NBC News has poached Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Rohde from The New Yorker.
Rohde, who was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008 and escaped from captivity, will join the recently revamped NBC News team as a senior executive editor for national security in May.
His hiring is the first major move made by Rebecca Blumenstein, who was named president of editorial in January amid a broader reorganization that saw Noah Oppenheim move to a production role at NBC Universal.
He will report to senior VP Catherine Kim and be based in New York, where he will oversee the NBC News national security team and direct editorial. He will also do some reporting and writing.
Rohde is currently the executive editor of NewYorker.com, where he’s worked since 2017.
He’s won two Pulitzers in his career. The first, for international reporting came in 1996, when he was recognized for his coverage for the Christian Science Monitor revealing the massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia.
He joined The New York Times in 1996, and reported from Afghanistan for the first three months of the U.S. invasion in 2001. He served as the co-chief of Times’ South Asia bureau from 2002 to 2005, then joined the outlet’s investigations team, based in New York.
In November 2008, while in Afghanistan researching a book, Rohde, his interpreter and his driver were abducted by the Taliban outside the capital, Kabul, as they were heading to a prearranged interview with a commander of the rebel force. They were held for seven months, but in an extraordinary effort, over 40 news outlets observed a news blackout and did not report the abductions as the Times, private security contractors and U.S. officials worked behind the scenes trying to secure their release.
During the slow negotiations, the prisoners were transferred across the border to the northern region of Pakistan. in June 2009, Rohde and his interpreter, Tahir Ludin, managed to escape from there and sneak past guards who had fallen asleep. The driver escaped a month later.
Rohde shared in the Times’ 2009 International Reporting Pulitizer for its coverage of Afghanistan, and his account of his abduction and escape was named a finalist for the prize the following year.
Rohde worked for Reuters before joining The New Yorker and also appeared on CNN as a global affairs analyst. He’s written multiple books, including 2010’s “A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides,” co-authored with his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, and 2020’s “In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America’s Deep State.”
“For many of us, David needs no introduction,” Blumenstein and Kim said in a memo to staff. “His distinguished career as a journalist spans decades, covering some of the most fraught conflict zones in recent memory.”
