Carlotta Gall

Carlotta Gall is a British journalist and author. She covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for The New York Times for twelve years.

Carlotta Gall is a daughter of the British journalist Sandy Gall and Eleanor Gall. She was educated in England and read Russian and French at Newnham College, Cambridge. She received a Masters from City University, London in international relations and journalism.

She started her newspaper career with The Moscow Times, in Moscow, in 1994, and covered the first war in Chechnya intensively for the paper, among other stories all over the former Soviet Union. She also freelanced for British papers (The Independent, The Times, and The Sunday Times) as well as American publications (USA Today, Newsweek and The New York Times).

In 1996 she co-authored with Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War. In 1997 she published Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, the book was awarded the James Cameron prize in the UK in 1997. Gall was awarded the Kurt Schork award for international freelance journalism in 2002, the Interaction award for outstanding international reporting in 2005, and was awarded the Weintal Award for diplomatic reporting by Georgetown University.

In 1998 she moved to the Financial Times and The Economist reporting on the Caucasus and Central Asia from Baku, Azerbaijan. From 1999 to 2001 Gall worked in the Balkans for the New York Times, covering the wars in Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia and developments in Bosnia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia. From 2001 to 2013, she was based in Afghanistan, as a correspondent with The New York Times for Pakistan and Afghanistan. She is currently the newspaper's North Africa correspondent.

In 2014 in her book The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 she accused the ISI, Pakistan's clandestine intelligence service, of hiding and protecting Osama bin Laden and his family after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Gall is featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007). She was the first journalist to report the story of two Afghans who died in US custody at Bagram air base (Parwan Detention Facility). The case of an Afghan taxi driver beaten to death in 2002 while in US-military custody forms the heart of the documentaries examination of the abuses committed during the detainment and interrogation of political prisoners. Gall investigated the death of cab driver Dilawar, officially declared by the military to be from natural causes, but uncovered incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.