Jim Hoagland's distinguished career as a reporter, editor and now columnist and senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Post helped prepare him for the biggest story of his lifetime. As the world sat stunned by the terrible destruction of Sept. 11, 2001, Hoagland was busy assessing the U.S. response to the deadly terrorist attacks.

"The United States is engaged in a shadow war that must now be the central priority for this president and his administration for every day of his term," Hoagland wrote in his column, filed shortly after the collapse of the World Trade Center and as the Pentagon still burned.

Likewise, covering and analyzing the war on terrorism has become the central priority for Hoagland, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In 2002, the editors of The Times of London, Le Figaro (Paris), Die Welt (Berlin) and four other leading European newspapers headed a jury that awarded him the Cernobbio-Europa Prize for explaining the aftermath of 9/11 and its effect on U.S.-European relations.

His twice-weekly columns focus on the major questions and issues facing national security and foreign affairs policymakers, and encompass the views not only of American officials but also of world leaders and thinkers. Essential reading inside the Washington Beltway, Hoagland is also must reading for anyone interested in global affairs and the rapid, even revolutionary, changes that mark our world today.

Launched from Europe in 1986, Hoagland's column chronicled the forces that would bring about the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and eventually the Soviet Union itself. He also focused on the momentous change occurring in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and showed how those events would shape the major international issues of the 1990s.

His coverage of the Tiananmen Square protests pointed to the shadow that the conflict between political repression and economic dynamism in China would cast across the world for years to come. Hoagland, who won the Pulitzer in international reporting in 1971 for a 10-part series on apartheid, also tracked the South African revolution closely. In 1976, that reporting was recognized with an Overseas Press Club award. He is author of "South Africa: Civilizations in Conflict."

And Hoagland was the first American journalist to warn of Saddam Hussein's menacing posture toward his Arab neighbors and the United States, beginning in 1987. Hoagland had interviewed Saddam and traveled into Kurdish areas of Iraq several times.

Hoagland returned to Washington in August 1990 just before Iraq invaded Kuwait, which led to the confrontation with the U.S.-led coalition that prosecuted the Persian Gulf War. The following year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary for warning of Iraq's predatory intentions, and for showing how and why Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to save communism and the Soviet state were doomed.

Born in Rock Hill, S.C., Hoagland graduated cum laude from the University of South Carolina and later did graduate work at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France and at Columbia University in New York.

He joined The Washington Post in 1966 as a metropolitan reporter. He was assigned in 1969 to Nairobi as The Post's Africa correspondent and in 1972 to Beirut as Middle East correspondent. A tour in Paris as West Europe correspondent preceded his becoming The Post's foreign editor in 1979.

Hoagland lives in Washington with his wife, the writer Jane Stanton Hitchcock.