11 attacks, on Dick Cheney's vice presidency, and on the global surveillance disclosure. Beginning in June 2013, he authored The Washington Posts coverage of the U.S. National Security Agency, based on top secret documents provided to him by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. He published a book for Penguin Press on the rise of the surveillance-industrial state in May 2020.
Gellman is based at the Century Foundation, where he is a senior fellow, and also holds an appointment as Visiting Lecturer and Author in Residence at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. From 2015–2017, Gellman was also a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton.
Early life and education
Gellman was born in 1960. His father was Stuart Gellman and his mother Marcia Jacobs of Philadelphia. He is Jewish.
After graduating from George Washington High School in Philadelphia, he graduated summa cum laude from Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He earned a master's degree in politics from University College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
Career
Newspaper and magazine writing
Gellman has said he found his way to his high school newspaper after washing out as a junior varsity gymnast. He began his tenure as editor with a legal battle. Carol Wacker, the principal at George Washington High School, directed him to kill a package of stories about teenage pregnancy. When he refused, Wacker seized and burned his first issue and fired him as editor. Gellman filed a First Amendment challenge in U.S. District Court against the principal and the School District of Philadelphia. He won a favorable settlement nearly a year after graduation, but the articles were never published. Gellman became chairman, or editor in chief, of The Daily Princetonian in his junior year of college, and worked as a summer intern at The New Republic, National Journal, The Miami Herald and The Washington Post.
The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee hired Gellman as a full-time staff writer in 1988 to cover Washington, D.C. courts, including the trial of former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. Gellman went on to become Pentagon correspondent during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.S. intervention in Somalia and the social upheavals relating to the status of homosexuals in the military and the assignment of women to combat roles. In 1994, he moved to Jerusalem as bureau chief, covering peace negotiations, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and the ascent of Benjamin Netanyahu. He returned to Washington as diplomatic correspondent in late 1997, covering Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the collapse of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) effort to disarm Iraq.
Gellman moved to New York in 1999 to take up a role as special projects reporter, focusing on long-term investigative stories. Among his early projects in the new role was a series on the early life of Senator Bill Bradley, with partner Dale Russakoff, during Bradley's run for the 2000 Democratic Party presidential primaries.
In 2000, he led a team of reporters in an award-winning series on the rise of the global AIDS pandemic and the failure of governments, pharmaceutical companies and the World Health Organization to act on clear warnings that the disease was on a path to killing tens of millions of people.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Gellman wrote an eyewitness account from the scene of the World Trade Center. He spent the next two years tracking the war with Al Qaeda. Gellman broke stories on the history of the "Global War on Terror" before 9/11 under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; the activation of a secret "shadow government" and the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora. In late 2002, he and fellow reporter Dana Priest disclosed that the U.S. government was holding terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas and subjecting them to abusive interrogation techniques.