Corbin, Jane 1954-

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CORBIN, Jane 1954-

PERSONAL: Born July 16, 1954, in Exeter, Devon, England; daughter of Aubrey and Olive Corbin; married John Maples (a politician), 1987; children: Tom, Rose. Education: King's College, London, B.A. (with honors). Religion: Church of England.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o British Broadcasting Corp., 201 Wood Ln., London W12, England. Agent—Bill Hamilton, A. M. Heath and Co. Ltd., 79 St. Martin's Ln., London WC2N 4AA, England.

CAREER: Journalist and author. ITN-TV, foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News, c. 1983-88; British Broadcasting Corp., London, England, current-affairs and investigative journalist for BBC-TV, senior foreign correspondent for Panorama series, c. 1988—, presenter of live debate program Behind the Headlines, c. 1991—. Also worked for Thames Television and Granada Television.

AWARDS, HONORS: Rainier Award, Monte Carlo Television Festival, 1990, for film The Poisoned Land, the Dying Sea; Emmy Award nomination for best investigative journalist, American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1992, for "Saddam's Secret Arms Ring"; four awards for television journalism, Royal Television Society, including 1994, for "The Norway Channel"; shortlisted for Louis Gelber Award for nonfiction.

WRITINGS:

The Norway Channel: The Secret Talks That Led to the Middle East Peace Accord, Grove/Atlantic (New York, NY), 1994.

Al-Qaeda: The Terror Network That Threatens the World, Thunder Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals in England and abroad.

SIDELIGHTS: Jane Corbin, a noted British news correspondent, has placed herself on the front lines of some of the most troubling international news stories making headlines during the late twentieth century and beyond. She has witnessed tragic events and translated them for her worldwide audiences: the assassination of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, catastrophic widespread famine throughout Africa, riots in Korea, and the bloody Angolan civil war. As Corbin told CA, since the late 1980s, as senior correspondent for the BBC prime-time current-affairs program Panorama, "I have covered events in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, an award-winning program on the legacy left by Chernobyl, and the environmental disaster of the Aral Sea. I also made a program examining the Red Army's role in the bloody quashing of rebellion in Azerbaijan and other outposts of the [former] Soviet Empire.

"I was the first journalist in 1988 to travel widely inside Cambodia to report on the political and social trauma of the country a decade after Year Zero. I have also reported from South America and from the United States.

"During my time at Panorama, I have specialized in Middle East affairs. At the end of the Gulf War, I entered Kuwait with the first Allied troops and reported the first documentary from there just five days after liberation. Between 1989 and 1993 I made a series of four investigative programs on Iraq's project to develop weapons of mass destruction. This included 'Project Babylon: Saddam's Supergun' and an investigation into the Iraqi nuclear program, which proved remarkably accurate in the light of discoveries by the[2002] United Nations weapons teams.

"In 1993 I traveled to Iran to report on clandestine chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons programs and to look at the Islamic revolution fifteen years after Khomeini ousted the Shah. In September I achieved a world exclusive with the inside story of 'The Norway Channel,' which revealed how a small group of Norwegians, Israelis, and Palestinians had negotiated a secret Middle East peace accord.

"Much of my work has been shown in the United States, mainly on PBS-TV, on Frontline and The MacNeil-Lehrer Report, but also on ABC-TV's Nightline. My programs have also been broadcast on Australian, Canadian, and European broadcasting networks and in Japan. My work is regularly shown in Africa and the Far and Middle East on the BBC's World Service Television."

To supplement these credentials, Corbin has compiled two nonfiction books. The first, The Norway Channel, was inspired by a story she developed for the BBC on peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which story won Corbin an award for television journalism from the Royal Television Society. In her book she focuses on the role of Norway in the Gaza-Jericho Accord, especially the roles of Jan Egeland, Mona Juul, and Terje Larsen, three Norwegians who, according to Jerome M. Segal in a review for the Journal of Palestine Studies, were "the moving spirit behind Norway's nurturing of the agreement." Segal went on to state that although Corbin's book does not have all the answers as to why this agreement was signed or what affect it will have on history, The Norway Channel does provide an interesting view of the talks. The book "gives sumptuous detail … of what happened … the sequence of meetings, the participants' styles, the tenor of interaction, and how all this was experienced by some of the Norwegians most involved."

Corbin's second book, Al-Qaeda: The Terror Network That Threatens the World, was cited by Marcus Warren in his review for London's Daily Telegraph as coming close to being "a life and times of Osama bin Laden." Corbin has admitted that for three years the screen-saver on her computer monitor generated a portrait of bin Laden, the alleged leader of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda and the man responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; as a reviewer for Publishers Weekly put it, Corbin has obviously been "pursuing bin Laden for a long time." In order to track down the illusive terrorist she traveled to "Kenya, Egypt, the Emirates, Germany, [and] the Florida aviation schools," wrote Warren, describing the journalist's search for bin Laden and his "underlings."

Although she has devoted much time to the study of bin Laden, Corbin, like the rest of the world, still has many more questions than answers about his organization. As a reviewer for the Economist concluded, "The most alarming conclusion to be drawn" from Corbin's book "is how little we really know." Corbin, in describing the evolving organization of the terrorist group, credits them, according to the Economist reviewer, for their "skills and cunning." On the other side of the issue, she blames authorities in both Germany and the United States for missing opportunities that might have prevented the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or, in the least, for recognizing the potential for disaster.