Claudia Rosett at the Weekly Standard -- Crying Wolfowitz:

Operating with even less transparency than the opaque U.N. Secretariat, and now channeling more than $5 billion per year worldwide in the name of development (at least $245 million of that contributed by U.S. taxpayers), the UNDP has made a practice of bunking with dictators from Algeria to Zimbabwe. It has done this while maintaining internal oversight controls lax enough to embarrass Enron in some cases. This January, in the Cash-for-Kim scandal, the UNDP got caught playing sugar daddy to North Korea's nuclear extortionist regime of Kim Jong Il. It further emerged that while forking over hard currency to Kim, UNDP officials in Pyongyang had been storing counterfeit U.S. banknotes in their own office safe.

What has not been disclosed until now is that the UNDP in Pyongyang was also busy shepherding and bankrolling "study tours" of the U.K. and Europe for North Korean arms experts, stocking Kim Jong Il's research libraries with specialized publications on global security matters, and dispensing funds on behalf of other U.N. agencies for such ventures as sending North Korean officials to a three-week conference on "statistics" in Iran. This went on even after North Korea's U.N.-denounced missile and nuclear bomb tests last year.

And though the U.N. has treated Cash for Kim as an anomaly (recently suspending UNDP operations in Pyongyang, but nowhere else), the program's odd activities hardly begin and end with North Korea. The UNDP is also supporting such endeavors as an upgrade for the state-owned national airline of Syria, a mullah-approved official youth group in Iran, and a network of women's groups in Burma that were recently accused of shaking down impoverished villagers for forced membership fees. In Zimbabwe, the UNDP is embroiled in unproven allegations that its vehicles have been used for smuggling from a diamond mining venture it has been supporting--which raises the question of why the UNDP is involved in diamond mining at all.