Tewfik Mishlawi, the International Center for Journalists’ first director of training, died on Wednesday, January 25.

A legendary journalist in the Middle East, Tewfik succumbed to heart failure at the American University Hospital in Beirut after a fall at his home in the Lebanese capital. He was 76.

Tewfik directed training programs at what was then called the Center for Foreign Journalists in Reston, Va., from 1985, the Center’s first year of operation, until 1992, when he returned to Beirut following the retirement of his longtime partner at the daily newsletter the Middle East Reporter.

“He was a newsman to the core,” George Krimsky, the first president and co-founder of the Center, said from his home in Connecticut. “We had worked together in Beirut during the civil war, and I thought he would be perfect to launch our training programs at the Center. He was.”

Although initially reluctant to leave his beloved Beirut, Tewfik accepted the challenge and spent seven years on these shores with his wife, Phillipa, and their young son, Nadim. “He was already well-known by many in the Washington press corps, and that gave us a needed leg up in those early days,” Krimsky said.

For every foreign correspondent who came to Beirut after the outbreak of war in the mid-1970s, their first stop was usually the MER office off Hamra Street to find out what was really going on, not only in Lebanon but throughout the Mideast. “Tewfik and his partner, Ihsan Hijazi, monitored the Arab media closely and were among the very few who could make sense of what often seemed nonsensical,” Krimsky recalled.

Through the 1990s, Tewfik wrote on a freelance basis for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and The Daily Star in Beirut.

A Palestinian by birth, Tewfik stood out as a professional journalist who believed in the ultimate value of truth gathered from hard facts. He taught and ran programs for hundreds of visiting journalists from developing countries on how best to find and report that truth. “He never veered from that course,” Krimsky said.

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To read Mishlawi's complete obituary in Lebanon's The Daily Star, please click here.