Backstabbing for Beginners:

  Out of desperation, I enrolled in a conflict-resolution seminar at Columbia University. It was a fascinating class, in which I learned to recognize how easily and unnecessarily people manage to offend one another. The conflict-resolution coaches had the same kind of look in their eyes as people in sects. They spoke like they had “seen the light,” and for a time, I thought I had seen the light, too. I became convinced that the problems we had between our senior staff could be resolved if only they would attend a conflict-resolution seminar together. So I raised the idea at our weekly management meeting.

  “I think it would be great if all of us could attend this conflict-resolution seminar,” I said, with the same honest-to-God round eyes as the gurus who had indoctrinated me.

  During the silence that ensued, the tension rose sharply. Cindy became fidgety, and Bo turned into a rigid block of ice.

  “I think it would be great if you just took notes and shadap,” Pasha replied, releasing the tension by causing an uproar of laughter around the table.

  “Just an idea, Sir . . .”

  Clearly, I would have to apply the conflict-resolution “techniques” I had learned all on my own.

  After a particularly nasty round of Paper Flow Paranoia, Cindy and Bo stopped talking to each other altogether. Bo was not the type of person who would normally refuse to communicate with another staff member, but Cindy was driving him up the wall, and their rivalry was only accentuated by Pasha, who would not rule on the issues that were dividing them.

  It got pretty nasty. Bo, with whom I sometimes spoke in French, would refer to Cindy as “la pouffiasse du bout du couloir,” meaning the “bitch down the hall,” and Cindy would refer to Bo as “your boss, that dickhead.”

  It is in this context that I tried to apply the “de-escalation” procedure I had learned at the training seminar. As I shuttled between “the bitch down the hall” and my boss, “that dickhead,” I began by trying to reassure each of them that the other was not, actually, “out to get them.” This backfired, because they would then feel I had accused them of being paranoid—an accusation that paranoid people tend to be especially paranoid about. In their defense, they were not wrong to remind me that their nemesis had indeed done a list of things that were offensive. Realizing I was only making matters worse by causing them to concentrate all of their energy on justifying their paranoia, I quickly changed tactics. Rather than deny that wrongs had been committed, I tried to get each of them to understand where the other person was “coming from.”

  Now, Bo knew exactly where Cindy was coming from. In his opinion, she was coming from the point of view of someone who was a sexually frustrated control freak. As for Cindy, she knew exactly where Boo! was coming from, too: the United Nations Development Program, which, in Cindy’s book, was synonymous with the Death Star.

  The UNDP and the UN Secretariat competed for managerial control of humanitarian operations every time a new mission was drawn up by the Security Council. Secretariat staff thought themselves more able diplomats, and UNDP staff felt they were better managers. I wish I had been tipped off to that long-running, overarching turf war within the UN system before I tried to intervene between Bo and Cindy. Nonetheless, I plowed ahead with my de-escalation efforts. I tried to explain to Cindy that Bo felt undermined when she issued orders directly to some of his staff and that it would be really helpful if she would just ask him to do so himself. I tried to explain to Bo that Cindy was indeed a very controlling woman but that it would probably be smarter just to ignore some of the awkward things she did and focus on the issues. For a while there, I almost thought I had persuaded them to lay down their arms. Increasingly, I felt that both Cindy and Bo were beginning to listen to me more carefully.

  As it turned out, the reason I had their attention was not that I was convincing them. It was that they were growing increasingly suspicious of me! The stage was set for a clash that would squeeze the taste for conflict resolution out of me for good.

  One afternoon, I walked into Bo’s office to bring him some faxes for his signature. He greeted me with an accusatory stare, then held out a piece of paper and declared: “The plot thickens!”

