WSJ reporter Barnes joining New York Times

New York Times Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller sent out the following announcement on Thursday:

We’re happy to announce that after 17 years wandering through the wilds of national security journalism, Julian Barnes will rejoin The New York Times, this time as a reporter in the Washington Bureau covering the intelligence agencies.

For the last eight years Julian worked at The Wall Street Journal, most recently in Brussels, where he wrote about terrorism, NATO and the American military in Europe. Before that he was a Pentagon reporter for The Journal and made some of us in the bureau scramble after exclusives with Adam Entous and Siobhan Gorman on the drone program in Pakistan, secret hostage rescue missions in Syria and troop deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Before that, Julian was at The Los Angeles Times (under then-editor Dean Baquet). As a Pentagon reporter in the paper’s Washington Bureau, Julian covered the troop surges in Iraq and spent a week at ISAF Headquarters with then Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn. Before The LA Times, Julian was at U.S. News & World Report, where on the eve of the war in Iraq his then-US News & World Report colleague, Mark Mazzetti, saved him from an embed with a coalition water purification team and landed him a slot with the 101st Airborne Division.

Julian, a native of Maine and a 1993 Harvard graduate who worked on The Crimson with Phil Pan, started his career covering night cops and education for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock.

His first tour at The Times was as an intermediate reporter in New York from 1998 to 2001, when he worked for Biz Day, the City Weekly and at one point helped out a beleaguered City Hall Bureau Chief with a stint in Room 9.

Not least, Julian is a chicken farmer. He has faced repeated fox attacks, many caught on video, in coops in Washington and Brussels that have claimed no fewer than 13 of his hens. But Julian has never been deterred. In Brussels he built a virtually impregnable Chicken Run Fortress, with multiple security cameras, automatic steel doors and triple fencing, dubbed by one observer as Hentanamo. In preparation for his return to Washington, Julian’s chickens have relocated to Flanders.

He starts July 9. Please welcome him back.