Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  Our charts would show this quite clearly. Yet our words would extol the program’s humanitarian achievements. If half-truths make for complete lies, this was a lie that Security Council members could agree to preserve. This did not mean they stopped lying to one another about other things.

  Diplomats spend quite a bit of time reading between other diplomats’ lies. Official meetings are most tedious in this regard, as each player restates his policies for public consumption. Glimmers of truth are much more likely to emerge during cappuccino breaks, lunches, or, better yet, during diplomatic cocktail parties. That’s where the real work of diplomacy took place. As Adlai E. Stevenson, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN, once put it, “A diplomat’s life is made up of three ingredients: protocol, Geritol and alcohol.”

  Alcohol is the truth serum, Geritol (a popular multivitamin in Stevenson’s day) is for the hangovers, and protocol, I would say, is there to minimize the risk that people whose job it is to lie to one another all day actually end up offending one another.

  Inasmuch as I gained a better understanding of why and how diplomats lie, I was struck by the connection between lying and preserving the peace. In a sense, I was back to square one, dealing with the assumption that diplomats were in fact justified in lying as long as their behavior helped maintain peace.

  Could peace really be built on blocks of lies? The inescapable answer was yes. Temporarily.

  And so we were excused. Temporarily.

  Rule #2: Never Get Stuck With the Buck.

  There is no more pitiful sight than a bureaucrat who can’t find a way to step aside when a hot potato comes flying. Sometimes the inevitable happens, however, and a bureaucrat is given an actual task involving a deadline or, worst of all, a decision.

  Making a decision is a dangerous endeavor. Any bureaucrat making a decision runs the very real risk of violating one of the UN’s many nonsensical regulations, or offending some country’s political sensitivities, and screwing up his career. As servants of the UN Security Council, we had not one boss but fifteen. Any person wishing to gain access to a high-level post in the future needed to keep these fifteen ambassadors with radically opposed worldviews happy. Consequently, the safest decision for a bureaucrat to make was often no decision at all.

  The Secretariat was designed to facilitate diplomacy, not to manage a country’s economy, as we had now been asked to do with the Oil-for-Food program. The challenges we faced were so unusual for us that we were better off ignoring them than dealing with them head-on.

  “If you let them sit long enough, most issues go away all on their own,” a high-level UN bureaucrat, who shall remain unnamed, once explained at a cocktail party. The official served in the UN’s Bosnia operation and may stand as a perfect illustration of the famous Peter Principle, which holds that in hierarchical bureaucracies, each worker rises to the level of his own incompetence. While this man was at a high level of responsibility, a massacre happened in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Not surprisingly, the UN took no action, and in one sense, the bureaucrat’s theory proved correct. The issue, which was how the UN would protect the population of the town from Serbian forces, went away. Eight thousand Muslim men of Srebrenica were gunned down at point-blank range by Serbian forces while the UN soldiers stood inactive nearby. They had received no clear instructions from New York. This, despite the fact that the town had been declared a “UN safe haven.”

  One Bosnian once put it plainly: “If you see Blue Helmets, it means you’re already fucked.”

  Well, this may not always be the case. And Blue Helmets have on occasion saved lives. But in this case, how could the organization allow a designated “UN safe haven” to become the site of such a massacre?

  Did anybody at the UN take responsibility? Did anybody resign?

  No.

  By contrast, the entire Dutch government eventually resigned when a report blamed the Dutch peacekeeping troops for having failed in their duties. Now that’s accountability.

  At the UN, no bureaucrat ever considered stepping down in the aftermath of Srebrenica. As a master’s student, I interviewed Gen. Philippe Morillon, who was dispatched to lead the Blue Helmets in Bosnia at the time. The man started crying during our interview. Never had he imagined that he would be asked to lead such a senseless mission as the one that was given to him in the Balkans: to keep a peace that did not exist, with hardly enough authority to keep his own men alive.

  Kofi Annan, the head of UN peacekeeping at the time, was poised to become the UN’s next secretary general.

  If one wants to climb the ladders of the UN bureaucracy, one is far better off dodging responsibility than accepting it. There are plenty of ways one can rationalize such behavior after the fact as long as one doesn’t get stuck with the buck.

  This implies some mastery of the different techniques that allow a bureaucrat to pass along responsibility. Yellow routing stickers are a favorite. If a report comes in to a manager’s inbox warning of an imminent debacle requiring a risky decision? Easy: smack a yellow sticker on the memo and pass it along to a colleague with the note “Please advise on credibility of attached report.” The colleague will hate the manager, of course, because if disaster strikes while the report is in his inbox, he’ll be terribly embarrassed. So he’ll rush onto the web and print out an article corroborating the report and smack a new yellow sticker right on top of it with the words “See attached—would appear to confirm credibility of report.”

  What is a manager to do? He could smack a new yellow sticker on it and send it to the Office of Legal Affairs: “Please advise on options for legal action.” To doubly protect himself, he could use his URGENT stamp. But he knows that the use of his URGENT stamp may only get the report back into his own inbox faster. So eventually, he decides to call a meeting.

