Colvin was appointed Paris bureau manager for UPI, before moving to The Sunday Times in 1985.

From 1986, she was the newspaper's Middle East correspondent, and then from 1995 was the Foreign Affairs correspondent. In 1986, she was the first to interview Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi after Operation El Dorado Canyon. Gaddafi said in this interview that he was at home when U.S. planes bombed Tripoli in