Douglas Farah

Douglas Farah is a writer and investigator on terrorism and the drug trade, who is the president of IBI Consultants, a Senior Fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center and a researcher for the NEFA Foundation. He is a contributor to the Counterterrorism Blog and Family Security Matters.

UPI and freelancing
After graduation in 1985, UPI, for which he already worked, promoted him to  bureau chief in El Salvador, covering the civil war there and the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Honduras. In 1987 he left UPI to freelance for The Washington Post, the Boston Globe and US News & World Report. He won the 1988 Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence for a Washington Post series on right-wing death squads in El Salvador.

Washington Post
In 1991, he contracted to the Washington Post to cover drug organizations in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. In 1997, Farah returned to Washington as the international investigative reporter covering drug trafficking and organized crime. He covered the emergence of Russian organized crime groups in Latin America and the Caribbean, the growth of Mexican drug cartels within the United States and drug-related banks in the Caribbean. In March 2000, Farah became West Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post. Based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he covered civil wars in Chad, Sierra Leone and Liberia. reporting on blood diamonds and, in November 2001, the ties of al-Qaeda to the gem and weapons procurement networks.

He presented discussion of conflict diamonds and failed states to Brown University in 2003.

He left the Post in 2004.

Independent research
He has reported on studies that suggest the Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to the U.S.

Early life
At the age of 18 months, he and his missionary parents moved to the Amazon basin pf Bolivia. and, when he was 7, to the capital of La Paz. After graduating from the American Cooperative School in December 1974, he spent several years working in rural development and traveling around Latin America and Europe.

In 1980 he enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he began working for United Press International, and graduated with a B.A. in Latin American Studies and an B.S. in Journalism, with honors, in 1985.