  The point of a meeting is to spread out responsibility for decisions—or, better, to find a reason why no decision can be made at all. The meeting agenda is typically made up of pressing issues nobody wants to take action on individually. By the end of the meeting, the youngest person in the room will be asked to summarize what was said, making damned sure he or she doesn’t assign work to his seniors. It’s a great system. Over time, accountability is diluted to the point where it evaporates completely. In the case of our program, so much vapor would accumulate that it eventually condensed to form what UN leaders would describe as a “dark cloud” hanging over the United Nations. Lucky would be the ones who had taken cover before the storm.

  Rule #3: The Assistant of Your Enemy Is Your Friend.

  Pasha’s distrust of Denis Halliday stemmed from a simple fear, i.e., that Denis would stab him in the back in order to take his post. His fear about Denis was not as irrational as it might appear to the candid eye. Typically, the greatest threat to a bureaucrat’s authority would often come from his or her immediate subordinates.

  In a hierarchical pyramid, there is only so much room at the top.

  UN officials do not normally get to appoint their own deputies. Their seniors—in Pasha’s case, Iqbal Riza, Kofi Annan’s chief of staff—handpick them.

  Did Iqbal Riza not know that he had chosen two people who hated each other’s guts to helm the UN’s largest humanitarian operation? Of course he did. That was the whole point. Divide and rule.

  Having established on the first day of our mission to Iraq that Halliday was indeed “out to get him,” Pasha felt justified in depicting his deputy’s efforts to challenge the UN policy on Iraq as an attempt to stab him in the back. I don’t think that’s how Halliday would have described his maneuver, but perceptions seem to have been more relevant than facts. Would Annan back Pasha or would he undermine him only a few months after having appointed him?

  Pasha knew the rules would play in his favor. Halliday had exposed himself with decisions and statements that were far more provocative than his own. Pasha’s reserve would be rewarded. And his would-be competitor would have no other dignified choice but to resign.

  Ha
ving gotten rid of the most immediate threat to his authority, Pasha turned all his suspicions on my director, Yohannes Mengesha, the friendly Ethiopian man who had recruited me into the UN. The question in Pasha’s mind was not whether Mengesha would undermine him but how and when he would attempt to do so. For an answer, Pasha turned to me. He called me over to his office, which was across the street from our own, and asked me, “So, what are these bozos up to?”

  “What bozos?”

  “The guys across the street!”

  “The Americans?” I asked. The U.S. Embassy lay across the street, too.

  Pasha shook his head. “Facking Mengesha and those guys!”

  “Oh . . . well, you know, working. . . .”

  “Yeah, right . . . working to screw me . . . facking Mengesha and his vacations!”

  There we were again. Back to square one. Pasha would never forgive my director for going on vacation while he was in Baghdad. But soon that wouldn’t matter, for the Machiavellian Riza had another trick up his sleeve. He would appoint Mengesha to work for Pasha’s direct boss, the newly appointed deputy to Kofi Annan, Ms. Louise Fréchette of Canada.

  Bureaucratically speaking, it was a beautiful move. Take Pasha’s assistant and place him as the assistant to Pasha’s boss.

  Well, there was never any doubt that Pasha’s boss was in fact Kofi Annan. But Annan knew better than to get too involved in the UN’s largest and most controversial operation. The very idea that the secretary general should have a deputy was rather recent. Following several instances of gross UN mismanagement, it had occurred to member states that the secretary general could not possibly attend all the receptions and official functions they had lined up for him and be expected to actually manage the organization.

  The deputy would be given responsibility for management, though not the authority to manage. Decisions would remain firmly controlled by Annan’s chief of staff. It made perfect sense, and it reflected the core nature of the UN’s management culture in that it ensured that the person with responsibility had no authority; and vice versa, it protected the people with authority from having to take responsibility.

  Just as the Security Council arrogates to itself great authority yet bears no responsibility for its actions, the UN Secretariat is given enormous responsibilities yet minimal authority to act on them.

  This phenomenon replicated itself at all levels of the UN bureaucracy and naturally fomented suspicions among top managers that their deputies were undermining them behind their back. The system worked brilliantly to sour relations between deputies and assistants all the way down the ladder. Pasha used Halliday’s deputy in the field, an Afghan who had betrayed his country and served under the Soviets before joining the UN, to undermine his rival. The alliance between the Afghan and Pasha, an Armenian Cypriot, was a logical one. The Afghan feared that his boss would slam him with responsibility for failures he did not have the authority to address. His alliance with Pasha guaranteed his survival in the long term. And survival was exactly what the game was all about.

  Rule #4: Even the Paranoid Have Enemies.

  Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, knew what he was talking about when he shared this ironic piece of wisdom: indeed, “even the paranoid have some real enemies.”

  The characters who populated our office certainly acted on this premise. The deputy to my director was a French nobleman of Romanian origin named Gregoire. People in the office told me he was a descendant of the Count of Dracula. Hence his nickname. At first, I thought they were joking. But credible sources eventually assured me that Gregoire did indeed have a distant Transylvanian relative named Dracul. Or something. And then, there was the undeniable fact that Gregoire had fangs. I first saw them at the end of my first week in the office, when I decided to introduce myself to the mysterious man in the large office adjacent to my director’s, who always kept his door closed.

