Blaine Harden is an American author and journalist. His latest book, Murder at the Mission, dismantles a phony legend about how the Pacific Northwest became a part of the United States. The book shows how Protestant ministers worked together to falsify history, invent a fake hero, and sanctify white conquest. Their Big Lie helped justify a century of abusive treatment of Native Americans.

Harden is a longtime foreign correspondent who reported for The Washington Post from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Northeast Asia. He was also a national correspondent for the New York Times, a contributor to the Economist, and has reported for PBS FRONTLINE. He was an editorial consultant to “North Korea’s Deadly Dictator,” broadcast Oct. 4, 2017. He was the lead reporter on the 2012 FRONTLINE film, “Alaska Gold.”

Since 2012, Harden has written three acclaimed books about North Korea. King of Spies (Viking, 2017) is the story of a rogue American spymaster in Korea. Air Force Major Donald Nichols was part Rambo, part Kurtz, and his black-ops misadventures had been hidden from history. A review of King of Spies, which was published in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, called the book a “fascinating but profoundly disturbing story” of American spying in Korea.

Harden’s 2015 book is The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot. It’s about the rise of the tyrant who created North Korea and a young fighter pilot who stole his way to freedom with the help of a Russian-made MiG-15. Great Leader won a citation in 2015 from the Overseas Press Club for nonfiction. In a review of the book, the Washington Post said that “Blaine Harden has done more than anyone else to bring [North Korea] to a mass audience.”

Harden’s 2012 book, Escape From Camp 14, was an international bestseller translated into 29 languages. It’s the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in a N. Korean prison camp to escape to the West. The book and Shin’s testimony pushed the United Nations to create a Commission of Inquiry that concluded in 2014 that North Korea continues to commit crimes against humanity in its gulag of prison camps. The commission has asked the UN Security Council to send its findings to the International Criminal Court for a trial that would hold N. Korea’s leaders accountable.

Escape won the 2112 Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique, a French literary award, and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It also inspired a segment about Shin on 60 Minutes. Escape has become part of the common core in some American high schools, and has been used in Florida, Illinois, Vermont and Indiana as part of statewide programs focused on increasing reading among teenagers.

For 28 years, Blaine worked for The Washington Post as a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. For four years, he was a local and national correspondent for The New York Times and a writer for the Times Magazine. He has written for The Economist, Time, Foreign Policy, National Geographic and the Guardian. His books have been excerpted in The Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and performed on the air by BBC Radio productions.

Gonzaga University (Blaine’s alma mater in Spokane, Washington) awarded him a honorary doctorate in 2015.

Here are four print interviews with Blaine about Escape from Camp 14 and about his thoughts on writing and North Korea. Yonsei Journal of International Studies — an extended interview with Adam Cathcart, editor-in-chief of Sino-NK website. The Spectator (London). Bookgeeks (London). Asian Literary Review (Hong Kong). And an hour-long television interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb on Q & A.

Blaine is also the author of A River Lost. It’s about well-intentioned Americans (including the author’s father) who dammed and degraded the West’s greatest river, the Columbia.  An updated and revised edition of A River Lost was published by Norton in 2012 to coincide with a PBS American Experience program about Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia River. Blaine and the book are featured on the program.

Blaine’s first book, Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, was described by The Independent (London) as the “best contemporary book on Africa.” [amazon asin=0395597463&text=Order]

Journalism awards include the Ernie Pyle Award for coverage of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Nondeadline Writing (stories about Africa), and the Livingston Award for International Reporting (stories about Africa).

Blaine often speaks to colleges about North Korea and the American West, including the Korean Institute at Harvard, the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, Brandeis University, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and Gonzaga University. On North Korea and U.S. military intelligence, he has also given talks at the U.S. State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Agency in San Antonio.

Blaine lives in Seattle with his wife Jessica and their two children, Lucinda and Arno.