Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  I was about to explain the roots of my last name to Lindenmayer when I saw Nizar Hamdoon, the Iraqi ambassador, walking up the corridor toward us with a delegation of aides. What were they doing here?

  This was definitely not a good time for me to explain that my last name was Hebrew in origin. The name Soussan traces its roots to the town of Shushan, in ancient Babylon (present-day Iran), and is first mentioned in the Book of Esther, in the Old Testament. My father was born in French Morocco, hence the Francophone sound of the name. He had met my Danish Protestant mother in Israel in the 1960s, when it was popular for Northern European hippies to spend summers at kibbutzes, and the result was a child who could best be described as a Sephardic Viking. In Iraqi, the equivalent to Soussan would be Sassoon. Yes, like the shampoo. But to most Iraqis, the association would be with the Jewish religion rather than with Vidal’s hair products. I knew the Iraqis had refused to give visas to other staff with Jewish names in the past, so I wasn’t eager to complicate matters right then by satisfying Lindenmayer’s curiosity.

  “What’s going on? Why’s the Iraqi ambassador here?” I asked Pasha, un-tactfully ignoring Lindenmayer.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “They’re the ones who called for this meeting. The SG just told me this morning.”

  “So we don’t know what this is about?”

  Pasha shook his head. I thought about bringing him up to date on the “can of worms” issue he had asked me to handle, but it was too late. The Iraqis had arrived at our level. After shaking their hands, we all just stood there, as for a moment of silence, occasionally interrupted by an uncomfortable cough.

  I caught Ambassador Hamdoon looking at me and shifted position. The man had the strangest curly eyebrows. He looked like a cartoonist’s depiction of a vizier; in my previous capacity as a news assistant for CNN, I had ambushed him on several occasions with provocative questions as he walked toward the UN Security Council.

  Finally, the door to Annan’s office opened, and we were all invited to step inside. His office was sober and immaculate. The mounds of paper that seemed to fill up every corner of the UN building were absent here. The Iraqis sat on the couch, and I found a chair where I sat down and prepared to write up the official notes of the meeting.

  I was struck by the fact that the man who always appeared so calm and relaxed when I saw him on TV was actually neither calm nor relaxed. Kofi Annan was controlled, to be sure, but right beneath the surface of his persona I sensed a bubble of nervous energy waiting to burst. His handshake was warm, and the tone of his voice exuded confidence, alertness, and caution. There was a rumor that the man had never lost his temper, ever. Only one person could recollect a time when he nearly lost it, and that was Lindenmayer, now sitting outside. She confided to Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker that Annan had gotten angry once, back in the 1980s, when he was running the UN’s human resources. Apparently, he lost his cool at the corrupt way the member states were running the appointment and promotion committee.

  “If somebody does not get angry often and suddenly gets very angry, I can tell you it’s very powerful,” she had told Gourevitch. “He was like a lion roaring, he was so angry at them. . . . I tell you, he’s angry with his whole body—with his eyes. His anger comes from every single part of him. His voice goes down. It takes a register, like an organ, which is the lowest one. It’s very, very frightening when he gets angry.”

  My colleagues and I would eventually come to wish that Kofi Annan would get angry more often, either with Saddam Hussein or with the United States (depending on our politics), but it was simply not in his nature. At best, he would flicker his eyes, which was his way of expressing extreme irritation. His eyes seemed able to take in every aspect of the situation at once. Unlike Pasha’s, they wouldn’t roam around the room, picking up every detail. His gaze was steady, purposefully directed, and unafraid of contact. He addressed people with a humility that immediately put them at ease.

  Annan was a likable man. Even the UN’s worst enemy on Capitol Hill, Jesse Helms, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, once admitted to the secretary general that he had taken an extensive look at Annan’s background and had not found a single person who disliked him. This was not necessarily meant as a compliment, of course, but there was no question that Annan made a positive impression on the people who met him. An anecdote from his younger days as a student in the United States has it that he once walked into a barbershop and was told by the shop’s white owner, “We don’t cut niggers’ hair.”

  Instead of getting angry or simply leaving, Annan replied, “I’m not a nigger, I’m an African.”

  And the barber said, “Come on, siddown,” and proceeded to give him a haircut.

  Kofi Annan was more than just a diplomat. He was a black man who was able (and willing) to get a haircut from a white supremacist barber. He did have his detractors within the system, but one could sense a certain jealousy in their criticism. Pasha had been extremely friendly with Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Coptic Christian from Egypt who managed to become intensely disliked by the Clinton administration. Word had it that Boutros-Ghali saw Annan as a possible successor (and hence a threat) early on, and that this guided his decision to send him to Bosnia, as the failed UN mission there was being taken over by NATO troops. Against all logic, Bosnia proved to be a springboard for Kofi Annan. The U.S. military and diplomatic corps there instantly took a liking to him and put in a good word for the man when it became evident that the United States would not renew Boutros-Ghali’s term.

