Al Pessin spent his entire career with one employer, the Voice of America. His bio says that “he was a member of the Pentagon press corps from 2005-2011, including numerous trips to Afghanistan with Secretaries Rumsfeld and Gates, and with senior military officers, visiting the headquarters in Kabul and several forward operating bases. During that period, he also traveled to Iraq, Pakistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other strategic locales. In addition to his years at the Pentagon, Al has been posted to Hong Kong, Islamabad, Beijing, Jerusalem and London, and was a correspondent at the White House and in New York. Al was expelled from China after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 for coverage that the Chinese government described as ‘illegal news gathering’ that was ‘fomenting counter-revolutionary rebellion.’ Other major Asia stories Al covered included the Philippine revolution, China-Soviet rapprochement, unrest in Tibet and the plight of Cambodian refugees in Thailand. In the Middle East, Al covered Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, and increasing Kurdish nationalism in eastern Turkey. In later years, he returned to the region to cover the Arab Spring in Cairo and Tripoli, and the fallout from the Syrian Civil War in Lebanon. And as Europe Correspondent in the 2010s, Al covered the Ukrainian revolution and the Russian-sponsored invasion of Eastern Ukraine, as well as Europe’s economic crisis and nuclear negotiations with Iran.”
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