Clarissa Ward

Ward began her career as an overnight desk assistant at Fox News in 2003. From 2004 to 2005, Ward was an assignment editor for Fox News in New York City. She worked on the international desk coordinating coverage for stories such as the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the deaths of Yasir Arafat and Pope John Paul II. In 2006, Ward worked as a field producer for Fox News. She produced coverage of the Israeli-Lebanese war, the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and subsequent Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip, the trial of Saddam Hussein and the 2005 Iraqi constitutional referendum.

Prior to October 2007, Ward was based in Beirut and worked as a correspondent for Fox News. She covered the execution of Saddam Hussein, the Iraq War troop surge of 2007, the Beirut Arab University riots and the 2007 Bikfaya bombings. She conducted interviews with notable figures such as Gen. David Petraeus, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih and Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. She also spent time embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq, most notably in Baqubah.[3]

From October 2007 to October 2010, Ward was an ABC News correspondent based in Moscow. She reported from Russia for all ABC News broadcasts and platforms, including World News with Charles Gibson, Nightline and Good Morning America, as well as ABC News Radio, and ABC News Now. On assignment in Russia, Ward covered the Russian Presidential elections. She was in Georgia at the time of the Russian intervention into Georgian territory. Ward was transferred to Beijing to serve as the ABC News Asian Correspondent, where she covered the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. She has also covered the war in Afghanistan.[2]

Ward's CBS career started as the network's foreign news correspondent in October 2011. She was a contributor for 60 Minutes and served as a fill-in anchor on CBS This Morning beginning in January 2014.[5]

She covered many foreign news stories including the Syrian Uprising, Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng's stay at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and subsequent United States - China negotiations, and the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.

In her first 60 Minutes report in 2012, Ward and her team braved sniper-fire and aerial bombardments in the Syrian city of Aleppo to deliver one of the first reports examining the growth of Islamic extremism within the opposition. In July 2013, Ward reported on the unrest in Egypt, filming in the same area where CBS correspondent Lara Logan had been sexually assaulted a few years prior. In October 2014, Ward returned to Syria undercover to interview two Western jihadis - a young American man and a former Dutch soldier - about their paths to radicalism.

On 21 September 2015, CNN announced that Ward was joining the network and reporting for all of CNN's platforms. She will remain based in London. On August 8, 2016, she spoke at a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in the civil war-torn Aleppo, based on her 10+ years' experience of being a war correspondent.[6][7]

In July 2018, CNN named Ward its chief international correspondent, succeeding Christiane Amanpour in the role. In 2019, she became one of the first Western reporters to report on the life in the Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan.[8][9] In August 2020, reports emerged that Ward and her team were under surveillance while in the Central African Republic in May 2019.[10]

In December 2020, in a joint investigation by The Insider and Bellingcat in co-operation with CNN and Der Spiegel, she reported how Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) members stalked Alexei Navalny for years, including just before his poisoning in August 2020.[11] The investigation detailed a special unit of the FSB specializing in chemical substances and investigators tracked members of the unit using telecom and travel data.

Ward received a George Foster Peabody Award on May 21, 2012, in New York City for her journalistic coverage inside Syria during the Syrian uprising.[12][13] In October 2014, Washington State University announced that Ward would receive the 2015 Murrow Award for International Reporting in April 2015.[14] She has also received seven Emmy Awards, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, and honors from the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.[15]