Jackie Northam

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Journalist Jackie Northam is NPR's National Security Correspondent, covering foreign affairs, defense and intelligence policies, terrorism and other national security issues. Northam has worked for NPR since 2000, and her reports can be heard regularly on Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

Northam is based in Washington, DC, and travels extensively to cover unfolding news events overseas. She has spent much of the past two years in Pakistan and Afghanistan reporting on the resurgence of the Taliban and al Qaeda, US military efforts in the region, and presidential elections in both countries.

Northam has also reported on a number of other conflicts over her long career, traveling to Beirut during the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War.

While based in Nairobi, Kenya, Northam covered the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, entering the country just four days after the massacres began. Over the following months she reported on efforts to help refugees, the rebel take-over, and the spillover of violence into Burundi and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Northam has also lived and reported extensively from Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, southeast Asia and Indochina.

Northam is the lead reporter for NPR's coverage of the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She has traveled there regularly, charting on how the base has evolved over the years, efforts to prosecute the detainees, and release them to their home or third countries.

Northam has received several Associated Press, and regional Edward R. Murrow awards, a Unity, and a Gabriel Award. She was part of a team that won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award.

Northam is a native of Canada. On her first reporting venture overseas she spent seven years traveling through Europe, covering stories about Margaret Thatcher's Britain, and the efforts to create the European Union.