Douglas Farah is currently a consultant and freelance writer on terror finance and national security matters. He is the author of "Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who Makes War Possible," (2007) and "Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror" (2004), the premier book on the subject and now cited as one of the best books written on al Qaeda’s funding mechanisms. He worked for 20 years as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, covering wars, terrorism and criminal activities in Latin America, the Caribbean and West Africa.

For two decades, Mr. Farah was a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for the Washington Post, UPI, and other publications. From 1985 to 2000, he covered Latin American issues for the UPI, Washington Post, and other media outlets, and was one of the leading correspondents in the Western Hemisphere on the development of drug cartels and organized crime. He chronicled the rise and fall of the Medellin and Cali drug cartels; the move by Colombian drug traffickers into heroin; and the growing alliance between Colombian and Mexican drug mafias. Mr. Farah also covered the emergence of Russian organized crime groups in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the growth of Mexican drug cartels within the United States and drug-related banks in the Caribbean. He also covered the 1994 U.S. occupation of Haiti, the rise of HIV/AIDS across the region, and he traveled more than a dozen times to Cuba to write about the changing revolution on that island. His work brought him numerous awards for reporting, including the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence, and the Maria Moor Cabot Prize by Columbia University for outstanding coverage of Latin America.

In 2000, Mr. Farah was named West Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post. He traveled and wrote extensively about the brutal civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. He also wrote about the interlocking networks of agents, under the protection of governments across the region, which profited from those conflicts and the diamonds-for-weapons trade. In November 2001 Farah broke the story of al Qaeda's ties to those diamond and weapons networks. Later that month Mr. Farah and his family were evacuated from West Africa because of threats against his life, resulting from the diamond stories. He continued to travel there and elsewhere around the world to report on the financial network of bin Laden, from which he wrote Blood From Stones.