Peter Lance

He began his career as a reporter for his hometown paper, The
Daily News in Newport, Rhode Island. There he won the coveted
Sevellon Brown Award from the A.P. Managing Editors Association.
Lance next moved to WNET, the PBS flagship in New York, where he
won an Emmy and the Ohio State Award as a reporter for Channel
13's nightly news magazine THE 51ST STATE.

Later, while working as a writer and producer for WABC-TV
Lance won his second Emmy along with the Robert F. Kennedy
Journalism prize for WILLOWBROOK: THE PEOPLE VS. THE STATE
OF NEW YORK, an exposé on a notorious institution for the
mentally ill.

While getting his law degree at Fordham Lance worked as a
Trial Preparation Assistant in the office of the District
Attorney for New York County. Moving to ABC News as a field
producer in 1978, Lance won yet another Emmy for his
investigation of an arson-for-profit ring in the Uptown
neighborhood of Chicago.

In 1981 Lance became Investigative Correspondent for ABC
News. Over the next five years he covered hundreds of
stories worldwide for ABC NEWS 20/20, NIGHTLINE, and
WORLD NEWS TONIGHT.

He was a member of the first American crew into Indochina
after the fall of Saigon and filed investigative reports from
dozens of world capitals from Vientienne, Laos to Paris and
Rome. Then, in 1987, Lance took a break from non-fiction. He
came to Los Angeles and began working as a writer and story
editor for Michael Mann on two of his acclaimed NBC series:
CRIME STORY and MIAMI VICE.

In 1989 Lance became the co-executive producer and "show
runner" on the fourth season of WISEGUY for CBS and in 1993
he co-created MISSING PERSONS, for ABC. In later years he
served as a writer and producer on such series as JAG (NBC)
and THE SENTINEL (UPN).

In 1997 Lance's first novel FIRST DEGREE BURN became a
national best seller, ranking No. 24 on The Ingram A-List;
The Top 50 Requested Titles in Mystery- Detective Fiction.
The film-noir mystery features FDNY Fire Marshal Eddie Burke.

Later Lance adapted VEIL: THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA,
Bob Woodward's best-seller on William Casey and Iran-Contra
for HBO. For Showtime he wrote TERROR.NET, the story of
Bradley Smith, the courageous Diplomatic Security agent
responsible for helping to apprehend the world's most
notorious terrorists.

In the year 2000 Lance returned to investigative reporting
with his best-selling non-fiction investigative biography:
THE STINGRAY: Lethal Tactics of The Sole Survivor.

Then, following the 9/11 attacks he began investigating the
origins of the FBI's original probe of World Trade Center
bomber Ramzi Yousef. After visiting Yousef's former bomb
factory in the Philippines, Lance came away with 100's of
pages of formerly classified documents proving that Yousef
had set the 9/11 plot into motion as early as 1994.

Lance then examined the FBI's original efforts to stop
Yousef in 1992 as he built the first WTC device. The result
was his acclaimed best seller from Harper Collins:
1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE: International Terrorism And The FBI
(The Untold Story).

In 2004 Lance testified on his findings before the 9/11
Commission. By the late spring of 2004 his original
investigation had led to a startling discovery: a connection
between Yousef, al Qaeda and the notorious crash of TWA
Flight #800 in July of 1996 which killed 230.

These revelations and a critique of the 9/11 Commission
are contained in Lance’s second 9/11 investigative book:
COVER UP: What The Government Is Still Hiding About The War
on Terror. A series of formerly secret FBI #302 memos proving
the al Qaeda link to TWA #800 can be found on
www.peterlance.com along with a 32 page illustrated TIMELINE
tracing the origins of 9/11 back to 1989.

Lance is now at work on the last book in his 9/11 trilogy
for Harper Collins, which tells, in part, the story of the ABLE DANGER scandal which erupted in the summer of 2005.

Show full bio

Hide full bio