After leaving Eastbourne College, and before going up to Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, Kiley was commissioned into the
Gurkhas Regiment of the
British Army. He resigned from the Army halfway through university. In 1987, Kiley joined
The Times newspaper, where he became an education reporter. Three years later, he joined
The Sunday Times newspaper as its US West Coast correspondent. The following year, he moved to
Nairobi as
The Times Africa correspondent, from where his coverage of
Somalia,
Zaire,
Rwanda and
Sierra Leone won widespread acclaim. In 1996, Kiley won the
Granada Television Foreign Correspondent of the Year award for his coverage of the fall of the regime of
President Mobutu in Zaire and, after being promoted to
The Times Africa bureau chief, moved to
Johannesburg in South Africa. He was shot covering a coup attempt in
Lesotho in 1998. In 1999, Kiley moved to
Jerusalem where he became
The Times Middle East bureau chief for two years, before resigning after a dispute with his editors. Kiley had succeeded in tracking down and interviewing the Israeli soldiers who had shot dead Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy who had become, posthumously, an icon of the intifada. The instruction Kiley received to file his piece "without mentioning the dead kid" was the last straw. In 2001, he joined the London
Evening Standard newspaper as its chief foreign correspondent based in London – covering the wars in Afghanistan and the
Second Intifada in the
Palestinian Territories. In 2002, Kiley presented "Truth and Lies in Baghdad", part of Channel 4 television's main current affairs series,
Dispatches. He joined the channel full-time the following year and made many more programmes for
Dispatches and for
Unreported World, for both of which programmes he travelled across the world. While covering the
2003 invasion of Iraq for Channel 4, he was kidnapped along with his Iraqi helpers and cameraman Nick Hughes, taken into the desert, and narrowly escaped execution due to what appears to have been a fluke. In 2005, Kiley made two series for Sky One:
USA Unsolved with Sam Kiley and
Guns for Hire, the latter of which was an investigation into modern mercenaries in the war zones of Congo and Afghanistan. In November 2006, Kiley produced a BBC2 observational documentary in Afghanistan, ''The General's War'', for which he was granted exclusive and unprecedented access to British NATO General
David Richards. He returned to Channel 4, to make films in Cape Town, the Congo, the Palestinian Territories, Russia and Kosovo. Since November 2010, Kiley has worked for Sky News, first as security editor, then defence and security editor in 2012, and in November 2012 he became Sky News's Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem. On 14 August 2013, Kiley's cameraman
Mick Deane was shot and killed
while filming in Cairo. Kiley was working with him, reporting on the disturbances in the Middle East at the time. ==Publications==