Stephen Kinzer

Stephen Kinzer (born August 4, 1951) is an American author, historian, and journalist. A former New York Times correspondent, he has published several books and writes for several newspapers and news agencies.

Reporting career During the 1980s, Kinzer covered revolutions and social upheaval in Central America and wrote his first book, Bitter Fruit, about military coups and destabilization in Guatemala during the 1950s. In 1990, The New York Times appointed Kinzer to head its Berlin bureau, from which he covered Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from the Soviet bloc. Kinzer was The New York Times chief in the newly established Istanbul bureau from 1996 to 2000.

Kinzer also contributes columns to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe. He is a Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

In June 2026 Kinzer testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on the subject of Project MKULTRA.

Views Kinzer's reporting on Central America was criticized by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent (1988), which cited Edgar Chamorro ("selected by the CIA as press spokesman for the contras") in his interview by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting describing Kinzer as "just responding to what the White House is saying". In chapter 2 of Manufacturing Consent, Kinzer is criticized for deploying no skepticism in his coverage of the murders of GAM leaders in Guatemala and for "generally employing an apologetic framework" for the Guatemalan military state. In Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (2006), he critiqued U.S. foreign policy as overly interventionist. In a 2010 interview with Imagineer Magazine, he said:

In his 2008 book A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man who Dreamed It, Kinzer credits President Paul Kagame for what he calls the peace, development, and stability in Rwanda in the years after the Rwandan genocide, and criticizes Rwanda's leaders before the genocide, such as Juvenal Habyarimana. According to Susan M. Thomson, the "book is an exercise in public relations, aimed at further enhancing Kagame's stature in the eyes of the west", is one-sided due to heavy reliance on interviews with Kagame and even apologist.

In a 2016 opinion piece, Kinzer wrote that Aleppo had been liberated by Bashar al-Assad's forces from the violent militants who had ruled it for three years, but that the American public had been told "convoluted nonsense" about the war. He added: "At the recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on 'an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva.' The precise opposite is true. In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan's UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her."

In April 2018, he added: Kinzer wrote that the 2018 Syrian Gas Attacks on Civilians in the Douma region was a "false flag" attack, suggesting the event was staged by either al-Qaeda, NATO, or Syrian Civil Defense.