Jonathan Steele (born 15 February 1941) is a British journalist and the author of several books on international affairs.
Early life
Steele was educated at King's College, Cambridge (BA) and Yale University (MA). He took part as a volunteer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964) helping enable black American voter registration, and participated in the second abortive march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
Journalism
He joined The Guardian as a reporter on return to the UK in September 1965, and has reported from many countries. He was Washington Bureau Chief for The Guardian from 1975 to 1979, Moscow Bureau Chief from 1988 to 1994, Foreign News Editor between 1979 and 1982 and Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Guardian between 1982 and 1988 during which he reported on the El Salvador civil war and events in Nicaragua as well as the US invasion of Grenada in 1983.
Following his return to London in 1994 after six years in Moscow, he covered the Kosovo War in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 and the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. As Senior Foreign Correspondent, he covered numerous stories in the Middle East after 2001. He covered the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 and was regularly on assignment in Baghdad for the next three years. This resulted in January 2008 in his book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq which was published by I.B. Tauris in the UK and Counterpoint in the US. He reported on the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War in July/August 2006. He covered the protests and subsequent war in Syria after 2011, making numerous trips to Damascus.
Steele has reported regularly from Afghanistan beginning with his first visit to Kabul in 1981 during the Soviet occupation. He covered the Taliban take-over of the Afghan capital in 1996 as well as their collapse in 2001. His book, Ghosts of Afghanistan: the Haunted Battleground analyses thirty years of Afghan history (London: Portobello Books, 2011, and San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2011). In between foreign assignments, he worked as a columnist for The Guardian on international affairs. He was a member of The Guardian team which analysed the WikiLeaks documents on Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the State Department cables.
Steele is a frequent broadcaster on the BBC and an occasional contributor to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books. Since March 2014, he has worked as Chief Reporter of the website Middle East Eye. In early 2012, he wrote that Assad is a popular leader citing an opinion poll in which 55% of those polled said they wanted him to remain as Syria's leader, although he also commented it was worrying for the Assad government that half of those approving his government wanted free elections in the near future. In The Guardian in September 2018, Steele called for the anti-Assad rebels in the Syrian Civil War to surrender.
Books
The South African Connection: Western Investment in Apartheid (1972)
(With Ruth First and Christabel Gurney)
Steele and his co-authors, who included Ruth First, a well-known South African journalist and activist who was later assassinated by a letter bomb sent by agents of the South African government, tackled the controversy over the role and effect of foreign capital in the apartheid economy. Did it accelerate 'modernisation', raise African living standards and help to liberalise the apartheid system from within? Or did it prop up and strengthen a regime of injustice and exploitation?
The book contains detailed analysis of the chronically low rates of wages paid by leading British companies and their South African affiliates to African workers. It showed that the gap between average wages paid to white and black workers was widening, and that although the colour bar which blocked Africans from taking skilled jobs reserved for whites was floating upwards, companies paid an African less for doing the same work which had been done by a white. In other words, the shortages of skilled labour which created opportunities for Africans to be promoted into senior roles did not reduce racial inequalities but merely lowered the companies' wage bill.