‍Career

A Japanese and French speaker, Deborah began her career in 1999 as a producer at the UK bureau of TV Tokyo, a Japanese television station. She moved to Japan in 2001 as the economics editor for Agence France-Presse (AFP), the French news agency. At that time, the country was in the grip of a crippling financial crisis.

The September 11 attacks later that year by al-Qaeda against the United States, transformed the global security environment. With US, UK and other western forces fighting in Afghanistan and then Iraq, Deborah wanted to start covering these wars.

She moved to work for AFP in Geneva and began rotating into Baghdad from February 2004.

She switched to the London bureau of the Reuters news agency in 2006, before joining The Times newspaper as its Iraq correspondent in 2007, based in Baghdad.

Deborah became defence editor at The Times three years later – the first woman to hold this role on any national UK newspaper.

She moved to Sky News in 2018, first as foreign affairs editor before becoming security and defence editor in 2021.

Awards

Deborah won the Amnesty International award for national newspaper human rights reporting in 2008 for a series on the plight of Iraqi interpreters working for UK forces in Iraq.

This series also won her the inaugural Bevins Prize for investigative journalism in 2008.