  With some apprehension, I knocked on Gregoire’s door. He yelled for me to “come in!” in a tone signaling that he was in the kind of bad mood only French nobles of Transylvanian descent can get themselves into. I stepped in, interrupting a game of cards he was losing to his computer, and caught him in mid-yawn. That was my first glimpse at his overdeveloped incisors.

  “Oui? ” he said, when he was done yawning. I explained that I had come to introduce myself, when in fact my real agenda was to find out what the hell he was doing all day long behind his closed door.

  Gregoire explained that he was quote-unquote deputy director, then grimaced, as if to undermine the statement he had just made, and let silence fill the air. He did not appear eager to chat, even after I nearly split my face smiling, so I decided to ask him straight up what he did when he wasn’t playing cards against his PC.

  That got his attention. After a moment’s hesitation, he smiled and explained that he didn’t really do anything at all because “the fellow next door” (my director) didn’t give him a chance.

  “Aha,” I said, flabbergasted at the level of childishness I would have to deal with in this office. I had never worked in a place where someone of relatively high rank would simply admit to doing nothing all day.

  For a moment, I tried to figure out if this meant that Dracula and I would have to be enemies. But I couldn’t really figure it out. So I asked him what he felt should be the nature of our relationship.

  The frankness of my question softened him up. After doing a double take to reevaluate me, he told me that I could always come to him if I had any questions. He was, in fact, eager for information himself, because he wasn’t necessarily copied on all the correspondence addressed to my director. I promised him that I would send copies his way and seek his advice, and we left on surprisingly good terms. Dracula, it turned out, could be a very warm character once you got on his good side.

  Soon after I met him, Dracula suddenly became my direct boss. Mengesha, my first director, accepted the offer to work for Annan’s deputy (Pasha’s boss). The moment Mengesha packed his things and moved to the thirty-eighth floor, Dracula became the official “officer-in-charge” of the program’s Management Division. This meant he had to stop playing cards and start signing faxes, which were mine to draft and submit for his consideration. Much to my surprise, Dracula, whose experience had been in emergency field operations, was eager to do some actual work.

  Unfortunately, Pasha had never envisaged that Dracula would become an actual decision-maker. When Pasha intercepted the first fax going from Dracula to Halliday in Baghdad, he officially barred anybody but himself from any official communication with our mission in the field. All faxes going from New York to Baghdad would have to be signed by Pasha personally. This struck me, and everyone else, as incredibly impractical.

  Pasha’s new “policy” meant I had to run across the street to get his signature every time we needed to send a fax. I ended up having two offices. One on Pasha’s side of the street and one on Dracula’s. (Eventually our office would take up space in four separate buildings around the United Nations.)

  I suppose we could have saved a lot of time simply by using e-mails. But e-mails had yet to gain acceptance as a “formal” method of communication. They did not constitute an “official” exchange and could therefore be ignored by the recipient if he did not feel like dealing with it.

  “Our side of the street” was infuriated by the new procedure, and at a meeting Dracula convened, my colleagues decided to appoint me as their emissary to go and persuade Pasha to grant us the authority to send faxes to Baghdad without his clearance. So off I went across the street in the hope of striking an arrangement with Cindy Spikes, Pasha’s special assistant.

  Cindy was in her early forties. She had flamboyant TV hair, shiny white teeth, and a reputation as a man-eater. She invited me to sit in her office with a wave of the hand while she continued her phone conversation.

  After she hung up, a radiant smile lit up her face, right on cue. It was fake, but still, it had an unapologetic quality that made it convincing at
the same time. Clearly, this was a woman in control of her facial expressions. After listening to my argument about the need to let “our side of the street” send faxes to Baghdad, she immediately understood the problem. A mutiny had developed that needed to be crushed, its leader (whom she assumed to be Dracula) castrated.

  To emphasize her point, she made an imaginary scissors motion with two fingers, complete with sound effects: “chuck, chuck, chuck!” As my eyes widened, she clarified that such attitudes needed to be nipped in the bud and asked if there was anything else she could help me with.

  I tried to speak, but instead I cracked up. Cindy’s face immediately became severe. She didn’t appreciate being laughed at in her office. Unfortunately, I found it very hard to stop. Her scissors motion had caught me completely off guard. For a moment, it looked like I would get off on the wrong foot with Cindy. I scrambled to think of a reason for my sudden outburst; thankfully, I found one right in front of me.

  On Cindy’s desk was a small glass jar filled with garlic and labeled “Boutros Boutros Garlic.”

  “Sorry . . . I just saw this,” I said, pointing to the small garlic joke-jar. “Where did you find this thing?” I asked, still snorting. Cindy looked at me strangely. The label on the garlic jar was meant to make people smile, not burst into uncontrollable laughter.

  Having narrowly avoided causing great offense to Pasha’s “spec ass” (as special assistants are sometimes called behind their backs), I decided to stay off the subject of my visit and make light conversation. I learned that Cindy hated men who “didn’t have any balls.” In her opinion, this phenomenon applied to most of the males at the United Nations.