Michael Weiss

Michael D. Weiss is an American journalist, author, and news commentator. He specializes in international affairs, in particular the Middle East and Russia. a senior correspondent for Yahoo News, and editor of The Insider. co-written with Hassan Hassan. He is a former investigative reporter at CNN, followed by Dartmouth College in 2002 with a B.A. in History.

Career

Journalism Weiss spent his early career as a war reporter covering the Syrian revolution for news publications including The Daily Telegraph, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. He was on the ground in Aleppo in 2012, just days after the city fell to the rebels. He has been its editor-in chief since launch.

Weiss worked as a contributing editor at The Daily Beast until 2017, where he focused on world affairs and culture.

Weiss was part of the team that launched New Lines Magazine, an international affairs magazine, in October 2020. which specializes in Russia related investigative journalism, fact-checking and political analytics. A 2024 investigation into Havana Syndrome, conducted by The Insider in collaboration with the U.S. network CBS and the German news magazine Der Spiegel, led to senators calling for the case to be reopened in a joint letter to U.S. President Joe Biden.

Working frequently in collaboration with international outlets such as Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Delfi and Re:Baltica, Weiss has led several high-profile exposés into Russian intelligence operations and political interference:

In early 2024, Weiss co-authored a joint investigation with Delfi Estonia, Re:Baltica, and Expressen revealing that Tatjana Ždanoka, a long-serving Latvian Member of the European Parliament, had been an operative for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) for at least two decades.

Weiss's reporting has examined alleged Kremlin influence over European far-right parties. This includes investigations into Lega Nord in Italy, reporting on claims that Russian officials were involved in a proposed scheme to provide funding to the party via an oil deal, and similar reporting on alleged influence operations involving Alternative for Germany (AfD), including claims that an AfD-linked parliamentary aide had connections to Russia’s Federal Security Service.

In 2024, Weiss co-led an investigation that identified fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek as an alleged long-term asset of Russia's GRU, reporting that he had been managed by Russian intelligence for over a decade before fleeing to Moscow.

Weiss's work has also examined the activities of Russia's GRU Unit 29155, including reporting on the unmasking of Nikolai and Elena Shaposhnikov, a husband-and-wife team of "illegal" spies in the Czech Republic, who were alleged to have assisted the unit in operations linked to the 2014 Vrbětice ammunition depot explosions.

Weiss's reporting has examined alleged Russian military intelligence activities abroad, including claims that Russia's GRU offered bounties to the Taliban to target U.S. forces in Afghanistan, as well as reporting on the recruitment of foreign mercenaries from Latin America and Serbia to support Russian military operations in Ukraine.

He was a senior correspondent for Yahoo News.

Media commentary Weiss is a regular guest on network TV, including on Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room, Anderson Cooper 360°, and CNN Tonight with Don Lemon.

He also used to write regular columns with Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast and Beirut-based Lebanese news website NOW Lebanon.

In March 2015, in a commentary piece cowritten with U.S. army intelligence officer Michael Pregent for the international affairs journal Foreign Policy, Weiss accused Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militias of committing extensive atrocities against Sunni civilians in the course of their war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. According to these reports, Weiss wrote, the militias were "burning people alive in their houses, playing soccer with severed human heads, and ethnically cleansing and razing whole villages to the ground."

In 2016, Weiss interviewed Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė for The Daily Beast, about her claim that Russia was a terrorist state. The interview focused on Russia’s involvement in the Baltic, and allegations of corruption.

Think tanks In 2012, Weiss served as co-chair of the Russia Studies Centre at the trans-Atlantic foreign policy think tank Henry Jackson Society.

In 2016, he was a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Weiss is a director of special investigations at the Free Russia Foundation, where he oversees a project called the Lubyanka Files, intended to translate KGB training manuals still being used to train Russian spies.

Publications

Books In 2015, Weiss co-wrote a book with Hassan Hassan on the rise of the militant group ISIS, titled ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. The book was chosen by The Wall Street Journal as one of 10 must-read works on the evolution of terrorism in the Middle East, one of the London Times Best Books of 2015, and The New York Times Editors' Choice in April 2015. The book was reviewed favorably twice in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. The Times chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, said the book gave readers "a fine-grained look at the organization’s evolution through assorted incarnations."

Weiss is reportedly writing a book about the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. The report accused Russia of waging "propaganda and disinformation" campaigns, and was cited as evidence in a BBC News investigation on the matter. It included recommendations on how to confront Russian propaganda which included creating an "internationally recognized ratings system for disinformation." The recommendations were criticized in an article written by James Carden – executive director of the lobbying organization American Committee for East–West Accord – in The Nation as a "censorship campaign."

Another report, published in 2015, was titled “An Invasion by Any Other Name: The Kremlin’s Dirty War in Ukraine.” It was co-authored with James Miller, Pierre Vaux, and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The report confirmed Russia’s presence on the ground in eastern Ukraine. It was commended by former U.S. diplomat John E. Herbst, who authored the foreword.

Accolades Weiss was nominated for an investigative reporting award at the European Press Prize in 2020, along with a number of collaborators. The nomination was for "Master and Chef," a report that proved Russia’s involvement in the Libyan civil war.

He was described in 2017 by a CNN executive editor as having “deep knowledge and an extensive source network in two key areas of focus right now: The Middle East and Russia.”

Personal life He is married to Amy Thirjung.