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Garrett Graff        

Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Cybersecurity & Technology Program

Garrett M. Graff, a distinguished magazine journalist, internationally bestselling historian, and regular TV commentator and producer, has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology, and national security and is recognized today as one of the nation’s most prolific and wide-ranging journalists and historians. His award-winning work—including a half-dozen books on topics ranging from presidential campaigns, Watergate, 9/11, cybersecurity, and the U.S. government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, as well as dozens of magazine articles, essays, podcasts, and documentaries—uses history to explain the story of today, illuminating where we’ve been as a country and where we’re headed as a world.

A Pulitzer Prize Finalist, he has written for publications from WIRED to Esquire to the New York Times and served as the editor of two of Washington’s most prestigious magazines, Washingtonian (2009-2014) and POLITICO Magazine (2014-2015), which he helped lead to its first National Magazine Award, the industry’s highest honor. Graff is the author of multiple books, including "The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI" and the national bestseller "Raven Rock," about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, as well as co-author of "Dawn of the Code War," tracing the global cybersecurity threat.

His most recent book, "Watergate: A New History," was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, called “dazzling” by Douglas Brinkley in the New York Times Book Review and “standard-setting” by Kirkus Reviews, and became an instant New York Times bestseller. Graff’s previous book, a #1 national bestseller, "The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11," compiling the voices of 500 Americans as they experienced that tragic day, was called “a priceless civic gift” by the Wall Street Journal, as well as “an exceptional document [and] brilliant work of immediate history” by Le Monde. It was also named the industry’s 2020 Audiobook of the Year.

A regular voice and analyst on NPR, PBS NewsHour, the History Channel, and other outlets, he is also the host of “Long Shadow,” a #1 Apple History podcast series, whose multiple seasons have examined the lingering questions of 9/11 and the rise of the American far-right. He served as executive producer of “While the Rest of Us Die,” a two-season VICE TV series based on his book Raven Rock, among other multimedia, TV, and film projects.

He is the founding director of the Aspen Institute’s cybersecurity and technology program, where he helped start the prestigious Aspen Cybersecurity Group, and has a long history as a new media pioneer. He was the founding editor of mediaBistro.com’s FishbowlDC, a popular blog that covered the media and journalism in Washington, and co-founder of EchoDitto, Inc., an internet strategy consulting firm at the dawn of the social media age. During his time at FishbowlDC, he was the first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing in 2005. A Vermont native and graduate of Harvard, he served as deputy press secretary on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean’s first webmaster.

Over the years, his writing and commentary has appeared in publications like the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, New York, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, 5280, Politico, AARP Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Daily News, The Week, Eater, Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine, USA Today, GQ UK, NextCity, and he has appeared on Face the Nation, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBC, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, the History Channel, National Geographic, and various NPR programs, including “This American Life,” “Fresh Air,” and “All Things Considered.”

He taught at Georgetown University for seven years, including courses on journalism and technology. He has served on the boards of the Burlington Housing Authority, Vermont Public Radio, and the National Conference on Citizenship and received a doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa, from Champlain College.

Speech Topics

The FBI: The World’s Police Force

With almost no public discussion or notice, the FBI has evolved to be the only truly global crime-fighting organization. Whereas the FBI was originally conceived to be a domestic law enforcement organization—the CIA was supposed to handle American interests overseas—with cases increasingly focused on cybercrime and organized crime groups like the Russian mafia, al-Qaeda terror networks, and Central American or Asian gangs, the FBI now operates in more than a third of all countries every day and has hundreds of personnel deployed internationally. They’ve even investigated a case in Antarctica. In fact, their overseas force is now roughly a tenth of the size of the entire State Department’s foreign service. In some countries, the FBI has unique partnerships with local police that allow them to operate as if they’re in the United States.

Ten Years After 9/11—Are We Safer?

What’s worked in the U.S. response? What hasn’t? Are we safer today? How has the government’s response to the war on terror matured and evolved? Plus, why the U.S. has settled on just two main antiterrorism tools: Handcuffs and Hellfire missiles.

Ten Things To Know About Terrorism Today.

The threat of terrorism today looks very different than it did in the early years after 9/11. Al-Qaeda, while weakened, has developed a global affiliate network and turned the internet into its best recruiting tool ever. While it spent years trying to launch massive, catastrophic attacks, its ambitions have evolved: The new emphasis is attacks “on the cheap,” like the cargo plane printer cartridge plot, or “home-grown radical,” like the Times Square bombing. In fact, the FBI is arresting a terror plot every few weeks now with very little press attention.

News

‘I’d Never Been Involved in Anything as Secret as This’
On the morning of May 1, 2011, most Americans had never heard of Abbottabad. By that night, the dusty midsize city near the mountains of northwest Pakistan was the center of the biggest story in the world. A team of U.S. Navy SEALs had just descended by helicopter on a high-walled mansion there in the dark of night, located the globe’s most hunted man and killed him. Read more…
The Man Who Speaks Softly—and Commands a Big Cyber Army
Meet General Paul Nakasone. He reined in chaos at the NSA and taught the US military how to launch pervasive cyberattacks. And he did it all without you noticing. In the years before he became America’s most powerful spy, Paul Nakasone acquired an unusually personal understanding of the country’s worst intelligence failures.

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