U.N. tell-all book leads to series

Sex, drugs and corruption among United Nations peacekeeping forces in the world’s most dangerous hot spots will become fodder for a possible TV series, the whistle-blowing authors of a tell-all book said.

“Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures,” written by current and former U.N. peacekeeping mission employees Heidi Postlewait, Andrew Thomson and Kenneth Cain, will be developed and produced as a dramatic series by Miramax Television.

The book caused a sensation when it was published by Miramax Books in June over objections by senior U.N. officials who thought it cast the international organization in a bad light and was inaccurate.

Cain, who quit the world body in 1996 after a disillusioning experience in Liberia, said the trio felt compelled to write the story of corruption and failed leadership that contributed to disasters in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia at about the same time.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard described the book as “sensationalist, exploiting the sex angle and not in the U.N.’s interest to be published.”