Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  And so, late in the afternoon on February 20, 1998, the secretary general landed at Baghdad airport and declared to the press that he had a “sacred duty” to perform this peace mission.

  He was driven to a villa where he and his staff would stay for the remainder of the weekend. But Albright kept calling and insisting that he be woken up in the middle of the night. The world’s peacemaker simply could not get a moment of peace from this one.

  The next day, a working meeting was planned with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz to go over a possible deal that might allow UNSCOM inspectors into Saddam’s palaces. Annan had only the thinnest margin for maneuver and zero support from Washington, which reserved a right to reject any deal he and Aziz came up with. Working one-on-one for several hours, pens in hand, on a document that would outline the conditions under which palace visits might take place, Annan and Aziz arrived at a text that was substantively no different from Washington’s list of conditions, although it read more elegantly. Essentially, Saddam would allow inspectors to search his palaces, but the teams would need to be accompanied by a delegation of diplomats from other countries; in other words, the visits would be formal and the inspectors would not be allowed to run around Saddam’s digs without supervision. Aziz submitted this text for review by Saddam.

  Shortly before midday on Sunday, February 22, three black Mercedes sedans pulled into the driveway of the Baghdad villa in which Annan and his team had taken residence; Saddam’s personal drivers were at the wheels. After several days in Iraq, Annan was finally permitted to see the Iraqi dictator in person.

  Annan’s spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, asked one of the drivers where they were going to take the secretary general. Speaking to New York Times reporter James Traub shortly thereafter, Fawzi said of Saddam’s driver, “He looked at me like I was a cockroach. I think that he wanted to take me out back and have me shot.”

  The secretary general of the United Nations had gone out on a limb to help Saddam Hussein. Now he was being whisked off by stone-faced drivers to meet with the Iraqi president, whose whereabouts were unknown. After a surprisingly short drive, the three cars entered Saddam’s main presidential palace, located on the banks of the Tigris River. It was anyone’s guess how Saddam slipped in and out of these palaces. Coalition troops would eventually discover an extensive network of tunnels leading in and out of his quarters. But with the secretary general in the building, the Iraqi president ran no risk of being hit with a Tomahawk cruise missile.

  Kofi Annan had made the decision to meet with Saddam Hussein alone, without his aides. His rationale was to avoid a situation in which Saddam might be seen to lose face in front of his staff. It is of course doubtful whether Saddam would have gone through with this whole charade if he had not already made up his mind in favor of a compromise along the lines of the previously negotiated document with Tariq Aziz.

  Back at their hotels, reporters were engaged in wild speculations. Shashi Tharoor was estimating the chances of a deal at 51-49. How he came up with those numbers was anyone’s guess. Back in Washington, Albright was banging the table for a copy of the tentative agreement. At the Pentagon, images from spy satellites showed Saddam Hussein’s palace from every angle, yet nobody was privy to the negotiations going on inside.

  Kofi Annan and Saddam Hussein settled down across from each other, over two glasses of orange juice. After a few polite words were exchanged, Saddam offered Annan a nice Havana cigar from his personal stash. It remains unclear whether the secretary general then felt a “sacred duty” to accept this cigar, or whether he was just being polite, or whether he was, in fact, dying for a smoke.

  After lighting up, the two men sat back and began exchanging compliments. Annan told Saddam that he was a leader of great scope and courage, a “builder” who had brought Iraq into the modern age.

  The secretary general’s description of Saddam Hussein’s achievements in Iraq did not quite match what we had seen on the ground—the ruins of Kurdish villages that had been destroyed, then mined, then destroyed again during various genocidal campaigns. And though some of the Iraqi dictator’s torture techniques were distinctively “modern,” others were reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition. Iraq had missed the modern age because of Saddam; the infrastructure that his people had built up had been destroyed after the Iraqi leader stubbornly refused to relinquish Kuwait in 1991. But Kofi Annan had not come to lecture the Iraqi dictator. He had come to strike a deal with him, to save him from himself. And with very little room to negotiate down from America’s demands, Annan was perhaps not wrong to believe that a few compliments might improve Saddam Hussein’s disposition.

