Based in Athens, he worked as a radio and off-air television correspondent for ABC News and was a long-time contributing editor to the Christian Science Monitor.
He was a key part of the ABC News Prime Time Live team that won an Emmy in 1990 for its investigation into the December 21, 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
He lived in North Africa from 1953 to 1964, covering the Algerian War for UPI, NBC News and The Observer, and in 1965 became Middle East correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Beirut.
Cooley and his wife Vania were among 90 foreign residents of the InterContinental and Philadelphia hotels in Amman who were taken hostage in June 1970 by George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and released after the personal intervention of King Hussein.
Cooley wrote in the Christian Science Monitor on May 23, 2002, that Jordan's General Intelligence Division (GID), which since the early 1990s has been tracking CIA and Pakistani-trained Arab guerrillas, intercepted an al-Qaeda communication between July 5 and August 6, 2001, deemed so important that it was relayed immediately by King Abdullah's men to Washington through the CIA station in the U.S. Embassy in Amman.