Russ Baker

Russ Baker (born 1958 ) is an American author and investigative journalist. Baker is the editor-in-chief and founder of the nonprofit news website WhoWhatWhy. Earlier in his career he wrote for a variety of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The Guardian, Wired, and The Village Voice.

Baker is the author of the 2008 investigative history book Family of Secrets that alleges that a young future president George H.W. Bush served secretly in the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s and investigates his network and activities in Dallas at the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and later in Washington during the Watergate scandal. He then reported on tribal genocide in Burundi for the largest circulation newspaper in the Netherlands and for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the fall of the Berlin Wall for CBS Radio and The Christian Science Monitor, and, for a variety of publications, the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

In 1989, he became a New York correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. He also wrote for the Village Voice.

His articles included a report on the efforts of the controversial Church of Scientology to recruit Michael Jackson, on George W. Bush's disappearance from his US-based military unit during the Vietnam War received a 2005 award from the Deadline Club, the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, for a web-exclusive article.

Baker has been on the adjunct faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review.

Following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Baker and his team at WhoWhatWhy published dozens of articles and podcasts about inconsistencies in government statements regarding the alleged perpetrators. Among other things, they noted that the FBI had visited with the Tamerlan Tsarnaev in years prior to the bombings he was accused of, noted ties between the Tsarnaev family and people in the US national security apparatus, and pointed out that US government itself had said that the brothers were themselves unable to make the types of sophisticated bombs used at the marathon.

WhoWhatWhy At the time that Family of Secrets was released, Baker founded an independent, nonprofit news organization, WhoWhatWhy. Board members and advisory board members have included journalism figures, among them Alicia Patterson Foundation director Margaret Engel, former Village Voice editor Jonathan Larsen, Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg and Salon founder David Talbot. Its donors have included Joan Konner, a former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, the Larsen Fund, and TV producer and activist Norman Lear.

He was interviewed on a television program, Greater Boston, and profiled by Boston magazine. The latter explored Baker’s career and reputation as context for evaluating the reporting. The article included this statement: "Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist."

Family of Secrets

Baker's 2008 book Family of Secrets outlines historical connections of members of the Bush political dynasty, including Prescott Bush, President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush, to individuals in the Central Intelligence Agency, military-industrial complex and global financial system. A 2019 Salon article by Jefferson Morley noted that a "handful of declassified records suggest that Bush’s relationship to the agency might have run deeper than his overt roles as director, vice president, and president. The records, which I believe were first reported in Russ Baker’s 2009 book, 'Family of Secrets,' went unmentioned in the recent media coverage of Bush’s death."

Personal life Baker says that because of his work as an investigative journalist, he prefers not to discuss his family or details on his location.