Opinion

JENNIFER GRIFFIN: I covered wars, terror and tragedy for Fox News. What I found was a family

I am proud to work at a place where many of those who started when we launched are still putting the news on the air each day

By Jennifer Griffin Fox News

Published October 5, 2026 1:45pm EDT

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I started reporting for Fox News in 1997, shortly after its launch in October 1996, while based in Moscow. Russian President Boris Yeltsin had just undergone heart surgery in November when I arrived, and the Mir Space Station, a Soviet-Russian station, with American astronauts on board, caught fire — the first fire on an international space station.

Every Monday, Yeltsin seemed to fire his cabinet, sending shock waves through the Western world. Vladimir Putin had moved to Moscow in 1996. In March 1997, Yeltsin appointed him deputy chief of the Presidential Staff and chief of the Main Control Directorate to work as an auditor in the Kremlin and to get close to Yeltsin.

He later took over as head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, and staged what independent critics, intelligence officials, and dissidents long alleged were a series of false flag operations that involved blowing up four apartment buildings filled with women and children sleeping in their beds to justify an invasion of Chechnya.

During that time, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, bankers were gunned down, their bodies found in the streets as the ruble crashed and the rising Russian mafia and oligarchs began dividing up Russian state enterprises and assets.

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After starting with Fox in 1997, I remember standing on an icy-cold bridge on New Year’s Eve with the snow at times blowing upwards over the Moskva River and St. Basil’s onion dome cathedral lit up in the background as drunken Russians careened toward our camera position and fireworks lit the midnight sky over the Kremlin.

I was learning on the job how to do stand-up and live shots for this new American cable television network, which hoped to compete with CNN.

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I was working for Simon Marks, a former ITN correspondent, who hired me as the Fox News correspondent in Moscow to work for Feature Story Productions, which had a contract to provide coverage for the new channel. I was trained in print and radio, not television. I had to learn on the job.

Soon I was assigned by Fox to cover the Kosovo War from NATO headquarters in Brussels during its bombing campaign in March 1999. Gen. Wesley Clark was NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, and I will never forget the mood at NATO headquarters when a U.S. B-2 Spirit dropped five satellite-guided bombs (JDAMs) on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and injuring dozens.

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The mistake was the result of a CIA miscalculation of coordinates associated with the intended target: a Yugoslav weapons storage facility. Months later, after the Serbs were forced to withdraw, I flew to Kosovo, joining Fox’s Greg Palkot on the ground. We took over from David Lee Miller and the Jerusalem team, including Yaniv Turgeman and Eli Fastman, who had remained in Belgrade during the NATO bombing campaign. We........

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