  It made me laugh when he said that because he looked like a suspicious Daffy Duck. But Bo wasn’t joking. I asked him what he meant, and he sent the memo flying across his desk. I had seen it before, since I saw everything that went into Bo’s inbox. It was the memo in which Pasha asked me to draw up a “status sheet” on all the promises we had made in our report to the UN Security Council. The status sheet needed to list who was responsible for following up on each promise and indicate any progress that had (or had not) been made.

  The memo was signed by Pasha, but we could tell from its style that Cindy had drafted it. She knew it would cause Bo to blow his top for two reasons. First, the memo was addressed to me, with a cc to Bo, instead of just addressed to Bo, who should have been the person to decide whom he appointed within his own Division of Program Management to do the job. Second, it suggested Bo should have taken such an initiative himself, that he was behind schedule, and that his office would be the one held accountable for any failure to meet the promises made in our report to the Security Council. The translation from UN-ese read as follows: “If anything goes wrong with the largest operation in UN history, we’ll blame it all on you.”

  Bo wanted to know how long I had known about this memo, why I hadn’t advised him of it immediately, and why the hell the memo was addressed to me, since I worked for him. I said I didn’t know why it was addressed to me. While I hadn’t run into his office with it, I had obviously placed it in his inbox so he would see it. I explained that the idea of a status sheet had originally been my own, and that I had no idea, when I shared it with Cindy, that she would use this idea to launch a catty memo to him. But all my explanations were to no avail. Bo was now convinced I was in on the plot to undermine him.

  All day long, Cindy walked around like a cat licking the cream off her whiskers, and Bo kept barging into my office and barking orders about how he wanted the status sheet to be prepared, saying he wanted it finished by “close of business today.” His anger was compounded when he ran into Cindy on his way out of my office and she asked him how things were going with “Mikey’s status sheet.” Bo was too angry to answer her. And Cindy couldn’t repress a devilish smile.

  Cindy’s victory was complete. She had put Bo on the defensive with the bureaucratic equivalent of a Panzer division offensive and at the same time sown distrust between Bo and his closest aide. Cindy had played by the un-written rule handbook: the assistant of your enemy is your friend.

  Close of business came, and I wasn’t done with the status sheet. In fact, I realized that to do it well, I would need to consult with several other offices and that such a process would take days. When I informed Bo of that, he went ape shit. I was in no mood to justify myself. In fact, I felt that if I had to take another second of Bo’s abuse, I would start yelling back even louder. So I left the office early and went out for drinks with my pals from the other side of the street, and when I was sufficiently inebriated, I made a decision to call up my director, tell him I wasn’t going to “take this shit” anymore, and that he could have my letter of resignation on his desk on Monday.

  On Monday morning, Bo called me into his office and apologized. Once again, the management training Bo had undergone at some stage in his career served him well, for he knew exactly how to apologize in a manner that was honest, convincing, and dignified. So I accepted his apology. We talked about how we had gotten to the point of a confrontation, and I realized the extent to which he had begun to question my loyalty. Cindy had really done a masterful job of sowing doubt in Bo’s mind. As he retraced the events that had caused him to grow angry, I had to agree that they added up. Bo may have been a tad bit paranoid, but it did not mean Cindy was not out to get him.

  In order to put Bo’s increasingly Shakespearean mindset into perspective, I laid my cards on the table and explained that I
had tried to “de-escalate” the conflict between him and Cindy. He smiled and told me something I had completely overlooked: “That’s not your job, Michael.”

  He was right. It was Pasha’s job. Only Pasha had the authority to impose peace between his director and his chief of staff. My job was to be loyal to my boss. And yet I had to be careful here too, because my boss could leave for another post any day, and then I would still have to deal with Cindy. I was beginning to understand Spooky’s advice: be your own man.

  Still, there was a problem with this approach: if I started acting on my own agenda rather than just serving the needs of the office, what was to stop me from becoming a turf warrior like the rest of them?

  I called up my father for advice. I took great care to explain to him all the intricacies of the current office politics, but at one point, he interrupted me.

