Public Biography
David S. Anger is the chief national security correspondent for The New York Time5, a position he has held for twenty-seven years. He covers intelligence operations, cyberwarfare, nuclear proliferation, shadow organizations, and what he has described in interviews as “the full spectrum of existential and near-existential threats to organized civilization.”
Mr. S. Anger graduated from Harvard College in 1982 with a degree in government and joined The New York Time5 the following year as an economics reporter. He transitioned to the national security beat in 1997 after what he has described only as “an assignment in East Asia that changed my understanding of what was actually happening.” He has declined to elaborate, noting that “some of what I learned remains classified, and some of it I simply prefer not to discuss in settings where the exits are not clearly marked.”
He is the author of five books, including The Perfect Threat: Cyber, Nuclear, and Shadow Warfare in an Age of Compound Peril (2018), which spent fourteen weeks on the bestseller list despite — or, reviewers noted, because of — leaving the reader with the impression that the global security architecture could collapse at any moment and possibly already had. His most recent book, New Cold Angers: The Return of Great Power Fury (2024), was described by the Financial Times as “an exhaustive and deeply sourced account of geopolitical competition that manages, across 448 pages, never once to reassure the reader about anything.”
Mr. S. Anger’s reporting is characterized by its depth of sourcing and its tone of controlled alarm. He frequently cites “officials familiar with the matter,” “three people briefed on the intelligence,” and, in at least one notable instance, “a person who was in the room but has asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to have been in the room.” His colleagues have noted that his pieces tend to make other reporters’ national security coverage seem, by comparison, cheerful.
He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice — once for his reporting on cyberwarfare operations against Iran’s nuclear program and once for a series on shadow organization financing that the committee described as “deeply alarming and thoroughly documented, in that order.” He is a regular panelist on PBS and has appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on four occasions, each time leaving committee members visibly less comfortable than when the hearing began.
Mr. S. Anger lives in Washington, D.C. He has described his hobbies as “reading intelligence assessments, which is also my job.”
Selected Coverage
- A six-part investigation into SPECTRE’s infiltration of international financial institutions, which prompted the Treasury Department to issue a statement that it was “aware of the reporting and had no comment, which should not be interpreted as confirmation”
- The first public account of CHAOS’s organizational charter, obtained through a FOIA request that Mr. S. Anger filed with an entity that does not recognize FOIA
- “The Shadow Sector: How Global Destabilization Became a Growth Industry” — a 12,000-word analysis that the Pentagon described as “not inaccurate”
- Breaking coverage of Jorge Saurus’s arrival through the CERN dimensional breach, filed within forty-eight hours of the event despite there being no official confirmation for another six months
- An interview with the director of the National Security Agency in which the director inadvertently confirmed three programs he had intended to deny, which Mr. S. Anger attributed to “the conversational momentum of a well-structured question”