About

Brett Forrest spent a decade covering national security and intelligence for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C. He reported from the war in Ukraine for the Journal and was the first reporter into the Kyiv suburb of Bucha after Moscow’s military withdrawal, where he broke international news of atrocities committed by Russian troops.

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Brett’s investigative work has often focused on the former Soviet Union; he lived for years in Russia and Ukraine. His book, LOST SON—an expansion of a two-year reporting project at the Journal—unravels the mysterious disappearance of an American FBI source in Russia. Vanity Fair magazine called the book “a masterwork of intrigue and shoe-leather reportage evoking James M. Cain and Graham Greene.”

Brett was part of a team at the Journal that won the National Press Club's Edwin M. Hood Award for diplomatic and foreign policy correspondence.

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Brett was formerly a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine, where he reported on corruption and crime in international sports and shared a National Magazine Award for general excellence. He co-directed the Emmy-nominated PIN KINGS, an ESPN true-crime documentary about two friends turned enemies in the Colombian cocaine trade.

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While at ESPN, Brett uncovered a Chinese-controlled international conspiracy to manipulate the outcomes of soccer games for the purposes of illegal betting. Netflix is adapting Brett’s resultant book, the international bestseller THE BIG FIX, into a feature film starring Mark Wahlberg and Riz Ahmed, with Brett serving as an executive producer.

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Brett is the author of LONG BOMB, which tells the inside story of NBC's ill-fated pro-football league, the XFL.

 

His international-affairs reporting has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Wired, Playboy, Fortune, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.
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An article of Brett's serves as the basis of an episode of THE SIMPSONS, in which Homer Simpson, as a World Cup referee, faces a moral quandary.