Con Coughlin

Con Coughlin (born 14 January 1955) is a British journalist and author, currently The Daily Telegraph Defence Editor.

Early years

He was born in London, England, the son of the Telegraphs crime correspondent C.A. Coughlin. The eldest of four children (his younger brother is Vincent Coughlin QC) he grew up in Upminster, Essex. Raised as a Catholic, at the age of 11 he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, and at 18 gained a scholarship to read Modern History at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he specialised in the Industrial Revolution under the tutelage of the historian Simon Schama.

Journalist

In August 1977 Coughlin joined the Thomson Regional Newspapers graduate trainee course and after undertaking his initial training in Cardiff served out his indentures as a trainee reporter with the Reading Evening Post. In November 1980 Coughlin joined The Daily Telegraph as a general news reporter. Coughlin has spent most of his journalistic career working for what is now the Telegraph Media Group.

As a young reporter for his newspaper he was initially given responsibility for covering a number of major crime stories, such as the arrest of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper and the Brixton riots.

Becoming a foreign correspondent, his first big assignment was to cover the American invasion of Grenada in late 1983. From there he was sent to Beirut during the Lebanese civil war where he developed his interest in the Middle East and international terrorism. After the Telegraph group was bought in 1985 by the Canadian businessman Conrad Black, Coughlin was appointed the Daily Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent by Max Hastings, the newspaper’s new editor.

Coughlin opened the newspaper’s new bureau in Jerusalem, and spent the next three years covering a multitude of stories throughout the region. In April 1986 he narrowly escaped being kidnapped by Hezbollah gunmen in Beirut, the day before another British journalist John McCarthy was kidnapped. In March 2009 Coughlin recalled this experience in My Alter Ego, a programme for BBC Radio 4. In 1989 Coughlin returned to London, where he transferred to The Sunday Telegraph and was appointed the newspaper’s chief foreign correspondent. During the next few years he received several promotions, becoming Foreign Editor in 1997 and Executive Editor in 1999. The following year the Sunday Telegraph won the prestigious “newspaper of the year” award at the British Press Awards.

He has appeared as a foreign affairs analyst on the American networks CNN, Fox News, CBS, ABC and MSNBC and NBC. In Britain he broadcasts regularly for the BBC and Sky News.

In 2006 Coughlin rejoined The Daily Telegraph as the newspaper’s Defence and Security Editor after a brief spell writing for the Daily Mail, and later that year was promoted to the post of Executive Foreign Editor. He writes a weekly column, "Inside Abroad", and comments on a broad range of subjects, with a special interest in defence and security issues, the Middle East and international terrorism. He maintains a blog for the Telegraph's website.

Author

Coughlin is the author of several books. His first book was Hostage: The Complete Story of the Lebanon Captives (Little, Brown 1992), which was followed by a study of the politics of modern Jerusalem, A Golden Basin Full of Scorpions which was BBC correspondent John Simpson’s “book of the year” and was described as “excellent, a brilliant book” by the author A. N. Wilson.

In 2002 Coughlin published a biography of Saddam Hussein. The American edition, Saddam: King of Terror (ECCO) was a New York Times bestseller in 2003, and received international critical acclaim.

His next book, American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror (ECCO, 2006) was nominated Kirkus Reviews books of the year. In 2009 Coughlin published Khomeini’s Ghost (Macmillan, London, and ECCO, New York) a study of the life of Ayatollah Khomeini and his impact on the radicalisation of the Islamic world during the previous thirty years. Historian Dominic Sandbrook, reviewing Khomeini's Ghost in The Observer, wrote: "Readers already familiar with recent Iranian history will not discover much new information in Coughlin's account, but it nevertheless makes a very readable and entertaining introduction to a nation badly misunderstood in the west. And while Coughlin makes no secret of his deep antipathy to the Iranian regime, his treatment of its founder is satisfyingly nuanced".