ABCNEWS' Charles Glass

— -- 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.

Glass has written two books, Tribes with Flags and Money for Old Rope. He has produced documentary films for U.S. and British television, including Pity the Nation: Charles Glass' Lebanon; Iraq: Enemies of the State, about military escalation and human rights abuses, broadcast six months before Iraq invaded Kuwait; Stains of War, on the history of war photography; The Forgotten Faithful, about the Palestinian Christian exodus from the West Bank, for the BBC; Our Man in Cairo for PBS; Islam for London Weekend Television; and Sadat: An Action Biography for ABCNEWS.

Glass was also chief overseas and investigative correspondent for CNN & TIME. Among his many stories for the program between 1999 and 2001 were the United Nations's role in the Rwandan genocide, the murder of an Irish Catholic woman by the IRA, an exposé of the career of right-wing Austrian politician Jorg Haider, the uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Professor Edward Said's view of the Oslo accords and the libel trial in England of the historian David Irving. In October 2002, he published a history of the British occupation of Iraq in the London Review of Books.

For his reporting and investigative pieces, Glass has been honored by the Overseas Press Club and has shared Commonwealth and George Foster Peabody Awards. A native of Los Angeles, he received a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from the University of Southern California and did graduate studies in philosophy at the American University of Beirut. He is the father of three children, holds dual U.S. and U.K. citizenship and lives in Paris.