  Annan’s pitch to Iraq’s dictator was rather simple, in the end. He basically suggested that with everything Saddam had rebuilt since Desert Storm, it would be a pity if his country were to get bombed again. And incredibly, Saddam agreed with him.

  Did Annan actually sway the Iraqi dictator? The team around Annan publicly described their boss as “the moral conscience of the world,” but it is difficult to imagine that Saddam really cared one dime about morality at this stage in his life. In the end, Annan had nothing more to offer the Iraqi dictator than a chance to save face, as the prospect of a heavy bombing campaign loomed. And Saddam Hussein took it.

  After he put out his cigar and wished his counterpart the best, the secretary general was whisked out by the same three black Mercedes sedans, and Saddam returned to whatever his hiding place was at the time.

  Back at the UN-occupied villa, Annan informed his aides that he believed he had a deal. They could barely contain their joy. The weapons inspectors would be allowed into Saddam’s palaces. Not that they would be a very logical place for Saddam to store germ warfare materials. (He had a notorious phobia of germs and sometimes wouldn’t even allow small children to kiss him, for fear that their faces may have been smothered with a bio-agent meant to harm him.) But such considerations didn’t matter at this stage. Even if there had been something to be found, Saddam would have had ample time to remove it before the inspectors arrived.

  The secretary general described Saddam’s manners as “very correct, very calm, almost serene.” Coming from a yogi, this was quite a compliment for the man who could occasionally be seen shooting his gun into the air from his balcony. Before stepping into his plane in Baghdad, Annan felt it would be important to thank Saddam once again for accepting not to be bombed. “I would like to thank His Excellency President Saddam Hussein and the government of Iraq for the goodwill, cooperation, and courtesy extended to my delegation and myself during the last few days,” Annan said. He added that Saddam’s regime had been “demonized” by the international community.

  Annan then flew back to Paris to give Jacques Chirac his jet back. The French president had ordered that a state dinner be prepared for the secretary general. At a toast that evening, Chirac got up and thanked Annan in front of all the guests for preventing a third world war. Chirac has been known to drink pretty heavily at state dinners, but still, a world war? All the Clinton administration had planned was a four-day bombing campaign to destroy suspected Iraqi military and industrial facilities and to try to land a bomb on Saddam’s cranium, which was a bit difficult, since the only moment when they knew Saddam’s location was when he was meeting with Annan.

  Buoyed by his reception in Paris and news reports coming out of Washington saying that the Clinton administration would hold off on a strike to see if Saddam would keep his promise to Annan, the secretary general flew back to New York and made his hero’s entrance into the building amid the applause of a staff that had been instructed to stand there by his own aides. As a member of the UN staff involved with Iraq, I had come down more out of curiosity than out of an irrepressible desire to cheer our leader. The lobby was packed, and cameras had been set up to catch the staged hero’s entrance. Annan seemed surprised at the sight of all the staff, and perhaps he was. But one thing was clear. New Yorkers had not poured out to meet him at the airport or clap as his car e
ntered the UN’s driveway.

  Word suddenly got around (nobody could see anything) that Annan was in the building. After shaking hands with some front-row enthusiasts and seeming to downplay the event as only he knew how to, Annan stopped to speak before the cameras. This was his moment of glory. Or as people inside the United Nations liked to put it, his “Hammarskjöld moment,” in reference to the first secretary general of the United Nations, who, for lack of a more brilliant successor, remains venerated to this day.

  Stepping up to the microphone, Kofi Annan announced that on his journey to Baghdad he had been surrounded by “the world’s prayers.” I suppose that was his way of sharing the credit for what he had achieved during his “sacred” mission. The UN weapons inspectors, who were clearly the most concerned by Annan’s mission, had not even come down to greet him this morning.

  Saddam Hussein, he told us, “is a man I can do business with.”

