David Rohde: “The best reporter you’ve never heard of,” writes BAM editor Norman Boucher. Credit: Brown Archives

Reporter David Rohde ’90 escapes from the Taliban

On June 19, seven months after being kidnapped in Afghanistan, New York Times reporter David Rohde ’90 climbed over a wall and escaped from a Taliban prison in Pakistan. It was the second time Rohde survived imprisonment in the line of work.
By TAB staff  |  June 24, 2009  |  Email to a friend

Brown alumnus David Rohde ’90, a New York Times reporter, escaped from a Taliban prison on the night of June 19 after more than seven months of captivity in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Along with an Afghani reporter, Tahir Lundin, and their driver, Rohde was kidnapped last November, while researching a book.

Rohde was part of the Times’s reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize this spring for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan last year. He also won a Pulitzer in 1996 for his reporting for the Christian Science Monitor on the war in Bosnia, specifically his discovery of a mass grave site that held the remains of some 7,000 mostly Muslim men slaughtered by Serbian forces. Rohde survived imprisonment in the course of reporting on the Bosnian war, as well.

In today’s Anderson Cooper 360 blog, Brown Alumni Magazine editor Norman Boucher writes about Rohde’s dedication as a reporter whose guiding principle is to get the story, even under dangerous circumstances. Boucher profiled Rohde in the BAM in 1998.

“Rohde is a reminder of what journalism at its best is still capable of,” Boucher writes. “In an era of self-promoters, Rohde never ever wants the story to be about him. As a result, he’s the best reporter you’ve never heard of.”

The Times has reported that Rohde survived the ordeal in good health. Calling him “one of the best and most intrepid of the reporters at the Times,” columnist Nicholas D. Kristof noted in his blog that Rohde will now be reunited with his wife of nine months, Kristen, who has not seen him for the last seven of those months.

 

Read the Anderson Cooper 360 blog about Rohde here.