Elaine Shannon

Shannon was born in Gainesville, Georgia, on November 16, 1946.[3] She was an English major at Vanderbilt University where she graduated in 1968.[3][4] While a senior at Vanderbilt, Shannon began working for the Nashville Tennessean where she reported on civil rights, police brutality, and prisoner abuse.[3] In 1970 Shannon became the newspaper's Washington, D.C., correspondent and covered the Senatorial campaign of Albert Gore Sr., the Presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon and George McGovern, and the Watergate scandal.[3] She spent a year at Harvard University where in 1974 she earned a Nieman Fellowship in journalism, then went to work for Newsday the following year.[3][4]

According to CNN, Shannon "has covered criminal justice issues, including international arms trafficking, drug trafficking and money laundering, organized crime, white collar crime, terrorism and espionage" since 1976.[3] She frequently speaks on issues related to drug trafficking.[3] Through her reporting, Shannon has built "an extensive network of sources as she covered the FBI, DEA, Customs and Justice departments, intelligence and terrorism."[4]

She joined Newsweek in 1976 and covered the Presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.[3] In October 1986, she left Newsweek to finish writing her New York Times best-selling book about the drug trade, Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win.[3]

In April 1987, Shannon joined Time where she was a correspondent in their Washington, D.C., bureau.[3] She became a panelist on PBS's To the Contrary in 1993.[3]

Shannon is the author of four books. Her first, Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win, sold over 130,000 copies.[3] Publishers Weekly stated that Shannon drew on 10 years of expertise covering the international drug scene for Newsweek to write about the 1985 torture-murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.[5] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Kirsch called Desperados "a sock-in-the-eye work of reporting about America's losing struggle against the multinational, multibillion-dollar drug industry" [6] Desperados also served as the basis for Michael Mann's three-part miniseries Drug Wars: The Camarena Story broadcast on NBC in January 1990.[3] The docudrama received an Emmy award as the best miniseries of 1990.[3] A second miniseries based on Desperados, Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel, was broadcast on NBC in January 1992 was also nominated for an Emmy for best miniseries of 1992.[3][7]

No Heroes: Inside the FBI's Secret Counter-Terror Force was written with Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI Danny Coulson and The Spy Next Door: The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen was co-authored by journalist Ann Blackman.[7]

Shannon's fourth book, Hunting LeRoux, was published in 2019 by William Morrow/HarperCollins.[4] The story discusses Paul Le Roux and the DEA's elite special operation group that tracked him in an effort to bring down his global criminal enterprise.[4] Shannon learned about Le Roux in Afghanistan while researching how warlords and terrorist groups were financed by the heroin trade,[4] and her sources included undercover DEA agents and informants.[8] Mann wrote the foreword of the book and as of 2019 had plan to develop it into a movie.[4] Kirkus Reviews called it a "painstaking, fascinating account of crime and punishment" and said Shannon did an especially good job presenting "how the American Drug Enforcement Administration pieced together its multiagency, multigovernmental case against Le Roux".[8] Jeff Ayers' review described the book as a "gripping account that is both well-written and exhaustively researched".[9]

Shannon has won the Association for Women in Communications' Clarion Award and the New York State Bar Association Award.[3] In 1992, Shannon and John Moody's two-part cover story in Time about the Cali cartel won the Inter American Press Association's IAPA-Bartolome Mitre Award for distinguished journalism.[3][10] Their story, "Cocaine, Inc.—The New Drug Kings", addressed the drug problem in the United States.[3][10]

Shannon lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Dan Morgan, author and correspondent for The Washington Post.[3][7] They have a son, Andrew.[3]

• Official website
• LinkedIn profile
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Cover Stories: New Kings of Coke
• Interview with Dave Watson of davesaymoviesmatter.com