RICHARD HARVEY PYLE

Richard Pyle was born in Ohio, grew up in Michigan, served in the U.S. Army in Japan and earned a journalism degree at Wayne State University in Detroit while working full-time for a daily newspaper. In 1960, Pyle joined The Associated Press in Detroit. After two years as a one-man bureau in Ann Arbor and two covering state government in Lansing, he moved in 1964 to the AP World (international) Desk in New York, and in 1967 to Washington.

In August 1968, Pyle joined AP's Vietnam war staff, beginning a five year stint as combat correspondent. In September 1970 he became Saigon chief of bureau and directed coverage that included Allied invasions of Cambodia (1970) and Laos (1971), North Vietnam's Easter Offensive (1972) and the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces and release of POWs (1973).

Returning to Washington in 1973, Pyle scored a major beat on Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation on Oct 10 and three days later went to Cairo to cover the Arab-Israeli war.

Over the next six years in Washington, Pyle covered various beats in Washington. As a member of AP's Special Assignment Team, he shared in a six-month probe of the Chappaquiddick incident. He was at the White House when President Nixon resigned in August 1974, and covered President Ford's first days in office. During the Carter years he reported on foreign, military and national security affairs on Capitol Hill.

Special assignments from Washington also included Beirut during the Lebanon civil war (1976); Cuba (twice in 1977), Panama (1978); the Tennessee prison escape of James Earl Ray, killer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1977), and the Three Mile Island nuclear mishap (1979).

In 1979, Pyle returned abroad as AP News Editor for Asia, based in Tokyo. Over 7 1/2 years he covered riots in South Korea (1979); Israel's invasion of Lebanon (1982); the Soviet shootdown of Korean Air 007 (1983) and the fall of Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos (1986), with other assignments in China, India and Southeast Asia.

In 1987, Pyle moved from Tokyo to Cairo as AP's Roving Middle East Correspondent, but soon shifted to Bahrain, to cover the Iraq-Iran war in the Persian Gulf. He filed eyewitness reports from shipboard during a one-day U.S. Navy war against Iran in April 1988.

On assignment in South Africa in 1989, he reported on the independence of Namibia, Africa's last foreign colony. Eight months after returning to New York in early 1990, Pyle was back in Saudi Arabia, covering Iraq's armed takeover of Kuwait and the Gulf war. Afterward, he wrote a paperback biography of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

In New York since 1990, Pyle covered mob trials, politics, the crash of TWA 800, and other stories. In April 1999, he went to Albania where Task Force Hawk, a U.S. Army helicopter unit, was deployed for the Kosovo war.

A year later he was among AP staffers who returned to Vietnam for the 25h anniversary of the war's end and produced a prize-winning series called ``Vietnam Legacy.'' He also covered the findings of a Pentagon inquiry following up AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning report on the killing of civilians at No Gun Ri during the Korean War in 1950.

Pyle returned to Laos in 1998, when a U.S. MIA search team excavated the site of a helicopter shootdown that killed four combat photographers 27 years earlier. He wrote an article for Vanity Fair magazine and in 2003 co-authored a book, ``Lost Over Laos,'' on the same subject.

Richard and his wife, free-lance writer and professional actress Brenda Smiley, met in Japan, were married in Cyprus and live in Brooklyn. On Sept. 11, 2001 they witnessed the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center from their roofdeck, two miles away. Richard went to the scene, then spent the day reporting from the streets.

Most recently, Richard was among 12 AP staff writers who collaborated on the book, ``Breaking News, How The Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace and Everything Else,'' published in 2007. He wrote two war chapters for the book which covers AP's history from its creation in 1846 to the present.