Toby Harnden has been the US Editor of The Daily Telegraph of London since October 2006. He was previously the Sunday Telegraph's Washington bureau chief. As the newspaper’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, he reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Bahrain, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Austria, Italy, Estonia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United States and Thailand. In May 2005, he was imprisoned in Zimbabwe for 14 days after being arrested at a rural polling station on the day of the country's parliamentary elections and deported following acquittal on a charge of "practicing journalism without accreditation".
Before joining The Sunday Telegraph in January 2005, he was Middle East Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, based in Jerusalem but travelled extensively throughout the region. Harnden he spent much of 2004 and 2005 covering the war in Iraq. He was a "unilateral" reporter during the siege of Najaf in August 2004 and three months later was embedded with the US Army's Task Force 2-2 during the battle of Fallujah.
From 1999 to 2003, he was The Daily Telegraph's Washington bureau chief. While in the United States, he has reported from 49 out of 50 states, writing about American politics, US foreign policy and all aspects of life in the only superpower of the 21st Century. He was in Washington on September 11th 2001.
He joined The Daily Telegraph in 1994 as a home news reporter before being posted to Belfast as the newspaper's Ireland Correspondent in 1996. He subsequently covered the Good Friday Agreement and the Omagh bombing of 1998 as well as numerous explosions, ceasefires, shootings, riots, marches and political crises. The culmination of his work in Northern Ireland was the publication of "Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh" (Hodder & Stoughton 1999), which has sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide and is considered essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the Irish Troubles.
Born in 1966, he hails originally from Manchester and took his degree at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, being awarded a First in Modern History in 1988. After nearly 10 years afloat and ashore as an officer in the Royal Navy, he became a journalist, beginning his new career initially as a theatre reviewer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and a writer of obituaries. As well as the Telegraph titles, he has worked for the Leith Leader, The Scotsman, Western Morning News (Plymouth) and The Independent and had articles published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, The Spectator, The Evening Standard, The Literary Review, The Naval Review, East End Life, The Sunday Business Post (Dublin), The Daily Star (Beirut) and Conde Nast Traveller. A regular broadcaster, he has appeared on CNN, Fox, CNBC and the BBC as well as numerous other television and radio outlets. He lives with his wife Cheryl and their daughter Tessa, born in June 2007, in Washington DC.
He blogs regularly at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/tobyharnden.
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