Iran snags UN plum

Still worse, the UNDP is not just any old U.N. agency. It is the U.N.'s lead development agency, the chief coordinator in the field of almost all the others, loaded with money, dispensing high-level advice along with more than $9 billion per year around the globe--some $5 billion of that from its own budget and another $4 billion or so on behalf of other U.N. operations.

Headquartered in New York, across the street from the U.N. Secretariat's landmark domino building, the UNDP is a vast bureaucracy, blanketed in diplomatic immunity, bankrolled both by U.N. member-state contributions and hundreds of opaque public and private trust funds (the U.S., which gives well over $200 million per year, is among the UNDP's top donors).

Boasting a presence in 166 countries, the UNDP moves money, personnel and equipment across borders around the globe with minimal independent oversight. It does not bode well to have this kind of outfit chaired by Iran, with its record of running networks for terror and sanctions-busting nuclear procurement.

Prone to collaborating on "development programs" with some of the world's worst tyrannies, from North Korea to Syria to Zimbabwe to Iran (where it fields a big office), the UNDP has inspired quips in recent years that its initials might better stand for "UN Dictators Program," or that maybe, in the tradition of Oil-for-Food, the agency should be re-named "Dollars for Dictators."

A Senate subcommittee investigation, led by Sens. Norm Coleman and Carl Levin, further discovered, as disclosed in a January 2008 report, that the UNDP in North Korea had transferred funds to North Korean front entities involved in arms and nuclear proliferation networks.

Some of these entities were in Macau. During a trip to the Far East last fall, I dropped by two of the addresses with which, according to the subcommittee's exhibits, the UNDP in Pyongyang had been doing business. One was a basement supermarket, which the clerks said had been in business at that address for years. The other turned out to be a locked apartment in a residential high-rise.

The UNDP now proposes to re-open its North Korea office, following a "roadmap" offering assorted promises of good conduct. That begs the question of who will enforce discipline and oversight, not only for the UNDP's resurrected operations in North Korea, but around the globe.