Jonathan Steele is a senior foreign correspondent for the Guardian. His most recent book, Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq, was released this month from Counterpoint Press.

Since 1994, Steele has been based in London as the Guardian's Senior Foreign Correspondent and main International Affairs Columnist. He covered the crisis over Kosovo on repeated assignments to the Balkans, the Taliban take-over of Afghanistan in 1996 as well as the war in 2001. In 2003, he covered the US-led invasion of Iraq, and has completed eight assignments in the country since then. He continues to cover Iraq, Darfur, and Afghanistan.

Jonathan Steele has twice won the International Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards—in 1981 for coverage of Afghanistan and Poland, and in 1991 for coverage of the USSR. He also won the James Cameron award "for work as a journalist that combined moral vision and professional integrity," the Martha Gellhorn prize "for the consistently high standard of his reporting over a number of years," the Amnesty International human rights award for his coverage of Kosovo; and the London Press Club's "Scoop of the Year" trophy for being the only English-language reporter to reach Gorbachev's prison-villa in the Crimea where he interviewed the Soviet president as the hardline coup against him collapsed.

He was appointed the paper's East European correspondent in 1969 shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1975, Steele became the Washington bureau chief, covering the Jimmy Carter presidency until 1979 when he returned to London, first as Foreign News Editor, then as Chief Foreign Correspondent. In this position, Steele covered the US interventions in El Salvador, Grenada, and Nicaragua as well as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and wars in southern Africa. In 1988, he became the paper's Moscow bureau chief and remained there until 1994, covering Gorbachev's perestroika and the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union.

A regular broadcaster on the BBC and CNN, Jonathan Steele has written several books on international affairs, including The South African Connection: Western Investment in Apartheid, Inside East Germany, Soviet Power, and Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy. He lives in London.

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