  “Sounds to me like you need to make yourself some enemies,” he said.

  “What? How can you say something like that? The whole point here is I’m trying to do my job without making enemies!”

  “You can’t do that. Listen, it’s good to have lofty goals. But if you just try to be nice to everybody, nobody’s going to respect you. You’ll never get anywhere like this.”

  My father made his point clear by recalling the advice that Talleyrand once gave to Napoleon. Talleyrand was France’s top diplomat during the revolutionary wars. Napoleon was considering appointing a young man to a high post, and he asked Talleyrand for his advice. Talleyrand scoffed at Napoleon’s choice. The problem was not so much with the candidate’s youth. The problem, as Talleyrand put it, was that the man had “not even been capable of making a single enemy yet.”

  Somehow, that meant something to Napoleon, and the candidate didn’t get the job.

  “So go ahead,” said my father. “Make your enemies. Get into people’s faces. But for heaven’s sake, do it for the right reasons!”

  CHAPTER 16

  Cigars With Criminals

  FEBRUARY 25, 1998

  “We interrupt this program to bring you live to the United Nations, where Secretary General Kofi Annan is about to address his staff. . . .”

  I had stood in the lobby just moments earlier, when Annan made his “triumphant” entrance, but I soon decided to jet up to the third floor to watch the scene on TV and to hear better what he had to say to us. We had received an e-mail earlier that morning urging us to drop whatever we were doing, leave our desks, and descend to the UN lobby. Annan was going to make an entrance shortly after 10:00 a.m., and his aides thought it would create the right message if we showered him with applause and cheers upon his arrival, the way ancient Romans did when Julius Caesar returned from a glorious military campaign.

  It was to be Kofi Annan’s moment of glory—one that would, as such moments often do, come back to bite him in the ass.

  A few months had passed since our first visit to Iraq, and tensions had flared up again. The Clinton administration was once again threatening airstrikes in response to Saddam Hussein’s refusal to let UN weapons inspectors into his palaces. Again, CNN began showing footage of F-15 fighters taking off from carriers in the Gulf, followed by images of Iraqi women walking into Saddam’s palaces chanting, “We will die for you, Saddam!”

  Russia and France were determined to prevent a confrontation. Both countries now had increasing stakes in the expansion of the UN Oil-for-Food operation. Hundreds of hefty contracts had been signed, and a clash easily could have sabotaged their execution. We had just authorized billions of dollars in new oil sales, with more than half of that business going to Russia and France.

  Russia and the Arab League had already put forward compromise proposals, but both had been rejected by the United States. Annan would be their man of last resort. A high-profile mission to Baghdad by the world’s top diplomat would surely throw a wrench in Washington’s countdown to military action.

  The United States was dead set against an eleventh-hour round of diplomacy. Tired of letting Saddam Hussein control the crisis agenda, the Clinton administration had hoped to seize the initiative from the Iraqi dictator and bring the crisis to a boil by the end of February. So when word reached the U.S. president that Annan was considering going to Baghdad, Bill Clinton picked up his phone and called the secretary general.

  “Don’t jam me!” Bill Clinton pleaded, according to a high-level administration official who recounted the phone call to the New York Times. But Annan was being pulled in a different direction by his aides, and this was a chance to reach for greatness. Marc Malloch Brown, one of his closest friends, even warned him about the dangers of becoming “a first-year U Thant.” U Thant, a Malaysian, served as secretary general from 1961 to 1971; he was generally regarded as a kind but rather irrelevant character who remained “confined by the diplomatic salons of the East River.” According to Malloch Brown, going to Iraq could be Annan’s “first step out of the box.”