  Kofi Annan was the first nominee for the post of secretary general to come from Africa and the first to emerge from within the ranks of the UN Secretariat. He had joined the UN system in 1962, after completing his studies at Macalester College, a small liberal arts school in Minnesota, which he traveled to from his native Ghana on a Ford Foundation grant. At twenty-four, he was unusually young when he got his first UN job with the World Health Organization in Geneva. Like many younger staff, he reportedly predicted that his stint with the UN would be brief: “two years, then I’m out.” I had told myself exactly the same thing when I was recruited, at the same age, the previous year. But that morning, as I waited anxiously to hear what the Iraqis had come to say, I prayed that it wouldn’t involve any Swiss magistrates. I didn’t want to lose this job. In barely a year, my responsibilities had grown exponentially. I had become personally invested in this operation’s future.

  Unfortunately, the waters for which we were headed were not navigable—not by Kofi Annan or by anyone else. Slowly but surely, the warning signs would accumulate. But much like the incident that was causing me so much anxiety that morning, they would not be acted on. Saddam Hussein was testing the system to see how much fraud he could get away with. The use of front companies had not yet become systematic. We could have nipped this scheme in the bud, but it would have required a number of communications that never took place. The Office of Legal Affairs would have needed to clearly state our own rules. Pasha would have needed to inform Annan of the emerging phenomenon. And Annan would have needed to tell the Iraqi ambassador that we were prepared to go public if the practice didn’t stop.

  As it stood, I didn’t even know if Pasha had briefed Annan on the problem. He would eventually have to, I assumed. But perhaps not quite yet. Surely, the Iraqis were not about to bring up the issue.

  As the meeting began, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Clearly, neither side was interested in the Swiss magistrate’s letter. It would be years before I realized that this should have been a cause for concern, not relief. If the UN was not addressing issues of compliance with international law as they related to billions of dollars under its control, then what, if anything, were we doing to exercise “oversight” over this operation?

  Well, I suppose we were just trying to keep our jobs, and if anything had become clear to me that morning, it was that doing so involved taking the minimum possible amount of risk.

 
; This would help explain why issues of compliance by the Iraqi regime would be methodically ignored. Merely confirming our own rules to an outside entity had been a complicated affair for us, and the simple fact that I finally decided to act on my own had caused me to fear for my job that morning. Would I take such risks again?

  To be sure, with the massive growth of the operation, there would be plenty of occasions to make such calls. Especially in light of what the Iraqis were now telling us.

  The Iraqi ambassador had come to complain that his government was unhappy with our proposal to increase the size of the Oil-for-Food program. They wanted an increase, all right, just not of the kind that we had proposed. The humanitarian projects we had presented to the Security Council as part of our pitch to increase the operation were not to their liking. They were, in essence, too humanitarian and did not involve enough industrial projects. The Iraqis did not want to buy as much food and medicine as we had recommended. They wanted more trucks, telecom equipment, and industrial machinery. And they would send a team from Baghdad to New York to negotiate with us on that basis. Only then would they agree to the expanded Oil-for-Food scheme.

  Having made his key demand, the ambassador gauged Annan’s and Pasha’s reactions. Rather than make a commitment, my bosses pledged they would take Iraq’s request under consideration. The meeting was kept short. Tensions on the weapons of mass destruction front were still at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Iraq’s economic future took second place to that conflict.

  The Iraqi ambassador had some nerve to criticize us for the way we had handled the expansion of the program. It almost seemed like we, at the UN, were more worried than Saddam Hussein himself about the welfare of the Iraqi people. It almost felt like we were begging him to let us help his country. And now we would have to negotiate down from the terms we had proposed to the Security Council.

  Saddam and his cronies were happy to organize parade burials through Baghdad once every couple of months, with little wooden coffins that supposedly contained “children killed by the sanctions,” but when it came to actually saving these malnourished kids, there was nobody home. Spooky had fought tooth and nail to make sure the Iraqi government purchased special food for the most malnourished kids. It took them nine months to comply, and they did so only after Spooky threatened to go public with the issue and harm their propaganda campaign.

  The fact that Spooky’s threat produced a result was proof to me that the Iraqis could in fact be influenced. I would always remain uncertain of what exactly would have happened if we had gone public with the information that Saddam was defrauding the UN humanitarian program as we received it. But here is what would not have happened. The UN would never have stood accused of turning a blind eye to Saddam’s multibillion-dollar rip-off or of lying to the public when asked about it. And I would certainly not have ended up sitting in this cold little conference room, being interrogated by a team of international investigators, about an e-mail I had long since forgotten, in which a colleague counseled me not to open “that can of worms.”

  As I sat there being questioned by the Volcker inquiry panel seven years after the start of my UN employment, I could perfectly understand why my interrogator would be frustrated. Especially now that she had this e-mail exchange proving that we knew about Saddam’s massive fraud from the very beginning.

  “So what happened after this e-mail exchange?” she asked me.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I mean nothing happened. We simply didn’t follow up on it. We dropped the ball.”

