About

Robert is an author and journalist specialising in security and social mobility. His journalism appears in the Guardian, Independent, i newspaper, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times.

Robert was the home affairs editor and law editor at The Independent, where he worked for 12 years. After leaving the Independent he joined the Mail on Sunday as security editor.

Since the 9.11 attacks on America, he has covered the ‘war on terror’ and has visited the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and interviewed victims of torture in Syria. He has also headed media campaigns against ‘secret justice’ and in support of greater press freedoms. More recently he has been writing about the causes of extremism and social immobility.

In 2013 he was runner-up at the National Press Awards in the category of specialist journalist. Robert has also been long-listed for the Orwell Prize and the Paul Foot Award. He is also a non-practising qualified barristercalled to the Bar in 2007.

His latest book is the Sunday Times bestseller, The Traitor of Colditz.

PREVIOUS BOOKS

Posh Boys, How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain was published in July 2019 by Oneworld. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Posh-Boys-English-Schools-Britain/dp/1786073838

Defiant: the Untold Story of the Battle of Britain, published by Robinson June 2020. https://www.waterstones.com/book/defiant/robert-verkaik/978147214355

Why You Won’t Get Rich, How Capitalism Broke its Contact with Hard Work, is published in April.

Why You Won’t Get Rich on Radio 4’s Start the Week: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rmhh

Jihadi John, the Making of a Terrorist. Published by Oneworld January 2016.

https://oneworld-publications.com/jihadi-john-pb.html

It was a defining moment, the first time ‘Jihadi John’ appeared. Suddenly Islamic State had a face and the whole world knew the extent of their savagery. Weeks later, when his identity was revealed, Robert Verkaik was shocked to realise that this was a man he’d interviewed years earlier. Back in 2010, Mohammed Emwazi was a twenty-one-year-old IT graduate who claimed the security services were ruining his life. They had repeatedly approached him, his family and his fiancée. Had they been tracking an already dangerous extremist or did they push him over the edge?

In the aftermath of the US air strike that killed Emwazi in November 2015, Verkaik’s investigation leads him to deeply troubling questions. What led Emwazi to come to him for help in the first place? And why do hundreds of Britons want to join Islamic State? In an investigation both frightening and urgent, Verkaik goes beyond the making of one terrorist to examine the radicalisation of our youth and to ask what we can do to stop it happening in future.

Jihadi John has been published in America, Australia, Japan, Holland and Finland and is now the subject of feature film commissioned by the BBC.

Reviews:

‘An exemplary account… The book’s most important contribution is to highlight the difficulties faced by the intelligence services… a first-class primer on Muslim extremism in Britain.’

– Max Hastings, Sunday Times

‘The chief strength of this book lies in its exploration of the radical subculture in parts of west London…The web of influences is complex but Verkaik skilfully unpicks I, while losing none of the atmosphere that makes his book so readable and engaging’.

– Shiraz Maher, New Statesman

‘Verkaik gives a fascinating if frightening picture of the jihadists in our midst’.

– Francis Wheen, Mail on Sunday

‘No detail is too small in Verkaik’s quest to work out how a “misfit schoolboy” turned into a “psychopathic mass murderer”.’

– Independent

‘An outstanding pulling together of the fractured career of one of the most notorious terrorist psychopathic killers of this or any other age. The book is exceptional because its author makes no false claims for what he doesn’t know and never confuses explanation with explaining away… [an] excellent and thought-provoking book.’

– Robert Fox, Evening Standard

‘Highly readable book …….He does a fine job in putting together what is known about Emwazi.’

Andrew Anthony, the Observer.

This book is not a polemic and Verkaik doesn’t claim to give clear answers. He canvases a range of causes for radicalisation – simply being a young man at a loose end plays a disconcertingly large part – and reasons enough to conclude that it was Emwazi’s involvement in radical Islam that caused the police to take an interest in him, rather than the other way around.’

Sydney Morning Herald.

‘A riveting and compelling portrait of Mohammed Emwazi on his journey to the heart of darkness.’

– Andrew Hosken, author of Empire of Fear: Inside the Islamic State

‘Detailed and absorbing… Drawing on a wealth of primary conversations with security officials and targets alike, Verkaik explores the difficult balance that has to be struck between freedom and liberty and those who find themselves in its crosshairs.’

– Raffaello Pantucci, author of ‘We Love Death as You Love Life’: Britain’s Suburban Mujahedeen

‘This book is more than just the story of Mohammed Emwazi. Verkaik delves into the broader issues of marginality and the fluid identity of young people such as Emwazi to provide an enthralling account of the rootlessness of many second-generation European immigrants.’

– Library Journal, US.

‘Verkaik has a unique perspective on the evolution of Jihadi John’.

