Foundation For Defense of Democracies - Investigative Reporting

Investigative Reporting

Claudia Rosett, the foundation's journalist-in-residence, has reported on the United Nations, including the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal. She writes regularly for Commentary Magazine.

Insights gained from investigating the scandal led the foundation's reporter to other investigations in 2006, exposing more U.N. graft, misconduct, and abuse of public trust. Among the 35 articles published under Rosett’s byline in 2006 were claims that the United Nations indirectly helps advance North Korea's nuclear weapons program, and that its refugee agency sabotages the struggle of North Korean refugees seeking freedom.

Rosett also broke the story of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan accepting a $500,000 personal prize from the ruler of Dubai, through a prize jury stacked with U.N. personnel. Her 2006 investigation set off a storm of press criticism that ultimately forced the U.N. leader to return the prize money.

Following up on some of the high-ranking U.N. officials implicated in corruption scandals exposed earlier by Rosett, she again scooped the world press in 2006 by interviewing the former head of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan. Since fleeing the United States in 2005, Sevan had been living in the Cypriot capital of Nicosia. He had refused to speak to the media or to congressional investigators. Rosett conducted an exclusive two-and-a-half hour interview, which was published in The Wall Street Journal in April 2006.