Reporting

In 1986, Brown joined Independent Radio News, covering major stories from superpower summits to the Hungerford massacre. He joined BBC TV News two years later and was a Foreign Affairs Correspondent until 1991, reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War, from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

He was appointed Moscow Correspondent in 1991, where he witnessed the final collapse of Communism and the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev. He was at the Russian Parliament when troops loyal to President Boris Yeltsin stormed it in 1993, and the following year he was in Chechnya for the start of the civil war. His coverage of that conflict won him several international prizes, including the Bayeux War Correspondent of the Year Award and the Golden Nymph Award from the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.

In January 1995, Brown resumed his roving role as a foreign correspondent, based in London. He covered the break-up of Yugoslavia extensively, reporting from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo, where his stories helped to secure several awards for the BBC, including a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award.

In 2001 he won the Bayeux-Calvados Award for war correspondents for the second time for his coverage of the Intifada in Israel.

More recently, in 2003 Brown was embedded with British troops in the Iraq War. He wrote about his experiences in a book, The Battle for Iraq, notably how a British soldier saved his life by opening fire on an Iraqi militiaman who was just about to shoot Ben in the back with a rocket-propelled grenade. Brown covered the first Gulf War in 1991, and his account of that, All Necessary Means was also published.

Other work

Brown wrote a novel based on his experiences of war reporting, entitled Sandstealers. The novel was published in May 2009 by HarperCollins.