  Perhaps he had a point. But this crisis was about more than Annan’s image. And even if his image was indeed the primary consideration, it was unclear how a trip to Baghdad at this moment would play in the long run. The decision to take center stage in the Iraq conflict would force the secretary general to mediate between Washington and Baghdad, which, aside from being a full-time job, was also a very risky undertaking. First, it risked pitting the UN secretary general against his host nation—a move that had caused his predecessor, Boutros-Ghali, to get sacked after the United States refused to renew his tenure for another term. Second, it meant trying to reach a reliable deal with Saddam Hussein. Others had tried this tactic before, with little success. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who signed the 1991 cease-fire on behalf of the U.S.-led coalition, gives an account in his memoir, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, of how he was snookered by Saddam. Schwarzkopf had as much leverage as any negotiator could wish for. The tent he was negotiating in, at the Safwan Airbase, was encircled by a dozen U.S. M1 Abrams tanks. Saddam had lost control of his army, and popular uprisings threatened his hold on both the north and south of the country. Yet before signing the cease-fire, Saddam’s representative, Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmad, managed to extract one last concession from the American general. Stormin’ Norman’s account is edifying:

  “We have one point,” [Ahmad] said. “You know the situation of our roads and bridges and communications.” I nodded, thinking of the overwhelming damage our bombing had done. “We would like to fly helicopters to carry the officials of our government in areas where roads and bridges are out. This has nothing to do with the front line. This is inside Iraq.”

  Schwarzkopf agreed to the request, but as he recounted the scene in his memoir, he realized he had been hoodwinked:

  Then [Ahmad] said something that should have given me pause:

  “So you mean even helicopters that are armed can fly in Iraqi skies but not the [jet] fighters?”

  “Yeah, I will instruct the Air Force not to shoot down any helicopters flying over the territory of Iraq where our troops are not located.”

  In the following weeks, we discovered what the son of a bitch really had in mind: using helicopter gun ships to suppress rebellions in Basra and other cities.

  If Saddam could fool Stormin’ Norman at a time of war, he could certainly fool the United Nations in peacetime. But what did Saddam have in mind this time? Looking narrowly at the weapons inspection game, it was difficult to surmise. But looking at the big picture, including the money his regime stood to make from an expanded Oil-for-Food program, it was evident that the Iraqi dictator had an interest in playing for time, an objective shared by his business partners on the UN Security Council. But what did Kofi Annan stand to gain by aligning himself with those interests? And more important, what did he stand to lose?

  Annan, a widely respected figure whose talent as a diplomat was not in question, was at the height of his popularity. But his primary job was not to play world peacemaker. It was to manage UN operations. Offering his “good services” to mediate crises was optiona
l, but the rule of thumb for such forays was to intervene in situations that were actually resolvable through mediation. In this case, the very idea of mediation was strongly opposed by Washington. And it was safe to assume that Saddam never would have invited Annan to visit Baghdad unless he felt such a visit would play to his advantage.

  What, then, compelled Annan to go? If Saddam had something to say to the world, he was free to say it. The United States had made it extra clear that the only acceptable outcome would be unconditional cooperation. What difference would a face-to-face meeting make? Shashi Tharoor, Annan’s communications adviser, liked to describe his boss as the political version of a yogi. A master of the art of diplomacy was called for. The diplomatically challenged nations of America and Britain simply didn’t understand how to talk sense to Saddam. Kofi the Yogi would show them how it was done.

  French President Jacques Chirac was elated at the news that Annan would go to Baghdad, and he immediately made his own presidential jet—France’s version of Air Force One—available to the secretary general and his staff. With U.S. warships moving into position in the Persian Gulf, time was of the essence.

  Having failed to rein in the secretary general, Bill Clinton let his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, loose on him. As Annan prepared to leave for Baghdad, he was constantly hounded by angry phone calls from Albright, who worried that he was about to get duped by Saddam.

  “She’s very . . . demanding,” Annan confided to an aide after Albright had raised her voice at him on the phone. “You’re not going to Baghdad!” she allegedly yelled at the secretary general. But Annan decided to go nonetheless, in defiance of the woman who had sponsored his ascent to the top of the UN hierarchy.