Career
He is the author of three books, including The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the Central Intelligence Agency, which told the stories of previously unnamed Central Intelligence Agency officers killed in the line of duty. Gup has been a prolific writer regarding doomsday scenarios and facilities to provide for continuity of government and the preservation of important assets of civilization, including the Mount Weather facility, as well as intelligence issues. In the 1992 Washington Post Magazine article "The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway," Gup was the first to reveal publicly the existence of Project Greek Island, a large underground bunker at West Virginia"s famed Greenbrier Resort to house the Congress of the United States in case of a nuclear attack on Washington, District of Columbia, a revelation still considered controversial two decades after its publication.
Those opposed to the revelation note that the exposure rendered the $14,000,000 ($123,382,792 by current standards) taxpayer-funded bunker useless and led to its decommissioning.
"We sat on the story for a couple of months making sure it wouldn"t harm national security," Gup said. "The bunker mentality that preserved that place was itself a threat to national security.
lieutenant"s exactly why you want an active press"
Gup, a 1968 graduate of Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, was a reporter for The Washington Post and Time Magazine prior to his work in academia. He was the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University before heading the journalism department at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts and was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2003.
He was also a 1980 recipient of the George Polk award in journalism offered by Long Island University.
His 2010 book, A Secret Gift, much unlike anything else he"d ever written, chronicles the Christmastime 1933 anonymous charitable efforts of his Romanian Orthodox Jewish grandfather, Sam Stone, to help families in Canton, Ohio affected by the Great Depression. In the Michaelmas term of 2015 he was visiting Fellow of the Saint Cuthbert"s Society SCR.