Matthew Lee

Matthew Lee is the Chief State Department Correspondent for The Associated Press, covering U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. After graduating from Nichols in Buffalo NY, in 1984 and studying for a year in Scotland, he attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He graduated from Georgetown with a bachelor’s degree in Foreign Affairs in 1989.

Immediately after college, he worked as a news aide at The Washington Post, and then as a reporter for The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va. He moved to Cambodia in 1994 and did freelance work for The Cambodia Daily newspaper, AP, UPI, Reuters, the BBC, the Economist, the Far Eastern Economic Review, CNN and Time Magazine before becoming the Phnom Penh Bureau Chief for the French news agency, Agence France-Presse, in 1995.

Lee was transferred to Washington in 1999 and covered the State Department for AFP until 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he was AFP’s Deputy Bureau Chief for East Africa and the Indian Ocean based in Nairobi, Kenya. After 12 years with AFP, Lee joined the AP and returned to Washington and the State Department beat in 2007.

In Cambodia, he covered the death of Pol Pot, the ultimate collapse of the Khmer Rouge and was shot and wounded during the 1997 coup. Elsewhere, he covered final days of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s regime in Haiti and the rise of the al-Shabab Islamist movement in Somalia. He has traveled the world with every Secretary of State since Madeleine Albright and reported from more than 100 countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and North Korea.