  Seven months after Kofi Annan had come back from his sacred mission to Baghdad, Saddam Hussein decided to tear up their agreement. Once again, UNSCOM inspectors were barred from doing their work. And again, the United States and Britain went back into countdown mode for military action, and Saddam forced his people back into his palaces to serve as human shields. The buildup to military action lasted from August to November 1998, by which point U.S.-led forces in the Persian Gulf had already received the order to proceed with a strike. They were fifty minutes away from hitting their targets when CNN suddenly announced that Iraq had sent a letter to Kofi Annan saying their deal was back on. The letter, dated November 14, 1998, and signed by Tariq Aziz, informed the secretary general that Saddam Hussein had decided to resume cooperation and allow UN weapons inspectors to “carry out their normal mission.”

  President Clinton decided to hold off on an airstrike once again. But U.S. forces remained ready to attack on short notice. The decision to use CNN as a diplomatic channel was critical for the Iraqis; if they had waited for their letter to be faxed and re-faxed through the normal channels (i.e., from Baghdad to the thirty-eighth floor of the United Nations, from there to the U.S. mission to the UN, then on to the State Department, and on to the White House), the news might have reached President Clinton a few minutes too late.

  Clinton had decided to delay the operation until he had a chance to read the letter. Once he did, the White House was enraged to discover that it contained an annex detailing “conditions” Iraq wanted to impose on the inspections process. Specifically, Iraq insisted that the Security Council start lifting its sanctions as a quid pro quo. This was unacceptable to the White House. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, soon made this clear to the media, and before diplomats had a chance to think up new peace initiatives, the airwaves flared up with rumors of an imminent strike. Watching CNN from Baghdad, the Iraqis realized they might be struck because of an annex, so they scrambled to send another letter to Kofi Annan, which they immediately provided to CNN as well, in case the fax machines on the thirty-eighth floor got stuck. Insofar as our role was to facilitate international communications, the UN had been supplanted by a news channel. Once the crisis moved into real time, our main purpose was to serve as a repository for official records.

  In their second letter, the Iraqis specified that the annex (which was still attached) did not contain “conditions,” merely “views and preferences” of the Iraqi regime. But the White House was in no mood to deal with Saddam Hussein’s “views and preferences” at this stage. Saddam had banked that the Monica Lewinsky affair (which got far more coverage than he did on CNN) might interfere with Clinton’s ability to act. But in fact it appeared to make Clinton all the more eager to seem “presidential.” So Saddam was forced to order a third letter sent to CNN (and the UN) saying that his previous decision to cease cooperation with the weapons inspectors was “null and void.” No annexes, no views and preferences, just a full capitulation.

  Three days later, on November 17, eighty-six UNSCOM inspectors returned to Iraq. Our Bunny Huggers had watched them leave and come back, then leave again and come back again several times. The cook in the Canal Hotel compound in Baghdad was forced to calibrate his food purchases in relation to the news coming out of CNN, so that he would have enough supplies for lunch the next day, when the Cowboys barged back into the cafeteria and reoccupied their favorite seats.

  This time, they would be back at work for less than a month before another crisis erupted. On November 22 the Iraqi government began denouncing “provocative” acts by UNSCOM inspectors, who tried to force their way into certain locations by driving around Iraqi roadblocks and kept leaking videotapes to the media showing Iraqi officials trying to block them. By December 15, UNSCOM reported to the UN Security Council that Iraq was refusing to cooperate with its inspectors, in effect calling Saddam’s second promise to Kofi Annan a lie. On December 16, UNSCOM inspectors got back on their C-130 transport plane and headed out of town, which indicated quite clearly that, this time around, the Clinton administration had managed to seize the initiative and act on its own timetable. The submission of UNSCOM’s official report to the Security Council had clearly been chosen ahead of time as the spark that would ignite hostilities. Except nobody had bothered to tell us.

