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. Gellman broke important stories about the use of and misuse of intelligence
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before and after the
war in Iraq, including an account of the previously undisclosed
White House Iraq Group. In Iraq, traveling with weapons hunters with the
Iraq Survey Group, he showed vividly how the search for WMD was failing, even as the Bush administration asserted otherwise. When Gellman reported that U.S. and allied teams had exhausted their leads on a "reconstituted" Iraqi nuclear weapons program, the CIA issued a strong rebuttal. In testimony before the U.S. Senate, less than 3 months later, Iraq Study Group head
David Kay acknowledged that The Post's account had been correct. By January 2004, Gellman used independent interviews on the ground with Iraqi scientists and engineers, U.S. and United Nations officials to tell a comprehensive story about how the prewar allegations fell apart. During the presidential election campaign of 2004, Gellman and partner
Dafna Linzer wrote a series on the Bush administration's national security record, offering behind-the-scenes narratives of the war with al Qaeda and of Bush's efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. In 2005, Gellman discovered that the Defense Department, under Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, was building
Strategic Support Branch, a clandestine human intelligence service to rival the CIA, and that the commander had a controversial past. Later that year he uncovered classified details about the FBI's abuse of
National Security Letters under the new powers granted by the
USA Patriot Act, revealing as well that the bureau issued tens of thousands of those letters every year. The Justice Department mounted a fierce campaign to discredit that story, but eventually was obliged to retract many of its accusations. Congress responded to the story by asking the Justice Department Inspector General to investigate the use of NSLs. The Inspector General's blistering report, nearly two years later, led to substantial reforms. In 2007, Gellman and
Jo Becker wrote a four-part series on Vice President Dick Cheney, persuading many of his allies and opponents to speak on the record for the first time. The widely honored series pierced the secrecy protecting the most powerful Number Two in White House history, demonstrating Cheney's dominance of the "iron issues" of national security, economic and legal policy. Gellman took an extended book leave in 2008 to expand the newspaper series into a book for Penguin Press called "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency." After 21 years on the staff of
The Washington Post, Gellman resigned in February 2010 to concentrate full-time on book and magazine writing. Between 2010 and 2013, Gellman was contributing editor at large of
Time magazine, where his work included cover stories on extremist domestic militias, on FBI Director
Robert Mueller, and on the early influences in the life of Republican Party Presidential Nominee
Mitt Romney. He also wrote
Time CounterSpy blog on digital privacy and security.
Global surveillance disclosure Gellman returned to
The Washington Post on temporary contract in May 2013 to lead the paper's coverage of the 2013 and 2014
Global surveillance disclosure, based on top-secret documents leaked by ex-
NSA contractor
Edward Snowden. In December 2013, after interviewing Snowden in
Moscow, Gellman summarized 6 months of reporting in The
Post as follows: Gellman has spoken about the revelations in numerous broadcasts and public appearances. Among the most widely cited is an interview on NPR's
Fresh Air with host Terry Gross. He spoke of the biblical roots of surveillance in a lecture at St. John's Church (the "church of the presidents") and participated in panel discussions at Princeton, Yale and Harvard. Gellman has twice debated former NSA and CIA Director
Michael Hayden about the Snowden revelations, first at Duke University and then at American University. "The government tries to keep secrets and we try to find them out," Gellman said in the second debate. "There are tradeoffs." In February 2014, Gellman stated during an event at
Georgetown University that due to legal concerns the full story about his contact with Snowden had not yet been revealed. "I don't rule out that there is legal exposure either criminally in an unlikely case or rather more likely civil compulsion," Gellman said. "Just because Edward Snowden has outted himself doesn't mean every part of my interaction or my reporting around these documents has been disclosed or I'd be willing to disclose any more of it."{{cite web ==2020 Election Interference==