Frank Smyth
Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist, an adjunct professor of Journalism at American University in Washington, D.C., and the Washington Representative and Journalist Security Coordinator of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. He is a former foreign correspondent for news outlets including CBS News Radio, The Economist and The Village Voice working in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. In the Voice, Smyth was the first to name the then-Chief of Staff of the Salvadoran Army as a suspect for having ordered the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests –three years before the same commander was so named by a U.N. Truth Commission. The Voice later nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize for his behind-the-lines coverage of the 1991 uprisings in Iraq against then-President Saddam Hussein.
Through most of the 1990s, Smyth worked as an investigative consultant for the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch. He is author of the HRW report Arming Rwanda, which documented the roles of France and others in arming the nation on the eve of the 1994 genocide. Smyth is co-author of the 1996 HRW report, Colombia’s Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States, which established the role of U.S. intelligence agencies in reorganizing Colombian military intelligence networks to secretly incorporate paramilitary death squads. He conducted field research in Sudan and other African Horn nations for the 1998 HRW report Global Trade, Local Impact.
Smyth’s investigative, analytical and opinion pieces have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The SAIS Review of International Affairs, the Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, World Policy Journal and Foreign Affairs. He is co author of Dialogue and Armed Conflict: Negotiating the Civil War in El Salvador, and a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know and to The Iraq War Reader. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com. Smyth has a BA from Boston College and an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Related Links
Colombia’s Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States »
Select Publications
“A New Game: The Clinton Administration on Africa,” World Policy Journal 15.2 (1998). »
“Has Guatemala Become the Cali Cartel’s Bodega?.” The Wall Street Journal 10 March 1995. »
“Who Killed Guatemala’s Leading Anthropologist?” The Village Voice 3 September 1991. »
“Arming Genocide in Rwanda.” Foreign Affairs 73.5 (September/October 1994). »