– Toronto Star

Please contact me on bobbyverkaik@hotmail.co.uk

Screenshot 2020-03-28 at 18.04.10

SECURITY AND TERRORISM

By Robert Verkaik

Sunday Telegraph. July 29th 2018

RICH RUSSIAN oligarchs are deserting Britain’s public schools, as the economic reality of the new cold war starts to bite.
Figures published by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents 1,300 private schools in the UK, reveal a steep decline in numbers of Russian pupils being taught in the UK over the last three years.
The trend is believed to have been exacerbated by the nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury in March this year.
Relations between Russia and Britain soured after Sergei and his daughter Yulia were targetted by the Russian state using a soviet-made poison called novichok.
A number of Russian diplomats and their families, including children at leading public schools, were expelled from the UK as Theresa May had no hesitation in blaming the Kremlin for master-minding the attack.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/29/russian-oligarchs-deserting-britains-public-schools-economic/

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YULIA SKRIPAL and the ‘art of disappearing’: Assuming a new identity in the internet age. By Robert Verkaik. The i June 25th.

The lives of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia will never be the same again. After surviving a murder attempt alleged to be by the Russian state, they must now prepare to disappear, take on new identities and say goodbye to family and friends for ever. Yulia Skripal left hospital this week and will have already entered a shadow state of safe houses, false passports and Government-issued credit cards. She still needs medical care and may have begun her secret new life in the safety of a private medical clinic, away from the attention of the media, including unscrupulous members of the Russian press who found their way into Salisbury hospital where the Skripals were being treated.

Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/yulia-skripal-disappearing-new-identity/

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Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik

6 JANUARY 2018 • 9:30PM

FORMER SPIES who received six-figure redundancy pay-offs have been re-employed by MI6 as part of a massive £1.2 billion spend by Britain’s security services on hundreds of agents and outside contractors.
Three MI6 officers who received compensation packages are among 73 spies to be rehired by the service in a scramble to reverse staff cuts in the wake of the heightened terror threat facing the UK.
The Government’s top secret listening station, GCHQ, has rehired 200 former employees while MI5 has taken on just seven former officers.
But MPs have criticised the recruitment policy as “very poor value for money” which “highlight a lack of adequate skills planning.”
Members of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said in their annual report: “Whilst it may always be necessary to re-hire some former staff in exceptional circumstances, this should be kept to a minimum given the potentially significant costs involved.”
The overall cost of hiring consultants and contractors for last year reached £1.2 billion, a third of the combined budget of MI6, GCHQ and MI5. The report found that on average these temporary contractors were being paid up to £144,000 – twice the annual salary of their in-house staff.
In 2011 it was reported that twelve senior MI6 officers had won generous pay and pension packages as part of a secret deal struck with Ministers, ahead of a clampdown on civil servant pay in 2010.
The new report said “This Committee previously criticised an expensive redundancy exercise run by SIS in 2011/12, when it made payments to 111 staff to take early retirement. Given that a few years later it is looking to increase staff numbers by considerably more than this, it does not appear to have been well planned.”
The head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, refused to justify the policy, telling MPs: “I make it a rule not to comment on decisions made by my predecessors… I was not in the leadership then… It was an extraordinary time, do you remember? It was just after the banking crisis and all of that”.
MI6 is in the process of boosting its staff numbers from 2,368 full-time equivalent staff at March 2014 to 3,231 staff by March 2020 – a 36% increase in headcount over six years.
Questioned on whether it would be possible to bring in so many new staff so quickly, MI6 said: “So we are very aware that it is a challenge. If I focus on the absorption as opposed to the recruitment for the moment, a lot of the investment that we have been doing this year is in the things that will enable that, recruitment included, and up powering our learning and development effort, and we are looking really hard at what sort of people we bring in and where we are going to put them and then making sure they are going to be alongside people who are more experienced.”
MI6 was also asked to justify a £800,000 cost for employing outside business consultants to reorganise the structure of the service.
The report, pubished last month, found that GCHQ was facing competition from private tech and internet companies who could offer bigger pay-packets to attract its staff to the private sector.

Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik

A British Muslim man who claimed he was discriminated against after being stopped and questioned by police under terrorism laws has won the right to challenge the secret intelligence used against him.

The case could have far-reaching implications for the security services who use undisclosed intelligence to conduct tens of thousands of random stops at airports each year.

Shayab Miah, from Southampton, was stopped and detained for an hour by counter-terrorism police at Heathrow Airport after returning from India in August 2009.

Later Mr Miah, who was released without further action, complained to the Metropolitan Police that his detention was not based on a random stop but motivated by religious discrimination.

Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik
18 NOVEMBER 2017 • 10:00PM

British spies have been citing a controversial security company, which is run by a former KGB-trained intelligence expert, to help warn the public about cyber and hacking attacks.
GCHQ, the UK’s frontline in cyber defence, has five times in the last year published “threat alerts” based on Moscow-headquartered agency, Kaspersky Lab.
Last week Kaspersky Lab faced claims that its software maybe being used by the Kremlin to spy on British banking customers.
Yet, as recently as November 10th, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ, issued a threat alert citing Kaspersky research about the dangers of using dating apps.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/18/british-spies-using-controversial-security-company-run-former/

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