[5] He previously spent 17 years at The Daily Telegraph, based in London, Belfast, Washington, Jerusalem and Baghdad, finishing as US Editor from 2006 to 2011.
He is the author of two previous books: Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh (1999) and Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story of Britain's War in Afghanistan (2011).
He was reporter and presenter of the BBC Panorama Special programme Broken by Battle about suicide and PTSD among British soldiers, broadcast in 2013.
I believed him not just because I know him to be a reputable and ethical journalist but also because I was told the same, that a well-known Dundalk Garda was in the back pocket of the IRA in South Armagh.
[19] In 2019, novelist David Keenan named "Bandit Country" as one of the top 10 books written about the Irish Troubles, stating: "One of my fascinations with Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s is how it became a place where different rules applied, where reality itself seemed up for grabs.
Nowhere was this more the case than the "Provisional Republic" of South Armagh, AKA Bandit Country, with its handmade 'sniper at work' signs and its community militias all surveyed by the watchtowers and helicopters of the British army.
"[20] BBC journalist and author Peter Taylor, a veteran of more than three decades of reporting in Ireland, had named "Bandit Country" in his top 10 Irish Troubles books in 2002, concluding: "Courageous journalism and compulsive reading as Harnden goes inside the most impenetrable and deadly of the IRA Brigades.
The book had already been cleared for publication by the MOD after a four-month review process that Harnden had agreed to as part of a contract that provided him with access to the Welsh Guards.
[27][3] Orwell prize judges Helena Kennedy, Miranda Carter and Sameer Rahim said: "It sometimes seems that we only care about the soldiers fighting in our names when they are killed.
He subsequently covered the IRA's second ceasefire, the Good Friday Agreement and the Omagh bombing of 1998[34] Harnden was ordered by Lord Saville's Bloody Sunday Tribunal to hand over recordings and notes of his interviews with two anonymous Paratroopers who had been present during the 1972 killings.
"[36] In June 2004, Saville dropped contempt proceedings with Harnden stating that he would never have revealed the identity of "Soldier X", who had opened fire on Bloody Sunday.
[39] In November 2004, he was embedded with the US Army's Task Force 2-2 during the battle of Fallujah, including Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, later awarded the Medal of Honor.
[40] Of Bellavia's platoon, Harnden reported: "With Dope's 'Die Motherfucker Die' blaring out from the psychological operations Humvee, the Terminators entered Fallujah to go about their business in the way they know best.
They joked about the cat they'd seen eating the face of a corpse, about the fighter who had been 'fragged' by a grenade and shot several times but who still managed to jump off a roof and escape.
"[41] Harnden joined The Sunday Telegraph in 2005 as London-based Chief Foreign Correspondent, traveling to report from Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Bahrain, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Austria, Italy, Estonia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United States and Thailand.
[50] In January 2013, he joined The Sunday Times as Washington Bureau Chief [51] and spent almost six years as the newspaper's senior American correspondent, covering the Boston bombings,[52] unrest in Ferguson, Missouri,[53] the 2016 presidential election,[54] and the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas.