Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  Finding an accommodation with Cindy would clearly not be easy, but it would definitely be required if we were going to get both sides of the street to work together rather than against each other. And I did have a few cards in my hands. Since the management arm of the office was on the other side of the street, she saw me as someone who could serve as her eyes and ears there. (The assistant of your enemy is your friend.) I had no intention of playing that role, but I did make it clear that I was tuned in to what was going on in the office. The other thing that I could leverage was that she had never set foot in Iraq and had a limited understanding of the situation on the ground.

  So after a bit of polite conversation, I decided to lead a second charge. I whipped out two of the many faxes I had brought with me to get signed by Pasha. One of the faxes was a recommendation to engage the government of Iraq in a discussion of “vulnerable groups,” meaning kids without parents and widowed mothers, whom we wished to target with special protein biscuits as a way of improving their health and preventing disease. The government had previously refused to engage in any talks about “vulnerable groups,” because it feared that we were interested in helping those it oppressed most severely, like the Shiite Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. Given the subject’s political sensitivity, I explained that I would never let a fax like that go out unless Pasha had signed it.

  “I should certainly hope not,” Cindy said.

  Hoping to have reassured her, I then pointed to the other fax, which was filled with detailed questions about water pumping stations in Ninewah—

  “Ninewhat?”

  “Ninewah, it’s a province of Iraq.”

  “Right. . . .”

  The fax thanked our staff in the field for their report and asked them for tons of additional technical information. You had to be a water engineer just to understand the questions. I handed the fax to her and watched her eyes crease as she tried to decipher what it was all about.

  “Tell you what, kiddo,” she said, “you can send the routine stuff on your side, but it’s your ass if there’s a fuckup, you hear me? So you better vet it before it goes out or I’ll have your head on a stick.”

  I stood up but stayed in place. Insofar as I could figure this woman out, it was pretty obvious to me that she would not respect anybody who cowered to such threats. So I ventured into the unknown.

  “If you want me to send a truckload of faxes like this your way every day, I’ll do it. It’s your call. Either you trust me to help you or you don’t,” I said.

  “All right, young man, don’t take this tone with me,” she said. “And sit your ass back down. We’re not done.”

  I sensed she was about to back off her threat, so I sat halfway down on the chair’s armrest.

  “Look Mikey,” she said, using a new nickname for me and suddenly transforming herself into a charming person again. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but we need to have control over these guys. They’re totally out of control!” I nodded, not because I agreed with her but because I was beginning to understand the world she lived in. It was a world of out-of-control, spineless cowards who were out to undermine her authority. The logic of triangulation would have made her an automatic enemy of Gregoire, and this made me an automatic ally of hers, so her appeal to me was pretty straightforward: “Join me and we shall rule the Oil-for-Food ship together!”

  At that point, Pasha walked by in an unusually good mood after a long and probably well-lubricated lunch.

  “How are you, Kid?” he said, slapping his hand down on my neck, then feigning to punch me in the stomach.

  “Fine, sir . . . ”

  Pasha turned to Cindy and launched into an imitation of me with a big stupid smile on my face. As usual, Pasha’s imitation was great, and I made a mental note not to smile so much all the time.

  Pasha then pointed to his signature book, which was fat with faxes, and asked, “What’s all this shit?”

  “For your signature, sir,” I replied.

  “Ahrf ! Gimme a break!” he said, fleeing the scene unapologetically to take his customary after-lunch siesta.

  “Ahrf ! Gimme a break!” I repeated, imitating the under secretary general right back at him. Pasha stopped dead in his tracks. Cindy broke the tension first, chuckling, and then Pasha’s secretary joined in. Pasha wagged his finger at me and said something about the “facking people across the street” having a bad influence on me. Then he disappeared into his office and closed the door. I turned to Cindy and cringed, realizing I had probably gone too far.

  Cindy shook her head and laughed some more. “Ah, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, what are we going to do with you?”

  I sat all the way back down and began the first of many productive meetings with Cindy. She was a very competent woman when she wasn’t beset with Paper Flow Paranoia (PFP).

  Paper Flow Paranoia is a disease that is proper to large bureaucracies and is especially rampant at the United Nations. A most dramatic form of PFP occurs in individuals who become convinced that every detail of a paper communication is designed with the intent of harming them. The way it works is this: when two people at the United Nations communicate, they have to do so “on paper,” because if they merely talk, there’s no record of their communication, and if there’s no record of their communication, it is as if they had never communicated. For example, if Person A asks Person B to do something and Person B agrees to do it but then doesn’t do it, there’s nothing Person A can do about it because there’s no paper trail, and therefore no accountability.

  Sometimes, people are so concerned about getting things on paper that, after a phone conversation with a colleague, they will sit down for an hour and write a “note to the file” about their conversation. The note can be copied to actual human beings, but it took me a while to come around to the notion that one might want to address a note to a file. The idea is to have a record, and the only use one can possibly have for such a record is either to protect oneself or attack another.

