CNN Profiles - Nick Paton Walsh - Chief International Security Correspondent | CNN (2024)

Nick Paton Walsh is a multiple Emmy Award-winning Chief International Security Correspondent for CNN.

Based in CNN’s London bureau, Paton Walsh reports on conflict, global security and intelligence stories across TV and CNN Digital. With decades of experience reporting from warzones around the world and deep knowledge and contacts across the international security and intelligence communities, Paton Walsh reports on and provides informed context and analysis of key global security-related issues in the studio and out in the field.

Paton Walsh previously served as the network’s International Security Editor, delivering a range of stories from the battlefields of Ukraine, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, as well as covering global terrorism and the ongoing threat of Covid-19.

He has played a pivotal role in CNN’s coverage of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and in 2023 was part of the CNN team which won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Live Breaking News Coverage for their reporting on this story.

Paton Walsh covered the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021 and led an investigation into the deaths of over 170 Afghans and Americans at Abbey Gate, outside the capital’s airport. During the pandemic in 2020 he reported from Brazil, Iran and Coventry, England, and broke an exclusive on what China knew in the opening weeks of the pandemic. In recent years he has also reported extensively from Venezuela, Brazil and Haiti on the political, social and environmental crises.

Since joining CNN in 2011, Paton Walsh has been at the center of some of the network’s most award-winning coverage, particularly his work in Syria and Iraq. His reporting on the Turkish incursion into Syria helped earn the network a 2020 Emmy Award in the Outstanding Breaking News Coverage category. He received the David Kaplan Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2018 for his reporting on the fall of ISIS; two 2018 Emmy Awards for ‘The Fall of Raqqa’; two Edward R. Murrow Awards in 2013 and one in 2018; three Peabody Awards for CNN’s coverage in Syria (2012), for its ISIS reporting (2016) and for the network’s coverage of the fall of ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2018. He has won Eppy Awards for his work on plastic pollution and police violence in El Salvador. Additionally, his script-writing in Syria and Afghanistan won an Emmy in 2013 for Outstanding Writing.

In 2019, Paton Walsh reported from inside Venezuela undercover as its crisis unfolded, revealing key details and videos about the plot to assassinate Nicolas Maduro with commercial drones, and the hugely profitable drug routes that run north through the embattled country, enriching its military and elite. In Iran, he interviewed foreign minister Javad Zarif, whose threat of “all-out war” if Iran was attacked made headlines across the world. He also reported on the Turkish incursion into Kurdish held areas of Syria and broke a series of stories on the shelved US withdrawal from Syria. Additionally, Paton Walsh reported from the Amazon rainforest as it experienced its worst fires in at least a decade.

Paton Walsh was previously based in Afghanistan at length on the chaotic close of NATO’s campaign there. He then moved in 2012 to Beirut for the network, where he reported inside Syria at the height of its civil war. He followed the rise of ISIS - from the first moments they moved into Syria in 2013, to their spread in Libya and Afghanistan - to their fall in Mosul over three years later, and their final collapse in Raqqa in late 2017.

Fluent in Russian, he has also covered the 2014 Russian-backed invasion of Ukraine, the expansion of the fighting into Donetsk, and was the first Western reporter into Debaltseve in 2015 when the key city fell to separatists. Paton Walsh also reported from Dagestan in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston bombings, interviewing the family of the Tsarnaev brothers and establishing some of the first links to militants there.

Additionally, Paton Walsh has covered many key environmental stories as well as natural disasters in the Caribbean and Philippines. In 2019 he reported on the fires raging across the Amazon from one of the worst-affected states in Brazil. He won an Eppy award in 2018 for his reporting on gang violence in El Salvador and one in 2017 for CNN’s ‘Midway Island’ report on plastic pollution in the Pacific.

Paton Walsh first reported for CNN from Pakistan in March 2011. He was subsequently the network’s first correspondent reporting live from Abbotabad covering the death of Osama Bin Laden, where he obtained exclusive video from inside the al-Qaeda leader’s compound and broke the story that a courier’s cell phone signal had led American troops there.

Previously he spent several years working in Asia for the UK’s Channel Four News, focusing on Afghanistan where he gained rare access to a tiny and isolated American outpost near the Pakistani border - COP Keating - which was overrun by insurgents, and covered the 2009 presidential election crisis.

While Asia and foreign affairs correspondent at Channel Four News he secured a rare and exclusive interview with the Russian alleged arms dealer Viktor Bout, while his team’s reports on alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka at the end of the civil war led to their forced deportation from the country.

From 2002 to 2006, Paton Walsh was the Moscow Correspondent for the Guardian newspaper during the rise of Vladimir Putin. He reported on both the Dubrovka theatre siege and the Beslan school hostage crisis, alongside the revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan and developments from the troubled North Caucasus.

Paton Walsh won the British Press Awards’ Young Journalist of the Year in 2000, aged 22. He won Amnesty International’s Gaby Rado Award for a reporter at the start of their career in 2006 for his work in the former Soviet Union, and their television award for his work in Sri Lanka in 2010.