ABCNEWS' Charles Glass

ByABC News
March 18, 2003, 2:43 PM

— -- Charles Glass began his journalistic career in 1973 in the Beirut, Lebanon, bureau of ABCNEWS with Peter Jennings, when he covered the October Arab-Israeli War in Syria and Egypt.

He covered the civil war in Lebanon, and was wounded by artillery fire in 1976. He became ABCNEWS' chief Middle East correspondent in 1983, a post he held in Beirut and London for 10 years. In 1986, Glass interviewed the hostage crew of TWA flight 847 on the tarmac at Beirut airport. He broke the news that the hijackers had removed the hostages from the plane and hidden them in the suburbs of Beirut, causing the Reagan administration to abort a rescue attempt that would have gone wrong. In 1987, Glass himself was abducted and held hostage for two months before escaping from his Shiite Muslim captors.

In 1988, he revealed that Saddam Hussein had developed biological weapons, a fact denied by the U.S. government until Iraq invaded Kuwait two years later. In addition, Glass was the only U.S. television correspondent in northern Iraq covering the entire Kurdish rebellion in 1991. One year later, he went alone with a hidden camera to Indonesian-occupied East Timor and, despite government restrictions, filmed and filed a report on repression and torture there. This report influenced a U.S. Senate committee vote to suspend U.S. military aid to Indonesia. He has covered other wars in Eritrea, Rhodesia, Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In addition to reporting for ABC, Glass has served as correspondent for Newsweek magazine and The Observer. For the past 25 years, he has been a regular free-lance contributor and columnist in newspapers and magazines in the United States and the United Kingdom. His work has appeared in Time magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Daily News, The Guardian, The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, The Independent, The Spectator, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Granta, Prospect, Harper's & Queen and the London Magazine.