Smale was appointed the Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, United Nations Department of Public Information by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on 9 August 2017. Since August 2013, Smale served as chief correspondent for
The New York Times for Germany and central and eastern Europe. In December 2008, she was the first woman to take up the post of Executive Editor at the
International Herald Tribune in Paris. Prior, she had been the Deputy Foreign Editor at
The New York Times. She organized much of the paper's coverage of the
Iraq war and the war in
Afghanistan. In her reporting days, Smale worked for
United Press International in Central Europe, then was
The Associated Press bureau chief for Eastern Europe between 1987 and 1998, based in
Vienna. In this capacity, she covered the rise of
Slobodan Milosevic in
Serbia and changes in
Russia. She covered the anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and, on the night of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, crossed Checkpoint Charlie along with the first East Germans to do so. ==Education==