He interviewed the dictators Idi Amin of Uganda, Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire and Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, and won a George Polk Award for his work.
Upon her return to Japan, she worked as an interpreter before moving into television news, where she interviewed the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat.
In the early 1980s, the most intense period of the conflict, filmmakers Pamela Yates, Tom Sigel and Peter Kinoy interviewed the military dictator, General Efrain Rios Montt, and persuaded both the rebel forces and the military to let them film their activities.
In April 1992, she became the first and only American journalist to interview the North Korean dictator, Kim Il-sung, whom she described as a "reflective, confident elder statesman".
He later wrote a book about his experience interviewing the former Iraqi dictator. .
Her "interview" with the dictator appeared in 1936, when she was at the height of her glory, and had recently returned to Paris from a French trade fair in Moscow, where her presence made news.
He is in Edinburgh to launch the documentary film he has made about Castro's Cuba, Comandante, the result of an unprecedented three days of interviews with the dictator.
Their 2011 film "Grantio: How to Nail a Dictator" tells of Spanish lawyers who sought to bring Guatemalan leaders to trial, of current prosecutions and of the value of their interview with the dictator as evidence against him.
Jaafari, who is the daughter of Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, reportedly spent three months working for al-Assad, during which she helped set Barbara Walters up with an exclusive interview with the dictator.
The only leaders who can draw any comfort from his tweets and interviews are the dictators and despots whom he reveres, compliments and invites to the White House.