  Paper Flow Paranoia can be sparked by something as seemingly irrelevant as the order in which staff are copied on a given memo. In the days before personal computers, typewriters were used and copies were made on carbon paper—hence the denomination “cc” for carbon copies. The order in which people’s names are listed in any given memo is enormously important and must reflect the hierarchy of the UN. The most important people go first. Only when people are equally important does the alphabetical order kick in, and then it is required. So basically, people at the United Nations know more or less where they stand in the pecking order based on the location of their name on the cc list of a given memo. Even in the UN phone directory, offices were not listed in alphabetical order but in order of (perceived) importance, which made it rather difficult to look up any given division.

  The formality of the communication system made it possible for two bureaucrats who did not feel like talking to each other to communicate exclusively through cc’s on memos to their boss. In the organization dedicated to world peace, bureaucrats could sit in adjacent offices, separated only by a thin partition wall that allowed each of them to overhear parts of the other’s phone conversations, and hate each other’s guts as a result of perceived insults contained in memos. In one case, a memo sent by one staff member in 1997 still had another employee royally miffed in 2008. Eleven years had gone by. The issue at stake had lost its relevance ten years ago. For the record, it had to do with food distribution in Iraq.

  Memorandums, like bombs, have guidance systems. There are smart memos and dumb memos. A smart memo has a defined target and can navigate its way through the system without causing too much collateral damage. A dumb memo may cause more damage to the sender than to the recipient. Much depends on a bureaucrat’s ability to control his or her anger.

  Rule #5: Always Be More Polite Than Your Enemy.

  “Even in a declaration of war, one observes the rules of politeness.”

  OTTO VON BISMARCK

  One reason interpersonal co
nflicts at the UN often drag on for years, even decades, is that they are conducted so freaking politely. There are show-downs, of course, but they are rarely conclusive in an absolute sense. Both parties will likely stay at the UN for the rest of their lives. If the UN were to have its own reality show, it would be just like Survivor, except nobody would ever get kicked off the island. The show would go on with the same characters even after they conspired to vote one another off the show. It could be called No Exit, like the play by Jean-Paul Sartre in which characters who are locked in a room together slowly realize that they are, in fact, in hell and that their punishment is to be stuck together so they can get on one another’s nerves forever.

  To stay sane, a bureaucrat has to win the occasional showdown. And the yardstick against which performances are judged is simple. In the absence of actual stakes, the bureaucrat who has the last polite word wins.

  I once witnessed a scene between two UN staff members that provides an extreme illustration of this point. One rainy morning, I was waiting for an elevator with an Afghan and a Yemenite—both of whom were in their midforties. I was aware that the two characters were avowed enemies, though I did not know exactly why. When the elevator arrived, I stepped in, while the Afghan and the Yemenite stood outside, tensely inviting each other to step in first. Taking turns, they waved the palms of their hands, smiled hypocritically, and said, “Please, I insist,” “No, please, I insist,” until finally, the doors started closing without consulting either of them.

  Going the extra mile for politeness, the Afghan tried to hold the door from closing so as to let the Yemenite in first. But the Yemenite retaliated by grabbing on to his own side of the door. I think it must have been impossible for them not to be struck by the absurdity of the situation, but they were now locked in a war of wills. Eventually, the elevator itself went berserk, making a loud buzzing noise and forcing its doors shut. Seized with panic, the Afghan and the Yemenite were both forced to jump in at the same time. The Afghan knocked his head on the door and spilled some coffee on the Yemenite’s suit. I immediately asked the Afghan, who had received a substantive blow to the head, if he was OK, but when he saw that I had a smile on my face, he chose not to reply.

  “You could at least apologize!” said the Yemenite, tending to the coffee stain on his pants.

  “Are you suggesting I did this on purpose?” the Afghan retorted, irritated. Then he caught himself. “If so, please accept my most sincere apologies.”

  The Afghan was mocking his counterpart, of course, but he had the last polite word. Would the Yemenite be composed enough to retaliate? Not this time. Any word coming out of his mouth would have been a swear word. So he made a serpentlike hissing noise. The Afghan raised his eyebrows and exchanged a smile with the rest of the passengers, savoring his well-earned victory.

  I can testify to dozens of tense situations resulting from diplomats having to walk through open doors. What took me some time to understand was why it was so important for them to let the other person go first. Is this not a courtesy normally extended by men to women? Why would two men, or two women, for that matter, be so insistent on having their counterpart take the first step through an open door?

  In a world where there is no truth but consensus, where initiative is highly risky, where assistants can turn into enemies, and where paranoia makes practical sense, I suppose it is unfair to blame diplomats for accepting invitations that leave their backs exposed.

  CHAPTER 15

  Conflict Resolution

  “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”

  THE BORG

  Several months after losing his first director, Pasha hired a new one, Bo Asplund. Bo was a competent and morally upright Swede who kept a toothbrush in his breast pocket and liked to run a tight ship. He had made it clear from the outset that he would seek to apply “sound management principles” to the work of the office. Somehow, I had an inkling his lofty goal would meet with some resistance. To begin with, Pasha couldn’t get around the fact that someone might be called Bo. And so he called him Boo!, as if he were a ghost.

