Anchors & Reporters

Walter Rodgers is senior international correspondent for CNN based in London. Named to this position in September 2000, he previously served as the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem for five and a half years. He was also the ABC News bureau chief in Moscow for five years.

In the post-Sept. 11 world, Rodgers has traveled across central and southwestern Asia in pursuit of stories associated with the international fallout, including to Kabul, Afghanistan; Islamabad, Pakistan; Amman, Jordan; and Ankara, Turkey. During 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom, Rodgers was one of CNN's 18 embedded journalists. He reported from the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry as it rolled toward Baghdad. Rodgers used the phone and videophone to provide the latest reports, many during the cavalry's movement and some during intense fire. In October 2001, he also spent time aboard the USS Carl Vinson, sharing with viewers a rare look at life on an aircraft carrier.

Rodgers joined CNN in September 1993 and has more than 30 years experience as a broadcast journalist. He served longer in Jerusalem than any other CNN correspondent or bureau chief. Before that he was a correspondent in CNN's Berlin bureau. He has covered many major stories for this network, including Middle East Summit conferences, suicide bombings in Israel, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the war in former Yugoslavia, and the 1993 attempted coup d'etat in Moscow.

He joined CNN after 12 years with ABC News where he appeared regularly on ABC's World News Tonight. He has covered wars and seen combat in Lebanon in the 1980s, the Soviet War in Afghanistan and strife in Sarajevo, Kosovo, South Lebanon and the West Bank.

Rodgers joined ABC News in 1981, where he was a London-based correspondent until 1983. From 1984-1989, Rodgers worked as ABC News' Moscow bureau chief and correspondent. While in Moscow, he covered a wide range of stories originating from the Soviet Union, including the first four years of Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika programs; the deaths of former Soviet presidents Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the downing of Korean Airlines flight KAL 007, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the U.S. Embassy security and spy scandal.

He has covered every U.S.-Soviet presidential summit since the 1974 meeting between U.S. President Gerald Ford and the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev, including the summits between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Rodgers also covered the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the Iranian hostage story and some of the Watergate court proceedings in 1974. From 1981-1983, he covered the Falklands War and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

In the United States, Rodgers covered the Farmington, W.Va., coalmine disaster and Republican, Democratic, and national governors' conferences in 1968. He was the first journalist to report that Jimmy Carter was ready to concede the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan before the polls closed. He also was in close proximity to Reagan during the assassination attempt in March 1981 and was among the first correspondents to break that story.

In addition to his work in broadcast journalism, Rodgers has written extensively for the Associated Press, The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor and Washingtonian Magazine.

Rodgers earned bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Southern Illinois University.