Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist who grew up in Japan and South Korea. He is the author of SPIES FOR HIRE: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster. Over the past 35 years, his work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Salon, the Atlantic, the Journal of Commerce, Mother Jones, The Nation, Harper’s, Inter Press Service, The Progressive, Foreign Policy in Focus, Asia Times, Sisa Journal (Korea) and Hankyoreh 21 (Korea). He also appears frequently on the radio as a commentator on US-Korean relations and US intelligence and foreign policy, and has been interviewed on South Korea’s MBC, Al Jazeera, Pacifica’s Democracy Now, NPR’s Fresh Air and Air America.
Since returning to the United States for good in 1969, he has lived in Indiana, California, Maine, Oregon and (since 1982) in Washington, DC. In 2005, he left DC for three years, living in Memphis, Tennessee, for most of that time and spending a year in Tahoma, California. He is now back in DC working for an AFL-CIO union representing federal employees and continuing to write and speak about Asia, intelligence, contracting-out and U.S. foreign policy, for a variety of publications – and on this website.
Click here to send Tim Shorrock an e-mail. You can also follow Tim on Twitter.
Note: Yes, this is the same Tim Shorrock who was fired in 1984 by Ralph Nader for trying to organize a union and running a labor-friendly magazine with an anti-imperialist viewpoint. That wasn’t very popular during the 1980s and scared the dickens out of Nader, who had very good friends at the highest levels of the Reagan administration. You can read about that episode here and here. And if you still think Nader is some kind of hero, read my account of how he sold me out to the right-wing rag Human Events back in the 1980s – a sordid story I told after reading about Glenn Greenwald’s recent encounter with that pathetic excuse for a newspaper.
Links:
- “The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Intelligence,” Salon, June 2007 – My scoop that 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget of spent on private contracts. That’s seven-oh, 70, and makes spying for hire a $50 bilion business.
- Tim Shorrock’s archive page at The Nation. It includes articles on NSA spying, US corporations in Iraq, CACI International (the contractor involved in Abu Ghraib), and other topics.
- March/April 2006 article in Mother Jones about the Common Ground free clinic in New Orleans.
- 2005 expose in Mother Jones of the massive outsourcing taking place in US intelligence.
- 2003 investigation into the AFL-CIO archives of Labor’s Cold War for The Nation.
- One of the first exposes of the Carlyle Group (The Nation).
- A thorough reaming of Paul Wolfowitz from Asia Times – long before 9/11 made him a key player in the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
Note: Thanks to Todd Gill of Fayetteville, Arkansas, for his help in building this site in 2006 and turning me on to WordPress and BlueHost.