  At the start of his employment, Boo! made every effort to get along with Cindy. For a time it worked reasonably well because Boo! had backbone and Cindy could sense that it would not be wise for her to confront him directly. Instead, she decided to grind him down gradually.

  First, Cindy hired one of the most incompetent secretaries available in the entire UN system to work for Boo!: a woman from Haiti who appeared highly cultured and unusually slow to react to urgent demands. She had a knack for transforming a request for her to send a fax into a discussion of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry.

  At first, Boo! did his best to appear interested in what his secretary had to say. This could not have been easy for him. Every detail of his body language exuded urgency. He would stand before her cubicle with arms crossed, tapping his foot, and nodding preemptively at every point she made, until such a time that he could cordially remind her that the piece of paper he carried in his hand required her attention.

  Bo finally lost his temper with her, one day, after she disappeared for three hours in the middle of the afternoon. After Bo slammed his door shut, his secretary started mumbling to herself in Haitian. She sounded like she was reciting a prayer . . . or maybe a curse? The answer came at the end of the day, when Bo called me into his office and announced, with surprising calm, that he was having an attack of hives. His neckline was red, and itchy plaques were beginning to form on his face. He explained that he needed to rush to an emergency room to get an adrenaline shot.

  Bo did not believe in voodoo, he said, when I mentioned how his secretary had been mumbling mysteriously all afternoon. But he never yelled at her again. The search was on for a new secretary. The next candidate Cindy sent him was a nose-ringed, grungy activist type with a history of conflict with her supervisors. After that interview, Bo looked like he was ripe for another attack of hives. “This,” he said, “is pure sabotage.”

  The rapid deterioration in the relationship between Bo and Cindy accelerated as they jostled to determine who was to be the top dog in the office—a conflict Pasha appeared to encourage. Disputes between directors and special assistants are so common at the United Nations that one might think the idea was written into the organization’s charter. While the director is of higher rank than the special assistant, the special assistant usually has better access to the big boss and can use that access to undermine the director. The conflict followed a classic triangular pattern. To make matters worse, in this case, Pasha was from the “divide and rule” school of management.

  Bo’s first order of business was to write a mission statement for the office. So far, our mission statement had been to follow Pasha’s wild mood swings, and Pasha himself had an intriguing way of describing his duties.

  “I am the Security Council’s donkey,” he kept saying, before adding, “but even donkeys, sometimes, they kick back!”

  Notwithstanding Pasha’s intriguing conception of his role, we were not entirely free to do as we pleased. The source of our mission had been inscribed in UN Security Resolution 986 (1995), so it was not as if we were operating without a mandate. The idea of having a mission statement was to adapt our routines and the structure of our daily interactions to maximize the likelihood that we would fulfill our mandate.

  Bo’s mission-statement initiative struck most of my colleagues as a waste of time, because we were constantly running from crisis to crisis. Most of the time, these crises were sparked by Saddam’s conflict with the weapons inspectors. There could be armed conflict at a moment’s notice. We ran pretty much like an emergency operation, and most of us barely had time to catch our breath. Yet Bo was right. If this operation was going to be effective in the long run, it needed more than a donkey-inspired mission statement.

  I suggested a meeting to kick off the effort. We invited Pasha to attend, so that it would be clear to everybody that the big boss was fully behind Bo’s initiative. Bo wa
s heading the Division of Program Management. Under his direction, several “chiefs” were supposed to manage the flow of (a) humanitarian reports coming in from Iraq; (b) contracts flowing into the UN system from outside companies; and (c) contracts given by the UN partners working in northern Iraq, where we had responsibility for execution.

  Before Bo’s arrival we had spent several months without a director, so most of them were used to reporting directly to Pasha, often using me as a conduit when they were proposing ideas Pasha might dislike. Now Bo wanted Pasha’s explicit support for instituting more structure. It all made sense. But when Bo explained the point of the mission statement at the meeting, Pasha rolled his eyes for the rest of the staff to see, sparking some awkward chuckles.

  I went to see Pasha that night, to see if he had just been joking around or if he was really out to undermine my new director. Over a glass of Chivas, I asked him what he thought of Bo’s management style, and he answered me with a question: “You call that style?”

  His answer made me laugh, even though technically, it was tragic. What Pasha wanted to know was “why Boo needs to hold all these facking meetings all the time.” Bo had instituted a weekly management meeting of the senior staff. A note of the meeting was written up (usually by me) and copied to Pasha for his information. Yet Pasha didn’t like it one bit when the staff in his office started talking to one another behind his back, and that was precisely what he assumed went on at these meetings.

  When I left Pasha’s office late that night, I realized it would be an uphill battle to get the Cypriot and the Swede to work together. Deep down, I knew the dice were loaded from the moment Pasha had said “Boo!” And when I realized that Cindy was at work on her own version of a mission statement for the office, for which she had Pasha’s backing, it dawned on me that we might be in for a catastrophic clash of egos.