James Risen (born April 27, 1955) is an American journalist for The Intercept. He previously worked for The New York Times and before that for Los Angeles Times. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S. government activities and is the author or co-author of two books about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a book about the American public debate about abortion. Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Risen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. He graduated from Brown University (1977) and received a master's degree in journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism (1978). He has been an investigative reporter for The Intercept. In the spring of 2023, he joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland as the visiting professor on press freedom.

Risen won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his stories about President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. He was a member of The New York Times reporting team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for coverage of the September 11th attacks and terrorism. He was also a member of The New York Times reporting team that was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, for coverage of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Risen has written four books: Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War (Basic Books) (Judy Thomas, co-author) (1998); The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (Random House) (Milt Bearden, co-author) (2003); State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (The Free Press) (2006); and Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) (2014). State of War was a New York Times bestseller. Pay Any Price was also a New York Times bestseller. The Main Enemy was awarded the 2003 Cornelius Ryan Award for "best nonfiction book on international affairs" by the Overseas Press Club of America.

In 2004 Risen came upon information about the National Security Agency's surveillance of international communications originating or terminating in the United States, code-named "Stellar Wind". He and Eric Lichtblau, who had obtained similar information, co-wrote a story about "Stellar Wind" just before the 2004 United States presidential election. Risen said the New York Times spiked the story at the request of the White House. The two reporters rewrote and resubmitted the story a number of times after the election but were rejected each time. Risen decided to publish the information in a book along with information about the CIA's Operation Merlin. He warned the paper about the book and suggested it publish the information itself. Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, and Philip Taubman, Washington bureau chief, were furious with Risen. Keller and Taubman negotiated with the Bush administration and, after a delay, the paper published much of Risen and Lichtblau's report about "Stellar Wind" in December 2005. Risen's book, titled State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, was published in January 2006.

Risen and Eric Lichtblau were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for the series of controversial investigative reports that they co-wrote about "Stellar Wind" and about a government program called Terrorist Finance Tracking Program designed to detect terrorist financiers, which involved searches of money transfer records in the international SWIFT database.

Risen is the author of the book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (January 2006). The book conducted important investigations into Central Intelligence Agency activities. It states that the CIA carried out an operation in 2000 (Operation Merlin) intended to delay Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program by feeding it flawed blueprints for key missing components—which backfired and may actually have aided Iran, as the flaw was likely detected and corrected by a former Soviet nuclear scientist the operation used to make the delivery. In early 2003, The New York Times refrained from publication of the story after an intervention by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice with the NYT Executive Editor Howell Raines.

While doing research for the book, Risen's email and phone connections with former CIA Operations Officer Jeffrey Alexander Sterling were monitored by the US federal government. The US federal government also obtained Risen's credit and bank records. The CIA Public Affairs Office issued a press release alleging that Risen's book contains serious errors in every chapter. However, CIA documents released in January 2015 confirm many details on Operation Merlin.