Kirk Wallace Johnson is an American author, screenwriter, and journalist. He received his bachelor of arts degree from the University of Chicago in 2002. Johnson is also a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and has received several other fellowships from prestigious organizations. His writings appear in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and on 60 Minutes and This American Life. 

Johnson spent many years working to help reconstruction efforts in Iraq. He now lives with PTSD because of conducting this aid work. To help him cope with his PTSD, Johnson took up fly-fishing as therapy. He first heard about Edwin Rist’s feather heist from his New Mexico fly-fishing guide, Spencer Seim.

Johnson was not an investigative journalist by training. Prior to becoming obsessed with the Tring heist, he launched and managed the List Project, a small nonprofit that was dedicated to helping his Iraqi colleagues who helped American citizens during the war flee the country and settle as refugees in the US. The lives of these Iraqi people were at risk because they helped the US. Johnson thought that the US government was not doing enough to ensure the survival and safety of these Iraqi people, so he took matters into his own hands.