0 ratings | 0 reviews | avg rating:0.0

Ed Offley’s Followers (8)

Ed’s Bookshelves

to-read (0)
currently-reading (0)
read (0)

Ed’s Friends (48)

David Vest

70 books | 36 friends

Carol Hoenig

52 books | 1,591 friends

Jocelyn

391 books | 148 friends

Kerry Sipe

451 books | 44 friends

Philip Caputo

1 book | 598 friends

Edgar Raines

959 books | 33 friends

John A. Smith

42 books | 74 friends

Patty Hester

6 books | 51 friends

More friends…

Ed Offley

Goodreads Author

Born

in Washington, D.C., The United States

Member Since

August 2013

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/edoffley

edit data

Ed Offley has been a military reporter for over 30 years in a wide variety of journalism assignments throughout the United States, including newspaper reporting and editorial writing, and online editing and commentary. Since 2006, he has worked full-time as an author focusing on military history topics.

His military reporting career spanned the final decade of the Cold War, including the Reagan administration’s defense buildup of the 1980s and American interventions in Lebanon, Grenada and Panama; the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; the outbreak of mass violence in the Balkans; and major U.S. military interventions in the Middle East including Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Ed Offley has been a military reporter for over 30 years in a wide variety of journalism assignments throughout the United States, including newspaper reporting and editorial writing, and online editing and commentary. Since 2006, he has worked full-time as an author focusing on military history topics.

His military reporting career spanned the final decade of the Cold War, including the Reagan administration’s defense buildup of the 1980s and American interventions in Lebanon, Grenada and Panama; the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; the outbreak of mass violence in the Balkans; and major U.S. military interventions in the Middle East including Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

During that time, he covered military operations and exercises in eighteen countries. These included the 1989 American intervention in Panama; the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s historic 1990 visit to the Soviet Union at Vladivostok; the 1991 Operation Desert Storm offensive to liberate Kuwait, and the 1992 U.S. intervention in Somalia. Other assignments have included a major U.S. Navy fleet exercise in the Bering Sea in 1987; the U.S. Air Force’s 1989 mid-winter airdrop of supplies to the South Pole Base Camp, and a reporting trip to the border village of Panmunjom in 1994 during a period of heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Throughout his career, Offley practiced hands-on coverage of the military. This included coverage of naval fleet exercises at sea from the central Pacific to the Atlantic and Caribbean. He participated in training maneuvers with the U.S. Army in Alaska, Washington state, southern California and Puerto Rico. He qualified for flight in Navy and Air Force tactical jet aircraft, flying as an observer in a number of warplanes, including the B-52H, A-6E, CF-18, F-5E and EA-6B. He flew with both the Navy’s Blue Angels and Air Force’s Thunderbirds, logged over 300,000 miles of flight with the Air Mobility Command worldwide, and made over a dozen aircraft carrier landings and takeoffs. He spent four days submerged in the Trident submarine USS Nevada and three days inside an even more cramped M1A1 Abrams tank

His investigative reporting regularly produced headline-generating disclosures. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting in 1996 for articles on a brain-injured former Army soldier who was released from a civilian jail and had his veterans benefits restored as a result of the coverage revealing a faulty Army medical diagnosis of the soldier’s condition. His disclosure of a Top Secret plan to use trained dolphins as security guards at the Bangor Submarine Base triggered a federal lawsuit by animal-rights groups that stopped the program in its tracks. His revelation that retired Navy Warrant Officer John Walker’s espionage for the KGB had allowed Soviet submarines to penetrate American and Canadian coastal waters sparked a parliamentary hearing in Canada.

In addition to his published works, Ed Offley has long worked to improve the quality of military reporting in American journalism. In 2001, his military reporting manual, Pen & Sword: A Journalist’s Guide to Covering the Military (Marion Street Press, Oak Park, IL), received widespread praise by reviewers. The American Journalism Review called the manual “especially valuable” to reporters who found themselves covering military subjects on short notice. He also was a founding director of Military Reporters & Editors Association, a professional group committed to improving the quality of military reporting in the American news media.

A 1969 graduate of the University of Virginia, Ed served in the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Midway. He and his wife, Karen Conrad, live in Panama City Beach, Fla. They have two adult daughters, Elaine and Andrea. ...more

2 posts
Ed Offley's Blog: Ed Offley's Blog

Correction to 25 Weird Moments

To my friends, sorry — I accidentally cut off the end of Item #25 in my previous post. Here it is in full:

25. In one weird encounter, the enemies actually talked to each other in the middle of a battle: Convoy TM-1, a formation of nine Allied oil tankers, was proceeding from the Caribbean to North Africa on January 3, 1943, when it was detected by German U-boats. The under-strength escort group (o Read more of this blog post »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on January 27, 2014 12:14 • Tags: ed-offley

View all 2 posts »

Combine Editions
Ed Offley’s books

Average rating: 3.74 · 705 ratings · 96 reviews · 7 distinct works • Similar authors

	Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion 3.79 avg rating — 302 ratings — published 2007 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Burning Shore: How Hitler's U-Boats Brought World War II to America 3.71 avg rating — 241 ratings — published 2014 — 13 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Turning the Tide: How a Small Band of Allied Sailors Defeated the U-boats and Won the Battle of the Atlantic 3.70 avg rating — 142 ratings — published 2011 — 15 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Lifting the Fog of War by Bill Owens, Ed Offley (Goodreads Author) 3.63 avg rating — 19 ratings — published 2000 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Pen & Sword: A Journalist's Guide to Covering the Military 4.33 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 2001	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Turning the Tide: How a Small Band of Allied Sailors Defeated the U-boats and Won the Battle of the Atlantic 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story Ofthe USS Scorpion 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Ed Offley…

Quotes by Ed Offley (?)

“Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, who had commanded the U.S. submarine campaign against Japan during World War II, later recalled his astonishment at hearing Abelson's briefing: "If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget that meeting on March 28, 1946, in a large Bureau of Ships conference room, its walls lined with blackboards, which in turn were covered with diagrams, blueprints, figures and equations which Phil used to illustrate various points as he read from his document, the first ever submitted anywhere on nuclear-powered subs. It sounded like something out of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."7”
― Ed Offley, Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion

0 likes

“The new boats created unprecedented career opportunities for those already in the elite nuclear submarine force and gave migraines to personnel specialists who had to find trained crewmen. During the Scorpion's first seven years, the navy constructed and commissioned twenty-five nuclear attack submarines and thirty-nine Polaris missile boats. Each Polaris submarine had two crews of seventeen officers and 128 enlisted men. The math was brutal: The navy had to recruit and train 103 additional submarine crews during the eighty-four-month period that the shipyards were cranking out Polaris missile submarines and nuclear attack boats.”
― Ed Offley, Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion

0 likes

“Meanwhile, U.S. Navy officials were grappling with their own problems. The American fleet that vanquished Imperial Japan and helped storm the shores of Fortress Europe did not exist anymore. From a wartime high of 3.3 million men and women, the U.S. Navy roster plummeted to 491,663 by December 1946.8”
― Ed Offley, Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion

0 likes

See all Ed Offley's quotes »

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
THE WORLD WAR TWO...: 2014 - September - Theme Read - World War Two Battle	247	108	Oct 04, 2014 01:44AM
THE WORLD WAR TWO...: Submarine Warfare during WW2	207	258	Aug 12, 2025 02:42PM
THE WORLD WAR TWO...: New Release Books on WW2	3287	1269	Oct 10, 2025 01:38PM