International Affairs: The V.F. Archive Collection

Some of the best work of our globe-trotting reporters and photographers, including Christopher Hitchens’s visit to North Korea, T.D. Allman’s trip with Yasser Arafat, and more.

By Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair
Visit to a Small Planet
Vanity Fair - By Christopher Hitchens
North Koreans worship their dead dictator, Kim Il Sung, and his son the reigning Kim Jong Il, despite the surreal nightmare of famine, isolation, repression, and nuclear peril the dynasty has spawned....
Vanity Fair
9/11: The Tapping Point
Vanity Fair - By David Rose
What if, two years before the 9/11 attacks—with the installation of a cell-phone-and-Internet system in Afghanistan—the U.S. had been handed complete access to al-Qaeda and Taliban calls and e-mails? secret...
Vanity Fair
Adventures in the Ransom Trade
Vanity Fair - By William Prochnau
The huge number of multinational businessmen being abducted abroad (hundreds a year at ransoms reaching $30 million) has made organized kidnapping a big business. It has also spawned a counterindustry—getting...
Vanity Fair
Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House
Vanity Fair - By Michael Lewis
Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department’s...
Vanity Fair
The Vietnam Syndrome
Vanity Fair - By Christopher Hitchens
Agent Orange, used by the U.S. to defoliate Vietnam’s jungles, has now poisoned a third generation. From Ho Chi Minh City to the town of Ben Tre, photographer James Nachtwey and the author confront that...
Vanity Fair
A Flowering Evil
Vanity Fair - By Mark Seal
The shooting of environmentalist Joan Root at her 88-acre farm overlooking Lake Naivasha, last January, shocked Kenya’s “Happy Valley” and the entire conservation world. Blonde, beautiful, and fearless,...
Vanity Fair
On The Road With Arafat
Vanity Fair - By T. D. Allman
When Yasser Arafat gave T.D. Allman ten minutes to scramble aboard his private jet, he refused to say where they were going. Forty hours and four countries later, it was clear to Allman that the real had...
Vanity Fair
Why a Massive International Effort Has Failed to Contain the Ebola Epidemic | Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair - By Jeffrey E. Stern
As the Ebola epidemic rages, two questions have emerged: How did the deadly virus escape detection for three months? And why has a massive international effort failed to contain it? Traveling to Meliandou,...
Vanity Fair
On the Frontier of Apocalypse
Vanity Fair - By Christopher Hitchens
As the events in Afghanistan unfold, the scariest place on the planet may be just next door. Patched together like Frankenstein’s monster by the British under Lord Mountbatten, Pakistan, a nation mired...