Udo Ulfkotte

Udo Konstantin Ulfkotte (20 January 1960 – 13 January 2017) was a German journalist and author who worked for the German main daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) from 1986 until 2003. From the end of the 1990s, he wrote several bestsellers and increasingly advocated right-wing populist, Islamophobic, and conspiracy-theory positions. He said that journalists, including himself, and leading newspapers published material that had been fed to them, or bought, by the CIA and other Western intelligence and propaganda agencies.

Early life and education

Ulfkotte was born in Lippstadt in Westphalia and grew up in Dorsten and Warburg. After graduating from high school in 1978 at the Marianum Gymnasium in Warburg, he studied law and political science at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. In February 1987, he received his doctorate under Dieter Oberndörfer at the University of Freiburg with a dissertation on continuity and change of American and Soviet politics in Near and Middle East 1967 to 1980.

Career

In October 1986, Ulfkotte became a member of the political editorial board of FAZ, where he belonged to the foreign policy department until 2003 and dealt with Africa, the Arab states and the United Nations. He said that he lived mainly in Islamic countries between 1986 and 1998 (including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan) and travelled to over sixty states. These stays would have helped shape his image of Islam. According to Michael Schmidt-Salomon, he was a "born-again Christian".