  We were hours away from a military strike. And yet no plan had been made to evacuate our Bunny Huggers—hundreds of humanitarian staff were left behind in Baghdad. I received dozens of calls an hour from panicked staff asking me what they were supposed to do with themselves. My instruction was to tell them to “stay put for now.”

  “But what’s the plan? How are we going to get out of here?”

  While Kofi Annan had been playing Peace Messiah, the command structure of the UN’s Oil-for-Food operation had collapsed. Denis Halliday had resigned on October 31, more than a month before this crisis, in protest over the sanctions. He left the mission in the hands of his deputy, Farid Zarif, a former minister in the Soviet occupation government in Afghanistan. The man had been forced to flee his country to save his life after the Soviet withdrawal of 1989.

  According to the rule whereby “the assistant of your enemy is your friend,” Pasha had immediately taken Zarif under his wing. Together, they might have been able to organize an evacuation. But Annan was under pressure to appoint a new head of mission in Iraq, and between two peace initiatives, he chose a German national named Hans von Sponeck, to whom Pasha took an instant dislike.

  Pasha soon found reason to be suspicious of his new Number Two. I believe it was a fax in which von Sponeck had copied Iqbal Riza, Kofi Annan’s chief of staff, that got the two off on the wrong foot. The contents of the fax were not the problem. The cc sparked Pasha’s ire. Why did his Number Two need to copy the thirty-eighth floor? In Pasha’s view, only he should have had the privilege of communicating to higher-ups, and the slight to his authority would not be tolerated.

  In retaliation, Pasha did a number of things to screw with von Sponeck. First, he allowed Cindy to interfere with von Sponeck’s recruitment efforts. Second, he undermined him politically by refusing to let him brief the UN Security Council.

  After that, Pasha and von Sponeck no longer spoke to each other. The memos got colder, and each of them got in the habit of sending copies of their communications to Riza, who was starting to get seriously amused. Once again, the thirty-eighth floor did not intervene. And it took the prospect of an all-out military conflict to get von Sponeck to pick up the phone and dial Pasha’s number. Pasha was the UN’s security coordinator, and von Sponeck could not evacuate his staff from Iraq without his permission.

  “Now he comes calling again, huh?” Pasha said, when his secretary announced von Sponeck on the line.

  Pasha told his secretary to tell von Sponeck he was in a meeting. Von Sponeck would need to call back. This, as a U.S. strike on Baghdad was imminent.

  “Don’t you guys understand?” a weapons inspector asked me. “This time, it’s for real! What are your Bunny Huggers still doing in Baghdad?”

 
It was unclear how our staff would get out of the country, because unlike the arms inspectors, we no longer had a plane. Saddam Hussein had decided that the staff of the Oil-for-Food operation should no longer be allowed to fly in and out of the country. The Bunny Huggers would have to drive. Although it was illegal for Saddam to impose such a restriction on us, the UN ended up complying without protest. Had von Sponeck and Pasha been on speaking terms, they might have been able to do something about this. But their mutual dislike clearly took priority over the mission, and so the only way our staff could be evacuated was by bus.

  The night von Sponeck called to request permission to evacuate, Pasha turned him down. Though he had the authority as UN security coordinator to order the staff to safety, Pasha told von Sponeck that he wanted to consult with Annan first. But Annan was still trying to “exhaust all diplomatic options” to avoid a war, so he was too busy to deal with Pasha and von Sponeck’s dispute.

  By the night of December 16, 1998, no decision had been made on whether or how to evacuate our Bunny Huggers. We had missed the window of opportunity and could not afford to send our guys on the road without knowing when a strike would commence. I was on the phone with my friend Habibi, who was calling from Baghdad to ask me what the hell was going on, when I heard the first explosions. Some time later (could be minutes, could be hours, our panic skewed our sense of time), CNN brought us live to the White House, where President Clinton was sitting at his desk, on the eve of the impeachment vote in Congress over the Monica Lewinsky affair, to address the American people:

  Good evening. Earlier today, I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors. Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world. Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons.