About
Peter Eisner, an award-winning foreign correspondent and author, has served as editor and reporter at The Washington Post, Newsday and The Associated Press. He is a contributing editor to the online investigative publication, Spytalk. He is also co-host of the podcast, Unconventional Threat.
Eisner was correspondent and consulting producer at the PBS programs Newshour Weekend and World Focus and was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2010. He served as deputy foreign editor and Washington, D.C, political editor with the Washington Post from 2003-2007. Prior to that he was foreign editor and senior foreign correspondent of Newsday, and received the InterAmerican Press Association Award for distinguished reporting on drug trafficking in Latin America. He was a bureau chief and correspondent for The Associated Press in the United States and Latin America. In 1994, he founded NewsCom, an online international news and photo transmission agency.
From 1999 to 2001, Eisner was the managing director of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based watchdog organization. He was an early member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
His book, MacArthur’s Spies, is a non-fiction account of guerrillas and the American underground in Japanese occupied Manila during World War Two. He is also co-author with Philip Brenner of Cuba Libre, A 500-Year Quest for Independence.
He is also the author of The Pope’s Last Crusade, the story of the lesser-known Pope Pius XI, who served before World War Two and engaged an American Jesuit journalist to help him oppose Hitler, Mussolini and anti-Semitism. The book was a History Book Club and Catholic Book Club monthly selection. His 2004 book, The Freedom Line, which won the Christopher Award, is the story of young resistance workers in occupied Europe who rescued downed Allied fighter pilots during World War II.
Praise
“Peter Eisner does a masterful job of telling the colorful, largely unknown story of an intrepid array of Americans in the Philippines who evaded capture by the Japanese in World War II and helped mount a powerful resistance movement against them. A sultry nightclub owner in Manila and a businessman who used his cover as a Central American consul to spy on the Japanese are just two members of a fabulous cast of characters that could have come straight from a Graham Greene novel.”
—Lynne Olson, author of Citizens of London and Last Hope Island