  The investigator looked at me strangely, as if it was inconceivable that such an issue would simply vanish from our radar screen. At that point, I recognized the challenge facing the investigators. They were probing a case of massive fraud, yet they were totally unfamiliar with the managerial culture that prevailed within the United Nations. Some kind of guidebook might have helped them, but official papers, even our e-mails, did not contain the most important rules of all: the UN-written rules.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Rules of the Game

  The investigators who eventually dove into our exclusive little world to try to figure out how billions of dollars could have vanished from right under our noses when the whole point of our operation was to watch over this money were deeply baffled by the UN system’s inability to enforce even minimal standards of accountability on its members, staff, and agencies.

  I tried to explain to them that expecting accountability from the UN system was akin to expecting a blind dog to catch a flying Frisbee.

  By design, the UN Security Council is accountable only to itself. There is no proper separation among governing branches on the international stage. All power is concentrated among the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council. If they were to be penalized for their failures, they would have to agree to inflict such punishment as they deem appropriate on themselves.

  Alternatively, they can blame the UN Secretariat. As its name indicates, the Secretariat was originally designed to provide conference-support services to its member states, not to manage large and complex multibillion-dollar operations that dwarf its own yearly budget. Of all the operations ever assigned to the UN, ours was the most unusual, grandiose, and unrealistic. But the logic behind asking the Secretariat to manage any new operation is always the same: the great powers don’t trust one another. With the UN in charge, they know that they can all maintain control over key managerial decisions. This, in turn, guarantees a high level of inefficiency.

  The more the Security Council micromanages, the easier it is for the UN Secretariat to redirect any and all blame right back at that institution’s doorstep. It’s a simple system, really. The buck can go back and forth between the bodies that share responsibility for a given action and never stop on any one player’s desk. That is, if they know how to play by the rules.

  The gap that had developed between the UN’s high-minded principles and the organization’s management culture was a canyon better explored by corporate anthropologists than by law enforcement officials. The investigators would eventually understand this. They came in intending to conduct their probe “by the book,” only to realize there really wasn’t any book to go by. Theirs was the first large-scale exercise in accountability on the world stage. And the rules that regimented our world could not be found in textbooks.

  More often than not, new recruits would encounter these rules in much the same manner as one’s forehead encounters a low ceiling. Here are some of the unspoken rules of the game that I banged my head against during my first few months:

  Rule #1: The Truth Is Not a Matter of Fact; It Is a Product of Consensus.

  One rule that had become clear to me after my numerous blunders in Iraq was that telling the truth as I saw it was not (insofar as Pasha and other managers were concerned) my job. Initially, I was forgiven on account of my youth and inexperience. But as I accumulated new responsibilities at a rate that most bureaucrats would consider unwise, I could no longer claim innocence. With greater responsibility came less freedom of speech.

  Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639), a British author and diplomat, once wrote, “An Ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” The endurance of this often-quoted phrase speaks to its resonance. Few experienced diplomats ever challenge the notion that their pursuit of “the greater good” somehow absolves them from having to abide by the Ninth Commandment (“Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness”).

  In intelligence circles, this absolution is balanced by what operatives call the Eleventh Commandment: “Don’t Get Caught!” Of course, this is an easier rule to follow when one is operating outside the public realm.

  Diplomats are occasionally expected to perform before the cameras. Instead of a script they have a policy, which they must defend regardless of its merits or risk incurring the wrath of their government. Hence, when promoting a senseless or immoral policy, a diplomat is bett
er off being caught in a lie than being caught admitting the truth.

  I can’t say I had a moral problem complying with this rule, especially if it was going to help me become “a player.” I just had one question: if it was considered acceptable for a diplomat to lie on behalf of his country, on whose behalf were we, the UN’s diplomats, supposed to lie? After all, our allegiance was not supposed to be to any state in particular, not even to the one that issued our passports. To make this extra clear, the UN issued us its own blue passports for use during professional travel.

  Was I supposed to lie on behalf of Pasha or Kofi Annan? Or was I supposed to lie on behalf of the Security Council, which was itself composed of ambassadors who were lying to each other?

  Some questions were obviously better left unasked. During the process of compiling our first report to the Security Council, I began to understand what kinds of lies were expected of us. In short, our job was to pretend that there was unity of purpose among the members of the Security Council, the UN Secretariat, and Iraq.

  The truth, of course, was that no such unity of purpose existed. Competing interests were at work, and everyone involved understood this. But it was felt that the pretense of consensus was a necessary part of keeping the peace. Hence, our job was to pretend that the policies derived from the lowest denominator of common interest among the states in the Security Council were inherently legitimate, moral, and practical.

  Just like the oil companies will commission advertisements that exalt their efforts on behalf of “the environment,” the Security Council would expect us to report on the humanitarian achievements of a program that, in the big picture, ripped the Iraqi people off. When all expenses were added up, including war reparations (one-third of Iraq’s oil revenue) and the cost of arms inspections, UN financial oversight, surcharges, bribes, and kickbacks (more on those later), the Iraqi people received less than fifty cents in humanitarian supplies for every dollar of oil their country sold.