T. D. Allman

His interviews with leading political figures such as Yasser Arafat, Helmut Kohl, Boris Yeltsin, and Manuel Antonio Noriega were published in the magazine Vanity Fair, where he was a foreign correspondent.

His first book, Unmanifest Destiny, dealing with issues of American nationalism in U.S. foreign policy, grew out of his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, but his “definitive educational experience” occurred in the lowland town of Nepalganj, Nepal, after joining the Peace Corps in order to avoid the draft.

Allman exposed the CIA’s secret war in Laos, rescued massacre victims in Cambodia, became an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, survived a kidnapping in Beirut, a bullet in Tiananmen Square, and a balloon crash in Kathmandu while reporting from more than 90 countries.” [5] He died on May 12, 2024, at a hospital in Manhattan, from pneumonia.

[3] Allman's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The New Republic, Rolling Stone,[6] National Geographic,[7] as well as in The Guardian, Le Monde, The Economist.

Later, as a contributing editor of Harper's,[8] he aroused further controversy when he predicted that the U.S. defeat in Indochina had opened the door to a new epoch of Pacific Rim success for American values and economic systems.

The news in his dispatches spurred congressional investigations and protests in America, and he went on to document the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia.

Allman Studentships, funded by the ChengZhong Focus Foundation, support ground-breaking independent research into past and present events.