Jere Van Dyk

board member

Jere Van Dyk is a journalist, writer and hostage advocate. In the early 1980s, working as a correspondent for The New York Times, he lived with the mujahideen (holy warriors) in Afghanistan as they fought against the Soviet Red Army, an experience that was recapped in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated articles, and in his first book, “In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey.”

From 1987 - 1995, he was an explorer for National Geographic Magazine, traveling the length and finding the source of the Brahmaputra and Amazon rivers, among other assignments. Twenty years later, he returned to Afghanistan to report on the U.S.-led war, only to be captured and held by the Taliban for 45 days in 2008. This harrowing experience is detailed in his book “Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban,” which Foreign Affairs selected in 2010 as one of its “Must-Read Books for the World Ahead.” His book, “The Trade, My Journey into the Labyrinth of Political Kidnapping,” is the story of his trip back to Afghanistan and Pakistan to find out who really kidnapped him, and why.

It was selected in 2017 by The Sunday New York Times Book Review as an Editors’ Choice. His most recent book, “Without Borders: The Haqqani Network and the Road to Kabul,” published in late 2022, is in part about his relationship to the Haqqani Mujahideen, with whom he lived in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in the 1980s, when they were U.S. allies, who today the U.S. and its allies call the “Haqqani Network,” the most powerful of all Taliban-related military groups, maybe the most powerful jihadist group in the world.