New Washington Investigations Team

For a decade now in the Washington Bureau, Mark Mazzetti has been a great leader in our intelligence and national security reporting. He’s broken countless stories on his longtime beat, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, filed amazing narratives from the Middle East and in 2009 shared a Pulitzer Prize on the intensifying violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Bush administration’s response.

Mark was also a Pulitzer finalist with a group of four reporters for coverage of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program, and is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award — first in 2010 for reporting with Dexter Filkins on Afghanistan and Pakistan and again in 2015 as part of a team investigating operations of Navy SEALs. His 2013 book, “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., A Secret Army, and A War at the Ends of the Earth,” was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than ten languages.

So it’s a great pleasure to announce that Mark, an all-around great guy and one of the funniest people in the bureau, is Washington Investigations Editor. He’ll be leading a team of four outstanding reporters — Eric Lipton, Matt Apuzzo, Mike Schmidt and Sharon LaFraniere — to look into all parts of the government and Washington. The bureau already has a long and celebrated tradition of breaking big stories and doing deep investigative work on national security and many other subjects, and the new team is meant to enhance that investigative muscle. Depending on the subject, the group will work with other reporters in the bureau on short and longer term stories, and will collaborate with the Investigations Department and our National, International and Biz Day staffs and others in New York. Mark will at times continue to write as a player- coach.

A brief word about the team:

*Eric has been at The Times since 1999 and in the bureau since 2004. He won the 2015 Pulitzer for investigative journalism for a series examining the explosion in lobbying of state attorneys general by corporate interests, and was a co-author last week of the astonishing story about the Russian hacking of the DNC.

*Matt joined the The Times in 2014 from the investigative team at the Associated Press, where he won a Pulitzer for exposing the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims. He’s spent the last year focused on enterprise and investigative reporting on criminal justice, security and other topics.

*Mike started his career at The Times in 2005 as a clerk on the International Desk, went on to cover drugs in sports and then spent a year in Iraq before coming to Washington, where he’s covered the FBI and Pentagon. Last year he broke the story on Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

*Sharon, a reporter in the Investigations Department in New York, has been at The Times since 2003. She covered southern Africa and China for us and before that was in Moscow for The Washington Post. She won the Michael Kelly Award in 2006 for her coverage of sub-Saharan Africa and more recently has been reporting on gun violence, bias in policing and substandard care at military hospitals. She’ll be moving to Washington to join the team.