Ivan Watson

Ivan Watson is CNN's senior international correspondent based in Hong Kong. He moved to the city in the summer of 2014 to focus on reporting from the Asia Pacific region after being based for in Istanbul, Turkey for CNN for the previous five years. Watson rejoined CNN in 2009 from NPR, where he spent eight years reporting extensively on major stories around the Middle East, Central Asia and West Africa, including the US invasion and troubled occupation of Iraq and the US-led overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Prior to NPR, Watson worked as a Moscow-based producer for CNN in the late 1990's. He covered the Russian war in Chechnya and the sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Arctic, among other stories. Watson attended Brown University, where he earned a BA in International Relations, and speaks Russian and French.