John Dinges was born in Iowa. His first job in journalism was at the
Des Moines Register and Tribune, followed by a decades long career as a freelance correspondent in Latin America, foreign desk assistant editor at the Washington Post, and managing editor at NPR. He has a bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy from Loras College and obtained a master's degree from Stanford University in Latin American studies. He studied theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, for three years, with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest, before switching to journalism. He worked on the foreign desk of The Washington Post, traveling as a reporter to cover the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. From 1972 to 1978 Dinges lived in Chile, "one of the few American journalists to live in Chile during its most violent period of military rule". He helped create three Chilean media organizations. The first,
APSI/Actualidad Internacional, was founded in 1976, under intense military censorship, and became one of the leading investigative news magazines exposing the abuses of the military. As an expert on Operation Condor, Dinges is the most frequently cited expert witness in the prosecutor's case due to his significant contributions to the investigation across multiple countries including Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and the United States. His contributions include authoring two notable books - "Assassination on Embassy Row" and "The Condor Years" - conducting interviews with over a dozen police, military agents, and victims, and gathering crucial data from intelligence archives in the region. In May 2016, the verdict of the tribunal, the "Tribunal Oral Federal N°1", declared 15 convictions directly related to the forced disappearance of 106 victims. ==Personal life==