An IACSP Q&A with National Security Reporter Bill Gertz

Interviewed by Paul Davis

Bill Gertz is the National Security Columnist for the Washington Times. For more than 20 years, he has written a weekly Washington Times column called “Inside the Ring,” which covers the U.S. national security bureaucracy.

He is also the author of eight books. His most recent is “Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy.” Vyachaslav Trubnikov, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, once called him a “tool of the CIA” after he wrote an article exposing Russian intelligence operations in the Balkans. In the United States, a senior CIA official once threatened to have a cruise missile fired at his desk at The Washington Times after he wrote a column critical of the CIA’s analysis of China. 

China’s communist government also has criticized him for his news reports exposing China’s weapons and missile sales to rogues states, accusing him of “spreading lies about China.” The state-run Xinhua news agency in 2006 identified him as the No. 1 “anti-China expert” in the world, although Bill Gertz insists, he is very much pro-China - pro-Chinese people and opposed to the communist system. 

Bill Gertz studied English literature at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., and journalism at George Washington University, Washington, DC. In March 2014, he received the Reed Irvine Award for Investigative Journalism by Accuracy in Media in March of 2014. In September of 1999, he was awarded the Wester...