Richard Engel is NBC News' Middle East correspondent and Beirut Bureau chief. Prior to joining NBC News in May 2003, he covered the start of the 2003 war in Iraq from Baghdad for ABC News as a freelance journalist. He speaks and reads fluent Arabic and is also fluent in Italian and Spanish. Engel wrote the book A Fist in the Hornet's Nest, published in 2004, about his experience covering the Iraq war from Baghdad.

A winner of the Edward R. Murrow award, Engel is from New York and after attending Stanford University in California and graduating in 1996 with a B.A. in International Relations, he left for Cairo, Egypt, with little money and no contacts or prospects because he felt that region was where the next story would be. He first lived in a ramshackle seven-story walk-up, learned the Egyptian dialect of Arabic and worked as a freelance reporter out of Cairo for four years. Next he moved to Jerusalem, continuing his freelance reporting for three more years until the U.S.– led invasion of Iraq (where he has been predominantly since), and Engel was offered a position as a foreign correspondent with NBC. Engel described his background—paraphrased in referenced paragraph—on the American NBC network's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, August 31, 2006 Most recently Engel filed a number of reports from Lebanon during the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.

On NBC's Meet the Press on February 18, 2007, it was reported that he is divorced due to his duties covering the Iraq war.